Journalists Living In Glass Preconceptions Shouldn’t Throw Stones

Gary Stein of the Florida SunSentinel.com casts aspersions at the logical ability of some of his correspondents. He throws out some examples from Republicans, conservatives and members of the Florida Legislature before bringing up his favorite: “I have heard all those above arguments and conspiracy theories and other attempts at logic in the past couple of weeks. They were emailed or phoned in, along with dozens of others. With all the idiotic attempts at logic, however, my favorite came from my absolute favorite people — gun lovers. Why am I not surprised?” Maybe it’s because . . .

Civil rights tend to excite peoples’ passions and passionate people can often make errors in logic. Or, possibly, its because you are trying to perpetuate the stereotype of ignorant gun-owners. You know those stereotypes: the unshaven, camo-clad ignoramuses, the strident, biased ignoramuses, and the just plain lunatics. The types of attitudes that led John Aquilino to comment that “Gun owners are the new niggers … of society.” But I’m sure that you weren’t deliberately playing into an invidious shibboleth.

But putting all that aside, what is this leap of illogic the tickles Gary’s fancy?

But my favorite argument and attempt at logic — and I’ve heard this one before — came from a gun afficionado [sic] and conspiracy theorist in Central Florida who figures we need to control cars more than we need to control guns.

He said there are many more guns in the U.S. than there are cars, yet there are more car accidents than gun incidents. Cars kill more people than guns, he said. Guns thus aren’t as dangerous as cars, he said.

You know I actually addressed this issue the other day in my reply to some Washington State antis. To recap:

Between 1999 and 2009, car accidents caused 475,223 deaths or 43,202 deaths annually. In the same time period there were 7,733 accidental firearm related deaths or 703 annually. In 2006 there were 203 million licensed drivers giving us 21.28 deaths per 100,000 drivers. Now according to MSNBC there are more than 6 million permit holders in the US which gives us 11.72 accidental deaths per 100,000 permit holders.

And that’s just counting concealed carry permit holders, if we look at all gun owners we have a rate that’s closer to 0.62 accidental firearm fatalities per 100,000 gun owners.

Oh, but Gary doesn’t dispute the fact that cars are more dangerous than guns. He explains (again, with gratuitous insults directed at gunnies’ intelligence):

Because I am a nice guy and I don’t want to make this too complicated for the gun lovers out there, I will keep this real simple.

Yes, we have accidents with cars. Deadly accidents. Unfortunately, it happens all the time. …

The purpose of cars is to make life a little easier and more bearable for people, despite the accidents and the nut cases on the road.

Yes, we have accidents with cars. Deadly accidents. Unfortunately, it happens all the time. …

The purpose of cars is to make life a little easier and more bearable for people, despite the accidents and the nut cases on the road.

I think you went a little too simple there Gary. The purpose of cars is to move things in an efficient fashion. Their effect is to make life easier for people.

Guns, on the other hand, have one purpose. To hurt people. Or to kill people.

Again, Gary, you went a little too simple. Guns are tools for applying force from a distance. Yes they can be used to hurt and kill, but they can also be used to deter those who would try to hurt or kill others. Unless you are going to also try to tell me that the only purpose of police officers is to hurt or kill? Like their guns (and in part because of them) cops have a deterrent effect. Often the mere presence of a police officer can defuse a situation.

I’ll even make it simpler. Cars — a necessity. Guns — used to kill.

And I try to make it simple for you Gary, but there will be some math involved: Guns – used in about 12,750 homicides and accidental killings annually. I guess that’s a pretty big number, isn’t it. But let’s look at an even bigger number, shall we? 25,000. That is a very conservative estimate of the number of lives saved in DGUs every year. Here’s the math part:

According to the Kleck-Gertz study from the early 1990s there are between 2.1 and 2.5 million DGUs annually. Now there are a lot of people out there who deride this number as ludicrous, unable or (more likely) unwilling to accept that Dr. Kleck is not some sort of shill for the Gun Lobby™. This, despite the good doctor disclosing in his 1997 book Targeting Guns (quote from GunCite.com):

The author is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, Independent Action, Democrats 2000, and Common Cause, among other politically liberal organizations He is a lifelong registered Democrat, as well as a contributor to liberal Democratic candidates. He is not now, nor has he ever been, a member of, or contributor to, the National Rifle Association, Handgun Control, Inc. nor any other advocacy organization, nor has he received funding for research from any such organization.

But skeptics will always be skeptical and antis will always prefer their own “reality” so (without questioning its validity) let’s go ahead and throw the K-G number out in favor of a more conservative one. Let’s use the numbers from the study which was commissioned by the Clinton DoJ shortly after the K-G study came out (to refute the K-G numbers maybe? If so: Oops!). That study, conducted by Dr.s Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig (very strong proponents of very strict gun control) concluded that there were 1.46 million DGUs per year.

Now, I imagine that some may find even this lower number dubious, probably preferring to rely on the numbers from the National Crime Victimization Surveys which show between 50,000 and 100,000 DGUs per year. Unfortunately for those hopeful doubters, the way the NCVS is structured means that it seriously undercounts the number of DGUs. I’ll let Tom Smith explain:

First, it appears that the estimates of the NCVSs are too low. There are two chief reasons for this. First, only DGUs that are reported as part of a victim’s response to a specified crime are potentially covered. While most major felonies are covered by the NCVSs, a number of crimes such as trespassing, vandalism, and malicious mischief are not. DGUs in response to these and other events beyond the scope of the NCVSs are missed.

Second, the NCVSs do not directly inquire about DGUs. After a covered crime has been reported, the victim is asked if he or she “did or tried to do [anything] about the incident while it was going on.” Indirect questions that rely on a respondent volunteering a specific element as part of a broad and unfocused inquiry uniformly lead to undercounts of the particular of interest.

There is another problem with the failure to directly inquire about DGUs; to wit, the DGU question is only triggered by someone saying they were the victim of a crime. Now if someone came towards me with a knife saying “Gimme your wallet” and I put my hand on my weapon and replied “I don’t think so, Skippy” causing the assailant to retreat, was I actually the victim of a crime?

Before I started researching these issues I would have told the NCVS interviewer that no, I hadn’t been the victim of a crime so they never would have learned of my DGU.

So to try and figure out how many lives were saved I turn once again to Kleck and Gertz’s article Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun[1]. They found that 15.7% of people involved in a DGU believed that they “almost certainly” saved their life of someone else’s.

Now that might strike some people as being an awfully large percentage, but if you take into account the fact that most states regard pulling a gun as using deadly force and combine it with the fact that most states also require someone to be in “reasonable fear of imminent death or great bodily harm” before you can lawfully use deadly force, the number seems more feasible. In addition to the “almost certainly” pool, The K-G study also found that 14.6% of respondents believed that someone “probably would have” been killed if not for their DGU.

Because I want my numbers to be distinctly conservative let’s say that 9 out of 10 of the “almost certainly” folks were wrong, and lets say that 99 out of 100 of the “probably” people were also incorrect. That means we can state with a fair degree of certainty that at least 1.716% of the 1.46 million DGUs saved a life. Doing the math that translates to over 25,000 lives that are saved annually by guns.

Gary finishes up with:

I know it’s hard for some gun lovers to understand that. Logic always is.

And no, Gary, the fact that 25,000 lives are saved by guns annually is not hard for me to understand. What’s hard for me to understand is how you seem to mistake hoplophobia and ignorance with logic.