Some Practical Arguments for an Armed Civilian Population

Most of the time you hear gun owners defending their guns, they're talking about "the right to keep and bear arms." That is, of course, an important argument to make, but it's not the one that will appeal to those among us who are swayed only by arguments regarding social utility.

I've never believed there is any great divide between good theoretical arguments and good practical ones. If something is correct in theory, it should necessitate practical consequences. If something works in practice, it should be generalizable into a theory. How can something be moral if it isn't practical? How can it be practical if it produces destruction?

I'll focus more on political theory later in this book. But for now, here are some empirical arguments in favor of keeping and bearing arms. - JNS




A Time to Kill

Maybe you haven't noticed it, but the Star-Spangled Banner has been replaced by the dove of peace. Attorney General Janet Reno and Senator Paul Simon condemn the portrayal of violence on television. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders wants to ban toy guns. The Los Angeles Times wants to ban real guns. The latest Clint Eastwood movie, A Perfect World, is not Dirty Harry ending the career of some maniac, but a buddy movie about a fatherless boy and the sympathetic psychopath who takes him under his wing. The federal Center for Disease Control, backed by the American Medical Association, has declared violence to be a national health crisis.

There is without doubt a national crisis when automatic-teller-machine hold-ups, carjackings, and serial rapes are commonplace; when our celebrities are a woman who cuts off her husband's penis and the husband who sells T-shirts commemorating it; when youth gangs don't even have the courage to rumble - they just do drive-by shootings.

But it's not a national health crisis. It's a national moral crisis.

The King James Bible tells us that the Sixth Commandment is, "Thou shalt not kill." Any biblical scholar will tell you that's a mistranslation from the original Hebrew. It should instead read, "Thou shalt not murder."

In Ecclesiastes Chapter 3, Verse 3, the Bible also tells us that there is a time to kill.

We have lost our ability to distinguish between justified and unjustified violence. We no longer feel certain about the difference between good guys and bad guys. We no longer know when it's time to kill, or whom.

A time to kill would have been when Patrick Purdy walked into a schoolyard in Stockton, California and started shooting at children. But we place our children in the care of defenseless teachers, so there was no one able to kill Patrick Purdy in time.

A time to kill would have been when George Hennard walked into a Luby's cafeteria in Killeen, Texas and began shooting diners. But Texans may no longer legally carry six-shooters on their hips, so there was no one able to kill Hennard in time.

A time to kill would have been when Gian Luigi Ferri walked into a San Francisco law office and began shooting at attorneys, secretaries, and clients. But not one lawyer kept a Smith & Wesson in her desk, so there was no one able to kill Ferri in time.

A time to kill would have been when Colin A. Ferguson began shooting passengers on the Long Island Railroad. There were men on the train with the courage to tackle and capture Ferguson even though they were unarmed - but not before Ferguson had shot dozens of people. If only one person had been armed, innocent people might be alive and Ferguson dead.

A recent article in The Public Interest by Jeffrey Snyder - lauded by George Will in Newsweek - suggests that we have become "a nation of cowards" in our willingness to submit peaceably to crime and rely on police to protect us. But is it courage that we lack, or moral certainty?

We have become a nation of deer facing oncoming headlights, paralyzed with moral ambiguity. Like Clint Eastwood's stymied Texas Ranger in A Perfect World, we declare, "I don't know a damn thing anymore."

The currently fashionable condemnation of violence is based on morally untenable premises, either pacifistic or statist. We civilians are told to be peaceable either because violence does not solve problems, or because only people in uniforms are entitled to use violence.

Certainly violence does not solve all problems. But there is one sort of problem that violence is indispensable to solve: stopping violent evildoers.

Certainly we don't want to live in a nation of lynch mobs. There is a clear distinction between self-defense and proactive law enforcement. But with the examples of the ATF siege in Waco, the unindicted murder of Randy Weaver's wife and son by federal agents, and the looming threat of well-armed police enforcing civilian gun bans, isn't Janet Reno's condemnation of violence more than a little hypocritical?

Violence is not of itself always wrong. Sometimes committing an act of violence is a right and a moral necessity. When violence is righteous, it is glorious. If we do not understand this and ready ourselves with arms and training for the rightful violence that is necessary to defend the innocent, then the random violence eating away at our nation's substance is just what we have coming to us.




140,000 LA County Gun Owners Have Used Firearms Defensively

In new data on defensive use of firearms by private citizens, a Los Angeles Times poll published Sunday, May 17, 1992, indicates that 9% of Southern California gun owners have used a firearm in personal self-defense, resulting in an approximation of between 135,000 to 145,000 gun owners who have personally defended themselves with a gun in Los Angeles County alone. The poll question excluded defensive use of a weapon in the military or while on the job.

Out of those who say they have used a gun in self-defense, only 2% say they actually fired the gun, signifying that the deterrence value of the firearm without being fired was approximately 98%.

The poll, conducted by telephone between April 9-15, 1992, interviewed 2,619 Southern Californians 18 or older - 878 gun owners and 1,741 non-gun-owners, and the Times' pollsters, using demographic weighting, estimate the number of gun owners in Southern California as approximately 24% of the population. Because of the size of the sample, the Times' pollsters give a 4% margin of error in their results.

The 1990 U.S. Census gives the 18-and-older population of Los Angeles County as 6,537,054.

The Times' poll data is particularly useful, inasmuch as it can be directly correlated with other statistical information on crime drawn from the polling.

While 9% of Southern California gun owners report use of their weapon in defense against crime, 13% of Southern Californians report that a member of their household has been a victim of a violent crime or act of violence in the last two years, with 13% also reporting having personally witnessed a crime or act of violence.

This data, when correlated, indicates that among the subset of the population that owns a firearm, the firearm stands a significant chance of preventing a crime or act of violence when it occurs. Just how high the deterrence effect is can not be correlated exactly because the Times' poll did not specify that the defense in question needed to be within the last two years, as the crime or act of violence in question was.

Further, the highest rates of victimization are among African-Americans, at 20%, and Latinos, at 17%, while 11% of Anglos and 9% of Asian Americans are victimized. With the exception of the Asian-American community, this victimization rate approximates an inverse proportion to the rate of firearms ownership in each community, with 43% of Anglos having at least one gun in their home or garage, 33% of African-Americans, and 25% of Latinos. The anomaly is the Asian-American community which has a 19% rate of firearms ownership and a relatively low rate of crime and violence.

The Times' poll data tends to reinforce the findings of the study by Gary Kleck, Ph.D., a criminologist from the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, which he summarized at the August 29 through September 1, 1991, Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, as follows:

"Each year," Kleck stated, "about 1500-2800 criminals are lawfully killed by gun-wielding American civilians in justifiable or excusable homicides, far more than are killed by police officers. There are perhaps 600,000 -1 million defensive uses of guns each year... People who use guns for self-protection in robberies and assaults are less likely to have the crime completed against them (in a robbery, this means losing their property), and, contrary to widespread belief, are less likely to be injured, compared to either victims who use other forms of resistance or to victims who do nothing to resist. (Criminals take the gun away from the victim in less than 1% of these incidents.) The evidence does not support the idea that nonresistance is safer than resisting with a gun."

