There are plenty of reasons to support the Second Amendment’s guarantee of our right to bear arms, but an expectation of being the victim of society‐​collapsing chemical warfare shouldn’t be one of them. Wayne LaPierre, CEO and executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, recently said at the organization’s annual meeting:



“We know, in the world that surrounds us, there are terrorists, home invaders, drug cartels, carjackers, “knock‐​out game”-ers, rapers [sic], haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping mall killers, and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse the society that sustains us all.”

People tend to overestimate their vulnerability because politicians, reporters, and interested individuals like LaPierre stand to gain from such misperceptions. My colleague John Mueller reported that as recently as late 2011, 75 percent of Americans polled believe that another terrorist attack causing large numbers of American lives to be lost in the near future is somewhat or very likely. The reality is much tamer: outside of war zones, Islamist terrorism claims about 200 to 400 lives each year worldwide. And the United States is less violent now than it has been in years. In the short 35 years between 1973 and 2008, murder dropped by over 40 percent. Rape dropped by 80 percent over the same period.



The mismatch between perceived vulnerability to violence and reality is one of several public misconceptions that the website Human​Progress​.org hopes to amend. This is not to say that the right to self defense is superfluous—quite to the contrary, it is fundamental and firearm ownership is an important component of securing that right. That alone is justification for the right to defensive weapons. But there is no need to exaggerate dangers such as probable and imminent threats from terrorists and psychopaths.