NRA’s MYTH OF DEFENSIVE GUN USE IS LARGELY JUST A MYTH

ALL-LEN-ALL

FIREARM JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDES AND NON-FATAL SELF-DEFENSE GUN USE [PDF]

The cold, hard facts:

In 2012, across the nation there were only 259 justifiable homicides involving a private citizen using a firearm reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program as detailed in its Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR).

That same year, there were 8,342 criminal gun homicides tallied in the SHR. In 2012, for every justifiable homicide in the United States involving a gun, guns were used in 32 criminal homicides.

And this ratio, of course, does not take into account the tens of thousands of lives ended in gun suicides or unintentional shootings that year.

 Gun advocates” are working from a mythical, idealized and utterly false concept that the gun is some sort of magical creator of protection.

Pro-gun advocates – from individual gun owners to organizations like the National Rifle Association – frequently claim that guns are used up to 2.5 million times each year in self-defense in the United States.⁸

According to the 2004 book Private Guns, Public Health by Dr. David Hemenway, Professor of Health Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health and director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center:

Much discussion about the protective benefits of guns has focused on the incidence of self-defense gun use. Proponents of such putative benefits often claim that 2.5 million Americans use guns in self-defense against criminal attackers each year. This estimate is not plausible and has been nominated as the most outrageous number mentioned in a policy discussion by an elected official.

 

NEW STUDY SHOWS GUNS RARELY USED FOR SELF-DEFENSE

“The [National Rifle Association] has staked its entire agenda on the claim that guns are necessary for self-defense, but this gun industry propaganda has no basis in fact,” Josh Sugarmann, the executive director of VPC, which conducted the review, said in a statement. “Guns are far more likely to be used in a homicide than in a justifiable homicide by a private citizen. In fact, a gun is far more likely to be stolen than used in self-defense.”

Sure, there were 291 actual defensive uses of guns, situations in which a bad person was doing bad things and the person with a gun was able to stop that bad person by shooting them and killing them. And yeah, sure — there were doubtlessly other times in which a gun owner displayed a gun as a deterrent to lethal force, causing some dumbass to rethink their intentions. I get it. Delusions often contain some kernel of truth: guns CAN be used defensively. 

The NRA has, in a powerfully and in a hugely unethical manner, encouraged a form of self-fulfilling prophecy for gun advocates who clearly — at this point in time — think guns should be everywhere we go — in case somebody has a gun. These are the people who BELIEVE you cannot leave the house unarmed. You cannot POSSIBLY go to the Walmart without being armed.

And the facts show this is just complete nonsense. This has to be a huge reason the NRA has worked so tirelessly to PREVENT gun data from being collected and used.

Of the 8,601 total homicides recorded in 2012, just 259 of those deaths were the result of a self-defense scenario, according to the study. There were thirteen states in which zero justifiable firearm deaths were logged that year. That no-deaths list included states with relatively strict gun control laws as well as states where firearms are more easily accessible.  From New York and New Jersey, with tighter regulation, to Idaho and Montana, known for their love of hunting and opposition to gun control, firearms don’t appear to be used with any real frequency to save one’s self or family, according to the study.

MOST gun owners are responsible as evidenced by the same data: there are hundreds of millions of guns in America and while any tragedy is a tragedy and there are thousands of them a year, this is still a tiny fraction of what it could be if it was a “worse” problem.