The Los Angeles Times poll compiled other interesting data relating to firearms ownership:

o While 75% of all homicides in Los Angeles County are gun-related, 33% of homicides in Los Angeles County are gang-related - either the shooter or the victim is gang-member.

o The chances of being shot in Los Angeles county: 1/1000 (.1%) - (same odds as getting lung cancer).

o Over the last five years, California Department of Justice records show 466,543 handguns sold in Los Angeles County.

o The vast majority of firearms in Los Angeles are owned by ordinary citizens rather than criminals or gang-members.

o 29% of Southern California homes have guns compared to 43% nationally, however most Southern Californians have guns for self-protection rather than sporting use, compared to opposite elsewhere.

o Most Southern California gun owners possess more than one gun. 70% own at least one handgun. 70% own a shotgun or rifle.

o Most firearms owners in Southern California have received formal firearms training, and firearms classes are booming, especially for women.

o Even though it is a misdemeanor, 25% of gun owners admit to sometimes carrying a loaded gun either in their car or on their person. 20% of gun owners admit to carrying a loaded gun in their car, and 11% admit to carrying a concealed loaded gun on their person.

o 12-1/2% of Southern California residents are planning to buy a gun in 1992 - 75% for self protection. In a follow-up survey conducted in Los Angeles after the riots, 5% of LA City residents said they will buy a gun as a result of the riots.




Do Guns Do More Harm or More Good?

One of the greatest problems in determining any sort of social policy is comparing that which is seen, and therefore directly quantifiable, to those effects which are unseen, and therefore must be inferred by other means.

Such is the problem in comparing the number of people killed or wounded by firearms, with the number of times a gun is used to prevent or stop an act of violence.

The number of gun homicides are more or less tracked. Minus those bodies which are encased in cement overshoes and end up at the bottom or the East River or in the foundation of a new office building, most people who die from gunfire end up in a morgue where the homicide is statistically recorded.

Likewise, for non-fatal gunshots, most are treated at hospital emergency rooms which are legally required to report them to police agencies. Often, as the LA Times has reported is the case in Los Angeles, there is no further investigation; nonetheless, the figures can be collected and entered into databases.

The Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday, May 17, 1992, that in Los Angeles County in 1991 there were 1554 firearm-related homicides (no breakdown given between wrongful homicides and those which are either excusable by reason of self-defense or justifiable in the attempt to prevent or stop a violent attack), 489 gun-related suicides, and 32 accidental shooting deaths. Additionally, 8050 firearms wounds were treated in local hospitals in 1991.

Minus the uncounted "excusable" and "justifiable" shootings, fatal or not, this gives us a more-or-less quantifiable database of undesirable shootings.

Suicides we can eliminate from our analysis of gun-effects immediately. The American Journal of Psychiatry from March, 1990 reported in a study by Rich, Young, Fowler, Wagner, and Black that all gun-suicides which were statistically reduced by Canada's handgun ban of 1976 were substituted 100% by suicides using other methods. Therefore, eliminating firearms does not eliminate suicide: it merely shifts the suicide to other causes, and no rational public policy can conclude that the existence or availability of firearms is a causative factor.

Since the quantity of gun suicides to gun homicides is approximately 31%, it's fair to assume that some significant percentage in non-fatal shootings is likewise an incomplete suicide rather than an incomplete homicide. It would be tempting to assume that 31% of the 8050 gunshot wounds are botched suicides, but this strikes me as counterintuitive: I suspect that most people who choose a firearm for suicide aim at a vital target, and are more-or-less successful at achieving fatality.

This suspicion gains weight from the Time Magazine of July 17, 1989, which says that, "But one study has found that when people use a gun, the rate of death is 92%. Says Tulane University sociologist James Wright: 'Everyone knows that if you put a loaded .38 in your ear and pull the trigger, you won't survive.'"

Therefore, for the purpose of this statistical exercise, I will assume that 8% of non-fatal shootings are incomplete suicides rather than incomplete homicides.

As far as quantifying excusable or justifiable shootings and firearm homicides, we are on less certain ground. The FBI Unified Crime Reports for 1990 reported only 215 homicides out of 11,700 to be justifiable. However, the FBI classifies a homicide as justifiable only if it is so ruled in the first police report; if a homicide is later ruled by investigation or judicial procedure to be excusable or justifiable, those figures are not figured in by the FBI's statistical methods.

We must therefore go to inferential methods. The study by criminologist Gary Kleck, Ph.D., of Florida State University estimates that private citizens account for between 1500 and 2800 excusable and justifiable homicides in a year. If we use Kleck's figure, we get a ratio of criminal homicides to excusable or justifiable homicides between 7.8: 1 (87.2% criminal to 12.8% excusable or justifiable) and 4.2: 1 (76.2% criminal to 23.8% excusable or justifiable) a year. This would quantify the Los Angeles County homicide figures so that of the 1554 firearm-related homicides reported in 1991, between 198 and 369 were likely excusable by reason of self-defense, or justifiable in the prevention or stopping of a criminal attack.

It is reasonable to assume that a similar ratio would apply to non-fatal shootings, which would mean that of the 8050 gunshot victims treated at Los Angeles hospitals in 1991, between 1030 and 1916 were persons who had been excusably or justifiably shot while they were in the process of committing a crime or other violent attack.

The real problem of comparing criminal use of firearms to defensive use of firearms only really begins at this point, though, because of the unseen deterrence effect of firearms which prevent a criminal attack without even having been fired. According to a Los Angeles Times Poll conducted April 9-15, 1992 of 2619 Southern Californians (878 gun owners and 1741 non-owners), "9% of firearms owners in Southern California say they have used their guns to thwart burglaries, car thefts, or other crimes." The Times' poll question specifically excluded gun defenses in the military or while on the job, which leaves a sizable number of gun defenses in convenience stores, pawnshops, jewelers, banks, etc., uncounted in this data. More problematic for the purposes of comparison is that the Times' Poll did not ask how many times the poll respondent had used a firearm in self-defense, or set a time frame within which this defensive act had occurred.

Out of this 9%, in the LA Times' poll, only 2% report having fired their weapon in the course of the defense, leaving 98% claiming successful defenses without the necessity of their gun being fired. It would be tempting at this point to assume that we have quantified a 98% passive deterrence rate when a firearm is available for defense, but we run into a problem which makes this figure questionable.

Time Magazine, in its January 29, 1990 issue, published the results of a telephone poll of 605 gun owners for Time/CNN made from December 15-22, 1989 by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman.

In response to the poll question, "Have you ever fired your gun?" 9% of those polled by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman stated that they had done so for "self-protection," while 7% stated they had fired their gun "to scare someone."

Either the LA Times's sample of gun owners is much more effective at scaring someone away without having to fire their guns than the Yankelovich Clancy Shulman sample - which seems unlikely - or Los Angeles gun owners are afraid to tell of pulling the trigger for fear of later repercussions, or the form of the LA Times's question is creating some ambiguity.

Further, accepting the LA Times rate of deterrence without trigger-pulls leads to the absurdity of an estimated number of justifiable or excusable homicides which is greater than the estimated number of times a trigger is pulled to stop or end a criminal attack.

We will therefore leave open the question regarding the rate of passive versus active deterrence.

Both the Time/CNN poll and the LA Times' poll data, however, tend to confirm data from a nationwide poll conducted by Peter Hart Research Associates, Inc., for the National Alliance Against Violence, which found that 4% of households reported the use of a handgun in self-defense within the 5 years preceding the survey (including cases when the handgun was only displayed, not fired). The Hart study did not count defenses with shotguns or rifles. Including shotguns and rifles, one can easily, with no fear of overestimation (and a strong suspicion of underestimation), raise the gun-defense figure by 20% to 5% within the preceding five years, which gives us a horseback estimate of 1% of households having a member who uses a firearm - handgun, shotgun, or rifle - for defensive purposes in any given year.

We now have a reasonable percentage for firearm defenses that we can quantify with reference to census, police, and poll data, and compare to known figures for criminal homicides and wrongful non-fatal shootings.

