toledoblade.com -- Right to arm is basic to being an American

Friends argue that more damage is done with guns than lives are saved by them.

They haven't a clue. They don't read Florida scholar Gary Kleck's research. He has estimated that about 2 million people a year prevent crime because they have a gun. They may not fire it. Simply showing it drives off would-be miscreants.

They don't track stories gathered from U.S. newspapers at KeepAndBearArms.com.

And they haven't heard of Robert A. Waters, who has just published his second book of stories (Guns Save Lives - True Stories of Americans Defending their Lives with Firearms Loompanics Unlimited, 2002) of people whose guns let them live.

In a preface to this book, U.S. Senator Larry Craig, (R., Idaho) notes that in 1998 the FBI said criminals used guns 380,000 times, and in 1997 the Centers for Disease Control put those dead from firearms injuries at 32,000.

Tragedies, sure, some likely perpetrated by people properly defending themselves. God forbid that the CDC should track that.

Senator Craig estimates that 400,000 Americans each year use a gun "in a way that almost certainly saved either their life or somebody else's life."

Should they have died to satisfy the hysteria of anti-gunners?

Would the 2 million who prevented a crime because they were armed have done the world a favor by embracing victimhood?

My friends' idea is that people ought not have to protect themselves, because the larger society, incarnate in the police will - never mind lengthening response times or the fact that many areas of this country have no resident police and none nearby.

This notion has exploded in the face of British officials, who for decades, and to bad result, have been limiting people's self-protection rights, clearing the path for crime and criminals.

Bentley College historian Joyce Lee Malcolm, notes that they first limited private gun possession. Then they forbade people to carry anything that could be used offensively. Then they subjected claims of self-defense to what in hindsight seems "reasonable," scrubbing centuries of basic common law. She recently revealed in a column how far afield these policies had gone.

First, there was Eric Butler, a British oil executive set upon by thugs in a subway car in 1987 and being strangled. Gasping and fearing for his life, he pulled a sword blade hidden in his cane and stabbed one in the stomach. He was convicted of carrying an offensive weapon.

Then came the six-times robbed Norfolk farmer, Tony Martin, 55, who shot and killed one of two professional burglars who broke into his farmhouse. He got life for the killing, 10 years for wounding the other, and another year for having a shotgun. Talk about absurdity. His area had no police.

Five years earlier, a homeowner with a fake gun held a brace of would-be burglars at bay until police arrived and arrested him "for using an imitation gun to put someone in fear."

Now recall American economist John Lott's research of a few years back, when he was at the University of Chicago Law School. He found, to his surprise, that in most venues permitting concealed carry of firearms, crime went down. Why? Because the risk to the bad guys went up.

And in Britain, where self-defense and armed, law-abiding people are anathema?

"Between April and November, 2001, the number of people robbed at gunpoint in London rose by 53 percent. Last summer, in the course of a few days, gun-toting men burst into an English court and freed two defendants; a shooting outside a London nightclub left five women and three men wounded, and two men were machine-gunned to death in a residential neighborhood of North London," Ms. Malcolm writes.

Today "your chances of being mugged in London are now six times greater than in New York. England's rate of robbery and burglary are far higher than America's, and 53 percent of burglaries in England occur while occupants are at home."

In this country, where one in three homeowners are armed, it's 13 percent. Mr. Lott believes that's because the risk to the intruder is potentially greater.

Now friends are advancing the sorry view that personal preparedness is equivalent to running scared, not looking after one's interests in a sane, adult manner. Is the Ted Kennedy-Sarah Brady anti-gun axis doing lobotomies?

Now they see an absurd rightist plot in Attorney General John Ashcroft's (I am no fan) Justice Department insisting correctly that an individual's right to bear arms is constitutionally protected.

No one wants guns in everyone's hands. There must be limits, for children, felons, and the mentally ill and deficient who can't fathom consequences.

Though the rest of us may never have to defend ourselves, being able to do it if we choose is basic to being American. We can no more blame firearms for crime than we can credit Isaac Stern's violin for his virtuosity.

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