Incidence of Defensive Gun Use Far Outweighs Offensive Gun Use

[MMMMMM]

In this article the point is made that, according to 3 different academic surveys, defensive gun use outweighs offensive/criminal gun use by a ratio of about 4-1. Of course most defensive incidents don't make big news splashes. When people weigh the benefits/costs of gun ownership, the actual defensive uses of guns need to be factored into the equation too. Article below:


"With the avalanche of horrific news stories about guns over the years, it's no wonder people find it hard to believe that, according to surveys (one I conducted for 2002 for my book, "The Bias Against Guns," and three earlier academic surveys by different researchers published in such journals as the Journal of Criminal Justice) there are about two million defensive gun uses (search) each year; guns are used defensively four times more frequently than they are to commit crimes.

The rebuttal to this claim always is: If these events were really happening, wouldn't we hear about them on the news? Many people tell me that they have never heard of an incident of defensive gun use. There is a good reason for their confusion. In 2001, the three major television networks -- ABC, CBS, and NBC -- ran 190,000 words' worth of gun-crime stories on their morning and evening national news broadcasts. But they ran not a single story mentioning a private citizen using a gun to stop a crime.

The print media was almost as biased: The New York Times ran 50,745 words on contemporaneous gun crimes, but only one short, 163-word story on a retired police officer who used his gun to stop a robbery. For USA Today, the tally was 5,660 words on gun crimes versus zero on defensive uses.

Just take some of the 18 defensive gun uses that I found covered by newspapers around the country during the first 10 days of December:

-- Little Rock, Ark: After the assailant attacked him and his son-in-law with a poker, a 64-year-old minister shot a man dead on church grounds. The attacker had engaged in a string of assaults in an apparent drug-induced frenzy.

-- Corpus Christi, Texas: A woman shot to death her ex-husband, who had broken into her house. The woman had a restraining order against the ex-husband.

-- Tampa Bay, Fla.: A 71-year-old man, Melvin Spaulding, shot 20-year-old James Moore in the arm as Moore and two friends were beating up his neighbor, 63-year-old George Lowe. Spaulding had a concealed weapons permit.

--Bellevue, Wash.: A man shot a pit bull that lunged to within a foot of him and his family. Police said the man's family had been repeatedly menaced in the past by the dog.

-- Jonesboro, Ga.: A father out walking with his 11-year-old daughter was attacked by an armed robber. The police say the father shot the attacker in self-defense and will not face charges.

-- Houston, Texas: Andrea McNabb shot two of the three men who tried to rob her plumbing business on the afternoon of Dec. 1.

-- Philadelphia, Pa: A pharmacy manager fatally shot one robber and wounded another after the robbers threatened to kill workers at the store. The wounded robber escaped.

Part of the reason defensive gun use isn't covered in the media may be simple news judgment. If a news editor faces two stories, one with a dead body on the ground and another where a woman brandished a gun and the attacker ran away, no shots fired, almost anyone would pick the first story as more newsworthy. In 2002, some 90 percent of the time when people used guns defensively, they stopped the criminals simply by brandishing the gun.

But that doesn't explain all the disparity in coverage. It doesn't, for example, explain why, in some heavily covered public middle and high school shootings, the media mentioned in only 1 percent or fewer of their stories that the attacks were stopped when citizens used guns to stop the attacks.

The unbalanced reporting is probably greatest in cases where children die from accidental gunshots fired by another child. Most people have seen the public-service ads showing the voices or pictures of children between the ages of four and eight, never over the age of eight, and the impression is that there is an epidemic of accidental deaths involving small children. The exaggerated media attention given these particularly tragic deaths makes these claims believable.

The debate over laws requiring that people lock up their guns in their home usually concentrates on the deaths of these younger children. The trigger and barrel locks mandated by these laws are often only considered reliable for preventing the access to guns by children under age 7.

The truth is that in 1999, for children whose ages correspond with the public service ads, 31 children under the age of 10 died from an accidental gunshot and only six of these cases appear to have involved another child under 10 as the culprit. Nor was this year unusual. Between 1995 and 1999, only five to nine cases a year involved a child wounding or killing another child with a gun. For children under 15, there were a total of 81 accidental gun deaths of all types in 1999. Any death is tragic, but it should be noted that more children under five drowned in bathtubs or plastic water buckets than from guns.

The gun deaths are covered extensively as well as prominently, with individual cases getting up to 88 separate news stories. In contrast, when children use guns to save lives, the event might at most get one brief mention in a small local paper. Yet these events do occur.

