More Guns Less Crime (37 page)

Some authors—such as William Bartley and Mark Cohen or Carlisle Moody—use the original data and claim to have "found strong support for the hypothesis that the right-to-carry laws are associated with a decrease in the trend in violent crimes" or that their alternative specifications "confirm and reinforce the basic findings." 107 David Olson and Michael Maltz check the findings by using newly available county-level data from the Supplementary Homicide Report data in place of the FBI's Uniform Crime Report and obtain virtually the same drop in murders after the passage of the right-to-carry laws. 108 Others—including Florenz Plassmann and Nicolaus Tideman—contend that the reduction in murder rates is almost twice as large as I claimed. They conclude that their results "indicate that more guns generally lead to fewer rather than more murders, and that it would be wrong to dismiss right-to-carry laws on the ground that more guns mean more danger, without considering their discouraging effect on potential murders." m

Another paper by Florenz Plassman and Nicolaus Tideman examines the deterrent effects of right-to-carry laws both across states and over time. They find that all the states that adopted the laws between 1977 and 1992 experienced reductions in murder, rape, and robbery between the year the law was passed and the first, second and third full years that the law was in effect. 110 Other recent evidence by David Mustard suggests that right-to-carry laws help reduce the rate at which police are murdered.

The book reviews in economic journals have been favorable. 111 As one academic review claimed, "his empirical analysis sets a standard that will

be difficult to match this has got to be the most extensive empirical

study of crime deterrence that has been done to date.. .. The results are extremely robust, but they are also consistent with the theoretical principles." 112 Other academics from Northwestern University, the University of Texas, George Washington University, George Mason University, and Cardozo School of Law have also written supportive reviews. 113

Yet, to me, the most remarkable thing about this debate is what goes unsaid. None of my academic critics has mentioned anything about the other gun-control laws that I have examined. Not a single academic has challenged my findings that the Brady law or state waiting periods or background checks caused some crime rates to increase. In fact, they have all avoided including these laws in their own research. Nonetheless, gun-control organizations, such as Handgun Control, to this day still attack me for supposedly not accounting for other gun-control laws in my research.

Conclusion

The noise came suddenly from behind early Tuesday— feet rapidly pounding the pavement, voices cursing. Before Jim Shaver could turn around, he was knocked to the ground at East 13th Avenue and Mill Street, fighting off punches from two young men. Police said the assailants figured they'd found a drug dealer to rob, someone who'd have both drugs and money. They couldn't have been more wrong. Their victim was a 49-year-old nurse on his way to work—a nurse with a concealed weapons permit. The fists kept flying, even as Shaver told them— twice, he said—that he had a gun. Fearing for his life, Shaver pulled a .22-caliber revolver out of his coat pocket and fired several shots. One of them hit 19-year-old Damien Alexander Long in the right hip. Long's alleged accomplice, Brandon Heath Durrett, 20, wasn't injured. The pair ran off. 114

A man who police said kidnapped a 2-year-old child and robbed a disabled elderly woman of a medical monitor was in jail Friday after he was captured and held at gun point by a man with a license to carry a concealed handgun. ... "I have never pulled a gun on anyone before, and I wouldn't have pulled a gun on this man if he had not run off with that little girl," [the man who stopped the crime] said. "That mother was screaming for her child. She was quite upset." 115

Awe-struck Phoenix police declared Mr. Vertigan a hero and gave him $500 and a new pistol for catching a cop killer after running out of ammunition in a gunfight with three heavily armed men. Mr. Vertigan ... came upon three armed Mexican drug-traffickers fatally ambushing a uniformed Phoenix policeman who was patrolling alone in Phoenix's tough Maryvale precinct. Firing 14 shots with his left hand during a slam-and-bump car chase that left the killers' license number imprinted on the front of his own car, Mr. Vertigan emptied his Glock 31 .357 Sig. He wounded the shooter, who was firing at him, and forced the getaway car to crash, slowing the shooter's partners long enough for pursuing police to seize them, as well as a pound of cocaine "eight balls" they were dealing from their white Lincoln. "I always felt that if my life was in danger or anyone around me was in immediate danger I never would hesitate to use that gun. Unfortunately, that day came," Mr. Vertigan said. 116

