Editorial: Yes, guns can save lives, too :: 08/24/2019

After the recent massacres in El Paso and Dayton, President Donald Trump in part blamed “mental illness and hatred” as critical factors that drive mass shooters to inflict so much terror and bloodshed.

Trump’s analysis bothered Los Angeles Times columnist Scott Martelle. Martelle criticized Trump in a recent piece for trotting out “the old canard that guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” After Trump reiterated his point to a different audience, Martelle followed up in another column: “Yes, of course the person pulls the trigger. That’s how guns work. But if there was no gun in the person’s hand, there would be no trigger to pull, a reality the president conveniently omits.”

Well, anti-gun advocates often conveniently omit reality as well: guns can save lives as well as take them. We’ve seen two recent examples in Polk County.

Last week Circuit Judge Jalal Harb upheld a Winter Haven man’s claim of self-defense under Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. Johnny Ray Owsley Jr. claimed he fatally shot an acquaintance, Patrick Thrower, in 2017 after Thrower twice tried to kill him during a confrontation at Owsley’s home. Owsley said the two first argued inside the house, where Thrower pulled a gun and squeezed the trigger, only to have it misfire. Owsley then pulled his own gun and fired a warning shot. The argument continued outside the house, and Thrower again pulled his gun again and charged Owsley, who promptly shot him dead. Owsley’s account was helped when his former girlfriend, who witnessed the incident, reversed her earlier statement that Thrower did not have a weapon.

This week, also in Winter Haven, a homeowner grabbed his gun and fired a warning shot at Brandon Patterson after he threw a brickbat through the front window of his home and appeared like he would enter through the shattered opening. The man and a neighbor, whose house was also attacked by Patterson, subdued Patterson and held him at gunpoint until cops arrived.

We mention these incidents because this month, the Democratic-led U.S. House fulfilled a long-held desire by gun-control advocates by voting along party lines to provide $25 million to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for gun violence research. It’s doubtful Trump would approve the bill. But gun-control activists believe documenting firearm-related mayhem will persuade the public to support tougher gun laws.

Writing in Forbes in April 2018, though, Dr. Paul Hsieh, co-founder of Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine, suggests such a study would be meaningless if it excludes cases of “defensive gun use,” or DGU, such as happened with Thrower and Patterson. He’s right.

We can track gun violence fairly well because we can count the number of firearm injuries and deaths each year. Measuring gun usage in self-defense is trickier, however. Such incidents commonly go unreported. And, as Hsieh notes, when researchers have attempted that, they find people often lie, either to avoid legal trouble or to pose as tough guys.

Though DGU is difficult to quantify definitively, some have tried. Hsieh referred to a 1995 study by Florida State University criminology professors Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. They used federal data and other studies to estimate Americans brandished guns for self-defense 2.5 million times a year. Hsieh also noted the CDC in 2013 commissioned study that found DGU “by crime victims is a common occurrence ... at least as common as offensive uses by criminals.” That research estimated between 500,000 and 3 million times a year. Dr. Hsieh further pointed out that last year Kleck, in follow-up research, revealed the CDC had conducted surveys about DGU in the mid-1990s, but never published the results. Kleck speculated the findings were buried because “high estimates of DGU prevalence was clearly not helpful to efforts to enact stricter controls over firearms.”

Mass shootings stoke our collective fear, sorrow and anger. All of us want gun violence to end. But depriving people of the right to defend themselves would be counterproductive. As Kleck and Gertz wrote nearly a quarter-century ago: ”(M)easures that effectively reduce gun availability among the noncriminal majority also would reduce DGUs that otherwise would have saved lives, prevented injuries, thwarted rape attempts, driven off burglars, and helped victims retain their property.”

We cannot know how all DGU incidents would turn out if would-be victims were unarmed. But failing to consider firearms as life-saving tools will only keep outlaws armed, and only exacerbate the grief and misery already visited upon us.

https://www.theledger.com/opinion/20190823/editorial-yes-guns-can-save-lives-too