Myth-Busting Monday
Myth-Busting Monday
MYTH: Gun owners shoot someone they know after mistaking them for an intruder between five to eleven times each year
This article was originally published on GVPedia.
Summary:
Researcher John Lott claims that gun owners shoot someone they know after mistaking them for an intruder between five to eleven times each year.
While still rare, about 29 people are reported to have been shot every year due to mistaken identity.
Lott’s Claim:
In his 2020 book, Gun Control Myths, Lott claims that gun owners accidentally shoot between five to eleven people each year because they mistook them for intruders.
Lott argues: “Does law-abiding gun ownership pose a risk to innocent neighbors? While there are no official government statistics on people accidentally shooting people they know (having mistook them for intruders), we used Nexis news searches from 2011 to 2013 to get a rough idea of the frequency of these cases. Though each incident garnered news stories in major U.S. media outlets (USA Today, CNN, Fox News, New York Daily News), it is amazing how rare these cases are. We found eight such tragedies in 2013, eleven in 2012, and only five in 2011.”
The Facts:
In reality, there are roughly four times as many shootings as Lott claims involving a gun owner mistaking a person they know for an intruder.
The most accurate data on this particular aspect of gun violence comes from the nonpartisan nonprofit Gun Violence Archive (GVA), which compiles data from more than 7,500 police and media sources.
The Gun Violence Archive identified an average of 28.6 incidents per year in the United States:
31 cases in 2016
43 cases in 2017
19 cases in 2018
30 cases in 2019
20 cases in 2020
Combined, these cases resulted in 54 deaths and 91 injuries. Compared with nearly 39,513 gun deaths in 2019 alone, these figures are relatively small. However, the yearly totals are, on average, quadruple those found by Lott’s research.
It is also important to note that cases of mistaken identity might not be reported to the police or labeled as unintentional if the shooting isn’t fatal (or the shooter missed), so GVA’s number is almost certainly an undercount.
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