Armed with Reason: The Podcast - Episode 11

Hosts Devin Hughes and Caitlin Clarkson Pereira discuss defensive gun use and the myth of the “good guy with a gun.”

(L-R) Devin Hughes, Caitlin Clarkson Pereira

---

On the eve of the release of a major paper from the Center for American Progress on the topic, GVPedia founder Devin Hughes and Executive Director Caitlin Clarkson Pereira talk about the complexities of defensive gun use and the myth of the “good guy with a gun.”

You can listen to the chat via our channel on Spotify as well as watch on YouTube, or read the transcription below.

---

We hope you’ll tune in and let us know not only what you think, but what you’d like to hear more about in the future. And if you are interested in recommending a guest, or even being one yourself, please let us know!

Given the abundance of gun violence in our country, it is critical to have the ability to discuss and advocate for a safer community. This podcast is one more way for the movement to do just that.

---

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION:

Caitlin: Hi everyone. Thank you for joining us for this week's episode of the Armed With Reason podcast, brought to you by GVPedia. While Devin and I have been coordinating lots of interesting guests who will be joining us in the upcoming weeks and months, this week we decided here together that we're just going to speak about a topic that Devin is — what I would certainly consider a subject matter expert — and that is, uh, defense of gun use. So we chose this topic first of all, because the Center for American Progress has been working with GVPedia on a joint paper about the topic of defensive gun use, and that is going to be released very shortly — actually by the time this podcast goes live it will just be about to come out. But also how defensive gun use ties to this myth of the image of the quote unquote "good guy with a gun." Right? And for me over the past couple of days learning about Uvalde, Texas, and the shooting that happened there very tragically at Robb Elementary School and the devastation that caused. And now the DOJ's 575 page report that has been released about the lack of action by the police to do essentially nothing while these poor children were inside calling 911 begging for help. And clearly the situation was, uh, volatile. But as police officers, you have a gun and you're trained to use it, especially in situations where children are in danger. And here we are — so the proverbial "good guy with a gun" failed miserably. That feels like even that feels like an understatement. In the most sincere form of cowardice that I can think of in recent times. So while I certainly wouldn't want to draw the connection that, you know, police are using guns necessarily in the defense of gun use way the same that, you know, uh, a civilian might, I think it is important to to draw that connection and to really try to understand the weight of such a report, and the fact that such a report needs to exist in the first place is really just baffling on so many fronts. So, we don't mean to start the podcast off with a negative tone, but we we did want to acknowledge that. So, Hi, Devin!

Devin: Hi. Yeah. There's just to kind of go off of that for a moment, there definitely is a parallel between the broader "good guy with a gun" myth and then defensive gun use in particular. And while defensive gun use typically relates to civilians, using a firearm in self-defense, like there definitely is an element with police as well. And in Uvalde, we saw not just one or two police officers, but dozens upon dozens of trained, highly trained, good guys with guns being held up at bay by a single lone gunman. Because they were scared to go in there and face the firepower of the AR-15. And like this was obviously a dereliction of duty at the most profound level. Like police are supposed to be trained to go in there in those certain situations, and why they didn't is a travesty that will echo down through the ages. But I think it shows, it puts the lie to the whole idea of like the gun being this sort of magical sword and shield where if you wield one, all the bad guys will flee from you and it's going to be an automatic button to prevent bad things from happening. And we just saw in that case that it clearly wasn't. Like the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun was not a good guy with a gun, or dozens of good guys with a gun in that case. And pretending that civilians are going to do much better in those sorts of situations is one of the major myths out there, and one that we're going to get into in this podcast.

Caitlin: Yes, absolutely. All of the training that those police officers received when they were in the academy as recruits, when they graduated, all of the annual trainings that they went through specifically for such incidents — and on top of that, swearing an oath to put other people's lives before your own. You're absolutely right. Forgetting to fall back on your training, on that oath, really forgetting to fall back on who you are, how you identify, because there is one person with an AR-15 inside really does show the gravity and the heaviness of of having a young person allowed access to just such a gun. Okay. So we're going to jump into the defensive gun use piece of this podcast. So first Devin, let's just start with the basics. So what does the term defensive gun use mean?

Devin: So at its most basic, it means a civilian, as opposed to somebody in law enforcement or the military, using a gun defensively. What's that mean? So it can mean firing and shooting somebody in self-defense. It can mean merely brandishing a firearm in self-defense. And by self-defense, basically, they have to be the victim of an attempted or completed crime in order to do this. Otherwise, brandishing or shooting somebody is itself a crime. So there has to be the defensive element to a defensive gun use. And that dividing line, as it were, between defensive and offensive use is a lot more blurry than most people think at first glance. Um, and we'll get into that in a little portion. But at it's very core, it's using a gun defensively. The gun does not have to be fired in order for it to be counted as a defense of gun use.

