The Defensive Gun Use Lie and the Gun Lobby’s Firehose of Falsehood - Part 11
The Defensive Gun Use Lie and the Gun Lobby’s Firehose of Falsehood - Part 11
Defensive gun use is not more effective
By: Devin Hughes
This is Part 11 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. Part 9 looked at pro-gun attempts to resurrect the defensive gun use myth in recent years. Part 10 examined the story of why the CDC removed flawed defensive gun use numbers from its “Fast Facts” website, and the resulting pro-gun firestorm.
Today we will analyze the false claim that defensive gun use is more effective at preventing injury than other forms of self-defense.
Part 11: Defensive gun use is not more effective
Gun ownership is often seen as a form of insurance, like having a fire extinguisher readily available — even if you probably won’t need it, if you do, you’ll be glad you had it. From this analogy comes the idea that engaging in a DGU is like putting out a fire, and extinguishing fires is obviously beneficial for society.
The distinction is that people don’t start fires with fire extinguishers, and when one is used, it will never make the situation worse. Indeed, even the phrase “defensive gun use” itself implies a positive outcome. After all, defending oneself or loved ones from a threat is seen as justified in American culture.
While effective and beneficial, defensive gun use is largely an unstated assumption in the broader gun debate. In the academic debate, the benefits and effectiveness of DGUs is an important and separate question from the overall number of DGUs. And for the pro-gun side of the debate, the uniform answer is that defensive gun use is common, effective, and beneficial for society.
In a 2017 Declaration of Support for a California court case, pro-gun researcher Gary Kleck wrote: “Victim DGU is generally effective (Tark and Kleck 2004). That is, it makes it less likely the victim will be injured or lose property. Consequently, a law that obstructs DGU by crime victims impairs their capacity for effective self-protection and increases the likelihood of the victims suffering injury or property loss.”
On multiple occasions, pro-gun advocate John Lott has championed the supposed benefits of DGUs, writing in a 2020 Newsweek article, “Having a gun is by far the safest course of action when one is confronted by a criminal.” And in his 2016 book, The War on Guns, he wrote, “Having a gun is by far the most effective way for people to protect themselves. That is particularly true for the most vulnerable, people who are relatively weaker physically (women and the elderly) and those who are the most likely victims of violent crime (poor blacks who live in high-crime urban areas).”
When talking about “vulnerable” populations, and particularly women, pro-gun advocates go a step further, arguing that such individuals are “defenseless” if they don’t have a gun.
As Jennifer Carlton wrote in From Gun Politics to Self- Defense Politics: A Feminist Critique of the Great Gun Debate: "The image of female frailty colors pro-gun discourse. The pro-gun lobby supports women’s armed self-defense on the premise that women are incomplete and utterly vulnerable without guns."
I turned to Dr. George Schorn, a professor at the University of Texas and founding member of the Empowerment Self Defense Alliance, to discuss self-defense for women.
As Dr. Schorn expounded:
“It is in fact common for people with no training at all to successfully defend themselves against a larger/stronger aggressor. You don’t have to be very big or strong to damage an attacker’s eyeball, or cause sufficient soft tissue damage to the groin to render them unable to walk. Some basic training in vulnerable points on the body, and simple attacks, can further increase efficacy. However, Empowerment Self Defense (ESD) models have demonstrated that a significant obstacle to teaching women to protect themselves is social conditioning, which tells us women cannot, or should not, fight back. This conditioning extends to other marginalized groups, including the LGBTQ community, and especially the disability community. Effective self-defense models will work with students to overcome the socially enforced assumption that their identity means they are weak and defenseless.”
Instead of firearms she recommends:
“Empowerment Self Defense is the best-studied, the most accessible, and the most effective (based on peer-reviewed research). ESD is a skills-based intervention that empowers students to avoid, interrupt, and defend against many forms of harassment, violation, and assault. ESD is distinct from other forms of self-defense, many of which are unsupported by efficacy research and may reproduce victim-blaming and/or violence-promoting gender norms.”
Obtaining a firearm for self-defense comes with substantial risks. As Dr. Schorn explains, there are four main risks:
“The risk of suicide. Women who are battered or suffering from emotional abuse are already more likely to feel useless, helpless, and depressed. Ready access to a firearm increases their risk of suicide dramatically.
The risk that her children, or other innocent people around her, will gain access to the weapon and cause an accidental injury or death.
