Grigsby: Why I'm no longer anti-gun

[Preface: Everything after this preface was written by my friend John Grigsby over e-mail in a conversation started by this thread discussing this article about Democrats who are against Gun Control which is a follow up to this open letter by Michael Moore. In an earlier e-mail John said "The gun control lobby is to the left what the anti-stem-cell-research mob is to the right. They're all anti-fact radicals who drive more people away from their party than they bring in" and he's right. If you have comments, updates or corrections from reliable sources feel free to post them below or e-mail John directly at 'grigsby AT evil-genius DOT com.]

Since I was suspicious of the Handgun Control Inc. statistics that everyone quotes, I decided to do my own research. Here's what I found. I welcome corrections and reliable sources of more recent statistics.

"Out of 30,708 Americans who died by gunfire in 1998, only 316 were shot in justifiable homicides by private citizens with firearms." -Handgun Control, Inc.

Let's break that number down.

17,424 (57%) of those were suicides, so you're down to 12,968 people actually shooting other people. (I'll talk about suicide in a moment.) Most of this is gang or drug-related. When we talk about the danger of shootings in the home, we're talking about people shooting intimates: family members, children, boyfriends or girlfriends.

In 1998, about 1000 people killed one of their intimates with guns. Add the 134 children age 0-14 killed in gun accidents, and you have...

1150. That's a lot less than 30,708. (Source: DOJ statistics.)

Now let's compare these numbers to crimes prevented by guns. The HCI report cheats by only counting cases where a criminal was shot _and killed_ as successful defensive gun usage. In the vast majority of cases, displaying a firearm is sufficient to prevent a crime.

Here's a US DOJ (i.e. government) report which includes a survey of defensive gun usage in America. According to the surveys, guns were used to prevent a crime 1.5 million times in 1994. (*) (Source: DOJ statistics.)

That's 1300 crimes prevented by guns per gun homicide of a family member, intimate, or ex-intimate -- and 115 crimes prevented by guns per gun death of anyone, anywhere in the USA.

How about that!

These are all numbers from official government studies which I found myself, not just a parroting of someone else's propaganda.

Now we tackle suicide.

From 1972 to 1995, the per capita gun stock in the U. S. increased by more than 50%. In 1972, the suicide rate was 11.9 per 100,000. In 1995, the suicide rate was -- 11.9 per 100,000. (It remained remarkably constant during this time, with a high of 13.0 and a low of 11.8.)

This clearly demonstrates that owning a gun does not cause people to commit suicide: the number of guns per American increased by 50%, yet we did not kill ourselves any more often than before. So even if you believe the government should try to keep people from killing themselves, banning guns won't do it.

The numbers are out there, and it's easy to see the results. I used to be anti-gun until I realized that "gun control" was totally failing at its stated goal of keeping Americans safer.

Here's a last little tidbit: In what city do husbands kill their wives the most? (Per capita -- I'm not a statistical cheat.)

New York, which has some of the toughest anti-gun laws around.

Here's another classic: the "save the children" canard.

How many children are killed each year by gun accidents? Take a guess. Now let's look at some numbers: the way that anti-gun groups get big numbers is by stretching the definition of "children".

"The annual review of mortality data, published by the Department of Health and Human Services, said gun-related deaths dropped from 4,223 in 1997 to 3,792 among children under age 20 in 1998." -Handgun Control, Inc.

"Children under age 20?" What? Some of these "children" are fighting a war in Iraq right now.

"In 1997 gun accidents killed 142 children from birth to age 14."

Oh.

I don't want to imply that these deaths are somehow acceptable -- but 142 is a lot less than 4,223. Most of the 4,223 are 16-19 year olds shooting each other in gang-related violence, not accidental shootings in the home.

To give some perspective to this number, in an average year, roughly 550 children 0-14 are run over by cars, 800 are drowned, 660 are burned to death in fires, and 1,850 die inside cars. Most of these drownings are unattended children in backyard swimming pools -- meaning that swimming pools are many times more dangerous than guns! Where's the "Mothers Against Swimming Pools" lobby?

(*) The government report spends a lot of time being skeptical of its own 1.5 million number and tries to find ways to discredit it -- but they can't find any evidence, because their own procedure was very specific: "Each respondent who answered yes to either of these DGU [defensive gun use] questions was asked a sequence of 30 additional questions concerning the most recent defensive gun use in which the respondent was involved, including the respondent's actions with the gun, the location and other circumstances of the incident, and the respondent's relationship to the perpetrator. [...] Respondents were excluded on the basis of the most recent DGU description for any of the following reasons: the respondent did not see a perpetrator; the respondent could not state a specific crime that was involved in the incident; or the respondent did not actually display the gun or mention it to the perpetrator."