| | | ... CITIZENSHIP AND THE BENEFICIAL ASPECT OF GUN OWNERSHIP
Laws that forbid the carrying of arms. disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.
— Italian Criminologist Cesare Beccaria, “On Crimes and Punishment,” quoted in
Thomas Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book.
Scholarship published in the criminologic, sociologic, and legal literature in the last 30 years show that the defensive uses of firearms by citizens amount to 2.5 million uses per year and dwarf the offensive gun uses by criminals. In the United States, between 25 and 75 lives are saved by a gun in self and family protection for every life lost to a gun in crime.[38] Medical costs saved by guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens are 15 times greater than costs incurred by criminal uses of firearms. Guns also prevent injuries to good people and protect billions of dollars of property every year.[13,29,30,38,39,41]
Moreover, the actual U.S. health care costs of treating gunshot wounds is approximately $1.5 billion, which is less than 0.2% of the U.S. annual health care expenditures. The $20–40 billion figure so frequently cited in the medical literature has been found to be a deliberate and exaggerated estimate of lifetime productivity lost, where every victim of crime is assumed that had not his life ended untimely he would have become a wealthy successful citizen. Reality points otherwise: Many “victims” are criminal elements who have been killed in the act of perpetrating serious crimes, either by the police or by law-abiding citizens acting in self-defense.[9,10,13,38,39]
In a 1986 New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) paper, Drs. Arthur Kellermann and Donald T. Reay claimed that defending oneself or one’s family with a firearm in the home is dangerous and counterproductive, noting that, “a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder.”[28] This conclusion, though, was severely criticized by numerous investigators, who had not only discerned evidence of methodological and conceptual errors in the study, but also found that the authors, most significantly, had failed to consider and underestimated the protective benefits of guns.[13,32,38,39] These and other serious deficiencies, stemming not only from methodological errors but also from political partisanship, have been noted in the standard public health model, which has also erroneously assumed that guns are a disease that must be eradicated in order to combat crime and promote what public health researchers deem desirable gun control laws.[3,9,10,13-19,27,38,43]
On the other hand, Professor John R. Lott, Jr., using the standard criminologic approach, reviewed the FBI’s massive yearly crime statistics for all 3054 U.S. counties over 18 years (1977–1994), the largest national survey on gun ownership and state police documentation in illegal gun use. The data show that while neither state waiting periods nor the federal Brady Law is associated with a reduction in crime rates, adopting concealed carry gun laws that allowed law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons for self-defense cut death rates from public, multiple shootings (e.g. as those which took place in 1996 in Dunblane, Scotland, and Tasmania, Australia or the infamous 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado in the United States) — by an amazing 69%. Allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crime — without any apparent increase in accidental death. In Professor Lott’s survey, children 14–15 years of age were found to be 14.5 times more likely to die from automobile injuries, 5 times more likely to die from drowning or fires and burns, and 3 times more likely to die from bicycle accidents than they are to die from gun accidents.[34]
In the United States, if states without concealed carry gun laws had adopted them in 1992, about 1570 murders, 4177 rapes, and 60,000 aggravated assaults would have been avoided annually. Moreover, when concealed carry gun laws went into effect in a given county, murders fell by 8%, rapes by 5%, and aggravated assaults by 7%.[34]
For this important, groundbreaking research, Professor Lott has received the accolades he certainly deserves both from his peers in the social sciences and from the freedom-loving citizens of the United States. Nevertheless, his work and findings need wider dissemination among the people, as well as the elected representatives, of the emerging democracies of the world at large, who are still not aware of his work and freedom-promoting message.
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rticle written by: Dr. Miguel Faria
Miguel A. Faria, Jr., M.D. is Clinical Professor of Surgery (Neurosurgery, ret.) and Adjunct Professor of Medical History (ret.) Mercer University School of Medicine. He is an Associate Editor in Chief and a World Affairs Editor of Surgical Neurology International (SNI), and an Ex-member of the Injury Research Grant Review Committee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 2002-05; Former Editor-in-Chief of the Medical Sentinel (1996-2002), Editor Emeritus, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS); Author, Vandals at the Gates of Medicine (1995); Medical Warrior: Fighting Corporate Socialized Medicine (1997); and Cuba in Revolution: Escape From a Lost Paradise (2002).
This article was originally published in Surg Neurol Int 2012;3:133..
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