The risk that the weapon will be used against her, especially by her abuser. This may be less of a risk in a stalking situation than with an intimate partner; however, unless you have trained in hand-to-hand combat, it is difficult to comprehend how chaotic gun use at close quarters can be. In my experience, fights involving a weapon almost inevitably turn into fights for the weapon — and extremely quickly. A gun is most likely to be useful if you identify an attacker as a threat while they are still quite [a] distance from you, remember that you have the weapon (I have worked with assault survivors who were armed at the time of the attack, and completely forgot about their weapon in the stress of the moment), draw the weapon, disengage the safety, aim successfully, and fire, all before the person reaches you. In domestic violence situations, an attacker is much more likely to be quite close to their victim before initiating an attack. People think it’s going to happen the way it does in the movies. It won’t.
The risk that she will use the weapon in self-defense and be prosecuted, jailed, and/or sued for doing so. This risk is especially high for women of color, who are much more likely to be criminally charged for protecting themselves physically (with or without a gun) than white women.”
One example of these risks is the case of Christy Salters Martin, a professional boxer and the owner of a concealed carry permit. When she attempted to leave her husband, he shot her with her own gun. Since then, Christy cautions other women against making the same mistake, saying: “Just putting a weapon in the woman’s hand is not going to reduce the number of fatalities or gunshot victims that we have. Too many times, their male counterpart or spouse will be able to overpower them and take that gun away.”
Indeed, one of the unstated assumptions of defensive gun use effectiveness is that the defender will have sufficient time and space to use the firearm, as Dr. Schorn details in point three. However, that is rarely the case.
As the Tueller drill taught in police academies demonstrates, it typically takes roughly two seconds for a well-trained individual to successfully deploy a firearm and fire two shots. In that time, as a memorable Mythbusters experiment demonstrated, an athletically average man can cross 20 feet. Yet in the overwhelming majority of situations, a threat is going to be within 20 feet, particularly in a domestic violence situation. So instead of being useful for self-defense, the gun becomes a lethal weapon that both the attacker and the otherwise “defenseless” victim will be fighting over in a physical contest.
The academic evidence highlights these problems with self-defense with a firearm, particularly for women.
In a 2004 study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, researchers interviewed 417 women across 67 battered women’s shelters. Nearly a third of these women had lived in a household with a firearm. In two-thirds of the homes, their intimate partners had used the gun against them, with 71.4% threatening to kill them. Only 7% of these women had used a gun successfully in self-defense, and primarily just to scare the attacking male partner away.
Indeed, gun threats in the home against women by their intimate partners appear to be more common across the United States than self-defense uses of guns by women.
For the overall population, the early evidence on the effectiveness of DGUs actually appeared promising for the pro-gun camp. A 2000 study by Lawrence Southwick in the Journal of Criminal Justice found that arming more victims “would reduce both losses and injuries from crime as well as both the criminals' incentives to commit violent crimes and to be armed.” A 2006 study by Gary Kleck and Jongyeon Tark argued that, “A variety of mostly forceful tactics, including resistance with a gun, appeared to have the strongest effects in reducing the risk of injury…”
Yet, more recent analyses have cast doubt on these findings.
As Phillip Cook and Kristin Goss point out in their book, The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know, Kleck and Tark’s study actually finds that using any weapon other than a firearm is more likely to reduce injury than a defensive gun use (see the chart below).
Further, none of the results are dramatically different from each other (the difference in injury rates in Southwick’s study were also not statistically significant between using or not using a firearm in self-defense). Both Southwick’s as well as Kleck and Tark’s surveys rely on NCVS data, which is the only source that provides detailed enough data to answer questions about injury rates.
A 2015 study by David Hemenway and Sara Solnick published in The Journal of Preventive Medicine provides a more updated look at the question.
Using NCVS data, the study found that in incidents where a victim used a gun in self-defense, the likelihood of suffering an injury was 10.9 percent. Had the victim taken no action at all, the risk of injury was virtually identical: 11 percent. Having a gun also didn’t reduce the likelihood of losing property: 38.5 percent of those who used a gun in self-defense had property taken from them, compared to 34.9 percent of victims who used another type of weapon such as a knife or baseball bat.
What’s more, the study found that while the likelihood of injury after brandishing a firearm was reduced to 4.1 percent, the injury rate after those defensive gun uses was similar to using any other weapon (5.3 percent), and was still greater than if the person had run away or hid (2.4 percent) or called the police (2.2 percent).
Overall, the evidence demonstrates that on average there is no major benefit from using a gun in self-defense.
Stay tuned for the last installment of our 12-part series on defensive gun use, which will provide some final thoughts on the defensive gun use myth and its central role in shaping America’s gun culture.
Devin Hughes is the President and Founder of GVPedia, a non-profit that provides access to gun violence prevention research and data.
Image by mokhalad musavi from Pixabay