A man who tried to commit an armed robbery at a Ben-salem convenience store Friday morning was thwarted by a customer who pulled out his own gun and fired five

shots at the crook Fearing he would be killed, police

said, the customer began shooting at the suspect.... Police said the clerks were "a little shaken up" after the attempted robbery—but they guessed that the would-be robber was probably just as shocked. "I'll bet he never expected that to happen," said Fred Harran, Bensalem's deputy director of public safety. 117

All these recent cases involved individuals with permitted concealed handguns. During 1999 concealed permit holders have prevented bank robberies, stopped what could have been a bloody attack by gang members at a teenage girl's high school graduation party, and stopped carjackings. 118 In the couple of months during which I was updating this book, armed citizens have helped capture murderers who had escaped prison, stopped hostage taking at a business which otherwise surely would have resulted in multiple deaths, and prevented robberies and rapes. 119 Residential attacks that were stopped by citizens with guns during 1999 were extremely common. 120

One of the bigger puzzles to me has been the news coverage on guns. Admittedly, some of it is easy to explain. Suppose a media outlet has two stories to choose from: one in which there is a dead body on the ground and it is a sympathetic person like a victim, another in which a women brandishes a gun and the attacker runs away, no shots are fired, no dead bodies are on the ground, and no crime is actually consummated. It

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seems pretty obvious which story is going to get the news coverage. Yet if we really want to answer the question of which policies will save lives, we must take into consideration not only the newsworthy bad events but also the bad events that never happen because people are able to defend themselves. Unfortunately, the newsworthy bad events give people a warped impression of the costs and benefits from having guns around.

Even when defensive gun uses are mentioned in the press, those mentions do not focus on typical defensive gun uses. The news stories focus primarily on the extremely rare cases in which the attacker is killed, though a few times press stories do mention cases of a gun being used to seriously wound an attacker. News coverage of defensive gun uses in which a would-be victim simply brandished a gun are essentially unheard-of. I don't think one has to rely on a conspiracy explanation to understand why this type of news coverage occurs, for it is not that surprising that dead attackers are considered more newsworthy than prevented attacks in which nobody was harmed. Even so, it is still important to recognize how this coverage can color people's perspective on how guns are used defensively. Since most people probably are very reticent to take a life, if they believe that defensive gun use almost always results in the death of an attacker, they will become more uncomfortable with guns.

While these examples are easily understood, some other news coverage is not as obvious. Take the case of accidental gun deaths involving young children, which we discussed in chapter 1. My guess is that people believe these events to be much more frequent than they actually are. When I have given talks, I have sometimes asked the audience how many children under age five or ten die from accidental gun shots each year; the answers are frequently in the thousand-plus range. A few answers might mention only hundreds of deaths per year. No one comes close to the Centers for Disease Control numbers: seventeen accidental gun deaths for children under age five and forty-two for children under ten in 1996. The information that forty children under age five drown each year in five-gallon water buckets or that eighty drown in bathtubs always astounds the audience. People remember national news reports of young children dying from accidental handgun shots in the home. In contrast, when was the last time that you heard on the national news of a child drowning in a five-gallon water bucket? 121

As a father of four boys, I can't imagine what life would be like if one of my sons died for any reason, including guns. But why so much more attention is given to guns when so many other risks pose a greater threat to our children is not immediately obvious to me. Indeed, it is difficult to think of anything other than guns that is as prevalent around American

homes, and that is anywhere near as potentially dangerous, yet is responsible for as low an accidental death rate. With around 80 million people owning a total of 200—240 million guns, the vast majority of gun owners must be extremely careful or such gun accidents would be much more frequent.

I have asked some reporters why they think accidental gun deaths receive so much coverage, and the only answer seems to be that these events get coverage because they are so rare. Dog bites man is simply not newsworthy because it is so common, but man bites dog, well, that is news. Yet this explanation still troubles me, for there are other equally rare deaths involving children that get very little news coverage.

