- Myth #1 - Having a gun makes you safe.
- Reality - Guns lethalize anger and despair. In fact, having a gun makes you less safe and endangers your loved ones. According to a recent study, a fun in the home increases the likelihood of homicide threefold. A gun in the home is more likely to be used to commit homicide, suicide, or an accidental killing than it is to be used to kill in self-defense.
- Myth #2 - The Second Amendment protects the rights of citizens to bear arms.
- Reality - The Second Amendment provides that, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Every court that has interpreted this language has found that the Second Amendment is infringed only by regulations that curtail the ability to maintain a well regulated militia.
- Myth #3 - Most violence is racially motivated.
- Reality - Actually, 85 percent of White victims are slain by White offenders and 94 percent of Black victims are slain by Black offenders.
- Myth #4 - Guns already are sufficiently regulated.
- Reality - Guns are virtually the only unregulated consumer products in the United States. While toy guns, teddy bears, toasters, and other consumer products all are subject to strict safety regulations, guns are subject to no such regulations, although they resulted in over 34,000 deaths in 1996, including over 4,600 children.
- Myth #5 - Most murders occur in the course of another felony.
- Reality - In 1997, only 19 percent of murders were the result of such activities as rape, robbery, or arson. One-third of all murders result from arguments.
- Myth #6 - Most gun deaths are homicides.
- Reality - In 1996 more Americans died from firearm suicides (18,166) than from firearm homicides (14,327). Between 1968 and 1996, 465,661 American gun deaths were suicides. Whites accounted for 92 percent of all handgun suicides.
- Myth #7 - Guns don't kill, people kill.
- Reality - According to the FBI, "When assaults by type of weapon are examined, a gun proves to be seven times more deadly that all other weapons combined." In 1996 nearly 400 children and youths under 20 were killed by guns in accidental shootings.
- Myth #8 - Gun control laws won't help.
- Reality - Since the Brady Law went into effect requiring background checks, more than 312,000 individuals not eligible to purchase a gun (e.g. convicted felons and juveniles) were stopped from buying a gun. That amounts to 210 a day or one every 7 minutes. According to a study published in the American Medical Association Journal, the 16 states that have enacted laws making adults responsible for storing firearms in a manner that makes them inaccessible to children have seen a 23 percent decline in the number of accidental shooting deaths in children below age 15.
- Myth #9 - Gun control advocates want to stop all hunting.
- Reality - The firearms that have been banned include "Saturday Night Specials", cheap handguns that are used to kill people, not animals, and semi-automatic assault weapons. What do handguns and semi-automatic weapons have to do with hunting?
- Myth #10 - Violence in the media doesn't hurt.
- Reality - Children between the ages of 12 and 15 spend and average of 17 hours a week watching television. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the average American child will have viewed approximately 200,000 hours of violence on television alone by the age of 18. The cumulative weight of hundreds of studies over the past several decades indicates that media violence "contributes to real-world violence" and desensitizes children to the consequences of violence.
No one should hide behind the First Amendment or the Second Amendment to abrogate responsibility to children or to public safety. |
