Plain Brown Rapper: In defense of the lowly handgun

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Plain Brown Rapper: In defense of the lowly handgunBy Carl BrownLEOJanuary 23, 2002"I'm no gun nut, OK? The only time I ever owned a gun, it was just for show," I wrote in LEO, April 14, 1993. I believe guns are dangerous to children and other living things. People are far more likely to get shot themselves than to shoot burglars and robbers and muggers.That said, let me make the case for the lowly handgun. Why do people buy them? I suggest it's for purposes of self-defense.A newspaper column by Dave Kopel, "Why Good People Own Guns," sets forth a couple of real-world examples that put a human face on the group known as "nefarious gun owners." He wrote:"Early one Sunday morning in November, factory worker Arthur Boone was walking home in Brooklyn after shopping in a neighborhood 'bodega.' Carl James, age 15, allegedly came up to Boone, stuck a gun to his head and ordered, 'Give it up,' while 19-year-old Taz Pell began searching through Boone's pockets. So far, a typical Sunday morning in New York."Boone then pulled out his .44 magnum, wrote Kopel, and shot both robbers dead. Each of the assailants had police records, according to the story, and one had been arrested for robbery just two weeks before. Boone, who had reportedly been mugged twice before and pistol-whipped so severely that he had required hospitalization, was arrested on weapons charges.The story also recounts an episode in Chicago in which a 16-year-old with a burglary record broke into the home of Bessie Jones, a 92-year-old widow confined to a wheelchair. "She was wheeled around and ordered to point out everything of value," Kopel wrote, and "when the burglar stepped outside for a moment to confer with his lookout, she reached under a blanket, pulled out a .38 Colt revolver and killed him."Let's face it; there was a reason guns were called "equalizers" in the Old West. Sadly, the very spectre of gun violence gives rise to the need for protection -- protection by gun ownership. Kopel cited some relevant surveys and studies that deserve quotation in full:"In a 1981 survey by pollster Peter A. Hart for the National Alliance Against Violence, 4 percent of the households polled reported at least one use of a handgun against a person in the previous five years. Even if we assume only one incident per reporting household, that's 645,000 defensive uses of handguns per year. Based on these figures, about 18 percent of people who owned handguns for protection actually used them for protection."Kopel cites a more in-depth survey conducted by Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck, in which detailed questioning weeded out respondents who confused merely owning a gun for protection with actually using it. The questions also accounted for persons who had used a gun defensively more than once."The new data showed that guns are used defensively between 850,000 and 2.5 million times a year in the United States. Most of the defensive uses involved handguns, and the vast majority of such uses do not involve firing the weapon, but merely brandishing it to scare away an attacker."The surveys of citizen use of guns for protection are consistent with surveys of criminals. In a National Institute of Justice study of incarcerated felons, 38 percent said that they had decided not to commit a particular crime out of fear that the victim might be armed."America has much more violent crime than other industrial nations, yet, oddly, America has a lower rate of burglary of occupied residences than do nations that prohibit gun ownership for protection. The best explanation is that only in America do burglars face the risk of getting shot that is as large as their risk of getting arrested."So spare the lowly handgun. As this world gets more vicious and insane, it may mean the difference between life and death. But anyway, I'm Carl Brown, Louisville's Plain Brown Rapper, and that's just my own damn opinion. If you don't like it, sue me. Just don't shoot me.Contact the writer at plainbrownrapper2001@yahoo.com http://www.louisville.com/leodisplay1.html?article=8149