CPRC discussed extensively at Fox News: Gun crimes grab most media attention, while gun use in self-defense gets merely a fraction: experts
Dr. John Lott was interviewed extensively for this news report at Fox News.
Americans across the country have used legal guns to defend themselves and thwart crimes, but the reports often fly under the radar and most people are unaware how often guns are used in self-defense cases.
“Having a gun is by far the safest course of action when people are facing a criminal by themselves,” Dr. John Lott, an economist and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, told Fox News Digital. He pointed to women in particular, who “behave passively” and are “about 2.4 times more likely to end up being seriously injured than a woman who has a gun to protect herself.”
As crimes skyrocketed in major cities since 2020, instances of women using guns to protect themselves and stop crimes have repeatedly played out. . . .
Lott said there are about 2 million defensive gun uses per year, according to the average of 18 national surveys. . . .
Lott said that people using guns in self-defense overwhelmingly don’t even lead to a criminal being killed or wounded.
“Ninety-five percent of defensive gun uses involve merely brandishing a gun, and less than 1% involve the attacker being killed or wounded. But most news stories only report on cases where attackers are killed and brandishings are ignored. It is understandable that someone getting killed is more newsworthy than a woman brandishing a gun and the criminal running away without committing a crime, but from a policy perspective we care about both cases,” he said. . . .
It’s a trend that has washed across the nation since 2020. The number of concealed handgun permits surged to 21.52 million in 2020, a 48% increase since 2016 and a 10.5% increase from the same time last year, according to a study conducted by the Crime Prevention Research Center released in October.
Lott said that last year, “women made up 28.3% of permit holders in the 14 states that provide data by gender.” While permitted concealed carry among Black Americans grew 135.7% faster than their White counterparts.
“The people who benefit the most from owning guns are also the ones who are the most likely victims of violent crime — poor Blacks who live in high crime urban areas,” according to Lott. . . .
To Lott, what most people miss amid the emphasis on gun crimes is that “over 92% of violent crime has nothing to do with guns.”
“The data shows that while violent crime reported to police rose 5% between 2019 and 2020, you can’t blame that increase on guns because gun crimes actually fell by 27%,” he said.
“The bottom line is that if you want to reduce gun crime, you do the same things that you do to reduce violent crime generally, and that is make it riskier for criminals to commit crime.”
