http://www.lewrockwell.com/lott/lott33.html

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Anti-Gun Academics

by John R. Lott, Jr.

This month the National Academy of Sciences issued a
328-page report on gun-control laws. The big news is that
the academy?s panel couldn?t identify any benefits of the
decades-long effort to reduce crime and injury by
restricting gun ownership. The only conclusion it could
draw was: Let?s study the question some more (presumably,
until we find the results we want).

The academy, however, should believe its own findings.
Based on 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government
publications, a survey that covered 80 different gun-control
measures and some of its own empirical work, the panel
couldn?t identify a single gun-control regulation that
reduced violent crime, suicide or accidents.

From the assault-weapons ban to the Brady Act to
one-gun-a-month restrictions to gun locks, nothing worked.

The study was not the work of gun-control opponents: The
panel was set up during the Clinton administration, and all
but one of its members (whose views on guns were publicly
known before their appointments) favored gun control.

It?s bad enough that the panel backed away from its own
survey and empirical work; worse yet is that it didn?t
really look objectively at all the evidence. If it had, it
would have found not just that gun control doesn?t help
solve the problems of crime, suicide and gun accidents, but
that it may actually be counterproductive.

The panel simply ignored many studies showing just that.
For example, the research on gun locks that the panel
considered examined only whether accidental gun deaths and
suicides were prevented. There was no mention of research
that shows that locking up guns prevents people from using
them defensively.

The panel also ignored most of the studies that find a
benefit in crime reduction from right-to-carry laws. It did
pay attention to some non?peer-reviewed papers on the
right-to-carry issue, and it also noted one part of a
right-to-carry study that indicated little or no benefit
from such laws. What the panel didn?t point out, however,
is that the authors of that particular study had concluded
that data in their work did much more to show there were
benefits than to debunk it.

James Q. Wilson, professor of management and public policy
at UCLA, was the one dissenting panelist and the only member
whose views were known in advance to not be entirely pro-gun
control. His dissent focused on the right-to-carry issue,
and the fact that emphasizing results that could not
withstand peer-reviewed studies called into question the
panel?s contention that right-to-carry laws had not for sure
had a positive effect.

Wilson also said that that conclusion was inaccurate given
that “virtually every reanalysis done by the committee”
confirmed right-to-carry laws reduced crime. He found the
committee?s only results that didn?t confirm the drop in
crime “quite puzzling.” They accounted for “no control
variables,” nothing on any of the social, demographic, and
public policies that might affect crime, and he didn?t
understand how evidence that wouldn?t get published in a
peer-reviewed journal would be given such weight.

While more research is always helpful, the notion that we
have learned nothing flies in the face of common sense. The
NAS panel should have concluded as the existing research
has: Gun control doesn?t help.

Instead, the panel has left us with two choices: Either
academia and the government have wasted tens of millions of
dollars and countless man-hours on useless research (and the
panel would like us to spend more in the same worthless
pursuit), or the National Academy is so completely unable to
separate politics from its analyses that it simply can?t
accept the results for what they are.

In either case, the academy, and academics in general, have
succeeded mostly in shooting themselves in the foot.

December 30, 2004

John Lott a resident scholar at the
American Enterprise Institute, is the author of The Bias
Against Guns (Regnery 2003).