Thomas Sowell
Gun control myths
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com
Professor Joyce Lee Malcolm of Bentley College deserves some sort of
special prize for taking on the thankless task of talking sense on a
subject where nonsense is deeply entrenched and fiercely dogmatic. In her
recently published book, "Guns and Violence," Professor Malcolm examines
the history of firearms, gun control laws and violent crime in England.
What makes this more than an exercise in history is its relevance to
current controversies over gun control in America.
Gun control zealots love to make highly selective international comparisons
of gun ownership and murder rates. But Joyce Lee Malcolm points out some of
the pitfalls in that approach. For example, the murder rate in New York
City has been more than five times that of London for two centuries -- and
during most of that time neither city had any gun control laws.
In 1911, New York state instituted one of the most severe gun control laws
in the United States, while serious gun control laws did not begin in
England until nearly a decade later. But New York City still continued to
have far higher murder rates than London.
If we are serious about the role of guns and gun control as factors in
differing rates of violence between countries, then we need to do what
history professor Joyce Lee Malcolm does -- examine the history of guns and
violence. In England, as she points out, over the centuries "violent crime
continued to decline markedly at the very time that guns were becoming
increasingly available."
England's Bill of Rights in 1688 was quite unambiguous that the right of a
private individual to be armed was an individual right, independently of
any collective right of militias. Guns were as freely available to
Englishmen as to Americans, on into the early 20th century.
Nor was gun control in England a response to any firearms murder crisis.
Over a period of three years near the end of the 19th century, "there were
only 59 fatalities from handguns in a population of nearly 30 million
people," according to Professor Malcolm. "Of these, 19 were accidents, 35
were suicides and only three were homicides -- an average of one a year."
The rise of the interventionist state in early 20th century England
included efforts to restrict ownership of guns. After the First World War,
gun control laws began restricting the possession of firearms. Then, after
the Second World War, these restrictions grew more severe, eventually
disarming the civilian population of England -- or at least the law-abiding
part of it.
It was during this period of severe restrictions on owning firearms that
crime rates in general, and the murder rate in particular, began to rise in
England. "As the number of legal firearms have dwindled, the numbers of
armed crimes have risen," Professor Malcolm points out.
In 1954, there were only a dozen armed robberies in London but, by the
1990s, there were more than a hundred times as many. In England, as in the
United States, drastic crackdowns on gun ownership by law-abiding citizens
were accompanied by ever greater leniency to criminals. In both countries,
this turned out to be a formula for disaster.
While England has not yet reached the American level of murders, it has
already surpassed the United States in rates of robbery and burglary.
Moreover, in recent years the murder rate in England has been going up
under still more severe gun control laws, while the murder rate in the
United States has been going down as more and more states have allowed
private citizens to carry concealed weapons -- and have begun locking up
more criminals.
In both countries, facts have no effect whatever on the dogmas of gun
control zealots. The fact that most guns used to murder people in England
were not legally purchased has no effect on their faith in gun control laws
there, any more than faith in such laws here is affected by the fact that
the gun used by the recent Beltway snipers was not purchased legally either.
In England as in America, sensational gun crimes have been seized upon and
used politically to promote crackdowns on gun ownership by law-abiding
citizens, while doing nothing about criminals. American zealots for the
Brady bill say nothing about the fact that the man who shot James Brady and
tried to assassinate President Reagan has been out walking the streets on
furlough.
Talking facts to gun control zealots is only likely to make them angry. But
the rest of us need to know what the facts are. More than that, we need to
know that much of what the gun controllers claim as facts will not stand up
under scrutiny.
The grand dogma of the gun controllers is that places with severe
restrictions on the ownership of firearms have lower rates of murder and
other gun crimes. How do they prove this? Simple. They make comparisons of
places where this is true and ignore all comparisons of places where the
opposite is true.
Gun control zealots compare the United States and England to show that
murder rates are lower where restrictions on ownership of firearms are more
severe. But you could just as easily compare Switzerland and Germany, the
Swiss having lower murder rates than the Germans, even though gun ownership
is three times higher in Switzerland. Other countries with high rates of
gun ownership and low murder rates include Israel, New Zealand and Finland.
Within the United States, rural areas have higher rates of gun ownership
and lower rates of murder, whites have higher rates of gun ownership than
blacks and much lower murder rates. For the country as a whole, handgun
ownership doubled in the late 20th century, while the murder rate went
down. But such facts are not mentioned by gun control zealots or by the
liberal media.
Another dogma among gun control supporters is that having a gun in the home
for self-defense is futile and is only likely to increase the chances of
your getting hurt or killed. Your best bet is to offer no resistance to an
intruder, according to this dogma.
Actual research tells just the opposite story. People who have not resisted
have gotten hurt twice as often as people who resisted with a firearm.
Those who resisted without a firearm of course got hurt the most often.
Such facts are simply ignored by gun control zealots. They prefer to cite a
study published some years ago in the New England Journal of Medicine and
demolished by a number of scholars since then. According to this
discredited study, people with guns in their homes were more likely to be
murdered.
