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http://www.nationalreview.com/17apr00/kopel041700.html
NATIONAL REVIEW
April 17, 2000 Issue
How the other side plays.
By Dave Kopel
Mr. Kopel is research director of the Independence Institute, a
free-market think tank in Colorado.
Antigun advocates have always faced an uphill battle in this country.
Americans have, to begin with, a constitutional right to gun ownership.
Today, half of American households exercise this right, owning a total
of about 250 million guns; and over 99 percent of those households do so
in a responsible manner. To fight for major restrictions on an item that
plays such a valued part in the lives of so many people looks like a
nearly impossible task. So if you´re really committed to the effort,
and you want to win, what do you do?
Simple: You lie.
A full listing of the lies told by the antigun lobby could fill a
book. A short list of the more popular ones would have to begin with the
canard about the number of children killed by firearms. We are told
repeatedly that 13, or 15, or 17 children every day are killed by guns.
This factoid is used to conjure up pictures of dozens of little kids
dying in gun accidents every week.
In truth, the number of fatal gun accidents is at its lowest level
since 1903, when statistics started being kept. That´s right: Not only
is the per capita accident rate at a record low, so is the actual number
of accidents—even though the number of people and the number of guns
are both much larger than in 1903. The assertions about “X children
per day” are based on counting older teenagers, or even people in
their early twenties, as “children.” The claims are true only if you
count a 19-year-old drug dealer who is shot by a competitor, or an
18-year-old armed robber who is shot by a policeman, as “a child
killed by a gun.” As for actual children (14 years and under), the
daily death rate is 2.6. For children ten and under, it´s 0.4 per day—far
lower than the number of children who are killed by automobiles,
drowning, or many other causes.
If the statistic about child gun deaths is the most notorious lie,
one of the most frequent has to do with gun shows. All of the antigun
groups repeat, incessantly, the phrase “gun-show loophole.” As a
result, much of the public believes that gun shows are special zones
exempt from ordinary gun laws. Handgun Control, Inc., the major antigun
group, has an affiliate in Colorado that claims that the “vast
majority” of guns used in crimes come from gun shows, while the
Violence Policy Center calls gun shows “Tupperware parties for
criminals.”
This is all an audacious lie. First of all, the laws at gun shows are
exactly the same as they are everywhere else. If a person is “engaged
in the business” (as the law puts it) of selling firearms, then he
must fill out a government registration form on every buyer, and get FBI
permission (through the National Instant Check System) for every sale—regardless
of whether the sale takes place at his gun store, at an office in his
home, or at a gun show. Those who are not gun dealers by profession, but
happen to be selling a gun, are not required to follow this procedure.
To imply that gun dealers can go to an event called a “gun show” and
thus avoid the law is absolutely false. Also false is the charge about
Tupperware parties for criminals. According to a National Institute of
Justice study released in December 1997, only 2 percent of guns used in
crimes come from gun shows. The gun show charge has great currency in
the media, but it is not very important in itself. How about the more
serious charge that guns are basically dangerous to society?
Public-health experts and gun-control lobbyists will tell you that most
murders, including those involving guns, take place among acquaintances
and are perpetrated by ordinary people; these facts supposedly indicate
that ordinary people are too hot-tempered to be allowed to have guns.
The facts tell a different story: 75 percent of murderers have adult
criminal records. As for the rest, a large number either have criminal
convictions as juveniles or are still teenagers when they commit the
murder; laws dealing with access to juvenile-crime records prevent full
access to their rap sheets. Furthermore, the category of “acquaintance”
murders is misleading. It includes drug buyers who kill a drug dealer to
steal his stash, and thugs who assault each other in barroom brawls.
There´s also a sad irony here. Domestic murders are almost always
preceded by many incidents of violent abuse. If a domestic-violence
victim flees the home, and her ex-husband tracks her down and tries to
rape her, and she shoots him, the killing will be labeled a “tragic
domestic homicide that was caused by a gun,” rather than what it
legally is: justifiable use of deadly force against a felon.
