Click Here to Download a pdf version for printing. 

"Once upon a time . . . " Sometimes it seems that news reports about guns or gun owners should begin with that phrase. Those four short words would inform readers that while the story to follow will be presented as fact, it is really fiction, or better said, a myth or a fable. Unfortunately, non-truths, through constant repetition, have come to displace facts in the public dialog about guns in America.

Some of these fables, as many fables do, started out with a grain of truth, but were later misrepresented and twisted to serve a particular political purpose. Others are the product of "advocacy science"-- research designed to promote a particular point of view. Still others are just incorrect assumptions that over time are given the imprimatur of fact. Whatever their source, it is vital that they be exposed as the fictions they are so that they might no longer influence the national debate.

Table of Contents

FABLE I:	A gun in the home makes the home less safe.
FABLE II:	The Second Amendment to the Constitution does not protect an individual right to keep and bear arms.
FABLE III:	NRA opposes all "reasonable" gun regulations.
FABLE IV:	"Gun control" laws prevent crime.
FABLE V:	It is because of the Brady Act's five-day waiting period and the "assault weapons" law that crime has decreased.
FABLE VI:	Firearm accidents are a large and growing problem, we need laws mandating how people store their firearms.
FABLE VII:	Allowing people to carry guns for protection will lead to more violence and injuries.
FABLE VIII:	We should ban all firearms that have no legitimate, "sporting" purpose.
FABLE IX:	Gun violence is an epidemic that can be cured by public health measures.
FABLE X:	Firearms manufacturers should be financially liable for the actions of criminals who misuse guns.
FABLE XI:	Firearms are unsafe because they are not regulated under consumer protection laws.
FABLE XII:	Hunting and the "gun culture" teach kids to be violent.
FABLE XIII:	Foreign countries such as England and Japan have much less crime than the U.S. because of their stronger gun laws.
FABLE XIV:	There are too many gun dealers in the U.S.
FABLE XV:	A gun show "loophole" exists that allows many criminals and terrorists to purchase guns.
NOTES:	Footnotes

Back To Table Of Contents

FABLE I: A gun in the home makes the home less safe.

Firearms are used three to five times more often to stop crimes than to commit them,1 and accidents with firearms are at an all-time recorded low.2 In spite of this, anti-firearm activists insist that the very act of keeping a firearm in the home puts family members at risk, often claiming that a gun in the home is "43 times" more likely to be used to kill a family member than an intruder, based upon a study by anti-gun researchers of firearm-related deaths in homes in King County (Seattle), Washington.3 Although Arthur Kellermann and Donald Reay originally warned that their study was of a single non-representative county and noted that they failed to consider protective uses of firearms that did not result in criminals being killed, anti-gun groups and activists use the "43 times" claim without explaining the limitations of the study or how the ratio was derived.

To produce the misleading ratio from the study, the only defensive or protective uses of firearms that were counted were those in which criminals were killed by would-be crime victims. This is the most serious of the study's flaws, since fatal shootings of criminals occur in only a fraction of 1% of protective firearm uses nationwide.4 Survey research by award-winning Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck, has shown that firearms are used for protection as many as 2.5 million times annually.5

It should come as no surprise that Kleck's findings are reflexively dismissed by "gun control" groups, but a leading anti-gun criminologist was honest enough to acknowledge their validity. "I am as strong a gun-control advocate as can be found among the criminologists in this country," wrote the late Marvin E. Wolfgang. "I would eliminate all guns from the civilian population and maybe even from the police. . . . What troubles me is the article by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. The reason I am troubled is that they have provided an almost clear-cut case of methodologically sound research in support of something I have theoretically opposed for years, namely, the use of a gun in defense against a criminal perpetrator. . . . I do not like their conclusions that having a gun can be useful, but I cannot fault their methodology."6

While the "43 times" claim is commonly used to suggest that murders and accidents are likely to occur with guns kept at home, suicides accounted for 37 of every 43 firearm-related deaths in the King County study. Nationwide, 58% of firearm-related deaths are suicides,7 a problem which is not solved by gun laws aimed at denying firearms to criminals. "Gun control" advocates would have the public believe that armed citizens often accidentally kill family members, mistaking them for criminals. But such incidents constitute less than 2% of fatal firearms accidents, or about one for every 90,000 defensive gun uses.8

In spite of the demonstrated flaws in his research, Kellermann continued to promote the idea that a gun is inherently dangerous to own. In 1993, he and a number of colleagues presented a study that claimed to show that a home with a gun was much more likely to experience a homicide.9

This study, too, was seriously flawed. Kellermann studied only homes where homicides had taken place--ignoring the millions of homes with firearms where no harm is done--and used a control group unrepresentative of American households. By looking only at homes where homicides had occurred and failing to control for more pertinent variables, such as prior criminal record or histories of violence, Kellermann et al. skewed the results of this study. After reviewing the study, Prof. Kleck noted that Kellermann's methodology is analogous to proving that since diabetics are much more likely to possess insulin than non-diabetics, possession of insulin is a risk factor for diabetes. Even Dr. Kellermann admitted, "It is possible that reverse causation accounted for some of the association we observed between gun ownership and homicide." Northwestern University Law Professor Daniel D. Polsby went further, writing, "Indeed the point is stronger than that: 'reverse causation' may account for most of the association between gun ownership and homicide. Kellermann's data simply do not allow one to draw any conclusion."10

Back To Table Of Contents

FABLE II: The Second Amendment to the Constitution does not protect an individual right to keep and bear arms.

