Thomas Sowell

Gun-safety starts with parental responsibility

POLITICAL REACTIONS to this year’s rash of schoolhouse
shootings have been classic liberalism: The government
should crack down on gun owners who haven’t shot
anybody. Meanwhile, liberals have very little interest in punishing the
young murderers, and instead are ready to listen to psychobabble
excuses.

The latest ploy in the anti-gun crusade is shifting from emphasis on gun
“control” to emphasis on gun “safety.” As with so many other safety
issues, few people — least of all politicians — seem ready to acknowledge
that one kind of safety often comes at the expense of other kinds of
safety.

Child-locks for guns are the latest
safety craze. But schoolhouse
shootings are not being done by
infants and toddlers. They are being
done by people old enough to
figure out any lock that an adult can
figure out. Child-locks provide no
protection whatever against the
premeditated murder of school
children and their teachers.

If you are serious about stopping smaller children from firing guns that
they may find around the house, there is an incredibly simple way to
prevent that: Don’t leave the guns loaded. Moreover, most guns already
have safety devices.

Maybe some parents are not responsible enough or thoughtful enough
to remember to take the bullets out of guns that they keep in their
homes. But are such parents any more likely to remember to lock the
gun?

More important, how often does this happen? More children die each
year from bicycle accidents than from gun accidents, but where is there
any such orchestrated hysteria about a need to ban bicycles?

There is a dangerous down side to locking guns — and especially adding
a child-lock to the existing safety devices. Many people keep guns in
their homes to protect themselves and their families. Studies show that
these guns have in fact saved great numbers of people from being
victims of intruders in their homes.

Multiple safety devices slow down the very people who need to be able
to fire in self-defense. Criminals with guns will undoubtedly already have
them unlocked and loaded. Zealots for gun-control laws never seem to
understand that criminals do not obey laws. Gun control means
unilateral disarmament of law-abiding citizens.

These law-abiding citizens have used guns to defend themselves at least
760,000 times in a single year. Some people with gun permits have saved
policemen’s lives by coming to their rescue.

None of this fits the liberal vision, so you are unlikely to hear about it in
the mainstream media. In the liberal vision, the rest of us are such
irresponsible slobs that we will go around shooting members of our
family or our friends, whether in anger at the moment or out of sheer
carelessness.

But what are the facts? Since the mid-1980s, there has been a 50 percent
increase in gun ownership. If guns are the problem, then we should have
seen a rise in murders. Instead, there has been a decline in murder and
other violent crimes — especially in places where gun ownership has
gone up.

In a country with more than a quarter of a billion people, you can find
isolated examples of almost anything. But the handful of accidental
deaths from guns are far outweighed by the reduced murder rate with
increased gun ownership.

If guns are the problem, then there should be higher murder rates in
rural areas, where guns are more prevalent, or among whites, who have
a higher rate of gun ownership than blacks. In both cases, the facts are
directly the opposite.

A careful and extensive study of the actual effects of gun ownership has
just been published by Professor John Lott of the University of Chicago.
It is titled “More Guns, Less Crime.” You may not hear much about this
book in the media because its factual data annihilate the liberal
shibboleths about gun control.

The truly ugly side of the gun-control crusade is in its typical liberal
assumption that ordinary people must be deprived of self-reliance and
have the government take care of them instead. Unfortunately, the
government is in no position to put a cop on every street corner, much
less in every home.

As Professor Lott discovered, gun ownership deters crime. But what will
deter liberals? Certainly not the facts. They have too much invested in
their vision of themselves as the saviors of us all. Crime.