How did they arrive at this conclusion? By taking people who were murdered
in their homes, finding out how many had guns in the house, and then
comparing them with people who were not murdered in their homes.
Using similar reasoning, you might be able to show that people who hire
bodyguards are more likely to get killed than people who don't. Obviously,
people who hire bodyguards already feel at risk, but does that mean that
the bodyguards are the reason for the risk?
Similarly illogical reasoning has been used by counting how many intruders
were killed by homeowners with guns and comparing that with the number of
family members killed with those guns. But this is a nonsense comparison
because most people who keep guns in their homes do not do so in hopes of
killing intruders.
Most uses of guns in self-defense -- whether in the home or elsewhere -- do
not involve actually pulling the trigger. When the intended victim turns
out to have a gun in his hand, the attacker usually has enough brains to
back off. But the lives saved this way do not get counted.
People killed at home by family members are highly atypical. The great
majority of these victims have had to call the police to their homes
before, because of domestic violence, and just over half have had the cops
out several times. These are not just ordinary people who happened to lose
their temper when a gun was at hand.
Neither are most "children" who are killed by guns just toddlers who
happened to find a loaded weapon lying around. More of those "children" are
members of teenage criminal gangs who kill each other deliberately.
Some small children do in fact get accidentally killed by guns in the home
-- but fewer than drown in bathtubs. Is anyone for banning bathtubs?
Moreover, the number of fatal gun accidents fell, over the years, while the
number of guns was increasing by tens of millions. None of this supports
the assumption that more guns mean more fatal accidents. Most of the gun
controllers' arguments are a house of cards.
No wonder they don't want any hard facts coming near them.
Most people who are in favor of gun control laws support such laws because
they believe that these laws will reduce the number of firearms deaths.
Such people are not the problem. Their minds can be changed when they learn
that the facts are very different from what they have imagined or have been
led to believe.
The problem is with very different kinds of people, often in leadership
positions, whose support for gun control laws is strong enough to override
any facts. When John Lott's empirical study of the effects of gun control
laws found that gun ownership tended on net balance to reduce crime in I
general and murder in particular, he offered to give a copy of that study
to a member of a gun control advocacy group, but she refused to look at it.
Later, when the study was published as a book under the title "More Guns,
Less Crime," that same advocate was contacted by ABC News for her comments,
and she described the study as flawed. When Lott then phoned her to ask how
she could say that it was flawed when she had never read it, sbe simply
hung up on him.
Clearly, the facts were not crucial to this gun control advocate - or to
many other zealots. Nor can the lineup of people for and against gun
control laws be explained by facts that are equally available to people in
all parts of the ideological spectrum, for the liberal-left crusades for
more restrictive gun control laws and conservatives generally resist.
While Lott's study is perhaps the best known one showing that widespread
gun ownership has led to less crime, other studies with similar findings
include "Pointblank" by Gary Kleck and the more recent book "Guns and
Violence" by Joyce Lee Malcolm.
What about studies on the other side? Two that have been widely cited are
an article in the New England Journal of Medicine back in 1993 and a book
published in 2000 titled "Arming America" on the history of gun ownership
in this country.
The medical journal article claimed that guns in the home increase the risk
of violence and death. This was based on comparing people who were killed
in their homes with a sample of similar people in the general population.
Those who were killed at home owned guns more often than the others.
What makes this reasoning especially strange in a medical journal is that
it closely parallels the reasoning used by those who commit the fallacy of
judging hospitals by their death rates. People who go into hospitals are
more likely to die than people who don't. Does that make hospitals
dangerous? Or does it show that people who go into a hospital already have
health risks?
Indeed, death rates may be higher in a worldclass medical facility than in
the local county hospital because it is people with more dire medical
problems who are more likely to go into hospitals with top specialists and
state-of-the-art equipment.
Just as it would be fallacious to assume that people who go to different
kinds of hospitals have the same levels of risk to begin with, so it is
fallacious to assume that people who decided to keep a gun in the house
were in no more danger initially than those who didn't. Some were criminals
and were killed by the police. Comparisons of apples and oranges don't
prove anything.
The more recent anti-gun book by Michael Bellesiles of Emory University has
been lavishly praised in such organs of the left intelligentsia as The New
York Times and The New York Review of Books and was awarded a prestigious
prize for historians. Then other scholars began rhecking out his evidence.
The net result is that Bellesiles has now resigned from Emory University
after an investigation into his research led to a report that raised
questions about his scholarly integrity. But that is unlikely to stop his
study from continuing to be cited by advocates of gun control.
Facts are not the real issue to gun control zealots, who typically share
the left's general vision of the world, in which their own superior wisdom
and virtue need to be imposed on others, whether on guns, the environment
or other things.
When Lott asked the gun control crusader to look at the facts he had
amassed, he may have thought the issue was simply whether one policy was
better than another. But what was really at stake was a whole vision of
society and the crusader's own sense of self. No wonder she could not risk
looking at the facts.
JWR contributor Thomas Sowell, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, is
author of several books, including his latest, The Einstein Syndrome:
Bright Children Who Talk Late.
