Ripostes and Counters

The people who don't like guns have a lot of media resources to call upon. That puts gun-rights activists in the position of playing defense most of the time.

Ah, but that's just another opportunity for a clever attack, if you know how.

Remember: you're never outnumbered. You just have a "target rich" environment. - JNS

KNX Editorial Replies

Broadcast January 9, 1992:

KNX's call for fewer incidents of irresponsible gunplay is one no sane person can disagree with. But the reasonable-sounding laws KNX endorses undercut the individual right to own firearms in this country, so wider anti-gun laws can be passed later.

Take the legal requirement that you need to pass a government safety test before you're allowed to buy a gun. What reasonable person can oppose gun safety? The problem is, it makes gun ownership a privilege instead of a right. It expands government power to decide who can't own guns.

If unchecked government power doesn't frighten you, consider that when Germany passed laws making Jews turn in their guns, it became possible for the Nazis to send them to death camps. Consider that it was armed soldiers who massacred unarmed students at China's Tien an men Square a couple of years ago.

Then ask yourself whether the massive civil disobedience that thousands of Californians are committing, by refusing to register their so-called assault rifles with the state, is "irresponsible." Just maybe it's a higher responsibility to the U.S. Constitution, the Second Amendment of which tells the government, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

Power-hungry officials understand the threat contained in the Second Amendment. That's why they often lie about it. It's the threat to all tyrants written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. It tells us that governments are instituted to secure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it."

Broadcast July 15, 1993:

KNX General Manager George Nicholaw asks why it takes a tragedy in a San Francisco high rise for there to be a chorus of outrage demanding stricter gun control. I'll answer that question. It's because the choir is the news media themselves.

When a lunatic misuses firearms to commit multiple murders and suicide, it's headline news, every hour on the hour. Then, for weeks afterwards, pundits capitalize on the tragedy with calls for more restrictive gun laws, based on the charge that firearms can only be used to murder the innocent.

But that's just not true. According to a study by Professor Gary Kleck, Criminologist at Florida State University, Americans use their privately owned firearms - handguns, rifles, and shotguns - 1.4 million times every year to save innocent lives. Let me say that another way. Three thousand, eight hundred times a day, an American firearm owner uses her or his firearm to prevent a rape, a robbery, or a burglary. In 99% of those thirty-eight hundred daily firearm defenses, no one is shot at all - and because non-violence is non-news, you never hear about it.

Let me put this statistic in perspective. During the fifteen-minute period in which a psycho murdered nine people at a San Francisco law office, forty ordinary Americans used their privately owned firearms to stop a crime, without shooting anyone.

The bitter tragedy in San Francisco is that some of those nine murders could have been stopped if anyone at that law office had kept a firearm locked in her or his desk for protection.

We do have a problem with firearms in this society. It's not that too many criminals and lunatics have a gun handy when they need one, it's that too many victims don't.

Broadcast October 6, 1993

KNX General Manager George Nicholaw wants the LA Police Department to restrict licenses to carry concealed firearms to a small elite who can demonstrate a "clear and present danger" ... but he also thinks that simple fear of violence isn't enough. Under that standard, he says - and this is a direct quote - "every city resident would qualify."

Amen to that!

Mr. Nicholaw also says - another direct quote - "Let's be careful not to turn the 'City of Angels' into an armed camp of gun-toting vigilantes."

Mr. Nicholaw seems to be more afraid that you might legally carry a firearm for protection than he is of the carjackers, ATM-robbers, and rapists who are already carrying them illegally.

This paranoia about ordinary citizens turning into vigilantes just isn't supported by states where civilians are already commonly carrying firearms.

Pennsylvania, Oregon, Washington, Georgia, and New Hampshire are among the states where it's easy to get licensed - and none of those states have problems with ordinary civilians carrying firearms. Vermont doesn't even require a license for anyone to carry a concealed firearm. Have you seen any stories on 60 Minutes about vigilantes being a big problem in Vermont?

But Florida is the best example because they're a big state and keep good records.

Florida issues a license to carry a concealed firearm to any adult who can meet minimal requirements. In the last six years, Florida has issued almost 120,000 new licenses to carry - and only 16 Floridians lost their licenses because they violated Florida's laws regarding the use of that firearm. That's a compliance with the law of 99.99987 percent.

And even though 120,000 concealed-weapons carriers aren't all that many in a state with 13 million people, it just might be enough of a reason why criminals in Florida are attacking tourists whom they know are a lot less likely to shoot back.

Excerpts from a Letter to Nadine Strossen, President, ACLU

October 11, 1991

Dear Ms. Strossen:

I'm a member of ACLU writing to ask your assistance in a matter where ACLU Of Southern California is, itself, violating my civil rights.

In the light of recent court decisions which have been narrowing civil liberties one after another, I joined ACLU with the intention of bringing my activism to ACLU. I have been impressed by ACLU's work in the areas of the first and fourth amendments, its fourteenth amendment work in the area of equal protection, and its pro-privacy work (including pro-choice and gay rights), but there were major gaps where the government has been running roughshod over civil rights where I felt my energies, and those of like-minded people, could be of maximum value. Specifically, these are the fundamental human right to autonomy over one's own body, as violated by drug prohibition and FDA interference with the purchase of vitamins and drugs, and the right to keep and bear arms, as protected by the 2nd amendment, and violated by statutes prohibiting or restricting ownership, trade, possession, and carrying of defensive weapons. (Let me note here that the Second Amendment is included in the copy of the Bill of Rights which ACLU of Southern California mailed me as part of the membership information kit, and again as part of the membership kit when I joined. What on earth are they thinking?)

