More light

THE AVAILABILITY OF handguns continues to be a hot-button
political issue, particularly in Virginia. The commonwealth’s
right-to-carry,
concealed weapons law is vigorously opposed by those who favor strict
government controls on these agents of death, including thousands attending
the Million Mom March earlier this year.
It seems so obvious. The whole purpose of guns is to kill and injure, so the
fewer guns out there, the fewer mothers (and fathers) will be grieving over
a lost son or daughter.

But Yale University researcher John Lott says his nationwide crime study,
the largest ever done, proves exactly the opposite. Counterintuitive or not,
Lott says, more guns consistently mean less crime.

His data show that each additional year a right-to-carry law is in effect,
murder rates consistently drop 1.5 percent, over and above any national
or regional decrease, and the rate of rape, robbery and aggravated
assault goes down 3 percent as well.
Lott, who was in Arlington last weekend to address the Citizens’ Committee
to Keep and Bear Arms, is no gun nut, but an expert on crime who has
published 80 academic papers. He taught at the prestigious University of
Chicago Law School and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School
of Economics before going to Yale last year.

When he started his research seven years ago, Lott told The Journal, he
wasn’t
expecting such results. But when he painstakingly looked at crime rates in
all
3,100 counties in the U.S. over a 20-year period, taking into account such
factors
as illegal drug prices, income and demographics, police activity and
incarceration
rates, the effects of various gun control laws became obvious.

What he found was that “bad things happen when guns are around, but that
guns
also prevent bad things from happening.” Indeed, Lott says, his data show
that
about 2 million people successfully use handguns each year to thwart
criminal
activity, and he estimates that nationwide, as many as 8,000 people are
spared
each year because either they or a bystander had a gun when a criminal
decided
to attack.

Accidental deaths of children from handguns, while tragic, are extremely
rare,
he notes. “As many children under the age of 5 drown in five-gallon plastic
buckets and bathtubs as the number of children under 10 who die from
accidental
gunshots.” Another study published in the August Journal of the American
Medical
Association concluded that the 1994 Brady law, requiring background checks
and a
waiting period before a gun can be purchased, had no effect on homicide or
suicide
rates, although a more recent study disputed that finding.

But Lott’s study found that waiting periods actually increased the number of
crimes
against women by 3 percent. He believes one of the law’s “unintended
consequences”
is to prevent threatened women from quickly obtaining weapons they need to
deter an
attack.

Last year, a group of 294 academics from Harvard, Princeton, Yale,
Northwestern
and other universities signed an open letter to Congress, suggesting that
instead of passing
more gun laws, lawmakers should review the ones currently on the books to
make sure they
did not unintentionally put law-abiding citizens at risk.

That sounds like a good way to shine more needed light on an already
overheated topic.