My loathing of private gun ownership, of the laxity of American gun regulations, and of the NRA is no secret, but when I call for the virtual abolition of private gun ownership in the US (hunting for necessity and target shooting are possible exceptions), I get pushback. “We need to defend ourselves against the bad guys,” say the dissenters. “Given the prevalence of weapons in the U.S.,” they add, “we’re safer if we’re allowed to have our guns.”
Well, we can see how often this kind of justifiable self-defense really occurs, for it’s one of the main justifications for “concealed carry” permits in the US—including a new law allowing concealed carry on Texas college campuses. But, according to several reports, justifiable self defense is extremely rare, whether or not the weapon is concealed. A New York Times op-ed today, “The concealed-carry fantasy,” gives statistics from a new report. The Times summarizes the data:
The more that sensational gun violence afflicts the nation, the more that the myth of the vigilant citizen packing a legally permitted concealed weapon, fully prepared to stop the next mass shooter in his tracks, is promoted.
This foolhardy notion of quick-draw resistance, however, is dramatically contradicted by a research projectshowing that, since 2007, at least 763 people have been killed in 579 shootings that did not involve self-defense. Tellingly, the vast majority of these concealed-carry, licensed shooters killed themselves or others rather than taking down a perpetrator.
The death toll includes 29 masskillings of three or more people by concealed carry shooters who took 139 lives; 17 police officers shot to death, and — in the ultimate contradiction of concealed carry as a personal safety factor — 223 suicides. Compared with the 579 non-self-defense, concealed-carry shootings, there were only 21 cases in which self-defense was determined to be a factor.
And yet:
. . . A Gallup poll this month found 56 percent of Americans said the nation would be safer if more people carried concealed weapons.
In other words, American’s assertion of concealed-carry as an assurance of safety is a fantasy: it’s security theater. The proportion of killings via concealed carry that involve justifiable self-defense is just 3.6%. The other 96.4% of killings were either murders, suicides, or mistakes. That means that over 96% of the time, concealed carry leads not to the aims used to justify it, but to tragedies. And remember, these are not illegal guns, but guns properly licensed for concealed carry. Overall, the policy leads to far more deaths of innocent people than of criminals.
The study cited by the Times is from The Violence Policy Center (free pdf), which includes not just concealed-carry deaths, but all deaths from handguns. Here’s part of its summary:
Guns are rarely used to kill criminals or stop crimes.
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. 3 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.4 This report analyzes, on both the national and state levels, the use of firearms in justifiable homicides. It also details, using the best data available on the national level, the total number of times guns are used for self-defense by the victims of both attempted and completed violent crimes and property crimes whether or not the use of the gun by the victim resulted in a fatality.
. . . The reality of self-defense gun use bears no resemblance to the exaggerated claims of the gun lobby and gun industry. The number of justifiable homicides that occur in our nation each year pale in comparison to criminal homicides, let alone gun suicides and fatal unintentional shootings. And contrary to the common stereotype promulgated by the gun lobby, those killed in justifiable homicide incidents don’t always fit the expected profile of an attack by a stranger: in 35.5 percent of the justifiable homicides that occurred in 2012 the persons shot were known to the shooter.
Now of course gun advocates will argue that guns used in homicides that are not “legally concealed” are stolen or obtained by other illegal means, but many of those guns were stolen from those who acquired them legally. No legal guns, no theft of legal guns for illegal acts. What I argue is that banning all guns will drastically stem the tide of criminal homicides in the U.S., both directly and indirectly. Here are the overall data on criminal homicides versus justifiable homicides between 2008 and 2012. Note the last row that gives their ratio, which is about forty to one:
Finally, I refer you to this site about concealed carry homicides: Concealed Carry Killers, which tracks deaths due to that policy. You can investigate for yourself; I’ll just present their conclusions:
Concealed Carry Killers is a resource maintained by the Violence Policy Center that includes hundreds of examples of non-self defense killings by private citizens with permits to carry concealed, loaded handguns in public. These incidents include homicides, suicides, mass shootings, murder-suicides, lethal attacks on law enforcement, and unintentional deaths. Only a tiny fraction of these cases are ever ruled to be in self-defense. Any homicide that is legally determined to be in self-defense is documented and removed from the Concealed Carry Killers database and the ongoing tallies.
It saddens and maddens me that we could eliminate so many killings of innocent people, prevent so many suicides, and largely halt mass murders if we’d only get rid of guns in the U.S. And yet, because we already have so many guns, people tells us that there’s no way to go back, even if we didn’t have a Second Amendment used to justify mass ownership of handguns—an amendment designed to allow states to have militias. I will never own a gun, and I feel safer without one. We’re a civilized society, or so we like to think. There must be a way to stop the madness.
