Repeal the Second Amendment by Allan J. Lichtman

Author:Allan J. Lichtman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

11

Debunking the Gun Lobby’s Case for Firearms Self-Defense

Most purported self-defense gun uses are gun uses in escalating arguments and are both socially undesirable and illegal.

—DAVID HEMENWAY, DIRECTOR, HARVARD INJURY CONTROL RESEARCH CENTER, 20001

On the night of July 16, 2018, in North Philadelphia, two men fired at least twenty shots into a group of children. Before their clean getaway, the gunmen killed a fourteen-year-boy and struck one adult with a stray bullet. The perpetrators injured three other children, aged eleven, fourteen, and sixteen. The father of the murdered child said that he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Earlier that same day, in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, a single shooter killed two victims, age twenty-one and twenty-two, and wounded four others; in Washington, D.C., gunmen killed a ten-year-old child and wounded four adults.2

A week later, the CDC reported a 31 percent increase in gun homicides in just two years, from 2014 to 2016. However, the Dickey Amendment chilled research into the causes behind this upsurge in deaths. The amendment’s sponsor, late congressman Jay Dickey, came to regret his role in restricting gun research. In a coauthored op-ed that he published in 2012, Dickey said, “The federal government has invested billions to understand the causes of motor vehicle fatalities and, with that knowledge, has markedly reduced traffic deaths in the United States.” However, “it’s vital to understand why we know more and spend so much more on preventing traffic fatalities than on preventing gun violence.”3

In the 2018 budget resolution Congress explained what was already known, that the Dickey Amendment did not explicitly prohibit federal support for gun violence research. However, research remained chilled; Congress did not appropriate any substantial research funds. A 2017 study found that “in relation to mortality rates, gun violence research was the least-researched cause of death.” From 1975 to 2012, America experienced four hundred cases of cholera, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) doled out 212 research awards to study the disease. During this same span, when Americans suffered from several million deaths and injuries from gunfire, the NIH granted just three research awards to study firearms injuries.4

Fortunately, we now have a wealth of credible, independent studies that document the undeniable correlation between lax gun controls and the deaths from murder, suicides, and accidents that they facilitate. Still, though, the gun lobby insists that Americans are safest when their access to every type of firearm, allegedly for self-defense, is little controlled.

We know from death records that gunshots killed nearly forty thousand Americans in 2017—a death toll from firearms that is topped only by Brazil’s—and per capita only by a few strife-riven less-developed countries—and that gunshots likely injured close to another hundred thousand. The gun lobby argues preposterously that gun violence in America would somehow be lessened with more guns for good guys to stop bad guys with guns. They prop up this myth about firearms self-defense by asserting that law-abiding Americans use guns for defense against criminals millions of times each year, many times more than the total of all gun crimes.

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