Proof That Gun Control Increases Crime

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Gun control is back in the news. Kansas City Chiefs football player Jovan Belcher shoots and kills a woman then shoots and kills himself. That weekend television personality and famed sports commentator Bob Costas interrupts his monologue of a Sunday night football game to promote his personal support for gun control.

There is a fascinating and very detailed study that was released a few years ago by two criminologists that you probably never heard about. It dispels the mainstream media’s presentation that guns kill and more guns kill more. The heavily peer reviewed study titled, “ Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence ,” and was published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy (Volume 30, Number 2, pages 649-694).

Written by Professor Gary Mauser and Professor Don Kates this extension and heavily cited research covers gun control efforts in Europe, the former Soviet Union and Russia and the United States. They detail gun, gun ownership and criminal activity from the Revolutionary war to present day.

“Might stricter gun laws result in more gun crime? It seems counterintuitive but makes sense if we consider one simple fact: Criminals don’t obey the law. Strict gun laws, like the ban in Britain, probably only affect the actions of people who wouldn’t commit crimes in the first place,” reports ABC News .

In this exhaustive research by these two professors supports that statemement. Here are a few excerpted highlights from the study, “ Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence .”

“If more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death, areas within nations with higher gun ownership should in general have more murders than those with less gun ownership in a similar area. But, in fact, the reverse pattern prevails in Canada, “England, America, and Switzerland, [where the areas] with the highest rates of gun ownership were in fact those with the lowest rates of violence”

US Does Not Have Highest Murder Rate

“Since at least 1965, the false assertion that the United States has the industrialized world’s highest murder rate has been an artifact of politically motivated Soviet minimization designed to hide the true homicide rates. Since well before that date, the Soviet Union by a police state apparatus providing stringent enforcement. So successful was that regime that few Russian civilians now have firearms and very few murders involve them. Yet, manifest success in keeping its people disarmed did not prevent the Soviet Union from having far and away the highest murder rate in the developed world.

“In the 1960s and early 1970s, the gun?less Soviet Union’s murder rates paralleled or generally exceeded those of gun?ridden America. While American rates stabilized and then steeply declined, however, Russian murder increased so drastically that by the early 1990s the Russian rate was three times higher than that of the United States. Between 1998?2004 (the latest figure available for Russia), Russian murder rates were nearly four times higher than American rates. “

“Homicide results suggest that where guns are scarce other weapons are substituted in killings.”

“Where firearms are most dense violent crime rates are lowest and where guns are least dense violent crime rates are highest.”

Gun Control : 90 percent of Murders have Prior Record

“Though only 15 percent of Americans over the age of 15 have arrest records approximately 90 percent of “adult murderers have adult records, with an average adult criminal career [involving crimes committed as an adult rather than a child] of six or more years, including four major adult felony arrests”

“The determinants of murder and suicide are basic social, economic, and cultural factors, not the prevalence of some form of deadly mechanism “There is no consistent significant positive association between gun ownership levels and violence rates”

“Armed crime, never a problem in England, has now become one. Handguns are banned but the Kingdom has millions of illegal firearms. Criminals have no trouble finding them and exhibit a new willingness to use them. In the decade after 1957, the use of guns in serious crime increased a hundredfold.”

Gun Ban Created Highest Rate of Violent Crimes

“In the late 1990s, England moved from stringent controls to a complete ban of all handguns and many types of long guns. Hundreds of thousands of guns were confiscated from those owners law?abiding enough to turn them in to authorities. Without suggesting this caused violence, the ban’s ineffectiveness was such that 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.”

More Guns in USA Equals less Crime

“Despite constant and substantially increasing gun ownership, the United States saw progressive and dramatic reductions in criminal violence in the 1990s. On the other hand, the same time period in the United Kingdom saw a constant and dramatic increase in violent crime to which England’s response was ever?more drastic gun control including, eventually, banning and confiscating all handguns and many types of long guns. Nevertheless, criminal violence rampantly increased so that by 2000 England surpassed the United States to become one of the developed world’s most violence?ridden nations.”

Gun Control: Law Abiding Citizens Don’t Rob, Rape or Murder

“Analysis of perpetrator studies shows that violent criminals—especially murderers—“almost uniformly have a long history of involvement in criminal behavior. So it would not appreciably raise violence if all law abiding, responsible people had firearms because they are not the ones who rape, rob, or murder. By the same token, violent crime would not fall if guns were totally banned to civilians. As the respective examples of Luxembourg and Russia suggest, individuals who commit violent crimes will either find guns despite severe controls or will find other weapons to use.”

“The non?correlation between gun ownership and murder is reinforced by examination of statistics from larger numbers of nations across the developed world. Comparison of and suicide mortality data for thirty?six nations (including the United States) for the period 1990–1995” to gun ownership levels showed “no significant (at the 5% level) association between gun ownership levels and the total homicide rate.” Consistent with this is a later European study of data from 21 nations in which “no significant correlations [of gun ownership levels] with total suicide or homicide rates were found.”

Gun Control and African Americans

“Particularly corrosive to the mantra are the facts as to rural African?Americans gun ownership. Per capita, rural African?Americans are much more likely to own firearms than are urban African?Americans. Yet, despite their greater access to guns, the firearm murder rate of young rural black males is a small fraction of the firearm murder rate of young urban black males”

Please take the time to read the entire report, “ Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence ”. It is an excellent research paper with many facts all need to know when considering any type of gun control.

What are your thoughts and opinions on gun control ? Post your comments below.

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