Gun laws don’t reduce crime
>USA Today | 5-9-2002 | John R. Lott Jr.
>
>Posted on 5/9/02 7:12 PM Central by Gun142
>
>Gun laws don’t reduce crime
>
>By John R. Lott Jr.
>
>Should we treat the Second Amendment like the rest of the Bill of Rights
>and assume it protects Americans against an over-intrusive
>government, as the Bush administration now argues? While the question
>whether people have a right to protect their own lives and the lives
>of loved ones is important, for most the bottom line is simpler: Do gun
>laws reduce violent crime?
>
>Too often calls for ”reasonable” gun control or ”sensible”
>gun-safety laws ignore that such legislation can actually result in
>increased crime. Guns are used
>defensively about 2 million times a year, according to national surveys.
>Physically weaker victims (women and the elderly) and those most likely
>to be victims of
>crime (particularly poor blacks) benefit the most from owning a gun.
>Unfortunately, rules that are primarily obeyed by law-abiding citizens
>and not would-be
>criminals make crime easier.
>
>One would never know from reading the news that there exists not one
>single academic study showing that the federal Brady Act,
>assault-weapons
>bans, state waiting periods, background checks, one-gun-a-month rules or
>safe-storage laws reduce violent crime. Some research even finds that
>these rules increase crime.
>
>Advocates of ”reasonable” gun laws need only look at Europe to see
>what the future holds. Europe has everything American gun-control
>proponents favor, but
>the three worst public shootings in the past year all occurred in
>Europe. All took place in so-called gun-free ”safe zones.” With
>violent crime rising, European
>police complain that strict gun laws have not impeded criminals’ access
>to guns.
>
>Around the world, from Australia to England, countries that have
>recently strengthened gun-control laws with the promise of lowering
>crime have instead seen
>violent crime soar. In the four years after the U.K. banned handguns in
>1996, gun crime rose by an astounding 40%. Since Australia’s 1996 laws
>banning most
>guns and making it a crime to use a gun defensively, armed robberies
>rose by 51%, unarmed robberies by 37%, assaults by 24% and kidnappings
>by 43%.
>While murders fell by 3%, manslaughter rose by 16%.
>
>Gun-control advocates conveniently ignore that the countries with the
>highest homicide rates have gun bans.
>
>John R. Lott Jr. is a resident scholar at the conservative American
>Enterprise Institute and the author of More Guns, Less Crime. Firearm
>restrictions make
>law-abiding citizens more vulnerable.
>