so what else is new??????
———

http://insidedenver.com:80/rosen/0428rosen.shtml

Where do you get you information?

Mike Rosen
Anti-gun crowd cooks the books

The anti-gun crowd persists in spreading misinformation about the successful
use of firearms by citizens in defense of their homes. Especially one
particular bogus statistic that keeps coming back like a bad burrito.

First, some context: Last Sunday, the Denver Rocky Mountain News published a
point-counterpoint on whether the Second Amendment protection of the right
to
keep and bear arms applies to citizens as individuals or only as members of
a
collective militia. Arguing for individual rights was a former U.S. Justice
Department attorney, Jim Winchester. On the other side was Robert Hardaway,
a
law professor at the University of Denver. The two advocates offered dueling
precedents and interpretations. Reasonable people have long disagreed on
this
question. Ironically, Hardaway cited conservative former Supreme Court Chief
Justice Warren Burger to make his case. Touche.

I’ll return the favor by citing Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe, the
liberal establishment’s first choice for the next vacancy on the court. In
his newly revised edition of American Constitutional Law, Tribe declares
that
the Second Amendment was conceived as a political right and guarantees
individuals the right “to possess and use firearms in the defense of
themselves and their homes.”

While the debate goes on, the law will default to the status quo and we’ll
continue to enjoy the individual right to own firearms, tempered by
regulations.

Now for Hardaway’s regurgitation of the bad burrito. He cited a tendentious
14-year-old study by Arthur Kellermann of Emory University and Seattle
medical examiner Dr. Donald Reay. If Hardaway ever actually saw the study,
he
either misread it or misrepresents it. More likely, he’s just parroting
anti-gun rhetoric he’s gotten from others. According to Hardaway, the study
“reveals that for every person in the U.S. who claims use of a gun for
self-defense, 43 people die from gun accidents, suicides and unintentional
killings, many of them innocent children.” That’s just not true and a
shameful stretch from the study’s original language, which was shifty
enough.
But you’ll have to follow the wording very carefully.

The study claimed that guns in the home are 43 times more likely to kill a
family member or friend than an intruder. Specifically, that “for every case
of self-protection homicide involving a firearm kept in the home, there were
1.3 accidental deaths, 4.6 criminal homicides and 37 suicides involving
firearms.” (That adds up to 43.) Did you spot the gimmick, though?
“Self-protection homicide.” The study considered only homicides. (Hardaway
failed to mention this.) In contriving the 43-to-1 unfavorable ratio, the
study conveniently ignored all instances of home defense in which an
intruder
was not killed. If you scare the intruder away, that doesn’t count. If you
wound him, that doesn’t count either. You’ve got to kill him or be killed.
Talk about cooking the books.

On the other hand, the lion’s share, 37 of the 43 deaths noted in the study,
were suicides. What does that have to do with home defense? If you’re intent
on killing yourself, you could do it with sleeping pills, too, but they
wouldn’t do you much good against an ax-wielding intruder in the middle of
the night.

In a rival study, Gary Kleck, professor of criminology at Florida State
University, found that guns are used in self-defense between 800,000 and
2.45
million times a year, that the defender actually fires the gun in fewer than
1 in 4 cases, that in most instances merely displaying a weapon is
sufficient
to scare off an intruder, and that gun ownership is a deterrent to crime.
All
of this is ignored in the Kellermann/Reay polemic.

Would you like the option of self-defense in your own home? A former Green
Beret might give a different answer to that question than a Boulder
pacifist.
It’s a highly personal decision. The anti-gun crowd would rather you not
have
that choice. They’ve decided for you that it’s a bad idea. And they’d love
to
make it law.

Mike Rosen’s radio show airs daily from 9 a.m. to noon on 850 KOA.

April 28, 2000