Why is it in Vogue to Fear Guns?
Lyn Bates

Normally I’m fairly blase about unfavorable articles in the media. I assume that most reporters, writers, and editors are as ignorant about firearms as I once was, and should be forgiven their ignorance and gently educated whenever possible. But the recent wave of media hype has me seeing red.

The October issue of Vogue magazine has an article that purports to reveal to women the truth about firearms. It starts with the tragic story of the single mother who decided to get a gun for protection and asked the advice of a 16 year old neighbor boy, who purportedly had been to some type of firearms course; the kid brought over a gun that he said was loaded with blanks, pointed it at one of her children, and the tragic result was a dead child. The article goes on to present the infamous 43-to-1 Big Lie (“For every case of justifiable homicide with a gun, there area 43 unnecessary deaths.”), and concludes that “What’s being used to sell guns to women is a myth.”

Is it true that firearms manufacturers and dealers use fear to sell guns to women? Of course they do. Fear is one of the standard, effective marketing techniques that is used to sell thousands of types of products including car tires, insurance, underarm deodorant, and condoms. Yet it isn’t considered wrong for a tire company to use an ad that reminds people what can happen to their precious children in a car accident caused by worn tires.

In short, there’s nothing wrong in using fear to sell goods, if the fear is justified and the product is effective. It is only wrong to use an irrational or unfounded fear, or to hype a product that doesn’t work (for example, selling expensive spray bottles of water labeled “Dinosaur Repellent” to people who thought Jurassic Park was a documentary). The fear that most women have of violence directed at them or their families is not irrational or unfounded – just look at the assault and rape statistics – and a gun in properly trained hands can be a wonderfully effective crime prevention tool.

The only gripe I have with the majority of gun advertising is that since most companies sell hardware but not training, they tend to perpetuate the notion that the gun by itself is the solution. It’s not. The message ought to be “get a gun AND the training to go with it.”

The biggest problem for gun owners today is the prevalence of the Big Lie, the 43-to-1 statistic that confronts us at every turn. Preston Covey said it best, that this statistic “proports to inform us, but is framed to warn us off. It is widely promulgated in the media as a ‘scare stat’, a grossly misleading half-truth whose very formulation is calculated to prejudice and terrify. The frightful statistic screams for itself: The risks far outweigh the benefits, yes? What fool would run these risks? If your car were 43 times more likely to kill you, a loved one, a dear friend or an innocent child than to get you to your destination, should you not take the bus?”

Every gun owner needs to understand why this scare stat is deceptive to the point of being fraudulent, and ought to be able to argue knowledgeably against those who try to use it to claim that guns are simply too dangerous for people to own.

The maxim “garbage in, garbage out” always applies. In this case, the garbage in is the assumption that counting firearm homicides in the home is an adequate way to measure the beneficial uses of guns, and the garbage out is the 43:1 number. The reason it is garbage is that it ignores the fact that in about 99% of the defensive uses of firearms nobody is killed.

Again abstracting from Covey’s excellent essay “Gun Stats and Mortal Risks”, there are many different ways to look at the limited data that is available on firearm use. Using very reasonable, non-garbage, ways of looking at the data, Covey came up with the following fascinating figures:

A gun is 32 times more likely to be used to defend against criminal threat than to kill anybody.

A gun is 245 times more likely to be used by a non-criminal to defend against criminal threat than to commit criminal homicide.

A gun is 535 times more likely to be used to defend against criminal threat than to accidentally kill anybody!

A gun is 50 times more likely to be used to defend against criminal threat than to kill another person.

A gun is 50 times more likely to be used to defend against criminal threat than to be used in suicide.

Of course, all of this was too long to pack into a letter-to-the-editor of Vogue, so I picked out just the most important point, and tried to explain it. I don’t know whether Vogue will print the letter I hammered out in response to their tripe, but I thought you all might be interested in it:

Dear Vogue,

As the holder of a PhD in Applied Mathematics, I am more than competent to read and analyze the research materials published about the use of firearms. As the author of two of the articles in the issue of Women&Guns magazine that was pictured in your misleading article about firearms, I am moved to point out just one of the many refutations of the fallacy that bad uses of guns outnumber good ones by 43 to 1. Would you rate the quality of your local police department by the number of criminals the police kill every year? Of course not! A better measure would be the number of arrests made, or convictions obtained, because that is the primary job of the police; killing in the line of duty is extremely uncommon. Similarly, it is wrong to rate the “goodness” of guns in the hands of law-abiding people by the number of home invaders they kill. A better measure would be the number of crimes thwarted by the presence of a defensive firearm, even if nobody was shot or killed. Fortunately, those numbers are available. The best independent statistics come from Professor Gary Kleck(*), a criminologist at Florida State University. He shows that there are a million defensive uses of firearms a year, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, the criminal is stopped by the presence of the gun, without anyone being killed. Taking this into account, the good uses of firearms outnumber the accidental deaths by 535 to one! Of course, gun ownership is not for everyone. If you live in a household with someone who is violent, depressed, or abuses drugs, adding a firearm to the home can indeed be a danger, because most people who murder have a history of criminal violence or drug involvement. Anyone who is considering the purchase of a firearm should get training from a qualified, certified instructor (not a 16-year old neighbor). Women&Guns has a resource list that can help people find such instructors, and also has accounts of women who have successfully defended themselves with firearms.

Sincerely,

Lyn Bates
(*) Gary Kleck, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, Aldine de Gruyter, 1992. The author states at the beginning of this scholarly book that he “is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, and Common Cause, among other politically liberal organizations. He is a lifelong registered Democrat, as well as a contributor to liberal Democratic political candidates. He is not now, nor has he ever been, a member of, or a contributor to, the National Rifle Association, Handgun Control Inc., or any other advocacy group on either side of the gun control issue, nor has he received funding for research from any such organization.”

We have to fight back against the ignorance that is embodied in the 43:1 scare stat. We have to explain the facts to everyone who tries to frighten us with that number.

Remember that it is wrong to use an irrational or unfounded fear to sell something that doesn’t work — and which means that it is wrong to use the irrational and unfounded fear of firearms that is induced in the general public by the 43:1 Big Lie to sell something to the public that doesn’t work: gun control.

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Lyn Bates is the Vice President of We are AWARE (Arming Women Against Rape and Endangerment), and Contributing Editor of Women & Guns magazine. She is a competitive shooter, and is certified to teach a range of self-defense techniques.