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Vol. 1, No. 9      September 2006 FREE

Media Bias Against Guns, Part II
John R. Lott, Jr.

The 1999 special issue of Newsweek entitled "America Under the Gun" provided over 15,000 words and numerous graphics on the topic of gun ownership, but not one mention of self-defense with a firearm. Under the heading "America's Weapons of Choice," the table captions were: "Top firearms traced to crimes, 1998"; "Firearm deaths per 100,000 people"; and "Percent of homicides using firearms." There was nothing at all on "Top firearms used in self-defense" or "Rapes, homicides, and other crimes averted with firearms." The magazine's graphic, gut-wrenching pictures all showed people who had been wounded by guns. No images were offered of people who had used guns to save lives or prevent injuries.

To investigate television coverage, I collected stories reported during 2001 on the evening news broadcasts and morning news shows of ABC, CBS and NBC. Several segments focused on the increase in gun sales after September 11, and a few of these shows actually went so far as to list the desire for self-defense as a reason for that increase. But despite over 190,000 words of coverage on gun crimes, a mere 580 words, on a single news broadcast, were devoted to the use of a gun to prevent crime - a story about an off-duty police officer who helped stop a school shooting.

Another sign of bias is in the choice of authorities quoted. An analysis of New York Times news articles over a two-year period shows that Times reporters overwhelmingly cite pro-gun control academics in their articles. From February 2000 to February 2002, the Times cited nine strongly pro-control academics a total of 20 times; one neutral academic once; and no academic who was skeptical that gun control reduces crime.

It's not that anti-control academics are non-existent. In 1999, 294 academics from institutions as diverse as Harvard, Stanford, Northwestern, the University of Pennsylvania and UCLA released an open letter to Congress stating that the new gun laws being proposed at that time were "ill-advised." None of these academics was quoted in New York Times reports on guns over a two-year period.

Misleading Polls

While polls can provide us with important insights about people's views, they can also mislead in subtle ways. In the case of weapons, poll questions are almost always phrased with the assumption that gun control is either a good thing or, at worst, merely ineffective. The possibility that it could increase crime is never acknowledged. Consider these questions from some well-known national polls:


I reviewed 17 national and seven state surveys and found that not one offered respondents a chance to consider whether gun control might increase crime. This omission of a "would increase crime" option creates a bias in two different ways. First, there is an "anchoring" effect. We know that the range of options people are offered in a poll affects how they answer, because many respondents instinctively choose the "middle ground." By only providing the choices that gun control reduces crime somewhere between "a lot" to "not at all," the middle ground becomes "a little." Second, when the possibility that gun control could increase crime is removed from polls, this affects the terms of the national debate. When people who hold this view never even hear their opinions mentioned in polls and news stories, they begin to think no one else shares their view.

There are other subtle biases in the construction of these surveys. When a survey questions whether gun control will be "very important" for the respondent at the voting booth, the media often hear a "yes" answer as evidence that the person wants more gun control. Rarely do they consider that someone might regard a politician's position on gun control as important because he or she opposes it. This blurring of opposite positions in one question causes gun control to be ranked more highly as an election issue than it should be.

Debunking the Myth of Accidental Shootings

A final area strongly affected by the media's anti-gun bias is that of accidental shootings. When it comes to this topic, reporters are eager to write about guns. Many of us have seen the public service ads showing the voices or pictures of children between the ages of four and eight, which imply that there is an epidemic of accidental deaths of these young children.

Data I have collected show that accidental shooters overwhelmingly are adults with long histories of arrests for violent crimes, alcoholism, suspended or revoked driver's licenses and involvement in car crashes. Meanwhile, the annual number of accidental gun deaths involving children under ten - most of these being cases where someone older shoots the child - is consistently a single digit number. It is a kind of media archetype story to report on "naturally curious" children shooting themselves or other children - though in the five years from 1997 to 2001 the entire United States averaged only ten cases a year where a child under ten accidentally shot himself or another child.

In contrast, in 2001 bicycles were much more likely to result in accidental deaths than guns. Fully 93 children under the age of ten drowned accidentally in bathtubs. Thirty-six children under five drowned in buckets in 1998. Yet few reporters crusade against buckets or bathtubs.

When crimes are committed with guns, there is a somewhat natural inclination toward eliminating all guns. While understandable, this reaction actually endangers people's lives because it ignores how important guns are in protecting people from harm. Unbalanced media coverage exaggerates this, leaving most Americans with a glaringly incomplete picture of the dangers and benefits of firearms. This is how the media bias against guns hurts society and costs lives.

John R. Lott, Jr., a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Los Angeles.He has been a senior research scholar at the Yale University School of Law, a fellow at the University of Chicago School of Law, a visiting fellow at Cornell University Law School and a Hoover Institution fellow. He has taught at the University of Chicago, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, Rice University and Texas A&M University. In 1988 and 1989, he was chief economist for the U.S. Sentencing Commission. He is the author of More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns.

All Maine Matters printed Part 1 of Mr. Lott’s speech in our August issue.

Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.

 
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