For Los Angeles County in 1991

Firearms homicides: 1554

Number of homicide victims estimated to be excusable or justifiable: 198-369

Mean estimated excusable or justifiable homicides in 1991: 283

Mean estimated wrongful homicides for 1991: 1271

Number of non-fatal gunshot wounds treated in 1991: 8050

Number of gunshot-wound victims estimated to be attempted suicides: 645

Number of gunshot-wound victims estimated to be excusable or justifiable shooting: 1030-1916

Mean number of estimated excusable or justifiable shootings: 1473

Estimated number of non-fatal gunshot victims caused by wrongful attack in Los Angeles in 1991: 5772

Number of wrongful gunshot victims (fatal and nonfatal) in Los Angeles in 1991: 7043

1990 U.S. Census figures for 18-and-older population of Los Angeles County: 6,537,054

Percentage of 18-and-older persons who own a firearm in Los Angeles County according to LA Times: 24%

24% of 6,537,054 = 1,568,893 gun owners in Los Angeles County

1% of Los Angeles County gun owners who are estimated to use a firearm for self defense in a year: 15,689

[Percentage of gun owners whose firearm defense is passive: 98% - LA Times]

[Estimated number of Los Angeles County firearm-defenders in a year who use a gun for defense without the gun having to be fired: 15,375 - derived from LA Times poll data]

[Estimated number of Los Angeles County firearm-defenders in a year who use a gun for defense with the gun having to be fired: 314 - derived from LA Times poll data]

Comparison of wrongful gunshot victims in Los Angeles County to firearm defenders: 7043 to 15,689 or 1: 2.2

Conclusion: For every wrongful gunshot victim in Los Angeles County, it is reasonably estimated that two persons are able to use a firearm to deter a violent crime or attack.

It must also be noted that the percentage of firearms ownership in Los Angeles is considerably lower than the nation as a whole: 24% as compared to 43% nationally. Whatever defensive uses we note in Los Angeles would therefore be considerably amplified elsewhere.

What is clear is that the unseen and unrecorded effect that firearms play in protecting the public from armed criminals is extremely likely to be equal to or greater than the number of victims created by firearms in the hands of criminals.

This statistically significant defensive and deterrent effect of firearms in the hands of private citizens must be given a wider hearing in public policy debate on the role of firearms in society.




The following article appeared in the Orange County Register on Sunday, September 19, 1993, and was reprinted in the October 1, 1993 Gun Week.

Q & A on Gun Defenses

Gary Kleck, Ph.D. is a professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University in Tallahassee and author of Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America (Aldine de Gruyter, 1991), a book widely cited in the national gun-control debate. In an exclusive interview, Dr. Kleck revealed some preliminary results of the National Self-Defense Survey which he and his colleague Dr. Marc Gertz conducted in Spring, 1993. Though he stresses that the results of the survey are preliminary and subject to future revision, Kleck is satisfied that the survey's results confirm his analysis of previous surveys which show that American civilians commonly use their privately-owned firearms to defend themselves against criminal attacks, and that such defensive uses significantly outnumber the criminal uses of firearms in America.

The new survey, conducted by random telephone sampling of 4,978 households in all the states except Alaska and Hawaii, yield results indicating that American civilians use their firearms as often as 2.5 million times every year defending against a confrontation with a criminal, and that handguns alone account for up to 1.9 million defenses per year. Previous surveys, in Kleck's analysis, had underrepresented the extent of private firearms defenses because the questions asked failed to account for the possibility that a particular respondent might have had to use his or her firearm more than once.

Dr. Kleck will first present his survey results at an upcoming meeting of the American Society of Criminology, but he agreed to discuss his preliminary analysis, even though it is uncustomary to do so in advance of complete peer review, because of the great extent which his earlier work is being quoted in public debates.

[Note For This Edition: The results of the National Self Defense Survey were published as "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalance and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun," by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, in The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, Northwestern University School of Law, Volume 86, Number 1, Fall, 1995. Marvin Wolfgang, Director of the Sellin Center for Studies in Criminology and Criminal Law at the University of Pennsylvania, considered by many to be the foremost criminologist in the country, wrote in that same issue, "I am as strong a gun-control advocate as can be found among the criminologists in this country. If I were Mustapha Mond of Brave New World, I would eliminate all guns from the civilian population and maybe even from the police ... What troubles me is the article by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. The reason I am troubled is that they have provided an almost clearcut case of methodologically sound research in support of something I have theoretically opposed for years, namely, the use of a gun in defense against a criminal perpetrator. ...I have to admit my admiration for the care and caution expressed in this article and this research. Can it be true that about two million instances occur each year in which a gun was used as a defensive measure against crime? It is hard to believe. Yet, it is hard to challenge the data collected. We do not have contrary evidence. The National Crime Victim Survey does not directly contravene this latest survey, nor do the Mauser and Hart Studies. ... the methodological soundness of the current Kleck and Gertz study is clear. I cannot further debate it. ... The Kleck and Gertz study impresses me for the caution the authors exercise and the elaborate nuances they examine methodologically. I do not like their conclusions that having a gun can be useful, but I cannot fault their methodology. They have tried earnestly to meet all objections in advance and have done exceedingly well."

So the interview you are about to read presents results which are no longer "preliminary"; they have now been peer-reviewed by the top criminologist in this country, one who was prejudiced in advance against its results, and even he found the scientific evidence overwhelmingly convincing. - JNS, 1996]

The interview was conducted September 14-17, 1993.

Readers may be interested to know that Kleck is a member of the ACLU, Amnesty International USA, and Common Cause, among other politically liberal organizations. He is also a lifelong registered Democrat. He is not and has never been a member of or contributor to the NRA, Handgun Control Inc., or any other advocacy gMotorroup on either side of the gun-control issue, nor has he received funding for research from any such organization.

Schulman: Dr. Kleck, can you tell me generally what was discovered in your recent survey that wasn't previously known?

Kleck: Well, the survey mostly generated results pretty consistent with those of a dozen previous surveys which generally indicates that defensive use of guns is pretty common and probably more common than criminal uses of guns. This survey went beyond previous ones in that it provided detail about how often people who had used a gun had done so. We asked people was the gun used defensively in the past five years and if so how many times did that happen and we asked details about what exactly happened. We nailed down that each use being reported was a bona fide defensive use against a human being in connection with a crime where there was an actual confrontation between victim and offender. Previous surveys were a little hazy on the details of exactly what was being reported as a defensive gun use. It wasn't, for example, clear that the respondents weren't reporting investigating a suspicious noise in their back yard with a gun where there was, in fact, nobody there. Our results ended up indicating, depending on which figures you prefer to use, anywhere from 800,000 on up to 2.4, 2.5 million defensive uses of guns against human beings - not against animals - by civilians each year.

Schulman: Okay. Let's see if we can pin down some of these figures. I understand you asked questions having to do with just the previous one year. Is that correct?

Kleck: That's correct. We asked both for recollections about the preceding five years and for just what happened in the previous one year, the idea being that people would be able to remember more completely what had happened just in the past year.

Schulman: And your figures reflect this?

Kleck: Yes. The estimates are considerably higher if they're based on people's presumably more-complete recollection of just what happened in the previous year.

Schulman: Okay. So you've given us the definition of what a "defense" is. It has to be an actual confrontation against a human being attempting a crime? Is that correct?

Kleck: Correct.

Schulman: And it excludes all police, security guards, and military personnel?

Kleck: That's correct.

Schulman: Okay. Let's ask the "one year" question since you say that's based on better recollections. In the last year how many people who responded to the questionnaire said that they had used a firearm to defend themselves against an actual confrontation from a human being attempting a crime?

Kleck:Well, as a percentage it's 1.33 percent of the respondents. When you extrapolate that to the general population, it works out to be 2.4 million defensive uses of guns of some kind - not just handguns but any kind of a gun - within that previous year, which would have been roughly from Spring of 1992 through Spring of 1993.

Schulman: And if you focus solely on handguns?

Kleck: It's about 1.9 million, based on personal, individual recollections.

Schulman: And what percentage of the respondents is that? Just handguns?

Kleck: That would be 1.03 percent.

Schulman: How many respondents did you have total?

