"Nations' rates of private gun ownership do not correlate to rates of murder"
©The_Smoking_Man@mj12.cid
------------------------------
Date: Thu, August 9, 2007 7:55 am
From: "Breitkreuz, Garry - Assistant 1" <Oer...@cney.tp.pn>
Subject: "...private gun ownership do not correlate to rates of murder"
Subject: "Nations' rates of private gun ownership do not correlate to
rates of murder"
F YI
Brant Scott
Parliamentary Assistant
c/o Garry Breitkreuz, MP
House of Commons
Room 685, Confederation Building
Ottawa ON K1A 0A6
Phone: (613) 992-4394
Fax: (613) 992-8676
E-MAIL: oer...@cney.tp.pn
www.garrybreitkreuz.com
------------------------------------------------------
NATIONS' RATES OF PRIVATE GUN OWNERSHIP DO NOT CORRELATE TO RATES OF
MURDER
By Don B. Kates and Carol Hehmeyer ***
FORUM COLUMN
DAILY JOURNAL NEWSWIRE ARTICLE
August 06, 2007
http://www.dailyjournal.com
Many people think that nations with more firearms will have more murder
and that banning firearms will reduce murder and other violence.
This canard does not comport, however, with criminological research in
the U.S. or elsewhere.
An extensive study that one of us (Kates) recently published with
Canadian criminologist Gary Mauser confirms the negative results of two
large-scale international studies over the past 15 years. ("Would
Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide: A Review of International
Evidence," Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, vol. 30, pages
651-694.)
These studies compared data from a large number of nations around the
world. There were no instances of nations with high gun ownership having
higher murder rates than nations with low gun ownership. If anything it
was the reverse, for reasons discussed below.
For example, though Norway has far and away the highest firearm
ownership per capita in Western Europe, it nevertheless has the lowest
murder rate. Other nations with high firearms ownership and comparably
low murder rates include Denmark, Greece, Switzerland, Germany and
Austria. Holland has a 50 percent higher murder rate despite having the
lowest rate of firearm ownership in Europe. And Luxembourg, despite its
total handgun ban, has a murder rate that is nine times higher than
countries such as Norway and Austria.
It turns out that in nations where guns are less available, criminals
manage to get them anyway. After decades of ever-stricter gun controls,
England banned handguns and confiscated them from all permit holders in
1997. Yet by 2000, England had the industrialized world's highest
violent crime rate - twice that of the U.S. Despite the confiscation of
law-abiding Englishmen's handguns, a 2002 report of England's National
Crime Intelligence Service lamented that while "Britain has some of the
strictest gun laws in the world, [i]t appears that anyone who wishes to
obtain a firearm [illegally] will have little difficulty in doing so."
In the rare case in which gun bans work, murderers use other weapons.
Eight decades of police-state enforcement of handgun prohibition have
kept Russian gun ownership low, resulting in few gun murders. Yet
Russia's murder rates have long been four times higher than those in the
U.S. and 20 times higher than rates in countries such as Norway. Former
Soviet nations like Lithuania also ban handguns and severely restrict
other guns, yet have 10-15 times higher murder rates than European
nations with much higher gun ownership.
Nor does the "more guns means more murder" belief square with our own
experience. The earliest American figures, dating from just after World
War II, showed both gun ownership and murder rates holding at low
levels. Today our murder rates are almost identical, despite six decades
of massive gun buying whereby Americans have come to own five times more
guns than they did in 1946. The intervening years saw a dramatic
increase in murder followed by a dramatic decrease. These trends had no
relationship to gun ownership, which steadily rose all the while
(especially handgun ownership).
American demographic data also refute the myth that fewer guns in a
community mean less murder. The murder rate among African-Americans is
six times higher than among whites. Does this mean African-Americans
have more guns? No, ordinary law abiding African-Americans are markedly
less likely than whites to own guns. But the argument for banning guns
to everyone is refuted, since fewer guns for law abiding
African-Americans does not mean fewer guns for African-American
criminals. Incidentally, rural African-Americans own guns as frequently
as whites, but the murder rate among them is only a tiny fraction of the
urban African-American rate.
Regardless of race, the distinction between good people and criminals is
vital. It is utterly false that most murderers are ordinary people who
went wrong because they had guns. Almost all murderers have life
histories of violence, restraining orders, substance abuse problems
and/or a form of psychopathology. It's generally illegal for these
people to have guns, but unlike good people, they ignore gun laws - just
as they ignore laws against violence.
