|
Do Guns Save Lives?
Sunday, Jun. 24, 2001 By ED MAGNUSON
After cabdriver Iran Bolton picked up an early morning
fare at a Phoenix Ariz., night spot, the customer held a
broken bottle to her throat and forced her to pull into a deserted area.
Robbing her of $70, the thug pushed the woman out of her cab and threw her
to the ground. When her assailant ordered her to crawl in the dirt, Bolton responded by emptying her pocket
semi-auto into him. He died later in a hospital."
Each month American Rifleman, the journal of the National Rifle
Association, features about a dozen such accounts of armed citizens
defending themselves against criminals. Based on newspaper clippings
submitted by N.R.A. members, the stories dramatically show how a gun can
sometimes prevent a crime and perhaps even save a victim's life.
The gun lobby lands on mushier ground, however, when it
leaps from such / examples into a far broader argument: that more lives are
saved than lost by the firearms Americans acquire to protect themselves and
their property. The N.R.A. emphasized that claim in a two-page newspaper
advertisement attacking TIME for its report ((July 17)) on 464 gun deaths
that occurred in the U.S. in a single week, chosen at
random. "Legally-owned firearms saved the lives of far more Americans
than those lost during ((TIME's)) 'seven deadly days,' " the
advertisement stated. "According to noted criminologist Dr. Gary Kleck
of Florida State University, every year some 650,000
Americans use firearms to thwart criminal assault. That's 12,500 a
week."
Even Paul Blackman, research coordinator for the N.R.A.,
concedes that the advertisement "stretches the data." He adds,
"I don't know of any criminological study that has tried to quantify
the number of lives saved based on the number of guns that were successfully
used for protection."
Kleck says his study did not consider the question of
lives saved. Nor did he conclude, as the N.R.A. claims, that a crime or an
assault had been "thwarted" in each of his estimated 645,000 (the
ad upped it to 650,000) annual instances of a protective use of a gun.
Kleck notes that his study may have included incidents in which a homeowner
merely heard noisy youths outside his house, then shouted, "Hey, I've
got a gun!" and never saw any possible attacker.
Still, Kleck estimates that an assailant or the defender
actually fired a handgun in nearly half the cases. If so, 322,000 incidents
each year involved great danger, and the potential victims credited their
guns with protecting them. That is about ten times the number who die from
guns annually in the U.S. "It is possible that guns
save more lives than they cost," Kleck says.
His numbers are based on a 1981 poll conducted by Peter
D. Hart Research Associates. It asked 1,228 U.S. voters whether in the previous
five years any member of their household had "used a handgun, even if
it was not fired, for self-protection or for the protection of
property." Roughly 4% (about 50 people) said they had done so.
Projecting that percentage onto the number of U.S. households in the five
years covered by the poll (1976-81), Kleck came up with the estimate that
handguns had been used protectively 3,224,880 times, or 645,000 a year.
Comparing that with surveys that included rifles and shotguns, he estimated
that all types of guns are used defensively about a million times a year.
Is his analysis valid? "I certainly don't feel very
comfortable with the way he's used the data," says Hart Research
president Geoffrey Garin. While Kleck based his findings on the Hart
survey, his analysis of the circumstances under which guns were used came
from other studies. Protests Garin: "We don't know anything about the
nature of the instances people were reporting." Says William Eastman,
president of the California Chiefs of Police Association, about the Kleck
conclusions: "It annoys the hell out of me. There's no basis for that
data."
There is far more research on the question of who is most
likely to get killed when someone keeps a gun at home. In a 1986 study
called "Protection or Peril?," Dr. Arthur Kellermann, a
University of Tennessee professor of medicine, and Dr. Donald Reay, chief
medical examiner of King County in Washington, concluded that for each
defensive, justifiable homicide there were 43 murders, suicides or
accidental deaths. Out of 398 gunshot fatalities in homes in King County between 1978 and 1983, only nine
were motivated by self- defense.
The one-week survey by TIME found a similar ratio on a
national basis: only 14 of the 464 gun deaths resulted from defensive
firing. An alarming 216 were suicides, 22 were accidental, and many of the
rest involved homicides among people who knew each other well rather than
citizens gunned down by strangers.
Such statistics do not refute the argument that a gun,
even if not fired, can save a life by discouraging a murderous attacker.
Still, Tulane sociologist James Wright points out that guns have limited
usefulness in preventing crimes. About 90% of crimes in homes occur when
the resident is away, he notes, while violent crimes often take place on the
streets. Says Wright: "Unless you make a habit of walking around with
your gun at all times, you're not going to stop that either."
A relatively balanced view of the gun question comes,
surprisingly, from Kleck. "The vast majority of the population lives
in low-crime neighborhoods and has virtually no need for a gun for
defensive reasons," he says. "A tiny fraction has a great deal of
reason to get anything it can get that might help reduce its
victimization."
Even the American Rifleman accounts of how helpful a gun
can be in saving a life may not always tell the full story. In the case of
cabdriver Bolton, the N.R.A. magazine failed to
report how chance, rather than her pistol, saved her life. Bolton told the Arizona Republic that after she wounded her assailant,
he grabbed her gun, pushed the barrel against her neck and pulled the
trigger several times. What really saved Bolton was that she had emptied the
chamber. Said she: "I kept thinking that maybe there was a bullet
still in it and it would go off at any minute." If that had happened,
the incident undoubtedly would not have appeared in the Rifleman.
With reporting by Reported by Jay Peterzell/Washington
and Richard Woodbury/Houston
|