by Dave Workman
Senior Editor
A newly-published study by veteran criminologists Prof. Don B. Kates and Gary A. Mauser shows the rate of firearms ownership is irrelevant to the homicide and violent crime rates both here and abroad.
According to Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, their report, appearing in the current issue of the prestigious Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, should be required reading, especially for reporters, editorial writers and elected representatives.
Kates told Gun Week that copies of the journal are provided to every federal judge in the country, and that they also go into every law library, so the legal community will have full access. Whether anti-gunners comment or just ignore it remains to be seen.
Gun Week obtained a full draft copy of the article, some of which does not appear in The Journal. The authors note that gun control proponents frequently argue that guns are uniquely available in the United States, compared to other developed nations, which is why this country has a far higher murder rate.
“Though this has been endlessly repeated,” they wrote, “in fact (it) is false and…substantially so.”
Kates is currently associated with the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco, CA, and Mauser is a professor at Simon Fraser University near Vancouver, BC, Canada.
The report, entitled “Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International Evidence,” is a detailed look at gun ownership and how it does not relate to the incidence of murder and violence. They conclude that “nations with very stringent anti-gun laws generally have substantially higher murder rates than those which allow guns.” It appears on pages 649-694 of the Spring 2007 edition of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy.
“The Kates/Mauser research strips bare the claims by gun control proponents that America is more dangerous than other countries because of our right to keep and bear arms,” Gottlieb said. “What these two seasoned researchers have revealed is that some of the most violent countries in Europe are those with the most stringent gun laws. It seems hardly a coincidence that here in America, the highest crime rates are in places with strict gun control policies, such as Chicago and Washington, DC. However, in areas here and abroad with high rates of gun ownership violent crime rates are lower.
“The authors note an earlier study by Kates that showed a declining murder rate over the 25-year period from 1973 to 1997, while overall gun ownership increased 103% and handgun ownership went up 163%,” he continued. “Yet during that period, the murder rate dropped 27.7%.”
Gottlieb said the timing of this report’s release in the Harvard Journal is significant due to the renewal of the gun control debate following the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech.
“Kates and Mauser make a solid factual case against all the emotion-laden rhetoric from the gun control crowd,” Gottlieb stated. “While their research will obviously not close the debate, they’ve made a strong case against the traditional anti-gun mantra. Gun ownership is not the problem, and this new report proves it.”
Loaded with footnotes and documentation, the Kates/Mauser report notes that “per capita murder overall is only half as frequent in the United States as in several other nations where gun murder is rarer, but murder by strangling, stabbing, or beating is much more frequent.” (Emphasis in original article.)
Tables accompanying the article show that murder rates in European nations that have essentially banned handguns are higher than in those nations that have not, with Russia being the worst, more than 20 times the rate in Switzerland—a favorite example of gun rights activists as a nation where there is widespread ownership of military firearms—and even higher than Germany, Norway and Austria.
Citing data from another study, Kates and Mauser recalled that “In the late 1990s England moved from stringent controls to a complete ban on handguns and many types of long guns. Hundreds of thousands were confiscated from owners law abiding enough to turn them in. Without suggesting this caused violence, the bans’ ineffectiveness was such that by year 2000 violent crime had so increased that England had the developed world’s highest violent crime rate, far surpassing even the US.”
Mauser and Kates estimate that at least 3.5 million Americans are licensed to carry concealed handguns in the 40 states where there is non-discretionary issuance of concealed carry licenses and permits. These states encompass about 60% of the country’s population.
The authors note that “adoption of state laws allowing millions of qualified citizens to carry guns has not resulted in more murder or violent crime in these states. Rather, adoption of these statutes has been followed by very significant reductions in murder and violence in these states.”
They cite the landmark study of more than 3,000 counties in this country by John Lott and David Mustard that was detailed in the book More Guns = Less Crime. The Lott-Mustard study was met with wails from the gun control community, but hailed by pro-gun organizations. Kates and Mauser acknowledge that the Lott-Mustard work resulted in considerable controversy, but they observed, “What the controversy has obscured from view is the corrosive effect of the Lott and Mustard work on the faith that more guns = more murder.”
In the 40 states with so-called shall issue statutes, Kates and Mauser noted, there has not been a sharp increase in homicide, as was predicted by opponents of concealed carry in state after state.
“To reiterate,” Kates and Mauser wrote, “the determinants of murder and suicide are basic social, economic, and cultural factors, not the prevalence of some form of deadly mechanism. In this connection, recall that the American jurisdictions which have the highest violent crime rates are precisely those with the most stringent gun controls.”