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An Army of Gun Lies
How the other side plays.
By Dave Kopel
Mr. Kopel is research director of the Independence Institute, a
free-market think tank in Colorado.
Antigun advocates have always faced an uphill
battle in this country. Americans have, to begin with,
a constitutional right to gun ownership. Today, half
of American households exercise this right, owning a
total of about 250 million guns; and over 99 percent
of those households do so in a responsible manner.
To fight for major restrictions on an item that plays
such a valued part in the lives of so many people
looks like a nearly impossible task. So if you�re really
committed to the effort, and you want to win, what
do you do?
Simple: You lie.
A full listing of the lies told by the antigun lobby
could fill a book. A short list of the more popular
ones would have to begin with the canard about the
number of children killed by firearms. We are told
repeatedly that 13, or 15, or 17 children every day are
killed by guns. This factoid is used to conjure up
pictures of dozens of little kids dying in gun
accidents every week.
In truth, the number of fatal gun accidents is at its
lowest level since 1903, when statistics started being
kept. That�s right: Not only is the per capita accident
rate at a record low, so is the actual number of
accidents�even though the number of people and
the number of guns are both much larger than in
1903. The assertions about �X children per day� are
based on counting older teenagers, or even people in
their early twenties, as �children.� The claims are true
only if you count a 19-year-old drug dealer who is
shot by a competitor, or an 18-year-old armed robber
who is shot by a policeman, as �a child killed by a
gun.� As for actual children (14 years and under), the
daily death rate is 2.6. For children ten and under, it�s
0.4 per day�far lower than the number of children
who are killed by automobiles, drowning, or many
other causes.
If the statistic about child gun deaths is the most
notorious lie, one of the most frequent has to do with
gun shows. All of the antigun groups repeat,
incessantly, the phrase �gun-show loophole.� As a
result, much of the public believes that gun shows are
special zones exempt from ordinary gun laws.
Handgun Control, Inc., the major antigun group, has
an affiliate in Colorado that claims that the �vast
majority� of guns used in crimes come from gun
shows, while the Violence Policy Center calls gun
shows �Tupperware parties for criminals.�
This is all an audacious lie. First of all, the laws at gun
shows are exactly the same as they are everywhere
else. If a person is �engaged in the business� (as the
law puts it) of selling firearms, then he must fill out a
government registration form on every buyer, and get
FBI permission (through the National Instant Check
System) for every sale�regardless of whether the
sale takes place at his gun store, at an office in his
home, or at a gun show. Those who are not gun
dealers by profession, but happen to be selling a gun,
are not required to follow this procedure. To imply
that gun dealers can go to an event called a �gun
show� and thus avoid the law is absolutely false. Also
false is the charge about Tupperware parties for
criminals. According to a National Institute of Justice
study released in December 1997, only 2 percent of
guns used in crimes come from gun shows. The
gun-show charge has great currency in the media, but
it is not very important in itself. How about the more
serious charge that guns are basically dangerous to
society? Public-health experts and gun-control
lobbyists will tell you that most murders, including
those involving guns, take place among acquaintances
and are perpetrated by ordinary people; these facts
supposedly indicate that ordinary people are too
hot-tempered to be allowed to have guns.
The facts tell a different story: 75 percent of
murderers have adult criminal records. As for the
rest, a large number either have criminal convictions
as juveniles or are still teenagers when they commit
the murder; laws dealing with access to juvenile-crime
records prevent full access to their rap sheets.
Furthermore, the category of �acquaintance� murders
is misleading. It includes drug buyers who kill a drug
dealer to steal his stash, and thugs who assault each
other in barroom brawls.
There�s also a sad irony here. Domestic murders are
almost always preceded by many incidents of violent
abuse. If a domestic-violence victim flees the home,
and her ex- husband tracks her down and tries to
rape her, and she shoots him, the killing will be
labeled a �tragic domestic homicide that was caused
by a gun,� rather than what it legally is: justifiable use
of deadly force against a felon.
