Front Sight, Press

WOULD BANNING FIREARMS REDUCE MURDER AND SUICIDE?

A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL AND SOME DOMESTIC EVIDENCE

DON B. KATES AND GARY MAUSER

Excerpts:

“International evidence and comparisons have long been offered
as proof of the mantra that more guns mean more deaths and that
fewer guns, therefore, mean fewer deaths.1 Unfortunately, such
discussions are all too often been afflicted by misconceptions and
factual error and focus on comparisons that are unrepresentative.
It may be useful to begin with a few examples. There is a compound
assertion that (a) guns are uniquely available in the United
States compared with other modern developed nations, which is
why (b) the United States has by far the highest murder rate.
Though these assertions have been endlessly repeated, statement
(b) is, in fact, false and statement (a) is substantially so…

…If the mantra “more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less
death” were true, broad based cross‐national comparisons
should show that nations with higher gun ownership per capita
consistently have more death. Nations with higher gun
ownership rates, however, do not have higher murder or suicide
rates than those with lower gun ownership. Indeed many
high gun ownership nations have much lower murder rates.
Consider, for example, the wide divergence in murder rates
among Continental European nations with widely divergent
gun ownership rates…

…In sum, though many nations with widespread gun ownership
have much lower murder rates than nations that severely restrict
gun ownership, it would be simplistic to assume that at all times
and in all places widespread gun ownership depresses violence by
deterring many criminals into nonconfrontation crime. There is
evidence that it does so in the United States, where defensive gun
ownership is a substantial socio‐cultural phenomenon. But the
more plausible explanation for many nations having widespread
gun ownership with low violence is that these nations never had
high murder and violence rates and so never had occasion to enact
severe anti‐gun laws. On the other hand, in nations that have experienced
high and rising violent crime rates, the legislative reaction
has generally been to enact increasingly severe antigun laws.
This is futile, for reducing gun ownership by the law‐abiding citizenry—
the only ones who obey gun laws—does not reduce violence
or murder. The result is that high crime nations that ban guns
to reduce crime end up having both high crime and stringent gun
laws, while it appears that low crime nations that do not significantly
restrict guns continue to have low violence rates.

Thus both sides of the gun prohibition debate are likely
wrong in viewing the availability of guns as a major factor in
the incidence of murder in any particular society. Though
many people may still cling to that belief, the historical, geographic,
and demographic evidence explored in this Article
provides a clear admonishment. Whether gun availability is
viewed as a cause or as a mere coincidence, the long term
macrocosmic evidence is that gun ownership spread widely
throughout societies consistently correlates with stable or
declining murder rates. Whether causative or not, the consistent
international pattern is that more guns equal less murder
and other violent crime. Even if one is inclined to think
that gun availability is an important factor, the available international
data cannot be squared with the mantra that
more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less
death. Rather, if firearms availability does matter, the data
consistently show that the way it matters is that more guns
equal less violent crime…

CONCLUSION

This Article has reviewed a significant amount of evidence
from a wide variety of international sources. Each individual
portion of evidence is subject to cavil—at the very least the
general objection that the persuasiveness of social scientific
evidence cannot remotely approach the persuasiveness of
conclusions in the physical sciences. Nevertheless, the burden
of proof rests on the proponents of the more guns equal
more death and fewer guns equal less death mantra, especially
since they argue public policy ought to be based on
that mantra.149 To bear that burden would at the very least
require showing that a large number of nations with more
guns have more death and that nations that have imposed
stringent gun controls have achieved substantial reductions
in criminal violence (or suicide). But those correlations are
not observed when a large number of nations are compared
across the world.”

Over a decade ago, Professor Brandon Centerwall of the University
of Washington undertook an extensive, statistically sophisticated
study comparing areas in the United States and Canada to
determine whether Canada’s more restrictive policies had better
contained criminal violence. When he published his results it was
with the admonition:

If you are surprised by [our] finding[s], so [are we]. [We] did
not begin this research with any intent to “exonerate” handguns,
but there it is—a negative finding, to be sure, but a negative
finding is nevertheless a positive contribution. It directs us
where not to aim public health resources.

To download the complete study in PDF form, click here.