Cost of gun locks too high
More deaths, crime and reliability problems aren’t worth it.

By John R. Lott Jr.

Will the New Jersey General Assembly follow the state Senate and mandate
that guns can be sold only if operated exclusively by someone with the
correct fingerprint or wearing a special electronic ring?
Such locks are touted as being able to reduce the rate of accidental gun
deaths and suicides among children. Who can oppose such a law?
But despite the obvious feel-good appeal of these rules, gun locks and safe
storage laws are more likely to cost lives than to save them.
Accidental gun deaths among children are fortunately much rarer than most
people believe. Consider New Jersey from 1994 to 1998. Among 1.5 million
children under the age of 15, there were only two accidental gun deaths – an
annual rate of 0.4 deaths. Suicides committed with guns raise the average to
1.4 deaths per year. With 1.1 million adults in New Jersey owning at least
one gun in 1996, the overwhelming majority of gun owners must be extremely
careful or the figures would be much higher.
According to national studies, the person who fires a gun accidentally is
not your typical person. Shooters overwhelmingly have problems with
alcoholism and long criminal histories, particularly arrests for violent
acts. They are also disproportionately involved in automobile crashes and
are much more likely to have had their driver’s license suspended or
revoked. The problem is that those who are most at risk are the least likely
to obey the law. It is the low-risk, law-abiding citizens who will obey.
Academic studies of safe-storage and gun-lock laws have also overwhelmingly
found no evidence that they reduce the total number of suicides – although a
few studies have found some small reductions in suicides committed with
guns. There are simply too many ways to commit suicide. If people are intent
on killing themselves, they will still do it, with or without a gun.
The gun-lock law poses real risks. The most obvious is that gun locks are
costly. My research indicates that it is those who are most threatened by
crime – poor people, particularly blacks living in high-crime urban areas -
who benefit the most from being able to protect themselves. “Smart” locks,
even when they become reliable, will add hundreds of dollars to the price of
guns and stop many poor people from being able to protect themselves and
their families.
Locked guns are also not as readily accessible for defensive gun uses. Since
criminals are deterred by potentially armed victims, gun locks may therefore
increase crime. Exacerbating this problem are serious reliability issues.
Fingers that are slightly dirty or not placed exactly on the finger print
reading device may prevent the gun from firing. There is also the concern
that smart locks relying on radio signals can be jammed by criminals.
Guns clearly deter criminals. Americans use guns defensively over 2 million
times each year – five times more frequently than the 430,000 times guns
were used to commit crimes in 1997. Ninety-eight percent of the time, simply
brandishing the weapon is sufficient to stop an attack. Even though the
police are extremely important in reducing crime, they simply can’t be there
all the time and virtually always end up at the crime scene after the crime
has been committed. Having a gun is by far the safest course of action when
one is confronted by a criminal.
Even if one has young children, it does not make sense to lock up a gun if
one lives in a high-crime urban area. Laws, or for that matter exaggerations
of the risks involved in gun ownership, make people lock up their guns or
cause them not to own a gun in the first place, will result in more deaths,
not fewer deaths.
Recent research that I have done examining juvenile accidental gun deaths or
suicides for all U.S. states from 1977 to 1996, found that safe storage laws
had no impact on either type of death. What did happen, however, was that
law-abiding citizens were less able to defend themselves against crime. The
15 states that adopted safe-storage laws during this period faced over 300
more murders and 3,860 more rapes per year. Burglaries also increased
dramatically.
Laws frequently have unintended consequences. Sometimes even the best
intentioned ones cost lives.

John R. Lott Jr., a senior research scholar at the Yale University Law
School, is the author of “More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun
Control Laws.”

Original Article:
http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2001/06/02/opinion/LOTT02.htm