Yesterday’s incident at Great Mills High School in Maryland highlighted the principle that only good guys with guns can stop bad guys with guns.[1] Because of an armed good guy, the casualty was limited to 1, that of the malicious shooter. Whenever we use facts and logic to defend private ownership of firearms, the gun control faction would pass off the countless examples of good guys with guns as “anecdotal.” So when does anecdotal become fact?
The most comprehensive firearm study was commissioned via Executive Order by President Obama, “directing federal agencies to improve knowledge of the causes of firearm violence, the interventions that might prevent it, and strategies to minimize its public health burden.” Sponsored by the anti-gun Centers for Disease Control and Prevention[2], among others, the 2013 study “Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence” by the National Academy of Sciences [3] show overwhelming and undeniable evidence that far greater good came as the result of gun ownership. Of the documented cases alone, guns were used to protect the innocent at least 10 times as often as used to kill the innocent. [3a, pg 15] This doesn’t even include the undocumented, non-reported cases of deterrence.
“Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was “used” by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies” [3a, pg 16]
It’s simply logical. During a home invasion or assault, if neither criminal nor homeowner were armed, the odds are in the former’s favor, especially if it’s a hardened, career criminal versus the elderly and/or housewife. Who would you bet on in a fist fight between a 210 pound gang member versus a 140 pound middle age woman? Firearms would greatly even the odds. But by how much?
During robberies, not resisting has the greatest odds of losing property, at 83.6%. Fighting back would reduce the odds of losing property by 37%, but also increases the risk of injury by 44%. Fighting back, while armed, reduces the odds of losing property to 1/5 compared to not resisting, while ALSO reducing the chance of getting injured by half. Similar with victims of assault. Fighting back slightly increases the chances of being injured compared to not resisting, but fighting back while armed reduces chance of injury by half, from 55.2% probability to 27.9% probability. [4b]
But the anti-gun biased media often downplay this, while publishing misleading information, such as the New York Times: “It is true that guns are occasionally used to stop violence. But contrary to what the National Rifle Association suggests, this is rare. One study by the Violence Policy Center found that in 2012 there were 259 justifiable homicides by a private citizen using a firearm.”[5]
Referencing their source, it checks out [6]. So for every bad guy killed by a potential victim, there are 32 murdered victims. This kill-ratio seems dismal, but remember that the primary objective of a good-guy-with-a-gun isn’t to kill the bad guy, but to stop the bad guy from doing bad things (using lethal force if necessary). So it’s actually a GOOD sign for humanity that out of the 100,000+ defensive gun use per year, only a few hundred cases result in death. For example, refer to our prior post on mass shootings being stopped by good-guys-with-guns, many of which didn’t involve lethal force [7]. Thus even without killing the bad guy, being armed plays a big part protecting victims.
On the other hand, criminals can also commit crimes aided by guns without killing, and actually most illegal gun use does NOT involve someone getting killed:
“Approximately 3 percent of firearm-related assaults known to the police (which represent a portion of total firearm-related assaults) are fatal (computed from FBI, 2011c)” [3b, page 30]
“Guns also can be used to intimidate and coerce through threats of violence. In 2010, firearms were involved in less than 6 percent of the total 3,148,250 reported aggravated or simple assaults (Truman, 2011). Similarly, less than 7 percent of all rapes or sexual assaults in 2010 involved a firearm (Truman, 2011).” [3b, page 32]
Read that again: Less than 7% of assailants or rapists had used a gun to impose their will on the victim. That means the vast majority of violent crimes were committed with weapons other than guns.
Therefore, even if nobody had guns, both good guys and bad guys, criminals would still be committing violent crimes, just with an alternative weapon. There’s no data on what-ifs (unless we develop Minority Report tech), but logically I would surmise that the number of criminals deterred by not having access to firearms would be fewer than the number of criminals emboldened by the prospect that none of their potential victims would be armed. As if criminals followed the law anyway!
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/20/us/maryland-school-shooting-resource-officer-response-trnd/index.html
[2] “Dr. Timothy Wheeler of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership has noted that CDC has a track record of anti-gun bias. In the 1990s, one CDC official even stated that his goal was to create a public perception of gun ownership as something “dirty, deadly — and banned.””
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulhsieh/2018/03/20/any-study-of-gun-violence-should-include-how-guns-save-lives/#394a1ec05edc
[3] “Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence.” Institute of Medicine and . 2013. Committee on Priorities for a Public Health Research Agenda to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence . Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18319.
[3a] https://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/3
[3b] https://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/3
[4] “Firearms and Violence, A Critical Review.” National Research Council. 2005. Committee to Improve Research Information and Data on Firearms. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10881.
[4b] https://www.nap.edu/read/10881/chapter/7
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/06/opinion/how-to-reduce-shootings.html
[6] “In 2012, across the nation there were only 259 justifiable homicides involving a private citizen using a firearm reported to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program as detailed in its Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR). That same year, there were 8,342 criminal gun homicides tallied in the SHR… For the five-year period 2008 through 2012, there were only 1,108 justifiable homicides involving a gun.”
http://www.vpc.org/studies/justifiable15.pdf