Does It Matter Whether Guns Protect Us From Crime? Not If You Want To Sell Guns.

September 27, 2024

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Last week the pro-gun gang received a shot in the arm from a story out of Detroit where a legally-armed private citizen yanked out a gun and shot a man who was running away from a bank with a pile of cash. Actually, the armed citizen shot the bank robber in both arms, as well as the leg, shooter and robber doing just fine; the latter in the hospital under arrest, the former no doubt on his way to Fairfax, VA to be congratulated by Wayne-o for reminding us all about the true value of our 2nd Amendment rights.

Granted I’m indulging in a bit of hyperbole, but you would think that since groups like Everytown and Brady post interviews with victims of gun violence on their websites, the NRA would want to run stories about citizen-defenders to promote their point of view. Actually, the NRA has been running such stories since 1978. It’s something called the Armed Citizen, which is a monthly collection of press reports about good guys stopping the bad guys; for the current month there are four reports, including the incident in Detroit, which is slightly less than the average 6-7 reports published each month.

Glock 21

Wait a minute! Hold the presses! In a country of 319 million people, in a country where civilians own more than 300 million guns, in a country in which at least 12 million good guys have concealed weapons permits, how in God’s name is it possible that only six or seven people use a gun each month to defend themselves or others from a crime?

To try to answer this vexing question, the first thing I did was turn to the Armed Citizen website, which bills itself as the place that “provides you with the news and resources you need to remain informed and active.” One of their latest examples of the work of an armed citizen has the following headline: “Car fleeing from police goes through park, nearly hits children.” So I guess this website collects stories about citizens armed with cars.

Then there’s another outfit called GunPitt – Guns Saves Lives, which advertises itself as the “secure way to trade guns online” although the link is broken, also produces a series of gun podcasts, including a series called God and Guns, The Responsible Christian Gun Owners Interests (they must have been pretty busy this week given what Pope Francis told the Congress), and also collects stories about defensive gun uses which now totals 1,360 anecdotes about the work of armed citizens, although it’s not clear how many years are covered by this report. In any case, I took a look at the latest DGU story out of my neighboring state of Connecticut, and here’s what the website says: “A woman in Waterbury, Connecticut had to grab a gun in order to capture a naked man who was allegedly raping the woman’s dog in her backyard.”

Here’s the bottom line: If the same bunch which assures us that guns are used to stop crimes “millions” of times each year tries to prove it by publishing stories about cars driving through playgrounds or man rapes dog, then the argument about good guys stopping bad guys bears no relationship to the truth. And maybe it’s time to stop advancing cogent, reasoned and researched arguments against gun fantasists like Gary Kleck and John Lott, and step back to take another look.

Take a look, for example, at the marketing message of a company like Glock. Under personal defense products, the website shows a tough, executive-type strapping on his gun: “Defense is personal, and it should be, it’s about invading your space.” Then off he runs to catch the 7:15, armed with his G42 pistol and the Wall Street Journal to confront another harrowing day. Marketing isn’t reality; it’s about merging a product with a fantasy, in this case a lethal weapon which makes you feel that you’ll come out ahead. Sells guns, doesn’t it?

Want To Know What It Really Costs To Protect Yourself With A Gun? A Lott More Than He Thinks.

September 18, 2024

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Remember Al Pacino’s great line from Godfather II when he tells some mobster that, “my father always taught me to keep my friends close but keep my enemies closer.” Which is why I listen to AM Talk Radio whenever I’m alone in my car. Because when it comes to guns, I know what my friends are going to say. It’s what the other side is saying that I need to hear. In that respect I was listening the other day to Mark Walters whose show, Armed American Radio, is actually a running advertisement for a clever marketing scheme called U.S. Concealed Carry Association, but occasionally there’s a time-out from endless USCCA promotions for a brief interview with a guest.

And the guest just happened to be none other than John Lott who has become the poster-boy for the armed-citizen movement, or maybe sometimes he’s the poster-girl, depending on whether or not he’s pretending to be John Lott or Mary Rosh. Either way, within a sentence or so after he begins, you can count on John to start mumbling about how safe people are when they carry a gun or keep a loaded gun in their homes. And he cites all kinds of ‘studies’ and ‘research’ from various right-wing academics and pundits who share his point of view. The truth is he hasn’t done any serious research in more than twenty years.

John Lott

John Lott

Oh, I take that back. In 1997 he allegedly conducted a telephone survey about defensive gun use but he couldn’t produce the data because his hard-drive crashed. Then to prove that he wasn’t faking the loss of data he produced testimonials from a couple of people who thought they remembered answering questions over the phone. You can read a very comprehensive analysis of Lott’s attempt to defend himself right here. And what Tim Lambert’s article points out is that Lott has gone to great lengths to validate the idea that he suffered a hard-drive crash but his attempts to prove that this hard drive contained any kind of DGU survey falls far short of the mark.

