A conversation about gun control came up today. I seem to be in the minority in Kentucky when I express my displeasure about gun ownership. I often get asked why I don’t approve of firearms. I have a standard answer that I like to give:
“I have been a paramedic for 16 years. I have lost count of how many shootings I have responded to. All of these calls were crimes or accidents. People blow their toes off while cleaning guns. People shoot family members by accident. People kill other people during crimes. Not once have I ever responded to a shooting where someone successfully defended their home from a ‘bad guy.’ Not once.
“To continue with this…I now work for an organ procurement agency. It is my job to sit in a little room where hospitals are required to inform me of deaths. I take dozens of these calls each night. And as you can imagine, I get plenty of shootings. Again…accidents, murders, suicides…but not once has the gun related death of a ‘bad guy’ been reported here while I was clocked in.
“But wait…I’m not done. I also spent years teaching paramedic classes. I always loved to pose this question to the class: ‘Have any of you at any time in your careers ever made a run on a ‘bad guy’ who had been shot by the good guy?’ For years, everyone had to admit that this had never happened. Finally, during the last class that I taught an EMT became very animated while telling me about a call he ran where an intruder was shot. Since this was the only time I had ever heard of this in my entire career I asked some questions. Apparently an intruder was trying to forcibly enter a man’s home. So the home owner opened the door and shot him. Let me repeat this…opened the door…and shot him. So I asked the student why he didn’t just leave the door locked and call the police. I have had to do that myself when I lived in a shady apartment complex in college. It worked for me. Why did he have to aggravate the situation by opening the door and blowing someone away?
I always end my argument like so:
“So during my career as a paramedic I have responded to dozens…maybe over 100 shootings and none of them were for the reasons that gun owners cling to. Over the past couple of years I have taken hundreds of death referrals from hospitals and the same holds true. Out of all the experienced EMTs I have asked about this, only one time has anyone reported shooting an intruder, and that just didn’t need to happen. So its either 100’s to 1 or 100’s to 0. Either way, the numbers are ridiculous. This also seems to support and reflect data from real studies that have been done. So why in the hell do we allow people to own these things?
I would like to ask you the same question. If you think it is cool to tote guns around, I would like to ask you the following:
1. How many shootings have you responded to in your career? (This one is obviously for EMS folks only.)
2. How many ‘bad guy shootings’ have you run in relation to ‘oops I’m a dumbass who blew my toe off shootings’?
3. If you are a gun owner, have you ever even come close to needing to use it to defend yourself? (Really needing it, not just threatening to shoot a guy because you’re having an argument about basketball.)
4. If you never have had to defend yourself, how much money have you spent stockpiling things you have never needed?
5. If you have spent hundreds or thousands of dollars preparing for an emergency that has not happened yet, how much money do you spend preparing for other unlikely emergencies? Do you have a $500 lightning rod on your house? Is your basement stocked with MREs just incase you are cut off from food? Do you keep a wreath of garlic on your door to ward off vampires?
And before you answer these questions or comment you should know one more thing about me. Personally, I am not a pacifist. And I am not squeamish. If someone was threatening my life or the lives of my family I would not hesitate to act. A chair, a baseball bat, my bare hands…I would be willing to take a life with just about anything lying around if the circumstances necessitated the event. But I’ve been living in the same world that you have for 40 years and have never needed to use a gun. When I think of how dangerous guns are to me, how many lives they take, how many people they injure, how much money they cost…I might as well keep a rod of plutonium around my house. I’ll never need it for anything, the kids can play with it while I’m not in the room, I can slowly get cancer from it, and I would have to take out a loan to get one.
Hey, that brings up a point…are you paying interest on a loan to finance a gun you don’t need? Thanks! You’re helping our economy grow big and strong!
Here are my real views on gun control:
See link to the left for hate mail. Add angry comments below.
You make a good argument, I will be chewing on it for a while.
Just some background, I am in the middle on the gun issue. I think many people, but not all people, should be able to own them. I also think “enthusiasts” are a little crazy. No one can successfully argue to me that they need an assault rifle (or 15) to defend themselves or their home.
Anyway, my point is that I always welcome people to change my mind with a good argument. I am not sure you have convinced me completely, but you moved me in that direction.
