Control: Exposing the Truth About Guns (11 page)

It is frequently assumed that safe-storage gun laws reduce accidental gun deaths and total suicides, while the possible impact on crime rates is ignored. We find no support that safe-storage laws reduce either juvenile accidental gun deaths or
suicides. Instead,
these storage requirements appear to impair people’s ability to use guns defensively.
Because accidental shooters also tend to be the ones most likely to violate the new law,
safe-storage laws increase violent and property crimes against law-abiding citizens
with
no observable offsetting benefit in terms of reduced accidents or suicides. (emphasis added)

With fewer guns in people’s homes, murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults all rose. And when trigger lock laws prevented guns from being readily accessible for immediate self-defense, crime rates rose, too. Lott’s study projected that, five years after all states implemented new “safe storage” laws,
there would be 355 more murders and almost 5,000 more rapes in the United States.

“Most home invasion victims with arms find themselves in Herbert Clutter’s position: surprised and overwhelmed. Unless you sleep with your .45 auto fully loaded and under your pillow, you’re apt to find yourself in the same position if the bad guys ever should show up in your bedroom, enquiring as to the location of your safe.”

—STEPHEN KING
,
Guns

King is referencing a 1959 attack on the Clutter family (also the subject of Truman Capote’s book
In Cold Blood
), where two men invaded a home in Holcomb, Kansas, and killed the entire family. His point, I guess, is that since Herbert Clutter had guns in his house but was unable to use them before being killed, no one should have guns in their house. He also offers up absolutely no evidence to back his assertion that “most” home invasions end that way.

Let’s pretend for a second that Stephen King is completely right and that “most” home invasion victims never have a chance to get to their gun before they’re killed. Does that really mean that no one should have a gun in their house? What about the people
who aren’t in that “most” category—does King prefer that they’d ended up like the Clutters?

Besides, King is using just one example of a crime where having a gun might make a difference. There are plenty of others. Some say that none of these situations can be made better by a victim having a firearm, but the data says that’s just not true. And, data aside, there’s a larger reason why owning a gun for self-defense makes sense: it’s our responsibility to protect our families and neighbors.

Milwaukee County sheriff David Clarke Jr. created quite a stir recently when he voiced a commercial making it clear that we all have a role to play when it comes to defending ourselves against criminals:

I am Sheriff David Clarke, and I want to talk to you about something personal, your safety. It is no longer a spectator sport. I need you in the game. But are you ready? With officers laid off and furloughed, simply calling 911 and waiting is no longer your best option. You can beg for mercy from a violent criminal, hide under the bed, or you can fight back. But are you prepared? Consider taking a certified safety course in handling a firearm so you can defend yourself until we get there. You have a duty to protect yourself and your family.
We are partners now. Can I count on you?

The sheriff is making an important point. Police are vital in helping to protect people’s safety, but they can’t be there all the time. In fact, even in times before budget cuts and furloughs and the like, police generally don’t arrive until after a crime has already been committed. When you have to face a criminal by yourself, the sheriff is absolutely right: you have a duty to protect yourself and your family. The best way to do that is with a firearm that you’ve been trained how to use.

Controllists often debate with hypotheticals about what might go wrong if someone keeps a gun in their house, but the data is
actually pretty clear. The Department of Justice has been surveying 100,000 to 150,000 people a year for the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) for thirty years, with about 4,000 to 6,000 being victims of violent crimes. This survey includes extremely detailed data on these victims, from the type of crime, to where and when it occurred, to the characteristics of the criminal and victim, to how the criminal responded when attacked.

When you analyze this data, the results are extraordinarily clear: the best way to ensure your own safety when attacked is to have a gun, and know how to use it. The injury rate for victims of assault who use a gun is about
half
the rate for victims who try to run away, and about
one-tenth the rate for those who did not try to protect themselves in any way.

A 2000 study published in the
Journal of Criminal Justice
looked at NCVS data over a nine-year period to determine what the consequences of armed victims really were. The study’s summary makes their findings clear:

[Crime victims] who had and used guns had both lower losses and injury rates from violent crimes . . . . Based on these findings, consequences of having a greater portion of potential victims being armed were analyzed. Results showed this would reduce both losses and injuries from crime,
as well as a criminal’s incentive to commit violent crimes and to be armed.

“There’s good evidence that a gun in the home increases the likelihood that a woman in the home will die. There is
no evidence that a gun in the home is protective for the woman.”

—DAVID HEMENWAY
(director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center), January 31, 2013

Seriously? There’s no evidence that guns help protect women? Maybe Hemenway needs to leave that Harvard campus on occasion and get out into the real world (where about 15 percent of our military is female) to see what is happening. Here are just a few of the many cases involving women and guns from one recent month:

—Magnolia, Texas (January 29, 2013): Three male burglary suspects forced themselves into a home with a mother and her six-year-old child inside. The mother fired her pistol, hitting one of the invaders, at which time
all three criminals then fled the scene.

—Milwaukee, Wisconsin (January 9, 2013): When a robber pulled a knife and threatened a female clerk,
she pulled a gun and the attacker ran away.

—Loganville, Georgia (January 4, 2013): A woman hiding in her attic with her two children shot an intruder multiple times before fleeing to safety. The woman had tried to hide from the man, but he searched the house until he found her.
She fired six shots, hitting him five times. She ran out of bullets but bluffed that she would continue shooting if he came any closer, at which point he fled the home.

