Date: Fri, 25 Aug 95 23:53:00 UTC
From: [j--e--l] at [genie.geis.com]
To: [gr conf] at [mainstream.com], [n--b--n] at [mainstream.com]
Subject: In Defense of the NRA
The following is an excerpt from J. Neil Schulman's book
SELF CONTROL Not Gun Control, to be published Nov. 30,
1995 by Synapse--Centurion. Reproduction in computer file
and message bases is permitted for informational purposes
only. Copyright (c) 1995 by J. Neil Schulman. All other
rights reserved.
IN DEFENSE OF THE NRA
by J. Neil Schulman
Most of what you hear about guns on TV and radio, and
most of what you read about guns in prominent magazines and
newspapers, is distorted to the point of lying, by writers who
have a prejudice against private ownership of guns by the
American public.
Most journalists today write as if the NRA--usually
lumped in with the Tobacco Institute--represents only the
commercial interests of "merchants of death" who don't care how
many lives are lost--particularly the lives of our young
people--just so long as they get to keep selling their product.
So let's get that myth out of the way right now.
The National Rifle Association of America is a 124-year-
old organization almost entirely financed by the dues and small
contributions of its 3.2 million members, not by money from the
gun manufacturers. In addition to the NRA's other programs, the
NRA's Institute for Legislative Action lobbies for the right to
keep and bear arms not _only_ of 70 million current American gun
owners, but of anyone who might want to exercise that right in
the future.
This media hostility to the NRA permeates the entire
debate about guns and violence in this country, and allows lie to
be piled upon lie. When NRA held a news conference to tell the
media that a new Luntz-Weber poll showed that most Americans
don't think gun control will reduce crime or violence, the room
was empty. When Handgun Control, Inc., called a news conference
around the same time to discuss the results of a Louis Harris
poll, the room was jammed with reporters and TV cameras, and the
media reported Handgun Control's interpretation of the poll
results as if it were a papal encyclical.
At some point, you just have to ask yourself the
following question: who knows more about guns--the millions of
NRA members who own them, handle them on a regular basis, and
have taken its safety courses ... or journalists who talk and
write about guns for television networks and national magazines,
but are often afraid even to be in the same room with one?
As a comparison, would you believe a writer who spent his
life railing about how dangerous automobiles were, but who had
never sat behind the steering wheel of a car? Why on earth would
you believe a critic who spent his life telling you how to
improve automotive safety but who had never bothered to get an
engineering degree--and who dismissed the opinions of _real_
automotive experts who pointed out the critic's incompetence and
bias, sneering that the experts were "just mouthpieces for the
automobile manufacturers' lobby"?
The press accuses the NRA of being the most powerful
lobby in America. God only knows that with our rights to maintain
the means to defend ourselves hanging by a thread, I pray this
were true.
Part of the reason for the media's hostility to civilian
firearms may be ideological disagreement with our philosophical
premises. But part of it is without doubt the realities of how
news collection and reporting works day-to-day.
The problem is what sociologists call "dark side
phenomena": events that happen in a way that they can't be easily
seen or calculated.
It's the classic problem of how you would go about
proving that an extraterrestrial with an invisibility cloak is
hiding behind a door. When the door is closed, you can't detect
him because the door is in the way. As soon as the door starts to
open, he turns on his invisibility cloak, so you still can't see
him. It's logically impossible to prove that the extraterrestrial
_isn't_ there, so the burden of proof falls on those who assert
that he is. But without either the extraterrestrial's active co-
operation, or an indirect means of confirming its presence
despite its proven ability to remain hidden, this is darned
difficult to do.
That's why it's taken so long for criminologists to prove
that there are two to three times as many incidents every year
where a firearm is used in defense against a criminal than there
are incidents where a firearm is involved in harming a innocent
person.
Gary Kleck, Ph.D., professor in the School of Criminology
and Criminal Justice at Florida State University, is considered
the dean of criminologists on firearms issues by his colleagues
in the American Society of Criminology, who in 1993 awarded Kleck
its coveted Hindelang Award for his book _Point Blank: Guns and
Violence in America_ (Aldine de Gruyter, 1991). Kleck's
unimpeachable liberal credentials--he's a registered Democrat and
a member of Common Cause and Amnesty International, as
examples--precludes any possibility of pro-conservative or pro-
NRA bias. He takes no funding from any partisan in the gun-
control debate.