I read the literature mailed to me by ACLU of Southern California carefully, noting that chapters could be formed not only by region, but also by special interest - for example, there's a Gay and Lesbian Rights Chapter. I then called Gary Mandanach, President of ACLU of Southern California, and spoke with him several times, telling him that I have been recruiting new ACLU memberships with the intention of forming an ACLU of Southern California chapter, to be focused on 9th and 2nd amendment issues, including drug privacy and right to keep and bear arms. I requested his assistance in the formation of such a chapter, and he said he would bring up the issue at the next board meeting.

Today he informed me that ACLU of Southern California would not recognize any chapter I formed on these issues, since the board has a pro-gun-control policy. I asked how I could appeal this decision, or bring about its change, and he told me in essence, "There is no way."

I am shocked, dismayed, and outraged. It's the precise equivalent to me as if I was a newspaper reporter who approached ACLU with the intention of protecting the right of free press, and was told that the board of ACLU had a policy calling for government control of newspapers.

We have here a situation where I was (and am) ready to bring hundreds of new members into ACLU of Southern California, to support Constitutionally-protected civil rights - and ACLU of Southern California has not only told me to buzz off, but it has informed me it is in league with those who would narrow civil liberties. I do not intend to allow this corruption of ACLU policy to hinder the important work of defending civil liberties.

This letter is a formal request for national ACLU to grant me the right to recruit new ACLU members nationally, and to invite current ACLU members, for a new national ACLU affiliate to be called the Unabridged Bill of Rights Chapter. This would be unaffiliated with any regional affiliate of ACLU.

I believe that with proper publicity, I can bring in several thousand new members to national ACLU for this chapter, and restore the luster which has been tarnished by an ACLU affiliate's attempt to fight for government restriction of civil rights rather than the constitutional rights of the people.

I look forward to hearing from you as soon as possible, so that we can discuss the proper procedures I need to go through to form this chapter.

Sincerely,

J. Neil Schulman

Nadine Strossen replied to this letter and told me she'd forwarded my reply to the ACLU of Southern California; she told me to write her again if I found their response unsatisfactory. Since Gary Mandanach of the ACLU of Southern California told me in polite language to buzz off, I wrote back to Nadine Strossen, and followed up with phone calls and faxes that were never acknowledged. - JNS

Letter to Scientific American

The following letter was sent to Scientific American. They elected not to publish it. - JNS

October 28, 1991

Franklin E. Zimring's article in the November 1991 Scientific American, "Firearms, Violence and Public Policy," has no proper place in any publication with the name "science" on its masthead, much less a publication with the prestige of Scientific American. It is pure political advocacy covered with a thin veneer of statistics to make it appear scientific to the naive.

Zimring's claim that "[T]he percentage of gun-related crimes in an area is related to the proportion of owners of firearms in that area" is not even supported by comparing Zimring's own charts on "Crimes with Guns by Region in 1990" and "Homicides by Region in 1990" with his "Households with Guns by Region in 1991." These clearly show that while the Midwest has the second highest percent of households owning at least one gun, it has the lowest per capita number of crimes with guns and per capita gun homicides of any region.

That Zimring begins with an ideological point of view, and chooses to study only that which might tend to support his conclusions, is borne out by the absence from his study of any data comparing armed crimes against the unarmed with armed crimes against the armed. Zimring asks only how reducing the number of guns in criminal hands affects violence; he never asks the obvious corollary, as any scientist would, of how increasing the number of guns available to potential crime victims at the point of attack would affect the sociology of violence. His omission is not without intent: if Zimring has looked into anything on this question at all, he would be aware of the book Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America (1991) by Gary Kleck, and "The Value of Civilian Arms Possession as a Deterrent to Crime or Defense Against Crime," by Don B. Kates Jr., in American Journal of Criminal Law, Volume 18, #3 (1991). Both clearly show, by interviews with criminals convicted of violent attacks, and with statistics comparing criminal attacks against unarmed persons with criminal attacks against armed persons, that the number of successful criminal attacks and homicides are far lower when criminals are met by armed defense.

Nor is Zimring's premise, that reducing the number of gun deaths is a social goal that justifies curtailing the legal right of Americans to keep and bear arms, borne out by statistics from the National Center for Health Statistics that rate gun homicides as less than one-half percent of the yearly causes of death in this country and only three percent yearly of accidental deaths, or by FBI statistics showing that yearly criminal misuse of firearms involves only four-tenths of one percent of handguns, or by comparisons between U.S. cities with restrictive handgun laws and lenient handgun laws showing that the per capita rate of homicide and robbery average four times as high in cities with restrictive gun laws, or that each year, handguns are successfully used to repel more crimes than handguns used to commit crimes.

