Why People Fear Guns

By John R. Lott, Jr.

(Excerpted from Fox News 01/03/2004)

 

People fear guns.  Yet, while guns make it easier for bad things to happen, they also make it easier for people to protect themselves.

 

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 there are about two million defensive gun uses each year; guns used defensively four time 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 verses 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, AK:  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, TX:  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, FL:  A 71-year old man, Melvin (Edit), shot 20-year old James (Edit) in the arm as Moore and two friends were beating up his neighbor, 63-year old George (Edit).  Melvin has a concealed weapons permit.

 

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 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.

 

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 may was using his grandmother as a shield.

 

In May, 2001 in Louisiana, 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.

 

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 mind.  This makes them ever more reluctant to publish such stories.

 

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.