By
Thomas Sowell
Dec 2012
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com
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,
D.C., 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, hand gun 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 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.
Some years back, there was a professor whose
advocacy of gun control led him to produce a "study" that became so
discredited that he resigned from his university. This column predicted
at the time that this discredited study would continue to be cited by
gun control advocates. But I had no idea that this would happen the
very next week in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
