Will Questioning Our Neighbors Make Us Safer?
By JOHN R. LOTT JR. August 29, 2001 The Hartford Current

Should you ask your neighbors if they own a gun? Recently, a massive
advertising and letter-writing campaign tried to persuade parents to do just
that. Sponsored by ASK (Asking Saves Kids), an umbrella organization for
groups including the National Education Association, the Children’s Defense
Fund and Physicians for Social Responsibility, the campaign’s eye-catching
ads pictured a young girl wearing a flak jacket and warned parents against
letting their children play in the homes of people who own guns.
ASK’s literature tells how to overcome responses such as, “This is not
any of your business.” Given the risks of young children being “naturally
curious,” eliminating or locking up guns is explained as just another way of
childproofing a home.

The fear is understandable, but the ASK campaign is still
irresponsible. Persuading owners to give up their guns or lock them up out
of easy reach will cost more lives than it saves. It also gives a misleading
impression of what poses the greatest danger to young children.
Accidental gun deaths among children are fortunately much rarer than
most people believe. In 1998, the last year for which the data is available,
53 children younger than 10 years old died from accidental shootings in the
United States, about one per state. With some 85 million gun owners and
almost 40 million children younger than 10, it is hard to find any item as
commonly owned in American homes, as potentially lethal, that has as low an
accidental death rate.
These deaths also have little to do with “naturally curious” children
shooting other children. No more than five or six of these cases each year
involve a child younger than 10 shooting another child.

Overwhelmingly, the shooters are adult males with long histories of
alcoholism, arrests for violent crimes, car crashes and suspended or revoked
driving licenses. Even if gun locks can stop the few children who abuse a
gun from doing so, gun locks cannot stop adults from firing their own guns.
It makes a lot more sense to ask your neighbors if they have violent
criminal records or histories of substance abuse.
Fear about guns also seems greatest among those who know the least
about them. For example, few children possess the strength to cock a pistol
or even know how to cock one.

Here are some of the other ways that children younger than 10 died in
1998: Almost 1,100 died as passengers in cars, and cars killed almost
another 400 young pedestrians. Bicycle and space-heater accidents take many
times more children’s lives than guns. Eighty-eight children drowned in
bathtubs. Another 36 children younger than age 5 drowned in 5-gallon plastic
water buckets.
The real problem with this gun phobia is that without guns, victims are
much more vulnerable to criminal attack. Guns are used defensively some 2
million times each year, five times more often than guns are used to commit
crimes, according to national surveys from Duke and Florida State
universities, among others. Police are extremely important in reducing
crime, but they virtually always arrive after the crime has been committed.
Having a gun is by far the safest course of action when confronted by a
criminal.

I examined juvenile accidental gun deaths for all states from 1977 to
1996 and found that those states that mandated guns be locked up did not
experience a relative drop in accidental deaths. Instead, other problems
arose: Just as surveys indicated that people were locking up their guns,
criminal attacks in people’s homes increased and were more successful. The
states with these laws had a total increase of 300 more killings and nearly
4,000 more rapes relative to the states without such laws. Burglaries also
increased.

States with the largest increases in gun ownership have had the biggest
relative drops in violent crime. Each 1 percent increase in ownership was
associated with a 3 percent drop in violent crime.

Asking neighbors about guns not only strains relationships, it
exaggerates dangers and risks lives if neighbors are unarmed when criminals
attack. Yet possibly some good can come out of all this gun phobia. If your
neighbors ask you whether you own a gun, why not offer to go out to a
shooting range together and teach them about guns?