Caitlin: And we hear banter around this topic rather regularly. Whether it is specifically calling out using the term defensive gun use, or using the term a "good guy with a gun." The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. But why is that? What is the controversy around this topic specifically?

Devin: Right, so the core controversy is whether guns on net save more lives or cost more lives, or do more harm than good. And from the pro-gun side of the issue, the answer is that, or the claims are that there are millions of defensive gun users every year. Those defensive gun uses are overwhelmingly beneficial for society, and that it's the most effective means of self-defense, of preventing injury. So from the pro-gun side, while there's a lot of tragedies that happen with firearms, there's also a lot of potential lives saved from firearms. And, now what the best research shows is that's not the case. In fact, there are vastly more harmful uses then quote unquote "beneficial uses" with firearms. And so that's kind of where the core controversy lies. And it does tie a bit into everything in the gun violence prevention debate, because if the pro-gun side were correct — and to be clear, they aren't — that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, and that more guns everywhere is the best way to prevent America's gun violence epidemic — which, if you think about for more than two seconds doesn't make much sense; but it's the argument that is made — that would dramatically change the policies that one should pursue in trying to reduce gun violence. So the defensive gun use controversy is really at the core of every.

Caitlin: Yeah. The idea, I mean, we see it in a myriad of places, for me as a mother I think the the place that comes up the most is along the lines of SROs (School Resource Officers) at schools, and the ability to keep our children safe. Or maybe the perception of the lack thereof if there is not a safety resource officer available at the school. Uh, it comes up in budget debates. You know, do we have enough money to make sure that there's an SRO at every school at all times? And certainly this idea that having somebody with a gun at your school is a way to make sure that, the good guy keeps the bad guy with the gun away. But, you know, we've seen time and again situations where we have school shootings, where there are SROs present, and it's the perfect example of the good guy with a gun is unable to stop the bad guy with a gun for a variety of reasons. And we've brought up on the podcast before the shooting in Maine in the fall, and in a place where guns are pretty common in the state of Maine, for that shooter to have made it to two public spaces and for nobody to have been able to respond and neutralize the shooter, I think, also says something about this idea of a good guy with a gun versus a bad guy with a gun.

Devin: Yeah. And even with guards, like with Parkland, there was an armed security officer there who did nothing, which has been the subject of court cases since. Or if you look at the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting, the second worst mass shooting in modern U.S. History. You had an armed guard there who exchanged gunfire with the suspect before he entered the club. So there were good guys with guns present there. And then you have the egregious example, Uvalde, where you have dozens upon dozens just cowering in the hallway waiting for orders that would never come. And yet all those guns did not stop the massacre.

Caitlin: Right? So let's get into the numbers behind defense of gun uses a little bit more. Would you say defensive gun use is widespread?

Devin: So there are three main estimates out there of defensive gun use. I'll go from largest to smallest. So the largest comes from private surveys, the most famous of which was written by a guy by the name of Gary Kleck in the 1990s that indicated around 2.5 million defensive gun uses every year. Now, if you calculate that out on a daily basis, there's something I think like six to 7000 defensive gun uses every single day according to this, which you think somebody would've had evidence of or noticed. But we'll get to that in just a bit. So you have the 2.5 million number top. Then you have the National Crime Victimization Survey, which is the largest crime-based survey conducted in the U.S. either annually or semiannually. And it comes out to around 60 to 100,000 defensive gun uses. Again, this is a survey, um, it has some key differences with the private surveys like Gary Kleck's, that I'll get into, but still survey-based. And then you have the empirical data which is going out there and finding how many verified defensive gun uses are there that we can collect, where there are actually police reports or news media reports behind it. And those are collected by the Gun Violence Archive. And on an annual basis, they find somewhere between 1,400 to 2,000 defensive gun uses. So I'll just use the 2000 defensive gun uses to make things simpler. So at the top end, we have 2.5 million defensive gun uses; at the bottom end we have 2,000 defensive gun uses — which is an absolutely astronomical difference. So how did we get there? And the reason that the top numbers are so high is because they rely on surveys. So Gary Kleck's, for example, interviewed 5,000 people from across the country. 66 of those 5,000 said that they had a defensive gun use in the past year. And he then extrapolated that number to the entire U.S. population, which indicates 2.5 million. Now, while 2.5 million sounds like a large number, and it is, when compared to the U.S. Population, it's around 1% of the adult U.S. population at the time. And in surveys that's what's known as a statistically rare event. If something happens to, say, less than 5% of the population, it's going to be very rare. And what happens in these surveys is you have people who don't always answer honestly. And in surveys of statistically rare events, you're going to have a lot more potential for people to lie and say something happened to them than the reverse. And so you have what's called this false positive problem. Now The National Crime Victimization Survey tries to solve this by asking people first if they've been the victim of an attempted or completed crime. Which, going back to our defensive gun use definition, is necessary for it to be a defensive gun. If you have not been the victim of an attempted or completed crime, you are not using a gun defensively. And by merely putting that question first, the number goes from 2.5 million down to 60,000. So it's weeding out a lot of these false positives. But even there, you still have people who might falsely claim that yes, I was a victim of attempted or complete crime, when they weren't. And so we then have, well what are the verified cases. And that's where the Gun Violence Archive comes in, with around 2,000 that are reported by media and/or the police. Now, one of the pushbacks to this is on the pro-gun side is like, well, not all cases are reported to the police and therefore won't end up in media reports. Which is certainly true. Like there are likely defensive gun uses out there that never happened to be reported. But even assuming that ridiculous numbers go unreported, say like 95 or 99% of cases aren't reported, the Gun Violence Archive number is still going to be closer to reality than the 2.5 million, simply because of massive false positive problems. And so at most -- with extreme assumptions about the lack of reporting -- you can get up to maybe National Crime Victimization Survey data levels. But the 2.5 million number and other numbers around it, such as 500,000, are clearly impossible based off of the evidence that we have. And so the true number of defensive gun uses is going to be somewhere between the Gun Violence Archive number and the National Crime Victimization Survey number. So between 2,000 and 60,000, which does sound like a large range, but it's a much smaller range than 2,000 to 2.5 million.

