More Guns Less Crime by John Jr (best free e book reader .txt) 📕

seems pretty obvious which story is going to get the news coverage. Yet if we really want to answer the question of which policies will save lives, we must take into consideration not only the newsworthy bad events but also the bad events that never happen because people are able to defend themselves. Unfortunately, the newsworthy bad events give people a warped impression of the costs and benefits from having guns around.

Even when defensive gun uses are mentioned in the press, those mentions do not focus on typical defensive gun uses. The news stories focus primarily on the extremely rare cases in which the attacker is killed, though a few times press stories do mention cases of a gun being used to seriously wound an attacker. News coverage of defensive gun uses in which a would-be victim simply brandished a gun are essentially unheard-of. I don't think one has to rely on a conspiracy explanation to understand why this type of news coverage occurs, for it is not that surprising that dead attackers are considered more newsworthy than prevented attacks in which nobody was harmed. Even so, it is still important to recognize how this coverage can color people's perspective on how guns are used defensively. Since most people probably are very reticent to take a life, if they believe that defensive gun use almost always results in the death of an attacker, they will become more uncomfortable with guns.

While these examples are easily understood, some other news coverage is not as obvious. Take the case of accidental gun deaths involving young children, which we discussed in chapter 1. My guess is that people believe these events to be much more frequent than they actually are. When I have given talks, I have sometimes asked the audience how many children under age five or ten die from accidental gun shots each year; the answers are frequently in the thousand-plus range. A few answers might mention only hundreds of deaths per year. No one comes close to the Centers for Disease Control numbers: seventeen accidental gun deaths for children under age five and forty-two for children under ten in 1996. The information that forty children under age five drown each year in five-gallon water buckets or that eighty drown in bathtubs always astounds the audience. People remember national news reports of young children dying from accidental handgun shots in the home. In contrast, when was the last time that you heard on the national news of a child drowning in a five-gallon water bucket? 121

As a father of four boys, I can't imagine what life would be like if one of my sons died for any reason, including guns. But why so much more attention is given to guns when so many other risks pose a greater threat to our children is not immediately obvious to me. Indeed, it is difficult to think of anything other than guns that is as prevalent around American

homes, and that is anywhere near as potentially dangerous, yet is responsible for as low an accidental death rate. With around 80 million people owning a total of 200—240 million guns, the vast majority of gun owners must be extremely careful or such gun accidents would be much more frequent.

I have asked some reporters why they think accidental gun deaths receive so much coverage, and the only answer seems to be that these events get coverage because they are so rare. Dog bites man is simply not newsworthy because it is so common, but man bites dog, well, that is news. Yet this explanation still troubles me, for there are other equally rare deaths involving children that get very little news coverage.

Another puzzle is the lack of coverage given to cases in which citizens with guns have prevented multiple-victim public shootings from occurring. Given the intense concern generated by these attacks, one would think that people would be interested in knowing how these attacks were stopped.

For a simple comparison, take the justified news coverage accorded the heroic actions of Dave Sanders, the Columbine High School teacher who helped protect some of the students and was killed in the process. By the Sunday morning five days after the incident, a Lexis-Nexis search (a type of on-line computer search that includes news media databases) indicates that over 250 of the slightly over 1,000 news stories around the country on this tragedy had mentioned this hero.

Contrast this with other school attacks in which the crimes were stopped well before the police were able to arrive. Take, for example, the October 1997 shooting spree at a high school in Pearl, Mississippi, described at the beginning of this section, which left two students dead. It was stopped by Joel Myrick, an assistant principal. He retrieved his permitted concealed handgun from his car and physically immobilized the shooter for about five minutes before police arrived.

A Lexis-Nexis search indicates that 687 articles appeared in the first month after the attack. Only 19 stories mentioned Myrick in any way. Only a little more than half of these mentioned he used a gun to stop the attack. Some stories simply stated Myrick was "credited by police with helping capture the boy" or that "Myrick disarmed the shooter." A later story reported by Dan Rather on CBS noted that "Myrick eventually subdued the young gunman." Such stories provide no explanation of how Myrick accomplished this feat.

The school-related shooting in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, which left one teacher dead, was stopped only after James Strand, the owner of a nearby restaurant, pointed a shotgun at the shooter when he was finishing reloading his gun. The police did not arrive until eleven minutes later. At

least 596 news stories discussed this crime during the next month, yet only 35 mentioned Strand. Once again, the media ignored that a gun was used to stop the crime. The New York Daily News explained that Strand "persuaded [the killer] to surrender," while