Harvard Study: Gun Control Is Counterproductive
 

Harvard Study: Gun Control Is Counterproductive

I've just learned that Washington, D.C.'s petition for a rehearing of the Parker case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit was denied today. This is good news. Readers will recall in this case that the D.C. Circuit overturned the decades-long ban on gun ownership in the nation's capitol on Second Amendment grounds.

However, as my colleague Peter Ferrara explained in his National Review Online article following the initial decision in March, it looks very likely that the United States Supreme Court will take the case on appeal. When it does so - beyond seriously considering the clear original intent of the Second Amendment to protect an individual's right to armed self-defense - the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court would be wise to take into account the findings of a recent study out of Harvard.

The study, which just appeared in Volume 30, Number 2 of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy (pp. 649-694), set out to answer the question in its title: "Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence." Contrary to conventional wisdom, and the sniffs of our more sophisticated and generally anti-gun counterparts across the pond, the answer is "no." And not just no, as in there is no correlation between gun ownership and violent crime, but an emphatic no, showing a negative correlation: as gun ownership increases, murder and suicide decreases.

The findings of two criminologists - Prof. Don Kates and Prof. Gary Mauser - in their exhaustive study of American and European gun laws and violence rates, are telling:

Nations with stringent anti-gun laws generally have substantially higher murder rates than those that do not. The study found that the nine European nations with the lowest rates of gun ownership (5,000 or fewer guns per 100,000 population) have a combined murder rate three times higher than that of the nine nations with the highest rates of gun ownership (at least 15,000 guns per 100,000 population).

For example, Norway has the highest rate of gun ownership in Western Europe, yet possesses the lowest murder rate. In contrast, Holland's murder rate is nearly the worst, despite having the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe. Sweden and Denmark are two more examples of nations with high murder rates but few guns. As the study's authors write in the report:

If the mantra "more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death" were true, broad cross-national comparisons should show that nations with higher gun ownership per capita consistently have more death. Nations with higher gun ownership rates, however, do not have higher murder or suicide rates than those with lower gun ownership. Indeed many high gun ownership nations have much lower murder rates. (p. 661)
Finally, and as if to prove the bumper sticker correct - that "gun don't kill people, people do" - the study also shows that Russia's murder rate is four times higher than the U.S. and more than 20 times higher than Norway. This, in a country that practically eradicated private gun ownership over the course of decades of totalitarian rule and police state methods of suppression. Needless to say, very few Russian murders involve guns.

The important thing to keep in mind is not the rate of deaths by gun - a statistic that anti-gun advocates are quick to recite - but the overall murder rate, regardless of means. The criminologists explain:

[P]er capita murder overall is only half as frequent in the United States as in several other nations where gun murder is rarer, but murder by strangling, stabbing, or beating is much more frequent. (p. 663 - emphases in original)
It is important to note here that Profs. Kates and Mauser are not pro-gun zealots. In fact, they go out of their way to stress that their study neither proves that gun control causes higher murder rates nor that increased gun ownership necessarily leads to lower murder rates. (Though, in my view, Prof. John Lott's More Guns, Less Crime does indeed prove the latter.) But what is clear, and what they do say, is that gun control is ineffectual at preventing murder, and apparently counterproductive.

Not only is the D.C. gun ban ill-conceived on constitutional grounds, it fails to live up to its purpose. If the astronomical murder rate in the nation's capitol, in comparison to cities where gun ownership is permitted, didn't already make that fact clear, this study out of Harvard should.

http://www.theacru.org/blog/2007/05/...terproductive/

Re: Harvard Study: Gun Control Is Counterproductive
 

I think the justices are actually supposed to interpret the law, not case studies, in making their decisions.

Hopefully, though, they will make the right decision in this case.

Re: Harvard Study: Gun Control Is Counterproductive
 

This depends on your standards of "productivity":15_1_70v:

Re: Harvard Study: Gun Control Is Counterproductive
 

They did, but just barely. The blog post Silver001 quoted was from 2007 and it was talking about the case that became known as DC vs Heller, which was decided in June 2008.

Re: Harvard Study: Gun Control Is Counterproductive
 

We've been trying to tell this to the anti's for years but most of them don't want to hear it. If some academic dares to produce something like this, the anti's immediately try to portray them as "pawns of the gun industry or the NRA." Dr. Lott has gone through a lot of this even though he doesn't own any guns or belong to the NRA. (At least he didn't when he wrote his book. Things might have changed!)

When I read the post title, I thought it was going to reference another side of the same coin. Every time the anti's start to push to "ban xxxx," sales of xxxx go through the roof. For instance, my Dad bought a Colt AR-15 in the late 1960's. It was the first one I ever saw in the flesh. It was the only AR pattern rifle I ever fired until I went into the US Army in 1985. It was a very unusual rifle for "Joe Blow" to own.

Then came all the gun control hysteria of the last twenty years. Effort to limit the capacity of magazines, the invention of a totally new term "assault weapons" and efforts to demonize them in the media and ban them legislatively. Bush 41 released an EO cutting of their import. Suddenly every gun show had AK's and AR's everywhere. People who had no guns at all were buying them. People who had only considering themselves "bird hunters" or "deer hunters" were buying them. Had to get yours before "the government bans them."

Then the AWB of 94 happened. People still wanted that style of firearm. So the makers found ways to meet the letter of the law while still appealing to people who wanted to have a gun the government "didn't want them to own." There were more AK's and AR's sold during the ten years of the AWB than ever before! Then the ban ended. More publicity. More cries from the media to "bring back the ban." And the rollercoaster just picked up steam. Obviously the election of Obama has made the hill even steeper. People want to own military style guns in greater and greater numbers. Many people want to own several of them or to buy extra and put them away for "the day when they are banned and worth a lot more."

You would _think_ even the antis would realize that all their efforts have actually resulted in FAR more guns actually "out in society" today than there would be if there had been no new gun control efforts in the first place!!! Talk about counter-productive!

Gregg