Kleck: We had a total of 4,978 completed interviews, that is, where we had a response on the key question of whether or not there had been a defensive gun use.

Schulman: So roughly 50 people out of 5000 responded that in the last year they had had to use their firearms in an actual confrontation against a human being attempting a crime?

Kleck: Handguns, yes.

Schulman: Had used a handgun. And slightly more than that had used any gun.

Kleck: Right.

Schulman: So that would be maybe 55, 56 people?

Kleck: Something like that, yeah.

Schulman: Okay. I can just hear critics saying that 50 or 55 people responding that they used their gun and you're projecting it out to figures of around 2 million, 2-1/2 million gun defenses. Why is that statistically valid?

Kleck: Well, that's one reason why we also had a five-year recollection period. We get a much larger raw number of people saying, "Yes, I had a defensive use." It doesn't work out to be as many per year because people are presumably not remembering as completely, but the raw numbers of people who remember some kind of defensive use over the previous five years, that worked out to be on the order of 200 sample cases. So it's really a small raw number only if you limit your attention to those who are reporting an incident just in the previous year. Statistically, it's strictly the raw numbers that are relevant to the issue.

Schulman: So if between 1 percent to 1-1/3 percent of your respondents are saying that they defended themselves with a gun, how does this compare, for example, to the number of people who would respond that they had suffered from a crime during that period?

Kleck: I really couldn't say. We didn't ask that and I don't think there are really any comparable figures. You could look at the National Crime Surveys for relatively recent years and I guess you could take the share of the population that had been the victims of some kind of violent crime because most of these apparently are responses to violent crimes. Ummm, let's see. The latest year for which I have any data, 1991, would be about 9 percent of the population had suffered a personal crime - that's a crime with personal contact. And so, to say that 1 percent of the population had defended themselves with a handgun is obviously still well within what you would expect based on the share of the population that had suffered a personal crime of some kind. Plus a number of these defensive uses were against burglars, which isn't considered a personal crime according to the National Crime Survey. But you can add in maybe another 5 percent who'd been a victim of a household burglary.

Schulman: Let's break down some of these gun defenses if we can. How many are against armed robbers? How many are against burglars? How many are against people committing a rape or an assault?

Kleck: About 8 percent of the defensive uses involved a sexual crime such as an attempted sexual assault. About 29 percent involved some sort of assault other than sexual assault. Thirty-three percent involved a burglary or some other theft at home. Twenty-two percent involved robbery. Sixteen percent involved trespassing. Note that some incidents could involve more than one crime.

Schulman: Do you have a breakdown of how many occurred on somebody's property and how many occurred, let's say, off somebody's property where somebody would have had to have been carrying a gun with them on their person or in their car?

Kleck: Yes. We asked where the incident took place. Seventy-two percent took place in or near the home, where the gun wouldn't have to be "carried" in a legal sense. And then some of the remainder, maybe another 4 percent, occurred in a friend's home where that might not necessarily involve carrying. Also, some of these incidents may have occurred in a vehicle in a parking lot and that's another 4 percent or so. So some of those incidents may have involved a less-regulated kind of carrying. In many states, for example, it doesn't require a license to carry a gun in your vehicle so I'd say that the share that involved carrying in a legal sense is probably less than a quarter of the incidents. I won't commit myself to anything more than that because we don't have the specifics of whether or not some of these away-from-home incidents occurred while a person was in a car.

Schulman: All right. Well, does that mean that approximately a half million times a year somebody carrying a gun away from home uses it to defend himself or herself?

Kleck: That's what it would imply, yes.

Schulman: All right. As many as one-half million times every year somebody carrying a gun away from home defends himself or herself.

Kleck: Yes, about that. It could be as high as that. I have many different estimates and some of the estimates are deliberately more conservative in that they exclude from our sample any cases where it was not absolutely clear that there was a genuine defensive gun use being reported.

Schulman: Were any of these gun uses done by anyone under the age of 21 or under the age of 18?

Kleck: Well we don't have any coverage of persons under the age of 18. Like most national surveys we cover only adults age 18 and up.

Schulman: Did you have any between the ages of 18 and 21?

Kleck: I haven't analyzed the cross tabulation of age with defensive gun use so I couldn't say at this point.

Schulman: Okay. Was this survey representative just of Florida or is it representative of the entire United States?

Kleck: It's representative of the lower 48 states.

Schulman: And that means that there was calling throughout all the different states?

Kleck: Yes, except Alaska and Hawaii, and that's also standard practice for national surveys; because of the expense they usually aren't contacted.

Schulman: How do these surveys make their choices, for example, between high-crime urban areas and less-crime rural areas?

Kleck: Well, there isn't a choice made in that sense. It's a telephone survey and the telephone numbers are randomly chosen by computer so that it works out that every residential telephone number in the lower 48 states had an equal chance of being picked, except that we deliberately oversampled from the South and the West and then adjusted after the fact for that overrepresentation. It results in no biasing. The results are representative of the entire United States, but it yields a larger number of sample cases of defensive gun uses. They are, however, weighted back down so that they properly represent the correct percent of the population that's had a defensive gun use.

Schulman: Why is it that the results of your survey are so counter-intuitive compared to police experience?

Kleck: For starters, there are substantial reasons for people not to report defensive gun uses to the police or, for that matter, even to interviewers working for researchers like me - the reason simply being that a lot of the times people either don't know whether their defensive act was legal or even if they think that was legal, they're not sure that possessing a gun at that particular place and time was legal. They may have a gun that's supposed to be registered and it's not or maybe it's totally legally owned but they're not supposed to be walking around on the streets with it.

Schulman: Did your survey ask the question of whether people carrying guns had licenses to do so?

Kleck:: No, we did not. We thought that would be way too sensitive a question to ask people.

Schulman: Okay. Let's talk about how the guns were actually used in order to accomplish the defense. How many people, for example, had to merely show the gun, as opposed to how many had to fire a warning shot, as to how many actually had to attempt to shoot or shoot their attacker?

Kleck: We got all of the details about everything that people could have done with a gun from as mild an action as merely verbally referring to the gun on up to actually shooting somebody.

Schulman: Could you give me the percentages?

Kleck: Yes. You have to keep in mind that it's quite possible for people to have done more than one of these things since they could obviously both verbally refer to the gun and point it at somebody or even shoot it.

Schulman: Okay.

Kleck: Fifty-four percent of the defensive gun uses involved somebody verbally referring to the gun. Forty-seven percent involved the gun being pointed at the criminal. Twenty-two percent involved the gun being fired. Fourteen percent involved the gun being fired at somebody, meaning it wasn't just a warning shot; the defender was trying to shoot the criminal. Whether they succeeded or not is another matter but they were trying to shoot a criminal. And then in 8 percent they actually did wound or kill the offender.

Schulman: In 8 percent, wounded or killed. You don't have it broken down beyond that?

Kleck: Wound versus kill? No. Again that was thought to be too sensitive a question. Although we did have, I think, two people who freely offered the information that they had, indeed, killed someone. Keep in mind that the 8 percent figure is based on so few cases that you have to interpret it with great caution.

Schulman: Did anybody respond to a question asking whether they had used the gun and it was found afterward to be unjustified?

Kleck: We did not ask them that question although we did ask them what crime they thought was being committed. So in each case the only incidents we were accepting as bona fide defensive gun uses were ones where the defender believed that, indeed, a crime had been committed against them.

Schulman: Did you ask any follow-up questions about how many people had been arrested or captured as a result of their actions?

Kleck: No.

Schulman: Did you ask any questions about aid in law enforcement, such as somebody helps a police officer who's not themselves an officer?

Kleck: No. I imagine that would be far too rare an incident to get any meaningful information out of it. Highly unlikely that any significant share of these involved assisting law enforcement.

