Self-Defense Efficacy Fails Pc Test

People who disagree about guns and crime are likely to stay in separate camps. No force on Earth is likely to change Sarah Brady’s mind about gun availability and its link to her brain-damaged husband’s fateful day on that sidewalk with President Reagan.

Likewise, no tearful anecdote will change the minds of the more than 50 million handgun owners for whom a weapon is an important tool against crime in a world where police presence is no guarantee of safety.

But everyone involved in creating gun control policy (all of us, no?) must work toward understanding facts if any new approach is to work. They may surprise you. The dirty little secret about handgun control is that it ignores the growing body of criminal justice evidence.

Twenty years worth of research now show that Americans use guns for self-defense in far greater numbers than criminals use guns to commit crimes.

Florida State University’s Gary Kleck is one of the original scholars. He has never taken a dime from the National Rifle Association. What’s more, he began his first study in the mid-‘70s with the predictable mindset of a “liberal college professor hoping that gun control could do some good.”

He ended up like the cigarette puffing scientists who undertook the first epidemiological studies of smoking to prove that tobacco was safe. As the incontrovertible links with lung cancer began to roll in, those early researchers began to kick the habit - and fast.

Kleck’s findings “have been confirmed by others, including people who didn’t like the results at all,” he says. He has in mind the Centers for Disease Control, which almost lost $2.6 million in funding last year because key senators grew weary of its “campaign to reduce lawful firearms ownership in America,” they said in a letter signed by 10 of them, including then-majority leader Bob Dole and current Majority Leader Trent Lott.

Contrary to the public health model naming guns the cause of the disease of violence, “There are a total of 15 surveys that verify lots of defensive gun uses,” Kleck says. His widely quoted study shows these figures:

2.5 million people a year using a gun for a defensive purpose.

1 million crimes in which the offender carried a gun (or the victim thought he did).

One of those “defensive purposes” took place in Tallahassee, Fla., last month. John Gilcher went home for lunch to find himself face to face with a shotgun. The recent graduate of Lively Law Enforcement Academy pointed his .40-caliber handgun right back at the burglar, who dropped the shotgun and, ultimately, joined his two fellow perpetrators waiting submissively for the police to arrive. (Pul-leeze don’t try this at home, kids.)

Gilcher thwarted a crime in progress that, without his intervention, could have turned deadly moments later when his mother walked in. She got there while the yellow tape of the crime scene was still up.

Apparently, more crime-stopping by ordinary citizens goes on than people realize. The “Almanac of American Politics” contains this stunning line about Florida: “Muggers target foreign tourists who don’t have guns. A carrying-concealed-weapons law allows law-abiding citizens to routinely be licensed to carry guns. The result has been lower crime rates.”

Why does this startling info - that prohibitions on handguns and tough-gun licensing systems are ineffective - stay as concealed as a Lady Wesson in a clutch purse? Why is it kept under wraps that guns used lawfully for defensive purposes may provide a major public safety benefit? Kleck speculates:

“To a great extent people are depending on the press, and the press to some extent has an agenda set by the advocates of gun control. When the NRA brings up the studies, everybody dismisses it as the usual gun-nut stuff.”

In Washington state this month, voters turned down what would’ve been one of America’s toughest gun control laws. Did voters - who buried the citizen-sponsored initiative 71 percent to 29 percent (despite the backing of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates) - act on facts or fancy?

Maybe that dirty little secret that Kleck and other criminologists have uncovered is slowly leaking out.

Don’t bet on it, though. “It takes an awful long time with an awful lot of studies for stuff from academic criminology to penetrate,” Kleck says.

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