My town, New York City, enforces rigid gun laws. Police refused to assign me a gun permit. The law doesn't even let me hold a fake gun on TV to demonstrate something.
But New York politicians are so eager to vilify gun ownership that they granted an exception to the anti-gun group States United to Prevent Gun Violence. New York allowed States United to set up a fake gun store, where cameras filmed potential gun customers being spoofed by an actor pretending to be a gun-seller.
States United then made that footage into an anti-gun public service announcement. "Over 60 percent of Americans think owning a gun will make them safer. In fact, owning a gun increases the risk of homicide, suicide and unintentional death," says the video.
It's a powerful message. But it's a lie, says John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center. He says that gun control advocates lie all the time.
Lott acknowledges the tragedies. Sometimes a gun in the home is used in a homicide or suicide, or leads to accidental death, but he adds, "It also makes it easier for people to defend themselves—women and the elderly in particular."
Lott says, "Every place in the world that's tried to ban guns... has seen big increases in murder rates. You'd think at least one time, some place, when they banned guns, murder rates would go down. But that hasn't been the case."
I pushed back: what about people harming themselves?
"There are lots of different ways for people to commit suicide," Lott said, and researchers have looked at how those tragedies are affected by access to guns. "We find that people commit suicide in other ways if they don't have guns."
What about accidents? Lott replies that accidental shooting deaths are relatively rare: "about 500 a year." That sounds bad, but about 400 Americans are killed by overdosing on acetaminophen each year (most of them suicides), and almost as many Americans drown in swimming pools.
"It would be nice if it was zero (but) consider that 120 million Americans own guns," Lott says.
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