Gun Control Advocates Continue to Spread Falsehoods

The lefties can't stand the fact that ordinary people have the right to defend themselves with a gun. They believe such protection should only be allowed to government officials like Mayor Daley of Chicago, who has 24/7 armed police protection, or the Chicago Aldermen, who have the right to possess a handgun even though the little people don't. They also don't have a problem when a celebrity gun-grabber like Rosie O'Donnell has armed guards to protect her children.

So now that the Supreme Court has upheld this right, gun-grabber Arthur Kellerman tries to tell us unwashed masses what we should do:

The Supreme Court has spoken: Thanks to the court's blockbuster 5 to 4 decision Thursday, Washingtonians now have the right to own a gun for self-defense. I leave the law to lawyers, but the public health lesson is crystal clear: The legal ruling that the District's citizens can keep loaded handguns in their homes doesn't mean that they should.

In his majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia explicitly endorsed the wisdom of keeping a handgun in the home for self-defense. Such a weapon, he wrote, "is easier to store in a location that is readily accessible in an emergency; it cannot easily be redirected or wrestled away by an attacker; it is easier to use for those without the upper-body strength to lift and aim a long rifle; it can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police." But Scalia ignored a substantial body of public health research that contradicts his assertions. A number of scientific studies, published in the world's most rigorous, peer-reviewed journals, show that the risks of keeping a loaded gun in the home strongly outweigh the potential benefits.

In the real world, Scalia's scenario -- an armed assailant breaks into your home, and you shoot or scare away the bad guy with your handy handgun -- happens pretty infrequently. Statistically speaking, these rare success stories are dwarfed by tragedies. The reason is simple: A gun kept loaded and readily available for protection may also be reached by a curious child, an angry spouse or a depressed teen.

More than 20 years ago, I conducted a study of firearm-related deaths in homes in Seattle and surrounding King County, Washington. Over the study's seven-year interval, more than half of all fatal shootings in the county took place in the home where the firearm involved was kept. Just nine of those shootings were legally justifiable homicides or acts of self-defense; guns kept in homes were also involved in 12 accidental deaths, 41 criminal homicides and a shocking 333 suicides. A subsequent study conducted in three U.S. cities found that guns kept in the home were 12 times more likely to be involved in the death or injury of a member of the household than in the killing or wounding of a bad guy in self-defense.

What Kellerman's 'study' conveniently leaves out are the number of times that a gun is brandished to prevent a crime, without being fired. John Lott has estimated the number of such occurences:

Those who advocate letting law-abiding citizens carry concealed handguns point to polls of American citizens undertaken by organizations like the Los Angeles Times and Gallup showing that Americans defend themselves with guns between 764,000 and 3.6 million times each year, with the vast majority of cases simply involving people brandishing a gun to prevent attack. [1] Victims (such as women or the elderly) are most often much weaker than the criminals that attack them. Guns are seen by these advocates as the great equalizer, and allowing concealed handguns provides citizens even greater ability to defend themselves. [Page 356]

While cases like the 1992 incident in which a Japanese student was shot on his way to a Halloween party in Louisiana make international headlines, [2] they are rare. In another highly publicized case, a Dallas resident recently became the only Texas resident so far charged with using a permitted concealed weapon in a fatal shooting. [3] Yet, in neither case was the shooting found to be criminal. [4] The rarity of these incidents is reflected in Florida statistics: 221,443 licenses were issued between October 1, 1987 and April 30, 1994, but only eighteen crimes involving firearms were committed by those with licenses. [5] While a statewide breakdown on the nature of those crimes is not available, Dade County records indicate that four crimes involving a permitted handgun took place there between September 1987 and August 1992 and none of those cases resulted in injury. [6]

The potential defensive nature of guns is indicated by the different rates of so-called "hot burglaries," where residents are at home when the criminals strike. [7] Almost half the burglaries in Canada and Britain, which have tough gun control laws, are "hot burglaries." By contrast, the United States, with laxer restrictions, has a "hot burglary" rate of only 13%. Consistent with this rate, surveys of convicted felons in America reveal that they are much more worried about armed victims than they are about running into the police. This [Page 357] fear of potentially armed victims causes American burglars to spend more time than their foreign counterparts "casing" a house to ensure that nobody is home. Felons frequently comment in these interviews that they avoid late-night burglaries because "that's the way to get shot." [8]

We don't want those poor felons to get shot. Do we lefties?