1
Gun Control Misfires in Europe
Wall Street Journal Europe
April 30, 2002
By John R. Lott, Jr.
European gun laws have everything American gun control proponents advocate. Yet, the three very worst public shootings in the last year all occurred in Europe. Indeed around the world, from Australia to England, countries that have recently strengthened gun control laws with the promise of lowering crime have instead seen violent crime soar.
Sixteen people were killed during last Friday¹s public school shooting in Germany. Compare that to the United States with almost five times as many students, where 32 students and four teachers were killed from any type of gun death at elementary and secondary schools from August 1997 through February 2002, almost five school years. This total includes not only much publicized public school shootings but also gang fights, robberies, accidents. It all corresponds to an annual rate of one student death per five million students and one teacher death per 4.13 million teachers.
In Europe shootings have not been limited to schools, of course. The other two worst public shootings were the killing of 14 regional legislators in Zug, a Swiss canton, last September and the massacre of eight city council members in a Paris suburb last month.
So one must automatically assume that European gun laws are easy. Wrong. Germans who wish to get hold of a hunting rifle must undergo checks that can last a year, while those wanting a gun for sport must be a member of a club and obtain a license from the police. The French must apply for gun permits, which are granted only after an exhaustive background and medical record check and demonstrated need. After all that, permits are only valid for three years.
Even Switzerland¹s once famously liberal laws have become tighter. In 1999 Switzerland¹s federation ended policies in half the cantons where concealed handguns were unregulated and allowed to be carried anywhere. Even in many cantons where regulations had previously existed, they had been only relatively liberal. Swiss federal law now severely limits permits only to those who can demonstrate in advance a need for a weapon to protect themselves or others against a precisely specified danger.
All three killing sprees shared one thing in common: they took place in so-called gun-free ³safe zones.² The attraction of gun-free zone is hardly surprising as guns surely make it easier to kill people, but guns also make it much easier for people to defend themselves. Yet, with ³gun-free zones,² as with many other gun laws, it is law-abiding citizens, not would-be criminals, who obey them. Hence, these laws risk leaving potential victims defenseless.
After a long flirtation with ³safe zones,² many Americans have learned their lesson the hard way. The U.S. has seen a major change from 1985 when just eight states had the most liberal right-to-carry laws--laws that automatically grant permits once applicants pass a criminal background check, pay their fees, and, when required, complete a training class. Today the total is 33 states. Deaths and injuries from multiple-victim public shootings, like the three in Europe, fell on average by 78% in states that passed such laws.
The lesson extends more broadly. Violent crime is becoming a major problem in Europe. While many factors, such as law enforcement, drug gangs, and immigration, affect crime, the lofty promises of gun controllers can no longer be taken seriously.
In 1996, the U.K. banned handguns. Prior to that time, over 54,000 Britons owned such weapons. The ban is so tight that even shooters training for the Olympics were forced to travel to other countries to practice. In the four years since the ban, gun crimes have risen by an astounding 40%. Dave Rogers, vice chairman of London¹s Metropolitan Police Federation, said that the ban made little difference to the number of guns in the hands of criminals. . . . ³The underground supply of guns does not seem to have dried up at all.²
The United Kingdom now leads the United States by a wide margin in robberies and aggravated assaults. Although murder and rape rates are still higher in the United States, the difference is shrinking quickly.
Australia also passed severe gun restrictions in 1996, banning most guns and making it a crime to use a gun defensively. In the subsequent four years, armed robberies rose by 51%, unarmed robberies by 37%, assaults by 24%, and kidnappings by 43%. While murders fell by 3%, manslaughter rose by 16%.
Both the U.K. and Australia have been thought to be ideal places for gun control as they are surrounded by water, making gun smuggling relatively difficult. Of course, advocates of gun control look for ways to get around any evidence. Publications such as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times blame Europe¹s increasing crime problems on a seemingly unstoppable black market that ³has undercut . . . strict gun-control laws.² Let¹s say that¹s the case--even then, these gun laws clearly did not deliver the promised reductions in crime.
It is hard to think of a much more draconian police state than the former Soviet Union, yet despite a ban on guns that dates back to the communist revolution, newly released data suggest that the ³worker¹s paradise² was less than the idyllic picture painted by the regime in yet another respect: murder rates were high. During the entire decade from 1976 to 1985 the Soviet Union¹s homicide rate was between 21% and 41% higher than that of the United States. By 1989, two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, it had risen to 48% above U.S. rate.
