NATIONAL REVIEW April 17, 2000 Issue
An Army of Gun Lies
How the other side plays.

By Dave Kopel
Mr. Kopel is research director of the Independence Institute, a
free-market think tank in Colorado.

Antigun advocates have always faced an uphill battle in this
country. Americans have, to begin with, a constitutional right to gun
ownership. Today, half of American households exercise this right,
owning a total of about 250 million guns; and over 99 percent of
those households do so in a responsible manner. To fight for major
restrictions on an item that plays such a valued part in the lives of so
many people looks like a nearly impossible task. So if you?re really
committed to the effort, and you want to win, what do you do?

Simple: You lie.

A full listing of the lies told by the antigun lobby could fill a book.
A short list of the more popular ones would have to begin with the
canard about the number of children killed by firearms. We are told
repeatedly that 13, or 15, or 17 children every day are killed by
guns. This factoid is used to conjure up pictures of dozens of little
kids dying in gun accidents every week.

In truth, the number of fatal gun accidents is at its lowest level since
1903, when statistics started being kept. That?s right: Not only is the
per capita accident rate at a record low, so is the actual number of
accidents?even though the number of people and the number of
guns are both much larger than in 1903. The assertions about ?X
children per day? are based on counting older teenagers, or even
people in their early twenties, as ?children.? The claims are true only
if you count a 19-year-old drug dealer who is shot by a competitor, or
an 18-year-old armed robber who is shot by a policeman, as ?a child
killed by a gun.? As for actual children (14 years and under), the daily
death rate is 2.6. For children ten and under, it?s 0.4 per day?far
lower than the number of children who are killed by automobiles,
drowning, or many other causes.

If the statistic about child gun deaths is the most notorious lie, one
of the most frequent has to do with gun shows. All of the antigun groups
repeat, incessantly, the phrase ?gun-show loophole.? As a result,
much of the public believes that gun shows are special zones exempt
from ordinary gun laws. Handgun Control, Inc., the major antigun
group, has an affiliate in Colorado that claims that the ?vast majority?

of guns used in crimes come from gun shows, while the Violence
Policy Center calls gun shows ?Tupperware parties for criminals.?

This is all an audacious lie. First of all, the laws at gun shows are
exactly the same as they are everywhere else. If a person is ?engaged
in the business? (as the law puts it) of selling firearms, then he must
fill out a government registration form on every buyer, and get FBI
permission (through the National Instant Check System) for every
sale?regardless of whether the sale takes place at his gun store, at
an office in his home, or at a gun show. Those who are not gun
dealers by profession, but happen to be selling a gun, are not
required to follow this procedure. To imply that gun dealers can go to
an event called a ?gun show? and thus avoid the law is absolutely
false. Also false is the charge about Tupperware parties for criminals.
According to a National Institute of Justice study released in
December 1997, only 2 percent of guns used in crimes come from
gun shows. The gun-show charge has great currency in the media,
but it is not very important in itself. How about the more serious
charge that guns are basically dangerous to society? Public-health
experts and gun-control lobbyists will tell you that most murders,
including those involving guns, take place among acquaintances and
are perpetrated by ordinary people; these facts supposedly indicate
that ordinary people are too hot-tempered to be allowed to have
guns.

The facts tell a different story: 75 percent of murderers have adult
criminal records. As for the rest, a large number either have criminal
convictions as juveniles or are still teenagers when they commit the
murder; laws dealing with access to juvenile-crime records prevent
full access to their rap sheets. Furthermore, the category of
?acquaintance? murders is misleading. It includes drug buyers who kill
a drug dealer to steal his stash, and thugs who assault each other in
barroom brawls.

There?s also a sad irony here. Domestic murders are almost always
preceded by many incidents of violent abuse. If a domestic-violence
victim flees the home, and her ex- husband tracks her down and tries
to rape her, and she shoots him, the killing will be labeled a ?tragic
domestic homicide that was caused by a gun,? rather than what it
legally is: justifiable use of deadly force against a felon.