In _Point Blank_, Kleck had already analyzed a dozen
studies conducted by other researchers, and had concluded that
American gun owners used their firearms at least one million
times each year in defense against criminals. But Kleck wasn't
satisfied with the research methods used in some of these
studies, so in Spring, 1993 he and his colleague Marc Gertz,
Ph.D., conducted a National Self-Defense Survey of 4,978
households.
I interviewed Kleck about the not-yet-published results
of this survey for the September 19, 1993 _Orange County
Register_; it's also included in _Stopping Power_.
What Kleck's National Self-Defense Survey discovered is
that even excluding all uses of firearms by police, military, or
security personnel, an American gun owner uses a privately owned
firearm 2.45 million times each year in an actual defense against
a criminal. About 1.9 million of these defenses use handguns, the
rest some other firearm--a shotgun or a rifle.
In _Stopping Power_, I boil down the results of my
interview with Kleck as follows:
* Every 13 seconds, an American gun owner uses her or his
firearm in defense against a criminal. If you're only counting
handguns, it's every 16 seconds. Compare this to the "once every
two minutes" that the much-ballyhood Death Clock in New York
City's Times Square clicked off an incident of "gun violence."
* Women use handguns 416 times each day in defense
against rapists, which is a dozen times more often than rapists
use a gun in the course of a rape. Handguns are used 1145 times a
day against robbers. Handguns are used 1510 times a day in
defense against criminal assaults.
* A gun kept in the home for protection is 216 times as
likely to be used in a defense against a criminal than it is to
cause the death of an innocent victim in that household--the
well-publicized Seattle study's 43-1 ratio of dead householders
to dead burglars notwithstanding.
It's this lack of dead bodies for the police to find
which is the main reason that for every time you see on TV or
read in a newspaper about a gun being used to defend someone, you
are seeing _hundreds_ of cases where a firearm is used in an
incident of wrongful violence.
Kleck's data shows that in only 14% of the gun defenses
reported in the National Self-Defense Survey was the gun in
question even fired. In only 8% of gun defenses did the survey
respondent believe that he or she had even wounded a criminal,
much less killed one--and _this_ might be a vastly high estimate
of criminals shot by their potential victims, given the
relatively small number of actual justifiable or excusable
homicides recorded each year--between 1500 and 2800, according to
Kleck.
The question remains: why aren't crime victims reporting
their gun defenses to the police, so that these incidents can
find their way onto the evening news?
The answer is the prejudice in our society against gun
ownership itself. Most of the crime in this country takes place
in large cities, and for most of this century, city-dwellers have
been either socially discouraged or legally prohibited from
carrying a firearm for protection.
The New York City case of Bernhard Goetz in the mid-
1980's was a perfect example.
After one grand jury failed to indict Goetz, a white,
middle-class victim of a previous armed robbery, for shooting and
critically wounding several African-American teenagers whom Goetz
said had threatened him with a sharpened screwdriver on a subway
car, the New York prosecutor submitted the case to a _second_
grand jury, which did indict Goetz. Goetz was acquitted of all
charges except illegally carrying the handgun he had used to
defend himself, and served jail time on those gun charges.
Additionally, even though Roy Innis of the Congress of Racial
Equality--now an NRA director--sided with Goetz, Goetz's action
was portrayed in the media as racially motivated.
After seeing what happened to Bernie Goetz for carrying
the means to defend himself, is there any wonder why most people
decide _not_ to tell the police that they had to use a gun to
save their lives?
Every month, news clippings about gun defenses are sent
in by readers of the NRA's magazines, _The American Rifleman_ and
_The American Hunter_, and many are published in "The Armed
Citizen" column in these magazines. Many of these news clippings
are from smaller newspapers, or from newspapers in rural regions
where gun ownership is more accepted. Major newspapers in
Democratic-party-controlled cities hardly ever report on
incidents where the use of a gun has a beneficial result, even
when the incident deserves a front-page headline.
Two months after the much-reported October 16, 1991
incident where a madman randomly murdered 23 lunchers, and
wounded another 19 at a restaurant in Killeen, Texas, postal
clerk Thomas Glenn Terry, who had a license to carry his
concealed .45 semi-auto pistol, saved 20 hostages in an Anniston,
Alabama restaurant from takeover robbers--one of whom had
murdered a motel clerk just a few days earlier. No TV network
news program mentioned it. A madman with a gun is news. A hero
with one isn't.
The same thing happened again on September 18, 1992, when
ex-prizefighter Randy Shields, a part-time bodyguard with a rare
license to carry a concealed .380 semi-auto pistol, saved a 4 n
20 Pie Shop in Studio City, California from a gang of takeover
robbers who had already started shooting wildly at customers and
employees. The story wasn't reported outside Southern
California--and the anti-gun _Los Angeles Times_ buried the story
in its sports section.
