Headline: Man Found Guilty of Murder in Wrong-Driveway Shooting in Upstate N.Y.

Read the New York Times story on Kevin Monahan being found guilty of second-degree murder for killing Kaylin Gillis by shooting a 20-gauge shotgun from his Hebron, NY porch into a car she was riding in that had mistakenly gone down his driveway and was in the process of leaving.

This story merited attention in and of itself but received even more because it happened very soon after 16-year-old Ralph Yarl was shot (though thankfully not killed) after approaching the wrong house in Kansas City while trying to pick up his siblings.

At the time, I wrote an opinion for The Hill in which I argued that “Stand Your Ground laws do not allow you to ‘shoot first and ask questions later.’” (I also noted that the cases of Kaylin Gillis and Ralph Yarl do not even fall under “stand your ground” since they did not take place in public spaces.)

I continued,

From where I stand, shooting someone through the locked glass of your front door or at a car in your driveway does not rise to the reasonableness standard required by self-defense law. These cases are reminiscent of the killings of Renisha McBride in Detroit and Jordan Davis in Jacksonville. Both shooters claimed self-defense but are now incarcerated for murder.

And so Kevin Monhan joins Ted Wafer and Michael Dunn (and Markus Kaarma and Byron David Smith) in jail for murder – notwithstanding their claims of self-defense.

As in all of these cases, these legal decisions represent partial justice as the murderers live while the victims are gone forever. But better than nothing.

I make a general point of not blaming all gun owners for the stupid and/or criminal actions of some, but I have to point out (as I have before) the utter stupidity of signs like “I Don’t Dial 9-1-1” and “Protected by Smith & Wesson” and “Warning: We Shoot First and Ask Questions Later.”

I don’t know what was in Kevin Monahan’s mind when he fired at a car in his driveway, but I would not be surprised if it was sentiments like these.

As I said in an earlier “Light Over Heat” video, if you have one of these signs, you should take it, shine it up real nice, turn it sideways, and shove it right . . .

. . . in the trash.

What I wish I didn’t have to say but need to: The young man pictured below is the VICTIM.

An interesting fact that I don’t mention in the op-ed: The shooter graduated from the same high school the same year as my daughter.

I was preparing for class today when news of the killing of a professor by an (allegedly/apparently) disgruntled student (who also killed himself) reached me.

My first thought when I heard this news was to three weeks ago when I posted my final grades for the spring semester and started receiving the usual stream of complaints from students who thought they deserved higher grades than they earned. This happens every semester, and the cases are usually resolved by 1-3 emails from me explaining the grade.

But in a context in which increasingly entitled, increasingly medicated students feel increasing pressure to get good grades, I wonder when one of these students is going to “snap.” And I wonder what I will do if/when he does (in all likelihood it will be a “he”).

One option that is not available to me is armed self-defense. As a private institution, Wake Forest University has chosen to ban everyone other than police officers from carrying firearms on campus.

Here I take some solace in the fact that college campuses in the United States are some of the safest places in the world in terms of the risk of homicide victimization. I have not had time to look for national data on this, but in the 10+ years I have spent at Wake Forest, there have been 0 homicides on campus. And in the 6 years I spent at the University of Notre Dame before that, there were 0 homicides on campus.

Indeed, the fact that a professor was killed by a student is a notable news story is in part because it happens so infrequently.

Which is not to say that I don’t think about it, because if there is only 1 homicide ever on the Wake Forest campus and it happens to be me, the generally low risk of homicide victimization does me no good.

Nonetheless, I do try to put my exposure to risk in context. Much like when I went to Washington, DC following the Paris terrorist attacks last fall, I remind myself that I am PROBABLY safe going to work today, but not CERTAINLY safe. Driving to work poses a risk to me, as does my body mass index, consumption of processed foods, and generally sedentary lifestyle.

Of all the risks to my well-being I face today, being shot by a student is not high on the list. But it is on the list, which means it is something I think about and plan for. Hope for the best, but plan for the worst.

That Newsom is anti-gun is not news. He has recently led the effort to get 800,000 signatures for an anti-gun ballot initiative in California, and he was Mayor of the city that recently puts its last gun store out of business.

What interested me was a couple of moments in the show that were very revealing. A multi-millionaire son-in-law to someone who is even richer, Newsom declined to comment when WWHL host Andy Cohen asked about his security detail. I wonder whether they carry guns, though, because guns do not make you safer according to Newsom and his political allies. Actually, I don’t wonder – I am pretty darn sure they do.