Schulman: The question which this all comes down to is that we already have some idea, for example from surveys on CCW license holders, how rare it is for a CCW holder to misuse their gun in a way to injure somebody improperly. But does this give us any idea of what the percentages are of people who carry a gun having to use it in order to defend himself or herself? In other words, comparing the percentage of defending yourself to the percentage of being attacked, does this tell us anything?

Kleck: We asked them whether they carried guns at any time but we didn't directly ask them if they were carrying guns, in the legal sense, at the time they had used their gun defensively. So we can probably say what fraction of gun carriers in our sample had used a gun defensively but we can't say whether they did it while carrying. They may, for example, have been people who at least occasionally carried a gun for protection but they used a gun defensively in their own home.

Schulman: So what percentage of gun carriers used it defensively?

Kleck: I haven't calculated it yet so I couldn't say.

Schulman: So if we assume, let's say, that every year approximately 9 percent of people are going to be attacked, and approximately every year that 1 percent of respondents used their guns to defend against an attack, is it fair to say that around one out of nine people attacked used their guns to defend themselves?

Kleck: That "risk of being attacked" shouldn't be phrased that way. It's the risk of being the victim of a personal crime. In other words, it involved interpersonal contact. That could be something like a nonviolent crime like purse snatching or pickpocketing as well. The fact that personal contact is involved means there's an opportunity to defend against it using a gun; it doesn't necessarily mean there was an attack on the victim.

Schulman: Did you get any data on how the attackers were armed during these incidents?

Kleck: Yes. We also asked whether the offender was armed. The offender was armed in 47.2 percent of the cases and they had a handgun in about 13.6 percent of all the cases and some other kind of gun in 4.5 percent of all the cases.

Schulman: So in other words, in about a sixth of the cases, the person attacking was armed with a firearm.

Kleck: That's correct.

Schulman: Okay. And the remainder?

Kleck: Armed with a knife: 18.1 percent, 2 percent with some other sharp object, 10.1 percent with a blunt object, and 6 percent with some other weapon. Keep in mind when adding this up that offenders could have had more than one weapon.

Schulman: So in approximately five sixths of the cases somebody carrying a gun for defensive reasons would find themselves defending themselves either against an unarmed attacker or an attacker with a lesser weapon?

Kleck: Right. About five-sixths of the time.

Schulman: And about one-sixth of the time they would find themselves up against somebody who's armed with a firearm.

Kleck: Well, certainly in this sample of incidents that was the case.

Schulman: Which you believe is representative.

Kleck: It's representative of what's happened in the last five years. Whether or not it would be true in the future we couldn't say for sure.

Schulman: Are there any other results coming out of this which are surprising to you?

Kleck: About the only thing which was surprising is how often people had actually wounded someone in the incident. Previous surveys didn't have very many sample cases so you couldn't get into the details much but some evidence had suggested that a relatively small share of incidents involved the gun inflicting wounds so it was surprising to me that quite so many defenders had used a gun that way.

Schulman: Dr. Kleck, is there anything else you'd like to say at this time about the results of your survey and your continuing analysis of them?

Kleck: Nope.

Schulman:Then thank you very much.

Kleck: You're welcome.




How Does Japan Get That Low Crime Rate, Anyway?

Today's Los Angeles Times has an article that illuminates the difficulty of citing Japan's low crime rate as evidence that gun-control is a factor.

In a Column One story titled "Victims of a Safe Society," the Los Angeles Times details how the relatively low rate of private criminality in Japan is achieved by massive police criminality: beating suspects so severely that they are permanently crippled in order to obtain confessions, a massively high rate of false executions and imprisonment, and virtually no penalties for police who commit these crimes.

"Many foreign people think Japan is a highly developed, advanced, democratic country, and it is," says Hideyuki Kayanuma, an attorney for an American entertainer who was permanently crippled by Japanese police who suspected him of drug possession. "But especially in the field of criminal justice, it's a Third World country. There are no human rights."

Civil-rights attorney Kensuke Onuki says, "It's almost like Midnight Express."

In addition to beating of suspects, sleep deprivation to achieve confessions, and common torture of arrestees, the article describes a Japanese criminal justice system with virtually no bail, strip searches for traffic violations, and a conviction rate of 98% - about that of Stalinist USSR. In contrast, of 12,615 complaints of torture and abuse filed against police over the last 40 years, only 15 cases were tried, and only half of that 15 resulted in punishment for police officers.

Citing "a typical example," of Japanese justice, the article tells of a day laborer released after 16 years in prison. The laborer was coerced into a false confession during six months of detention in three different police stations outside Tokyo. During that time, the laborer says, "officers beat him on the head with fists, trampled his thighs, and ordered him to 'apologize' to a photo of the dead woman as they burned incense for her spirit in the interrogation room. They interrogated him for a total of 172 days as much as 13 hours a day."

Other methods of interrogation, according to the Times article, involve telling suspects that their families will suffer if they don't confess or that an interrogation won't end without a confession. The article cites human rights attorneys who have estimated forced confessions to be as high as 50%. Suspects may be held in custody for up to 23 days with no charges, bail, right to an attorney, or court supervision.

Nor is there much objection to this brutality by the Japanese public. The Japanese Civil Liberties Union has only 600 members, as compared to 280,000 ACLU members. Instead, says the Times article, "most Japanese place a high degree of confidence and trust in police and assume that suspects under arrest probably committed the crime."

Those who wish to cite Japan's low murder rate as proof that gun control works, had better think again. And if after reconsidering the issue they still advocate the Japanese approach, those Americans who value the concepts of fairness and justice would do well to understand what the goal of those who advocate gun control actually is: the importation of fascism to America.

- February 27, 1992




An Overview of the Statistical Case

In June, 1993, I responded to a message in the Gun Rights "echo" on the Fidonet personal computer network. The following is a slightly edited version of the stimulus and my response.

[Note for this edition: There has been some controversy regarding the accuracy of Interpol figures on homicide which throw into doubt figures given for Scotland below. See Rebuttal to "Stopping Power": Letters in Reply.

I nevertheless stand by my conclusion that gun control laws are ineffective at stopping violent individuals, as the recent gun massacre of schoolchildren at Dunblane, Scotland indicates. See my article "A Rude Awakening."
- JNS, 1996]

From : NEIL SCHULMAN

To : CHRISSY M Date: 06/04/93 11:04a

Subject : Weapon permits

Conf : 003 - GUN RIGHTS

NEIL> Guns don't encourage more murders. That is fallacious
NEIL> reasoning.

NEIL> Guns in the hands of bad people are used to do bad
NEIL> things.

NEIL> Guns in the hands of good people are used for the good
NEIL> purpose of stopping bad people from doing bad things.

NEIL> Pacifism is based on the premise that if good people
NEIL> surrender to bad people, good will prevail. Wrong. Dead
NEIL> wrong. If good people do not conquer bad people when
NEIL> bad people use violence to do bad things, then innocent
NEIL> people suffer.

CHRIS> Geeeeee, Am I getting slammed or what?? <grin> I

CHRIS> realize this. But in *MY* opinion, I don't think it
CHRIS> should be MANDATORY to have a gun in our homes. It
CHRIS> should be that person's decision. And you hafta admit,
CHRIS> that guns DO in fact increase the crime rate. A small
CHRIS> percentage, but it does.

CHRIS> Chris.


No, Chris, I do not admit that guns increase the crime rate. Your opinion is not in accordance with known facts.

Switzerland and Israel have two of the most heavily armed civilian populations on Earth. Both have an extremely low rate of violent crime and homicide - some of the lowest anywhere.

According to The Jewish Week for Dec. 11-17, 1992, the Israeli homicide rate for 1992 was 1.96 per 100,000 persons. One in ten Israeli civilians carries a firearm.

