http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=85000757

FOUL PLAY

Armed Self-Defense Works
First step to sensible crime policy: Ignore the
school shootings.

BY GARY KLECK
Tuesday, March 27, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST

The U.S. has again been hit by mass school
shootings, this time at two separate high schools in
the San Diego area. The close timing of the incidents
has brought about the usual publicity and
hand-wringing, as well as the usual response from
both sides of the gun issue.

Gun-control advocates and their media allies have
asserted the incidents show the need for more gun
control. Yet they have been vague as to exactly
what measures would have prevented these or other
school shootings. Locking up guns, for example, would
not have made a difference. In one of the California
schools, Santee, the shooter used a gun he had
stolen from a locked cabinet. In the other, El Cajon,
the shooter–an 18-year-old adult–used a shotgun
he owned.

There is little doubt that guns make it easier to
kill
large numbers of people, but this fact has no clear
implications for further gun control. Nearly
everything
a juvenile might do with a gun when not under adult
supervision is already illegal, and schools already
forbid guns on school property. The only further
regulation would be taking away everyone’s guns, and
even major gun-control organizations don’t advocate
full prohibition.

Pro-gun commentators, though less visible, have
drawn equally predictable conclusions. They claim
that more armed adults in schools would deter these
incidents altogether, or at least disrupt would-be
killers, saving lives in the time it took for police
to
arrive on the scene.

In truth, we aren’t likely to learn much about how to
prevent violence by focusing on these incidents.
Sensible crime policy is rarely produced by tailoring
solutions to an unrepresentative handful of bizarre
events that happen to draw media attention. Mass
school shootings are radically different from general
violence, youth violence and even most school
violence. While there is a great deal of violence in
schools, almost none of it involves guns. Conversely,
while there is a great deal of gun violence, less
than
1% occurs in schools. Moreover, little serious
violence
occurs in middle-class suburbs or is committed by
previously noncriminal middle-class kids.

Nevertheless, there is an important difference
between the two California shootings. In the El Cajon
shooting, an armed police officer who just happened
to be on the scene when the violence started was
able to shoot the attacker, stopping him before lives
were lost (five victims suffered nonfatal wounds).
The
shooter in the Santee incident, however, was not
stopped so soon; he killed two people and wounded
13 others before armed police arrived and arrested
him. Indeed, it is worth noting that it is usually
the
arrival of police armed with guns that stops
murderers
armed with guns.

I don’t, at least at this point, support more armed
police or civilians in schools, as many schools
already
have. I worry about omnipresent armed guards
misleading our children into believing that the world
is
a far more dangerous place than it really is. This
scary-world imagery is in itself one reason why
people
are quick to overreact to school shootings. One would
scarcely guess from the recent heated public
discussion that violence, gun violence, mass murder
and school violence have all dramatically declined in
recent years, or that the juvenile homicide rate has
dropped by 58% since 1991.

It also makes little crime-control sense to station a
police officer in every school. Police resources are
limited; one more officer at a school means one less
officer on the streets. Schools remain among the
safest places in our society, and it is foolish to
shift
police officers from higher-crime neighborhoods to
low-violence middle-class schools.

It would, on the other hand, be wrong to mindlessly
reject the notion that armed self-defense works.
Analysis of data from the federal government’s
National Crime Victimization Survey indicates that
crime victims who use guns for self-protection are
less likely to be hurt or lose property than victims
who
resist in other ways or don’t resist at all. Lives
are
saved by victims using guns, just as lives are taken
by criminals using them.

Contrary to popular myth, criminals almost never grab
a victim’s weapon and use it against them. Victims’
gun use also rarely provokes more violence from the
offender; criminals are far more likely to be
intimidated
than angered. Defensive uses of guns are rarely
shootouts between two gun-wielding combatants in
which innocent bystanders are caught in the
crossfire. In most cases, it is only the victim who
has
a gun, and most of the time the victim doesn’t even
fire. Instead, defensive uses are typically confined
to
the victim pointing the gun or verbally referring to
it in
a threatening manner.

Professionally conducted national surveys have
repeatedly indicated that Americans use guns for
self-protection remarkably frequently, perhaps 2.5
million times a year–considerably more often than
criminals use guns to commit crimes. In sum,
violence-reducing defensive uses of guns (less than
1% of them in schools) are both frequent and
effective.

The idea that Americans frequently and effectively
use guns, mostly in or near their homes or in public
places, to prevent injury and property loss cannot be
dismissed in the debate over gun control. We’d be
wise not to cloud what we do know with the hasty
and emotional policy prescriptions that these rare
school shootings tend to produce.

Mr. Kleck, a professor of criminology and criminal
justice at Florida State University, is author of
“Targeting Guns” (Aldine de Gruyter, 1997) and
“Armed” (Prometheus, 2001).

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NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
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