William English, an assistant professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, published the 2021 National Firearms Survey, which was a massive survey of 54,000 American armed citizens. He was later subpoenaed by a number of anti-gun attorneys general to turn over his research, attacked in The New York Times and by many other “mainstream” outlets and, basically, pilloried by the gun-control Left so loudly that he wrote an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal titled “Antigun Activists Ambushed Me.” In it, he said, “The survey outraged gun-control advocates, who believed it could hurt them in court. They proceeded to disparage me professionally and tried to delay the progress of my research without any scientific basis.”
English also said that anti-Second Amendment-freedom proponents were obviously working overtime to “warn off other academics thinking of doing similar research, and to influence courts where states are losing on the merits.”
They didn’t like that English’s large study determined that armed citizens use their guns defensively about 1.67 million times annually; and that, indeed, the survey found that “in most defensive incidents (81.9 percent) no shot was fired.”
Somehow, English has survived at Georgetown. He is still listed as an assistant professor there.
English’s data was too honest—or counter anti-gun narrative—for many in the mainstream media and gun-control groups to deal with, so they attempted to kill the messenger. The data is, indeed, inconvenient to anti-gun fiction; after all, if we compare the 2021 National Firearms Survey data to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) estimates that there were approximately 330,000 violent victimizations involving a firearm in 2021, we find that defensive gun uses occur 5.06 times more often than reported violent crimes. If this data is a good indicator, then an obvious conclusion is that armed citizens are statistically behaving very responsibly with their right to keep and bear arms.
Thanks to the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC)—a research and education organization founded by economist and renowned expert on crime Dr. John Lott—we can add another important layer to understanding violent crime in America. According to data analyzed by the CPRC, murders occur overwhelmingly in dense urban areas, many of which have onerous anti-gun restrictions, and far less in suburban and rural areas where legal gun ownership tends to be more common.
“This research shows that murders in the U.S. are highly concentrated in tiny areas in the U.S. and that they are becoming even more concentrated in recent years,” said the report from Lott’s CPRC.
“The worst 1 percent of counties (the worst 31 counties) have 21 percent of the population and 42 percent of the murders. The worst 2 percent of counties (62 counties) contain 31 percent of the population and 56 percent of the murders. The worst 5 percent of counties contain 47 percent of the population and account for 73 percent of murders. But even within those counties, the murders are very heavily concentrated in small areas,” Lott wrote of the 2020 numbers.
The CPRC put the numbers into a colored map. This map continues to be talked about and shared on social media, as it clearly shows the worst areas in red. Indeed, the murder map in the report very closely mirrors the nation’s most anti-Second Amendment jurisdictions.
“Murder isn’t a nationwide problem,” Lott’s study said. “It’s a problem in a small set of urban areas and even in those counties murders are concentrated in small areas inside them, and any solution must reduce those murders.”
This again presents the needed and critical point that the Second Amendment doesn’t—and should not be treated as if—it ends at state lines. American citizens need the national concealed carry reciprocity legislation that is now active in Congress.
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