IF you look at both sides of this argument, you will get a lot of posturing and rhetoric. It seems that everyone who studies guns used in defensive situations has an agenda BEFORE they start their research. This is true for BOTH sides on this. The absolute hands down champion for positive studies of gun ownership is a guy by the name of Gary Kleck. His Wikipedia page has a ridiculous picture of him posing with all his guns, ready to pounce on the bad guys: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kleck So…what do you think he was thinking when he designed his surveys?
But the peace/love/hippie crowd does it too. Such as the Violence Policy Center: http://www.vpc.org/studies/myth.htm. They have repeatedly been pro gun control. That political base is who provides their funding.
So, who are we to believe? When you get mired in politics, it pays to use a little common sense and not believe everything you read. So if you are reading Kleck, you may think to yourself, “Man…people defend themselves with guns so often, and the numbers are so high, then I must know several people who have defended themselves with a gun!” And that’s where this falls apart. Over the course of my life I have known thousands of people. I have hundreds or even thousands at my fingertips right now. How come I don’t know anyone who has ever successfully defended themselves with a firearm? Even though it is my job to basically screen EVERYONE who dies in Kentucky, why don’t I get calls about bad guys who have been taken out? How come I have been on an ambulance for 16 years and never seen it?
So…looking back at the Violence Policy Center information page they state that, “To put it in perspective, more people are struck by lightning each year than use handguns to kill in self-defense.” This is a lot more consistent with my experience. EXTREMELY CONSISTANT. So I think I’m going to let Mr. Kleck show off his beard, and his wall of armaments while I slowly back away.
When I posed a similar question on Facebook several months ago … looking for the news stories about armed citizens stopping a crime in progress (other than a home intruder or business robbery) I was told to check the archives of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action http://www.nraila.org/ArmedCitizen/ My scan of the archives for my state was limited but I only saw incidents about home intruders and business robberies.
I also found this gem, “In the United States, firearms are used as often as 2.5 million times each year in self defense, in the vast majority of cases without a shot being fired.” (Source: http://www.nraila.org/Issues/Faq/?s=25) Which if true makes me wonder that in my vast network of real world and face to face friends wonder why I have never had anyone tell me their personal story of self defense with a fire arm. Surely, Buck, you know someone that has used their fire arm in self defense without firing a shot.
This 2.5 million number of defended without a shot fired comes from the research of Gary Kleck who I mentioned in a previous comment. I was actually mulling this over today. Kleck argues that most studies prior to his only counted defense incidents where shots were fired or incidents where someone was killed. Kleck would argue that many robberies are thwarted by displaying your firearm and scaring the would-be attacker. This is interesting to me from several aspects. There is one school of thought (one I happen to agree with, and one that is taught in many hand gun classes) that dictates that if you pull out a gun, you better be killing someone with it. Why would anyone adopt this policy? Well, if you pull out a deadly weapon, you must need that level of force to defend yourself. If you show this to your attacker, and you don’t use it, you are merely introducing another weapon to the fight that may be used by anyone including the attacker who takes it away from you.
And as it happens, I have recently heard a story about how a co-worker (actually someone who was fired from my place of employment) who threatened a homeless man with a handgun. As the story goes, he was driving slowly down the alley in back of our workplace when a homeless man jumped onto the running board of his truck and reached in to steal change out of the ashtray. This was a bold and stupid maneuver to say the least. My co-worker pulled a gun out of his glove compartment and stuck it in the mans face, demanding his change back, and making the man get off of his car. People laugh about this incident, but when it was told to me I had a different take that was not popular among my peers. (As usual.) I said the following:
“So a homeless guy was trying to steal some change, and he threatened him with death? That’s the dumbest thing I have ever heard. What it the guy grabbed the gun and tried to wrestle it away from him? Then he is there, trying to drive down and alley and keep a deadly weapon from being taken from him. For what? Change? That’s just stupid. As soon as he pulled out that gun, there was no good outcome to that situation if the homeless dude decided to resist. What if he had actually shot that guy in the face? What would the police do to you for killing a guy over some change? That whole situation was pointless.”
They asked me what I would have done.
“I would have just accelerated until he fell off the car if I thought he was dangerous. Or maybe just kicked open the door. Or…how about this…let the sad fucker have the change and laugh it off while I drove away. I’m living in the same world you all are living in, and I have had plenty of similar things happen. I have never felt the need to use a gun to guard the precious change in my car’s ashtray.”
