Cato Paper Shows How Guns Thwart Crimes and Save Lives

Cato Paper Shows How Guns Thwart Crimes and Save Lives:

In a new Cato Institute
paper,
Clayton Cramer and David Burnett review the controversy over how
often Americans use guns in self-defense each year. Estimates range
from about 100,000 to more than 2 million, and the surveys used to
generate the numbers are subject to weaknesses that plausibly lead
to undercounting or exaggeration. Cramer and Burnett's
contribution, an analysis of defensive gun uses reported in the
press during an eight-year period, does not resolve this issue. As
they emphasize, the vast majority of defensive gun uses seem to be
encounters where brandishing a weapon suffices to interrupt or
prevent a crime. When no shots are fired and no one is injured or
killed, the incident may not even be reported to the police,
let alone be deemed newsworthy. Still, Cramer and Burnett's
analysis, based on a randomly drawn sample of nearly 5,000
incidents, sheds light on the details of cases that are considered
interesting enough to report in a newspaper.

The most common situation, accounting for 1,227 of 4,669
incidents, was a "home invasion," where intruders try to force
their way into a home they know to be occupied. Burglaries were
also common, accounting for 488 incidents. In 285 cases, the
defender had a concealed carry permit, and most of those incidents
occurred in public. There were very few cases where a permit holder
became involved in an avoidable dispute that turned deadly because
he had a gun—a scenario that figures prominently in arguments
against nondiscretionary permit laws. Also contrary to the warnings
of gun controllers, victims in this sample were rarely disarmed by
their attackers; the reverse happened more than 20 times as often.
Criminals took away defenders' guns in 11 out of 4,669 incidents,
and the defender ended up dead despite being armed in 36 incidents,
less than 1 percent of the time. Cramer and Burnett describe many
specific cases (mapped by Cato here) in which a
gun prevented robbery, rape, serious injury, or death, illustrating
their general point that policy makers need to take these benefits
into account instead of focusing exclusively on criminal uses.

Cramer and Burnett note that journalists often seem irrationally
hostile to the very idea of armed self-defense, as reflected in a
2009 Miami New Times story:

It was pouring rain just after 1 p.m. Monday, July 20, when
a man burst into a Honduran grocery store on NW 36th
Street in Miami. A shirt was wrapped around his face as
he gripped a black semiautomatic handgun. Twenty-year-old
Charles Bell shoved the pistol into the face of a manager
behind the counter. Then he demanded the contents of the
cash register and cartons of cigarettes in a plastic bag.
Next he began herding customers to the back of the
small market.

After the store's manger shot and killed the robber, police
deemed it a justifiable homicide. The headline on the article:
"South Florida Store Clerks Go Vigilante."