"If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the Constitution and Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791 states such a thesis." 1

Anyone familiar with the principles upon which this country was founded and upon which it has operated for the last two centuries will recognize this claim's most glaring flaw: In America, rights, by definition, belong to individuals.

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote that "all men are created equal" and "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights," while governments derive their "powers" from the consent of the governed. The Constitution and Bill of Rights repeatedly refer to the "rights" of the people and to the "powers" of government.

In each case, rights belonging to "the people" are undeniably the rights of individuals. As the Supreme Court recognized in U.S. v. Verdugo-Urquidez (1990), "'the people' seems to have been a term of art employed in select parts of the Constitution. The Preamble declares that the Constitution is ordained and established by 'the People of the United States.' The Second Amendment protects 'the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,' and the Ninth and Tenth Amendments provide that certain rights and powers are retained by and reserved to 'the people.'. . . It suggests that 'the people' protected by the Fourth Amendment, and by the First and Second Amendments, and to whom rights and powers are reserved in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, refers to a class of persons who are a part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community."

Future U.S. President James Madison introduced in the House of Representatives the amendments that became our Bill of Rights. In notes for his speech proposing the amendments, Madison wrote that "They relate first to private rights." Several days later, William Grayson wrote to Patrick Henry, telling him that "[A] string of amendments were presented to the lower House; these altogether respected personal liberty."2 A week later, Tench Coxe referred to the Second Amendment in the Federal Gazette, writing that "the people are confirmed by the next article in their right to keep and bear their private arms."3 Samuel Adams warned that "The said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms."4

Dozens of essays have been written by the nation's foremost authorities on the Constitution, supporting the traditional understanding of the right to arms as an individually possessed right, protected by the Second Amendment.

For example, Prof. Akil Reed Amar of the Yale Law School and Alan Hirsch, like Amar a former Yale Law Journal editor, wrote: "We recall that the Framers' militia was not an elite fighting force but the entire citizenry of the time: all able-bodied adult white males. Since the Second Amendment explicitly declares that its purpose is to preserve a well-regulated militia, the right to bear arms was universal in scope. The vision animating the amendment was nothing less than popular sovereignty--applied in the military realm. The Framers recognized that self-government requires the People's access to bullets as well as ballots. The armed citizenry (militia) was expected to protect against not only foreign enemies, but also a potentially tyrannical federal government. In short, the right to bear arms was intended to ensure that our government remained in the hands of the People." 5

By contrast, only a few law journal articles advocating the anti-firearm groups' view have appeared, most written by those groups' employees. (A bibliography of Second Amendment-related books, law reviews and other published works is available at www.nraila.org and from the NRA-ILA Grassroots Division.)

Gun control supporters insist that "the right of the people" really means the "right of the state" to maintain the "militia" mentioned in the amendment, and that this "militia" is the National Guard.

Such a claim is not only inconsistent with the statements of America's early statesmen and the concept of individual rights as understood by generations of Americans, it misdefines the term "militia."

For centuries before the drafting of the Second Amendment, European political writers used the term "well regulated militia" to refer to the citizenry on the whole, armed with privately-owned weapons, led by officers chosen by themselves.

America's statesmen defined the militia the same way. Richard Henry Lee (who before ratification of the Constitution was the author of the most influential writings advocating a Bill of Rights) wrote, "A militia when properly formed are in fact the people themselves . . . and include all men capable of bearing arms. . . . To preserve liberty it is essential that the whole body of people always possess arms. . . ."6 Making the same point, Tench Coxe wrote that the militia "are in fact the effective part of the people at large."7 George Mason asked, "[W]ho are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers."8

The Militia Act of 1792, adopted the year after the Second Amendment was ratified, declared that the Militia of the United States (members of the militia obligated to serve if called upon by the government) included all able-bodied males of age. As the U.S. Supreme Court observed in U.S. v. Miller (1939), "The signification attributed to the term Militia appears from the debates in the [Constitutional] Convention, the history and legislation of Colonies and States, and the writings of approved commentators. These show plainly enough that the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense . . . bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time." The National Guard was not established until 1903. In 1920 it was designated one part of the "Militia of the United States," the other part remaining all other able-bodied males of age, plus some other males and females.

However, in 1990, in Perpich v. Department of Defense, the Supreme Court held that the federal government possesses absolute, unlimited power over the Guard. (The Court never mentioned the Second Amendment, noting instead that federal power over the Guard is not restricted by the Constitution's Article I, Section 8, Clauses 15 and 16.)

Thus, the Guard is in fact the third component of the United States Army, behind the Army and Army Reserve. The Framers' independent "well regulated militia" remains as they intended, America's armed citizenry.

The most thorough examination of the Second Amendment and related issues ever undertaken by a court is the Oct. 16, 2001, decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for Fifth Circuit in U.S. v. Emerson, a case that centers around an individual indicted for possessing firearms while under a certain kind of restraining order, in violation of federal law.

The court upheld the indictment against Emerson, noting that restrictions on the right to arms are permissible if they are "limited, narrowly tailored specific exceptions or restrictions for particular cases that are reasonable and not inconsistent with the right of Americans generally to individually keep and bear their private arms as historically understood in this country."

The court then devoted dozens of pages of its decision to a comprehensive examination of the Second Amendment's history and text, and court decisions and scholarship on the amendment and related issues. It began with an examination of the Supreme