The second interesting comment had to do with the effort to bring a ballot initiative in California to legalize the recreational use of marijuana. Newsom indicated that this should be on the ballot in California in the next couple of years and he is the only Democrat in statewide office who has publicly supported it. Certainly the legalization of pot in California could become to marijuana liberalization what Florida passing concealed carry was to the liberalization of firearms laws.

The conjunction of Newsom’s anti-gun and pro-pot ballot initiatives really struck home for me because of the recent “execution-style” murders of 8 members of a single family in four locations in rural Ohio. CNN called the murders “Heartless. Well-planned. Mysterious. And terrifying.”

Interesting not highly relevant side note: Newsom attended Santa Clara University on a partial baseball scholarship, graduating in 1989. I was accepted to Santa Clara University and planned to play baseball there beginning in the 1986-87 academic year, but chose to go to school elsewhere. We could have been teammates! Oh, fate!

Ben and Nikki Goeser owned a mobile karaoke business that contracted with various clubs in the Nashville, Tennessee area. At some point, a patron named Hank Wise began to attend their shows and occasionally participate. At first Wise seemed, in her words, “normal,” but over time he began to behave more oddly, and then even inappropriately in messages sent to Nikki through their MySpace page.

The Goesers deleted Wise from the MySpace page and Ben subsequently spoke to him and asked him to respect his wife and their marriage. A couple more shows passed without incident, but then in April 2009 Wise showed up at a venue that was far enough away from the downtown shows Wise usually attended that Nikki sensed something was wrong. (See Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear.)

Nikki told the manager she felt uncomfortable with Wise being there and the manager asked him to leave. At that point Wise drew a handgun from under his jacket and shot Ben once in the head and then stood over him and shot several more times until three bar patrons tackled and disarmed him. Ben Goeser, 49 years-old, died at the scene.

Nikki Goeser subsequently became an advocate for the expansion of concealed carry to bars and restaurants that serve alcohol in Tennessee. It turns out that Nikki was licensed in the state of Tennessee to carry a concealed firearm, but due to Tennessee law she had to lock her gun in her car that night. This is “how gun control helped a stalker murder my husband,” to quote her book’s subtitle.

(There is a strong parallel here to Suzanna Gatria Hupp who campaigned for concealed carry in Texas back in the 1990s after surviving, but losing her two parents in, the 1991 Luby’s Cafeteria shooting in Killeen. Hupp, author of From Luby’s to the Legislature: One Woman’s Fight Against Gun Control, wrote the forward to Goeser’s book.)

Goeser freely admits that having her handgun with her that night may not have made any difference. In fact, the speed with which Wise drew and shot Ben Goeser suggests that it probably would not have made a difference. But, as the book’s title suggests, she was “denied a chance” to make a difference by Tennessee law.

Tennessee has since amended its law to allow restaurant carry, as did Ohio and my home state of North Carolina (as of October 1, 2013). Goeser provided testimony to all three state legislatures. For her efforts, she was awarded the NRA’s Sybil Ludington Women’s Freedom Award in 2012.

Goeser also spoke at the GRNC dinner more generally about the need to carry firearms. In her words, spoken from the worst possible direct experience:

“It is not paranoid but prepared, because you never know when you are going to be visited by evil.”

When Nikki Goeser spoke this haunting line, I flashed immediately back to Taya Kyle speaking at the 2013 NRA meeting just three months after her husband, Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle, was murdered at a gun range by a military veteran he was trying to help. Taya Kyle began her speech by declaring,

“I challenge anyone to tell me that there isn’t evil in this world. From the days of Cain and Abel we know all too well there will always be evil. But that evil shouldn’t take away our freedoms. In fact, the only way to defeat evil is by taking advantage of our freedoms.”

Beginning from the reality of evil leads to a different attribution of blame by both Nikki Goeser and Taya Kyle. As Goeser succinctly put it, “The issue is violence, not gun violence.” Taking guns out of the equation does not remove the potential for or reality of violence perpetrated by evil people. It only denies good people the chance to defend themselves and their loved ones.