This distortion of how firearms are actually used in our
country is only the beginning of the myths the anti-gun media
creates: cop-killer bullets that were sold as police rounds and
never killed a cop; "Rhino" hollowpoint bullets which, defying
all laws of wound ballistics, are reported as being able to
penetrate police body armor; deadly "assault weapons" which
hardly ever end up in police evidence lockers; "invisible plastic
guns" which contain over a pound of metal and X-ray identically
to all other handguns--this list is almost endless.
The media gleefully report every case where a waiting-
period law supposedly kept a gun out of the hands of a
criminal--but they never bother checking to find out how many of
these criminals who were denied a gun purchase were later
arrested in possession of a gun they'd stolen or bought on the
black-market anyway.
They edit TV footage to misrepresent the accuracy and
firepower of "assault weapons"--to make them look more deadly
than they actually are.
The news reporters terrorize you with daily shooting
reports to make you afraid of guns, then the editorialists and
columnists call you paranoid for thinking the danger is great
enough that you should consider keeping a gun to defend yourself
from all these armed criminals.
As I said, it depends on whom you're going to trust: the
people at the NRA who have 124 years of institutional experience
dealing with firearms, or a bunch of ignorant, politically biased
pundits who believe the lies they tell each other.
Isn't it your right to demand that the people who report
the news make the effort to get the real facts about guns and gun
control, so you can make a rational decision for yourself?
Or are you willing to have the American media continue to
manipulate and lie to you?
In the months following the November 8, 1994
elections--which even President Clinton attributed as a defeat of
anti-gun Democrats because of NRA's opposition--the attacks on
the NRA by the Clinton administration and its media choirboys
have been relentless. They've even sunk so low as to try to blame
the Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred Murrah Federal Building
on the "extremism" of NRA's opposition to their gun-control
schemes.
But there are many up-sides to this sort of political
attack. The first is simply that the more the Democrats attack
the NRA, the more they are showing that the NRA is a potent force
reshaping the American political landscape.
The second is that it's making the gun issue a litmus
test for both parties. The more pro-gun Democrats are being
pressured to ignore their pro-NRA constituents and follow the
Democrats' anti-NRA leadership, the more Democrats are looking to
get out of their party and look for a more congenial political
home. And the more anti-gun Republicans like Rudolph Giuliani and
John Warner endorse Democrats--and the more liberal Republicans
like George Bush and Pete Wilson jump on the anti-NRA
bandwagon--the more apparent it will become to the Republican
leadership that anti-NRA Republicans can't be trusted to support
Republican candidates ... and when Republicans support gun
rights, the NRA can.
It's _your_ right to keep and bear arms that the NRA is
defending. It's possibly your life--or that of a loved one or
neighbor--that's hanging in the balance.
While not even the Tobacco lobby would dare to claim that
their product saves lives, the NRA--through both its firearms
safety programs and its support for gun-owners rights--does.
And in my view, that makes the NRA one of the best things
America has going for it.
***
THE NEW BOOK
from J. Neil Schulman!
Author of
STOPPING POWER: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns
SELF CONTROL Not Gun Control
"Schulman interestingly and insightfully raises a number of
liberty-related issues that we ignore at the nation's peril.
His ideas are precisely those that helped make our country
the destination of those seeking liberty. The book's title
says it all: personal responsibility, not laws and prohibitions,
is the mark of a civil society."
Professor Walter E. Williams, Chairman
Department of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, Virginia
Publisher: Synapse--Centurion
Price: $24.95 U.S.; $32.95 Canada
Publication Date: November 30, 1995
Approx. Shipping Date: Oct. 15, 1995
ISBN: 1-882639-05-7
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 95-74682
Full info is on J. Neil Schulman's World Wide Web Page at:
http://www.pinsight.com/~zeus/jneil/ or download the file
SELFCONT.ZIP from GunTalk.
*** ORDER INFO ***
Synapse--Centurion Books is now accepting pre-printing wholesale
orders for whole cases of SELF CONTROL Not Gun Control at 60%
off cover price -- $10 per book and 24 books per case -- IF
THE ORDER WITH FULL PAYMENT IS RECEIVED ON OR BEFORE
SEPTEMBER 20TH, 1995.
To mail-order SELF CONTROL Not Gun Control, send a check or money
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Reply to:
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Mail: P.O. Box 94, Long Beach, CA 90801-0094
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Internet: [j--e--l] at [genie.com]
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