Mayor Bloomber Fires Blanks Against the Innocent

THE DAILY CALLER
By Bob Barr

If you caught the Super Bowl on Sunday, you may have seen an ad
featuring New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Boston Mayor
Tom Menino claiming they “support the Second Amendment”
but want to keep “illegal guns” off the streets and “save lives.”
The ad might appear innocuous, even laudable.
After all, who doesn’t want to keep guns out of the hands of criminals?
However, the group sponsoring the ad, “Mayors Against Illegal Guns,”
is blatantly anti-gun and openly supports strict limits on the ability
of all citizens — including law-abiders — to own and possess firearms.

Of course, the media often reports on violent crime, which aides
anti-gun politicians in their never-ending crusade against firearm rights.
After all, bad and salacious news sells. The facts, however, tell
another story. According to a seminal study published in the mid-1990s
by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, firearms are used in self-defense about
2.5 million times each year in this country.

Unfortunately, news stories that feature law-biding citizens using firearms
to fend off attackers often either go unreported or wind up buried in
the back pages of newspapers, but even though these stories aren’t
being reported, a new paper from the Cato Institute confirms what
Kleck and Gertz discovered nearly two decades ago — that guns are
frequently used to ward off all manner of crimes, including assaults,
home invasions and rape.

This latest report, which undercuts Bloomberg’s message, is based
on extensive and sound factual research. Authors Clayton Cramer
and David Burnett examined more than 4,600 incidents over an
eight-year span — October 2003 to November 2011 — that involved
the use of a firearm in self-defense during a crime or some sort of serious injury.


The results are interesting. The authors found that home invasions
made up the largest share of the incidents they examined (more than
a quarter, or 1,227 incidents). They also identified 488 burglaries
where guns were used in self-defense.

Cramer and Burnett identified 14 instances where college students
in off-campus housing used firearms to defend themselves. This is
important because of the ongoing debate over whether guns should
be allowed on college campuses, which are often considered or
mandated to be “gun-free zones.” Of course, the “gun-free”
designation matters only to law-abiding citizens; criminals don’t
care about the law. That’s why there has been a rash of violent crimes
over the last couple of years on the campuses of Georgia Tech and
Georgia State University, both based in Atlanta. Lives could have
been saved if students at those schools were allowed to carry weapons.

For Cramer and Burnett, the evidence leads to the obvious conclusion
that the “rationale for [anti-gun] legislation is to reduce accidental
shootings and the criminal use of guns against people, but if harm
reduction is the goal, policymakers should pause to consider how
many crimes — murders, rapes, assaults, robberies — are thwarted
by ordinary persons who were fortunate enough to have immediate
access to a gun.”

None of these facts will matter to Bloomberg and his anti-gun cohorts,
whose crusade to disarm all potential victims of criminal assault will
continue unabated. These misguided nanny-staters continue to prove
the point that Winston Churchill made many years ago:
People may occasionally trip over the truth, but most of them simply
pick themselves up, dust themselves off and continue merrily on their way.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of
Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He provides regular commentary
to Daily Caller readers