Government

On Gun Control And Defensive Gun Use

No one's counting the number of times that merely displaying a gun resolves a conflict.

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999438Gun rights advocates love to tell us that the presence of “a good guy with a gun” can stop crimes.

Conservative websites regale us with stories of when a bystander to a crime possessed a gun and used the weapon to injure or kill the criminal (or otherwise stop the crime).

Those stories, of course, are of the “one in a million” type. Far more often, the presence of a gun in a household permits one spouse to shoot (rather than, for instance, stab) the other during an argument or permits a depressed person who would otherwise attempt suicide with pills to instead attempt suicide with a gun (with a far more certain outcome).

On balance, I’m a gun control sort of guy.

But there’s one issue that does give me pause: defensive gun use.

Many people who talk about defensive gun use emphasize the actual discharge of a gun — the victim who shoots the attacker or the bystander who shoots the criminal. Those are the dramatic examples of defensive gun use. These events are often reported to the police, and there’s some data on how often those things occur.

The more interesting aspect of defensive gun use is the mere defensive display of a weapon, with the weapon never being discharged.

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Think, for example, of a bouncer in a gritty bar. The patrons of the bar start to get out of hand; the bouncer displays a gun; the patrons then either behave or disperse. That defensive display of a gun surely served a useful purpose, but no one will ever report that incident to the police. The benefits of that type of gun ownership go unrecorded.

Or think of a pimp who’s having some trouble with an unruly john. The pimp displays the gun; the john slinks away. Is anyone reporting that beneficial display of a gun to the police?

Or during a drug deal. One side is about to steal the drugs; the other side displays a gun; the theft does not occur. Is anyone reporting that to the police?

These are imponderable examples. There’s no data on these types of defensive displays (but not discharges) of guns, because they go unreported to the police. Since there’s no reliable data, people can only speculate about how beneficial these displays are.

Surely there are many of these defensive displays of guns every year. Surely the displays do some amount of good. And surely that good should not be overlooked in the public debate on gun control.

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But it is, because there’s no useful data about defensive displays of guns that can be discussed.

I can’t provide the missing data. But I can increase the odds that you, at least, will not overlook the benefits of defensive displays of guns when you think about the issue in the future.

Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and later oversaw litigation, compliance and employment matters at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Drug and Device Product Liability Litigation Strategy (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.

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