PA Bill Number: HB335
Title: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons.
Description: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons. ...
Last Action: Removed from table
Last Action Date: May 1, 2024
CPRC: New Violence Policy Center "study" on guns recycles old claims using Justifiable Homicide data :: 06/17/2015
The Hill Newspaper reports on a “new” Violence Police Center (VPC) study.
A new study attempts to debunk the claim that gun owners rely on their firearms for self-defense.
The Violence Policy Center released a study Wednesday that finds people are much more likely to use a gun to kill someone without cause than to protect themselves.
According to the study, gun owners committed 259 justifiable homicides compared to 8,342 criminal homicides in 2012, the most recent year data was available.
That means gun owners are 32 times more likely to kill someone without cause than to act in self-defense, the study reasoned. . . .
The comparison of justifiable homicide numbers to murders with guns is a very old claim.
1) The data on justifiable homicides is useless. It is very bad for police (only about 1 percent of police departments report justifiable homicides by police and see also here) and the numbers are even worse for civilian justifiable homicides. Even the places that report this data don’t really have any incentive to get the numbers correct. For example, see this investigative study for Michigan.
One reason those numbers are low is simple, MLive’s investigation found.
Police are reporting the cases as criminal homicides. When it’s later determined to be justifiable, they don’t change the easy-to-recode electronic records. It’s as simple as changing a “1” to a “4.”
That was the case in Kalamazoo County, where FBI statistics show only one justifiable homicide between 2000 and 2010. There were eight, three by civilians and five by police, MLive found.
“It’s all a data-input problem,” Kalamazoo Public Safety Chief Jeff Hadley said. “What happens is when the initial reports are generated, it’s coded as a homicide. It never gets recoded.” . . .
In addition, while more than half the states report a justifiable homicide number, but that hides the fact that very few jurisdictions within those states that report the number actually compiled the numbers.
2) The notion that one should compare cases where a criminal is killed with all cases of murders with guns is flawed in many ways. It assumes that if you banned guns, all those murders would disappear. In fact, every single time that we have murder data before and after a gun ban, murder rates have gone up. If this line of reasoning were right, you should see both justifiable homicides and gun murders falling to zero when guns are banned.
3) The claim that “Gun owners not likely to use firearms for self-defense” assumes that all self defense actions with guns result in the death of the attacker. This completely ignores the times that a defensive gun use stopped a victim from being harmed even when the criminal wasn’t killed. By any measure defensive gun uses, only a tiny fraction of one percent of defensive gun uses result in the criminal attacker being killed or wounded. This claim completely ignores all those benefits and assumes that they are zero.
4) Finally, it is disappointing that as a journalist you didn’t try to get a response from someone who might be critical of the VPC report. The VPC has a long history of making up factual claims (see here, here, and here).
UPDATE: The Blaze interviewed us about this claim by the VPC.
Lott argued, for the Violence Policy Center’s assertions to be true, it would mean that banning all guns would dramatically decrease murders — a claim he said is “completely false.”
“Every single time — and not just in places like Washington or Chicago, but around the world — that you’ve had a complete ban on guns, murder rates have gone up,” he claimed, citing analysis by the Crime Research Prevention Center.