Caitlin: Right. Well and and as you said, for it to be defensive gun use, you have to be the victim of an attempted crime or a completed crime. Therefore, why are you not reporting what happened if there was a crime that occurred? Um, so and those numbers are vastly different. And Devin, would you say that defensive gun use is beneficial for society in aggregate?

Devin: And so that's the other thing that comes along is like, well, are those claimed defensive gun uses actually legal? And there's been one study that actually looked into this, where they collected the survey responses and then put them to a panel of judges and asked them, take the respondents at their word for what happened. Is the case they're describing legal or illegal guns? And that panel judges found that more than half of the cases being claimed in surveys of defensive gun use were illegal uses — meaning that they were using the gun offensively rather than to defend themselves against some form of crime. And so if you look at the 2.5 million defensive gun use number, that would indicate that there are 1.25, at least, million defensive gun use cases that are actually illegal gun users. And so when the majority of defensive gun uses aren't actually real defensive gun uses that indicates that those whole numbers are not beneficial for society then. And the only evidence that we have so far, which unfortunately does rely on surveys, indicates that defensive gun use on a whole is not beneficial for society, and actually make society less safe because people are using guns in an aggressive fashion. And to highlight one story that we wrote about last year — this actually comes from Mark Bryant, the founder of the Gun Violence Archive. So he was perusing one of the numerous gun forums out there, and he ran across this "You won't believe what happened to me" story on there. And the story, this older white guy was walking out of this theater with his wife, and he noticed three black men in hoodies approaching, and he thought that was extremely suspicious. And so he pulled his firearm on them. And the three black men ran away. And he was bragging about how he had stopped a potential crime from occurring with that interaction. The same day Mark Bryant is on the phone with the assistant district attorney for this town. And he was like, you will not believe what happened to me. Like last night. My brother and I and a friend were walking to the movies, and all of a sudden this white guy pulled a gun on us out of nowhere, and we had to scatter. And keep in mind, this is an assistant district attorney. His brother was a medical student, as was his friend. And it was the exact same incident, of course. Now, if the white guy had been surveyed by Gary Kleck, he would have been, "Oh, absolutely. I used my gun defensively."

Caitlin: Right, right.

Devin: But as any objective observer would see, when all the facts were present, that was obviously an offensive gun use. And that's one of the major problems with the surveys of defensive gun uses is they just take the person's word for what happened.

Caitlin: Right, when in reality the truth isn't necessarily in the eye of the beholder in that situation, right? It's depends on the perspective that you have. That's very interesting. Um, and it's a good thing that that, I mean, depending on the state you live in, I guess if that gentleman had fired his gun, that situation would have unraveled for a variety of reasons. Um, but we, you know, unfortunately, we know in the history of the United States, you don't have to look back very far for somebody to say, you know, yeah, I brandished my gun and I fired because I thought this person was going to do x, y, z, and it ends up resulting in somebody very seriously injured or dead. And depending on Stand Your Ground or other laws really impacts what happens to the individual who did the shooting in the first place. But that's a podcast topic for over another day. So we've been on the podcast for a couple minutes here discussing the intricacies of defensive gun use and the the myth of the good guy with a gun stopping a bad guy with a gun. But why, at the heart of the debate, why does the defense of gun use conversation matter?

