And I can quote NUMEROUS stories, more than a hundred where in some person would have been the victim of a horrendous crime (close to death assault, homicide) had they not had a gun. You guys just can't say that oooh well a majority of the leftist funded statistics show that having a gun makes you LESS safe. Gimme a break guys.
I would contest that 300k number as well, doesn't sound right, I think you are using OLD stats there. Back when the guns that were reported stolen were from guns that were already stolen by criminals themselves.....
Like I said before, we will FOREVER disagree, but the hard fact is that guns make you MORE safe and LESS safe at the same time, you just need the right training, the right firearm ownership sensibility, to make yourself more safe and less of a VICTIM. Thats the part you guys aren't seeing because you're only looking at it from the left side of the table. I'm being neither right or left here. If I was going full blown right I'd be jumping at your throats with mega stats that show guns make people more safe.
NCPA wrote:
The intended effect of most 20th century "gun crime" legislation has been to prevent criminals from obtaining guns or from using the guns they obtained. Yet the number of armed criminals and the amount of armed crime has increased during a period in which gun control laws have proliferated. On the surface, it would appear that the actual effects of legislation have not been the intended ones.
""Sophisticated statistical models show that reducing gun ownership doesn't reduce crime.""
Why then is there such strong support for laws controlling firearms? Much of it may stem from a belief in one or more myths about firearms and laws governing their possession. This study examines the most popular of these myths.
Myth No. 1: Guns cause crime.
The National Crime Survey estimates that 83 percent of Americans will be victims of violent crime at some time in their lives.2 Parties with diametrically opposed views on gun control seize on this estimate to support their positions. Those favoring gun control laws claim that such laws would keep more guns off the streets and out of the hands of criminals in an increasingly violent world. Opponents of new gun restrictions contend that a firearm in the hands of a law-abiding person is one of the best deterrents to crime, protecting people with limited physical strength from physically stronger criminals. Let's take a look at the available evidence.
Domestic Studies.
Several sophisticated statistical models have attempted to measure the net effect of firearms on criminal violence. On balance, they show that there is nothing to be gained from reducing the general level of gun ownership.3
* A thorough review of 18 studies of the effects of gun availability among potential victims and criminals found that the overall effect on criminal violence was zero.4
* In one study, researchers found no significant differences in total robbery rates between cities where guns were widely available and cities where they were not; in cities with fewer firearms, armed robbers simply used other weapons.5
* The best available evidence, based on at least eight national surveys of the general adult population, indicates that guns are used about as often for defensive as for criminal purposes.6
This conclusion is especially true of handguns.
International Evidence.
The experience of other nations also provides little support for the notion that guns causecrime:7
* Switzerland has one of the lowest murder rates in the world, and it requires all able-bodied males between the ages of 20 and 50 to have a military-issued automatic weapon, ammunition and other equipment in their dwellings.8
* Israel, which has an extremely low crime rate but is vulnerable to enemies including terrorists, depends on the defensive value of widespread civilian gun possession.
* Denmark and Finland also have high rates of gun ownership and low crime rates.
The experience of these countries shows that widespread gun possession is compatible with low crime rates. On the other hand, nations like Japan and England also have low crime rates but low gun ownership. There is no simple relationship between firearm availability and crime.9
Crimes Involving Guns.
"Eighty-eight percent of violent crimes do not involve firearms."
How many violent crimes involving guns are committed each year? FBI data for 1990 show that criminals used firearms in about 258,000 violent offenses, or about 16 percent of the 1.6 million crimes reported to the police. Fewer than half of all violent crimes are reported to the police, however. The National Crime Survey (NCS) estimates that there are about 5.4 million violent crimes (both reported and unreported) and that guns of all types are involved in some 650,000 or 12 percent.10 In other words, 88 percent of violent crimes do not involve firearms.
While certainly a very large annual number, reported and unreported violent crimes committed with guns remain relatively rare events. Less than 2 percent of the estimated 36 million crimes of all types (in the National Crime Survey) committed each year involve a gun. A majority of gun crimes are assaults, but only one in 42 handgun crimes involves a victim being shot. While there is a lot of violent crime in America relative to other industrial nations, an overwhelming majority of the violence involves knives, hammers, sticks, broken bottles, hands and feet and other weapons besides firearms.
"Firearms were used in a higher percentage of homicides in the 1920s than in the 1980s."
Guns are used in a majority of murders (from 59 percent to 66.3 percent in each of the past 10 years) and accounted for 14,265 deaths in 1991. According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, 53.1 percent of reported murders in 1991 were committed with handguns, 5.2 percent with shotguns and 3.4 percent with rifles, while miscellaneous and unknown firearms accounted for the remaining 4.6 percent. (Long guns, although virtually uncontrolled, were involved in only 8.6 percent of homicides.) By contrast, firearms were used to commit about 70 to 75 percent of homicides in the 1920s, a higher percentage than the average 60 percent rate during the 1980s.11 Firearms were the instrument of death in 60 percent of murders in 1980 and 66 percent in 1991 " the highest percentage in recent years " suggesting an upward trend. Firearms were used in 40 percent of all reported robberies but in only 11 percent of all rapes, 12 percent of severe assaults and 12 percent of all violent crimes. [See Figure I.]