And it’s not just older women who use guns defensively. Here’s a case from last fall involving a young girl.

—Durant, Oklahoma (October 19, 2012): A strange man rang the doorbell of a twelve-year-old girl’s house. When she didn’t answer he went to the back door and kicked it down. The girl called her mother, who told her to get the family’s gun, hide in the closet, and call 911. When the man tried to enter the closet she was hiding in
she shot and wounded the man.

I understand that, compelling as it is, this is all just anecdotal evidence, so let’s turn back to the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey to see what the data says about attacks specifically on women.

It’s not even close. The probability of serious injury from aggravated assault is 2.5 times greater for women who offer no resistance than for women who resist their attacker with a gun. In contrast, the probability of a woman’s being seriously injured was almost four times greater when resisting without a gun
than when resisting with a gun.

While both men and women benefit from having a gun, the benefit for women is much larger. The reason for that is pretty simple: Attackers are almost always men, and the difference in strength between a male attacker and a female victim is bigger, on average, than the difference in strength between a male attacker and a male victim. Having a gun therefore makes a bigger relative difference for a woman than it does for a man.

You can also see this difference with people who carry concealed handguns. According to research by John Lott, murder rates decline when either sex carries a concealed gun, but the effect is particularly pronounced for women.
An additional woman carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for women by three to four times more than an additional armed man reduces the murder rate for men.

So women and guns are not oil and water, far from it—but let’s address Hemenway’s quote specifically because he seems to be alluding to domestic violence incidents that occur in the home. In that case, women shouldn’t be fearful of a gun in the home; they should be fearful of dating or marrying men with criminal records.

Murders of wives by their husbands by any means are, thankfully, relatively rare. While the FBI doesn’t break down its data by
the type of weapon used, about
4.6 percent of all murders (603) in 2010 involved wives being murdered by their husbands.
Given the number of married women (about 63,150,000 million), the overall rate was infinitesimally small (0.0009 percent).

But this is not really the right statistic to be looking at. The focus should not be on the gun, but the man. Few murderers are committed by previously law-abiding citizens. While studies are hard to come by, a 1988 report looked at the largest seventy-five counties in the United States and found that approximately
90 percent of adult murderers had previous criminal records as adults. A 1983 study by Gary Kleck and others looked at national data. They wrote: “The FBI is rather vague about the types of crimes for which offenders were previously arrested or convicted. However, in special computer runs for the 1968 Eisenhower Commission it was determined that 74.7 percent of persons arrested between 1964 and 1967 for criminal homicide had
a record of previous arrests for ‘a major violent crime or burglary.’ ” But they made another important point as well: “Because most violent acts are not reported to the police, and many do not result in any kind of officially recorded action (arrest, conviction, or imprisonment), official records of the previous violence of homicide offenders
represent only the tip of the iceberg.”

The bottom line is that a criminal record is usually more of a risk factor for violence than is gun ownership—especially when those guns are owned legally.

“But it’s hard to enforce that law when as many as 40 percent of all gun purchases are conducted without a background check. That’s not safe. That’s not smart.
It’s not fair to responsible gun buyers or sellers . . . . ”

—PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
,
January 16, 2013

“
40 percent of all gun trades, there’s no background check.”

—PIERS MORGAN
,
December 21, 2012

“
40 percent of gun sales now take place privately, including most guns that are later used in crimes.”

—NEW YORK TIMES
(editorial), January 14, 2013

I could probably fill the rest of this book with quotes from gun control activists using some version of this same statement.
It’s been printed in the
New York Times,
USA Today,
and the
Wall Street Journal.
Even on the normally skeptical Fox News channel, we heard Chris Wallace asserting that “in 40 percent of the [gun] sales there is
no such screen on the person buying the gun.” Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) went even further, claiming that the number is actually “
48 percent of gun sales.”

It is repeated so often that it’s now mostly accepted as fact even though most people who use it have no idea where it originally came from. Even more troubling is that this shocking “fact” provided the principal rationale for the president’s first announced gun control proposal: “universal background checks.” After all, if current gun purchase rules are so lax that almost half of all weapons are obtained without a background check, then there would seem to be much room for improvement.

The truth, however, is that this statistic is way off. The real number is likely less than 10 percent. I’ll explain in a bit, but first some background on where the “40 percent” number comes from.

In 1997, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) undertook a study on gun ownership using data collected from a telephone survey done in 1994. (
There’s the first red flag: these numbers are nearly twenty years old.) The survey, which included 2,568 households, asked several questions about gun ownership—including how the guns were obtained.

Of those people who told the researcher how they obtained their gun (second red flag: only 251 of the 2,568 people answered this question),
35.7 percent said they acquired it from someone other than a licensed dealer. This number has conveniently been rounded up to 40 percent as the years have passed. According to a PolitiFact analysis of the underlying data in this survey,
researchers in some cases “made a judgment call” when respondents weren’t clear about where they obtained the gun.

So, we already have four big problems with this number (it’s a twenty-year-old number based on answers from just 251 people that was rounded up to 40 percent for no good reason and was subject to the “judgment” of researchers), but there are many more.

Problem five is that this statistic pertains to
all transfers
of firearms, not just purchases, which is the term the president used. A very large portion of guns change hands through inheritances and gifts. Grandpa’s old rifle ends up with a grandchild; a husband gives his wife his old handgun for protection, etc. In the 1994 survey, 29 percent of people who answered the question about the origin of their gun said it came from a family member or friend.