In fact, the countries with by far the highest homicide rates have gun bans.
2
Small Arms Save Lives
The Wall Street Journal Europe
http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB9 ... 587961.htm
July 30, 2001
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Small Arms Save Lives
By John R. Lott Jr. Mr. Lott is a senior research scholar at Yale University Law School and author of "More Guns, Less Crime" (University of Chicago Press, 2000).
The United Nations' conference on small arms, which ended in controversy earlier this month, had an admirable enough goal: to save lives. Some conference attendees claimed that guns used in armed conflicts cause 300,000 deaths world-wide every year. The "international community's" proposed solution? Prevent rebels from getting guns by requiring that "member states complete a registry of all small arms within their borders" and by "limiting the sale of such weapons only to governments."
This may be an understandable "solution" from governments that don't trust their citizens. But it also represents a dangerous disregard for their citizens' safety and freedom. For that reason, the Bush administration should be thanked, not scolded, for effectively squelching the accord. Why? First, and most obviously, because not all insurgencies are bad. It is hardly surprising that infamous regimes such as those in Syria, Cuba, Rwanda, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, and Sierra Leone support these provisions. To ban providing guns to rebels in totalitarian countries is like arguing that there is never anything such as a just war.
But, in hindsight, would Europeans really have preferred that no resistance was put up as Hitler rolled across Europe? Should the French or Norwegian resistance movements simply have given up? Surely this would have minimized war causalities. Many countries already ban private gun ownership. Rwanda and Sierra Leone are two notable examples. Yet, with more than a million people hacked to death over the last seven years, were their citizens better off without guns?
Schindler's Guns
What about the massacre of civilians in Bosnia? Would that have been so easy if the Bosnian people had been able to defend themselves? And what about the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II? Wouldn't it have been better if they had more guns to defend themselves? With all the well-deserved publicity for the movie "Schindler's List," the movie left out how Schindler, an avid gun collector, stockpiled guns and hand grenades in case the Jews he was protecting needed to defend themselves. More recently, the rules would have prevented the American government from assisting the Afghanis in their fight against the Soviet Union.
There is a second reason to avoid a ban on small arms. Even in free countries, where there is little risk of a totalitarian regime, gun bans all but invariably result in higher crime. In the U.S., the states with the highest gun ownership rates have by far the lowest violent crime rates. And similarly, over time, states with the largest increases in gun ownership have experienced the biggest drops in violent crime.
Recent research by Jeff Miron at Boston University, examining homicide rates across 44 countries, found that countries with the strictest gun control laws also tended to have the highest homicide rates. Earlier this month, news reports in Britain showed how crimes with guns have risen 40% since handguns were banned in 1997. Police are extremely important in stopping crime, but almost always arrive on the scene after the crime occurs. What would the U.N. recommend that victims do when they face criminals by themselves? Passive behavior is much more likely to result in serious injury or death than using a gun to defend oneself. The only serious research on this issue has been conducted in the United States.
The National Crime Victimization Report, done by the U.S. Department of Justice, indicates consistently that women who behave passively are 2.5 times more likely to be seriously injured than women who defend themselves with a gun. It is the physically weakest people (women and the elderly) who benefit the most from having a gun. Criminals, overwhelmingly young males, like to attack the targets that will give them the least trouble. A gun represents a great equalizer. Defensive gun uses are almost completely ignored by the media, but Americans use guns defensively about two million times a year, five times more often than guns are used to commit crimes.
Media Disregard
No one would ever learn this by simply watching the news. In part this disregard by the media might arise because an innocent person's murder is more newsworthy than when a victim brandishes a gun and an attacker runs away with no crime committed. Unlike the crimes that are avoided, bad events provide emotionally gripping pictures. But covering only the bad events creates the impression that guns only cost lives. Even the rare local media coverage of defensive gun use in the seldom involves more than very brief stories. News worthiness also dictates that these stories are not the typical examples of self-defense, but the rare instances where the attacker is shot. In fact, in up to 98% of the cases, simply brandishing a gun is sufficient to stop a crime.
