22nd Annual Gun Rights Policy Conference

by Dave Workman
Senior Editor

Our GRPC 2007 report is divided into sessions for easier reading.
Click on the desired section to read.

October 6, 2007
October 7, 2007

“It is pretty hard to think of almost any other item that’s as commonly owned in American homes as guns...”

Substitute Keynoter
With NRA’s LaPierre sidelined by a serious flu bug, Prof. John Lott, author and senior researcher at the University of Maryland, filled in as the keynote speaker during Saturday’s session.

He noted that while several political leaders attribute at least part of the decline in crime during the 1990s to gun control, he suggested that other factors were responsible, including hiring of more police officers. Lott said he believes current laws should be enforced, rather than create more laws.

Lott also focused on the appeal by the District of Columbia, of the Parker case. In its appeal brief, he said, nearly half of the text is devoted to why a gun ban is “reasonable” in the nation’s capitol.

“I think the biggest problem they have is that it is pretty easy to pull up the raw data on how crime rates have been changing over time,” Lott observed.

He recalled that before the gun ban took effect in 1976, murder rates were falling in the District, and they “hit bottom” in 1976. After the ban was adopted, murder rates began rising again. For several years, the District had the highest murder rate of any US city with more than 500,000 population, he said.

Lott also reported that Chicago “had similar patterns before and after” it banned handguns by not issuing any more licenses many years ago.

“Look at England,” Lott stated. “It is interesting to note that when (anti-gunners) point to other countries that have banned guns, one of the countries they point to is England. Since 1997, England has banned handguns, but if you look at the crime statistics, the murder rate or injuries caused by gun crimes from 1998 to 2005, they’ve gone up 340%.”

Lott said England has a violent crime rate that is about double that of the United States, and while England’s murder rate is still lower, the gap has gotten much smaller.

“We all want to take guns away from criminals,” he said, “but the question is, when you passed these laws, who are most likely to obey them?...When you disarm law-abiding citizens, what you wind up having happen often is that the criminals have less to worry about when they try to attack people than they would have otherwise.”

Lott also had disdain for so-called “safe storage” requirements, noting that research has found that when people are required to keep their firearms under lock and key, it “has consequences.”

“It poses a real risk for people’s safety,” he said. “Having a locked gun doesn’t provide you with an option to defend yourself.”

In areas where such laws are instituted, Lott said criminals “tend to attack people in their homes (more) than they did previously.”

He also contended that suggestions by gun control proponents that children are dying in large numbers due to gun laws are wrong. He cited data from the Centers for Disease and Control that show in 2003, for example, only 20 children under age 10 died from gunshot wounds accidentally, and only 56 under age 15 died that year from bullet wounds.

“It is obvious it would be great if you had zero deaths,” he said. “One death is one too many.”

However, in a nation with 40 million children under age 10 and 60 million under age 15, the number of child firearm fatalities is virtually an invisible number, Lott intimated. And, in a nation where some 90 million people own firearms, that small number of fatalities is remarkable.

During the same period, Lott noted, nearly 100 children under age 5 drowned in bathtubs, and about 35 children under age 5 drowned in five-gallon buckets.

“It is pretty hard to think of almost any other item that’s as commonly owned in American homes as guns are that is anywhere near as remotely dangerous, that has as few actual deaths associated with it, as you have in the case of guns,” he observed.

Lott was honored as the “Journalist of the Year” for his work in producing newspaper opinion pieces debunking the myths of gun control.
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