In Switzerland, every male between 20 and 50 is required to keep a fully-automatic assault rifle in his home, and the Swiss regularly carry these full-auto rifles to ranges on public transportation and on bicycles for practice. There are 4 million weapons in private hands including 220,000 pistols in a nation of 6.5 million people, which gives Switzerland about 3,400 pistols/100,000 Swiss citizens; and there are 4 million weapons in private hands, for a ratio slightly less than the ratio in the United States (61,500/100,000 in Switzerland compared to 83,300/100,000 in the US). I don't have the overall Swiss homicide rate handy, but they had 91 handgun murders in 1990 - for a population of 6.8 million, this works out to a Swiss handgun-related homicide rate of .00014%.

Let's look at the British now. Great Britain has had almost a complete gun ban in effect for most of this century. This is reflected in their extremely low gun homicide rate: Great Britain had 22 handgun homicides in 1990. But that figure tells only part of the story. Here are the British overall homicide rates:

Homicides in Great Britain, 1987-1988

(Source: Interpol)

England & Wales:               1987                     1988

Population                  49,923,500               50,424,900
Homicides:                     981                      992
Homicide Rate:               2 per 100K               1.97 per 100K

Scotland

Population:                  5,112,129                5,094,001
Homicides:                     508                      510*
Homicide Rate:              9.9 per 100K            10.0 per 100K
*excludes Pan Am 103 bombing

Northern Ireland

Population:                  1,500,000                1,575,200
Homicides:                     401                      563
Homicide Rate:             26.7 per 100K            35.7 per 100K

Evidently, British gun control doesn't seem to work at keeping down the overall homicide rate either in Scotland or Northern Ireland.

Comparing British And American Homicide Rates

(Source: FBI Unified Crime Reports)

For comparison, the United States Homicide Rate in 1987: 8.3 per 100K (compare to 9.9 for Scotland, 26.7 for Northern Ireland); and in 1988: 8.4 per 100K (compare to 10.0 per 100K in Scotland and 35.7 per 100K in Northern Ireland).

Which refutes the claim that British-style gun control produces a national homicide rate which is lower than the United States.

Now, let's compare these homicide rates with the U.S. 
U.S. cities (1990):               U.S. states (1990):

Washington D.C........78 per 100K        New York.....14.5 per 100K
Miami.................39 per 100K        Florida......10.7 per 100K
Houston...............35 per 100K        Pennsylvania..6.7 per 100K
New York City.........31 per 100K        Montana.......4.9 per 100K
Los Angeles...........28 per 100K        Minnesota.....2.7 per 100K
Denver................14 per 100K        Vermont.......2.3 per 100K
Phoenix...............13 per 100K        South Dakota..2.0 per 100K
Seattle...............10 per 100K        New Hampshire.1.9 per 100K
El Paso................7 per 100K        Iowa..........1.7 per 100K
Colorado Springs.......3 per 100K        North Dakota. .08 per 100K

Several things become immediately obvious. First, Northern Ireland as a whole has a 1987-1988 murder rate less than half of Washington D.C., less than Miami or Houston, and about equivalent to New York City. Washington, D.C. and New York have extremely strict gun laws; Houston and Miami less so. Gun control doesn't seem to be a factor. Also, the rural areas of the United States have a homicide rate low enough to make our national homicide rate lower than Scotland's, and much lower than Northern Ireland's.

Second, there are areas of the United States with a lower homicide rate than England's, and these areas have little or no gun control.

Third, Colorado Springs, Colorado, with one of the lowest homicide rates of any major U.S. city has virtually no gun control laws; yet its homicide rate is only slightly higher than England's, which has a virtual gun ban.

Fourth, laws - not just gun control laws, but all laws - are not a controlling element in the homicide rate, period. Houston and El Paso both are subject to the same Texas laws; yet Houston has five times as many murders per 100,000 residents as El Paso. Denver, Colorado has 4.7 times as many murders per 100,000 residents as Colorado Springs, which has the same laws.

Perhaps looking at the United States homicide rate for this century will also be useful:

Murder Statistics from Statistical Abstract of the United States,

U.S. Department of Commerce

The murder rate from 1870 to 1905 was slightly under/over 1 per 100,000. Except for New York City's Sullivan Law and Reconstruction-era laws against blacks carrying guns without permission, U.S. has virtually no gun laws.

1900: 1.2
1901: 1.2 Sept. 6: President McKinley shot; dies 9/14.
1902: 1.2 Theodore Roosevelt elected president.
1903: 1.1
1904: 1.3 Upward trend in homicide rate begins.
1905: 2.1
1906: 3.9 T. Roosevelt reelected.
1907: 4.9
1908: 4.8
1909: 4.2 William H. Taft assumes presidency.
1910: 4.6
1911: 5.5
1912: 5.4
1913: 6.1 Woodrow Wilson assumes presidency.
1914: 6.2 World War I begins in Europe.
1915: 5.9
1916: 6.3
1917: 6.9 April 6: US enters World War I
1918: 6.5 WWI ends; troops return; influenza epidemic.
1919: 7.2
1920: 6.8 Prohibition starts.
1921: 8.1 Harding presidency begins.
1922: 8.0
1923: 7.8 Harding dies; Coolidge becomes president.
1924: 8.1
1925: 8.3
1926: 8.4
1927: 8.4
1928: 8.6 Herbert Hoover elected president.
1929: 8.4 Oct. 29: Stock market crash
1930: 8.8 Beginning of Great Depression
1931: 9.2
1932: 9.0 FDR elected first time
1933: 9.7 Prohibition repealed.
1934: 9.5 National Firearms Act restricts machine guns
1935: 8.3
1936: 8.0
1937: 7.6
1938: 6.8
1939: 6.4 World War II begins in Europe
1940: 6.3
1941: 6.0 December 8: US enters WW II
1942: 5.9
1943: 5.1
1944: 5.0
1945: 5.7 WW2 ends; troops return home, many w/ weapons.
1946: 6.4 Beginning of baby boom.
1947: 6.1
1948: 5.9
1949: 5.4
1950: 5.3 June 25: Korean War begins.
1951: 4.9
1952: 5.2
1953: 4.8 July: Korean Armistice; troops return home.
1954: 4.8
1955: 4.5
1956: 4.6
1957: 4.5
1958: 4.5
1959: 4.6
1960: 4.7
1961: 4.7
1962: 4.8 October: Cuban missile crisis
1963: 4.9 Nov. 22: JFK assassinated; LBJ takes office.
1964: 5.1 Gulf of Tonkin resolution; LBJ elected.
1965: 5.5
1966: 5.9 Vietnam War escalates; anti-war demonstrations
1967: 6.8
1968: 7.3 Nixon wins; King & RFK murd'd; 1968 GCA passed
1969: 7.7 Jan. 20: Nixon takes office.
1970: 8.3
1971: 8.6
1972: 9.0 Nixon reelected
1973: 9.4 Watergate scandal; US troops pull out of Vietnam.
1974: 9.8 Nixon resigns; Ford assumes presidency.
1975: 9.6 April: fall of Saigon to Communists
1976: 8.8
1977: 8.8 Jan. 20: Carter takes office
1978: 9.0
1979: 9.7
1980: 10.2 Reagan elected. Dec. 8: John Lennon murdered.
1981: 9.8 Reagan takes office Jan 20; shot by Hinckley 3/20
1982: 9.1
1983: 8.3
1984: 7.9 Reagan re-elected
1985: 7.9
1986: 8.6 McClure-Volkmer Gun Act passes, easing gun laws.
1987: 8.3
1988: 8.4 Bush elected
1989: 8.7 Jan. 20: Bush takes office
1990: 9.4
1991: 9.8
1992: 9.3 Apr 29: widespread riots. Nov: Clinton elected.