Concluding Aside: Given Nikki Goeser’s perspective about the ubiquity and unpredictability of evil, I was surprised to see that in 2010 she filed a civil lawsuit against the owners of the bar where Ben Goeser was murdered (as well as Hank Wise). In her suit, Nikki argued that the bar owners failed to protect Ben from the foreseeable criminal act of Wise. The suit maintained that the bar should have had a trained security guard working and adequately trained its staff to protect its patrons.

The bar owners requested and were granted summary judgment to dismiss the suit prior to trial in the Circuit Court for Davidson County on the grounds that the bar owners had no way of foreseeing the outcome. The bar was not in a dangerous area and did not have any issue with serious violence previously. Indeed, it seems clear that the Goeser’s (unintentionally, of course) brought the violence to the bar in the form of Nikki’s stalker Hank Wise.

In any event, Nikki Goeser appealed and in September 2013, the Tennessee Court of Appeals upheld the decision in Nicole Goeser, et al. v. Live Holdings Corporation, et al.

I cannot find any information on-line that explains Goeser’s rationale for this lawsuit against the bar owners. It seems unfortunate that Goeser should take this action because if she herself had foreseen the problem Hank Wise represented, she could have taken a different line of action herself, perhaps calling the police for help rather than asking the management to remove Wise. Apparently a major point in the original dismissal in the lower court was that in Nikki Goeser’s own deposition she affirmed that she was not frightened but “irritated” by Wise when she asked management to intervene.

More generally, to hold the bar owners responsible for something no one can control — an unexpected visit by evil — seems contradictory to one of the main points of Goeser’s speech.

Smith is the man who on Thanksgiving Day 2012 shot and killed two individuals — Haile Kifer and Nicholas Brady — who broke into Smith’s house. He shot them both, one at a time, as they came down the stairs into his basement. He had set up in a position in the basement — lying in wait with a book, water, and energy bars — where he could shoot them as soon as he saw their hips on the stairs. It turns out he also created an audio recording of the events, in which he can be heard taunting Kifer and Brady, calling them “vermin.”  Smith then waited a full day before asking a neighbor to call police.

At the time, based on my understanding of the law and the limited facts of the case available at the time, I concluded “both the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and responsible gun owners can agree that shooting to death an intruder you have already rendered harmless is a criminal act of murder. From the statements attributed to him in the criminal complaint, it seems that Byron David Smith did in fact commit murder in the name of self-defense.”

On Tuesday, April 29th, a jury took just 3 hours to convict Smith of first-degree murder.  Which reminds me that those who would “rather be tried by 12 than carried by 6” had better know the law and be damn sure that a reasonable person would agree that being carried by 6 is a real possibility under those same circumstances.

Mass public shootings are defined in this paper as a shooting with 4 or more victims (not including the shooter) in a public location. By this definition, from 1980 to 2012 there were 117 mass public shootings in the United States, in which there were 922 total victims (724 killed and 198 wounded).

(Note that there is no commonly agreed upon definition of “mass public shooting.” A March 18, 2013 Congressional Research Service report, “Public Mass Shootings in the United States,” uses a slightly different definition: “These are incidents occurring in relatively public places, involving four or more deaths—not including the shooter(s)—and gunmen who select victims somewhat indiscriminately. The violence in these cases is not a means to an end—the gunmen do not pursue criminal profit or kill in the name of terrorist ideologies, for example.” By this definition, in the 30 years from 1983-2013, the CRS identified 78 incidents with 547 killed and 476 injured, for a total of 1,050 victims. Mother Jones magazine uses a different definition, Reddit another, and criminologist James Alan Fox still another.)

Unlike homicides in general, which disproportionately affect those engaged in criminal activity, the victims of mass public shootings are often guilty of nothing more than going about their daily lives in schools, shopping malls, religious services, and movie theaters. What the CRS calls the indiscriminate selection of victims makes these events particularly disturbing.

At the same time, the likelihood of being the victim of a mass public shooting is extremely low. Over the 33 years covered by Birch, Duwe, and Kovandzic, 22 people were killed and 6 were wounded per year on average. By comparison, over the same time period the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics show 625,917 victims of murder or nonnegligent manslaughter, an average of 18,967 per year (I generated these numbers using the handy FBI UCR table building tool).

Another way of looking at the rarity of death by mass public shooting is to consider data on the number of deaths by mechanism and intent from the National Vital Statistics Report from the Centers for Disease Control. Considering only “unintentional” deaths (excluding suicide and homicide) in 2010, 3,782 people drowned, 26,009 fell to their deaths, 33,041 died of poisoning, 6,165 suffocated, and 4,383 pedestrians died in motor vehicle crashes (Table 18, pp. 83-84). And these are not anywhere near the leading causes of death in the United States, which are heart disease and cancer (over 500,000 deaths each in 2010).

