Its no secret that mainstream press coverage of gun ownership in the United States tends to be in favor of gun control especially when those reporting on the topic are not firearm owners themselves. Journalists focus on how many people are killed by guns how many children get their hands on improperly stored firearms and how many deranged individuals go on shooting sprees.
This anti-gun news bias is widespread among the urban elite" who have very little personal experience with guns and yet write for influential newspapers like
The New York Times Washington Post etc. Despite this bias law-abiding private citizens owning guns does have positive impacts on American society that often go unreported many of which are significant.
Law-Abiding Gun Owners & Defensive Gun Use
Advocates of civilian disarmament tend to scoff at the capabilities of everyday
gun owners. Many believe that guns in the hands of normal people are crimes waiting to happen. However thanks to the research of individuals such as John Lott we
now have evidence showing that gun owners are some of the most law-abiding segments of the American population.
Lott drew the example of concealed license holders when compared to law enforcement:
Concealed-handgun permit holders are also much more law-abiding than the rest of the population. In fact they are convicted at an even lower rate than police officers. According to a study in Police Quarterly from 2005 to 2007 police committed 703 crimes annually on average. Of those there were 113 firearms violations on average.
With 683396 full-time law enforcement employees nationwide in 2006 we can infer that there were about 102 crimes by police per 100000 officers. Among the U.S. population as a whole the crime rate was 37 times higher than the police crime rate over those years 3813 per 100000 people."
Not only are gun owners very law-abiding they are also quite capable of defending themselves against criminals. Criminologists Dr. Gary Kleck and Dr. Marc Gertz carried out a
study that found 2.2 to 2.5 million cases of defensive gun use (DGU). Around 1.5 to 1.9 million of these cases involved
handguns. There is reason to believe that DGU numbers completely overshadow the criminal use cases of guns.
However in todays era of outrage politics many incidents of DGU go under the radar because of their lack of shock appeal that does not make for good headlines.
Continue reading
American Gun Ownership: The Positive Impacts of Law-Abiding Citizens Owning Firearms at
Ammo.com.
