FACT, NOT FICTION WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT GUNS, GUN OWNERS AND GUN CONTROL Paul Danish The great gun grab of 1989 thrives on ignorance and hysteria. Here are some facts that gun control advocates would just as soon you didn't know: AT LEAST 65 MILLION AMERICANS ARE GUN OWNERS. Gun control advocates would have you believe that the right to keep and bear arms is out of date, but the truth is it is one of the most widely exercised of all American rights. Surveys taken by national polling concerns, including the Caddell organization, show that of the 65 million Americans who own firearms, some 35 million own handguns. AMERICANS OWN APPROXIMATELY 200 MILLION HANDGUNS. National surveys(1) show that some 60 to 65 million of those firearms are handguns. Most of the rest are shotguns and rifles. A small percentage are full automatic weapons regulated under the firearms acts of 1934, 1968, and 1986. SLIGHTLY FEWER THAN ONE OF TWO AMERICAN HOUSEHOLDS OWN FIREARMS. Public opinion polls regularly show that just a little fewer than half the households in the United States own firearms. The percentage of American firearms-owning households has remained almost constant for decades. This is particularly noteworthy because as family size has shrunk the total number of households has grown substantially faster than the total population. MORE THAN ONE MILLION AMERICANS A YEAR USE FIREARMS TO PROTECT THEMSELVES. Several national opinion surveys have confirmed that millions of Americans have used firearms to protect their lives, homes, and property. Surveys taken by both the Caddell and Hart organizations show that every year, 650,000 Americans use handguns for self defense. Another 350,000 use rifles or shotguns for the same purpose. Gun control advocates rightly decry the 1,649 accidental gunshot deaths and 12,150 gunshot homicides per year in the United States. But they never tell you about the hundreds of thousands of Americans who avoid death or injury or theft of their property by virtue of being armed. THIRTY TWO PERCENT OF ALL AMERICANS WHO OWN FIREARMS SAY THEY OWN THEM FOR PROTECTION. Surveys(2) have found that protection is the second most common reason given for owning firearms. The reason most frequently cited by Americans for owning firearms is hunting, with 51 percent of firearms owners or 33 million people; self protection, 32 percent of firearms owners, or 21,000,000 individuals; followed by target shooting, 13 percent or 8,500,000; and collecting, four percent or 2,600,000. Among handgun owners, self-protection was by far the most commonly cited reason for owning a firearm, with 58 percent; followed by target shooting, 18 percent; collecting with 14 percent; and hunting with 10 percent. The 58 percent figure translates to 21 million individuals, a figure identical with the proportion of all gun owners who cite self-protection as a reason for owning firearms. In other words, handguns are currently the weapon of choice of Americans who want to defend themselves. Semiautomatic rifles do not play a significant role in this regard, despite the shrill assertion of gun control advocates that they are "weapons of war" designed only for killing. Regardless of what assault rifles were designed for, their civilianized derivatives and their functionally identical semiautomatic cousins are not being purchased by Americans with self-protection in mind. Evidently those Americans who acquire firearms to protect themselves do not share the anxiety of those police chiefs advocating gun control who profess to fear being outgunned by criminals. CRIMINALS FEAR ARMED CITIZENS AND TRY TO AVOID THEM. A survey of prisoners conducted by sociologists James Wright and Peter Rossi(3) has found that criminals are more afraid of being shot by their potential victims than by police. Another study (conducted by criminologist Gary Kleck) estimated that a burglar runs twice the chance of being shot by a potential victim as by the police. The same study found that using a gun to protect yourself from a violent crime such as rape, robbery, or assault reduces the chances the crime will be completed and reduces the likelihood the intended victim will be hurt. This directly contradicts an assertion that has been an article of faith among gun control advocates for years-which is that resisting violent crime is more dangerous than submitting to it. The truth is otherwise. In 1966 police in Orlando, Florida, responded to a rape epidemic by training 2,500 women in firearms use, and the following year rape dropped 88 percent in Orlando (the only major city in the United States to experience a drop that year) and five years