How many crimes are prevented by citizens with guns

A Factual Look at Guns in America. Share Tweet Email Post. Households Own a Gun Source. Citizens Source. Guns vs. Homicide While the number of guns manufactured in the U. Things That Kill More People Than Rifles Here are a list of 5 things politicians could ban that would actually save more lives than an assault rifle ban. Rifle homicides in were Contents show. Households Own a Gun. Criminal Acquisition of Guns 0. Concealed Carry 8. Rifle Stats 1 Murder per 55, Rifles Owned.

Kleck and Getz's survey could overestimate self-defense use by including such ambiguous uses. Kleck counters that the NCVS might underestimate self-defense because people who do not trust government surveyors will be afraid to admit that they used their gun.

Yet people who participate in the NCVS are told at the start that they are protected under federal law and that their responses will remain anonymous.

A closer look at the who, what, where and why of gun violence also sheds some light on the self-defense claim. Most Americans with concealed carry permits are white men living in rural areas, yet it is young black men in urban areas who disproportionately encounter violence. Violent crimes are also geographically concentrated: Between and , half of all of Boston's gun violence occurred on only 3 percent of the city's streets and intersections.

And in Seattle, over a year-period, every single juvenile crime incident took place on less than 5 percent of street segments.

In other words, most people carrying guns have only a small chance of encountering situations in which they could use them for self-defense. Yet these numbers don't resonate with many gun owners. In a June study, researchers surveyed American gun owners about why they owned handguns, reporting that 88 percent bought them for self-defense; many felt they were likely to become targets of violent crime at some point.

This belief is so pervasive that companies have even started selling self-defense insurance. At the lecture I attended in Stone Mountain, a representative of Texas Law Shield, a firearms legal defense program, tried to get me to sign up for a service that would provide free legal representation in the event that I ever shot someone to protect myself. But even as the belief that we are all future crime targets has taken hold, violent crime rates have actually dropped in the U.

According to the FBI, rates were a whopping 41 percent lower in than they were in The NRA attributes this decrease to the acquisition of more guns. But that is misleading. What has increased is the number of people who own multiple guns—the actual number of people and households who own them has substantially dropped. These laws allow people to kill in self-defense when they feel they are in danger.

Progun groups argue that they should deter crime because criminals will know that victims have no reason not to fight back. And a study found that states that adopted these laws experienced an abrupt and sustained 8 percent increase in homicides relative to other states.

But some argue that even an unused gun can thwart crime. The logic here is that in areas with high rates of concealed carrying, criminals don't want to victimize people who might have guns, so they don't commit violent crimes. The most famous study, published in by John R. Lott, Jr. Mustard, an economist now at the University of Georgia, looked at county crime rates in several states that had passed laws making it easy to get gun permits at various times prior to They compared such rates to crime levels in places that did not have easy access to guns during that period.

Their hypothesis: when areas make it easier for people to get permits, more people will get guns and start carrying—and then violence will drop. Lott and Mustard developed a model, based on this comparison, that indicated that when it was easier to get permits, assaults fell by 5 percent, rapes by 7 percent and murders by 7. Lott went on to publish a book in called More Guns, Less Crime , which tracked concealed carry laws and crime in more than 3, counties and reported similar findings.

Many other researchers have come to opposite conclusions. John Donohue, an economist at Stanford University, reported in a working paper in June that when states ease permit requirements, most violent crime rates increase and keep getting worse.

A decade after laws relax, violent crime rates are 13 to 15 percent higher than they were before. And in the National Research Council, which provides independent advice on scientific issues, turned its attention to firearm research, including Lott's findings.

Lott's models, they found, could be tweaked in tiny ways to produce big changes in results. There are a far larger number of studies that suggest that it has, on balance, detrimental effects.

It is crucial, though, to distinguish the leadership of progun organizations from their constituents, who often have more nuanced opinions. In Nelson, like Kennesaw, passed a law mandating that residents own guns, but the ordinance was relaxed later that year in response to a lawsuit. According to a survey published by Johns Hopkins University researchers, 85 percent of gun owners support background checks for all gun sales, including sales through unlicensed dealers—even though the NRA strongly opposes them.

I heard a lot more about divergence from NRA positions on my last stop in Alabama: Scottsboro Gun and Pawn, a shop perched at the end of Broad Street, one of the town's main drags. The co-owner, Robert Shook, told me about the ongoing push in the Alabama State Senate to eliminate concealed carry permits altogether, a move that would make it legal for anyone older than 18 to carry a hidden gun. The bill passed in the Alabama Senate in April of this year but did not come up for a vote in the state's House of Representatives during the session.

They're throwing common sense out the window. The belief that more guns lead to fewer crimes is founded on the idea that guns are dangerous when bad guys have them, so we should get more guns into the hands of good guys. In in Ionia, Mich. As I drove from Scottsboro to Atlanta to catch my flight home, I kept turning over what I had seen and learned. Although we do not yet know exactly how guns affect us, the notion that more guns lead to less crime is almost certainly incorrect.

The research on guns is not uniform, and we could certainly use more of it. But when all but a few studies point in the same direction, we can feel confident that the arrow is aiming at the truth—which is, in this case, that guns do not inhibit crime and violence but instead make it worse.

People, all of us, lead complicated lives, misinterpret situations, get angry, make mistakes. And when a mistake involves pulling a trigger, the damage can't be undone. Unlike my Glock-aided attack on the zombie at the gun range, life is not target practice. This article was originally published with the title "Journey to Gunland" in Scientific American , 4, October Obstacles to Firearm and Violence Research.

Arthur L. Kellermann in Health Affairs , Vol. John R. Mustard in Journal of Legal Studies , Vol. Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review. National Research Council. National Academies Press, Matthew Miller et al. Michael Siegel et al. Wolfgang Stroebe et al. Firearms, Violence and Public Policy. Franklin E. Zimring; November Credit: Nick Higgins. Even a fifth-grader could tell you that it would be largely the innocent who would be disarmed.

Criminals would have no problem keeping their guns or getting replacements on a thriving black market. So that leaves me with gratitude for the Ben McCoys of the world, the law-abiding gun owners who are every bit as important as the cops—and likely even more so—in the effort to keep the innocent safe and sound.

Lawrence W. He is author of the book, Was Jesus a Socialist? His website is www. Please, enable JavaScript and reload the page to enjoy our modern features. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.

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