The world can be a dangerous place, but as I have previously written about the “culture of fear,” mass public shootings and AR-15 style rifles should probably not be the biggest concern for most people.

In any event, the authors argue that the “assault weapons” ban did not have an effect on the firearm homicide rate overall because AR-15 style rifles are not often used in homicides. Indeed, rifles of any kind are used in less than 3 percent of homicides (323 of 12,664 in 2011).

But AR-15 style rifles are used more often in mass public shootings than in homicides in general. They were used in 18 of 117 (15.4%) mass public shootings covered by this study, and accounted for 19% of all victims killed (140 of 724) and 100% of the wounded (198 of 198). Of 922 total victims in mass public shootings, 338 (37%) were killed or wounded by AR-15 style rifles.

So, in terms of mass public shootings, AR-15 style rifles are slightly more lethal and much more likely to wound than other weapons. But, in part due to their rarity, the authors conclude that Assault Weapons Ban of 1994-2004 did not have a significant effect on mass public shootings.

Afterword:

In a recent article in the academic journal Homicide Studies, “Mass Shootings in America: Moving Beyond Newtown,” James Alan Fox and Monica J. DeLateur conclude: “Eliminating the risk of mass murder would involve extreme steps that we are unable or unwilling to take—abolishing the Second Amendment, achieving full employment, restoring our sense of community, and rounding up anyone who looks or acts at all suspicious. Mass murder just may be a price we must pay for living in a society where personal freedom is so highly valued” (p. 141)

In response to this, the British Parliament passed the 1988 Firearms Act, which imposed a great number of restrictions, the most notable of which was a complete ban on self-loading center fire and pump action rifles.

(In the entry on “United Kingdom-History of Gun Laws since 1900” in the encyclopedia Guns in American Society, David Kopel notes that “Home Secretary Douglas Hurd later admitted that the government prepared the provisions of the 1988 Firearms Act long before Hungerford and had been waiting for the right moment to introduce them” [p. 845]. This was mimicked by United States Senator Dianne Feinstein, who admitted that she had been working on a proposal to ban assault weapons for over a year prior to the Sandy Hook massacre in December 2012.)

In 1996, 43 year-old Thomas Hamilton massacred 16 children and 1 teacher (and himself) at a preschool in Dunblane, Scotland using 4 handguns. As a result, the 1997 Firearms Act was passed which banned private ownership of handguns. As Kopel notes, since 1921 legal handguns had been registered with the British government, so law abiding citizens had to surrender their guns to the government in exchange for a scheduled payment (p. 846).

Today, only certain shotguns, black power guns, and manually-loaded single shot pistols and rifles can be legally owned, are even those are heavily regulated. Understandably, as there as many proponents of banning firearms in the United States, the experience of the UK draws considerable interest. I have not fully examined the case of the UK in comparison to the US, but there are all sorts of reasons why any simple comparisons ought to be avoided.

For example, after noting the UK’s lower homicide rates, many people point to the higher rate of “violent crime” in the UK compared to the US as an offsetting consideration. But the way “violent crime” is defined differs between the two countries. Even the way “homicide” is counted in England and Wales differs from the US: they “exclude any cases which do not result in conviction, or where the person is not prosecuted on grounds of self defense or otherwise.”

Such an exclusion in US homicide statistics could drop the number of homicides in 2012 by half, and the rate from 4.7 per 100,000 to 2.3. Which is not to say that the US should count homicides the way the Home Office does (to the contrary), but to highlight the differences in the way statistics are collected and presented.

The homicide rate in the UK was lower than the US before the rifle and handgun bans of the 1980s and 1990s, so to connect those bans to the UK’s lower homicide rates relative to the US is nonsensical. To me it makes more sense to examine processes taking place within each country, then see if lessons learned in one country may be applicable to another.

As reported by the Home Office, in England and Wales (Scotland and Ireland are counted separately), the overall homicide rate in the 1990s (after the self-loading rifle ban in 1988) fluctuated up and down, showing no clear pattern. Then following the handgun ban in 1997, the homicide rate increased every year from 1998 through 2003. It then began a basically steady fall from 2003 to 2010.

