You'll Have to Pry This Article From My Cold, Dead Fingers

All too often, legal scholarship bears little relation to the "real worlds" of law enforcement, legal practice or policy making. The rule is proven by this refreshing exception -- an article in the Spring 2007 issue of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy entitled "Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence" by Don Kates and Gary Mauser, criminologists and lawyers with the Pacific Research Institute and Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, respectively.

Kates and Mauser present a somewhat counterintuitive thesis: Higher per capita rates of handgun ownership correlate with lower rates of violent crime generally and have no discernible impact on murder and suicide rates. Startling, yes. But the authors marshal a powerful barrage of studies and analysis to support their thesis. Consider this extended excerpt:

One reason the extent of gun ownership in a society does not spur the murder rate is that murderers are not spread evenly throughout the population. Analysis of perpetrator studies shows that violent criminals -- especially murderers -- "almost uniformly have a long history of involvement in criminal behavior." So it would not appreciably raise violence if all law-abiding, responsible people had firearms because they are not the ones who rape, rob, or murder. By the same token, violent crime would not fall if guns were totally banned to civilians. As the respective examples of Luxembourg and Russia suggest, individuals who commit violent crimes will either find guns despite severe controls or will find other weapons to use.

Startling as the foregoing may seem, it represents the cross-national norm, not some bizarre departure from it. If the mantra "more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death" were true, broad based cross-national comparisons should show that nations with higher gun ownership per capita consistently have more death. Nations with higher gun ownership rates, however, do not have higher murder or suicide rates than those with lower gun ownership. Indeed many high gun ownership nations have much lower murder rates. Consider, for example, the wide divergence in murder rates among Continental European nations with widely divergent gun ownership rates.

The non-correlation between gun ownership and murder is reinforced by examination of statistics from larger numbers of nations across the developed world. Comparison of "homicide and suicide mortality data for thirty-six nations (including the United States) for the period 1990-1995" to gun ownership levels showed "no significant (at the 5% level) association between gun ownership levels and the total homicide rate." Consistent with this is a later European study of data from 21 nations in which "no significant correlations [of gun ownership levels] with total suicide or homicide rates were found."

But surely if there were no guns, there would be no gun-related deaths, right? Right. There would be no gun-related deaths. But "[t]here is no social benefit in decreasing the availability of guns if the result is only to increase the use of other means of suicide and murder, resulting in more or less the same amount of death." So, while it is true that Americans are more likely to be shot to death than people in "the world's other 35 wealthier nations", per capital murder overall "is only half as frequent in the United States as in several other nations where gun murder is rarer, but murder by strangling, stabbing, or beating is much more frequent."

But what about England, where there is very little murder and the police don't carry guns, and gun control is widespread? The authors do a masterful job of unmasking this myth. First of all, gun control wasn't implemented in England until violent crime began to increase rapidly in the late 1950s and 1960s. Once it was implemented, violent crime rates (including gun crime rates) continued to increase, and England today has generally higher rates of violent crime than the United States. Today, English policy don't even investigate burglary and "minor assaults", and if they do catch a mugger, robber or burglar, they give him a strict warning and release him!!!

Another myth shot down by Kates and Mauser is "the false argument that a significant number of murders involve ordinary people killing spouses in a moment of rage." As it turns out, the only kind of evidence cited to support this myth is that "many murders arise from arguments or occur in homes and between acquaintances. These bare facts are only relevant if one assumes that criminals do not have acquaintances or homes or arguments." These "ordinary people" tend to have well established patterns of violent criminal history before they murder. Not exactly the "guy next door" who doesn't get along with his wife.

And how about this little gem:

National Institutes of Justice surveys among prison inmates find that large percentages report that their fear that a victim might be armed deterred them from confrontation crimes. "[T]he felons most frightened 'about confronting an armed victim' were those from states with the greatest relative number of privately owned firearms." Conversely, robbery is highest in states that most restrict gun ownership.

But surely extremely high rates of gun ownership would not produce such unexpected results, right? Wrong. Probably the most heavily armed population in the history of the world on a per capita basis was the people of the eighteenth-century United States, where the "citzen militia" concept was firmly embedded in the laws of most states, which required virtually every adult (women included!) to own a gun. Maryland's statute mandated "that every house keeper or housekeepers within this Province shall have ready continally upon all occasions within his her or their house for him or themselves and for every person within his her or their house able to bear armes one Serviceable fixed gunne or bastard muskett boare" along with a pound of gunpowder, four pounds of pistol or musket shot, "match for match locks and of flints for firelocks". Virginia law, which required everyone to attend church on Sundays, also required everyone to bring their guns and ammo to church with them! And yet, despite all this, violent crime rates in eighteenth-century America were extremely low, and the murders that did occur rarely involved firearms.

Finally, the authors get in a few well-deserved shots at the gun control crowd and their approach to statistical analysis. Consider the treatment of the 1980s teen suicide epidemic:

There is simply no relationship evidence between the extent of suicide and the extent of gun ownership. People do not commit suicide because they have guns available. In the absence of firearms, people who are inclined to commit suicide kill themselves some other way. Two examples seem as pertinent as they are poignant. The first concerns the 1980s increase in suicide among young American males, an increase that, although relatively modest, inspired perfervid denunciations of gun ownership. What these denunciations failed to mention was that suicide of teenagers and young adults was increasing throughout the entire industrialized world, regardless of gun availability, and often much more rapidly than in the United States. The only unusual aspect of suicide in the United States was that it involved guns. The irrelevancy of guns to the increase in American suicide is evident because suicide among English youth actually increased 10 times more sharply, with "car exhaust poisoning [being] the method of suicide used most often." By omitting such facts, the articles blaming guns for increasing American suicide evaded the inconvenience of having to explain exactly what social benefit nations with few guns received from having their youth suicides occur in other ways.

You can download the entire article in pdf format at http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/.