The following article is under submission. Reproduction
on computer bulletin boards is permitted for informational
purposes only. Copyright (c) 1993 by J. Neil Schulman.
All other rights reserved.
ANATOMY OF AN ANTI-GUN CRUSADE
by J. Neil Schulman
Anytime a publication calls an article "THE TRUTH ABOUT"
something, it's likely that what follows isn't going to be
dispassionate facts about anything, but a sermon. When the
subject is guns, you can bet the sermon is going to be
particularly short on objectivity. \Vogue\ magazine's October,
1993 cover, which headlines "Armed and in Danger: The Truth About
Women and Guns," bears this out.
The article's premise is that firearms manufacturers are
playing on women's fears of crime to sell them handguns, but that
firearms bought for protection are more likely to be a danger to
the woman or her family than a defensive tool. To illustrate
this sermon, \Vogue\ writer Steve Fishman begins with the parable
of Sharon Kendall of Wichita, Kansas, who decided to buy a gun
for protection.
Fishman writes: "A 52-year-old single parent with 11-year-
old twins and a 13-year-old at home, Kendall talked to a
neighboring 16-year-old, a responsible kid, one who'd grown up
around guns and who'd been to a gun school to learn how to handle
them. He said he'd bring a gun over, just to familiarize her.
The weapon was a .38 semiautomatic. He said it was loaded with
blanks. The neighbor had a gun aimed at one of the twins, who
reached over to turn the barrel away from him. The weapon fired
accidentally, and Kendall's 11-year-old boy took one shot in the
chest. He died at the hospital during surgery."
That Fishman is incompetent to evaluate firearms, their
safety, or their usefulness, is immediately apparent to any
experienced gun owner who reads this paragraph. Except for target
guns, semiautomatic handguns don't come in ".38" caliber; that's
a designation used for revolver ammunition. Magazine-fed handguns
use shorter and less-powerful .380 rounds.
Nor is the 16-year-old neighbor whom Sharon Kendall
supposedly chose to teach her about guns "a responsible kid." A
call to Lieutenant Landwehr at the Investigations Division of the
Wichita Police Department revealed that the 16-year-old in
question has a history of shoplifting and alcohol abuse, and had
stolen the key to remove the firearm from his grandfather's
locked gun case while the grandfather was out of town. The
neighbor boy broke at least three of the primary safety rules of
firearms handling which \any\ firearms safety and handling course
would teach.
1. "Never point a gun, even one you think is unloaded, at
anything you don't intend to destroy." But this "responsible"
16-year-old pointed a firearm he knew was loaded at an 11-year-
old boy.
2. "Never assume that a gun is unloaded, or that a round is
safe because it misfired." According to the police report, this
boy "who'd grown up around guns and who'd been to a gun school to
learn how to handle them" had been dry-firing rounds he assumed
were duds because they had previously misfired. Any one-day
National Rifle Assn. firearms handling course would have taught
him that multiple strikes on a round can cause it to fire at any
time. If he attended such a course, he evidently didn't learn
the most basic lessons.
3. "Never place your finger inside the trigger guard until
you to intend to fire." But did this 16-year-old merely break
this safety rule ... or did he pull the trigger on purpose? The
victim's 13-year-old sister, who was in the room at the time,
told the police that her brother had \not\ tried to reach for the
gun at all.
Where was Sharon Kendall, at 10 P.M., while her children and
a neighbor boy were playing with a loaded gun? She was in the
house, aware that the kids were handling the gun, and did nothing
to stop them.
Steve Fishman's cautionary tale about the danger of guns
also fails to tell us that another of Sharon Kendall's daughters,
a 25-year-old alcoholic and drug-user, was murdered in August,
1993 by a blunt object to the back of her head, in a case that's
still unsolved. A mother who has raised two children to be
killed within a year under sordid circumstances is hardly an
example to the rest of us.
The rest of Steve Fishman's polemic against women choosing
to buy firearms for protection relies on data as discreditable as
his example. He quotes studies which James Mercy, acting
director of the Center for Disease Control, and a gun-control
partisan with no criminological education, commissioned to
demonstrate the supposed risk of guns. The most quoted of these
by gun-control advocates, a study by Kellerman and Reay published
in the June 12, 1986 \New England Journal of Medicine\, is the
centerpiece of Fishman's conclusion that "For every case of
justifiable homicide with a gun, there were 43 murders, suicides,
or accidental deaths."
But Fishman never quotes Kellerman and Reay's own caveat in
their \NEJM\ article, which states, "Mortality studies such as ours
do not include cases in which burglars or intruders are wounded
or frightened away by the use or display of a firearm. Cases in
which would-be intruders may have purposely avoided a house known
to be armed are also not identified. We did not report the total
number of nonlethal firearm injuries involving guns kept in the
home. A complete determination of firearm risks versus benefits
would require that these figures be known."
Even Kellerman and Reay make no claim that their study tells
us anything about whether a gun kept in the home is more likely
to be used successfully against a burglar than to be a risk for a
homeowner.
Fishman then gives his "balance": "The NRA claims that guns
are used one million times each year in self-defense, but there
appears to be no firm statistics to back this up."
No firm statistics, that is, except the dozen studies
analyzed by Gary Kleck, Ph.D., professor of criminology at
Florida State University, in his book \Point Blank: Guns and
Violence in America\ (Aldine de Gruyter, 1991), which Fishman
could have looked up if he was more interested in truth than
sermons. Unlike Drs. Kellerman and Reay, Professor Kleck has
carefully avoided taking funding from either side in the gun
control debate, though he personally has impeccable liberal
Democratic credentials. And Kleck's latest research, his Spring,
1993 National Self-Defense Survey of 4979 households, reveals
that previous studies had underestimated the number of times
previous survey respondents had used their firearms in defense.
The new survey indicates 2.4 million gun defenses a year, 1.9
million of them with handguns, and about a third of these
millions of yearly gun defenses occurred in the home.
Published just a few days after the \Vogue\ article is
another article in the latest \New England Journal of Medicine\,
also by Kellerman and associates and again financed with a grant
from anti-gunner James Mercy at the CDC, which claims that a home
keeping a gun is three times as likely to experience a murder as
a home without a gun. Even if that were true -- and the new NEJM'
study's biases make it unlikely -- Kleck's survey shows that a
handgun kept in the home for protection produces a defense with no
dead body about 633,000 times a year. Even if a homeowner with a
gun suffers a three-fold increased risk of homicide from a family
member, the ability to deter a potentially lethal confrontation
against a burglar is increased a hundred-fold.
The Chicago Police Department analyzed 940 murders committed
in Chicago in 1992. It found that only 8% of the murders involved
family relationships. Seventy-two percent of the murderers,
however, had previous criminal records, and 65% of the victims
had criminal records as well.
Here is the essential truth about the risk of homicide which
all the talk about violence as a health problem, rather than a
criminal problem, is attempting to ignore: overwhelmingly, violence
isn't committed by ordinary people who commit murders because a
firearm is handy, but by criminals, who commit violence because
violence is a way of life for them. The National Rifle Assn.
has been saying this for years, but anti-gun crusaders just don't
want to listen.
All of which proves that if you're looking for "the truth
about guns," you'll find that it's just not in vogue.
#
J. Neil Schulman is a Los Angeles novelist, screenwriter,
and journalist. In September, 1993, he received the Second
Amendment Foundation's James Madison Award for his \Los Angeles
Times\ article, "If Gun Laws Work, Why Are We Afraid?"
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