Safer Streets 101: Another 'study' gets it wrong.

September 30, 10:15 AMLA Gun Rights ExaminerJohn Longenecker

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You won’t get back to safer streets by dispiriting the electorate. You won't get back to safer streets by trying to fake them out against their better judgment. A September 30, 2009 article from the University Of Pennsylvania’s School Of Medicine tries to show futility of the armed citizen in America. [Earth Times and elsewhere: Penn Study Asks, Protection or Peril? Gun Possession of Questionable Value in an Assault.]

First, ABC News tried to show that being armed on campus is a futile effort, but it failed. The content and ‘experiment’ to make their points was rigged and defective in its foundations. But, as many liberty purists are quick to point out, being armed is not futile, it works. It works more than 2.5 million times a year to de-escalate violent acts and stop them. To the way of thinking of 80 million gun owners, which is roughly about 45% of the adult population, ‘studies’ on the danger of the armed citizen and findings of futility of being armed are suspect from the git-go.

The presumption is that any study from an established institution is without bias, but the bias is blatant, evidenced by the sources of funding and the conclusions which have been impeached elsewhere (as with ABC News and others).

Penn may ask its interrogatory. Now let me ask mine.

1. What were the conditions under which armed adults were shot in making up the 6% random selection, please? Of the 677 cases, that would make the decedants number around forty persons; how were they shot, where, and by whom? It sounds as if they were ambushed. It is a question worthy of investigation.

2. Did they have a chance to draw? That is to say, did they become aware of the danger in the least, and what is the evidence for understanding whether they were aware or not and whether they drew their gun or not? Were they caught in a drive-by shooting? Without this information, the study is far from completing its stated purpose in investigating whether being armed is protection or peril.

3. Of these 677 shootings of persons who were armed, how many conditions involved so-called ‘accidental’ shootings? Many persons apprehended for shooting someone claimed that they missed their target and shot a bystander, and that it was therefore an ‘accident’.

4. Were these crime-on-crime shootings? Given the high degree of violence among the criminal portion of any city such as the city of brotherly love, such study inferences would become tainted and would be useless if these shootings were at all crime-on-crime assaults. Crime-on-crime violence is common in all crimes, making up a majority of violence stats. The concept of selling honest citizens on futility is a pretty tough sell when we know that it is not going to be relevant when criminals are ambushing their own as a significant but unreported finding.

Trying to tell law-abiding armed adults that being armed is futile is like trying to tell an old fisherman about fishing. All the data in the world will never take the place of his actual experience and the experience of all fishermen when you want to show the hazards of fishing and the futility of having a pole in the water. You don’t want to hose me down and tell me it’s raining. You don’t want to tell 90 million gun owners that being armed is futile when high numbers of shootings are demonstrable as crime-on-crime and so many millions of de-escalations result in non-shootings of the aggressor. [Once de-escalated with a show of lethal force and the willingness to use it, the situation is under control of the target and makes for few actual uses of force compared to the 2.5 million cases where, at the very, very last second, a use of force by the target was not necessary.]

Some of the researchers cannot imagine how a full-time EMS professional will see a lot of shootings in a typical career, nearly all of which are criminal shootings. Why aren’t there self-defense shootings if the gun is such a good idea?

Yes, I know that such studies are turned in for the fence-sitters and the rest of America. These are not written to change the minds of gun owners – these are written to change the nation out of liberty and independence into surrender and dependency.

But gun ownership serves a distinct purpose in a free nation, and where it is policies which tyrannize taxpayers, the polices thrive in a void created by gun control first. Crime soars in the absence of resistance, and to fill that void, government inserts itself to substitute for the lethal force that was the armed citizen. Soon, it became clear that gun control can be cloned into other areas by alleging hate and violence. Who knew? What we see today are tyrannical policies of the state over the sovereignty of the people in areas Americans never dreamed they would have to fight. Take away guns – or ammunition or over-regulate places and persons to carry – and you have a void of protection which invites the state to substitute itself in all things from banking to the retail automobile business to health care. Based on gun control, they think they know what the electorate will tolerate.

They are wrong, though, aren’t they?

The problem for the electorate has been that government cannot deliver. As soon as the electorate comes to notice that Government cannot take your place in so many other things too, it now becomes the government’s problem.

Cool.

To claim that being armed is futile is to refuse to understand what liberty is and to misunderstand the nature of the relationship between the government and the governed.

If the Republicans really want the job, they’re going to have get rid of gun control. All of it. Filling that void created by gun control will be an affirmation of what the electorate really needs to hear from the Conservatives. We’ll never get back to safer streets as long as Government thinks it can fill that void better than citizens can.

Be sure to register for my Safer Streets Newsletter.

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If guns are so good, then where are all the self-defense shootings? Safe Streets In The Nationwide Concealed Carry Of Handguns (Hardcover) is also available as an e-book.