Armed

by KLECK, GARYKATES, DON B.

• ISBN13: 9781573928830
• ISBN10: 1573928836
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-11-01
• Publisher: Prometheus Books

Summary

In a nation where nearly one-half of all households have firearms, the gun control issue has never been more relevant. While some Americans support controls aimed at disarming only criminals and the irresponsible, others oppose any controls at all, seeing them as steps toward the confiscation of all firearms. Intelligent public debate on what types of controls, if any, are feasible requires some understanding of the results of the best research on guns and violence. In this thought-provoking study of the issue, researchers Gary Kleck and Don B Kates closely examine the arguments used by advocates and opponents of gun control, identify crucial factual assumptions behind the arguments, and systematically address these assumptions using evidence from the best research available on the subject. Among the topics addressed are media bias in coverage of gun issues, prohibitionist measures for reducing gun violence, the frequency and effectiveness of the defensive use of guns, and a close analysis of the Second Amendment. Easily understood by both specialists and laypersons, this engaging work will help the reader grasp the many facets of this complex issue.

Author Biography

Gary Kleck is professor at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice of Florida State University Don B. Kates is a partner at the national law firm of Benenson and Kates

Table of Contents

Introduction	13	(18)
Don B. Kates
Gun Accidents versus Self-Defense	15	(3)
The Character of Gun Owners	18	(2)
The Myth That Ordinary People Murder	20	(2)
The Threat of Long Gun Substitution	22	(2)
The Second Amendment Constitutional Right to Arms	24	(1)
Notes	25	(6)
Guns and Public Health: Epidemic of Violence, or Pandemic of Propaganda?	31	(76)
Don B. Kates
The Public Health Agenda	32	(3)
The Verdict of Criminological Scholarship	35	(3)
Fear and Loathing as Social Science	38	(2)
A Nosology of Health Sage Error	40	(2)
The Valor of Ignorance	42	(1)
Issues, Data and References ``Missing in Action''	43	(3)
Unnatural Selection	46	(2)
``Sagecraft'' and Scholarship	48	(3)
International Disinformation	51	(12)
Gun Availability, Social Harms and Fraudulent Nondisclosure	63	(5)
Shibboleth Diverts Attention from Actual Causes	68	(1)
A Critique of Overt Mendacity	69	(3)
The Myth That Murderers Are Ordinary Gun Owners	72	(1)
``Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home''	73	(10)
Conclusion	83	(2)
Notes	85	(22)
``Poisoning the Well'' for Gun Control	107	(22)
Don B. Kates
A Tripartite Debate	109	(1)
Poisoning the Well for Gun Control	110	(1)
The ``Gun Control Paradox''	111	(3)
Gun Control Plebiscites	114	(2)
On the Morality of Personal Self-Defense	116	(5)
Conclusion	121	(1)
Notes	122	(7)
Absolutist Politics in a Moderate Package: Prohibitionist Intentions of the Gun Control Movement	129	(44)
Gary Kleck
The Issue: Moderate Overt Agendas vs. Convert Prohibitionist Goals	129	(11)
Why Do Prohibitionist Intentions Matter?	140	(3)
Evidence of Prohibitionist Intent of the Leaders of the Gun Control Movement	143	(1)
Past Political Efforts of Advocacy Groups	144	(2)
Recent Precedents of Gun Prohibition in Other Nations	146	(1)
``Nondenial Denials'' of Prohibitionist Intentions	147	(2)
Support for Gun Bans Among Moderate Control Supporters in the General Population	149	(1)
Public Statements Made by Leaders and Prominent Supporters of the Gun Control Lobby	150	(4)
The Premises and Logic of Arguments for Moderate Controls	154	(6)
The Advocacy of Licensing and Registration in Addition to Background Checks	160	(3)
Conclusions	163	(3)
Notes	166	(7)
Modes of News Media Distortion of Gun Issues	173	(40)
Gary Kleck
Sins of Omission-Exclusion Bias	175	(6)
A Speculation About How Exclusion Bias Works	181	(1)
Unbalanced Skepticism Applied to Pro and Con Information	182	(2)
Amount of ``Play''-Extent and Prominence of Coverage	184	(2)
Editorial Stances and Other Newspaper Policies	186	(1)
Other Forms of Bias	187	(1)
A Case Study-A CBS Television Documentary	187	(10)
Newsweek and the Invention of a Machine Guns Crisis	197	(2)
The Bernhard Goetz Case	199	(3)
Is It Bias or Just Random Sloppiness?	202	(1)
Discussion and Conclusions	203	(5)
Notes	208	(5)
The Frequency of Defensive Gun Use: Evidence and Disinformation	213	(72)
Gary Kleck
Early Surveys with Defensive Gun Use Questions	214	(1)
The National Self-Defense Survey	215	(6)
NSDS Results	221	(5)
Later Surveys	226	(3)
Explaining the Deviant NCVS Results	229	(6)
Early-Intervention DGUs	235	(2)
DGU in Crimes with No Harm to the Victim	237	(2)
Telescoping as a Source of Overestimation in the DGU Surveys	239	(2)
The Scholarly Response to Large DGU Estimates	241	(3)
Fallacious Reductio ad Absurdum Reasoning	244	(6)
The Meaning of Internal Inconsistencies in DGU Reports	250	(3)
Direct Evidence on the Relative Balance of False Positives and False Negatives	253	(1)
Circular Reasoning in Numerical Exercises on the Sensitivity of DGU Estimates to False Positives	254	(3)
One-sided Consideration of Errors in DGU Estimation	257	(3)
The Rare-DGU Theory: The Creation Science of Criminology	260	(2)
Discouraging the Development of Better DGU Estimates	262	(2)
The Relative Frequency of Defensive and Offensive Uses of Guns	264	(3)
Conclusions	267	(4)
Policy Implications of Large DGU Estimates	271	(1)
Appendix: Adjusting Earlier Estimates of DGU	272	(3)
Notes	275	(10)
The Nature and Effectiveness of Owning, Carrying, and Using Guns for Self-Protection	285	(58)
Gary Kleck
Issues of Armed Resistance to Criminals	285	(3)
The Effectiveness and Risks of Victim Resistance with Guns	288	(5)
Multivariate Analysis of Robbery and Armed Resistance	293	(1)
Multivariate Analysis of Rape and Armed Resistance	294	(1)
The Police Chief's Fallacy	295	(1)
The Myth of Criminals Taking Guns from Gun-wielding Victims	296	(2)
Self-Defense Killings and Woundings of Criminals	298	(2)
Keeping Loaded Guns in the Home	300	(5)
Carrying Guns for Protection	305	(3)
Psychological Effects of Keeping Guns for Protection	308	(2)
The Nonsense Ratio	310	(3)
The Nature of Defensive Gun Use	313	(3)
Who Is Involved in Defensive Gun Use?	316	(2)
Deterrence of Crime Due to Fear of Gun-Armed Victims	318	(10)
Guns and the Displacement of Burglars from Occupied Homes	328	(2)
Conclusions	330	(2)
Implications for Crime Control Policy	332	(2)
Notes	334	(9)
The Second Amendment: A Right to Personal Self-Protection	343	(14)
Don B. Kates
Self-Protection as Benefit to the Whole Community	346	(2)
Political Functions of the Right to Arms	348	(1)
The Armed Freeholder Ideal of Virtuous Citizenship	349	(2)
The Efficacy of Arms and Self-Defense	351	(1)
Conclusion	352	(2)
Notes	354	(3)
Subject Index	357	(4)
Name Index	361