later was still down. According to Wright and Rossi, some 53 percent of convicted career criminals who used handguns in their crimes have said they did not commit a specific crime for fear the potential victim was armed. Some 57 percent were at some time in their careers scared off or shot by armed victims. Some 88 percent believed criminals will always be able to get handguns, and 75 percent said that in the absence of handguns they would use sawed-off shotguns (which are, of course, already illegal and have been since 1934.) [Short barrel shotguns are subject to the same restrictions as fully automatic weapons-they may be legally owned subject to state and federal regulations] Unarmed felons, on the other hand, listed tougher penalties for using a gun as an important reason for not arming themselves. GUN LAWS HAVE LITTLE OR NO RELATIONSHIP TO MURDER AND SUICIDE RATES. England, with strict gun laws, has a lower murder rate than the United states, but Northern Ireland, with an even more restrictive gun ban, has a murder rate that is higher. Social and cultural conditions are clearly more important than restrictions on firearms-or even a massive military and paramilitary presence-in determining the level of armed violence in a society. Perhaps even more important is the degree of formal instruction citizens have in the use of firearms. Private firearms possession is very high in both Israel and Switzerland, for instance, and both countries murder rates are far below those in the United States and are comparable or lower than with those found in England or Japan. Both Israel and Switzerland have systems of universal military training in which all those who serve are taught to use firearms-typically true selective-fire [fully automatic] assault rifles whose ownership is restricted in the United States-and frequently are required to keep their arms in their homes. (England, incidentally, has twice as many homicides as it did prior to the adoption of it's highly restrictive firearms laws; in the past 12 years, robberies in which a handgun was used rose 200 percent in Britain. In the United States, they dropped. BILLS BEFORE THE CONGRESS TO RESTRICT THE SALE OF SEMIAUTOMATIC FIRE VERSIONS OF FULLY AUTOMATIC MILITARY STYLE ASSAULT RIFLES WILL AFFECT 20 TO 30 MILLION WEAPONS, MILLIONS OF WHICH AREN'T EVEN RIFLES. Gun control advocates are not being truthful when they say they are only attempting to ban assault rifles. In point of fact, true selective-fire assault rifles are already restricted under the firearms acts of 1934, 1968, and 1986, and the legislation gun control advocates are trying to push through Congress goes far beyond restricting their semiautomatic civilian derivatives. Al the various bills incorporate language that applies them to most classes of semiautomatic firearms capable of accepting detachable magazines above a certain capacity, and accordingly they sweep up in their net millions of firearms that Americans have been legally able to won since the beginning of the century. According to estimates prepared by the National Rifle Association, 20 to 30 million rifles, shotguns, and semiautomatic pistols would be affected. Soldier of Fortune Technical Editor Peter Kokalis has compiled a list of more than 270 different models of rifles, shotgun and pistols that would be restricted under the bills. Included on it are firearms such as the Colt M1911 .45 pistol, more than four million of which are in existence. Assault rifles indeed. THE EXPERIENCE OF STATES AND OTHER COUNTRIES WHICH HAVE PASSED HIGHLY RESTRICTIVE GUN CONTROL LAWS OF THE SORT NOW BEING CONTEMPLATED IN THE CONGRESS AND SEVERAL OF THE STATES HAS BEEN MASSIVE NON-COMPLIANCE. According to figures collected by the British firearms magazine Handgunner, compliance with highly restrictive firearms laws-those requiring registration or outlawing possession-runs from zero to a mere 25 percent even when the penalties for non-compliance are severe. Three years after passage of a highly restrictive gun law in West Germany compliance was estimated to have reached 20 percent. The figure for New South Wales in Australia was much lower-.06 percent or not even one-tenth of a percent. A 1977 study found that compliance with an Illinois law requiring handgun registration was only about 25 percent(4). A survey of Illinois gun owners taken two years later found that 73 percent of them indicated they would not comply with gun prohibition. Estimates of the number of illegal handguns in New York City, where firearms ownership is almost completely prohibited, range from one million to two million. In other words, the near certain consequence of passage of the