32. The average victim had 9.5 prior arraignments, while the average offender had 9.7. David M. Kennedy, Anne M. Piehl, and Anthony A. Braga, "Youth Violence in Boston: Gun Markets, Serious Youth Offenders, and a Use-Reduction Strategy," Law and Contemporary Problems 59 (Winter 1996): 147-96.
33. The relationship between age and sex and who commits murders holds across other countries such as Canada; see Daly and Wilson, Homicide, pp. 168—70.
34. James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), p. 177. Wilson and Herrnstein also discuss in chapter 3 evidence linking criminality to physical characteristics. The surveys that they summarize find evidence that criminality is more likely among those who are shorter and more muscular.
35. Ibid., pp. 204—7; see also Michael K. Block and Vernon E. Gerety, "Some Experimental Evidence on the Differences between Student and Prisoner Reactions to Monetary Penalties," Journal of Legal Studies 24 (Jan. 1995): 123-138.
36. John J. Dilulio, Jr., "The Question of Black Crime" The Public Interest 117 (Fall 1994): 3-24; and "White Lies About Black Crime," The Public Interest 118 (Winter 1995): 30-44.
37. While there are many sources of misinformation on the deaths that arise from handguns, some stories attempt to clarify claims. For example, a Nando Times (www.nando. com) news story (Oct. 26, 1996) reported that "during a campaign visit here this week, President Clinton met with the widow of a police officer killed in the line of duty and later during a political rally cited his death as a reason to outlaw armor-piercing bullets. What he did not tell his audience, however, was that the officer died in an auto accident, not from gunfire.... Neither a bulletproof vest nor a ban on 'cop-killer bullets,' however, would have saved Officer Jerome Harrison Seaberry Sr., 35. He was responding to a radio call for backup on Christmas night last year when 'he lost control of his vehicle, going too fast ... hit a tree head-on, and the vehicle burst into flames,' said Lake Charles Police Chief Sam Ivey. Armor-piercing bullets, Ivey said, 'had nothing to do with it.'"
38. National Center for Injury Prevention, Injury Mortality Statistics (Atlanta: Centers for Disease Control, 1999).
39. Editorial, "The Story of a Gun and a Kid," Washington Times, May 22, 1997, p. A18.
40. Joyce Price, "Heston Attacks Trigger-Lock Proposal: Actor Begins Role as NRA Executive," Washington Times, May 19, 1997, p. A4.
41. Currently, the impact of gun locks is difficult to test simply because no state requires them. Seven states (California, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Minnesota, New Jersey, and North Carolina) and the District of Columbia have laws regarding proper storage, but these laws do not mandate a particular method of storage.
42. W Kip Viscusi, "The Lulling Effect: The Impact of Child-Resistant Packaging on Aspirin and Analgesic Ingestions," American Economic Review (May, 1984): 324—27.
43. The Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice recently released a
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government-funded study entitled "Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms," by Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig. The study used poll evidence from 2,568 adults in 1994 to claim that "20 percent of all gun-owning households had an unlocked, loaded gun at the time of the survey. The report cited the accidental deaths of 185 children under the age of 14, and many times that number of accidental shootings. For each death, there are several accidental shootings that cause serious injuries." Fifty percent of respondents were said to have stored an unloaded gun that was unlocked. The Justice Department's press release quoted Attorney General Janet Reno as claiming that "these results show how dangerous unlocked guns are to children. That's why we must pass the child-safety-lock provision in the President's Anti-Gang and Youth Violence Act of 1997, now before Congress. A locked gun can avoid a family tragedy." Ignoring problems with the survey itself, several problems exist with these conclusions. First, the report does not show that those 20 percent of gun-owning households with "unlocked, loaded" guns were responsible for the 185 firearm deaths of children. We would be interested to know if the 20 percent of households included children. Second, the report only concentrates on the costs, while ignoring any possible benefits. One question that might be useful in considering benefits is this: Where did those with unlocked, loaded guns tend to live? For example, were they more likely to live in urban, high-crime areas? (See Department of Justice, PRNewswire, May 5, 1997.)
Unfortunately, despite issuing press releases and talking to the press about their findings, neither the Department of Justice, nor professors Cook or Ludwig, nor the Police Foundation, which oversaw the government grant, have made any attempt to release their data at least by August 1997.
44. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995). A common claim I will discuss later is that "more than half of all firearm deaths occur in the home where the firearm is kept." As noted in the text, since one-half of all firearm deaths are suicides, this should come as no surprise.
45. Editorial, Cincinnati Enquirer, Jan. 23, 1996, p. A8. Others share this belief. "It's common sense," says Doug Weil, research director at the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, in Washington. "The more guns people are carrying, the more likely it is that ordinary confrontations will escalate into violent confrontations" (William Tucker, "Maybe You Should Carry a Handgun," the Weekly Standard, Dec. 16, 1996, p. 30).
46. For these arguments, see P. J. Cook, "The Role of Firearms in Violent Crime," in M. E. Wolfgang and N. A. Werner, eds., Criminal Violence (Newbury, NJ: Sage Publishers, 1982); and Franklin Zimring, "The Medium Is the Message: Firearm Caliber as a Determinant of Death from Assault," Journal of Legal Studies 1 (1972): 97-124.
47. P. J. Cook, "The Technology of Personal Violence," Crime and Justice: Annual Review of Research 14 (1991): 57, 56 n. 4. Cook reported 82,000 defensive uses for an earlier period. The irony of Cook's position here is that his earlier work argued that the National Crime Victimization Survey radically underreports other violence-related events, including domestic violence, rapes, and gunshot woundings linked to criminal acts; see Gary Kleck, Targeting Guns (Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter Publishers, 1997).
It is easy to find people who argue that concealed handguns will have no deterrent effect. H. Richard Uviller writes that "more handguns lawfully in civilian hands will not reduce deaths from bullets and cannot stop the predators from enforcing their criminal demands and expressing their lethal purposes with the most effective tool they can get their hands on." See H. Richard Uviller, Virtual Justice: The Flawed Prosecution of Crime in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 95.
48. For instance, the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center states that reported gun-ownership rates are much lower in urban areas. In the nation's twelve largest cities, just 18 percent of all households report owning a gun. Women in rural areas
appear to own guns at about three times the rate that women in the twelve largest cities do. For a discussion about how these numbers vary between urban and rural areas generally or for women across areas, see James A. Davis and Tom W. Smith, General Social Surveys, 1972-1993: Cumulative Codebook (Chicago: National Opinion Research Center, 1993); and Tom W. Smith and Robert J. Smith, "Changes in Firearm Ownership Among Women, 1980— 1994," Journal ofCriminal Law and Criminology 86 (Fall 1995): 133-49. This issue is discussed further in chapter 3.
49. Gary Kleck provides an excellent discussion of the methodological weaknesses in the National Crime Victimization Survey. As an example, he writes, "Unfortunately, 88 percent of the violent crimes reported to the [National Crime Victimization Survey] in 1992 were committed away from the victim's home. Thus, by the time the self-protection question is asked, almost all the [respondents] who in fact had used a gun for self-protection know that they had already admitted that the incident occurred in a place where it would be a crime for them to have posse
ssed a gun" (see Kleck, Targeting Guns).
50. Still another survey deals more directly with the number of lives potentially saved by defensive gun uses. It reports that potential victims believe that each year, 400,000 people "almost certainly" saved a life by using a gun, though even the researchers providing this estimate believe that the number is too high. See Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 86 (Fall 1995): 150, 153, 180, 180-2; see also Gary Kleck, "Critique of Cook/Ludwig Paper," undated manuscript, Dept. of Criminology, Florida State University). Recent evidence confirms other numbers from Kleck's and Gertz's study. For example, Annest et al. estimate that 99,025 people sought medical treatment for nonfatal firearm woundings. When one considers that many criminals will not seek treatment for wounds and that not all wounds require medical treatment, Kleck's and Gertz's estimate of 200,000 woundings seems somewhat plausible, though even Kleck and Gertz believe that this is undoubtedly too high, given the very high level of marksmanship that this implies for those firing the guns. Even if the true number of times that criminals are wounded is much smaller, however, this still implies that criminals face a very real expected cost when they attack armed civilians. For discussions of the defensive use of guns, see J. L. Annest et al., "National Estimates of Nonfatal, Firearm-Related Injuries: Beyond the Tip of the Iceberg," Journal of the American Medical Association (June 14, 1995): 1749—54; and Lawrence Southwick, Jr., "Self-Defense with Guns: The Consequences," Managerial and Decision Economics (forthcoming).