John R. Lott, Jr. of the Crime Prevention Research Center attributes the decline to a significant increase in the number of police officers in 2003/2004 (really, from 2001 onward). Although it is too early to say whether a new trend is emerging, these tables show a decline in police beginning in 2010 and an increase in the homicide rate from 2010 to 2011.

However, even individual year homicide data needs to be interpreted cautiously. As the Home Office’s report notes, homicide data for 2000/01 includes 58 Chinese nationals who collectively suffocated in a lorry en route into the UK; 2002/03 includes 172 victims of medical doctor/serial killer Harold Shipman; 2003/04 includes 20 cockle pickers who drowned in Morecambe Bay; and 2005/06 includes 52 victims of the July 7^th London bombings (see notes to Table 1.03, p. 34). Even removing these special cases, however, the number and rate of homicide in England and Wales was higher every year after the handgun ban until 2009/10, as the following table that I compiled from the Home Office data shows.

So, something other than gun laws – perhaps something about policing and not the outright ban on handguns – seems to explain the homicide rate in England and Wales.  There are clear parallels here to the decline in homicide in Boston (recalling David Kennedy’s work, as I have written about previously) and New York City (see Franklin Zimring’s The City That Became Safe: New York’s Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control).

For me another important question has to do with the method of killing. If the homicide rate goes up after a handgun ban, does this mean that guns are being displaced by other weapons in homicides? If the homicide rate goes down 7 years after a handgun ban, does this mean that the supply of guns available to criminals is drying up (indicated, perhaps, by the proportion of homicides involving guns is going down)?

The table I produced above attempts to address these questions. In 8 of 10 years, when the homicide rate changed, the proportion of homicides that were committed using guns changed in the same direction. That is, most of the time, when the homicide rate goes up, gun homicides go up, and vice-versa.

Looking at just the percentage of homicides that were committed by shooting, the line graph above shows at least two patterns. First, from 2001/02 to 2008/09 a general pattern of decline. Second, in 5 of 10 years the proportion of homicides by shooting INCREASED from the previous year.

So, the bottom line seems to be that banning rifles and handguns in England and Wales did not clearly lead to a unilateral reduction in homicides, or in the proportion of homicides committed with guns.

This raises the issue of black markets for guns. Banning guns clearly does not mean that criminals will have no access to guns, though it certainly makes it more difficult. Here I come to the American Society of Criminology meeting paper presentation that got me thinking about guns in the UK in the first place. [UPDATE: This paper was presented at the November 2013 meeting of the American Society of Criminology in Atlanta.]

“The Impact of Weapon Availability on Firearm Selection: Lessons from the United Kingdom,” by Kate Gibson and Nick Tilley, University College London.

Kate Gibson’s work examines how criminals respond to weapons bans. She finds a great deal of creativity in securing functioning firearms, including reactivating previously disabled firearms or modifying antique weapons or even manufacturing firearms at home. In addition, re-use of firearms is key to the black market for guns in England and Wales. I was fascinated to learn that there are armorers who act as weapons suppliers – not selling guns to criminals but LOANING them out for a fee. I have not heard of this in the United States, which does not mean it doesn’t exist of course. But it may be that the lower availability of handguns generally in the UK compared to the US makes loaning more viable/necessary.

In the end, those who propose banning rifles and/or handguns in the United States need to think very seriously about the experience of England and Wales, since there is such a massive supply of guns in the US to be re-circulated, re-used, and re-activated (not to mentioned the vast possibilities for home-made guns here). I believe the maxim that “demand creates its own supply” applies to guns as well as to drugs, alcohol, and other banned products.

Does that mean nothing should be done? Of course not. I am very interested in seeing something done about crime guns. So are many people, gun owners and gun haters alike. I often see the name, “Mayors Against Illegal Guns” and think, what law abiding citizen is for illegal guns? But as the founder of MAIG Michael Bloomberg has repeatedly shown, he is not simply against illegal guns, he is for making more and more guns illegal. Efforts to cut down on illegal guns and the violence typically associated with them, without making criminals of law-abiding gun owners, is the key. Entirely banning whole categories of guns, as the UK has done and some Americans want to do, does not seem to me to be the answer.

