Study says self-defense gun use is effective

Examiner – by Dave Workman

Gun rights advocates from Miami to Mountlake Terrace are probably wondering this morning how soon news about a new study – reported yesterday by Slate – will disappear from view because it says that firearms are effectively used in self-defense a lot, a contention that is always disputed by gun prohibitionists.

Slate writer William Saletan’s piece was good enough to be picked up by the Miami Herald, but it did not seem to make much news anywhere else. The report was actually available earlier this month, and while it is not all good news for gun owners, there is enough information to make this document balanced, rather than a lengthy anti-gun diatribe.  

The report comes from the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on order from President Barack Obama. According to the report on Page 15, “Defensive uses of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed.” Estimates range from 500,000 to 3 million such uses annually.

On the following page, the report also notes, “Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was “used“ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.”

The report also notes something that has been evident in FBI Uniform Crime Reports for several years. The rate of violent crime has declined over the past five years, and gun-related death rates for teens aged 15-19 declined from 1994 to 2009, the report says.

Handguns are used in a majority of gun-related crimes, according to the report, which will reinforce contentions among gun owners that proposed bans on so-called “assault rifles” is at best misguided and more likely symbolic.

On the subject of symbolism, the “No More Names” bus tour, sponsored by anti-gun New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns was in Atlanta yesterday, and will be in Nashville tomorrow, in Little Rock on Thursday and New Orleans on Saturday.

This column has discussed the problem with Bloomberg’s bus tour here and here. Yesterday,Larry Keane, vice president and general counsel at the National Shooting Sports Foundation, had this to say about the tour’s embarrassing inclusion of criminals and suspected terrorists on a list of “gun violence victims” read aloud at the tour’s stops:

“Now Bloomberg’s people say they are going to ‘scrub’ the list but the damage to his credibility can’t be reversed. And that has consequences in politics. In New Hampshire, there is mounting pressure on the mayor of Dover, the only MAIG member in the state, to resign from the group. Other politicians all across the country are having to reevaluate whether they can believe any of the claims made by MAIG, since this episode makes it clear that the group doesn’t even bother to check its facts before parading them before the media. And the bus tour faces an uncertain future, now having put itself in the box of having to decide which ‘victims of gun violence’ are good or bad.

“The bell cannot be un-rung. And this bell tolls for the credibility of any claims made by Bloomberg and MAIG. Mayors and other politicians across the country have now been warned.”

http://www.examiner.com/article/study-says-self-defense-gun-use-is-effective