1.1 "Guns aren't effective defensive weapons, and are '43 to 1 times' more likely to kill their owners or family members than they are useful to defend against criminal attack."
Description
This article is from the talk.politics.guns Official Pro-Gun FAQ, by Ken Barnes (kebarnes@cc.memphis.edu) with numerous contributions by others.
1.1 "Guns aren't effective defensive weapons, and are '43 to 1 times' more likely to kill their owners or family members than they are useful to defend against criminal attack."
See_Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America,"by Gary Kleck,
Aldine de Gruyter, ISBN 0-202-30419-1 (1991) [Dr. Kleck's book is a
valuable resource for all participants in the "gun control" debate.
"Point Blank_received the American Society for Criminology's highest
honor, the Hindelang Award, at the ASC's 1993 annual meeting, for the
most important contribution to the criminology literature in the
preceding three years.]
also_Criminal Victimization in the United States,"1992"
A National Crime Victimization Survey Report,"Bureau of Justice
Statistics, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Dept. of Justice
SuDoc# J 29.9/2:992 (1992)
Kellerman, Arthur L. and Reay, Donald T., "Protection or
Peril? An Analysis of Firearm-Related Deaths in the Home"
New England J. Medicine, v.314, n.24, pp.1557-1560 (1986)
Kleck, Gary and Gertz, Marc, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The
Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun," J. of
Criminal Law and Criminology, v.86, n.1, pp.150-187 (1995)
In summary: The often-cited "studies that show" having a gun in
the home is a far greater risk to you and your loved ones than to
criminals, are a favorite topic of discussion here on t.p.g., in part
to demonstrate the extraordinary statistical contortions that "gun
control" advocates will go to in an attempt to support their flawed
premises. The idea that guns (and handguns in particular) are
ineffective as defensive weapons shows a distinct lack of imagination,
especially since police carry them for that purpose.
The 1986 Kellerman study, the source of the famous "43 to 1" ratio,
is deceptive in several ways. The basis for comparison in this study
is the ratio of "firearm-related deaths" of household members vs.
deaths of criminals killed in the home (justifiable homicides). The
"firearm-related deaths" in the study include suicides and accidents,
neither of which are randomly distributed throughout the population,
as the 43 to 1 "risk ratio" would imply. Both suicides and accidents
are more likely to occur in specific categories of people than they
are in the general population. Of the 398 "firearm-related deaths"
included in the study, the vast majority (333, or, 84%) were suicides.
The number of fatal firearms accidents in the study was 12 (or 3% of
the studied deaths). Since sometimes a "gun cleaning accident" is
actually a suicide reported under a name less likely to deny payment
from a life insurance company, there may in fact have been even
fewer accidents than are apparent from the reporting. When only the
criminal homicides are considered, rather than including suicides
and accidents, the "43 to 1" ratio disappears, and the ratio is far
less dramatic, more like "4.5 to 1". There were 41 criminal homicides
reported in the Kellerman study, and 9 instances of justifiable or
self-defense homicide. People who are violent, unbalanced, or involved
in a life of crime are much more likely to use their home gun unwisely,
and their chances of using it to harm another (or themselves) are higher
than would be expected for the majority of the population.
As criminologists know and can demonstrate, the fallacy underlying
the work of researchers who treat "gun violence" as an "epidemic" or as
an issue of "public health" is the idea that people are all at equal
risk for becoming a perpetrator of crime, and lack only a deadly weapon.
If a person is stable, and not suicidal, and not prone to extreme
violence, their chances of becoming involved in "firearm-related death"
will be far lower than the Kellerman "43 to 1 risk ratio" would suggest.