The exhibit description read: “‘Under the Gun’ was originally conceived as a response to the July 2012 shootings in Aurora, Colorado. This senseless killing saddened and outraged three Winston-Salem artists, who decided to invite a group of creative friends to make art that would provoke a conversation about the persistent fascination with guns and violence in the United States. Unfortunately, the latest massacre [at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut], this time of innocent children and teachers, has made the show more relevant than ever.”

During the exhibit, a panel discussion and symposium occasioned by the events that led to the artwork was held at the gallery.

Panelists included sociologist Jon Epstein (also the spouse of one of the artists and gallery owner, Kate Magruder), Winston-Salem City Councilman Dan Besse, Winston-Salem/Forsyth County School Board member Elisabeth Motsinger, Salem College professor Kimya Davis, and another of my colleagues, Wake Forest University professor Steven Gunkel.

As befit a good sociologist, Epstein began by attempting to counter some of the “hysteria” that arises in the wake of a horrific mass murder like at Newtown, CT. He noted that the violent crime rate in Winston-Salem, including the murder rate, is going down. That the crime rate is not related to the availability of guns. Something else/more is going on that just gun availability.

Also a sociologist, Kimya Dennis later added that most people do not base their views on actual data on violence but on how they feel. I would also bring to mind the cultural cognition work previously mentioned that suggests people’s positions on guns are formed by their broader worldview, not facts.

School board member Elisabeth Motsinger was self-consciously aware of this in her comments. She noted that she had been thinking a lot about Sandy Hook and arming teachers in response. She felt what was necessary was “moral courage” – not arming people with guns, but arming them with an idea of what a good society is. Arming people in school teaches kids that the world is a dangerous place, she held, which is the opposite of an open learning environment.

I found this line of argument very interesting because I believe that one’s attitude toward guns is heavily influenced by one’s assessment of how dangerous the world is, and related to broader conceptions of what society should be like.

Epstein agreed with Motsinger, saying “you can’t build a safe, caring community at the end of a gun. Reasonableness stops there.” And Dennis agreed with Epstein, maintaining that you have to fit the solution to the problem. Armed guards in schools will not prevent mass murders. The NRA, she argued, pushes this proposal because it represents the interests of gun manufacturers.

The brief discussion session after the panelists spoke was dominated by the question, What can we do? The issue of the media came up and Dennis debunked the idea that media desensitization played a major role in criminal violence. Esptein offered that rather than desensitizing us the media makes us scared.

City councilman Besse focused attention on the “availability of the tools of destruction.” You can’t kill someone with a gun without a gun. He maintained that there is no legitimate civilian use for military style assault rifles and high capacity magazines. No one on the panel or in the audience disputed this idea, suggesting again that it is a matter of cultural worldviews rather than facts that drives gun debates in America.

What then are “valid fears” for Glassner? In both the 1999 and 10th anniversary editions of his book, he makes clear that the danger “that by any rational calculation deserves top billing on Americans’ list of fears” is guns (p. xxvii).

Glassner’s Unreasoning Fear of Guns

You can read my initial response to this assertion, but I also promised to follow-up with further consideration of the idea of “rational fear” introduced by Glassner. Suffice it to say at the outset that not everyone who has written about fear agrees with Glassner’s assessment. For example, in his book The Science of Fear, Canadian journalist Daniel Gardner agrees with Glassner that there is appropriate fear and “unreasoning fear.” However, with respect to firearms, Gardner – who as far as I can tell does not have a dog in the American debate over guns – disagrees sharply with Glassner, observing, “if you are not a drug dealer or the friend of a drug dealer, and you don’t hang out in places patronized by drug dealers and their friends, your chance of being murdered with a handgun shrinks almost to invisibility” (p. 12).

Fear of being murdered by a handgun, then, is for Gardner an unreasoning or irrational fear. In the United States, the firearm homicide rate is 3.2 per 100,000 and the road fatality rate is nearly four times that, at 12.3 per 100,000. “Handguns are scary,” Gardner writes, “but driving to work? It’s just a boring part of the daily routine. So it’s no surprise that handgun killings grab headlines and dominate elections while traffic accidents are dismissed as nothing more than the unpleasant background noise of modern life” (p. 12). Indeed, with such extensive exposure to automobiles in American society, these massive self-powered projectiles remain one of the most dangerous entities we face, despite the facts that cars have become much safer over the years. To wit: Gardner begins his book with the number 1,595. As it turns out, that is the number of additional Americans who were killed in automobile accidents by switching from planes to cars in the year following 9/11 (p. 3).

