-Caveat Lector-
From
http://www.latimes.com/news/comment/20010330/t000027206.html
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Friday, March 30, 2001
...Others Fear Being Placed at the Mercy of Criminals
By JOHN R. LOTT JR.
Hardly a day seems to go by without national news coverage of yet
another
shooting. Yet when was the last time you heard a story on the
national evening news
about a citizen saving a life with a gun?
Few people realize that civilians use guns defensively to stop about 2
million
crimes a year, five times more often than guns are used to commit
crimes, according
to national surveys.
Last week, a police officer received national attention for stopping a
school
shooting in El Cajon. Where was the similar national news coverage
when equally
heroic civilians used their guns to stop other school
shootings, such as the ones in
Pearl, Miss., and Edinboro, Penn.?
Some of this lopsided coverage is understandable. An innocent person's
murder
is more newsworthy than when a victim brandishes a gun and an
attacker runs away
with no crime committed. Unlike the crimes that are
avoided, bad events provide
emotionally gripping pictures. Yet covering
only the bad events creates the
impression that guns only cost lives.
Even the rare local coverage of defensive gun use seldom involves more
than very brief stories. Newsworthiness also dictates that these stories
are not the typical examples of self-defense, but the rare instances
whe
re the attacker is shot. In fact, in 98% of the cases, simply
brandishing a gun is sufficient to stop a crime. Research at Florida
State University and at the University of Chicago indicates that only one
out of 1,000 def
ensive gun uses results in the attacker's death.
Here are some of the 20 defensive gun use stories that I found
reported in their respective local media in a single week, March 11-17:
* Clearwater, Fla.: At 1:05 a.m., a man started banging on a patio
door, briefly left to beat on the family's truck, but returned and tore
open the patio door. At that point, after numerous shouts not to break
into t
he home, a 16-year-old boy fired a single rifle shot, wounding the attacker.
* Columbia, S.C.: As two gas station employees left work just after
midnight, two men attempted to rob them. The sheriff told a local
television station: "Two men came out of the bushes, one of the men had a
shovel h
andle that had been broken off and began to beat [the male employee] . . . about the
head, neck and then the arms." The male
employee broke away long enough to draw a handgun from his pocket and
wound his attacker, who la
ter died. The second suspect, turned in by
relatives, faces armed robbery and possible murder charges.
* Little Rock, Ark.: By firing one shot with a rifle, a 19-year-old
man defended himself against three armed men who were threatening to
assault him. One of them was treated for a flesh wound.
* Detroit: A mentally disturbed man yelled that the president was
going to have him killed and started firing at people in passing cars. A
man at the scene, who had a permit to carry a concealed handgun, fired
shots
that forced the attacker to stop shooting and run away. The attacker barricaded
himself in an empty apartment, fired at police and
ultimately committed suicide.
* West Palm Beach, Fla.: After being beaten during a robbery at his
home just two days earlier, a homeowner began carrying a handgun in his
pocket. When another robber attacked him, the homeowner shot and wounded
his
assailant.
* Grand Junction, Colo.: On his way home from work, a contractor
picked up three young hitchhikers. He fixed them a steak dinner at his
house and was preparing to offer them jobs. Two of the men grabbed his
kitchen k
nives and started stabbing him in the back, head and hands. The
attackers stopped only when he told them that he could give them money.
Instead of money, the contractor grabbed a pistol and shot one of the
attackers. The
contractor said, "If I'd had a trigger lock, I'd be dead."
* Columbia Falls, Mont.: An ex-boyfriend is accused of entering a
woman's home and sexually assaulting her. She got away long enough to get
her handgun and hold her attacker at gunpoint until police arrived.
* Salt Lake City: Two robbers began firing their guns as soon as they
entered a pawn shop. The owner and his son returned fire. One of the
robbers was shot in the arm; both later were arrested. The shop owner's
state
ment said it all: "If we did not have our guns, we would have had several people dead
here."
* Baton Rouge, La.: At 5:45 a.m., a crack addict kicked in the back
door of a house and went in. The attacker was fatally shot as he charged
toward the homeowner.
What advice would gun control advocates have given these victims?
Should they have behaved passively? Unfortunately, by making it difficult
for law-abiding people to get the most effective tool to defend
themselves,
gun control often puts victims' lives in jeopardy.
- - -
John R. Lott Jr. Is a Senior Research Scholar at the Yale University Law School and
the Author of "More Guns, Less Crime" (University of Chicago Press, 2000)
Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times
T' A<>E<>R
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The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational
tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the
State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate
repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the
"democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist
by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse
of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of
taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between
the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that
the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State
has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to
accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a
share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded
subjects.
[[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard,
Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]]
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