David Frum calls BS on John Lott

Okay, so this took some research on my part, but not much. I happened to catch sight of a blogpost from GOP strategist-turned CNN pundit David Frum. In his post that you can read here, Frum implores President Obama to use the power of the Presidency to tackle the gun industry with Surgeon General Reports and Senate Panels on gun violence. Weak tea? Perhaps, but Frum points to similar success in tackling the tobacco industry in years passed. Remember, doctors used to to recommend cigarettes as a means to prevent coughing.

Former Bush-advisor turned sensible person, David Frum.

But more importantly, Frum refutes Lott's oft-repeated and bogus statistic that individual gun ownership prevents 2.5 million crimes per year, which translates to one crime deterred every 13 seconds. Frum provides a link to an earlier blogpost, written in the wake of the Aurora move theater massacre, which you can read here.

Basically, Frum cuts right to the core of Lott's sloppy research. Frum lays out five obvious flaws. Some of them are as follows:

1. Lott published his 2.5 million prevented crimes statistic in 1995. In the last 18 years, crime has decreased by one third, yet Lott and his supporters maintain that the number of crimes prevented by "good guys with guns" has remained constant. How can this be?

2. Lott did conduct a singular study from the year preceding 1995 to produce his result. Instead, his statistic is culled from 13 polls of gun users who said they used a gun to prevent a crime. And by "used" they meant owner of said gun heard a rustle in the bushes, walked outside with a gun, only to find nothing. Maybe the shotgun scared away a burglar, or maybe the wind picked up and died down. Hardly definitive methodology.

 3. The FBI counted an average of 213 justifiable homicides in the United States from 2005 through 2010. If Lott's 2.5 million number is anywhere near accurate, that would mean that defensive gun use would only result in a fatality 0.0052 percent of the time.

Which leads to Frum's final point. When one combines the actual statistics on crime with Lott's 2.5 million number, we see merely the illusion of the gun enthusiast crowd. To them, a bad guy has a gun, a good guy pulls out his gun, and problem solved. In reality, most crimes are committed among acquaintances, not strangers. Sometimes one person has a gun, sometimes both parties a gun. In either case, the likelihood of a fatality is higher than if no person had a gun, period.

Nancy Lanza thought her guns would protect her. They didn't.

His final thoughts are telling, and cut to the core of the gun culture. I will reprint, rather than paraphrase:

. . . Most of the time, gun owners are frightening themselves irrationally. They have conjured in their own imaginations a much more terrifying environment than genuinely exists -- and they are living a fantasy about the security their guns will bestow. And to the extent that they are right -- to the extent that the American environment is indeed more dangerous than the Australian or Canadian or German or French environment -- the dangers gun owners face are traceable to the prevalence of the very guns from which they so tragically mistakenly expect to gain safety.

Tragedy indeed. CNN published Frum's wise words on July 30th, 2012, five and half months before yet another "law-abiding citizen," Nancy Lanza, was shot and killed with a gun she purchased for self-protection.