The famous factoid that a gun in the home is 43 times more likely to
kill a family member than to kill a criminal is predicated on a similar
misclassification. Of the 43 deaths, 37 are suicides; and while there
are obviously many ways in which a person can commit suicide, only a gun
allows a small woman a realistic opportunity to defend herself at a
distance from a large male predator.
Emory University medical professor Arthur Kellermann is a one-man
factory of this type of misleading data. One of his most famous studies
purported to show that owning a gun is associated with a 2.7 times
greater risk of being murdered. Kellermann compared murder victims in
several cities with sociologically similar people a few blocks away in
those cities, who had not been murdered.
The 2.7 factoid was trumpeted all over the country; but the study is
patently illogical. First of all, Kellermann´s own data show that
owning a security system, or renting a home rather than owning it, are
also associated with equally large increased risks of death. Yet
newspapers did not start running dire stories warning people to rip out
their burglar alarms or to start lobbying their condo association to
dissolve. The 2.7 factoid also overlooks the obvious fact that one
reason people choose to own guns, or to install burglar alarms, is that
they are already at higher risk of being victimized by crime. As Yale
law professor John Lott points out, Kellermann´s methodology is like
comparing 100 people who went to a hospital in a given year with 100
similar people who did not, finding that more of the hospital patients
died, and then announcing that hospitals increase the risk of death.
Kellermann´s method would also prove that possession of insulin
increases the risk of diabetes.
The media are complicit in many of these lies. Take, for example, the
hysteria about so-called “assault weapons.” Almost everything that
gun-control advocates say about these firearms is a lie. The guns in
question are not machine guns; they are simply ordinary guns with ugly
cosmetics that give them a pseudo-military appearance. The guns do not
fire faster than ordinary guns. The bullets they fire are not especially
powerful; they are, in fact, smaller and travel at lower velocity than
bullets from standard hunting rifles.
The media have succeeded in giving a totally different impression—through
deliberate fraud. The CBS show 48 Hours purported to show a
semiautomatic rifle being converted to fully automatic—i.e., turned
into a machine gun—in just nine minutes. But the gun shown at the
beginning was not the same gun that was fired at the end of the
demonstration. An expert from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms (BATF) later said that such a conversion was impossible. And in
Denver, KMGH television filmed people firing automatic weapons and told
viewers that the guns were semiautomatics.
The chief culprits are not the media but the antigun lobbyists
themselves, some of whom have very little compunction about lying—even
in cases where it can be proven rather easily that they are aware of the
truth while spreading the falsehood. For example, in February 1989, a
former BATF employee who had become a paid consultant for Handgun
Control testified to Congress that “assault weapons” were rarely
used in crimes. (He wanted to ban them anyway, as a precautionary
measure.) Nevertheless, within weeks, Handgun Control was running an
advertising campaign insisting that assault weapons were the criminal
weapons of choice.
The most dangerous dishonesty concerns the ultimate intentions of the
antigun forces. Handgun Control claims that it merely wants to “keep
guns out of the wrong hands”; yet in 1999, it lobbied hard to preserve
Washington, D.C.´s outright ban on handguns. Back in 1976, the group´s
then leader, Pete Shields, explained the long-term strategy to The New
Yorker: “The first problem is to slow down the number of handguns
being produced and sold in this country. The second problem is to get
handguns registered. The final problem is to make possession of all
handguns and all handgun ammunition—except for the military, police,
licensed security guards, licensed sporting clubs, and licensed gun
collectors—totally illegal.”
Sarah Brady, the current chairwoman of Handgun Control, has said that
people should not be allowed to own guns for self-defense. Yet in
debates, employees of the group steadfastly deny that the organization
believes in the policies articulated by its leaders. In short, they are
lying about what they want to accomplish. This is understandable, to be
sure; but not honorable, or right for the country.
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