Persons with these risk factors are not only more likely to abuse guns
to harm themselves or others, but they probably can't be trusted with
knives, either. Aside from such obvious risk factors, the likelihood
of being injured accidentally can be decreased further by training
in safe gun handling, much as firearms accidents have declined in the
U.S. population in recent years due to such safety education, despite
an increase in the number of guns available. (See 1.3) The Kellerman
study, based on data collected in King County, WA from 1978 to 1983,
is skewed towards violence associated with an urban setting, and makes
little mention of the thousands of gun-owning households where no
"firearm-related deaths" occurred at all. If gun ownership was the
crucial factor in an "epidemiology of violence," how to explain the
fact that almost all gunowners' households weren't affected?
Assessing the effectiveness of gun use against criminals as "number
of criminals killed" (as the Kellerman study does) is an extraordinary
presumption as well, since law enforcement officers aren't judged by
such a restrictive standard. Why isn't "criminals deterred" or
"crimes completed" or even "criminals wounded or apprehended" a
legitimate means of measuring defensive effectiveness? Certainly in
some proportion of gun-owning households where no "firearm-related
deaths" occurred, it was because a firearm was used to deter, wound,
or otherwise thwart an attacker.
In point of fact, the reason these "studies" are structured as badly
as they are, and are published in medical (rather than criminological)
journals, is that the numbers don't work out in favor of the "gun
control" viewpoint if considered in these other ways (see also 3.0.b).
There's no more reason to judge the ability and effectiveness of armed
citizens at fighting crime by the numbers of criminals they kill than
it is to do so for the police. Surprisingly, however, the numbers are
quite similar (see 3.8). Still, it seems absurd for the anti-gun side
to imply that gun owners_ought_to kill as many or more criminals than
the number of people that criminals murder (which is the only way for
the law-abiding to make a good showing in Kellerman's "kill ratio")!
Kellerman implies that a general "cost-benefit" ratio can be developed
which can be used to weigh the harm committed with guns against the
right of the individual to have a gun for self-defense, and if it
happens that more people are being harmed with guns than there are
instances of self-defense, we can simply allow those few people
whose lives would be saved by having a gun to become victims too.
According to U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics data, having a gun
and being able to use it in a defensive situation is the most effective
means of avoiding injury (moreso even than offering no resistance) and
thwarting completion of a robbery or assault. In general, resisting
violent crime is far more likely to help than to hurt, and this is
especially true if your attacker attempts to take you hostage, such as
sometimes happens in a carjacking situation. Most often in with-gun
defenses, criminals can be frightened away or deterred without a shot
being fired. Estimates of these types of defensive uses of firearms
are wide ranging, from a low of 65,000 to 82,000 annual defensive
gun uses (DGUs) reported to the U.S. Department of Justice's National
Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), to a high end of some 2.1-2.5
million annual DGUs (see 1.1.b), but they seem to occur at least
as often (if not far more often) each year as misuses of firearms by
violent criminals. Since such defensive uses are rarely reported to
the police (in some cases because firearms possession in the locality
is illegal), it is difficult to quantify precisely the number of
instances in which defensive use of firearms has saved lives.
A variety of factors complicate the measurement of DGU, including
the completeness and accuracy of self-reporting by witnesses, the
nature and sequence of the questions asked (including the definition
of what constitutes a DGU), the willingness of the witness to respond
"at all_to questions about such incidents, and the difficulty in
distinguishing between self-defense and assault based on a witness'
own report. There is evidence to suggest that a substantial number
of homicide victims have at other times been perpetrators, and Kleck
suggests that criminals should comprise "a disproportionate share of
both DGU and gun crime victimizations." Whether criminals are any
more or less willing to report DGU in surveys than non-criminals
is another factor to be considered when estimating the frequency of
lawful gun use in self-defense.
Even if the number of crimes deterred by lawful armed citizens
annually is no greater than the number of violent crimes committed
with guns each year, in the absence of these self-protective acts,
the incidence of violent crime could be far higher than it is at
present, and injuries to innocent victims could also increase.
The annual use of firearms for other lawful purposes, unrelated to
self-defense, dwarfs both defensive and criminal uses combined.
Continue to:
My Books