51. Information from telephone call to Susan Harrell, Administrator, Bureau of License Issuance for the state of Florida in Tallahassee. David Kopel writes that "in Florida as a whole, 315,000 permits had been issued by December 31, 1995. Only five had been revoked because the permit holder committed a violent crime with a gun." See David Kopel, "The Untold Triumph of Concealed-Carry Permits," Policy Review 78 (July—Aug. 1996); see also Stan Schellpeper, "Case for a Handgun-Carry Law," Omaha World-Herald, Feb. 6, 1997, p. 27; and Clayton E. Cramer and David B. Kopel, "'Shall Issue': The New Wave of Concealed-Handgun Permit Laws," Tennessee Law Review 62 (Spring 1995): 679, 691. An expanded version of this last article is available from the Independence Institute, 14142 Denver West Parkway, Suite 185, Golden, Colorado, 80401-3134.
52. Cramer and Kopel, "New Wave of Concealed-Handgun Permit Laws," pp. 691—92.
53. Bob Barnhart, "Concealed-Handgun Licensing in Multnomah County," mimeo (Intelligence/Concealed Handgun Unit: Multnomah County, Oct. 1994).
54. See Richmond Times Dispatch, Jan. 16, 1997.
55. Schellpeper, "Case for a Handgun-Carry Law," p. 27.
56. "Packin' and More Peaceful," Las Vegas Review-Journal, Aug. 5, 1996, p. 6B.
57. Kentucky State Police Trooper Jan Wuchner is also quoted as saying that he has "heard nothing around the state related to crime with a gun committed by permit hold-
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ers. There has been nothing like that that I've been informed of." See Terry Flynn, "Gun-Toting Kentuckians Hold Their Fire," Cincinnati Enquirer, June 16, 1997, p. Al.
58. Lee Anderson, "North Carolina's Guns," Chattanooga Free Press, May 31, 1997, p. A4.
59. Lawrence Messina, "Gun-Permit Seekers Not the Criminal Type," Charleston Gazette, July 28, 1997, p. CI.
60. This is the incident discussed in note 3 that occurred during the beginning of 1996 in Texas. As for citizens with concealed handgun permits coming to the aid of police officers see the end of note 68.
61. Peter Hermann, "Unarmed Resident Slain by Intruder; Victim's Rifle Taken by Authorities," Baltimore Sun, Sept. 19, 1996, p. Bl.
62. Christi Parsons and Andrew Martin, "Bead Drawn on Gun Law," Chicago Tribune, May 22, 1997, p. 1; the article includes a long list of such cases, not all of which ended with the charges being dropped. For example,
In Chicago, two motorists, both U.S. Marine Recruiters, were charged with felonies for allegedly having guns in their car when stopped by police for a minor traffic violation. State Rep. Joel Brunsvold (D—Milan) said a downstate woman who kept an assembled rifle in her car to shoot rodents on her farm was pulled over and charged with a felony, as if she had been planning a drive-by shooting. And in March, Chicago Bears defensive end Alonzo Spellman was charged with a felony after volunteering to a police officer during a traffic stop that he had a handgun inside his car.
63. Stephen Singular, Talked to Death (New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987), p. 142. In several other tragic cases people have carried concealed handguns because of death threats, only to be arrested by the police for carrying them; see, for example, Kristi Wright, "Executive Decision," Omaha World-Herald, June 8, 1997, p. IE.
64. A recent case in Oklahoma illustrates how a gun allowed an elderly woman to defend herself:
An 83-year-old woman proved her aim was good Tuesday morning as she shot a burglar trying to get inside her home. Delia Mae Wiggins's home has been burglarized four times. She was beaten by a burglar in November. And she wasn't going to let it happen again. When she heard someone trying to break into her home at about 5 a.m., Wiggins said she grabbed a gun that had been loaded for nine years but never fired. She told police an intruder removed her window-unit air conditioner to enter her home. She said she warned the intruder she was armed. Then she pulled the trigger, hitting the intruder in the thigh. The man backed out the window and fled. (Robert Medley, "83-Year-Old Woman Shoots Fifth Burglar to Try to Victimize Her," Oklahoma City Daily Oklahoman, May 21, 1997.