Like Glassner, Gardner discusses how a culture of fear is fostered by politicians seeking votes, advocacy groups seeking support, businesses seeking profits, and media seeking ratings. But he is more fundamentally interested in the many ways in which cognitive biases uncovered by psychologists like Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman account for unreasoning fear. Even more fundamentally, he is interested in what evolutionary and cognitive scientists tells us about how the brain works and how this affects our assessment of risks. The bottom line is that there are many economic, cultural, psychological, and cognitive reasons we are unable to rationally assess the risks we face. I won’t do it here, but Gardner’s analysis of the biases that lead people to unreasoning fear could be applied exactly to Glassner’s fear of guns argument.

Unreasoning Fear Cuts Both Ways

Of course, unreasoning fear cuts both ways. The same statistics that I invoked to argue that Glassner’s fear of guns is irrational might be applied to those who own and carry guns for self-defense. In the literature on fear, one of the most common foci is crime and (mistaken) perceptions of the risk of crime. Consider a recent statement by NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre: “Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Riots. Terrorists. Gangs. Lone criminals. These are perils we are sure to face—not just maybe. It’s not paranoia to buy a gun. It’s survival. It’s responsible behavior, and it’s time we encourage law-abiding Americans to do just that.” The move from a possibility that we will face peril to a certainty here is striking.

LaPierre is not alone in his assessment of the necessity of carrying firearms for self-protection. Journalist and veteran shooter Michael Bane is host and producer of the Outdoor Channel television series “The Best Defense” and the expert on the Panteao Productions “Concealed Carry” DVD. As he notes in his on-line bio, “I have had a CCW pretty much forever and carry concealed every day.”

In a video promoting the current (fifth) season of “The Best Defense,” Bane discusses how he and his co-hosts (Michael Janich and Mike Seeklander) decide what topics to cover in each episode of a given season. He says they scour the internet and newspapers, and get input from military and law enforcement contacts on the most recent trends in crime – “what’s happening in the real world.” From there, they create models of certain crimes, break them down, and show how people can respond so as to keep themselves and their families safe. Among the scenarios covered in the current season are:

How criminals prey on the elderly in their homes. The hosts suggest that the disabled are twice as likely to be victims of violent crime than the able bodied.

• How to best defend your home if you see an intruder outside. The hosts suggest that the average 9-1-1 response time is 10 minutes, and even longer if you live in a remote area. So, you need to be able to take responsibility for defending your home in this situation.
• How criminals use social media to identify victims.
• How to protect yourself if you have to work or travel alone in potentially dangerous situations, such as real estate agents or women checking into hotel rooms.
• A situation in a suburb of Chicago in which as many as 18 people with bats and hammers attacked diners at a restaurant (possibly a group of white supremacists).
• A situation modeled on the Aurora, Colorado theater shooting.

As Bane summarizes “The Best Defense,” “It’s a show designed to keep you safe in an increasingly difficult, for lack of a better word, world.” Although Bane’s scenarios might be ripped from the headlines, other than the claim about the disabled, no evidence is given for the idea that the world is becoming more difficult. In fact, most data show that we are safer and healthier than any time in human history (see Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined).

The show’s motto is “Avoidance. Awareness. Preparation.” Bane consistently preaches that the best response to crime is always avoidance through awareness. But in the event that avoidance and awareness do not work, then preparation is key. And frequently that preparation involves carrying and using a handgun for self-defense.

(It is worth noting that Bane also produced and hosted the Outdoor Channel series “Best Defense: Survival,” a show that focused on “some of the most dangerous and unimaginable situations ever encountered” including “terrorists attacks, natural disasters, and other large-scale emergencies.” As my colleague and writing accountability partner reminds me at each of our meetings, there is some connection between owning firearms for self-defense and the “prepper” movement popularized most recently on the National Geographic channel series “Doomsday Preppers.)

In any event, among the questions that I am interested in answering in my research on those who concealed carry is: Why some people do this despite the very low odds that they will need to shoot another person in self-defense? Is this a “rational calculation” in some way that is not immediately evident? If it is an irrational calculation, what accounts for the deviance from rationality?

Here I will continue to read the psychology of making judgments under conditions of uncertainty, notably the work of Tversky and Kahneman.

As well as work on risk analysis and decision making.

And of course the pioneer work of Ulrich Beck on modernity as a risk society.