I was watching television on Monday, April 13, 1998, when a commercial caught my eye. In the spot, two young boys are playing with a locked briefcase that has a combination lock. They successfully decode the lock by trying one boy's parents' birthdays, to discover... THE HORROR! There's a handgun inside. One presumes the two lads go on to kill everyone they know, then themselves. A grave announcer then spews something like, "if you think your kids aren't smart enough to find your gun, you're a stupid NRA bastard." The spot ends with the ludicrous statistic that ten children are killed each day with handguns.

The ads are sponsored by CEASE FIRE, a miserable little organization that, at least at the time of the advertisement, could be located festering on the internet at www.ceasefire.org. Here is a quote from that web site:

"Myth: A gun in the home makes your family safe.

"Fact: Having a gun in the home makes you less safe and puts you and your loved ones at risk. Research indicates that a gun in the home is 43 times more likely to be used to commit homicide, suicide, or an accidental killing than it is to be used to kill in self-defense. Residents of homes containing guns are five times more likely to experience a suicide and three times more likely to experience a homicide than residents without guns."

LIES!

Ladies and gentlemen, "CeaseFire" is propagating one of the worst myths about guns:

"Since a gun in a home is many times more likely to kill a family member than to stop a criminal, armed citizens are not a deterrent to crime. "

Let us presume, for a moment, that the "10 children a day" figure can be believed. One must then ask: who qualifies as a "child?" We are lead to believe by CEASE FIRE that the youth of America -- cute little kids too small to ride amusement park rides -- are regularly blowing themselves, and each other, away with handguns. Yet the bulk of the "children" CEASE FIRE claims are dying are in fact mostly teenagers. Depending on which gun prohibitionist "study" one uses for statistics, these "children" could be anyone under the age of 21! And there is a big difference between teenage drug dealers and gang members -- the amoral societal predators our society is generating -- and the precocious, cherubic lads and lasses evoked by CEASE FIRE's pleas for gun control.

Fortunately, the nice folks at the NRA have debunked this nonsense for the falsehood that it is -- and unlike gun prohibitionists, the NRA has referenced its sources. Here's what their Fact Sheet, "10 Myths About Gun Control," has to say about this propaganda:

This myth, stemming from a superficial "study" of firearm accidents in the Cleveland, Ohio, area, represents a comparison of 148 accidental deaths (including suicides) to the deaths of 23 intruders killed by home owners over a 16-year period. 2

Gross errors in this and similar "studies"--with even greater claimed ratios of harm to good--include: the assumption that a gun hasn't been used for protection unless an assailant dies; no distinction is made between handgun and long gun deaths; all accidental firearm fatalities were counted whether the deceased was part of the "family" or not; all accidents were counted whether they occurred in the home or not, while self-defense outside the home was excluded; almost half the self-defense uses of guns in the home were excluded on the grounds that the criminal intruder killed may not have been a total stranger to the home defender; suicides were sometimes counted and some self-defense shootings misclassified. Cleveland's experience with crime and accidents during the study period was atypical of the nation as a whole and of Cleveland since the mid-1970s. Moreover, in a later study, the same researchers noted that roughly 10% of killings by civilians are justifiable homicides. 3

The "guns in the home" myth has been repeated time and again by the media, and anti-gun academics continue to build on it. In 1993, Dr. Arthur Kellermann of Emory University and a number of colleagues presented a study that claimed to show that a home with a gun was much more likely to experience a homicide. 4 However, Dr. Kellermann selected for his study only homes where homicides had taken place--ignoring the millions of homes with firearms where no harm is done--and a control group that was not representative of American households. By only looking at homes where homicides had occurred and failing to control for more pertinent variables, such as prior criminal record or histories of violence, Kellermann et al. skewed the results of this study. Prof. Kleck wrote that with the methodology used by Kellermann, one could prove that since diabetics are much more likely to possess insulin than non-diabetics, possession of insulin is a risk factor for diabetes. Even Dr. Kellermann admitted this in his study: "It is possible that reverse causation accounted for some of the association we observed between gun ownership and homicide." Law Professor Daniel D. Polsby went further, "Indeed the point is stronger than that: 'reverse causation' may account for most of the association between gun ownership and homicide. Kellermann's data simply do not allow one to draw any conclusion." 5

Research conducted by Professors James Wright and Peter Rossi, 6 for a landmark study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, points to the armed citizen as possibly the most effective deterrent to crime in the nation. Wright and Rossi questioned over 1,800 felons serving time in prisons across the nation and found:


•81% agreed the "smart criminal" will try to find out if a potential victim is armed.

•74% felt that burglars avoided occupied dwellings for fear of being shot.

•80% of "handgun predators" had encountered armed citizens.

•40% did not commit a specific crime for fear that the victim was armed.

•34% of "handgun predators" were scared off or shot at by armed victims.

•57% felt that the typical criminal feared being shot by citizens more than he feared being shot by police.


Professor Kleck estimates that annually 1,500-2,800 felons are legally killed in "excusable self-defense" or "justifiable" shootings by civilians, and 8,000-16,000 criminals are wounded. This compares to 300-600 justifiable homicides by police. Yet, in most instances, civilians used a firearm to threaten, apprehend, shoot at a criminal, or to fire a warning shot without injuring anyone.

Based on his extensive independent survey research, Kleck estimates that each year Americans use guns for protection from criminals more than 2.5 million times annually. 7 U.S. Department of Justice victimization surveys show that protective use of a gun lessens the chance that robberies, rapes, and assaults will be successfully completed while also reducing the likelihood of victim injury. Clearly, criminals fear armed citizens.


SOURCES

2 Rushforth, et al., "Accidental Firearm Fatalities in a Metropolitan County, " 100 American Journal of Epidemiology 499 (1975).

3 Rushforth, et al., "Violent Death in a Metropolitan County," 297 New England Journal of Medicine 531, 533 (1977).

4 Kellermann, et al., "Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home," New England Journal of Medicine 467 (1993).

5 Polsby, "The False Promise of Gun Control," The Atlantic Monthly, March 1994.

6 Wright and Rossi, Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms (N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter, 1986).

7 Gary Kleck and Mark Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Handgun," The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 86 (1995): 150.