{"id":89147,"date":"2023-01-08T14:07:57","date_gmt":"2023-01-08T20:07:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=89147"},"modified":"2023-01-08T14:07:57","modified_gmt":"2023-01-08T20:07:57","slug":"89147","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=89147","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

BOLD-FACED LIE: Gun Control Groups Twist Heritage Foundation Data Out of Recognition in Court Documents<\/a><\/p>\n

A conglomerate of gun control groups has\u00a0filed a brief<\/a>\u00a0in federal court supporting the District of Columbia in a lawsuit challenging the city\u2019s prohibition on civilian possession of magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds.<\/p>\n

This was not at all surprising.<\/p>\n

What was quite perplexing, however, was the gun control groups\u2019 citation of two of my recent monthly articles for\u00a0The Daily Signal<\/a>\u00a0on defensive gun use. The groups claim the two articles \u201csupport\u201d the premise that the District\u2019s ban doesn\u2019t negatively affect law-abiding gun owners, because none of the cases I cited \u201cinvolved the use of anywhere close to 10 rounds of ammunition.\u201d<\/p>\n

Worse, the gun control groups spun this as The Heritage Foundation, among others, having \u201cacknowledged that the ability to fire more than 10 rounds of ammunition without reloading is not necessary for defensive purposes.\u201d (The Daily Signal is Heritage\u2019s multimedia news organization.)<\/p>\n

These are incredible claims in the most literal sense: They lack any credibility.<\/p>\n

At best, the legal brief\u2019s characterization of my monthly articles on defensive gun use is lazy to the point of recklessness and wrongly attributes to my employer, The Heritage Foundation, a policy position that it doesn\u2019t hold. At worst, this constitutes an intentional effort to manipulate a federal court with a blatantly misleading representation of Heritage\u2019s work on defensive gun use.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

First, my monthly articles for The Daily Signal provide nothing close to a comprehensive accounting of every defensive gun use that occurs in a given month\u2014a point that is made quite clear in the articles themselves. Each one reminds readers that almost every study on the issue has found that Americans use their firearms between 500,000 and 2.5 million times a year.<\/p>\n

The series is intended to provide a snapshot of the thousands of cases in Heritage\u2019s\u00a0Defensive Gun Use Database<\/a>, and highlights, at most, only a fraction of the media-verified cases compiled in any given month.<\/p>\n

Yes, we choose cases to highlight based to some extent on an unquantifiable \u201cwow\u201d factor, which sometimes includes the number of rounds fired. But we also choose cases in large part based on aesthetic factors\u2014we like to spotlight cases that are spaced somewhat evenly throughout a given month and are also geographically diverse.<\/p>\n

In no way, then, is it reasonable to conclude that if one of my monthly articles for The Daily Signal doesn\u2019t highlight a case in which more than 10 rounds were fired by a defensive gun user, then no such case occurred that month.<\/p>\n

Ironically, the\u00a0September article<\/a>\u00a0that the gun control groups cite (covering cases from the previous month) is the perfect example to illustrate this point.<\/p>\n

Left out of that article\u2014but still included in Heritage\u2019s database and highlighted on the\u00a0@DailyDGU Twitter account<\/a>\u2014was an Aug. 19 example of defensive gun use in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, by a concealed carry permit holder\u00a0who fired 18 rounds<\/a>\u00a0while defending himself against an armed robber.<\/p>\n

A cursory review of Heritage\u2019s database reveals this is far from the only confrontation that didn\u2019t make it into the monthly \u201chighlight reel,\u201d despite involving more than 10 rounds fired in self-defense.<\/p>\n

In the\u00a0March article<\/a>, for example, we declined to highlight a Feb. 22 case in Richmond, Kentucky, in which a man\u00a0fired at least 19 rounds<\/a>\u00a0using two firearms during a shootout with an intruder who had just killed the man\u2019s daughter.<\/p>\n

That same month, a gun owner in Washington state told reporters that he\u00a0fired an entire magazine of ammunition<\/a>\u00a0at a gunman, providing covering fire for two wounded sheriff\u2019s deputies during a shootout and likely saving their lives.<\/p>\n

Second, the authors of the legal brief apparently assume that if a media report doesn\u2019t explicitly state that a defensive gun user fired more than 10 rounds, it simply couldn\u2019t have happened. Although it\u2019s sometimes evident from the broader context that fewer than 10 rounds were fired, at other times\u2014as the Washington case above underscores\u2014such an assumption is entirely unwarranted.<\/p>\n

In fact, at least two cases in the articles cited by the gun control groups cannot be so easily dismissed as involving \u201cnowhere close\u201d to the firing of 10 defensive rounds.<\/p>\n

In an\u00a0Aug. 16 case out of Lexington, South Carolina,<\/a>\u00a0both the assailant and the defensive gun user suffered multiple gunshot wounds during an exchange of gunfire inside the latter\u2019s home. As far as we can tell, law enforcement hasn\u2019t detailed the exact number of rounds fired during the shootout.<\/p>\n

