Cold Comfort: An Interview with John R. Lott

Economist John Lott discusses the benefits of guns--and the hazards of pointing them out.

Jacob Sullum & Michael W. Lynch from the January 2000 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

Lott: Most of these attacks do end in the death of the attackers themselves, frequently from suicide, but also because they're killed by others. But part of what's motivating them is the desire to harm other people, and to the extent that you can take that away from them, I think you reduce their incentive to engage in these attacks. Whether they do it just because they intrinsically value killing people or whether they do it because of the publicity, the fact that there might be a citizen there who can stop them well before the police are able to arrive takes away, in their warped minds, some of the gain from the crime, and stops a lot of them from doing it.

Reason: You often say, based on surveys, that Americans use guns to fend off criminals more than 2 million times a year. But in the book, you note that people who report incidents of armed self-defense could be mistaken or lying. How big a problem is that, and how confident can we be that the true number is more than 2 million?

Lott: Well, 2 million is the average of the various surveys. Different problems may plague different surveys, and the problems can go in both directions. You may have questions that weed out people who shouldn't be weeded out.

Reason: Like "Do you own a gun?"

Lott: Or it could be you ask them "Has a crime been committed against you?" before you ask them whether they've used a gun defensively.

Reason: And they might not consider it a crime if it wasn't completed?

Lott: Right. And so, we have errors that can exist on both sides....But that's the only type of evidence that we have on this....The most striking thing to me is the comparison between the results from these surveys and [survey data on] the number of violent crimes that are committed with guns each year. You see many more crimes that are averted by people who defend themselves with guns. I think that difference--even though both sets of numbers can be tainted for all the same reasons--is what's striking.

Reason: You say that resistance with a gun is the safest option when confronted by a criminal. What's the basis for that conclusion?

Lott: You hear claims from time to time that people should behave passively when they're confronted by a criminal. And if you push people on that, they'll refer to something called the National Crime Victimization Survey, a government project that surveys about 50,000 households each year. If you compare passive behavior to all forms of active resistance lumped together, passive behavior is indeed slightly safer than active resistance. But that's very misleading, because under the heading of active resistance you're lumping together things like using your fist, yelling and screaming, running away, using Mace, a baseball bat, a knife, or a gun. Some of those actions are indeed much more dangerous than passive behavior. But some are much safer.

For a woman, for example, by far the most dangerous course of action to take when she's confronted by a criminal is to use her fists. The reason is pretty simple: You're almost always talking about a male criminal doing the attacking, so in the case of a female victim there's a large strength differential. And for a woman to use her fists is very likely to result in a physical response from the attacker and a high probability of serious injury or death to the woman. For women, by far the safest course of action is to have a gun. A woman who behaves passively is 2.5 times as likely to end up being seriously injured as a woman who has a gun.

Reason: Why does the mainstream press seem to downplay the value of armed self-defense?

Lott: One question is, Why don't they report people using guns defensively? If I have two stories, one where there's a dead body on the ground vs. another where, say, a woman has brandished a gun and a would-be rapist or murderer has run away, with no shots fired and no dead body on the ground, it's pretty obvious to me which one of those is going to be considered more newsworthy. It doesn't require any conspiracy. Now if we care about policy, if we care about what types of actions are going to save the most lives, or prevent the most crimes, we want to look at both of those cases: not only the newsworthy bad events but the bad events that never become newsworthy because they don't occur.

But I don't think that explains everything. One example is gun deaths involving children. My guess is that if you go out and ask people, how many gun deaths involve children under age 5, or under age 10, in the United States, they're going to say thousands. When you tell them that in 1996 there were 17 gun deaths for children under age 5 in the United States and 44 for children under age 10, they're just astounded. There's a reason why they believe these deaths occur much more frequently: If you have a gun death in the home involving a child under age 5, you're going to get national news coverage. Five times more children drown in bathtubs; more than twice as many drown in five-gallon water buckets around the home. But those deaths do not get national news coverage.

This type of news coverage has consequences, because it affects people's perceptions of the benefits and costs of having guns around. Concentrating on gun deaths in the home, exaggerating the risks of that, creates a false impression. People are going to die because of that false impression. They're not going to have guns in the home, even though that's by far the safest course of action for them to take when they're confronted by a criminal. You may prevent some of the accidental deaths, but you're going to create other types of deaths because people won't be able to defend themselves.

I think the debate would be so different now if, even once in a while, some of the life-saving uses of guns got some attention in the news. A couple of the public school shootings were stopped by citizens armed with guns well before the police were able to arrive. Or take the case of the day trader shooting in Atlanta, which got huge attention. Within 10 days after that, there were three separate attacks in the Atlanta area that were stopped by citizens with guns, in two cases permitted concealed handguns. They got no attention outside of the local media market.