Fewer than one out of 1,000 defensive gun uses results in the attacker's death. World-wide we hear about crimes like the public-school shootings, as we should, but we never even hear locally about the many more lives saved. Since the well-known public shootings started in the fall of 1997, 32 students and four teachers have been killed in any type of shooting at elementary or secondary schools, an annual rate of one death per four million students. This includes deaths from gang fights, robberies, accidents, as well as attacks such as the one at Columbine.
But some sense of proportion is needed. During that same period, 53 students died playing high school football.
-- From The Wall Street Journal Europe
3
When Gun Control Costs Lives
Licensing legislation diverts attention from getting criminals off the street.
By John R. Lott Jr., a senior research scholar at Yale Law School and the author of More Guns, Less Crime
California's government, which has ably demonstrated its skills at regulating energy, is searching for new vistas to regulate. This past Thursday the California Assembly passed by one vote a bill to license handgun owners. A slightly different bill has already passed the Senate, and the two bills must be reconciled in conference. Yet before the final decisions are made and Governor Davis makes his decision, examining the experience in places like Canada and Hawaii might be helpful. As with electricity regulation, the best intentions are not always enough. When fighting crime, mistaken laws can cost lives.
Canadians are a law-abiding lot, but, as of January 1st of this year, millions have become criminals. Bill C-68, Canada's gun-licensing law that passed in 1995, gave half a decade's warning for people to obtain gun licenses. The Canadian program's obvious failure to license most gun owners despite its no-expense-spared approach should give Californians advocating licensing some pause.
Officially the Canadian Department of Justice now claims that its recent surveys show only 2.5 million Canadian gun owners — a 31-percent drop from what the government claimed just a couple years ago. But press accounts reveal internal Justice Department documents putting the number at 5 to 7 million gun owners, and academic and private surveys indicate numbers just as large.
What is most surprising is that any Canadians admit to pollsters that they own a gun without a license. With only 2 million Canadians licensed or in the process of being licensed, roughly 10 to 16 percent of Canadians are now felons.
Getting the government to release the costs of licensing is like cracking the black-ops budgets in the U.S. defense department. The numbers have even been refused to many members of parliament. Inside sources have told MPs that, excluding any costs borne by the Royal Canadian Mounties as well as local police, $265 million (Canadian dollars) was spent by the federal Canadian Firearms Centre this past year. To put it another way, just this limited accounting corresponds to 5 percent of all police expenditures in Canada.
Yet, the real costs of these unfunded mandates are borne by the provinces and local governments. No attempt has been made to record how many hours local police officers have spent processing paper work, but complaints are common. For example, the attorney general of Alberta complains that the law is an administrative mess, it is very costly, and it is using money that would be better suited to really fighting crime.
The California State Sheriff's Association, which has come out strongly against the legislation, has raised similar concerns and warned that the California legislation will spread already undermanned police agencies even thinner.
The ultimate question, though, is what impact these rules might have on violent crime. While Canada's system is too new to discern any impact, the experience in our own country is not encouraging.
In theory, if a gun is left at the scene of the crime, licensing and registration will allow a gun to be traced back to its owner. Police have spent tens of thousands of man-hours administering these laws in Hawaii (the one state with both rules). But, amazingly, there has not even been a single case where police claim licensing and registration have been instrumental in identifying the criminal.
Why? Criminals very rarely leave their guns at the scene of the crime. This really only happens when the criminals have been seriously wounded or killed. Would-be criminals also virtually never get licenses or register their weapons.
So will at least licensing allow for even more comprehensive background checks and thus keep criminals from getting guns in the first place? Unfortunately, there is not a single academic study that finds that background checks reduce violent-crime rates.
The California legislation is also filled with pages detailing everything from when grandparents are allowed to temporarily loan a gun to their grandchildren, to the politically correct gun myths that licensees must regurgitate on the licensing exam, to requiring that mandatory testing be done in only English or Spanish. For a state with election ballots printed in over 80 languages, this last requirement appears racist. But with the new fees and hundreds of dollars required for training classes, in addition to recent California laws outlawing inexpensive guns, the Democratic legislators who support this bill appear anti-poor. After all, it is the poor who are most likely to be victims of crime and to benefit the most from being able to protect themselves.
Those who so automatically see licensing as the solution to crime face an obvious question. As police spend thousands of man-hours enforcing the licensing, what else might they do with their time? Ventura County Sheriff Bob Brooks stated his concerns simply: "It is my belief that this legislation significantly misses the mark because it diverts our attention from what really should be our common goal: holding the true criminals accountable for the crimes they commit and getting them off the street."