Devin: And so as I kind of alluded to very early on, it's at the heart of everything, to a degree. One of the main reasons that pro-gun advocates cross country oppose various gun laws meant to save lives is because they believe that those gun laws will make it harder for people to defend themselves with firearms. And they think that the best defense against America's gun violence epidemic is even more guns out there on the streets, and in homes as well. Even though the overwhelming academic research shows that having a gun in the home doubles your risk of homicide, triples your risk of suicide, regardless of who you are. And more guns on the street where we've had the explosion of right-to-carry laws and permitless carry laws have seen increases in aggravated assaults and even murders. But defensive gun use at it's core is behind all that opposition. And if it weren't for the defensive gun use myth there wouldn't be nearly the push to sell as many firearms and get as many people owning firearms as possible. There wouldn't be the rush after any sort of tragedy for people to go to guns as safety.

The defensive gun use myth is why average people, when they think of guns, they think it's going to protect them. You have more than 60% of Americans thinking that a firearm will keep them safer. And that's a direct result of the defensive gun use myth, which has been strategically put out there by the NRA and other pro-gun groups. The NRA information director, I think it was back in 2021, is on record basically saying that no matter what the policy is, defensive gun use is going to be at the heart of their messaging because they know that's what sells guns. And it's this myth that helps prop up that money machine for the gun industry and unfortunately, continues the spread of firearms that cause more harm to communities.

Caitlin: Yeah. When we had Jennifer Mascia on of The Trace a couple of weeks ago, we were talking about the media, and she made mention of how, you know, a mass shooting might stay -- depending on where it happens, who it happens to, and the scale — might stay in the media for an extended period of time. And what ends up happening in those situations, depending on how the story is told, is that it elicits this sense of fear, and that fear is what can drive gun sales in those situations, which obviously, as we know, right, the more guns there are, the more risk there is. But you have to do some real digging, uh, or know the places to go to find the real answers related to the number of guns and how dangerous they are, to know that rather than the human instinct, which is to protect yourself and your family, which is what drives you to respond to a tragedy by going out and buying a gun.

Devin: Yeah. And back on a personal note, I was out with friends like a month or so ago. I don't get out much. And one of the women there was like, I brought up what I've been doing over the past couple years or so; it'd been a while so we were catching up. And I mentioned gun violence prevention. And she was like, oh, gun violence prevention is fine. But being a single woman in her 20s alone is scary out there. So I need a gun, sort of thing. And just this instinctive reaction to safety means a gun, and that comes from this defensive gun use myth.

Caitlin: Right. Absolutely. And and in that situation, rattling off statistics about defensive gun use or about injuries related to having a gun in the home. You can rattle them off until you're blue in the face and it's probably not going to make a difference for that individual, right? They are nervous and they feel like they need to do something to make sure that they are safer. And so that is with arming themselves. But that whole conversation is something that we here at GVPedia try to educate folks about is how to talk to individuals who feel like guns, make them safer, or that they need it to protect livestock, or their family or their property or whatever it might be. So feel free to come back here to learn more.

Devin: Check out our Firehose of Falsehood project.

Caitlin: Right now to have conversations with individuals. Yes, the fire hose of of falsehood. And I think when I was speaking before, I said SROs were safety resource officers, their school resource officers. So this is me just making my editors correction here. So, Devin, any final thoughts that you have for our listeners on whether it's defensive gun use myth, or good guys with guns, bad guys with guns, or anything in between?

Devin: I think overall, if you're interested in learning more you can check out our defensive gun use article on GVPedia. You can subscribe to our Substack with a lot more content on defensive gun use. And stay tuned for our paper with the Center for American Progress on defensive gun use. That should come out shortly after you listen to this.

Caitlin: Yes. If you become a subscriber on our Substack, which is called Armed with Reason, just like the podcast, we will be putting out that Center for American Progress paper shortly after it is released. And like I said in our opening, we are excited about some of the really fascinating guests that we have lined up for the next couple of months. And as always, if you have any topics that you would like us to discuss here on the podcast, feel free to find us on social media, send us an email, send us a Facebook message, whatever it might be, because we certainly want to produce content that those of you who are listening would would feel like you can learn something from. So just let us know what you come up with, and we'll see what we can do. All right, well, uh, it's snowy and cold here in Connecticut. I know it's cold in lots of other places across the country, some of which aren't used to having cold. So, Devin, I hope you stay warm, and I hope that our listeners are able to to stay warm as well.

Devin: Stay inside!

Caitlin: Yes. Thanks Devin, talk to you soon.

Devin: Thanks.

---

Photo courtesy of Caitlin Clarkson Pereira.