More Guns Less Crime by John Jr (ebook reader macos .txt) 📗

the Atlanta Journal wrote how he "chased [the killer] down and held him until police came." Saying that Strand "persuaded" the attacker makes it sound as if Strand were simply an effective speaker.

Neither Myrick nor Strand was killed during their heroics. That might explain why they were ignored to a greater degree than Dave Sanders in the Columbine attack. Yet one suspects a more politically correct explanation—especially when the media generally ignore defensive gun use. With five public-school-related shootings occurring during the 1997—1998 school year, one might have thought that the fact that two of them were stopped by guns would register in the public debate over such shootings.

The press's bias can be amply illustrated by other examples as well. Take the example of the July attack in Atlanta that left nine people dead. Mark Barton killed people working at two stock brokerages. 122 It did deserve the extensive news coverage that it received. Yet within the next week and a half there were three cases around Atlanta in which citizens with guns stopped similar attacks from occurring, and these incidents were given virtually no news coverage. They were an attack at a Lavonia, Georgia, store by a fired worker, an attack by a mental patient at an Atlanta hospital, and an Atlanta truckjacking. 123 The last two incidents were stopped by citizens with permitted concealed handguns, while the first was stopped by someone who had only been allowed to buy a gun hours before the attack because of Georgia's instant background check system. Meanwhile, a week after the Atlanta massacre, another attack, which left three people dead at a Birmingham, Alabama, business, again generated national television news coverage on all the networks and was the lead story on the CBS and NBC evening news. 124

Again, I can see that bad events that never occur are not nearly as newsworthy as actual bad events. Yet multiple-victim attacks using methods other than guns are frequently ignored. On May 3, 1999, Steve Abrams drove his Cadillac into a crowded preschool playground because he "wanted to execute innocent children." 125 Two children died horrible deaths as one was mangled under the wheels and the other pinned to a tree by the car, and another five were badly injured. One woman's son was so badly mauled that "teachers and other parents stepped between [her] and the Cadillac to prevent her from seeing her son's battered body" even though he was still alive. Yet only one television network provided even a passing reference to this attack. 126 One very obvious news angle, it seems to me, would be to link this attack to the various public school

attacks. Compare this news coverage with the attention generated by Bu-ford Furrow's August 10, 1999, assault on a Jewish community center, which left five people wounded, three of them young boys. 127 Multiple-victim knife attacks have been ignored by the national media, and few people would realize that there were 1,884 bombing incidents in the United States in 1996, which left a total of 34 people dead and 365 people injured. 128

The news coverage is also constantly framed as, Is more gun control the answer? 129 The question is never asked, Have increased regulations encouraged these attacks by making potential victims more vulnerable? Do these attacks demonstrate the importance of letting people be able to defend themselves?

We are constantly bombarded with pro-gun-control claims. While my research, when it is referred to in the press, is labeled as "controversial" or worse, the claims from the Clinton administration and Handgun Control, Inc., are reported without reference to any academics who might object to them. For years the Clinton administration has been placing public service ads claiming that "thirteen children die every day from guns," linking this claim with elementary school children's voices or pictures. But few of these thirteen deaths fit the image of innocent young children. Nine of these deaths per day involve "children" between seventeen and nineteen years old, primarily homicides involving gang members. Eleven of the deaths per day involved fifteen- to nineteen-year olds. This does not alleviate the sorrow created by these deaths or the 1.9 children under age fifteen that die from guns every day, but it strains credulity to have this number mentioned as evidence justifying the importance of trigger locks.

The Clinton administration has also been attempting to help out the city lawsuits against the gun makers by producing other research that will back up their claims that guns are being sold recklessly to criminals. 130 The administration claimed that around a third of the guns used in crimes were purchased legally with the intent of reselling them to criminals—so-called straw purchases. Yet the evidence was very indirect and purposely excluded most gun crimes from the sample to ensure a particular answer. The administration did not measure straw purchases, but simply assumed that guns legally purchased from a dealer and then used in the commission of a crime within three years must have involved straw purchases. These guns could have been stolen between the original sale and their use in a crime, but they would still be classified as straw purchases. To arrive at the percentages the administration reports, only guns that were both sold and used in the commission of a crime between the beginning of 1990 and the end of 1996 are examined.

Yet using this method the administration could have produced virtually any percentage it wanted. For example, accept its definition of a straw purchase as guns that are both purchased and used within a three-year period of time. If the administration had simply limited the sample to guns that were purchased and used in the commission of a crime in a three-year period from 1994 through 1996, it could have claimed that 100 percent of guns used in crimes were obtained through straw purchases. In this case, all the guns they would have studied