Hemenway, David; Miller, Matthew. Gun threats against and self-defense gun use by California adolescents. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. Using data from a survey of detainees in a Washington D. We found that one in four of these detainees had been wounded, in events that appear unrelated to their incarceration.
Most were shot when they were victims of robberies, assaults and crossfires. May, John P; Hemenway, David. Oen, Roger; Pitts, Khalid R. When criminals are shot: A survey of Washington DC jail detainees. Medscape General Medicine. Using data from surveys of detainees in six jails from around the nation, we worked with a prison physician to determine whether criminals seek hospital medical care when they are shot.
Criminals almost always go to the hospital when they are shot. To believe fully the claims of millions of self-defense gun uses each year would mean believing that decent law-abiding citizens shot hundreds of thousands of criminals. But the data from emergency departments belie this claim, unless hundreds of thousands of wounded criminals are afraid to seek medical care.
But virtually all criminals who have been shot went to the hospital, and can describe in detail what happened there. This is a supremely important question that the grandstanders and ideologues usually—and conveniently—ignore. A little after a. In the meantime, Ben McCoy, a man who witnessed all of this from inside his own vehicle, happened to have his rifle with him. Before he could use it, he was shot four times by the man wielding the.
Fortunately, despite being hit in the chest, stomach, left arm and right thigh, McCoy is recuperating, and the assailant was quickly apprehended. I chose this example because it was local and I wanted to express appreciation to Mr. I checked online and found some fascinating numbers.
A good website with footnotes and references to authoritative sources is GunFacts. There I learned the following:. How do police compare with armed citizens in this aspect? Response Time: 18 Minutes Size: , Officers. Skip to content. A Factual Look at Guns in America. Share Tweet Email Post. Households Own a Gun Source. Citizens Source. Guns vs. Homicide While the number of guns manufactured in the U.
This belief is so pervasive that companies have even started selling self-defense insurance. At the lecture I attended in Stone Mountain, a representative of Texas Law Shield, a firearms legal defense program, tried to get me to sign up for a service that would provide free legal representation in the event that I ever shot someone to protect myself.
But even as the belief that we are all future crime targets has taken hold, violent crime rates have actually dropped in the U. According to the FBI, rates were a whopping 41 percent lower in than they were in The NRA attributes this decrease to the acquisition of more guns. But that is misleading.
What has increased is the number of people who own multiple guns—the actual number of people and households who own them has substantially dropped. These laws allow people to kill in self-defense when they feel they are in danger. Progun groups argue that they should deter crime because criminals will know that victims have no reason not to fight back.
And a study found that states that adopted these laws experienced an abrupt and sustained 8 percent increase in homicides relative to other states. But some argue that even an unused gun can thwart crime. The logic here is that in areas with high rates of concealed carrying, criminals don't want to victimize people who might have guns, so they don't commit violent crimes.
The most famous study, published in by John R. Lott, Jr. Mustard, an economist now at the University of Georgia, looked at county crime rates in several states that had passed laws making it easy to get gun permits at various times prior to They compared such rates to crime levels in places that did not have easy access to guns during that period.
Their hypothesis: when areas make it easier for people to get permits, more people will get guns and start carrying—and then violence will drop. Lott and Mustard developed a model, based on this comparison, that indicated that when it was easier to get permits, assaults fell by 5 percent, rapes by 7 percent and murders by 7.
Lott went on to publish a book in called More Guns, Less Crime , which tracked concealed carry laws and crime in more than 3, counties and reported similar findings. Many other researchers have come to opposite conclusions. John Donohue, an economist at Stanford University, reported in a working paper in June that when states ease permit requirements, most violent crime rates increase and keep getting worse.
A decade after laws relax, violent crime rates are 13 to 15 percent higher than they were before. And in the National Research Council, which provides independent advice on scientific issues, turned its attention to firearm research, including Lott's findings. Lott's models, they found, could be tweaked in tiny ways to produce big changes in results. There are a far larger number of studies that suggest that it has, on balance, detrimental effects.
It is crucial, though, to distinguish the leadership of progun organizations from their constituents, who often have more nuanced opinions. In Nelson, like Kennesaw, passed a law mandating that residents own guns, but the ordinance was relaxed later that year in response to a lawsuit. According to a survey published by Johns Hopkins University researchers, 85 percent of gun owners support background checks for all gun sales, including sales through unlicensed dealers—even though the NRA strongly opposes them.
I heard a lot more about divergence from NRA positions on my last stop in Alabama: Scottsboro Gun and Pawn, a shop perched at the end of Broad Street, one of the town's main drags.
The co-owner, Robert Shook, told me about the ongoing push in the Alabama State Senate to eliminate concealed carry permits altogether, a move that would make it legal for anyone older than 18 to carry a hidden gun.
The bill passed in the Alabama Senate in April of this year but did not come up for a vote in the state's House of Representatives during the session. They're throwing common sense out the window.
The belief that more guns lead to fewer crimes is founded on the idea that guns are dangerous when bad guys have them, so we should get more guns into the hands of good guys. In in Ionia, Mich. As I drove from Scottsboro to Atlanta to catch my flight home, I kept turning over what I had seen and learned. Although we do not yet know exactly how guns affect us, the notion that more guns lead to less crime is almost certainly incorrect.
The research on guns is not uniform, and we could certainly use more of it. But when all but a few studies point in the same direction, we can feel confident that the arrow is aiming at the truth—which is, in this case, that guns do not inhibit crime and violence but instead make it worse.
People, all of us, lead complicated lives, misinterpret situations, get angry, make mistakes. And when a mistake involves pulling a trigger, the damage can't be undone. Unlike my Glock-aided attack on the zombie at the gun range, life is not target practice.
This article was originally published with the title "Journey to Gunland" in Scientific American , 4, October Obstacles to Firearm and Violence Research. Arthur L. Kellermann in Health Affairs , Vol. John R. Mustard in Journal of Legal Studies , Vol. Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review. National Research Council. National Academies Press,
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