| GOF Public Service Announcements |
GOF Public Service Announcements Promoting PROPER Gun Safety
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Below is sample text that GOF is including with professional-quality Public Service Anouncements being distributed to radio and television outlets nationwide.
Proper Gun Safety
Sponsor: Gun Owners Foundation
Campaign Objective: To generate public awareness of the dangers of not having a gun ready for protection and to encourage gun owners not to lock up their best means of self-defense.
Target Audience:
American adults in gun-owning households.
Did You Know?
* Guns are used 2.5 million times a year in self-defense. Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year -- or about 6,850 times a day.1 This means that each year, firearms are used more than 60 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives.2
* Locking up firearms can cost lives during a life-threatening situation. In California last year, two children died -- they were pitchforked to death by a crazed drug addict -- because a resident in the home could not access the household firearms in time. The guns were locked up in deference to California state law.3
* Guns are the Great Equalizer for women. As many as 200,000 women use a gun every year to defend themselves against sexual abuse.4
* Law-abiding gun owners are a good form of crime control. Citizens shoot and kill at least twice as many criminals as police do every year (1,527 to 606).5
FOR MORE INFORMATION or TO ORDER ADDITIONAL CAMPAIGN MATERIALS, PLEASE CONTACT:
1 Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense With a Gun," 86 The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Northwestern University School of Law, 1 (Fall 1995):164. The 2.5 million figure is consistent with a mountain of other independent surveys showing similar figures. The sponsors of these studies -- nearly a dozen -- are quite varied, and include anti-gun organizations, news media organizations, governments and commercial polling firms. For example, even anti-gun researchers who were commissioned by the Clinton Justice Department found there are as many as 1.5 million cases of self-defense with a firearm every year. [Source: Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, "Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms," NIJ Research in Brief (May 1997).]
2 According to the National Safety Council, the total number of gun deaths (by accidents, suicides and homicides) account for less than 35,000 deaths per year. This means that fewer Americans die by guns than by other common items such as cars (40,000 plus yearly) or doctors (about 98,000 per year). See Injury Facts, published yearly by the National Safety Council, Itasca, Illinois. For statistics on deaths due to medical mistakes, see the Institute of Medicine, which is a division of the National Academy of Sciences.
3 Kimi Yoshino, "Gun advocates say fear of liability keeps parents from teaching survival skills," The Fresno Bee (August 26, 2000). Removing a trigger lock can be somewhat tricky -- even in a non-emergency. Maryland Governor Parris Glendening struggled for at least two whole minutes to remove a trigger lock at a training session in March 2000. [See Gerald Mizejewski, "Device wins police praise but fails to move skeptics," The Washington Times (March 23, 2000).]
4 Kleck and Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime," at 185.
5 Kleck, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, (1991):111-116, 148.
A major media blitz like this costs considerable amounts of money. However, Since this is a Gun Owners Foundation project, any and all contributions to support it are 100% tax-deductible. If you would like to help, please click here to make a tax-deductible contribution. Or, write a check to Gun Owners Foundation and write in the memo line: Public Service Announcements Project. The address is 8001 Forbes Place, Suite 102, Springfield, VA 22151.
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