The broader context, however, is one in which it is more than plausible for the defensive gun user to have fired more than 10 rounds. He was defending his home and family against a well-armed man wearing a ballistic vest during a shootout in which both men would have had ample opportunity for defensive cover.<\/p>\n

Similarly, a June 16 incident in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, was featured in the\u00a0July article<\/a>\u00a0cited by the gun control groups.\u00a0That article includes language and circumstances that make it entirely plausible that the defensive gun user fired more than 10 rounds. The elderly homeowner got into a shootout with three armed intruders who fired at him first, and the\u00a0most detailed news reports<\/a>\u00a0say merely that the homeowner \u201creturned shots.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unless the authors of the two gun control groups\u2019 legal brief have information to which neither we nor the original journalists are privy, there\u2019s no reasonable basis to conclude that the homeowner could not and did not fire more than 10 rounds in self-defense.<\/p>\n

This type of scenario\u2014and indeed, scenarios in which it is almost certain that more than 10 rounds were fired\u2014are found routinely in the monthly articles published by The Daily Signal, and it seems evident that the gun control groups must have gone out of their way to ignore any recent articles that didn\u2019t fit the misleading narrative they wished to convey.<\/p>\n

For example, it\u2019s reasonable to assume that the Florida gun owner featured in June, who used three firearms to defend himself\u00a0during a May shootout<\/a>, did so because he expended all of the ammunition in at least one firearm. The odds, therefore, are quite high that the defensive gun user cumulatively fired more than 10 rounds from those three firearms.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, a July case out of Philadelphia featured in the\u00a0August article<\/a>\u00a0involved at least\u00a040 rounds fired<\/a>\u00a0between the victim and three assailants, only one of whom clearly was portrayed as armed, according to news reports. It\u2019s statistically reasonable, if not highly probable, for the victim to have fired more than 10 of those rounds under the circumstances.<\/p>\n

As with cases explicitly involving more than 10 rounds fired in self-defense, plenty of these \u201cstatistically probable\u201d cases were captured in Heritage\u2019s database but not highlighted in my monthly articles for The Daily Signal.<\/p>\n

Consider a February case out of Washington state, where the defensive gun user \u201cdrop[ped] an entire magazine<\/a>\u201d of ammunition against a criminal while saving the lives of two deputy sheriffs during a shootout. Given the prevalence in that state of standard capacity magazines holding more than 10 rounds, there\u2019s a high likelihood that \u201cexpending an entire magazine\u201d resulted in more than 10 rounds being fired.<\/p>\n

And sometimes the monthly articles include summaries of defensive gun uses that unintentionally omitted the fact that more than 10 rounds were fired. This happened, for example, in the first article in 2019, which simply noted that a homeowner\u00a0killed three of four intruders on Jan. 20<\/a>, but, for purposes of brevity, left out the detail that he\u00a0fired dozens of rounds<\/a>\u00a0during that gunbattle.<\/p>\n

It is quite likely that my articles published by The Daily Signal have omitted similar information in other cases. After all, the primary purpose of these articles never has been to compile and showcase every single time a defensive gun user fires more than 10 rounds.<\/p>\n

Along those same lines, neither Heritage\u2019s database nor the monthly articles provide insight into the number of times defensive gun uses are unsuccessful precisely because a gun owner is killed by an assailant while he or she is reloading. We know, however,\u00a0that such cases have occurred<\/a>\u00a0this year.<\/p>\n

Far from \u201cacknowledging that the ability to fire more than 10 rounds of ammunition without reloading is not necessary for defensive purposes,\u201d Heritage\u2019s research on defensive gun use undermines any such assertion.<\/p>\n

The Heritage Foundation<\/a>\u00a0strongly condemns this attempt by prominent gun control groups to misconstrue Heritage\u2019s position on the need for standard capacity magazines, especially when the groups perpetrating this falsehood are doing so to mislead a federal judge.<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s be clear about what the\u00a0Defensive Gun Use Database<\/a>\u00a0shows, and what Heritage\u2019s position is: Civilians\u2014just like the law enforcement officers who are exempt from these restrictions\u2014sometimes need to defend themselves with more than 10 rounds of ammunition.<\/p>\n

And in those cases where more than 10 rounds are needed, the extra ammunition may mean the difference between life or death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BOLD-FACED LIE: Gun Control Groups Twist Heritage Foundation Data Out of Recognition in Court Documents A conglomerate of gun control groups has\u00a0filed a brief\u00a0in federal court supporting the District of Columbia in a lawsuit challenging the city\u2019s prohibition on civilian possession of magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds. This was not at all … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75,95,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-mendacity","category-rkba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=89147"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89149,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89147\/revisions\/89149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=89147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=89147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=89147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}