Analysis: It's hard to draw specific conclusions on the causes of the increases and decreases in homicide. It's tempting to blame an increase on the passage of Prohibition or World War I, except the upward homicide trend begins in 1904, before either event. The repeal of Prohibition in 1933, however, does seem to begin a gradual lowering in homicide rates (one can't attribute it to the 1934 National Firearms Act because that law focuses only on machine-guns, a minor part of the body count), until the period beginning in 1963-64 with the JFK assassination and the escalation of the Vietnam War, when rates start sharply upward again. There is a short spurt in homicides at the end of World War II which is not repeated at the end of the Korean War. The period from 1949 to 1963 is fairly low on domestic homicide. Nor, judging from the Great Depression, can poverty be used to explain increasing homicide rates: after a brief peak in 1931, the U.S. homicide rates falls by about a third over the Depression decade.

The most severe federal gun control passed is the 1968 Gun Control Act, which outlaws buying guns through the mail or transferring them interstate without a federal dealers' license. The law has no observable effect on increasing homicide rates. Nor does the easing of some 1968 restrictions by the McClure-Volkmer Firearms Owners Protection Act in 1986, while outlawing ownership of new full-auto weapons, seem to produce any observable impact on the national homicide rate.

One set of comparisons are not included in the time-series homicide rate chart and probably should have been. The increase in domestic homicides seems to compare closely with the increase in immigration.

Also, if you were to statistically isolate the inner-city black population in the United States, the rest of the homicide rate drops down to that of the low-end-homicide-rate states. Black criminals murdering other blacks is the largest single statistical homicide grouping in this country, and throws all the other statistics out of whack.

As with regional comparisons of gun control, time-series observations do not seem to offer any reason to believe that increasing restrictions on firearms have any positive effect on reducing homicide rates.

All in all, I'd say anyone who is trying to make a case for or against gun control by linking availability of firearms with homicide rates is going to find it impossible to do so with any credibility.

Now let's get to the other side of the equation: gun defenses. When a pharmaceutical company markets a drug, they must check to see whether or not it is (1) safe; and (2) effective. Let's apply the same tests to firearms in the hands of the civilian population to see whether guns are safe and effective means for private citizens to defend themselves against crime.

Let's look at safety first.

First, what about gun accidents? Let's begin by comparing gun-related accidental deaths with accidental deaths from other causes.

Source: National Center for Health Statistics
(1991, latest official estimates)

Motor Vehicle* 47,575
Falls 12,151
Poisoning (solid, liquid, gas)* 6,524
Fires and Flames* 4,716
Drowning (incl. water transport drownings) 4,716
Suffocation (mechanical, ingestion)* 4,491
Surgical/Medical misadventures* 2,850
Other Transportation (excl. drownings)* 2,160
Natural/Environmental factors* 1,816
Firearms 1,489
(includes estimated 500 handgun and 200 hunting accidents)

*1989, latest official figures

In other words, firearms-related accidents are a comparatively small cause of death as compared to most other accidental causes.

And just to put this in context, accidental death from firearms is down 40% from ten years ago, and down 80% from fifty years ago.

Now that we've established that firearms accidents aren't a major problem, let's look at the overall safety of an armed citizenry.

Vermont in the only state in the union to allow any citizen to own or carry a gun, concealed or unconcealed, without any sort of license or permit. What is the homicide rate in Vermont? It's 2.3 per 100,000 - one of the lowest in the nation.

Now let's go to a state with a high homicide rate: Florida, with a homicide rate of 10.7 per 100,000. Florida licenses the carrying of concealed firearms to any U.S. resident who isn't disqualified by reason of being a convicted criminal, or a drug addict, or a mental patient. You have to pass a fingerprint background check and show some sort of proof that you're competent to carry a gun: any 8-hour NRA basic firearms handling & safety course will do.

Here are the statistics on Florida's concealed-carry-weapons program:

Florida CCW Licensing Statistics

We see here that among the 119,234 persons Florida has licensed to carry a concealed firearm, there have been only 16 cases where a licensee has subsequently used a firearm in violation of Florida law - and most of those are simply carrying into prohibited places such as a bar or airport.

We have established the safety of civilian carry of firearms beyond a doubt. Now let's look at effectiveness of civilian carry of firearms in fighting crime.

Gary Kleck, professor of criminology at Florida State University at Tallahassee, has examined data from 8 separate studies, and has concluded with a 95% certainty interval (assuming one defense per survey respondent in the last five years - a highly conservative assumption) civilians in the United States use firearms over a million times a year in defense against crime. My own analysis of data compiled in a study by the Los Angeles Times leads me to believe that Kleck's analysis is in fact an underestimate. [Note for this edition: I was right. The figure is now updated to 2.45 million defenses. See Q & A on Gun Defenses. - JNS, 1996] My own figures show that for every time a criminal uses a gun to commit a violent crime, there are two uses of a firearm by a private citizen to stop, prevent, or deter a crime.

Additionally, let's look at some comparisons between police use of firearms and civilian use:

Comparisons between Civilian and Police Use of Firearms

(Source: Civil Rights Attorney Don Kates, St. Louis University School of Law, in Restricting Handguns: The Liberal Skeptics Speak Out, Firearms and Violence, and "Gun Control and the Subway Class." The first two are books; the last is an article in the January 10, 1985 Wall Street Journal.)

Percentage of privately owned handguns used in crime: 0.4%

Number of times a year private handguns successfully used in defense: 645,000
[ Note for this edition: Now estimated at 1.9 million defenses yearly - JNS, 1996]

Percentage of times armed police have succeeded in wounding or driving off criminals: 68%

Percentage of times armed private citizens have succeeded in wounding or driving off criminals: 83%

Percentage persons who are innocent of a crime shot by armed police: 11%

Percentage of persons who are innocent of a crime shot by armed private citizens: 2%

Now, let's look a Florida's crime rate. We already know that Florida concealed-carry-weapons licensees aren't a problem. But is there any other change in the Florida crime statistics since they instituted their new carry law?

Not a dramatic or conclusive one, but the crime trend in Florida is reversing. Note the following:

Crime in the United States, the FBI's Uniform Crime Report.
Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter

Florida

____________________________________________________________

Year   Total     % Change    Rate/100,000    % Change

1990      1,379       -1.9         10.7            -3.6
1989      1,405       -.8          11.1            -2.6
1988      1,416       +3.3         11.4             --
1987      1,371        --          11.4            -2.6
1986      1,371       +5.8         11.7            +2.6
1985      1,296                    11.4

Which shows that homicide, the most serious of the offenses, has been in a downward trend in Florida during the period when the number of private persons legally carrying firearms is increasing.

Handgun Control, Inc., responded by charging that the homicide figures weren't telling, because rape and assault were still rising.

Well, they aren't anymore. The trend has started to reverse.

Verbatim Statistics on Violent Crime in Florida,

1991 Annual State Report:

Murder................DOWN .................8.0%
w/Handguns.................. DOWN .................3.9%
w/firearms...................DOWN ................15.4%
w/knives.....................DOWN .................5.2%
w/hands/fists/feet...........DOWN ................14.1%
Other........................DOWN ................17.9%


Robbery.............. DOWN .................1.7%
w/Handgun......................UP .................0.6%
w/firearms...................DOWN ................10.3%
w/knives.....................DOWN .................6.6%
w/hands/fists/feet...........DOWN .................0.6%
Other........................DOWN .................4.6%


Aggravated Assault....DOWN .................1.7%
w/handgun....................DOWN .................5.9%
w/firearms...................DOWN .................9.4%
w/knives.....................DOWN .................3.4%
w/hands/fists/feet.............UP .................5.5%
Other..........................UP .................1.3%


Burglary..............DOWN .................3.8%
w/forced entry...............DOWN .................2.0%
no forced entry..............DOWN .................9.5%
Attempted entry..............DOWN .................5.3%


Purse Snatching.......DOWN .................7.3%

Now lets look at some Non-Violent Crimes from the same 1991 Annual Report: 

Larceny.................UP .................3.1%
Pocket Picking.................UP .................1.0%
Shoplifting....................UP .................4.8%
Theft from Coin Machines.......UP ................11.4%
Motor Vehicle Theft............UP .................1.5%


Drugs: Sale Overall.....UP ................11.0%
Cocaine sale...................UP ................11.3%
Marijuana sale.................UP ................34.3%


Fraud...................UP .................0.7%
Credit Card/ATM................UP ................16.2%
Impersonation..................UP .................9.0%
Welfare........................UP ................45.5%
Wire (telephone fraud).........UP ................87.5%

Crooks in Florida do seem to be avoiding occasions where they might run into an armed citizen. I would say that while it is not conclusive, there is as much statistical weight at this point to the proposition that increasing the number of firearms being carried by the civilian population inhibits violent crime, as there is to the statistical linkage between cigarette smoking and heart disease or emphysema.

