John Stossel‘s latest column for Human Events explores key claims underlying anti-gun arguments.
“Over 60 percent of Americans think owning a gun will make them safer. In fact, owning a gun increases the risk of homicide, suicide and unintentional death,” says the video [from anti-gun group States United to Prevent Gun Violence].
It’s a powerful message. But it’s a lie, says John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center. He says that gun control advocates lie all the time.
Lott acknowledges the tragedies. Sometimes a gun in the home is used in a homicide or suicide, or leads to accidental death, but he adds, “It also makes it easier for people to defend themselves — women and the elderly in particular.”
Lott says, “Every place in the world that’s tried to ban guns … has seen big increases in murder rates. You’d think at least one time, some place, when they banned guns, murder rates would go down. But that hasn’t been the case.”
I pushed back: what about people harming themselves?
“There are lots of different ways for people to commit suicide,” Lott said, and researchers have looked at how those tragedies are affected by access to guns. “We find that people commit suicide in other ways if they don’t have guns.”
What about accidents? Lott replies that accidental shooting deaths are relatively rare: “about 500 a year.” That sounds bad, but about 400 Americans are killed by overdosing on acetaminophen each year (most of them suicides), and almost as many Americans drown in swimming pools.
“It would be nice if it was zero (but) consider that 120 million Americans own guns,” Lott says.
Often those guns are used to prevent crime. The homeowner pulls out the gun and the attacker flees. No one knows how often this happens because these prevented crimes don’t become news and don’t get reported to the government, but an estimate from the Violence Policy Center suggests crimes may be prevented by guns tens of thousands of times per year.
