Dimensions: 9.5'' x 6.36'' 300 pages Regnery Publishing, Inc. Publication Date: March 2003 Hardcover ISBN: 0895261146

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April 2003
The Bias against Guns
By John R. Lott Jr.

Media coverage of guns offers a skewed picture of their danger and utility. In The Bias against Guns, economist John R. Lott Jr. examines the inaccurate coverage of guns, the role of firearms in self-defense and countering terrorism, and the impact of gun-control laws such as waiting periods and regulations on gun shows.

Also the author of More Guns, Less Crime (2000), Lott is a resident scholar at AEI.

Guns receive tremendous attention from the media and government. But do these institutions do a good job of informing people about the costs and benefits of guns? Do people get an accurate picture of the tradeoffs we face with guns? The way the media and government educate people about guns has real safety implications. Just as ignoring the risks of guns can put families in danger, exaggerating the risks of gun ownership can frighten people and discourage them from owning guns to defend themselves and their families. The media and government have failed to give a balanced picture of guns.

Few people who watch the news will obtain an accurate perspective of how guns are used by Americans. For example, while Americans use guns to stop crime at least 4.5 times more frequently than to commit crime, the morning and evening national news broadcasts on ABC, CBS, and NBC during 2001 had about 190,000 words on gun crimes and zero words on cases where citizens have used guns to stop crime. The print media is little better. The New York Times had almost 51,000 words of contemporaneous gun-crime stories and only one story of 163 words on a crime that was stopped with a gun by a retired police officer.

No conspiracy explanation is needed to explain why an editor regards a dead body on the ground as newsworthy, particularly if it is a sympathetic person like a victim. Contrast that with a story in which a woman brandishes a gun and a criminal flees. No shots are fired, no crime is committed, and no one is even sure what crime would have been committed had a weapon not been drawn. Nothing bad actually happened. It is not emotionally gripping enough to make the story "newsworthy." Given that the vast majority of defensive gun uses simply involve brandishing a firearm, much of the lopsided media coverage is understandable. But as this book shows, this explanation is not sufficient to understand why crime stories already being covered nationally or even internationally leave out information on how the crime was stopped by a citizen with a gun. Nor can it explain much of the coverage involving issues such as accidental gun deaths. This imbalance in coverage gives a skewed view of the costs and benefits of guns and strongly influences the gun-control debate.

This book also shows that government research concentrates on only the costs of guns and completely ignores the benefits. While the government annually releases a list of top ten guns used in crime, there is never a list of the top ten guns used to stop crimes.

Gun-Control Laws

While this book discusses many gun-control laws, from one-gun-a-month restrictions to waiting periods to background checks to concealed-handgun laws, the primary focus is on several gun-control issues that have received much attention recently: how to reduce possible terror attacks with guns, the risks of increased gun ownership in the home, whether guns should be locked, gun-show loopholes, and assault-weapon bans.

The data allow us to answer some questions on how gun laws should be structured. Are mass killings prevented by gun-free zones? Does more training for permit holders help? Other issues are examined, such as whether shootings (or the news coverage of those attacks) lead to copycat attacks.

As to accidental gun deaths, there are many surprising findings. For example, the level of accidental gun deaths is not easily related to the level of gun ownership, though a simple fact explains this: Few accidental gun deaths involving children are caused by other children. Rather, adult males with long criminal histories who are either drug addicts or alcoholics cause the vast majority of these deaths. Additionally, when gun ownership falls or guns are locked up, it is not just general crime that increases, but criminals also become emboldened to attack people in their homes and these attacks are more successful.

This book also provides the first evidence on the impact of gun-show regulations on crime rates. Does closing the "gun-show loophole" reduce crime? Do the rules impact law-abiding people's ability to obtain guns? Given the loud debate over gun shows, these seem like basic questions, yet they have not previously been examined.

Guns and Terrorism

The issues surrounding these gun-control laws have been raised in the debate over terrorism, though in different forms. With the increased threat of terrorism, gun sales have risen despite constant media warnings about the risks of guns in the home. And finally, gun-show loopholes and assault weapons have supposedly provided criminals--as well as terrorists--with an important source of guns.

In addition to the implications for terrorism, understanding multiple victim shootings is also important from a purely theoretical perspective. Many criminals who shoot into crowds of people are diagnosed as being mentally unstable. But the evidence in this book shows that even these supposedly insane criminals generally respond to the deterrent effect of guns the way a sane person would. Indeed, the importance of incentives can be seen throughout the rest of this book.

The author acknowledges that law enforcement generally plays a central role in stopping crime. Still, he reports some surprises about the role of law enforcement in deterring multiple victim shootings, a role that is quite different than for deterring other crimes. The surprises of what works and what does not can only be thoroughly understood when considering what happens to the criminals at the crime scene.

The Bias against Guns addresses these issues from an economic--not philosophical--perspective. An economist's role is not to consider whether Americans have a "right" to own guns, keep them unlocked, sell them at gun shows, carry them wherever they go, and so on. The only objective is to study the measurable effect that gun laws have on incidents of violence and to let the facts speak for themselves.

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