semiautomatic firearms restrictions now before Congress and a number of state governments would be to create tens of millions of new criminals. It will also in all likelihood create an enormous and easily serviced black market. According to a 1988 study by David Kopel, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan, if small handguns were smuggled into the United States in the same physical volume as marijuana, 20 million would enter the country annually. Current legal demand for handguns is 2.5 million a year. CRIME STATISTICS INDICATE SEMIAUTOMATIC RIFLES-BE THEY CIVILIAN DERIVATIVES OF MILITARY TYPES OR OTHERWISE-ARE AMONG THE FIREARMS LEAST LIKELY TO BE USED FOR CRIMINAL PURPOSES. Semiautomatic and all other rifles combined are involved in only four percent of the homicides in the United States. Data from large cities indicate semi-auto derivatives of military rifles account of just 2.3 percent of guns seized by police. Of approximately 4,000 firearms seized by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1988, only 120 were semi-auto derivatives of military style weapons, and only 10 were full auto(5). In New York the figures were 80 out of 16,000(6). ON 6 April, Philip C. McGuire, a spokesman for Handgun Control, Inc., told the Subcommittee on Crime of the United States House of Representatives that "assault weapons right now-right now-play a small role in overall violent crime"(7). THE VIEW OF GUN CONTROL ADVOCATES THAT THE RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS IS A COLLECTIVE RIGHT THAT DOES NOT APPLY TO INDIVIDUALS IS REJECTED BY THE PEOPLE WHO WROTE THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION, THE SUPREME COURT, MOST STATES, AND THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. When gun control advocates are confronted with the Second Amendment of the Constitution, which reads in full, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" they argue the right to keep and bear arms applies only to official uniformed state militias. The people who wrote the constitution disagree, and so does the U.S. Supreme Court. The American revolution began on 19 April 1775 when British troops tried to confiscate the guns of Americans at Lexington, Massachusetts, so it should hardly be surprising that the writings of James Madison (in particular Federalist Paper 46), Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Adams and many of their contemporaries leave not a shred of doubt that they considered the right to keep and bear arms an individual right and considered the "well regulated militia" referred to in the Second Amendment to consist of all able bodied men capable of bearing arms. This view is still encoded in the federal law- section 311(a) of volume 10 of the United States Code declares "The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males of at least 17 years of age and...under 45 years of age." The following section distinguishes between the organized and the unorganized militia. The United States Supreme Court has affirmed this interpretation of the militia as consisting of all citizens in all four of its rulings on the Second Amendment. Further, 42 of the 50 states have clauses in their state constitutions guaranteeing the right to keep and bear arms, and many of these explicitly refer to an individual right to do so. Last and perhaps most significant, a public opinion survey has found that 88 percent believe the Constitution guarantees them a right to keep and bear arms. When gun control advocates assert that an individual right to keep and bear arms does not exist, they are attempting to rewrite history to suit their own ends and deny Americans a right they have treasured and exercised literally from the first shot of the American revolution. FOOTNOTES (1) Decision Making Information, Inc. surveys with handgun data confirmed by the Caddell Organization (2) Decision Making Information, Inc. surveys with handgun data confirmed by the Caddell Organization (3) James Wright and Peter Rossi, Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms (4) David Bordua, Alan Lizotte, and Gary Kleck, Patterns of Firearms Ownership, Use, and Registration in Illinois (5) Detective Jimmy Trahin, Firearms Explosive Section, L.A.P.D., before California State Assembly, 13 February 1989 (6) Lieutenant Moran, New York City Police Ballistics Unit, in White Plains Reporter Dispatch, 27 March 1989 (Associated Press Report) (7) Charles Mohr, "House Panel Issue: Can Gun Ban Work?" New York Times, 7 April 1989, p. A8 (National Edition) Note from Mike - Arm yourself with these facts and figures, and the next time an anti-gunner gets on your case, let'em have it.