Harvard study shows gun control doesn't save Lives
August 28, 2013
Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy has just released a study of the relative effects of stringent gun laws. They found that a country like Luxenbourg, which bans all guns has a murder rate that is 9 times higher than Germany, where there are 30,000 guns per 100,000 people. They also cited a study by the U.S.National Academy of Sciences, which studied 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and it failed to find one gun control initiative that worked.
In fact, in many cases it found that violence is very often lower, where guns are more readily available. The report points to a myth that guns are more easily obtained in the United States than in Europe. That is factually incorrect.
Austria has the lowest murder rate of any industrialized country, with .8 murders per 100,000 people, yet they have 17,000 guns per 100,000 people. Norway is second with .81 murders and 36,000 guns. Germany is third with .93 murders and 36,000 guns. The United states has a murder rate of 10.1 murders per 100,00 people. But Luxembourg, which does not allow gun ownership at all has a rating of 9.01.
The same pattern appears when comparisons of violence to gun ownership are done within nations. Indeed, "data on firearms ownership by constabulary area in England." like data from the United States show a "negative correlation" that is "where firearms are most dense, violent crime is lower, and where firearms are least dense, the violent crime rate is the highest."
Another longstanding myth is that Europe's relatively low murder rate is because of their gun control laws. The truth is, their rates were low even before gun control laws were passed, according to the Harvard study. In fact, their murder rates hit an all time low, before any gun laws were passed. In fact, their violent crimes have risen since they enacted gun control laws. By comparison, violent crimes have dropped in the US over the same period.
Russia has a ban on hand guns and their murder rate is 30.6%, whereas in the United States the rate is a much lower 7.8%. And during the 1990s, gun ownership grew significantly in the United States, while violent crimes dropped by 30%. In England, after they banned handguns, the rate of violent crimes soared.
The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, conceeded that the results they found in their report was not what they expected to find.
http://www.examiner.com/article/harvard-study-shows-gun-control-doesn-t-save-lives
Also see:
Britain’s Gun-Control Folly
by Scott McPherson December 16, 2005
In response, allow me to quote at length from “Gun Control in England: The Tarnished Gold Standard,” written by historian Joyce Lee Malcolm and published in the fall 2004 issue of Journal on Firearms & Public Policy:
[Between 1997 and 2003] crimes with [banned firearms] have more than doubled…. In 2002, for the fourth consecutive year, gun crime in England and Wales rose — by 35 percent for all firearms, and by a whopping 46 percent for the banned handguns. Nearly 10,000 firearms offenses were committed…. Clearly since the ban criminals have not found it difficult to get guns and the balance has not shifted in the interest of public safety….
In the four years from 1997 to 2001 the rate of violent crime more than doubled. The UK murder rate for 2002 was the highest for a century….
A recent study of all the countries of western Europe has found that in 2001 Britain had the worst record for killings, violence and burglary, and its citizens had one of the highest risks in the industrialized world of becoming victims of crime….
And here’s the icing on the cake: “[A] United Nations study of eighteen industrialized countries, including the United States, published in 2002 … found England and Wales at the top of the Western world’s crime league, with the worst record for ‘very serious’ offenses.” [Emphasis added]
And all this while crime in the United States, including violent crime, has been steadily falling. The “Wild West” seems to be 3,000 miles to our east.
http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/britains-guncontrol-folly/
The great gun control fallacy
Thomas Sowell
Must every tragic mass shooting bring out the shrill ignorance of "gun control" advocates?
The key fallacy of so-called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.
If gun control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive.
Places and times with the strongest gun control laws have often been places and times with high murder rates. Washington, DC, is a classic example, but just one among many.
When it comes to the rate of gun ownership, that is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, but the murder rate is higher in urban areas. The rate of gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, but the murder rate is higher among blacks. For the country as a whole, handgun ownership doubled in the late 20th century, while the murder rate went down.
The few counter-examples offered by gun control zealots do not stand up under scrutiny. Perhaps their strongest talking point is that Britain has stronger gun control laws than the United States and lower murder rates.
But, if you look back through history, you will find that Britain has had a lower murder rate than the United States for more than two centuries – and, for most of that time, the British had no more stringent gun control laws than the United States. Indeed, neither country had stringent gun control for most of that time.