Excerpts

Chapter One

Gun Accidents versus Self-Defense

How often is a small child killed in a handgun accident? From the national publicity such deaths often receive, lay readers are likely to assume them to be as frequent as they are tragic. In fact, gun accidents kill only ten to twenty children under age five each year. Tragic as each such death is, they are only about as numerous as the equally tragic deaths of children that age who are poisoned by ingesting iron supplements that look like candy and are often prescribed for mothers after birth. Indeed, handgun accidents kill only about half as many children under age five annually as does the ingestion of common household poisons (roach spray, lighter fluid, ammonia, iron supplements, ant poison, and so forth). In fact, gun accidents rarely involve preadolescents of any age. (See figures in chapter 2.)

    Typical of the wild exaggeration that regularly appears is USA Today 's claim that fourteen thousand fatal gun accidents occur each year; the actual number is fourteen hundred . In comparison, as many as 2.5 million victims use guns to defend against crime each year. (See discussion and evidence presented in chapter 6.) If the public is unaware of this, it is because the media do not mention the 2.5 million figure and report only a tiny proportion of such defense incidents. Nevertheless, the total number of defense uses is so large that the tiny proportion reported still constitute a goodly number. Yet consumers of the popular media are unlikely to realize how common such incidents are because even when reported locally, defensive gun uses somehow never manage to make the national news, unlike the far, far fewer instances of children being killed in gun accidents.

    The one exception is that a defensive gun use that seems to have gone wrong can become nationwide news; for example, when a Louisiana man mistakenly killed a Japanese student who menaced him in a Halloween prank, and when a Texan who had received a concealed handgun carry license under Texas's new right to carry law killed a man who attacked him in a traffic dispute. (In fact, both shooters were cleared, the Texan because he fired in reasonable fear of death or great bodily harm from his larger and younger attacker.) Those who get their information from the popular media are unlikely to realize that erroneous killings (which the Texas case was not) by civilians total only about thirty per year; even less likely is the average person to know how favorably this compares to the police who erroneously kill five to eleven times more innocent people each year.

