As you surely know by now, several U.S. cities have filed lawsuits against American firearms manufacturers, and dozens more are reportedly considering filing lawsuits of their own. I say it's time to meet these political profiteers and ambulance-chasing trial attorneys head-on. Our most potent weapon is the truth: Guns make society safer. They save cities far more tears and treasure than criminals with guns could ever cost.
Instead of suing the firearms industry for the costs of criminal violence, if anything, those mayors should pay gunmakers for the peace-dividend savings that gun ownership affords.
So let's set the record straight with a look at just a few of the lifesaving, public-fund-preserving, society-safeguarding, quality-of-life-improving, countless daily decisive contributions that firearms ownership makes to our society.
Award-winning criminologist Dr. Gary Kleck, of Florida State University, has calculated that Americans use firearms to stop criminal attacks--usually without firing a shot--up to 2.5 million times each year. Comparing that statistic with the number of crimes committed with guns, he concluded that ''the best available evidence indicates that Americans use firearms three to five times as often for defensive purposes as for criminal purposes.''
That raises critical questions someone should demand these mayors and their lawyers answer: How many innocents aren't murdered, how many daughters aren't raped, how many storekeepers aren't robbed and how many pensioners aren't beaten to death simply because they own the lifesaving tools produced by the American firearms industry?
If you want living, breathing proof, just look at ‘‘The Armed Citizen’’ section of this magazine each month, and its dozens of crimes prevented, victims protected and tragedies averted. They represent many more that don't make it into the news each day.
How many lives are saved in total? We can never know for sure. After all, most of the time, no one is hurt, no shot is fired and no police report is ever filed. And even when the incident is reported to police, the media generally ignore it since it undercuts their gun-ban agenda.
But look at the facts. Of those 2.5 million citizens who used a gun to stop a crime, Kleck found that 17 per-cent--or roughly 400,000--believed that without the firearm, someone would have been killed. How many fewer innocent lives lost would that translate to in the average U.S. city? And how much money does it save for city coffers--money now used to sue the very industry that makes such savings possible?
You don't have to be a genius to know that criminals prefer defenseless victims. In fact, a National Institute of Justice survey of imprisoned felons found that the one thing criminals fear most isn't police, prosecution or imprisonment--but a victim who turns out to be armed. If there's even a chance of that, predators think twice.
So the bigger question is this: How many citizens aren't murdered, raped, robbed or assaulted not because they're armed but because criminals can't tell who's armed and who isn't.
Researchers John Lott and David Mustard of the University of Chicago tried to figure that out. They examined FBI crime statistics for all 3,054 American counties from 1977 to 1992 to understand how ''shall issue,'' Right-To-Carry firearms laws affected crime rates. Their findings:
If the states without "shall issue" concealed firearms laws had adopted them in 1992, approximately 1,500 murders, 4,000 rapes, 12,000 robberies and 60,000 aggravated assaults could have been prevented each year.
As this is written, Miami is waging a lawsuit against gun manufacturers, but the fact is that firearms have made Miami safer. Florida passed a shall-issue, right-to-carry law in 1987. Its effect on violent crime was immediate and impressive.
So let's demand that these money-hungry mayors and trial attorney vultures stop playing political games with lawsuits against Second Amendment freedom. Let's make them face the bottom-line truth: Exercising the right to keep and bear arms makes their citizens safer.