It is indisputable that the Florida concealed-carry firearms law has not turned Florida into the Gunshine State, as HCI and CBS News predicted in 1986.

It is indisputable that making CCW-licenses available to anyone who wants one and can pass an ordinary background check showing no criminal or psychological disqualification does not endanger the public.

And it is getting statistically strong that increasing the ability of the civilian population to carry firearms reverses rising crime trends as well.

What can we conclude from all this?

1) Restricting firearms does not reduce the homicide rate. Look at Scotland and Washington D.C.

2) Proliferating firearms does not increase the homicide rate. Look at Switzerland, Israel, New Hampshire, and Vermont, and the concealed-carry-weapons licensees in Florida.

3) Civilians carrying firearms are more safe and effective at deterring crime than are professional police.

My bottom line is my tagline:

Gun Control = Victim Disarmament & Increases Violent Crime!

Neil




It's Time to Take a Second Look at Murder

If there is any fundamental precept of Western Civilization, it's the injunction from the Ten Commandments that tells us, "Thou shalt not murder."

But perhaps we in the United States today, suffering from one of the worst crime waves in our history - a crime wave that causes us to hide in our homes behind elaborate security systems - need to ask ourselves whether we are making a mistake in basing the laws of a secular society on the clearly sectarian religious precept that murder is wrong. Shouldn't we, rather, take a more empirical approach to murder and first assess whether the actual practice of murder produces greater harm to society or a net social benefit?

There is plenty of good reason to believe that murder benefits society more than it harms it.

The Detective Division of the Chicago Police Department has analyzed all 940 murders that took place in Chicago in 1992, and issued a report titled Murder Analysis. In it we discover not only that 72.39% of the 1992 Chicago murderers had a prior criminal history, but 65.53% - virtually two-thirds - of the 1992 murder victims in Chicago had a prior criminal history as well.

That means that for every time an innocent person in Chicago was murdered, two criminals lost their lives. Six hundred and sixteen criminals were killed in Chicago alone in one year.

It is, of course, unfortunate that innocent people are dying from murder, but clearly murder is eliminating criminals from society twice as often as it is eliminating good people. Shouldn't this make us begin to question whether we are making a mistake by placing the selfish interests of a few individuals to hang onto their lives for a few extra years above the clear social benefits of removing criminals whose destructive acts are destroying the fabric of our society?

Despite its sinister reputation, it appears that far more often than not, murder is a natural market reaction to the failure of our criminal justice system to punish criminals. Between 1968 and 1992, there were only 143 executions in the United States. During that same period, the United States had about 531,000 murders. If we apply the Chicago study's percentage of 65.53% murder victims having a criminal history, we come up with a figure of about 350,000 criminals killed during that 25-year period. This is over 2400 times as many criminals killed in the private sector as all the criminals executed in all the states.

With trials, appeals, and lengthy death-row waits before a criminal can be executed in the United States - almost always at taxpayers' expense - executing a single criminal costs the taxpayers well over a million dollars on average. Further, our antiquated laws only allow us to execute murderers, and not even all of them - there has to be "special circumstances."

Yet, the private sector executed over 350,000 criminals at a fraction of the cost that the government's criminal justice system did in one twenty-five year period. If the justice system had executed these criminals, it would have added 350 billion dollars to the federal debt.

But the taxpayers' savings in bypassing official executions are only the beginning. The average criminal can be expected to commit about half-a-million dollars-a-year in economic crime, and hundreds of thousands of additional dollars in property destruction and physical harm to victims. Considering the revolving-door nature of our criminal justice system, one can estimate that over a twenty-five-yearspan, a criminal will spend about half his time in prison - at taxpayers' expense, of course - and the other half on the street, committing robberies, assaults, burglaries, car thefts, carjackings, and rapes.

A simple automobile burglary for a car stereo can cost an insurance company almost a thousand dollars to repair broken windows and the dashboard console, and to replace the stolen equipment.

A simple assault can cost tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills, lost wages, and psychological counseling.

Shoplifting causes stores to hire security personnel to watch us instead of sales clerks to help us.

The thousands of dollars we spend each year in insurance premiums and higher prices reflect the costs of living in a criminal-infested society.

How can we, as a society, even begin to calculate the immense social benefit that permanently removing even one criminal from society has, much less the 15,000 or so criminals that private-sector killing is eliminating each year? If a single criminal is responsible for several million dollars in losses over a career, isn't murdering them at the rate of 15,000 or so a year producing a benefit to society several times that of the entire yearly federal deficit?

In 1729, Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, and best-known today for his Gulliver's Travels, wrote a satire called A Modest Proposal, in which he suggested that the children of the poor could benefit Ireland by being eaten.

Mark Twain said in his autobiography, "There are three kinds of lies - lies, damned lies and statistics."

And in 1983, my satirical novel The Rainbow Cadenza was published, in which I portrayed a future that had "eliminated" rape by drafting women into a three-year hitch of public sexual service, and legalized hunting of draft-evaders for free sex.

The statistics quoted above are true. It is true that the Chicago Police Department's Murder Analysis determined that twice as many persons with a criminal history were murdered in Chicago in 1992 than those without criminal histories.

It would have been just as easy for me to write an essay using real statistics, proving that since most crime in America is committed by young African-American males, therefore abolishing slavery was a bad idea, or that we could reduce our homicide rate to that of England's by the simple expedient of shipping blacks back to Africa.

We are living in a society which has come down with a bad case of a disease we can dub "statisticitis": the uncritical use of statistical soundbytes to influence public policy.

So-called experts at the federal Environmental Protection Agency have used statistics to claim that second-hand smoke is killing half a million of us each year.

Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop once claimed in the Journal of the American Medical Association that guns are killing a million American children each year.

In fact, the national death rate from all causes is two million or so per year, with heart disease and cancers alone accounting for about two-thirds of the deaths.

Now a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine is claiming that you are three times more likely to have one of your loved ones murder you with a handgun you keep for protection than that the handgun will scare off, or actually defend you from, a burglar. But the doctor who made that claim didn't even look at the question of how many times a year a firearm is used defensively without killing or wounding anyone.

We can't all be experts in all the technical fields of knowledge necessary to make political judgments nowadays. There are just too many of them. But is it too much to ask, when someone wants to engineer public policy on the basis of what's statistically "good" for society, whether it wrongs actual individuals who have to live in that society?

There is never shortage of good arguments for instituting a public policy that would benefit the greater good at the expense of some selfish few. These are the arguments we hear nowadays in favor of limiting your choice of legal medical treatment to those allowed by government-controlled "health alliances," or limiting the portrayal of violence on television to what may be suitable only for children, or restricting firearms only to people who wear uniforms.

But without a moral sense of the dignity and rights of the private individual placing overriding limits on what governmental power may do to benefit society, what is to stop every ambitious social experimenter from enslaving each of us in reality, to "all of us," in their wildest fantasies?

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