by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor

Many Americans maintain a healthy suspicion of government, and fear of power-hungry bureaucrats who they think are conspiring to use computer databases to impose new tyrannies and infringe on civil liberties. But then comes a story like that of the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s ( INS) belated mailing of approvals of flight school study visas for terrorists identified as part of the Sept. 11 use of airliners as weapons of mass destruction.

The President, Congress and the general public were horrified by the incredible ineptitude of the INS, which apparently never noticed that the people for whom it approved visas six months after the attacks no longer had need of them, nor should anyone have wasted time on the approvals.

But when something like the INS absurdity happens, people who fear government should breathe a sign of relief. If government bureaucrats are that incompetent, there may be less to fear in their ability to carry forward new power grabs.

On the other hand, when the bureaucrats or academics prepare studies in an effort to drive public policy, such fears may be justified.

In late February, The New York Times, Reuter’s news service and other media reported that researchers had claimed to have discovered a correlation between regions of the country where gun ownership is high and the number of children who die from gunshot wounds.

Study Published
Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health reported in the February Journal of Trauma that states with more guns had many more gun deaths among children—homicides, suicides and accidents.

The lead researcher, Dr. Matthew Miller, said the study could not definitively prove that increased gun ownership alone was linked to the childhood fatalities. But the researchers said other factors were unable to account for the differences.

“The elevated rates of suicide and homicide among children living in states with more guns,” they wrote, “is not entirely explained by a state’s poverty, education or urbanization and is driven by lethal firearm violence, not by lethal non-firearm violence.”

The researchers looked at children from 5 to 14 in 50 states from 1988 to 1997. They also compared death rates in the five states having the most gun ownership—Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and West Virginia—with the five states having the lowest ownership rates—Hawaii, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Delaware.

The two groups of states have about the same number of children, the researchers said. The first group had 253 accidental firearm deaths among the young. The second had 16. In the same period, there were 153 child suicides by gun in the first group and 22 in the second. For homicides, the numbers were 298 and 66, with killings that did not involve guns about the same for the two groups.

Capitol Comments
Pro-gun groups, however, expressed skepticism about the Harvard findings, while the anti-gun Violence Policy Center (VPC) welcomed the report. The VPC said it believes the study sends a simple message: “It’s the guns, Stupid.”

“We don’t have and haven’t seen a copy of the study,” said Kelly Whitley, a National Rifle Association (NRA) spokeswoman.

“But, as always, we are skeptical about any study funded by numerous advocates of gun control. Having not seen the data, we don’t know whether Harvard’s proxy measure of gun ownership is reliable for a study of this kind,” she said.

Within hours of the publication of the Harvard study, another famous citadel of anti-gun policy pushers, Johns Hopkins University Center for Gun Policy and Research, claimed that Maryland’s ban on so-called Saturday night specials had reduced murders in the state.

Reuters reported that the 1998 law may have helped cause a 9% drop in gun-related murders over the last decade, according to the John Hopkins unit’s researchers.

That translates into an average of 40 lives saved per year between 1990 and 1998, Dr. Daniel Webster, who helps direct the Center for Gun Policy and Research and who led the study, said.

“The study results suggest that the law did what it was intended to do—save lives,” Webster said in a statement.

The study, published in the March issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology, found that murders did not immediately decline after the ban went into effect in 1990.

Webster’s team looked at historical patterns and homicide trends in Maryland and neighboring states and ran a statistical model that showed the rate of gun killings was 9% lower between 1990 and 1998 than would have been expected.

They found no unexpected change in the rate of murders committed with other weapons.

The Maryland law banning what were called “cheap, easily concealed handguns” was passed during a time when gun murders were skyrocketing in the region. Gun control opponents tried immediately to get a referendum to overturn the law but failed.

Webster’s team said that, possibly as a result of the controversy, handgun sales were 34% higher than expected in the two years before the law took effect in 1990.

Study of Decline
Hardly had the ink dried on the Harvard and Johns Hopkins studies when they were contradicted by a third study that said gun violence among teens and young adults declined nationally during the 1990s. The opposite view was contained in an analysis of national data presented recently at the Society for Adolescent Medicine’s annual meeting in Boston, according to an early March Reuters news report.

The father-daughter team of Dr. Lawrence J. Tangelo and Marisa K. Tangelo found good news in firearm-related information from the National Center for Health Statistics and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance.

While deaths and injuries from firearm-related incidents have played a major role in the lives of teenagers, the Tangelos found, the trend in such incidents over the past 8 to 10 years has been a downward one.

In 1990, there were 25.8 firearm-related deaths per 100,000 people aged 15 to 24 in the US. This number had declined to 19.9 per 100,000 by 1998. While the decline was seen in all ethnic groups, it was most dramatic among African-American and African-Caribbean males, the researchers found, falling from 138 per 100,000 population to 101.8 per 100,000 over the same time period.

This decline was mirrored in other statistics. The percentage of youth who reported having carried a gun “in the past 30 days” fell from 7.9% in 1993 to 4.9% in 1999. In 1991, 42.5% of youths reported having been in a fight in the past 30 days, while 35.7% reported fighting in the past 30 days in 1999. The number of young people who reported contemplating suicide in the past year also fell, from 29% in 1991 to 19.3% in 1999.

While the reasons behind the decline are unclear, the results contradict the “common perception that gun violence is going up,” D’Angelo said. He added that while school-related firearm incidents such as Columbine have led to a heightened awareness about this issue, “it is improperly being reported. Adolescents are once again unfairly being stigmatized in terms of their behavior, while in reality they are making remarkable progress.”

He added, “Reporters don’t want this information, because it doesn’t sell newspapers, and it doesn’t make it on to the TV stations.”

Compared to other countries, D’Angelo said, “we still live in a relative climate of violence, but things are actually getting better. Whatever parents are doing at home, whatever is being done in the schools and in the community may not be enough, but something is taking hold.”

The competing studies, when compared jointly, tend to demonstrate that academics and their peer-reviewed journals seem about as competent as the bureaucrats at the INS. One cannot depend on either group in formulating public policy.