Harvard Journal of Law - International study confirms, more guns equal less crime.
By now, any informed American is familiar with Dr. John Lott's famous
axiom of "More Guns, Less Crime." In other words, American jurisdictions
that allow law-abiding citizens to exercise their Second Amendment right to
keep and bear arms are far safer and more crime-free than jurisdictions that
enact stringent "gun control" laws. Very simply, the ability of law-abiding citizens
to possess firearms has helped reduce violent crime in America.
Now, a Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy study shows that this is not
just an American phenomenon. According to the study, worldwide gun
ownership rates do not correlate with higher murder or suicide rates. In fact,
many nations with high gun ownership have significantly lower murder and
suicide rates.
In their piece entitled Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide?
A Review of International and some Domestic Evidence, Don B. Kates and
Gary Mauser eviscerate "the mantra that more guns mean more deaths and
that fewer guns, therefore, mean fewer deaths." In so doing, the authors
provide fascinating historical insight into astronomical murder rates in the
Soviet Union during the Cold War, and they dispel the myths that widespread
gun ownership is somehow unique to the United States or that America
suffers from the developed world's highest murder rate.
To the contrary, they establish that Soviet murder rates far exceeded
American murder rates, and continue to do so today, despite Russia's
extremely stringent gun prohibitions. By 2004, they show, the Russian
murder rate was nearly four times higher than the American rate. More
fundamentally, Dr. Kates and Dr. Mauser demonstrate that other
developed nations such as Norway, Finland, Germany, France and Denmark
maintain high rates of gun ownership, yet possess murder rates lower than
other developed nations in which gun ownership is much more restricted.
For example, handguns are outlawed in Luxembourg, and gun ownership
extremely rare, yet its murder rate is nine times greater than in Germany,
which has one of the highest gun ownership rates in Europe. As another
example, Hungary's murder rate is nearly three times higher than nearby
Austria's, but Austria's gun ownership rate is over eight times higher than
Hungary's. "Norway," they note, "has far and away Western Europe's
highest household gun ownership rate (32%), but also its lowest murder
rate. The Netherlands," in contrast, "has the lowest gun ownership rate in
Western Europe (1.9%) ... yet the Dutch gun murder rate is higher than the
Norwegian."
Dr. Kates and Dr. Mauser proceed to dispel the mainstream misconception
that lower rates of violence in Europe are somehow attributable to gun
control laws. Instead, they reveal, "murder in Europe was at an all-time low
before the gun controls were introduced." As the authors note, "strict
controls did not stem the general trend of ever-growing violent crime
throughout the post-WWII industrialized world."
Citing England, for instance, they reveal that "when it had no firearms
restrictions [in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries], England had
little violent crime." By the late 1990s, however, "England moved from
stringent controls to a complete ban on all handguns and many types of long
guns." As a result, "by the year 2000, violent crime had so increased that
England and Wales had Europe's highest violent crime rate, far surpassing
even the United States." In America, on the other hand, "despite constant
and substantially increasing gun ownership, the United States saw
progressive and dramatic reductions in criminal violence in the 1990s."
Critically, Dr. Kates and Dr. Mauser note that "the fall in the American crime
rate is even more impressive when compared with the rest of the world,"
where 18 of the 25 countries surveyed by the British Home Office suffered
violent crime increases during that same period.
Furthermore, the authors highlight the important point that while the
American gun murder rate often exceeds that in other nations, the overall per
capita murder rate in other nations (including other means such as
strangling, stabbing, beating, etc.) is oftentimes much higher than in
the United States.
The reason that gun ownership doesn't correlate with murder rates, the
authors show, is that violent crime rates are determined instead by
underlying cultural factors. "Ordinary people," they note, "simply do not
murder." Rather, "the murderers are a small minority of extreme antisocial
aberrants who manage to obtain guns whatever the level of gun ownership"
in their society.
Therefore, "banning guns cannot alleviate the socio-cultural and economic
factors that are the real determinants of violence and crime rates."
According to Dr. Kates and Dr. Mauser, "there is no reason for laws
prohibiting gun possession by ordinary, law-abiding, responsible adults
because such people virtually never commit murder. If one accepts that
such adults are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than to commit it,
disarming them becomes not just unproductive but counter-productive."