When political propaganda is labelled as science, it both discredits science in the minds of the public, and stands as evidence for the Luddites among us that scientists are mere technicians in the hire of the politically powerful.

J. Neil Schulman, Chair

The Committee to Enforce the Second Amendment

A Reply to Joyce Brothers

From Dr. Joyce Brothers' column of Nov 11, 1991 titled "Man May Equate Guns With Power":

Men who have a love affair with guns often feel threatened or insecure ... Men who are insecure about their sexual identity often equate guns with sexual power. In fact, gun is sometimes used verbally as another word for the male sex organ. Typically, this kind of man is usually a defender of sexual stereotypes. He places high value on the use of force and on maintaining the status quo, both sexually and politically.

November 11, 1991

Dear Dr. Brothers:

You are mistaken in stereotyping gun-owners as "a defender of sexual stereotypes [who] places high value on the use of force and of maintaining the status quo, both sexually and politically."

Thirty-five million Americans own handguns. Twelve million of them are women, including the president of the San Francisco NOW chapter, Helen Grieco. While currently gun ownership rises both with education and income, the population segment buying the most new handguns is black women living in crime-infested neighborhoods.

A recent survey of 1500 police officers show 92.2 percent feel that because of limited police manpower, citizens should retain the right to own firearms for self-defense at home or business, and with good reason. More private handguns are used in a year to prevent or end a crime than to commit one, and convicted armed robbers say they fear private gun owners more than they fear the police. As for accidental gun deaths, they represent one-and-a-half percent of the accidental deaths in this country, rating half as high as medical mishaps, and only three percent as high as auto accidents.

Finally, if you must invoke the Freudian image of a gun as a symbol of the male sexual organ, you might at least note that Freud described pencils, nail files, umbrellas, and trees as phallic symbols as well.

J. Neil Schulman, Chair

The Committee to Enforce the Second Amendment

Can You Trust Handgun Control, Inc.?

I got a new mailing last week, under the signature of Jim Brady, asking me to renew my Handgun Control membership.

Here are a couple of excerpts:

"In his attempt to assassinate the President, John Hinckley - a man with a history of mental problems - had purchased a $29 Saturday Night Special handgun in Texas where no waiting period or background check is required for gun buyers. He used that gun to shoot the President, a secret service agent, a policeman and me."

Brady Bill Would Not Have Saved Jim Brady

Interesting that Brady doesn't mention that Hinckley bought his gun months earlier, so that even if the Brady Bill had been in place, Hinckley still would have had plenty of time to buy his gun and attempt the assassination. Moreover, Hinckley's mental problems would not have been discovered by any legally possible background check - instantaneous or combined with a waiting period - because of the constitutional guarantee of privacy which shields psychiatric patients.

Here's another excerpt:

"ASSAULT WEAPONS BAN - Machine guns, assault pistols and other rapid-fire weapons were designed for one thing: killing. They have no place on our streets or anywhere in our country. Yet, the NRA fights any proposed limits on these killing machines as a violation of 'gun owner's rights.'"

Wow. Hard to believe there can be so many misstatements in three sentences. Let's take it one piece at a time.

**HCI: "Designed For One Thing: Killing."**

Since a gun is potentially lethal, it can be used to threaten lethality without having to kill. If the person threatening the lethality has criminal intent, the gun can be used to obtain a victim's compliance for robbery, rape, or other extorted behavior. If the person threatening the lethality has a non-criminal intent, the gun can be used to obtain a criminal's surrender before, during, or after a crime is attempted or committed.

In addition to killing, a gun can be used to produce a cone of shock force sufficient to incapacitate a person who would otherwise be able to deliver a lethal attack. This is technically called "stopping power," and is the reason that police and others who obtain guns for non-criminal purposes prefer larger caliber, higher-power firearms, which can drop an attacker quickly. The intent of shooting an attacker is not to kill; it is to instantly incapacitate. With certain wounds sufficient to stop, however, the wound is sometimes also fatal. Nonetheless, the death of the attacker is a by-product of the force needed to stop a lethal attacker; the attacker's death is not the intent of a defensive shooting.

Stopping Versus Killing

Stopping power and killing power are two different things. The "phasers on stun" of Star Trek illustrate effectively the concept of "stopping power at a distance" with a sufficiently advanced technology that there is a low mortality rate to the entity so stopped. Unfortunately, we don't live in that fantasy world, where stopping without high risk of mortality is possible. In the real world, if a person is threatening lethal force and needs to be stopped from attacking, the only effective way to stop them quickly from a safe distance is to shoot them, usually at the center of body mass, with around 150 or more grains of metal. Handguns are optimized to do this: they are engineered to be "machines that stop lethal attackers before they can murder."

That murderers misuse them to murder tells us no more about the engineered purposes of handguns than the fact that kitchen knives, icepicks, rat poison, baseball bats, and water can also be misused as implements of death.

A Gun Defined By Function, Rather Than Purpose

What is the function of a gun? It is to shoot something. An electron gun, for example, shoots electrons onto a plate so to emit photons and produce a visible image. This is called television.

The function of a firearm is to fire a projectile. The purposes to which that object may be put depend (a) on the qualities of design engineered into it and (b) the actual purposes to which it is put by the end-user.

