TTAG and Dan Baum

TTAG has posted a new article written by Dan Baum entitled "Question of the Day: How Can Gun Owners Lead by Moral Example?" Baum is the author of Gun Guys: A Road Trip, but has written various pieces in the past attacking private gun ownership for various magazines and newspapers, although he appears to have toned down his articles in the last couple years. He portrays himself as an anti-gun liberal who has converted to liking firearms. However, I first came across his name several years ago when he was trolling gun and survival boards trying to find gun owners to interview about caching weapons. 

Anyway, Baum's article at TTAG is a typical 5th column attack on private gun ownership. It starts out with a seemingly reasonable question: how to gain the moral high ground in the public debate over gun rights. Baum is no idiot: he recognizes that merely because something is a "natural right" or "God given right," it is not safe from a government attempting to curtail it. He then writes:

All guns start as the legal purchases of law-abiding people, who then lose control of them. When a child finds a loaded gun and kills herself or a playmate, it’s because a law-abiding gun owner let it happen. When a teenager gets ahold of a gun and commits suicide or worse, a law-abiding gun owner let it happen. Most guns used in violent crime are stolen, usually from law-abiding people who leave them unsecured. The majority is not wrong for wanting this nonsense to stop. 

The truth is that while each of us individually may believe he’s careful, as a community we are fatally sloppy. We have been so focused on bleating about our rights, that we have lifted our eye from our responsibilities. It is only by rediscovering, as a community, our commitment to the awesome responsibility of owning something as lethal as a firearm that we will ultimately secure our rights. 

We need to take the lead on reducing firearm accidents, suicides, and homicides away from Shannon Watts and Michael Bloomberg and the Brady Center — who don’t understand firearms at all — and reclaim that leadership for ourselves, who do. We need to demonstrate to the majority, by our moral example, that our right to keep and bear arms is not a zero-sum game — we win and you lose, or vice versa — but that an armed citizenry is good for everybody, gun owner and non-gun owner alike.

The flaw with Baum's argument is that it requires gun-owners to concede something that is not true--that gun owners are careless, and that this carelessness leads to gun deaths. John Lott looked into this issue in an article entitled "Children and Guns: The Fear and the Reality." He observed:

The CDC reports that for 2010 (the latest year available), one single six-year old died from a gunshot. For all children younger than 10, there were 36 accidental gun deaths, and that is out of 41 million children. Perhaps most important, about two-thirds of these accidental gun deaths involving young children are not shots fired by other little kids but rather by adult males with criminal backgrounds. In other words, unless you send your child to play at a criminal’s home, she is exceedingly unlikely to get shot. 

Indeed, if you are going to worry about your child’s safety you should check into other, perhaps less obvious dangers lurking in the playmate’s house: swimming pools, bathtubs, water buckets, bicycles, and chemicals and medications that can cause fatal poisoning. Drownings alone claimed 609 deaths; fires, 262 lives; poisonings, 54 lives. And don’t forget to ask about the playmate’s parents’ car and their driving records if your child will ride with them: After all, motor-vehicle accidents killed 923 children younger than 10.

It seems to me that I did some rough calculations as to the danger posed by swimming pools, and based on the number of swimming pools versus the number of deaths by drowning, a swimming pool was some 10,000 times more dangerous to a child than a firearm. Lott also noted that laws requiring owners to lock up firearms were less than useless:

My research on juvenile accidental gun deaths for all U.S. states shows that mandates that guns be locked up had no impact. What did happen in states with such mandates, however, was that criminals attacked more people in their homes and crimes were more successful: 300 more total murders and 4,000 more rapes occurred each year in these states.

Moreover, there is no correlation between homicide rates and gun ownership.  As even the highly biased Guardian notes:

From an international perspective, the US clearly has a problem - despite having less than 5% of the world's population, it has roughly 35-50% of the world's civilian-owned guns. [ed. And that's bad how?].

The United States has 88 firearms per 100 people. Yemen, the second highest gun ownership country in the world has 54.8. The third and fourth biggest countries may also come as a surprise - Switzerland (45.7) and Finland (45.3).

As a percentage of all murders, firearms are the most deadly in places like Puerto Rico and Sierra Leone where they account for 95% and 88% of homicides. The US also slides down the global rankings when homicide by firearm victims are looked at per 100,000 of the population - the figure is 2.97 for the United States, in stark contrast to Jamaica's 39.4 per 100,000 or Honduras's 68.43.

As Daniel Greenfield discusses in this December 2012 article at Front Page magazine, most of the murders in the U.S. occur in the large, Democratically controlled cities--that have strict gun control. That is, the U.S. has a gang problem, not a gun problem.

Chicago’s murder numbers have hit that magic 500. Baltimore’s murder toll has passed 200. In Philly, it’s up to 324, the highest since 2007. In Detroit, it’s approaching 400, another record. In New Orleans, it’s almost at 200. New York City is down to 414 from 508. In Los Angeles, it’s over 500. In St. Louis it’s 113 and 130 in Oakland. It’s 121 in Memphis and 76 in Birmingham.

Washington, D.C., home of the boys and girls who can solve it all, is nearing its own big 100.

Those 12 cities alone account for nearly 3,200 dead and nearly a quarter of all murders in the United States. And we haven’t even visited sunny Atlanta or chilly Cleveland.

 He also explains:

A breakdown of the Chicago killing fields shows that 83% of those murdered in Chicago last year had criminal records. In Philly, it’s 75%. In Milwaukee it’s 77% percent. In New Orleans, it’s 64%. In Baltimore, it’s 91%. Many were felons who had served time. And as many as 80% of the homicides were gang related.

Chicago’s problem isn’t guns; it’s gangs. Gun control efforts in Chicago or any other major city are doomed because gangs represent organized crime networks which stretch down to Mexico, and trying to cut off their gun supply will be as effective as trying to cut off their drug supply.

America’s murder rate isn’t the work of the suburban and rural homeowners who shop for guns at sporting goods stores and at gun shows, and whom news shows profile after every shooting, but by the gangs embedded in the urban areas controlled by the Democratic machine. The gangs who drive up America’s murder rate look nothing like the occasional mentally ill suburban white kid who goes off his medication and decides to shoot up a school. Lanza, like most serial killers, is a media aberration, not the norm.

National murder statistics show that blacks are far more likely to be killers than whites and they are also far more likely to be killed. The single largest cause of homicides is the argument. 4th on the list is juvenile gang activity with 676 murders, which combined with various flavors of gangland killings takes us nearly to the 1,000 mark. America has more gangland murders than Sierra Leone, Eritrea and Puerto Rico have murders.

Our national murder rate is not some incomprehensible mystery that can only be attributed to the inanimate tools, the steel, brass and wood that do the work. It is largely the work of adult males from age 18 to 39 with criminal records killing other males of that same age and criminal past.

(See also here). So basically, even with gang related deaths, the U.S. has a low murder rate; and without them, the U.S. is comparable to Western Europe. (See also this article at U.S. Conservatives).

So, no, gun owners should not concede that they have a problem with carelessness with firearms.