When liberals lie about guns

Gun-control advocates assert that just over 2 percent of handgun homicides are in self-defense and cite studies purporting to show that a gun in the house is more dangerous to the owner than to an intruder. Gun-rights supporters counter that these studies omit cases in which a civilian stops a crime, and perhaps escapes death or serious harm, by firing in the air or merely brandishing a weapon (surely, it's a bit harsh to require a dead criminal as proof of effective self-protection). Estimates of the frequency of such incidents vary widely, from 84,000 to 3.6 million a year. Obviously, the pro-gun groups prefer the higher numbers, and their claims deserve to be treated with caution. But so do the claims of the other side.

Lott charges that anti-gun bias causes the media to underreport dramatic evidence that guns can save lives. His most startling example comes from, of all things, two of the high school shooting sprees of recent years. In Pearl, Miss., and in Edinboro, Penn., armed civilians -- Assistant Principal Joel Myrick and restaurant owner James Strand -- disarmed the shooters at gunpoint before the police arrived; yet the few news stories that mentioned their role usually left out their use of firearms, saying simply that they "subdued" the attackers or "persuaded" them to surrender.

One may feel that crediting guns with saving lives in these cases is like rewarding an arsonist for helping put out the fire. After all, if it hadn't have been for guns, there would have been no shootings and no need for Myrick's and Strand's heroics. But this response presumes that we can achieve a situation in which guns are not available.

Let's suppose that a total handgun ban, which is advocated by a few gun-control groups such as the Violence Policy Center, had a chance of being enacted. At present it has virtually no political support and is opposed by a solid majority of the public in opinion polls, but let's imagine a barrage of high-profile handgun crimes changed the political debate. What about the 65 million handguns Americans already own? Some law-abiding gun owners would no doubt turn them in, but many or most would not. Would gun-ban advocates then support raids on private homes to confiscate weapons from citizens unwilling to turn them in? Even many people with no pro-gun sympathies would cringe at the idea.

Besides, this society just isn't very good at keeping illegal things away from people: Think of drug prohibition. Gun prohibition might turn out to be even harder to enforce, since a large portion of the population would be philosophically opposed to the ban. A War on Guns would probably prove to be as much of a civil-liberties disaster as the War on Drugs, without being much more effective.

Does anyone doubt that in an era when teenagers can find detailed bomb-making instructions on the Internet, the underground manufacture of handguns would quickly spring up? Or that some police officers and military personnel would be tempted to sell their handguns on the black market? Or that some of the 130 million other privately owned firearms would pick up some of the slack? Or that the very people in whose hands guns pose the most danger would be the most likely to ignore the gun ban?

NRA slogans like "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" and "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns" may have become a joke, yet there is some truth to them as well -- as the tragedy of Kayla Rolland's death should remind us. The boy who shot Kayla, as we know, had been dumped by his drug-using mother in a flophouse where guns were routinely traded for crack cocaine. A neglected, angry child, he had earlier stabbed another classmate with a pencil. (Who is to say that Kayla would have been alive if he had found a switchblade at home, instead of a stolen gun?) Despite Draconian drug laws, the house where the boy lived was awash in illegal drugs. I don't see any reason to believe that any gun law would have kept out the illegal guns.

Without minimizing the horror of every violent death, it is useful to remember that firearm fatalities overall have been steadily declining, despite media coverage that feeds the perception of a mounting crisis. This drop may be partly due to tougher gun laws, such as background checks that have stopped thousands of convicted felons from buying handguns -- though it probably had far more to do with the general decline in violent crime.

Some new measures, particularly ones related to gun safety, may save more lives. But these measures should be approached humbly, without any illusion that we can solve the problem of violence in America if we only muster the will to act against guns -- and without demonizing guns or their owners.

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