The "more guns means more murders" mythology also flies in the face of
history. From the 1600s, American colonial law required that every
household have a gun and that every military-age male be armed for
militia service. Men too poor to buy guns were supplied with them by
colonial governments and had to repay the cost in instalments. To assure
that every home and man was armed, officers periodically searched homes
and men were required to muster with their guns. Despite this universal
armament, murder was rare and few murders involved firearms.
Murder rates increased after the 1840s, by which time these armament
requirements were no longer enforced and per capita gun ownership had
become much lower. From the 1860s on, gun ownership increased sharply.
Millions of men came home from the Civil War with their weapons; and
firearms were even more widely distributed in the era of cheap pot metal
guns (the "two dollar pistol") that followed. But this vast increase in
guns - much deadlier guns than ever before - from the 1860s onward was
accompanied by a substantially decreasing murder rate.
A few 19th century American states adopted gun controls because they had
(and still have) severe violent crime rates. In most states, murders
were few despite high gun ownership and virtually no gun control.
Likewise, Europe had low murder rates prior to World War I despite high
gun ownership and virtually no controls. Severe European gun laws
appeared (for political reasons) in the tumultuous post-World War I era.
Despite ever-stricter gun laws, both political and apolitical violence
has increased apace in Europe.
If anything, a review of the European experience demonstrates more guns
correlating with less murder. Nine European nations (including Germany,
Austria, Denmark and Norway) have more than 15,000 guns per 100,000
members of the population. Nine others (including Luxembourg, Russia,
and Hungary) have fewer than 5,000 guns per 100,000 members of the
population. But the aggregate murder rates of these nine
low-gun-ownership nations are three times higher than those of the nine
high-gun-ownership nations.
Some groups, particularly the gun lobby, might argue that this shows how
widespread gun ownership actually reduces violence rates. There is
substantial evidence that this is true in the United States, where gun
ownership for self-defense is very common. But there is no evidence that
Norwegians, Germans and other Europeans often keep guns for defense.
The reason that European nations with more guns tend to have lower
violence is political rather than criminological. Gun ownership
generally has no affect on how much violent crime a society has. Violent
crime is determined by fundamental economic and sociocultural factors,
not the mere availability of just one of an innumerable bevy of
potential murder instruments. Politicians in nations with severe crime
problems often think that banning guns will be a quick fix. But gun bans
don't work; if anything, they make things worse. They disarm the
law-abiding while being ignored by the violent and the criminal. Yet
nations with severe violence problems tend to have severe gun laws. By
the same token, the murder rates in handgun-banning U.S. cities - New
York, Chicago, Washington, D.C. - are far higher than in states like
Pennsylvania and Connecticut, where handguns are legal and widely owned.
In sum, banning guns to the general public increases people's
vulnerability and fails to reduce violence because the law-abiding
citizenry are victims of violent crime, not perpetrators. Banning guns
to felons, violent misdemeanants, juveniles and the insane (which our
laws already do) is a good idea in general, though such laws are very
difficult to enforce. Disarming those who only want to defend
themselves, however, is a surefire road to empowering criminals at the
expense of the innocent.
- ---
*** Don Kates is a lawyer and criminologist associated with the
Independent Institute in Oakland. Carol Hehmeyer is a retired San
Francisco deputy district attorney.
***************
------------------------------
--
Triad Productions-Fantalla恙EZine~ParaNovel
National Association of Assault Research
(http://boblacasse.150m.com/htmlconc.html)
10x
>
>------------------------------
>
>Date: Thu, August 9, 2007 7:55 am
>From: "Breitkreuz, Garry - Assistant 1" <Oer...@cney.tp.pn>
>Subject: "...private gun ownership do not correlate to rates of murder"
>
>Subject: "Nations' rates of private gun ownership do not correlate to
>rates of murder"
>
>F YI
>
>Brant Scott
>Parliamentary Assistant
>c/o Garry Breitkreuz, MP
>House of Commons
>Room 685, Confederation Building
>Ottawa ON K1A 0A6
>Phone: (613) 992-4394
>Fax: (613) 992-8676
>E-MAIL: oer...@cney.tp.pn
>www.garrybreitkreuz.com
> ------------------------------------------------------
>
>NATIONS' RATES OF PRIVATE GUN OWNERSHIP DO NOT CORRELATE TO RATES OF
>MURDER
>By Don B. Kates and Carol Hehmeyer ***
>FORUM COLUMN
Further to that using the first two letters of the postal code on
wherer the handguns and rifles are in Canada there is NO Correlation
to the suicide rate, homicide rate, or firearms homicide rate by
postal code.
Simply put, guns do not cause crime. People do.