More Than School Shootings: Five Important Facts The Media Ignores In The Gun Debate

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School shootings are terrible.  Anyone with a soul wants to find ways to end them - or more realistically, decrease both the frequency and casualties.  This includes people both for and against increased gun control.  However, even though this is all we hear about, there is much more to the issue of guns than school shootings.

First, we need to take a realistic look at the whole issue.  We need to look at all the facts.

Fact one: The death rate from school shootings is very low.

Gun control advocates almost never
consider the risks of gun control laws

In the 19 years since Columbine, there have been 122 deaths from school shootings.  That is an average of a bit less than 6.5 deaths per year.  This is indeed a horrible thing - but there are 56 million K-12 students in the US.  56 million.  This means that, averaged out over 19 years, the chances of any student being killed in a school shooting is about one in 10 million.  The reality of this risk must be balanced against the negative impact of gun restrictions.  Gun control advocacy groups never do this.




Fact two: Homicides have dropped by 50% since 1980.  

This happened at the same time as a massive increase in the number of firearms and a literal explosion of lawful concealed carry.  The homicide rate rose by .4 per 100k population in 2016, but this likely reflects normal variation.  2017 figures are not yet available.







Fact Three: Firearms ownership and CCW licenses do not raise the homicide rate.  

A critical tenent of the gun control movement is that more guns equal more homicides.  They also insist that lawful carrying of firearms also result in increased homicides.  However the data simply does not bear that out.

The chart below compares two things: The number of NICS background checks in each state and the homicide rate.  The NICS check rate is the best indicator of firearms ownership and CCW license because gun purchases and checks on license holders are virtually the only reason a NICS check is run.  This information is from the FBI as is the homicide rate.  I complied this is 2013, so the data is for 2012.  In order to get the numbers in the same range, I computed the homicide rate in the number per 10 million population and the NICS checks in the number of checks per 100 population.  Although we cannot separate CCW checks and firearms checks, since both are indication of a strong "gun culture", it really doesn't matter.

If more guns and more carry licenses result in more homicides, the two lines should parallel each other.  As you can see, they do not.   Case closed.

Yellow Line = Homicide Rate Per 10 Million Population
Red Line = NICS Firearm Background Checks Per 100 Population

But what about people with carry licenses?  Don't they murder a lot of people?
The answer to that question is a decisive NO.

Rather than spend a lot of time on this, I'm going to show you two charts and link you to a recent post that includes a ton about this.  First let's look at official data on more than one million carry license holders.

Anti-gun rights activists accuse people licensed
to carry of increasing the murder rate.
How can this be when they almost never commit murder?

Just to prove that Texas is not a fluke, here's the same data from Michigan:

So, it is very clear that neither firearm ownership of CCW licensees increase homicide rates.  If you want more data, it's here.

Fact Four: Privately owned firearms are used in self defense as many as 2.5 million times every year.

Anti-gun rights groups continually deny that firearms are used to save lives - yet even researchers on their own side admit that firearms are used in self defense at least tens of thousands of times each year.  Even a recent CDC study, ordered by President Obama concluded that: "Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals." 

No government agency tracks Defensive Gun Uses (DGUs), and given their nature, this would be very hard.  Most of the time, the criminal flees without any shots being fired - let alone anyone being shot or killed. Many are never reported.

This legally armed citizen saved the life of a state trooper.
this is not the only case where this has happened.

Instead of focusing upon the number of lives saved, gun control groups try to distract people by comparing the number of firearms homicides with the number of justifiable homicides committed by citizens with firearms.  This a useless comparison, because the point of a defensive firearm is to save lives, hopefully without taking anyone's life.  Additionally, we now know that justifiable homicides have been massively underreported for decades.

Estimates of how often firearms are used defensively vary widely - but they all show numbers that dwarf the number of firearms homicides.  For years, I personally thought that the mid-range estimate of 250,000 to 370,000 DGUs per year was probably the closest to the actual figure - however this number has been called into doubt by recent revelations from the CDC.

A commonly cited 1995 study by Kleck and Gertz estimated that between 2.1 and 2.5 million DGUs occur in the United States each year.  This figure has been widely attacked since it was published - and even I thought it was likely high.  However, we now know that - even as anti-gun rights groups were attacking the numbers put forth by Kleck and Gertz, the CDC buried their own research that showed numbers of DGUs in the same range.  It now seems likely that - at least in the early 1990s - there were indeed over two million DGUs every year in the US.

Even Estimates Of DGUs By Gun Control Groups Massively Exceed Homicides

Firearms homicides source: FBI 2016 UCR - DGUs lowest estimate Violence Policy Center estimate - DGUs highest estimate CDC and Kleck and Gertz

There is an important corollary to this fact is that making firearms much harder for law abiding citizens to possess and carry firearms costs lives.   Many of those lives are mothers and children.

Fact Five: Armed citizens have indeed stopped active shooters

Sorry, but you are LYING.  Good guys with
guns stop bad guys - including active
shooters - on a regular basis.

Gun control groups quite simply lie about this constantly.  They know very well that lawfully armed citizens have not only stopped many crimes and saved their own lives and the lives of others - they have also saved many lives by stopping active shooters.  Their would be many more, but most public mass shootings take place in so called gun free zones.




Rather than list the many cases where this has happened, here are a four media reports that prove that armed citizens have ended mass shootings:

Again, there would be many, many more of these positive interventions if active shooters did not select so called gun free zones - only secured with a sign - that do nothing but assure the would be mass murderer they need not worry about armed opposition.

So, there you have it - five facts that the media largely ignores in the gun debate.  The only question left is: Will you choose to ignore them because you do not like the.