Guns Involved in Crimes.
No one knows what fraction of firearms ultimately is used to commit crime, but the percentage is almost certainly tiny. Even if the same gun were never used more than once in committing a crime, only one out of every 309 guns would be involved in a crime in a given year.12 Overall:
* Only one out of every 123 handguns (less than 1 percent) and one out of every 1,247 long guns (less than one-tenth of 1 percent) are used in crime in any given year.13
* Even under very generous assumptions to maximize the estimated percentage of guns used in a crime, at most 6.7 percent of handguns would ever be involved in a crime.14
* If we realistically allow for repeated criminal uses of the same weapons, the fraction of all guns that are ever involved in crime would be less than 1 percent, with long guns under 0.5 percent and handguns under 2 percent.
Gun control laws cannot possibly reduce the crime rate unless they affect the 1 percent of guns that are actually used in crimes. Even if the laws did this, criminals would find it easy to acquire new guns. The numbers by themselves raise doubts about the efficacy of general restrictions on gun ownership in decreasing the frequency of gun use in violent crime.
Case Study: Killeen, Texas.
George Hennard crashed a pickup truck through the front of a Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, on October 16, 1991, got out with two semiautomatic pistols and methodically killed 23 people in 10 minutes before police finally arrived and killed him.
Dr. Suzanna Gratia, who watched as her mother and father were shot to death by Hennard, said later that she had left a pistol in her car outside the cafeteria because Texas law forbade carrying a weapon. From where she lay, she said, she had a clear shot at Hennard early on - and would have taken it. "We were sitting ducks and that just makes me so blasted mad," said Dr. Gratia, a chiropractor. "I've got a right to protect myself."15
On that day, coincidentally, Congress was debating a crime control bill. Congressman Chet Edwards, in whose district the massacre occurred, said the event convinced him to favor a ban on so-called assault weapons (although assault weapons were not used in the Killeen massacre).
Case Study: Anniston, Ala.
Two months later, two armed robbers herded 20 customers and employees in an Anniston, Ala., Shoney's restaurant into a walk-in cooler and held the manager outside at gunpoint. Then they spotted Thomas Glen Terry, a customer, hiding under a table and began shooting at him. Unlike the situation in Texas, Terry, who had a permit, was carrying a .45 caliber automatic handgun. He shot back, killing one robber and wounding the other. The manager and the hostages were released. unharmed.16
Case Study: Los Angeles, Calif.
Rioters in Los Angeles in the spring of 1992 looted and burned a store owned by Korean-Americans in Hollywood, even though they had to break through steel roll-down doors with crowbars and sledgehammers to get at it. But they spared a similar business in Koreatown. The reason? The rioters could see commandos with Uzi machine guns on top of the Koreatown building. The merchants later revealed that, although they did have a few guns that they fully intended to use if necessary, the "Uzis" were toys, and the "commandos" were costumed merchants.17
The looters and arsonists tended to leave houses and apartment buildings in the riot area of Los Angeles alone - not out of compassion, but because, as a 13-year-old neighborhood resident said, "They (the residents) got guns and everybody knows that. Nobody's going to want to mess with folks in houses."
Despite some 20,000 gun laws in the United States, mostly at the state and local levels, there is little evidence that any but the most weakly motivated citizens have been discouraged from gun ownership. And there is no evidence that these gun control laws have made a dent in the crime rate.
Domestic Evidence.
If gun control laws have any effect, it may be to increase crime. For instance:19
* New Jersey adopted what sponsors described as "the most stringent gun law" in the nation in 1966; two years later, the murder rate was up 46 percent and the reported robbery rate had nearly doubled.
* In 1968, Hawaii imposed a series of increasingly harsh measures and its murder rate, then a low 2.4 per 100,000 per year, tripled to 7.2 by 1977.
* In 1976, Washington, D.C., enacted one of the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation. Since then, the city's murder rate has risen 134 percent while the national murder rate has dropped 2 percent.
Defenders of the Washington law say it isn't working because criminals are getting guns in Virginia, where the laws are more relaxed. But just across the Potomac River, Arlington, Va., has a murder rate less than 10 percent of that of Washington (7.0 murders versus 77.8 per 100,000 population). Can the difference be explained by the fact that Washington is a large city? Virginia's largest city, Virginia Beach, has a population of nearly 400,000, allows easy access to firearms - and has had one of the country's lowest murder rates for years (4.1 per 100,000 population in 1991).
