A False Sense of Security

The biggest non-constitutional justification for having personal arsenals has always been self-defense. The trite and irritating slogan, “the only response to a bad guy with a gun is good guy with a gun,” is not only misleading, it appears to be wildly statistically inaccurate. The statistics that the Nation Rifle Association relies on in this self-defense scenario were generated in 1981, when crime rates were much higher, although they were published in a report issued in 1995. Writing for CNN.com (July 30, 2012), journalist and author David Frum challenged the relevancy of these numbers today. The NRA holds that gun owners use their weapons every 13 seconds to deter crime, 2.5 million times a year.

Here’s are some of Frum’s responses: “1) Even if you think the 2.5 million statistic was correct at the time it was computed, it must be obsolete today, for the same reason that the victimization survey data is obsolete. The 1995 study that generated the figure of 2.5 million defensive gun uses was based upon data collected when crime rates were vastly higher than they are today. Some of the data was collected in 1981, near the very peak of the post-Vietnam War crime wave. It's just incredible on its face that defensive gun use would remain fixed at one level even as criminal attempts tumbled by one-third to one-half.

2) When we hear the phrase ‘defensive gun use,’ we're inclined to imagine a gun owner producing a weapon to defend himself or herself against bodily threat. Not so fast. The authors of the 1995 study aggregated 13 prior polls of gun users, most of which did not define what was meant by ‘use.’ As the authors of the 1995 aggregation study themselves ruefully acknowledged: ‘The lack of such detail raises the possibility that the guns were not actually 'used' in any meaningful way. Instead, (respondents) might be remembering occasions on which they merely carried a gun for protection 'just in case' or investigated a suspicious noise in their backyard, only to find nothing.’ In other words, even if the figure of 2.5 million defensive gun uses had been correct at some point back in the early 1990s or early 1980s, the vast majority of those "uses" may be householders picking up a shotgun before checking out the noises in the garage made by raccoons rooting through the trash.

3) The figure of 2.5 million defensive gun uses is supposed to represent the number of such uses per year. Yet none of the studies aggregated in the 1995 paper measured annual use. Most asked some version of the question, ‘Have you ever?’ Two asked instead, ‘Have you within the past five years?’ The authors of the 1995 study took those latter two surveys, multiplied the rate in the survey by the number of U.S. households, then divided by five to produce an annual figure.

Gun violence in the United States is epidemic, even as gun ownership (as a percentage of the U.S. population) has declined somewhat. According to Wikipedia, “In 2009, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 66.9% of all homicides in the United States were perpetrated using a firearm. There were 52,447 deliberate and 23,237 accidental non-fatal gunshot injuries in the United States during 2000. Two-thirds of all gun-related deaths in the United States are suicides. Of the 30,470 firearm-related deaths in the United States in 2010, 19,392 (63.6%) were suicide deaths, and 11,078 (36.4%) homicide deaths… In 2004, 36.5% of Americans reported having a gun in their home and in 1997, 40% of Americans reported having a gun in their homes.”

And then there are the “accidental shootings.” “People of all age groups are significantly more likely to die from unintentional firearm injuries when they live in states with more guns, relative to states with fewer guns. On average, states with the highest gun levels had nine times the rate of unintentional firearms deaths compared to states with the lowest gun levels.” Matthew Miller, Deborah Azrael & David Hemenway, Firearm Availability and Unintentional Firearm Deaths, 33 Accident Analysis & Prevention, 477 (July 2001).

Statistics from gunshot injuries and deaths are tough to come by, because the NRA has successfully lobbied state and federal legislatures legally to ban governmental agencies (including the FBI and the local police!) from gathering such statistics. I wonder what they’re afraid of? I wonder what a new, government-sanctioned study would reflect if the NRA supported the collection of such important statistics. In a 1986 report, doctors Arthur Kellermann and Don Reay noted that “for every case of self-protection homicide involving a firearm kept in the home, there were 1.3 accidental deaths, 4.6 criminal homicides, and 37 suicides involving firearms.” Protection or Peril? An Analysis of Firearms Related Deaths in the Home, New England Journal of Medicine, 1986. 314: pp. 1557-60.

Exactly who are we trying to kid? Aside from the fact that the NRA seems to justify its position by ignoring the first phrase in the Second Amendment (the “well-regulated militia” part), where numbers can be generated despite the NRA’s commitment to prevent such statistics from being assembled, they always seem to contradict the NRA’s overall position. We are watching Americans dying in their homes and on our streets because a powerful ultra-conservative lobbying organization is able to blackmail our Congress (and their membership) into misinterpreting the Constitution. I know our do-nothing House of Representatives will block a profoundly reasonable effort to get assault weapons and oversized magazines off the streets, but may they know that they are adding to the needless slaughter of their fellow citizens.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I only hope that sooner or later these misguided and obstructionist legislators will be able to watch real gun control legislation become the law of the land… someday.