To L.A. Times (Reality Check!)
by J. Neil Schulman
Originally published on this
website June 10, 2000
To L.A. Times Editors:
Samantha Kimmel, in Letters to the Times, June
5, 2000, responds to John Lott's June 1 Op-Ed, writing, "Gun advocates like
to cook statistics, making it seem that the very few incidents of people
defending themselves with guns outweigh the dangers of having guns taken away
and used against them, or escalating the situation into a shooting. It's simply
not true ..."
At what point did unsupported bombastic
assertions by people with no credentials gain equal credibility to the research
results of professional criminologists such as John Lott?
Lott's source for the comparative injury
statistic is the 1979-1985 National Crime Survey by the U.S. Bureau of Justice
Statistics, which shows that a robbery victim who resists attack with a firearm
is half as likely to be injured as a victim who either offers no resistance or
resists using any other weapon (17.4% injured as opposed to 33.2% injured).
Further, an assault victim who resists with a firearm stands only a 40% as great
chance of injury as a victim who either doesn’t resist at all or resists using
any other weapon (12.1% as opposed to 29.9% injured). Furthermore, the 1993
National Self Defense Survey that found American gun owners use their privately
held firearms 2.5 million times each year in successful defenses against a
criminal attack was not only peer reviewed by Marvin Wolfgang, perhaps the most
respected (and pro-gun-ban) criminologist of his time, who found the survey's
methodology flawless, but the results were replicated in a national survey
conducted in 1994 by the Police Foundation and sponsored by the National
Institute of Justice, which approximated 2.73 million defensive gun users in the
previous year.
J. Neil Schulman
Author Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns & Self Control Not
Gun Control
Webmaster, The World
Wide Web Gun Defense Clock
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