On the surface, h this NPR piece on the affect of the McDonald decision on Chigago’s fascist,racist gun laws has the superficial appearance of balance:  it’s got two pro-Second Amendment quotes and three antis, which is closer than you might be used to from the “elite” media.

But read between the lines:

Those who support fewer restrictions on guns point to incidents like a recent break-in on Chicago’s West Side — the kind of frightening event that happens far too often in crime-ridden neighborhoods.

“Happened at about 4 in the morning,” says Jose Perez, who lives two doors down from where an armed intruder was breaking into the house of an elderly man and his family. Perez woke up — and heard gunshots.

Pretty common in Chicago these days.  But it’s the shooter that was unusual:

“The guy broke the basement window in the back,” Perez continues. “Mr. Gant heard the noise with the window shattering open. … He got up, I guess got his gun out and the guy made it to the first-floor porch. The other guy fired first and then Mr. Gant fired after him — ended up striking the guy and killing him.”

Thank God, Perez says, the Korean War veteran was able to defend himself, even though this happened a month before the Supreme Court ruling, when owning a handgun in Chicago was still against the law.

The kind of thing that happens all over the US, every day.

“I think he did the right thing,” Perez says. “They’re 80 years old, him and his wife, and the grandson was with them, you know, and he’s about 12 years old. If the intruder would have came in, it would’ve been a tragedy, probably — found the whole family dead, shot up, you know?”…

…So even though it was illegal at the time, having a gun in the home may have saved lives.

The score so far:  Pro, 1 (a neighbor, portrayed in perfect lower-middle-class Chicago vernacular):  Anti, 0.

“It’s a pure case of self-defense, and it’s the kind of thing that needs to happen in the city of Chicago, if you expect the crime rate to drop,” says Richard Pearson, executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association.

Standing outside of Chicago’s City Hall as the City Council was enacting new restrictions on handgun ownership, Pearson argued the city was still going too far. He thinks it will prevent citizens from protecting themselves in their own homes.

The score so far:  Pro, 2 (neighbor, and a representative of an organization NPR has been turning into a boogeyman for the past forty years):  Anti, 0.

But Dr. Richard Keller views guns in the home through a different lens.

“My father had a handgun,” Keller says. “When I was 17 years old, he used it to end his own life.”

His father’s suicide was a shocking, confusing and life-changing event for Keller. In his line of work now, Keller sees many similar self-inflicted gunshot victims: He is the coroner of suburban Lake County.

Tragic, certainly.

But the suicide rate statistic is a red herring; many nations with gun laws every bit as strict as pre-McDonald Chicago’s have suicide rates that dwarf our rate nationwide: Japan’s is over double our rate; Sweden, France, Hong Kong and Canada all have higher rates of suicide than the US.

Dr. Keller:

“I’ve seen cases where if they — very likely, if they had not had a handgun in the home, they would not have used it upon themselves,” Keller says.

That must have been an interesting interview – a coroner interviewing his patients about their motivations.

It’s an absurd statement – when other nations’ suicide rates are higher, clearly something other than the availability of guns is at issue.

Modern psychology is still trying to unpack suicide – but it seems fairly clear that those who use handguns are not “looking for attention”. They want out, fast.  As Japan’s example shows, those who want to check out that bad will find a way, whether guns are available or not.

Keller:

I have plenty of job security. There will always be deaths. I don’t need things going on that are likely going to increase the business of the coroner’s office.

Most civil liberties cause some problem for some government official.  As Alito noted in his majority opinion, it’s not a reason to abandon the liberty.

So that’s Pro,2: Anti, 1.

Thom Mannard of the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence challenges the assertion that having guns in the home makes families safer.

“The evidence shows that handguns in the home are more likely to be used in a suicide, an unintentional shooting or a homicide with family members in that home than ever used in self-defense,” Mannard says.

Really?

Says who?

Got any research on that?

We don’t know.  The NPR reporter didn’t bother to ask, or to link to it.

I suspect it’s a latent 17 year old chanting point – the infamous New England Journal of Medicine study from the nineties that “showed”  that a gun in the home was 43 times more likely to kill the owner or “someone the owner knew” than a burglar.

Of course, most of the “43” were suicides; of the remainder, most were drug dealers killing other dealers, or customers who owed them money, or classmates shooting each other for Starter jackets – all of them “people the gun owner knew”.  It also included cases of estranged spouses shooting abusive ex-spouses in justified self-defense; the principals most definitely “knew each other”.

The study didn’t control for any of this, or account for deterrence rather than killing of criminals, or for the backgrounds of the gun owners.  It really turned out that if anyone in the home with the gun had a crime record or record of drug or alcohol abuse, the odds of deterring a crime or killing someone the owner knew were about even; for those without, it was conservatively more than 400:1 in favor of guns.

Was that the the information that was the basis of Mr. Mannard’s statement?

We don’t know.

We rarely do when the mainstream media interviews anti-gunners; they never ask for them to prove their assertions.

Never!

So that’s Pro, 2 (regular schlub and boogeyman):  Anti, 2 (both allowed to make unsupported assertions and references to evidence that’s been pretty roundly shredded!).

Jens Ludwig, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago, has done research that he says suggests allowing fewer guns leads to fewer gun deaths.

Mr. Ludwig, unlike many anti-gun researchers, is an academic of some integrity – hence, he has produced work that showed that gun control has no effect on homicide rates.  But their other resarch is not by any means airtight as the NPR report suggests by its utter lack of questioning.

So that’s Pros 2 (a regular guy and a boogeyman), Antis 3 (all of whom make claims that NPR didn’t even dream of asking them to substantiate, or at least didn’t bother to publish the substantiation).

To be fair, it’s as good as we can expect from NPR.

To be honest, we should still expect better.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, July 5th, 2010 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Victim Disarmament. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.