An analysis of 19 types of gun control laws [Table I] concluded that not only do they fail to reduce rates of violence, they even fail "to reduce the use of guns or induce people to substitute other weapons in acts of violence."20 For example:21
* When Morton Grove, Ill., outlawed handgun ownership, fewer than 20 were turned in.
* After Evanston, Ill., a Chicago suburb of 75,000 residents, became the largest town to ban handgun ownership in September 1982, it experienced no decline in violent crime.
* Among the 15 states with the highest homicide rates, 10 have restrictive or very restrictive gun laws.
* 20 percent of U.S. homicides occur in four cities with just 6 percent of the population - New York, Chicago, Detroit and Washington, D.C. - and each has a virtual prohibition on private handguns.
* New York has one of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation - and 20 percent of the armed robberies. Even more troublesome is the fact that the places where gun control laws are toughest tend to be the places where the most crime is committed with illegal weapons:22
International Evidence.
Other countries have had similar experiences. After Canada passed a gun control law in 1977, the murder rate failed to decline but armed robbery and burglary, crimes frequently deterred by gun ownership, increased.23 (Canadian homicide rates are slightly lower than those in states along the U.S. border.) Violent crime accelerated in Taiwan and Jamaica after handguns were banned.24
Why Gun Control Laws May Benefit Criminals.
An increase in violent crime that appears to follow a tightening of controls on gun ownership and use is consistent with economic reasoning. Gun control laws are most likely to be obeyed by people who are otherwise law-abiding if, indeed, they are obeyed by anybody. Thus measures that apply equally to criminals and noncriminals, if they affect behavior at all, are almost certain to reduce gun possession more among noncriminals. As the popular slogan puts it: "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns."
Scholarly studies have not been able to demonstrate any effect of gun control laws. But if there is an effect, it is likely to benefit criminals in two ways: fewer armed victims to worry about and fewer criminal justice resources to devote to prosecuting real criminals. If fewer potential victims have guns for defense, the balance of power tilts slightly toward criminals. The overall crime rate tends to increase, although guns may not be used in any more crimes because, on average, victim resistance is lowered.
Because more police resources are spent on gun registration, gun law enforcement and gun law convictions, fewer resources are available to deter real criminals. Arrests for weapons violations already exceed 220,000 per year,25 a nontrivial load on the criminal justice system. A Chicago judge from one of the two courtrooms exclusively dedicated to trying gun law offenses in that city testified a few years ago:26
The most striking experience I can take away from the Gun Court . . . is . . . the kinds of people that appear there as defendants. . . . This is their very first arrest of any kind. Many of them are old people, many of them are shopkeepers, persons who have been previous victims of violent crime.
Although many of these "criminals" get probation, the advocates of stricter gun laws press for mandatory sentencing. Meanwhile, punishments meted out for gun law violations not connected with real crimes tend to depress citizens' respect for law and the criminal justice system. As attorney David B. Kopel puts it, "In a world where first-time muggers often receive probation, it is morally outrageous to imprison . . . everyone who carries a firearm for self-defense."27
Advocates of gun control frequently argue that there is no defensible reason for innocent people to own handguns, since the only function of such weapons is to kill other people. Actually, there are a number of legitimate reasons to own a handgun - not the least of which is self defense. Pistol shooting (at inanimate targets) is a sport, and some professionals in the sport have million-dollar contracts.42 And, contrary to antigun propaganda, pistol hunting is also a sport.43 More important, as noted above, firearms are used one million times a year to ward off criminals and most of the time they are not discharged.
Who Owns Guns.
Surveys show that owning a gun is associated with peace of mind. Those who own guns are less fearful of walking in their neighborhoods. They are less apt to be afraid at night in their homes, less likely to have been burglarized or robbed within the last year. They also are more likely to be political conservatives and hunters. The overall pattern of gun ownership has been relatively stable over the past 30 years. The biggest single predictor of whether a householder owns a gun is whether he or she grew up in a household with a gun. This helps to explain the deep-seated cultural conflict between those who find gun ownership wholesome and judicious and those who find it abhorrent and in need of control.44
Guns for Self-Protection.
"Firearms are used a million times a year to ward off criminals."
Higher crime in an area sometimes stimulates more people to buy firearms for protection. Twenty-seven percent of gun owners say they have a gun mainly for protection. Another 62 percent say that protection from crime is at least one of the reasons they own guns.45 Of households with guns, those with no adult male are twice as likely as others to keep a loaded gun. Black gun owners are four times as likely as white gun owners to keep a loaded handgun.46
Criminals vs. Noncriminals.
Survey data show that gun ownership among people who are arrested is moderately higher than in the general population, but the difference is modest for handguns, the type most frequently involved in violence.47 Scattered evidence suggests that during the period of fastest increase in violent crime, from 1964 to 1974, gun possession grew more rapidly among criminals than among law-abiding citizens.48 Perhaps the sturdiest evidence is that the fraction of homicides, aggravated assaults and robberies involving guns increased from 1964 to 1974.
