More Guns, Less Murder
August 28, 2013
A HARVARD study of continental Europe shows no correlation between gun control laws and reduced murder rates. Breitbart reports on the study.
— Comments —
Buck writes:
The study that you linked was published in the Spring 2007 issue of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, by two criminologists, one a constitutional lawyer and the other a Canadian professor. The study devistates the anti-gun/gun control raison d’être. Here some brief portions of this very rich text and one dramatic chart:
The same pattern [ the drastically higher murders rates by an unarmed Russia, versus the murder rates in the supposedly over-armed United States] appears when comparisons of violence to gun ownership are made within nations. Indeed, “data on firearms ownership by constabulary area in England,” like data from the United States, show “a negative correlation,” that is, “where firearms are most dense violent crime rates are lowest, and where guns are least dense violent crime rates are highest.” Many different data sets from various kinds of sources are summarized as follows by the leading text:
[T]here is no consistent significant positive association between gun ownership levels and violence rates: across (1) time within the United States, (2) U.S. cities, (3) counties within Illinois, (4) country-sized areas like England, U.S. states, (5) regions of the United States, (6) nations, or (7) population subgroups . . . .
A second misconception about the relationship between firearms and violence attributes Europe’s generally low homicide rates to stringent gun control. That attribution cannot be accurate since murder in Europe was at an all・]time low before the gun controls were introduced. For instance, virtually the only English gun control during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the practice that police patrolled without guns. During this period gun control prevailed far less in England or Europe than in certain American states which nevertheless had—and continue to have—murder rates that were and are comparatively very high.
From section III. DO ORDINARY PEOPLE MURDER?:
Insofar as studies focus on perpetrators, they show that neither a majority, nor many, nor virtually any murderers are ordinary “law・]abiding citizens.” Rather, almost all murderers are extremely aberrant individuals with life histories of violence, psychopathology, substance abuse, and other dangerous behaviors. “The vast majority of persons involved in life threatening violence have a long criminal record with many prior contacts with the justice system.”
Wow. But, isn’t this what has been argued all along? Our courts argue about who has standing, what is a gun, what does being “armed” mean, about rules on storage and access, on carrying and concealing and collecting. We argue about all sorts of irrelevant tangential issues, but the courts don’t argue about the larger, most relevant issue of this study. It’s another fraudulent modern liberal meme; guns are the problem, eliminating guns is the solution, when all along the real problem is them.