4
More gun control, please
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Posted: October 24, 2002
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2002 Laurence A. Elder
More gun control, please!
Gun-control proponents, predictably, in the wake of the Beltway sniper, urge still more gun-control laws. So, as news watchers sit through another round of softball interviews with gun-control advocates, we humbly offer Second Amendment-challenged hosts some suggestions for questions:
Why does Switzerland, a country that requires a military-style rifle, plus ammunition, in every home, enjoy a very low homicide rate?
Why does Israel, a country where perhaps 10 percent of citizens possess permits to carry concealed weapons, enjoy a very low murder rate?
Why do gun-control proponents fail to mention countries with homicide rates higher than ours, including Brazil and Russia, with very restrictive gun-control laws?
Why does Washington, D.C., a district whose laws make it illegal to buy, possess, transport or acquire a handgun, experience the highest per capita murder rates in the nation?
Why does Canada, a nation of 31 million citizens, with official estimates of 7 million guns – although other experts place the number at 25 million – enjoy a low per capita murder rate?
Why did America, a hundred years ago, when citizens could purchase guns anonymously and with few of today's restrictions, enjoy a murder rate of 1.2 per 100,000, vs. the 5.5 rate in 2000?
Why don't gun-control proponents talk about the rising murder rate in severely gun-restricted England? "The American murder rate," writes Reason magazine, "which had fluctuated by about 20 percent between 1974 and 1991, was 'in startling free-fall.' We have had nine consecutive years of sharply declining violent crime. As a result the English and American murder rates are converging. In 1981, the American rate was 8.7 times the English rate, in 1995 it was 5.7 times the English rate, and the latest study puts it at 3.5 times." According to Reason, after a few days of crime after crime, "London police are now looking to the New York City police for advice."
Why does The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence's website say, "The risk of homicide in the home is three times greater in households with guns"? They fail to mention that Dr. Kellermann, the expert who came up with that figure, now distances himself from it.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Kellermann now says, "A gun can be used to scare away an intruder without a shot being fired," although he admits that such events weren't included in his original study. "Simply keeping a gun in the home may deter some criminals who fear confronting an armed homeowner."
Kellermann also admitted, "It is possible that reverse causation accounted for some of the association we observed between gun ownership and homicide – i.e., in a limited number of cases, people may have acquired a gun in response to a specific threat." In other words, some people obtain guns because they are more likely perpetrators, or they fear becoming victims, of violent crime.
How often do Americans use guns each year for defensive purposes, some of whom – but for their guns – might have been killed? Criminologist Gary Kleck estimates that 2.5 million Americans use guns for defensive purposes each year, and approximately 400,000 of them believe someone would have been dead had they not resorted to their defensive use of firearms. A government study put the figure at 1.5 million.
Why do gun-control proponents fail to admit the ineffectiveness of the Brady Act? Following the 1994 Brady Act's imposition of a 5-day waiting period for the 32 states previously not subject to such waiting periods, those states should have seen a reduction in crime, compared to the other 18 "control" states. But according to The Journal of the American Medical Association, "Our analyses provide no evidence that implementation of the Brady Act was associated with a reduction in homicide rates. We find no differences in homicide or firearm homicide rates to adult victims in the 32 states directly subject to the Brady Act provisions compared with the remaining control states." The study did find a decrease in gun suicides for men over 55. But the overall suicide rate remained unchanged. Men over 55 simply resorted to other means to kill themselves.
A father recently sent me the following letter: "I had to go to work unexpectedly one night due to an emergency. My 8-year-old daughter was a little worried that I would be leaving her and my wife alone. We live in a very nice and safe neighborhood but nonetheless she was concerned. I jokingly told her that no bad men would come in our house because I put out a sign that read, 'No Bad Men Allowed.' She frowned and immediately responded, 'Daddy, bad men don't do what the signs say. That's why they're bad.'"
Some things are so complicated only a child can figure them out.
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Larry Elder, controversial radio talk-show host from Los Angeles, is the author of the libertarian blockbuster "The Ten Things You Can't Say in America." Get your autographed copy now in WorldNetDaily's online store!
I have more!!!! JOIN THE NRA!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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11-11-2002, 11:08 AM
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