For example, a baseball bat is designed to hit baseballs. That is its intended purpose by its designers and manufacturers. That may or may not be the purposes of the persons using it, depending on whether they are baseball players or rioters in South Central Los Angeles.

The Manufacturers'Intended Purpose For The Guns They Make

The primary purpose of firearms designed and manufactured by Colt, or Smith & Wesson, or Glock, is entirely limited to end-users who wish them for defensive combat or threat of such against criminal attackers, or for sporting purposes. Firearms manufacturers are unhappy when their products are used by gangsters for drive-by shootings, or to rob the clerks of a 7-11, and if they knew a way to prevent criminals from getting their hands on them without depriving honest people from getting them also, they would encourage it.

Arms As The Empowerment Of The Citizenry

In addition to uses of defensive firearms in combat, firearms can also be used as part of the force necessary to secure the political sovereignty of the private citizen in a democracy.

The concept of liberty is that of a society organized on the basis of universal individual rights - rights which are equally held by every individual in that society.

What do we mean by a "right"? It is the moral authority to do something without needing prior permission from another to do it.

No matter what the institutions are of a given society, or what names they are called, the fundamental question is whether rights in that society are universally held by all the people, or whether they are reserved to those with the political power to get their own way.

Other Uses Of Arms

Firearms can be used to hunt animals, for the ecologically sound purpose of controlling their population so that they don't breed themselves into greater numbers than can be supported by the food supply available to them, causing them slow death by starvation, or causing them to attack humans or domesticated pets to obtain food.

Firearms can also be used for target shooting, a sport which many enjoy as much as other hand-eye competitions, such as baseball, cricket, archery, golf, bowling, or video games.

So it is clearly demonstrable that guns have other purposes than killing. And, in fact, 99.4% of firearms are used for purposes other than killing.

I am not arguing that guns can't kill. I am arguing against Handgun Control, Inc.'s contention that this is the only purpose to which they can be put. Guns, as inanimate objects, have no purposes of their own. To impute a purpose to them implies that they were engineered to perform a certain function by purposeful beings.

This is not an academic or trivial point. The rhetorical phrases " ... were designed for one thing: killing" and "killing machines" are misstatements with political purpose: to deny that guns have moral or otherwise lawful functions, particularly by others than police or armies.

So, when I point out that guns can threaten instead of killing, I am both describing a function to which they can be put and a lawful and moral purpose for which a person might wish to obtain them.

A Big Lie Told To Discredit One's Opponent

Handgun Control, Inc.: "Machine guns, assault pistols and other rapid-fire weapons were designed for one thing: killing. They have no place on our streets or anywhere in our country. Yet, the NRA fights any proposed limits on these killing machines as a violation of 'gun owner's rights.'"

The truth:

The self-loading, semi-automatic firearms that Handgun Control is trying to ban are not machine guns or machine pistols; they are handguns and rifles with firing capabilities no better than revolvers and hunting rifles in use for a century. Fully automatic machine guns have been illegal to own without a rare and expensive federal license since 1933, and no new licenses have been issued since 1986.

And the National Rifle Association of America and its lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action, does not "fight any proposed limits on these killing machines as a violation of 'gun owner's rights'" because that particular battle was lost half a century ago.

In other words, Handgun Control is attempting to persuade its constituency that there is a danger from machine guns on the streets in order to mislead them into thinking that proposed legislation against "assault weapons" is needed, and that NRA is opposing it.

There is no such danger and the "assault weapons" legislation is not aimed at it: it is aimed at the self-loading single-shot-per-trigger-pull rifles, shotguns, and pistols which Americans have been owning for self- defense, recreation, and animal-population control for over a century. And lying about the existence of machine guns on the streets and charging that NRA is attempting to keep them there is a Big Lie that Hitler or Stalin would have used.

- February 9, 1993

The following article appeared in the Orange County Register of Sunday, July 18, 1993.

>The Mark of Kane Is on Firearms Reporting

In the classic film Citizen Kane, newspaper publisher Charles Foster Kane is arguing with his wife. Kane's wife begins a sentence, "People will think ..." and Kane ends it, "what I tell them to think."

When it comes to print and broadcast news treatment of firearms, Kane's attitude is everywhere.

In the April 24, 1993 issue of Editor and Publisher, former Boston Globe editor Thomas Winship calls for "a sustained newspaper crusade" against firearms that Kane would have been proud to engineer. "Ask editorially whether small arms producers should be licensed more strictly or even shut down ... Investigate the NRA with more vigor ... Support all forms of gun licensing; in fact, all the causes NRA opposes."

Mr. Winship is late; the news crusade against civilian firearms has been on the march for years. A 1989 form letter sent out by Time Magazine to readers charging Time with biased reporting in a July 17, 1989 cover story on gun-related deaths, stated, "[T]he time for opinions on the dangers of gun availability is long since gone ... our responsibility now is to confront indifference about the escalating violence and the unwillingness to do something about it."

As in all crusades, factual correctness is sacrificed to political correctness. When the Glock 19 pistol, which replaces some steel parts with polymer, entered the American market, newspapers crusaded against terrorists' plastic guns which could evade airport metal detectors and X-rays. They failed to note that the Glock 19 contains over a pound of metal which sets off alarms, looks identical to any other gun in an airport X-ray ... and that no undetectable plastic guns exist.