Another puzzle is the lack of coverage given to cases in which citizens with guns have prevented multiple-victim public shootings from occurring. Given the intense concern generated by these attacks, one would think that people would be interested in knowing how these attacks were stopped.

For a simple comparison, take the justified news coverage accorded the heroic actions of Dave Sanders, the Columbine High School teacher who helped protect some of the students and was killed in the process. By the Sunday morning five days after the incident, a Lexis-Nexis search (a type of on-line computer search that includes news media databases) indicates that over 250 of the slightly over 1,000 news stories around the country on this tragedy had mentioned this hero.

Contrast this with other school attacks in which the crimes were stopped well before the police were able to arrive. Take, for example, the October 1997 shooting spree at a high school in Pearl, Mississippi, described at the beginning of this section, which left two students dead. It was stopped by Joel Myrick, an assistant principal. He retrieved his permitted concealed handgun from his car and physically immobilized the shooter for about five minutes before police arrived.

A Lexis-Nexis search indicates that 687 articles appeared in the first month after the attack. Only 19 stories mentioned Myrick in any way. Only a little more than half of these mentioned he used a gun to stop the attack. Some stories simply stated Myrick was "credited by police with helping capture the boy" or that "Myrick disarmed the shooter." A later story reported by Dan Rather on CBS noted that "Myrick eventually subdued the young gunman." Such stories provide no explanation of how Myrick accomplished this feat.

The school-related shooting in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, which left one teacher dead, was stopped only after James Strand, the owner of a nearby restaurant, pointed a shotgun at the shooter when he was finishing reloading his gun. The police did not arrive until eleven minutes later. At

least 596 news stories discussed this crime during the next month, yet only 35 mentioned Strand. Once again, the media ignored that a gun was used to stop the crime. The New York Daily News explained that Strand "persuaded [the killer] to surrender," while the Atlanta Journal wrote how he "chased [the killer] down and held him until police came." Saying that Strand "persuaded" the attacker makes it sound as if Strand were simply an effective speaker.

Neither Myrick nor Strand was killed during their heroics. That might explain why they were ignored to a greater degree than Dave Sanders in the Columbine attack. Yet one suspects a more politically correct explanation—especially when the media generally ignore defensive gun use. With five public-school-related shootings occurring during the 1997—1998 school year, one might have thought that the fact that two of them were stopped by guns would register in the public debate over such shootings.

The press's bias can be amply illustrated by other examples as well. Take the example of the July attack in Atlanta that left nine people dead. Mark Barton killed people working at two stock brokerages. 122 It did deserve the extensive news coverage that it received. Yet within the next week and a half there were three cases around Atlanta in which citizens with guns stopped similar attacks from occurring, and these incidents were given virtually no news coverage. They were an attack at a Lavonia, Georgia, store by a fired worker, an attack by a mental patient at an Atlanta hospital, and an Atlanta truckjacking. 123 The last two incidents were stopped by citizens with permitted concealed handguns, while the first was stopped by someone who had only been allowed to buy a gun hours before the attack because of Georgia's instant background check system. Meanwhile, a week after the Atlanta massacre, another attack, which left three people dead at a Birmingham, Alabama, business, again generated national television news coverage on all the networks and was the lead story on the CBS and NBC evening news. 124

Again, I can see that bad events that never occur are not nearly as newsworthy as actual bad events. Yet multiple-victim attacks using methods other than guns are frequently ignored. On May 3, 1999, Steve Abrams drove his Cadillac into a crowded preschool playground because he "wanted to execute innocent children." 125 Two children died horrible deaths as one was mangled under the wheels and the other pinned to a tree by the car, and another five were badly injured. One woman's son was so badly mauled that "teachers and other parents stepped between [her] and the Cadillac to prevent her from seeing her son's battered body" even though he was still alive. Yet only one television network provided even a passing reference to this attack. 126 One very obvious news angle, it seems to me, would be to link this attack to the various public school