The famous factoid that a gun in the home is 43 times
more likely to kill a family member than to kill a
criminal is predicated on a similar misclassification.
Of the 43 deaths, 37 are suicides; and while there are
obviously many ways in which a person can commit
suicide, only a gun allows a small woman a realistic
opportunity to defend herself at a distance from a
large male predator.
Emory University medical professor Arthur
Kellermann is a one-man factory of this type of
misleading data. One of his most famous studies
purported to show that owning a gun is associated
with a 2.7 times greater risk of being murdered.
Kellermann compared murder victims in several cities
with sociologically similar people a few blocks away
in those cities, who had not been murdered.
The 2.7 factoid was trumpeted all over the country;
but the study is patently illogical. First of all,
Kellermann�s own data show that owning a security
system, or renting a home rather than owning it, are
also associated with equally large increased risks of
death. Yet newspapers did not start running dire
stories warning people to rip out their burglar alarms
or to start lobbying their condo association to
dissolve. The 2.7 factoid also overlooks the obvious
fact that one reason people choose to own guns, or
to install burglar alarms, is that they are already at
higher risk of being victimized by crime. As Yale law
professor John Lott points out, Kellermann�s
methodology is like comparing 100 people who went
to a hospital in a given year with 100 similar people
who did not, finding that more of the hospital patients
died, and then announcing that hospitals increase the
risk of death. Kellermann�s method would also prove
that possession of insulin increases the risk of
diabetes.
The media are complicit in many of these lies. Take,
for example, the hysteria about so-called �assault
weapons.� Almost everything that gun-control
advocates say about these firearms is a lie. The guns
in question are not machine guns; they are simply
ordinary guns with ugly cosmetics that give them a
pseudo-military appearance. The guns do not fire
faster than ordinary guns. The bullets they fire are not
especially powerful; they are, in fact, smaller and
travel at lower velocity than bullets from standard
hunting rifles.
The media have succeeded in giving a totally different
impression�through deliberate fraud. The CBS
show 48 Hours purported to show a semiautomatic
rifle being converted to fully automatic�i.e., turned
into a machine gun�in just nine minutes. But the gun
shown at the beginning was not the same gun that
was fired at the end of the demonstration. An expert
from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
(BATF) later said that such a conversion was
impossible. And in Denver, KMGH television filmed
people firing automatic weapons and told viewers that
the guns were semiautomatics.
The chief culprits are not the media but the antigun
lobbyists themselves, some of whom have very little
compunction about lying�even in cases where it can
be proven rather easily that they are aware of the truth
while spreading the falsehood. For example, in
February 1989, a former BATF employee who had
become a paid consultant for Handgun Control
testified to Congress that �assault weapons� were
rarely used in crimes. (He wanted to ban them
anyway, as a precautionary measure.) Nevertheless,
within weeks, Handgun Control was running an
advertising campaign insisting that assault weapons
were the criminal weapons of choice.
The most dangerous dishonesty concerns the ultimate
intentions of the antigun forces. Handgun Control
claims that it merely wants to �keep guns out of the
wrong hands�; yet in 1999, it lobbied hard to
preserve Washington, D.C.�s outright ban on
handguns. Back in 1976, the group�s then leader,
Pete Shields, explained the long-term strategy to The
New Yorker: �The first problem is to slow down the
number of handguns being produced and sold in this
country. The second problem is to get handguns
registered. The final problem is to make possession
of all handguns and all handgun ammunition�except
for the military, police, licensed security guards,
licensed sporting clubs, and licensed gun
collectors�totally illegal.�
Sarah Brady, the current chairwoman of Handgun
Control, has said that people should not be allowed
to own guns for self-defense. Yet in debates,
employees of the group steadfastly deny that the
organization believes in the policies articulated by its
leaders. In short, they are lying about what they want
to accomplish. This is understandable, to be sure; but
not honorable, or right for the country.
_____________________________________________
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