In any case, it doesn’t really matter whether or not Lott’s telling the truth because his audience could care less about whether guns protect us from crime or protect us from anything else. The bottom line is that there are simply plenty of people out there who believe that any attempt by the government to implement any kind of progressive social policies at all represents nothing more than the imposition of some kind of Islamo-Fascist-Socialist-Communist world order brought directly from Kenya to the U.S. Think I’m kidding? In 2010, Pew Research stated that 18% of Americans believed that Obama is a Muslim. You going to argue gun control with them? And this is John Lott’s audience, which is something that some of his critics, as well-intentioned as they may be, sometimes tend to forget.

Two of his most well-intentioned critics happen to be Evan DeFilippis and Devin Hughes, whose website, Armed With Reason, is sprinkled with endless articles which accurately capture both the misstatements and wrong-headed research of Mary Rosh, a.k.a. John Lott. But I’ve decided to take a different tack towards Lott’s work and, for the sake of argument, pretend that everything he says is true. Let’s quantify how much money is saved because bad guys breaking into homes are stopped by good guys inside who happen to have guns. This is CDC and DOJ data, not some phony telephone survey, and it looks like this. Each year roughly 830,000 people are at home when someone tries to break in. Of this number, roughly 8,000 used a gun to scare the bad guy away.

Know how much all those good guys saved by protecting their homes with guns? Somewhere around two million dollars. Know how much the victims of unintentional gun shootings cost in medical bills and lost wages? More than one billion bucks. And that’s what it costs us to let some misguided John Lott fans take their hero at his word. Oh well, maybe the world really is flat.

All Of A Sudden The NRA’S Armed Citizens Aren’t So Armed

August 24, 2024

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Maryland was one of a number of states in 2013 that enacted gun control statutes in the wake of Sandy Hook, and last week a Federal District Court Judge upheld the state’s authority to ban most of the popular brands of assault-style rifles, along with limiting gun magazines to 10 rounds or less. This is a very significant ruling for two reasons. First, ,notwithstanding the fact that the NRA would like you to believe that armed citizens are the first line of defense against crime, the ruling affirms that government has a “compelling interest” in protecting public safety which allows for the regulation of guns. Second, the ruling flies directly in the face of the gun industry’s effort to legitimize assault-style weapons as no different from any other type of gun that might be used for personal defense. And while the 2008 Heller decision explicitly recognized the right of citizens to keep handguns in their homes for self-defense, it did not vacate the government’s right to regulate the types of weapons that might be used.

In their attempt to overturn the Maryland law, the plaintiffs, including the NSSF, argued two basic issues: (1). Banning assault-style weapons was a violation of the 2nd Amendment because it deprived shooters of a product that was in common use; (2). Banning assault-style weapons and large-capacity magazines deprived individuals of a weapon that was frequently kept and used in the home for self-defense. I found it interesting, incidentally, that the plaintiffs did not try to push the notion of AR-15s as “modern sporting rifles,” a totally phony nomenclature invented by the gun industry to overcome the resistance of big-box, chain stores like Wal-Mart who believed that such products interfered with their image as destinations for family shopping.

assault As regards the argument that a ban on assault guns would deprive Maryland residents of an increasingly popular type of firearm, Judge Blake noted that while the total number of the banned guns was upwards of 8 million, this represented less than 3% of all firearms held by civilians. Further, the Judge, using numbers from the NSSF, found that assault-style rifle ownership tended to be concentrated, with the average assault gun owner possessing more than 3 such weapons, meaning that less than 1% of the entire American population owned any assault weapons at all. [Pages 19-20.]

As for the question of using an AR or AK rifle for self-defense, the ruling cited a report submitted by Lucy Allen, who has been called as an expert witness in other cases involving sales of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. This report, based on data from the NRA, found that assault weapons are rarely used in instances of armed self-defense, nor did persons discharge more than ten rounds when using their guns in instances of armed self-defense. The plaintiffs, in arguing against Allen’s evidence, claimed that she did not “independently verify” the data on which her report was based, a claim rejected by the Court since the evidence came from the NRA, which although not a formal party to the case, certainly was in favor of a decision that would uphold the plaintiff’s suit.

The NRA has been promoting the idea that armed citizens protect themselves and others with guns for as long as I can remember. They now have an online repository for these anecdotes and you can submit a self-defense story, real or imagined, which is then edited and republished for all to read. And yes, even if you don’t have a story, the NRA will send you an armed citizen bumper sticker. The NRA claims that millions of Americans use guns in self-defense every year, but when someone uses the evidence posted on their website to contradict their claims about the self-defense value of AR-15s, all of a sudden the data is no good. I really can’t imagine how Judge Blake wrote that part of her decision with a straight face.

 

 

 

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