The Defensive Gun Use Lie and the Gun Lobby’s Firehose of Falsehood - Part 9
The Defensive Gun Use Lie and the Gun Lobby’s Firehose of Falsehood - Part 9
Attempts to resurrect the widespread DGU myth
By: Devin Hughes
This is Part 9 of a 12-part series debunking the defensive gun use myth. Part 1 examined recent high-profile incidents of DGUs gone wrong, how the NRA has seized on the defensive gun use narrative to further its guns everywhere agenda, and what constitutes a DGU. Part 2 looked at the academic origins of the DGU myth and its massive flaws. Part 3 delved into why surveys of statistically rare events produce substantial overestimates. Part 4 explored the surprising parallel pro-gun academic Gary Kleck draws between defensive gun use and using cocaine. Part 5 explained how most DGUs reported in surveys are likely aggressive and illegal. Part 6 looked at the National Crime Victimization Survey’s DGU numbers as an alternative to private surveys. Part 7 investigated the lie that there are more defensive gun uses than offensive uses, and how that lie found its way into the 2013 National Academy of Sciences Report on firearms. Part 8 examined the Gun Violence Archive’s data on defensive gun use and how it debunks the widespread DGU myth.
Today we will look at pro-gun attempts to resurrect the defensive gun use myth in recent years.
Part 9: Attempts to resurrect the widespread DGU myth
When President Trump came to office in 2017, pro-gun researcher/commentator John Lott was quoted saying it was an opportunity to conduct “new research to advance the Trump agenda and pull indefensible studies done during the Obama administration,” particularly on the topic of defensive gun use. As The Trace and New Yorker reported:
“A month after Trump took office, Lott began corresponding with a top official at the Department of Justice named Ryan Newman, who now serves as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s general counsel. In an email from February, 2017, Lott wrote, ‘There were a number of ideas that I hope can be dealt with by the D.O.J.’ He brought up the DOJ’s National Crime Victimization Survey, which, he said, ‘gun control advocates use’ to ‘claim that guns are rarely used for self defense.’ He asserted that ‘it needs to be fixed by changing a couple survey questions,’ like the poll’s screener about being a crime victim, which, by reducing subjectivity, weeds out potentially millions of unreliable responses.”
In the summer of 2020, Lott received a job offer from Trump’s Department of Justice at the direction of the White House.
On October 20, 2020, Lott began working as a senior advisor, and immediately began seeking to discredit the FBI’s active shooter reports that had found very few defensive gun uses.
While the FBI managed to successfully rebuff Lott’s attempts during his three months at the DOJ, Lott continued to prop up the DGU myth by publishing error-strewn reports claiming that the FBI had missed dozens of cases of defensive gun use during active shootings.
The FBI’s active shooter research found that armed civilians halted 4.4% of active shooter cases since 2000. Lott’s study erroneously claims that at least 34.4% — and closer to 50% in recent years — have been stopped in such a fashion.
Lott’s findings, however, result from covertly expanding the FBI’s definition of an “active shooter event,” despite Lott’s false public protestations that he was following the FBI’s definition.
The FBI uses the term “active shooting” to refer to attempted mass shootings, regardless of how many people that attempt kills or injures. Lott, though, defines an “active shooting” as any shooting that occurs in public and is not part of another ongoing crime.
Lott’s study then only applies that new definition to cases in which there was a defensive gun use, while deliberately excluding thousands of cases in which a defensive gun use did not occur. This deceptive tactic allows Lott to claim that the percentage of active shooter cases stopped by a defensive gun use is vastly higher than it is in reality.
The end result is blatant statistical malpractice.
Lott’s distorted findings were then amplified by the NRA, who called Lott’s work a “bombshell,” as well Fox News, the Washington Examiner, Real Clear Politics, the Epoch Times, and even Republican Congressmen Thomas Massie and Jim Jordan. The widespread coverage of Lott’s study in conservative media circles as well as among prominent politicians indicates its effectiveness as a tool to undermine the FBI’s credibility and prop-up the widespread DGU myth.
In 2021, a new survey authored by Dr. William English was released just in time to be used in the Supreme Court case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.
The case sought to overturn New York’s long-standing firearm permitting system, particularly its “good cause” requirement, which as the name suggests requires people who wish to carry a firearm in public to have a good reason to do so (in New York City and a few other areas, this “good cause” is almost never granted).
To bolster their case, the plaintiffs argued that firearms were crucial for personal safety, and that New York was crippling the right to self-defense. In order to make this argument, the plaintiffs submitted evidence that such defensive gun use was widespread. Rather than relying on Kleck’s work though, they cited this new survey by English.
English’s work finds that 31.9% of adult Americans own firearms, and of those, 31.1% had used a gun defensively over the course of their entire lives, with a total of 9.9% of adult Americans having experienced a DGU. English then extrapolates this lifetime figure of DGUs to 1.67 million DGUs a year.
Unlike Kleck’s surveys which had 5,000 respondents at most, English’s paper had a large sample of 54,000 respondents.
However, just like Kleck’s earlier work, English did not include any protections against the false positive problem that plagues surveys of statistically rare events.
Indeed, by asking about DGUs over a person’s entire life, rather than a year, English makes the problem worse as memories become less accurate as time passes, and is therefore more likely to capture illegal and socially undesirable incidents as DGUs.
In short, there is no reason to believe that English’s new survey provides additional evidence to the DGU debate. Dr. Hemenway told us that English’s “survey seems to have the exact same problems as Kleck's and other's surveys.” As such, it is merely the newest iteration of highly flawed survey data that provides nonsensical results.
Stay tuned for Part 10 of our 12-part series on defensive gun use, which will examine the story of why the CDC removed flawed defensive gun use numbers from its “Fast Facts” website — and the resulting pro-gun firestorm.
Devin Hughes is the President and Founder of GVPedia, a non-profit that provides access to gun violence prevention research and data.