News media eagerly jumped on former San Jose Police Chief Joseph McNarama's crusade against teflon-coated "cop killer" bullets which could defeat police body armor. The reports failed to note that such ammunition was created as a police round and was not available to the general public ... and no cop had ever been killed by one, anyway. The broadcast news about this issue, however, endangered police by graphically showing criminals that police were using body armor, and that they should shoot at unarmored body parts such as the head. Out of this crusade came legislation to ban armor-piercing bullets which would also have banned most ordinary rifle ammunition, since most body armor is no protection against it. When NRA opposed such legislation, the media then charged NRA with opposing legislation which would have protected the police. Again, Citizen Kane would have beamed approvingly.

The language of firearms reporting is itself intended to persuade rather than inform. Newspapers dub inexpensive handguns "Saturday Night Specials," even though three-quarters of criminals don't care about the price of the guns they use in crimes since they steal them or buy stolen guns anyway. Crusades against "assault weapons" deliberately confuse semi-automatic civilian firearms with similar-looking machine guns available only to the military, and only rarely note that law-enforcement studies show that these classes of firearms are hardly ever used in crimes.

Mark Twain said in his autobiography, "There are three kinds of lies - lies, damned lies and statistics." The news media have taken Twain to heart by making sure that the only statistics they use prove that private firearms are destructive and that the public wants them banned. The media quotes medical statistics on the number of criminally-caused firearm-related injuries and deaths but hardly ever quote criminological studies which show that gun owners use firearms 1.4 million times each year to stop or deter a crime, without anyone being wounded 99% of the time. That's two bloodless gun-owner defenses for each time a criminal uses a firearm in an attack.

Network TV programs such as 60 Minutes focus on the tragedy of children killed in firearms accidents, while failing to note that firearms are involved in only 3% of the accidental deaths of children 14 or younger each year. Other news stories also routinely use statistics which inflate such figures by including suicides and gang-related homicides that include statistical groupings up to age 25.

Neither do the press note that firearms accidents in general are down 40% in the last ten years, and down 80% in the last fifty years.

Editorials trumpet a new Louis Harris survey claiming that 52% of Americans want private handgun ownership banned - extremely unlikely, since half the homes in this country already keep firearms - but fail to note that this same Louis Harris survey finds that 67% of gun owners would refuse to comply with such a ban, even with a $200-per-gun buy-back program, making the law an instant dead-letter.

Showing further press bias, only three reporters show up at a June 10, 1993 Washington D.C. news conference announcing the results of a new study by Luntz-Weber Research which shows that 88.8% of Americans believe a citizen has the right to own a gun, and only 4% see lack of gun control as a root cause of violence. The reason the press conference was ignored? The Luntz-Weber study was commissioned by the press's favorite scapegoat, the NRA.

Headlines routinely focus on criminal use of firearms, and editors bury stories where a civilian successfully uses a firearm defensively. When postal clerk Thomas Terry saved a restaurant from a takeover robbery in Alabama two months after the restaurant massacre in Killeen, Texas, the story was almost universally ignored. When ex-prizefighter Randy Shields did the same at a 4 n 20 Pie Shop in Studio City last September, newspaper readers had to look for the story in the Los Angeles Times's sports section.

Political scandals related to abuse of civilian firearms rights are similarly ignored. Since 1974, the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners has refused to issue any private person a license to carry concealed firearms, even though state law requires them to do so, hewing to a policy which states, "[E]xperience has revealed that concealed firearms carried for protection not only provide a false sense of security but further that the licensee is often a victim of his own weapon or the subject of a civil or criminal case stemming from an improper use of the weapon." When this writer revealed in testimony at the November 2, 1992 police commission meeting that Commissioner Michael Yamaki had secretly obtained such a license to carry a firearm from Culver City - demonstrating that when it came to his own family's safety even a police commissioner didn't believe that policy - what few news stories appeared were buried in routine reports on the commissioners meeting, and the press unanimously honored Yamaki's refusal to discuss it.

Finally, there is outright, deliberate manufacture of news film footage to distort the truth about firearms' capabilities. Shortly after Patrick Purdy used a semi-auto AK-47-lookalike to murder schoolchildren in Stockton, NBC News ran footage showing a range officer using such a firearm to explode a melon into smithereens. The footage was faked; a Beretta 9 millimeter pistol with hollow-point expanding ammunition had to be used to make the melon explode: the full-metal-jacketed AK-47 round had merely made a dime-sized and unexciting hole in it.

This past February, Los Angeles TV station KABC pulled a similar stunt. In a report intended to show the awesome rapid fire accuracy of semi-auto handguns being carried by LA gangs, film showing LA County Sheriff's Department Sergeant Hugh E. Mears rapidly firing a 9 millimeter pistol from seventy-five feet away was intercut with footage showing the rounds hitting a target's bullseye. The film was faked: the rapid-fire shots at seventy-five feet had spread widely. The footage showing the repeated hits had been achieved by Sgt. Mears also being requested to provide an example of aimed fire at twelve feet - and this was the footage that KABC intercut.

