by J. Neil Schulman [email protected]

Author, Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans
Own Guns & Self Control Not Gun Control Webmaster,
The World Wide Web Gun Defense Clock Samantha
Kimmel, in Letters to the LA Times, June 5, 2000,
responds to John Lott’s June 1 Op-Ed, writing,
“Gun advocates like to cook statistics, making it
seem that the very few incidents of people defend-
ing themselves with guns outweigh the dangers of
having guns taken away and used against them, or
escalating the situation into a shooting.
It’s simply not true …”

Using Guns for Self-Defense, Monday, June 5, 2000)

At what point did unsupported bombastic assertions by
people with no credentials gain equal credibility to the
research results of professional criminologists such as John
Lott?

Lott’s source for the comparative injury statistic is
the 1979-1985 National Crime Survey by the U.S. Bureau of
Justice Statistics, which shows that a robbery victim who
resists attack with a firearm is half as likely to be in-
jured as a victim who either offers no resistance or resists
using any other weapon (17.4% injured as opposed to 33.2%
injured). Further, an assault victim who resists with a
firearm stands only a 40% as great chance of injury as a
victim who either doesn’t resist at all or resists using any
other weapon (12.1% as opposed to 29.9% injured). Further-
more, the 1993 National Self Defense Survey that found
American gun owners use their privately held firearms 2.5
million times each year in successful defenses against a
criminal attack was not only peer reviewed by Marvin Wolf-
gang, perhaps the most respected (and pro-gun-ban) criminol-
ogist of his time, who found the survey’s methodology flaw-
less, but the results were replicated in a national survey
conducted in 1994 by the Police Foundation and sponsored by
the National Institute of Justice, which approximated 2.73
million defensive gun users in the previous year.