--In February, 2002, the South Bend, Indiana Tribune reported the story of an 11-year-old boy who shot and killed a man holding a box cutter to his grandmother's neck. Trained to use a firearm, the boy killed the assailant in one shot, even though the man was using his grandmother as a shield.

--In May, 2001 in Louisianna, a 12-year-old girl shot and killed her mother's abusive ex-boyfriend after he broke into their home and began choking her mother. The story appeared in the New Orleans Advocate.

--In January, 2001, in Angie, Louisianna, a 13 year-old boy stopped for burglars from entering his home by firing the family's shotgun, wounding one robber and scaring off the other three. The four men were planning on attacking the boy's mother--an 85-pound terminal cancer patient--in order to steal her pain medication.

As a couple of reporters told me, journalists are uncomfortable printing such positive gun stories because they worry that it will encourage children to get access to guns. The whole process snowballs, however, because the exaggeration of the risks--along with lack of coverage of the benefits--cements the perceived risks more and more firmly in newspaper editors and reporters minds. This makes them ever more reluctant to publish such stories.

While all this coverage affects the overall gun-control debate, it also directly shapes perceptions of proposed legislation. Take the upcoming debate over renewing the so-called assault-weapons ban. This past summer CNN repeatedly showed a news segment that starts off with a machine gun firing and claims that the guns covered by the ban do much more damage than other guns. CNN later attempted to clarify the segment by saying that the real problem was with the ammunition used in these guns. But neither of these points is true. The law does not deal at all with machine guns (though the pictures of machine guns sure are compelling)--and the "assault weapons" fire the same bullets at the same rate, and accomplish the exact same thing, as other semi-automatic guns not covered by the ban.

The unbalanced presentation dominates not just the media but also government reports and polling. Studies by the Justice and Treasury Departments have long evaluated just the cost guns impose on society. Every year, Treasury puts out a report on the top 10 guns used in crime, and each report serves as the basis for dozens of news stories. But why not also provide a report--at least once--on the top 10 guns used defensively? Similarly, numerous government reports estimate the cost of injuries from guns, but none measures the number of injuries prevented when guns are used defensively.

National polls further reinforce these biased perceptions. Not one of the national polls (as far as I was able to find) gave respondents an option to mention that gun control might actually be harmful. Probably the least biased polls still give respondents just two choices: supporting "tougher gun-control legislation to help in the fight against gun crime" or "better enforcement of current laws." Yet, both options ultimately imply that gun control is good.

But if we really want to save lives, we need to address the whole truth about guns--including the costs of not owning guns. We never, for example, hear about the families who couldn't defend themselves and were harmed because they didn't have guns.

Discussing only the costs of guns and not their benefits poses the real threat to public safety as people make mistakes on how best to defend themselves and their families.

John R. Lott, Jr., a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of "The Bias Against Guns" (Regnery 2003)."

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,107274,00.html

[Al_Capone_Junior]

Excellent article.

I have once used a gun to prevent myself from being attacked by a hand held weapon. It worked. I never fired a shot, but they backed off. Not worthy of news coverage tho.

On the other hand, I haven't committed any crimes with guns at all (not since the 20's at least, when I was cruising for trouble with my dad).

Bias in media coverage is seen in other areas too. Take pit bulls for instance. Actually, German Shepherds bite more people per year than any other breed. I doubt I have ever seen any dogbite stories involving any dogs other than pit bulls tho. However, how many pit bulls kept burglers or other potentially violent criminals from entering the family abode? My big fat lovable hairy dog ain't 1/10 as fierce as a pitbull, but NO ONE has even gone so far as to enter the fence, not even delivery guys, because he's big, and he barks a lot.

Finally, look at the mad cow scare. Between 1980-2000 there were about a million infected cattle in the UK. About 130 or so people died from the disease during those 20 years. ONE lousy mad cow in the US (which came from canada, btw) and there's a HUGE media hype over it. Yet every year e-coli O:151 H:7 infects estimated 73,000 and causes 61 deaths in the US** (mostly from eating undercooked hamburger, but can be transmitted other ways). These cases rarely make the news unless the burger came from an unfortunate jack-in-the-box. The flu might be the biggest danger of all, but during the mad cow scare the flu virtually disappeared from the news. An estimated 10% to 20% of U.S. residents get the flu each year: an average of 114,000 people are hospitalized for flu-related complications and 36,000 Americans die each year from complications of flu.***

So get out your hpye-o-meters when the news starts spouting off about the evils of guns.

al

* proper processing of meat should be of far more concern than the potential for mad cow disease

** stat from the cdc website

*** sentence directly quoted from cdc website

[Schneids]

[ QUOTE ]
If a news editor faces two stories, one with a dead body on the ground and another where a woman brandished a gun and the attacker ran away, no shots fired, almost anyone would pick the first story as more newsworthy.