With a deliberate media campaign of distortion, suppression of vital facts, and outright lying, it's no wonder that the fifty percent of Americans who don't know about guns from personal experience might begin to wonder whether the Second Amendment was a mistake. But more to the point: if reporters and news editors are willing to lie to the public to achieve the public opinion on firearms they desire, then how can representative democracy become anything but covert aristocracy?

"You provide the prose poems," Citizen Kane said to his correspondent. "I'll provide the war."

Indeed he has.

Excerpts from a Letter to David Glass, CEO, Wal*Mart Stores

December 23, 1993

Dear Mr. Glass:

I have heard that as of February 1, 1994, Wal*Mart will no longer be selling handguns in its stores. I can understand, in the light of the recent shooting at a Wal*Mart in Oklahoma, why Wal*Mart might wish to climb onto the political bandwagon favoring reducing the number of firearms for sale to the civilian population. However, I think you need to be made aware of why this decision by Wal*Mart will impact negatively both on public policy and Wal*Mart's stature as a leading retailer.

Over the course of my research for the last few years, I have learned that most of what passes for news and information in the mass media is distorted to give the impression that the availability of privately held firearms makes the United States a more violent and dangerous society than it would be if firearms were more restricted. This is a popular belief among many persons in the media, and they promote it to politicians and other opinion leaders, even though the best available research proves quite the contrary.

[Excerpts from Kleck Survey.]

Since the number of times that a firearm is used criminally in the United States in a year is, at most, 800,000 times, the use of firearms by American gun-owners to prevent or stop a crime is three times as high as the number of times criminals use firearms to commit a crime.

As I said, this isn't widely reported on by the news media, whose personnel have their own prejudices on the subject for obvious reasons. A TV news slogan is, "If it bleeds, t leads." Crimes committed with firearms fit that election criterion. Civilian firearms defenses, the great majority of which are accomplished without anyone at all being shot, do not, and are therefore not reported on.

The Kleck survey, and other data collected by other prominent criminologists, clearly document the important role of privately-owned firearms in protecting lives and property from criminals and the criminally insane.

American firearms owners find themselves currently in a political and media battle to protect their right to own and carry firearms for defense against criminals. Anti-firearms politicians are daily introducing new legislation to restrict entire classes of firearms which are useful for defensive purposes; to tax ammunition; to transfer the choice of whether or not one can own or carry a firearm from the civilian population to political authorities. All of this is counter to the American tradition of relying on the people themselves as a force against crime, and adopting the European and Asian tradition of relegating the legal use of arms only to government officials. It is this sort of thinking that disarmed Europe's Jews and made them vulnerable to the Nazis sending them to death camps. American gun owners do not wish to see the same vulnerability to tyranny happen here.

It is vitally important that retailers of the prominence of Wal*Mart not abandon America's 70 million responsible firearms owners at a time when their rights are under attack by headline-seeking demagogues. If Wal*Mart discontinues the sale of handguns in its stores, it is implying that the American people cannot be trusted to buy guns and use them responsibly. This is a political message that is already being capitalized on by the opponents of civilian firearms ownership.

I strongly recommend that it is in Wal*Mart's interest to reexamine its decision, and decide whether it wishes to offend 70 million firearms-owning Americans by implying that they are not responsible individuals who are a bulwark in the defense against crime and tyranny, but are instead irresponsible children who need to be disarmed for their own good by a wise and paternalistic government.

Sincerely,

J. Neil Schulman

Following:

Interview with Gary Kleck

A Massacre We Didn't Hear About

Gunfight at the 4n20 Pie Shop

The Mark of Citizen Kane is On Firearms Reporting

And, here is David Glass's reply:

[Note for this edition: The following chapter was excerpted in the May 2, 1994 issue of National Review, and that excerpt was reprinted opposite "Guns in the Household" by Jerome P. Kassirir, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, in Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Health and Society, Second Edition, edited by Eileen Daniel (Brown & Benchmark Publishers, 1996).]

When Doctors Call For Gun Seizures, It's Grand Malpractice

Abraham Lincoln once told a visitor to the White House, "It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all the time."

We in the United States are about to test Lincoln's wisdom, and our own. While lying for political purpose is nothing new, it's hard to think of another time in our national history when the most trusted of all professionals, medical doctors, were willing to deliberately lie about the conclusions of supposedly unbiased scientific research for political purpose.

Anybody who's studied the stock market knows it's common knowledge that when women's skirts have gone up, the prices of stocks have gone up also, but no one is foolish enough to claim that by shortening women's skirts we can cause a stock market boom.

That sort of common sense, however, doesn't seem to hold when the subject is the so-called epidemiology of "gun violence," and medical researchers are sniffing for statistics to prove their predetermined conclusion that gun control is desirable public policy.

The point to this research is the contention that doctors can study firearms-related violence as an epidemiologic health issue apart from the motives of the people who pull the trigger ... which is the proper study of that branch of sociology known as criminology. By this premise alone, epidemiologists discard the humanistic premise of personal volition in favor of a mechanistic view of human behavior which denies a fundamental difference between the contagion of microbic cultures and human cultures: microbes don't act on their value-judgments and people do.