This case also illustrates another point, because it involves a crime where the perpetrator would have been classified as knowing the intended victim. The attacker had just a few days earlier "mowed a lawn at a rental property for her."
65. Kristi O'Brien, "Concealed-Gun Legislation Bottled Up Again," Copley News Service (Apr. 15, 1997).
66. As Lon Cripps, the police chief in Langsberg, Montcalm County, Michigan, said in discussing concealed handguns, "There comes a time when you have to take responsibility for your own life. Police officers just aren't always going to be there" (Detroit News, June 14, 1996).
67. States where less than 10 percent of the members responded to the poll were excluded from the polling numbers reported by the National Association of Chiefs of Police.
68. Recent legislative testimony during 1997 provides similar evidence. In testifying before the Kansas House of Representatives on behalf of the Kansas State Lodge of the
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Fraternal Order of Police, Joseph T. Gimar said, "We ... continue our support of the [right-to-carry] legislation with the belief that the citizens of Kansas will use it responsibly. ... I have gone to great lengths to speak to as many national [Fraternal Order of Police] members as possible, many in jurisdictions that have concealed-carry statutes, but [I] have been unable to find any that were in opposition to their statutes." (For this and other quotations by law-enforcement officers, see Gary K. Hayzlett, "Kansans Should Get to Carry and Conceal Arms," Kansas City Star, Mar. 21, 1997.)
Many stories involve armed citizens, some with licensed concealed handguns, who have come to the aid of police officers who are being attacked. For example,
Shapiro was arrested April 9 after punching and kicking Howey police Officer David Kiss in the face and mouth during a State Road 48 traffic stop, which also involved his wife, Susan Jane Shapiro.
The melee didn't break up until a Mission Inn employee who was passing by shot Mark Shapiro in the back of his left knee.
The passer-by, Vincent McCarthy, 46, of Eustis, had a permit to carry his .25-caliber automatic pistol and will not be charged, Lake sheriffs authorities said.
The Howey Town Council earlier this week commended McCarthy for coming to the aid of Kiss. (Linda Chong, "Man Gets House Arrest in Law Officer's Beating," Orlando Sentinel Tribune, May 16, 1992, p. 8)
69. Related stories can be found in the Alva (Oklahoma) Review Couri
er, Jan. 8, 1995; the Tuscaloosa News, Jan. 12, 1995; and the Houston Post, Jan. 22, 1994; see "Gun-Control Survey," Law Enforcement Technology (July—Aug. 1991), pp. 14-15.
Police officers are well aware that off-duty officers have often been able to thwart crimes because they were armed. News stories on such cases are easy to find; see, for example, Deborah Hastings, "Girl Killed in California During Stop for Ice Cream on Parents' Anniversary," Associated Press, June 18, 1997, dateline Los Angeles, 02:50 a.m. EDT).
70. See Richard Connelly, "Handgun Law's First Year Belies Fears of 'Blood in the Streets,'" Texas Lawyer, Dec. 9, 1996, p. 2.
71. See the Florida Times-Union, May 9, 1988, and Palm Beach Post, July 26, 1988.
72. Flynn, "Gun-Toting Kentuckians Hold Their Fire," p. Al.
73. However, other polls, such as one done by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, a group that I will discuss again in chapter 7, argue that people favor more restrictions on gun ownership and claim that 82 percent favored mandatory registration of all handguns (Larry Bivens, "Most Want Child-Proof Handguns, Poll Shows," Detroit News, Mar. 14, 1997, p. A5).
74. Tom Smith, "1996 National Gun-Policy Survey of the National Opinion Research Center: Research Findings," (Chicago: National Opinion Research Center, Mar. 1997), p. 21.
75. Ibid., pp. 8—9. The survey did include overwhelmingly positive responses to many questions on additional safety regulations for guns. I believe that many of these responses would have been significantly altered if the questions had been posed in terms of the trade-off between safety benefits and estimates of their costs, or if terms describing dangers to children had been eliminated (especially, as already noted in the text, since the number of children harmed by gun accidents is probably much smaller than most people believe).
76. Ibid., p. 13. The other major deciding factor for people's views on gun control appears to be whether they trust government. Those who do trust government are much more in favor of gun control.
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