Similarly, in Japan handguns and rifles are illegal and shotguns very difficult to obtain. The story behind this claim illustrates how myths that support gun control are generated. A 1991 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association discussed a study of several dozen homes in westem Pennsylvania where a teenager had committed or attempted suicide or where a non-suicidal teenager who had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital lived. A home with a teenager who had committed suicide was twice as likely as the other homes to contain a gun. In his column, Reeves took the factoid one step further, telling his readers that it applied to all teenagers, even though all of the subjects in the study had serious psychological problems.
Factoids also play an important role in the debate about guns in school.
The National Education Association puts the number at 100,000. The only comprehensive data on this question come from 1990 and 1991 surveys by the Centers for Disease Control that asked students if they had carried guns for protection during the preceeding 30 days. Students who answered yes included all those who occasionally carried guns anywhere, such as in cars when driving at night in dangerous neighborhoods, and most who carried did so infrequently. Interpreting the data realistically, Kleck, the FSU criminologist, estimates that one in every 800 high school students, which works out to 16,000 to 17,000 students nationally, carry a gun to school on a given day. Accordingly, guns play a relatively small role in the overall problem of violence in school.