The Myth Behind Defensive Gun Ownership
Guns are more likely to do harm than good.
By EVAN DEFILIPPIS and DEVIN HUGHES
January 14, 2015
n the early hours of Nov. 2, 2013,
in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, a pounding at the door startled Theodore
Wafer from his slumber. Unable to find his cell phone to call the
police, he grabbed the shotgun he kept loaded in his closet. Wafer
opened the door and, spotting a dark figure behind the screen, fired a
single blast at the supposed intruder. The shot killed a 19-year-old
girl who was knocking to ask for help after a car accident.
Shortly after midnight on June 5, 2014,
two friends left a party briefly. Upon returning they accidently
knocked on the wrong door. Believing burglars were breaking in, the
frightened homeowner called the police, grabbed his gun and fired a
single round, hitting one of the confused party-goers in the chest.
On Sept. 21, 2014,
Eusebio Christian was awakened by a noise. Assuming a break-in, he
rushed to the kitchen with his gun and began firing. All his shots
missed but one, which struck his wife in the face.
What
do these and so many other cases have in common? They are the byproduct
of a tragic myth: that millions of gun owners successfully use their
firearms to defend themselves and their families from criminals. Despite
having nearly no academic support in public health literature, this
myth is the single largest motivationbehind
gun ownership. It traces its origin to a two-decade-old series of
surveys that, despite being thoroughly repudiated at the time, persists
in influencing personal safety decisions and public policy throughout
the United States.
In 1992, Gary Kleck and Marc Getz, criminologists at Florida State University, conducted a
random digit-dial survey to establish the annual number of defensive
gun uses in the United States. They surveyed 5,000 individuals, asking
them if they had used a firearm in self-defense in the past year and, if
so, for what reason and to what effect. Sixty-six incidences of
defensive gun use were reported from the sample. The researchers then
extrapolated their findings to the entire U.S. population, resulting in
an estimate of between 1 million and 2.5 million defensive gun uses per
year.
The
claim has since become gospel for gun advocates and is frequently
touted by the National Rifle Association, pro-gun scholars such as John Lott and conservative politicians. The argument typically goes something like this: Guns are used defensively
“over 2 million times every year—five times more frequently than the
430,000 times guns were used to commit crimes.” Or, as Gun Owners of
America states,
“firearms are used more than 80 times more often to protect the lives
of honest citizens than to take lives.” Former Republican Sen. Rick
Santorum has frequently opined on the benefits of defensive gun use, explaining:
“In fact, there are millions of lives that are saved in America every
year, or millions of instances like that where gun owners have prevented
crimes and stopped things from happening because of having guns at the
scene.”
It
may sound reassuring, but is utterly false. In fact, gun owners are far
more likely to end up like Theodore Wafer or Eusebio Christian,
accidentally shooting an innocent person or seeing their weapons harm a
family member, than be heroes warding off criminals.
***
In 1997, David Hemenway, a professor of Health Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health, offered the first of many decisive rebukes of Kleck and Getz’s methodology, citing several overarching biases in their study.
First, there is the social desirability bias.
Respondents will falsely claim that their gun has been used for its
intended purpose—to ward off a criminal—in order to validate their
initial purchase. A respondent may also exaggerate facts to appear
heroic to the interviewer.
Second,
there’s the problem of gun owners responding strategically. Given that
there are around 3 million members of the National Rifle Association
(NRA) in the United States, ostensibly all aware of the debate
surrounding defensive gun use, Hemenway suggested that some gun
advocates will lie to help bias estimates upwards by either blatantly
fabricating incidents or embellishing situations that should not
actually qualify as defensive gun use.
Third is the risk of false positives from “telescoping,”
where respondents may recall an actual self-defense use that is outside
the question’s time frame. We know that telescoping problems produce
substantial biases in defensive gun use estimates because the National
Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), the gold standard of criminal
victimization surveys, explicitly catalogs and corrects for it.
Specifically, NCVS asks questions on the household level every 6 months. The first household interview has no time frame.
Follow-up interviews are restricted to a six-month time frame and then
NCVS corrects for duplicates. Using this strategy, NCVS finds that
telescoping alone likely produces at least a 30 percent increase in
false positives.
These
sorts of biases, which are inherent in reporting self-defense
incidents, can lead to nonsensical results. In several crime categories,
for example, gun owners would have to protect themselves more than 100
percent of the time for Kleck and Getz’s estimates to make sense. For
example, guns were allegedly used in self-defense in 845,000 burglaries,
according to Kleck and Getz. However, from reliable victimization surveys,
we know that there were fewer than 1.3 million burglaries where someone
was in the home at the time of the crime, and only 33 percent of these
had occupants who weren’t sleeping. From surveys on firearm ownership,
we also know that 42 percent of U.S. households owned firearms at the
time of the survey. Even if burglars only rob houses of gun owners, and
those gun owners use their weapons in self-defense every single time
they are awake, the 845,000 statistic cited in Kleck and Gertz’s paper
is simply mathematically impossible.
Evan
DeFilippis is a cofounder of ArmedWithReason and a research analyst for
Quest Opportunity Fund. Devin Hughes is a cofounder of ArmedWithReason
and the founder of Hughes Capital Management, LLC, a registered
investment advisor.
Devin Hughes is a
cofounder of ArmedWithReason and the founder of Hughes Capital
Management, LLC, a registered investment advisor.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/
Read more: http://www.politico.com/
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