The latest outbreak of statisticitis emerges from the study led by Arthur L. Kellermann, M.D., published in the October 7, 1993 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, and financed by the Centers for Disease Control. A previous Kellermann-led study published in the June 12, 1986 NEJM, also financed by the CDC, gave us the factoid that you are 43 times likelier to die from a handgun kept in the home from homicide, suicide, or accident than you are to kill a burglar with it.¹ By the time this factoid turned into the mega-soundbyte used by gun-control advocates in the media and Congress, you were supposedly 43 times as likely to die from a handgun kept in the home than to protect yourself from a burglar with it.²

Kellermann, himself, cautioned against that conclusion saying,

Mortality studies such as ours do not include cases in which burglars or intruders are wounded or frightened away by the use or display of a firearm. Cases in which would-be intruders may have purposely avoided a house known to be armed are also not identified. We did not report the total number of nonlethal firearm injuries involving guns kept in the home. A complete determination of firearm risks versus benefits would require that these figures be known.

Kellermann's latest "population-based case-control study" of homicides throws such caution to the wind. He attempts to quantify "firearm risks versus benefits" by comparing households where a homicide occurred with households where no homicide occurred in three counties, chosen for their convenient location to the researchers. After correcting for several other risk factors such as alcohol or illicit-drug-use, previous domestic violence, and persons with criminal records in the 316 matched households ultimately compared, Kellermann determined that households where "homicide at the hands of a family member or intimate acquaintance" occurred were almost three times likelier to have kept a loaded handgun in the home than control households where such a homicide did not occur. From this determination, Kellermann concludes,

Although firearms are often kept in the home for personal protection, this study shows that the practice is counterproductive. Our data indicate that keeping a gun in the home is independently associated with an increase in the risk of homicide in the home.

An immediate technical problem with Kellermann's methods is raised by David N. Cowan, Ph.D., in an unpublished letter to the NEJM. Cowan charges that Kellermann's research grouped together socially dysfunctional people - for example, the chronically unemployable - with normal people, and thus any other risk factors would be inseparable.

Another problem is that by relying on a case study of households with homicide victims, Kellermann is looking at almost twice as many black households as white, and only a handful of Asian households - far too few to be statistically useful. African-Americans are homicide victims way out of proportion to other racial or ethnic groupings, and any case study of homicides has to live with this demographic distortion. The problem is that studying homicide within the African-American culture may not produce conclusions which are generalizable to other racial or ethnic groups. According to Don Kates, a criminologist with the Pacific Research Institute, "African-Americans have greater death rates than other population groups for drowning, other accidents, and diseases." Other sociological studies note crude differences between African-Americans and Asian-Americans in divorce rates, school drop-out rates, father-absent households, and so forth.

A more basic problem with Kellermann's conclusion is that it attempts to draw a reverse implication from a set of facts. Certainly it will be true that people who own parachutes will die more frequently in falls from airplanes than people who don't - but does that mean that parachute-ownership constitutes an increased risk factor for death by falling from an airplane? Wouldn't logic tell us that the risk of dying as a result of falling from an airplane would be far greater by those people who fall from airplanes who don't have a parachute handy?

Kellermann tells us:

"We found no evidence of a protective benefit from gun ownership in any subgroup, including one restricted to cases of homicide that followed forced entry into the home and another restricted to cases in which resistance was attempted."

This is where Kellermann's study is completely disingenuous, and indicates - as does his financing and publication by gun-control zealots James Mercy at the Centers for Disease Control and Jerome P. Kassirer, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine - that the intent of these studies is to produce pro-gun-control soundbytes for Sarah Brady rather than scientific knowledge.

Kellermann is studying only those persons living in a household with a loaded handgun where a handgun failed to save the victim's life. We're being shown only the murder victims, not gun-owners whose firearms saved their lives. Kellermann's study didn't document whether a firearm used in a particular homicide was the same one kept in the home, or whether it might have been carried in by the murderer. Kellermann doesn't even tell us whether the murder weapon belonged to the victim or the murderer. And Kellermann still doesn't ask the questions he, himself, said would be necessary for "a complete determination of firearms risks versus benefits": "cases in which burglars or intruders are wounded or frightened away by the use or display of a firearm ... Cases in which would-be intruders may have purposely avoided a house known to be armed [and] the total number of nonlethal firearm injuries involving guns kept in the home."

Dr. Kellermann can't study such questions because these are the proper focus not of medical doctors, but of criminologists. And when we shift from the medical paradigm of "gun violence" as a health issue, to the criminological paradigm of "offenders and victims," we get a completely different vision.

Immediately we discover that the cases in which Kellermann perceives an increased risk factor - "homicide at the hands of a family member or intimate acquaintance" - are, according to both the FBI's Crime in the United States, 1992, and Murder Analysis, 1992 by the Detective Division of the Chicago Police - only around 10% of the yearly homicides in this country. In the Chicago study, 36.8% of the homicides occurred in or around the home - including public housing. In the three counties in which his study was conducted, Kellermann tells us that 23.9% took place in the home of the victim. Kellermann also tells us, "Guns were not significantly linked to an increased risk of homicide by acquaintances, unidentified intruders, or strangers."