In the middle of the 20th century, you could buy a shotgun in London with no questions asked. New York, which at that time had had the stringent Sullivan Law restricting gun ownership since 1911, still had several times the gun murder rate of London, as well as several times the London murder rate with other weapons.
Neither guns nor gun control was not the reason for the difference in murder rates. People were the difference.
Yet many of the most zealous advocates of gun control laws, on both sides of the Atlantic, have also been advocates of leniency toward criminals.
In Britain, such people have been so successful that legal gun ownership has been reduced almost to the vanishing point, while even most convicted felons in Britain are not put behind bars. The crime rate, including the rate of crimes committed with guns, is far higher in Britain now than it was back in the days when there were few restrictions on Britons buying firearms. In 1954, there were only a dozen armed robberies in London but, by the 1990s – after decades of ever tightening gun ownership restrictions – there were more than a hundred times as many armed robberies.
Gun control zealots' choice of Britain for comparison with the United States has been wholly tendentious, not only because it ignored the history of the two countries, but also because it ignored other countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States, such as Russia, Brazil and Mexico. All of these countries have higher murder rates than the United States.
You could compare other sets of countries and get similar results. Gun ownership has been three times as high in Switzerland as in Germany, but the Swiss have had lower murder rates. Other countries with high rates of gun ownership and low murder rates include Israel, New Zealand, and Finland.
Guns are not the problem. People are the problem – including people who are determined to push gun control laws, either in ignorance of the facts or in defiance of the facts.
There is innocent ignorance and there is invincible, dogmatic and self-righteous ignorance. Every tragic mass shooting seems to bring out examples of both among gun control advocates.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/18/great-gun-control-fallacy-thomas-sowell
History of Gun Registration Leading To Gun Confiscation
October 30, 2015/ /by Bill Kendall
Throughout modern history, gun confiscation is usually preceded by a gun registration. It makes sense to know where the guns are before you demand they be turned in. This usually does not end well for those turning in their weapons as history shows us.
http://genesiscnc.com/history-of-gun-registration-gun-confiscation/
"If you are for gun control, then you are not against guns, because the guns will be needed to disarm people. So it’s not that you are anti-gun. You’ll need the police’s guns to take away other people’s guns. So you’re very Pro-Gun, you just believe that only the Government (which is, of course, so reliable, honest, moral and virtuous…) should be allowed to have guns. There is no such thing as gun control. There is only centralizing gun ownership in the hands of a small, political elite and their minions."
- Stefan Molyneux
Do libertarians favor gun control?
QUESTION: I am unclear on the libertarian stand on gun control and crime. Should there be gun control in a libertarian society? And if so, how much?
MY SHORT ANSWER: Firearms, like fists, can be used for offense or defense. Libertarians would not advocate cutting off a person’s access to firearms any more than they would advocate cutting off a person’s hands to prevent a brawl.
Most people who advocate gun control do so because they believe it lowers the crime rate. In fact, just the opposite is true. Violent crime ( , robbery, and homicide) decrease dramatically when states pass laws that permit peaceful citizens to carry concealed weapons.
One famous example: in 1966 and 1967 Orlando, Florida police responded to a epidemic with a highly-publicized program to train 2,500 women in the use of firearms. Orlando became the only city with a population over 100,000 which showed a decrease in crime. , aggravated assault, and burglary were reduced by 90%, 25%, and 24% respectively — without a single woman ever firing a shot in self-defense.
Criminals are looking for an easy mark and avoid those who might be armed. Anyone who doubts this might wish to put a sign on their front lawn saying “This house is a gun-free zone” to experience the consequences firsthand.
Gun control is actually “victim disarmament.” It exposes the weakest among us — women, children, and the elderly — to greater risk of attack. It denies us the ability to defend ourselves against those who would harm us.
Since the courts have ruled that the police have no obligation to protect an individual citizen from attack, we have no legal recourse if they fail to do so.
Acting in self-defense, armed citizens kill more criminals each year than police do, yet shoot only one-tenth as many innocent people by mistake. Clearly, armed citizens act as responsibly (if not more so) than trained law enforcers.
Libertarians believe that everyone has the right to self-defense. America’s founders did too. Libertarians strongly support the Second Amendment. Libertarians do not support the victim-disarmament laws collectively known as “gun control.”
For more details, including references for the examples cited above, see Chapter 16 of my book, Healing Our World in an Age of Aggression, available from the Advocates (2003 edition). The 1993 edition can be read online for free at mywebsite.