And so…I didn’t count this event when I was thinking about people I knew who had defended themselves because I didn’t think it was an APPROPRIATE mode of defense. Which brings up a criticism I have with Kleck’s argument. I could probably go up and ask any number of ‘countrified Kentuckians’ if they ever have used a gun to defend themselves. Would I ever hear that they woke up to some masked intruder in their home? Or would I hear a bunch of stories of peppering the neighbor’s kids asses with rock salt after some episode of cow tipping? Or threatening a homeless dude with death to save the change in their ashtray?
Study idea! We need a large survey of gun owners. We need to come up with an objective set of criteria for judging whether or not the threat of deadly force was necessary given a set of circumstances. Cops have to do this all the time. So we may be able to start with something like the cops use and modify it for private gun owners. Then every time we get a positive for gun use in self defense, we apply the criteria to see if the use of a gun was appropriate in that context. I would love to see those numbers. If Kleck is right, he is right. But my hypothesis is that the average gun owner is just itching for a reason to skin that smoke wagon so he or she can feel like a big shot. The study should also include all instances that subjects can recall when self defense was needed. Did other people have similar experiences, and were they able to solve those without a deadly weapon. As I said…I encounter annoying and invasive homeless people all the time. I don’t need a gun to get rid of them. The questionnaire could stratify people as far as education level and political affiliation as well. Are Republicans with low education levels more likely to threaten violence to solve a dispute then someone else? I think I will stop this comment before really pissing someone off…but I want to see those numbers.
I didn’t know cars still had ash trays.
He had an old truck…
An interesting question: how many of the reported incidents could have been resolved without a gun? How many were legitimate threats as opposed to perceived ones? Scaring off a drunk or an unarmed break and enter might not require a firearm. Also, there were only about 600 justifiable homicides in 2010, (including law enforcement), so it seems there’s a lot more threatening going on than actual shooting.
One thing worth noting is why we have a Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the
right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
It never was about defending one’s self or home, but of defending the country at a time when the United States didn’t have the funds to keep a large defensive standing army.
The tradition of mandatory weapons ownership and proficiency goes back to the days of the longbow in England. Every able-bodied man between twelve and sixty was required to own and practice with a longbow in the very likely event that the kingdom was invaded or their services otherwise needed for a war. That tradition went forward until modern times when private ownership of guns was severely curtailed – and the crime rates went down in England.
Today, a bunch of yahoos standing around with their OTC weapons in defense of the country (or more likely thinking about fighting against it) can be taken out from twenty miles away by a Predator drone or one round of artillery. The government has bigger, better guns. Private citizens don’t need them.
I have read a lot of stories where someone picks up a gun to shoot at someone else, but never have they successfully defended their own home before being robbed, beaten or nearly killed – at least not since 1978. I’m sure it happens, but in a country where over a million Americans have died by firearms (murder, suicide, accident, etc) since 1978 all for the sake of an Amendment which is no longer necessary (The U.S. can afford a large standing army today and doesn’t even want people to bring their own weapons to war with them), one would think the people would get tired of headlines in which a depressed family member slaughters the entire family and themselves with the gun they bought for “home protection”.
Given the number of times that kind of tragedy happens (pretty much daily), versus the number of times defending the home happens (almost never), the whole fallacy of owning a gun for home or personal protection pretty much falls apart.
Were it up to me, I’d ban the ownership of all single-handed guns and constitutionally define “arms” as, “a non-breach-loading, non-cartridge using, firearm, no less than 36 inches long, capable of an average rate of fire no greater than four rounds per minute.” That way hunters would be able to hunt and the home would be defended the way homes were back then – with a muzzle loader. They make excellent clubs once the gun’s been fired.
MY personal home defense weapon is a Wakizashi. The Katana I also have is a bit long for home defense. I have not had the occasion to use either of them on real people, but I can cut a pig’s head off in a single stroke with both of them. (Obviously, I’m not a pacifist!)
My feeling about guns is that they’re not terribly useful. If a person has to have a gun to feel safe or to defend themselves, they need to turn on their man-card and join the long line of cowards hiding behind a hunk of metal bathed in the blood of more Americans than have died in all of our wars combined.