What this adds up to is that while home is where you are far less likely to be murdered by a stranger - not surprising since homes usually have locks to keep such people out - the great majority of murders that do take place at home are at the hands of those who have a key. The caution here might well be that if you live with someone whom you think might possibly murder you, you might want to move out if they also keep a loaded handgun. Or, if the loaded handgun is yours, you might want to keep it somewhere where you can get to it faster than he or she can.

The thrust of Kellermann's contention, that the mere availability of a loaded handgun is an increased risk factor to the general population, is also countered by comparing the 69% increase in the number of handguns in private hands from 1974 to 1988 to the 27% decrease in handgun murders during that same period.³ Therefore even though the increase in handguns and handgun murders were found the previous 15-year time period, no conclusion regarding cause and effect can be drawn.

The answer which Kellermann says we need to discover - the overall usefulness of firearms in self-defense - is to be found in the definitive analysis of a dozen studies in the book Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America (Aldine de Gruyter, 1991), by Gary Kleck, Ph.D., professor of criminology at Florida State University. Unlike Kellermann, Professor Kleck has carefully avoided taking funding from advocates in the gun-control debate, and Kleck's impeccable liberal Democratic credentials - membership in Common Cause and Amnesty International, for example - preclude a presumption of conservative or pro-NRA bias. Kleck's analysis of these studies had produced an estimate of around 650,000 handgun defenses per year, and over a million gun defenses if one included all firearms.

Kleck's latest research, his Spring, 1993 National Self-Defense Survey of 4978 households, reveals that previous studies had underestimated the number of times previous survey respondents had used their firearms in defense. The new survey projected 2.4 million gun defenses in 1992, 1.9 million of them with handguns, and about 72% of these gun defenses occurred in or near the home. This indicates a successful gun defense with no dead body for Dr. Kellermann to find about 1,728,000 times a year. Even if we were to accept Dr. Kellermann's reverse implication that a home-dweller who lives with a loaded handgun suffers a three-fold increased risk of homicide from a family member or intimate acquaintance, the handgun's usefulness in warding off potentially lethal confrontations against burglars is enormous.

Murder Analysis, 1992 by the Detective Division of the Chicago Police tells us that 72.39% of the murderers they studied in 1992 had a prior criminal history and, interestingly, 65.53% of the murder victims did as well.

Further, a recent National Institute of Justice analysis finds, "It is clear that only a very small fraction of privately owned firearms are ever involved in crime or [unlawful] violence, the vast bulk of them being owned and used more or less exclusively for sport and recreational purposes, or for self- protection."⁴

Criminologist Don Kates concurs in his book Guns, Murder, and the Constitution: "Concurrently, it has been estimated that 98.32% of owners do not use a gun in an unlawful homicide (over a 50-year, adult life span)."

Here is the essential truth about the risk of homicide which all the talk about violence as a health problem, rather than a criminal problem, is attempting to ignore: overwhelmingly, violence isn't a matter of ordinary people killing because a firearm is handy, but of criminals committing violence because violence is a way of life for them. The National Rifle Association has been saying this for years, but anti-gun crusaders just don't want to listen.

When the federal Centers for Disease Control start defining bullets as "pathogens" and declare that honest gun owners are the Typhoid Marys of a "gun-violence epidemic," the medical profession has lent its scientific credibility to a radical political agenda which threatens to increase the overall violence in our society by shifting the balance of power toward the well-armed psychopath, and destabilize our system of government by restricting the people's arms, which are a fundamental check on ambitious tyrants.

That this propaganda is being engineered by a committed gun-control advocate at the Federal Centers for Disease Control, James Mercy, who is diverting taxpayers' money away from the study of real diseases such as AIDS, makes this politicized science even more shocking.

Those who decide that a handgun is a useful tool for protection against the criminals among us can rest assured that the risks of being victimized with that firearm by their husbands, wives, and other loved ones are still massively outweighed by their firearm's ability to keep evil strangers at bay.⁵

Advocates of the right to keep and bear arms need to be especially aware that gun owners are the intended targets of the Centers for Disease Control's disinformation campaign against privately held firearms. James Mercy and his tax-financed minions are well aware that with half the households in the United States keeping firearms, the American people can't be disarmed without their cooperation. The only way they can gain that cooperation is by tricking gun owners into thinking that their firearms, and their neighbors' firearms, are more of a danger than they are an effective defensive tool.

In this particular gunfight, the best ammunition is the truth.

Footnotes:

^1. Thirty-seven of those 43 deaths were suicide; eliminating suicide immediately drops the claimed figure to "six times likelier."

^2. On the syndicated TV Mo Show, in January, 1994, a spokeswoman for the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence even asserted that a gun kept in the home was "43 times as likely to kill a child than to offer protection against a burglar."

^3. Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America (Aldine de Gruyter, 1991), by Gary Kleck, Ph.D.

^4. J. Wright & P. Rossi, NIJ Felon Survey 4.

^5. Oddly enough, even Dr. Kellermann agrees. In the March/April 1994 issue of Health magazine, Kellermann is quoted as saying, "If you've got to resist, your chances of being hurt are less the more lethal your weapon. If that were my wife, would I want her to have a thirty-eight special in her hand? Yeah."