[/ QUOTE ]
If it bleeds, it leads. The media has lost sight of what it should be doing and unfortunately does now what sells the best.

[ QUOTE ]
National polls further reinforce these biased perceptions. Not one of the national polls (as far as I was able to find) gave respondents an option to mention that gun control might actually be harmful. Probably the least biased polls still give respondents just two choices: supporting "tougher gun-control legislation to help in the fight against gun crime" or "better enforcement of current laws." Yet, both options ultimately imply that gun control is good.

[/ QUOTE ]
This is a good point and definitely a problem within American media -- journalists often feel they are presenting information without bias when in fact they are still letting their viewpoints cloud their supposed objectivity.

Take, for instance, four separate leads from stories describing the capture of the Washington Area snipers:

New York Daily News (10/25/02) -- "The Beltway snipers' three week reign of terror and one of the nation's biggest manhunts ended yesterday with the peaceful arrest of a sleeping ex-soldier and a teenager he called his stepson."

Boston Globe (10/25/02) -- "One of the most extraordinary manhunts in American history came to a peaceful conclusion yesterday with the predawn arrest of a former U.S. Army solider and a teenage companion as they slept in car at a Maryland rest stop."

ABC's World News Tonight (10/24/02) -- Peter Jennings: "Good Evening, everyone. The police in Maryland say tonight that the two men who have terrorized the Washington suburbs are behind bars."

CBS Evening News (10/24/02) -- Dan Rather: "It's over. They got them. After three weeks of murder, three weeks of terror in suburban Washington, police believe tonight they have cracked the case of the serial sniper."

From those four, it's easy to see who's looking to bring in the $$ and who is at least trying to do objective reporting. Journalists and reporters too often forget that it is their job to inform the public, and not to instill their own opinions into the public. Reporting nothing but the facts and giving a brief synopsis of 'why knowing the facts are important' (if the issue is more complicated), is what GOOD journalism is comprised of.

Even though the author and Fox did not come out and say "yes we are pro guns" (as they should have at the beginning of the article to give their own bias presentation more credibility...and therefore making it ok to make implications, since bias has been established beforehand and it is clear to ALL readers that the information being presented is not 'the only truth.'), kudos to them for at least giving this side of the fence some reporting with some facts and hard-nosed generalizations.

[MMMMMM]

Good points, Schneids2k02--and I suppose I was negligent to not note that it was on the "Views" page of Fox--even though it says so at the top of the linked page. So I think it is officially an opinion piece, even though it does seem to contain plenty of hard facts.

[Schneids]

No prob. Yeah, I didn't check out the link and didn't see it was in the Views section of their site. Though I will admit I think the article is very well-written and overall fairly factual.

[sam h]

While I agree with you that media bias exists against reporting these kind of acts of defensive gun use, I must say that this article is pretty unconvincing. The methodology behind the numbers isn't explained and unless its different than most of the previous work done in this realm - phone surveys of a few thousand people asking them if they've used a gun to defend against a crime and basically leaving it up to them to determine what that means - its pretty worthless as social science.

[andyfox]

"A man shot a pit bull that lunged to within a foot of him and his family. Police said the man's family had been repeatedly menaced in the past by the dog"

If you can show me more evidence of dogs being shot by people, I will become a pro-gun convert.

[Jim Kuhn]

Thank you very much for the informative post. It is going on my favorite list.

[HDPM]

Well Andy, I damn near had to shoot a couple of german shepherds. When I still rented I pulled up to my condo one night. A guest of a neighbor had a couple huge german shepherds that got out when the owners went drinking. When I got out of my car, they charged. So I got back in the car real fast. People who know me would be surprised at how fast I moved, but 2 attacking big dogs are good incentive. So I'm sitting there looking at these massive dogs and wondering what to do. Shoot it out in the dark sending bullets flying in a neighborhood or go away for a while and come up w/ a plan. Like most gun owners would if given the chance, I took the retreat option. because most people w/ guns are responsible enough to use them only when there is no other option.

So I wish I could give you some dog killing incentive to arm yourself, but I can't. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

[Ray Zee]

gee hdpm, i thought you would be in great shape from chasing all those ambulances around. it sounds like those dogs were trained well to me. if you can get the owners name i would like it as i am thinking of training a breed of lawyer attack dog. it would be a good seller.