    The nonreporting of successful victim self-defense incidents lends spurious credence to another argument that dates back to early in this century. Conventional wisdom holds that guns are not useful for self-defense. Defensive gun ownership is a "dangerous self-delusion," and groups like Handgun Control, Inc., advise victims who are attacked by a rapist, robber or other felon that "the best defense against injury is to put up no defense--give them what they want or run."

    This conventional wisdom persists only because the definitive contrary facts receive little or no attention in the popular media. Criminological data and studies have definitively established that, compared to victims who resisted with a gun, victims who submitted were injured about twice as often ; also, of course, nonresisters were much more likely to be raped or robbed.

    Nevertheless, until quite recently the sparsity of statistical information made it possible to still argue that guns are rarely used for self-defense. But a series of seminal studies by my coauthor Gary Kleck have now demonstrated beyond peradventure that handguns are actually used by victims to repel crime far more often than they are by criminals in committing crimes--as much as three times more. I shall not review the evidence here since Kleck does so in chapters 6 and 7. I raise the point only because Kleck's studies either go unreported in the nation's press or are derided. This media dubiety contrasts strikingly with a remarkable accolade accorded the Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz study on defensive gun use by the doyen of American criminologists, University of Pennsylvania Professor Marvin Wolfgang, who wrote:

I am as strong a gun control advocate as can be found among the criminologists in this country. If I [had the power] ... I would eliminate ALL guns from the civilian population and maybe even from the police. I hate guns--ugly, nasty instruments designed to kill people....

Nonetheless the methodological soundness of the current Kleck and Gertz study is clear. I cannot further debate it....

The Kleck and Gertz study impresses me for the caution the authors exercise and the elaborate nuances they examine methodologically. I do not like their conclusions that having a gun can be useful, but I cannot fault their methodology. They have tried earnestly to meet all objections in advance and have done exceedingly well.

I can only speculate as to why the popular media omits any mention of this tribute even as they continue to ignore Kleck's work or treat it as doubtful. What can be said is that here again the popular media is suppressing scholarly research that contradicts conventional wisdom.

    It is interesting to consider how the popular media treated two studies coming to opposite conclusions about the effects of laws passed by thirty states to allow all qualified applicants to carry concealed handguns for self-defense. Though these laws had been enacted in many more urbanized states for five or more years when it was done, the first study was limited to just five selected cities in Florida, Oregon, and Mississippi. In none of these cities had a murder been committed by a permit-holder. Yet this small, city-level study concluded that widespread carrying of concealed guns had not reduced crime and perhaps even increased gun homicides in three of the five cities whose data were examined. These conclusions are a spurious artifact of the use of city-level data and of the cities selected. Had the study looked at state-level data--even for just the three states selected --it would have found that overall homicide declined. (It may be coincidental that the study's conclusions here dovetail with the hypothesis its authors advance elsewhere that self-defense is not a personal right but rather a social evil that ought to be eliminated to the extent possible.) Yet the media gave this study extensive publicity. The New York Times actually reported it twice. Though the authors themselves qualified their results, neither their caveats nor criticisms by other scholars have received attention in popular media reports of the study.

    Contrast the New York Times 's total silence regarding a later study that differed from the earlier one both in its conclusions and in the extensiveness of its data. Done by University of Chicago economists, its findings were based on data from all 3,054 American counties. Perhaps more important to the Times , however, was that the data showed that liberal allowance of concealed handgun carry by thirty-one states had coincided with a reduction of thousands of murders, rapes, and other violent crimes in those states. The authors tentatively concluded that adoption of such policies by the other nineteen states would save many more lives and prevent thousands more violent crimes. Other popular media did not follow the New York Times in completely blacking out the University of Chicago study. But insofar as it was reported, the results were denigrated by falsely reporting that the study had been sponsored by the gun industry. (In turn, these falsehoods led to editorials denouncing the study as a fraud.)

    Similar contrasts are endless. For instance, to their credit, the New York Daily News and several other New York City papers have noted that the New York City police, having unfettered discretion under New York law, issue concealed handgun carry licenses only to especially influential people, including Donald Trump; numerous Rockefellers and DuPonts; and a raft of politicians, millionaires, and/or celebrities. Perhaps because its own publisher was one of these licensees, the New York Times never found this story "fit to print." It is ironic (to say the very least) that in lieu of such information, the Times gives readers editorials asserting that "the urban handgun offers no benefits," inter alia, because "most civilians, whatever their income level are likely to lack the training and alertness" required to "use a gun to stop an armed criminal."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from ARMED by Gary Kleck & Don B. Kates. Copyright © 2001 by Gary Kleck and Don B. Kates. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.