The famous factoid that a gun in the home is 43 times more likely to
kill a family member than to kill a criminal is predicated on a similar
misclassification. Of the 43 deaths, 37 are suicides; and while there
are obviously many ways in which a person can commit suicide, only
a gun allows a small woman a realistic opportunity to defend herself
at a distance from a large male predator.

Emory University medical professor Arthur Kellermann is a one-man
factory of this type of misleading data. One of his most famous
studies purported to show that owning a gun is associated with a 2.7
times greater risk of being murdered. Kellermann compared murder
victims in several cities with sociologically similar people a few
blocks away in those cities, who had not been murdered.

The 2.7 factoid was trumpeted all over the country; but the study is
patently illogical. First of all, Kellermann?s own data show that
owning a security system, or renting a home rather than owning it, are
also associated with equally large increased risks of death. Yet
newspapers did not start running dire stories warning people to rip
out their burglar alarms or to start lobbying their condo association to
dissolve. The 2.7 factoid also overlooks the obvious fact that one
reason people choose to own guns, or to install burglar alarms, is that
they are already at higher risk of being victimized by crime. As Yale
law professor John Lott points out, Kellermann?s methodology is like
comparing 100 people who went to a hospital in a given year with
100 similar people who did not, finding that more of the hospital
patients died, and then announcing that hospitals increase the risk of
death. Kellermann?s method would also prove that possession of
insulin increases the risk of diabetes.

The media are complicit in many of these lies. Take, for example, the
hysteria about so-called ?assault weapons.? Almost everything that
gun-control advocates say about these firearms is a lie. The guns in
question are not machine guns; they are simply ordinary guns with
ugly cosmetics that give them a pseudo-military appearance. The
guns do not fire faster than ordinary guns. The bullets they fire are
not especially powerful; they are, in fact, smaller and travel at lower
velocity than bullets from standard hunting rifles.

The media have succeeded in giving a totally different
impression?through deliberate fraud. The CBS show 48 Hours
purported to show a semiautomatic rifle being converted to fully
automatic?i.e., turned into a machine gun?in just nine minutes. But
the gun shown at the beginning was not the same gun that was fired at
the end of the demonstration. An expert from the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) later said that such a conversion was
impossible. And in Denver, KMGH television filmed people firing
automatic weapons and told viewers that the guns were
semiautomatics.

The chief culprits are not the media but the antigun lobbyists
themselves, some of whom have very little compunction about
lying?even in cases where it can be proven rather easily that they
are aware of the truth while spreading the falsehood. For example, in
February 1989, a former BATF employee who had become a paid
consultant for Handgun Control testified to Congress that ?assault
weapons? were rarely used in crimes. (He wanted to ban them
anyway, as a precautionary measure.) Nevertheless, within weeks,
Handgun Control was running an advertising campaign insisting that
assault weapons were the criminal weapons of choice.

The most dangerous dishonesty concerns the ultimate intentions of the
antigun forces. Handgun Control claims that it merely wants to ?keep
guns out of the wrong hands?; yet in 1999, it lobbied hard to
preserve Washington, D.C.?s outright ban on handguns. Back in
1976, the group?s then leader, Pete Shields, explained the long-term
strategy to The New Yorker: ?The first problem is to slow down the
number of handguns being produced and sold in this country. The
second problem is to get handguns registered. The final problem is to
make possession of all handguns and all handgun
ammunition?except for the military, police, licensed security guards,
licensed sporting clubs, and licensed gun collectors?totally illegal.?

Sarah Brady, the current chairwoman of Handgun Control, has said
that people should not be allowed to own guns for self-defense. Yet
in debates, employees of the group steadfastly deny that the
organization believes in the policies articulated by its leaders. In
short, they are lying about what they want to accomplish. This is
understandable, to be sure; but not honorable, or right for the
country.