http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/interrogatory040300b.html

4/03/00 6:45 p.m.
Yale’s John Lott Says…
“The bottom line should be not whether we strike a blow against the gun
industry, but what impact we are going to be having on people’s safety.”

By Kathryn Jean Lopez, NR associate
[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]%20>
John R. Lott Jr. is a senior research scholar at the
Yale University Law School and the author of
More Guns, Less Crime:
Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226493636/o/qid=953560006/sr=8-2/103-0825460-1436655

National Review: To a New York Times reporter, one official from the
Massachusetts attorney general’s office said the new rules that went into
effect in Massachusetts on Monday “mark the sharpest blow yet to the gun
industry.” How pernicious are these rules? Do you see states lining up to
follow suit?

John Lott: It’s sad that they phrase it in that way, as a “blow to the gun
industry.” The bottom line should be not whether we strike a blow against
the gun industry, but what impact we are going to be having on people’s
safety. I have real concerns about these rules in Massachusetts. When they
decide to essentially ban so-called “Saturday Night Specials,” inexpensive
guns, like they have here, it is the poor people in high-crime urban areas
who aren’t going to be able to defend themselves.
As for the impact this might have on other states, it’s interesting to note
that these restrictions weren’t part of a law that was passed. It was,
rather, an attorney general who issued these rules unilaterally. I don’t
think they could pass. In fact, there have been attempts to pass similar
types of safety rules in Massachusetts–and they haven’t been successful.

These rules generally – whether they be effectively banning certain types of
guns or mandating “childproof locks” – will create future problems. There’s
no such thing as a lock that’s impossible to tamper with. I’m concerned that
there will be a mandatory “tamper-proof” lock. Then, at some point in the
future, someone will discover that the lock can be tampered with, so there
will be legal action against companies that are selling the guns with the
locks. The [government] will say, “Did you realize that this lock was not
tamper-proof?” And the gun manufacturers will say, “Yes.” But they’ll face
violations of the law for having sold the guns even though they knew that
their guns were not able to stand up to this “tamper-proof” standard. I
think that what’s largely going on here is an effort to raise the price of
guns, make it impossible to sell many types of guns – if not handguns
completely – and make it so that over time the number of law-abiding
citizens who own guns will decline, and make it easier for more stringent
rules to pass in the future.

NR: In one news story, the author ends the article by explaining that “less
than ? of all handguns models have load indicators or magazine disconnects.”
And then it says that a “GAO study of accidental shootings found that 30
percent of them could have been prevented with the devices.” Is it
disingenuous to throw out numbers like that?

Lott: The author is referring to a GAO study that was done during the early
’90s when the Democrats were in control of Congress. You’ve got to multiply
these percentages by the numbers that are involved. Let’s say even if I
accept 30 percent – which, to be honest, I have a hard time believing–there
are two things to bear in mind: First of all, the GAO study said that gun
locks were only reliable in stopping accidental shootings for children under
the age of seven. Now, the number of accidental gun deaths for children
under the age of seven is actually very small. There’s no direct breakdown
for six-year-olds and under, but there is a breakdown for under age five.
And for children under age five in 1996, there were 17 accidental gun deaths
in the United States. So, let’s say 30 percent of those 17 would have been
eliminated, well then you’re talking about something like six. That’s
important. It would be nice to eliminate those. When you’re talking about
handguns, you’re only talking about a couple that are identified as
involving handguns. So, it’s not even clear how many of those you can get
rid of. Secondly, I don’t really think the GAO study went into who’s firing
these guns. Even when you’re talking about young children dying, it’s rarely
a young child who is firing the gun. It’s almost always somebody who is in
their twenties or who is an alcoholic or a drug addict or somebody who has a
history of arrest for violent crimes. I have a hard time understanding how
if you impose these rules–if I have a lock on the gun – how it’s going to
stop somebody who is in their twenties – who is an adult – from firing his
own gun. Surely they are going to be the ones who are going to be able to
unlock them.

Finally, the studies out there that have looked at either the accessibility
of guns or storage rules for guns don’t find an impact on accidental gun
deaths. The main reason for that – in particular with regard to the storage
law–is that the type of people that these laws would affect, law-abiding
citizens, are the ones for whom the risk of an accidental gunshot involving
a child is essentially zero to begin with. The types of families where you
are likely to see something bad occur are the ones which have drug problems
or other criminal activities going on. I don’t really think you are going to
be able to affect their behavior very much by passing these laws. When you
look at the safe-storage laws you have in 17 states now in the United
States, they had increases in violent crime occurring after the passage of
those laws–because they made it more difficult for people to be able to
defend themselves. It seemed to be of no benefit in terms of reducing
accidental gun deaths. My concern is, what is the net effect on deaths? Even
if one believes there might be some small impact – the people that keep on
arguing that are talking about just a few deaths a year.

NR: At last week’s annual Children’s Defense Fund conference, just about
every main event was prefaced with the same rallying cry to “stop the
violence.” It became chant-like by the end of the weekend that 12 kids die
every day because of guns. How dangerous is this kind of talk?

Lott: It’s very dangerous, because it causes people to think that having
guns around the home is much more dangerous than it actually is. I think
that causes people to make mistakes that endanger their safety.

President Clinton has mentioned this claim over and over in the last month
after the Kayla Rowland death in Michigan, essentially using the number of
deaths per day as a justification for trigger locks. What he doesn’t point
out, and what is misleading about this, is that when you look at the
public-service ads that the Clinton administration has put out within the
last couple of years they have pictures or voices of young children, who are
under ten always, usually seven or eight years old. That’s the impression
that people get – that these are these young kids that are dying when they
talk about these 11 or 12 deaths per day. The problem is that that is a
complete misrepresentation, because about 70 percent of those deaths involve
17,- 18-, and 19-year-olds. The deaths that they have are for people under
the age of 20. The 17-, 18-, and 19-year-olds are primarily homicides in
high-crime urban areas, primarily involving gangs. To go and argue that
trigger locks are going to be relevant in stopping 19-year-old gang members
from getting into a gang fight in an urban area seems bizarre to me. When
you break down the numbers to correspond to the images that people are
trying to make, you find that just a little bit over 2 percent of the deaths
involve children under the age of 10. That’s a significant 2 percent, but
it’s probably a lot smaller than people are getting the impression of when
they hear these claims bandied about. I think it’s sad that they have to go
and distort these numbers.