Some Criminologists sound a retreat on Gun Control

GUNS AND AMMO - HANDGUNS MAGAZINE

ABANDON SHIP

BY DON B. KATES

1960s. That was the era in which the faith that gun control is the sovereign remedy for criminal violence became an orthodoxy among liberal academics. This was a matter of naive, unsubstantiated faith as opposed to empirical evidence. However, as preeminent gun control advocate Frank Zimring acknowledged: "In the 1960s there was literally no scholarship on the relationship between guns and the incidence or consequences of interpersonal violence and no work in progress."

Professor Zimring remains firmly in the anti-gun camp. But later research caused an unbroken string of recantations by criminologists who once supported gun bans. In the late 1970s, the Justice Department funded the University of Massachusetts' Social and Demographic Research Institute to evaluate the literature on gun control in the U.S. and elsewhere. The institutes's resulting report observed:

"It is commonly hypothesized that much criminal violence, especially homicide, occurs simply because [of guns]...and, thus, that much homicide would not occur were firearms generally less available. There is no persuasive evidence that supports this view."

The professors who authored that evaluation subsequently published a commercial version their personal recantation: "The progressives' indictment of American firearms policy is well known and is one that [we]...once shared...The more deeply we explored the empirical implications of this indictment, the less plausible it has become."

In 1979, the criminologist who would become the premier analyst of gun control, Florida State University's Gary Kleck, published his earliest paper on the subject. It suggested that widespread firearms ownership may contribute to overall levels of criminal homicide. Five years later however, Kleck repudiated this suggestion because his own and others' research demonstrated that widespread firearms ownership does not increase homicide levels.

Kleck later told the National Academy of Sciences: "When I began my research on guns in 1976, like most academics, I was a believer in the 'anti-gun' thesis, i.e. the idea the gun availability [increases]... the frequency and/or seriousness of violent acts....However, as a modest body of reliable evidence...accumulated, many of the most able specialists in this area shifted... to a more skeptical stance, in which it was negatively argued that the best available evidence does not convincingly or consistently support the anti-gun position...

"Gun availability does have effects on violence...but these effects work in both violence-increasing and violence decreasing directions, with the effects largely canceling out. For example, when aggressors have guns, they are 1) less likely to physically attack their victims, 2) less likely to injure the victim given an attack, but 3) more likely to kill the victim, given an injury.

Further, when victims have guns, it is less likely aggressors will attack or injure them and less likely they will loose property in a robbery...Gun availability...just does not affect total rates of violence (total homicide rate, total suicide rate total robbery rate, etc.)"

Kleck's views are confirmed by later studies such as Moody & Marvell's exhaustive 2005 statistical analysis: "The estimated net effect of guns on crime...is generally very small and insignificantly different from zero."

The high-water mark of anti-gun thought among academics was the 1968-69 Eisenhower Commission's call for handgun prohibition. One of the commission's advisers, professor Hans Toch of the School of Criminology at the State University of New York (Albany), has noted that he fully agreed. But Toch later recanted: "It is hard to explain that where firearms are most dense, violent crime rates are lowest, and where guns are least dense violent crime rates are highest."

More recent is David Mustard's recantation: "When I started my research on guns [at the University of Chicago] in 1995, I passionately disliked firearms...It is now over six years since I became convinced otherwise and concluded that shall-issue laws...laws that require permits to be granted unless the applicant has a criminal record or a history of significant mental illness...reduce violent crime and have no impact on accidental deaths."

In 2003 Oxford University Press published "Can Gun Control Work?" by professor James Jacobs, director of NYU's Center for Research on Crime and Justice. Answering his title question, Jacobs concluded that while certain controls can have modestly positive effects, no gun laws "work" in the sense of greatly reducing violent crime. As to banning handguns, or all guns, to the general public, he views such measures as disastrously counterproductive.

In 2004, the National Academy of Sciences released its evaluation based on review of 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications and some empirical research of its own. It could not identify any gun control that had ever reduced violent crime suicide or gun accidents.

In 2007, Canadian criminologist Gary Mauser and I published a study reviewing gun ownership and controls over various nations and eras dating back the invention of firearms. We concluded that gun bans to the general populace had never reduced violent crime anywhere. There appears to be a negative correlation between such violence and the widespread availability of guns.

Among other things, we found that European nations with very strict gun control and very low gun ownership and murder rates three times higher than less-restrictive European nations with three times higher gun ownership per capita. Nations plagued with violent crime tend to respond with severe gun controls, but these just do not cure their violent crime problem.

Such conclusions are consistent with uniform finding of homicide research dating back to the 19th century that murderers are almost always people with criminal records (excepting a relatively small proportion of murderers who are mentally disturbed). Obviously such people are unlikely to be constrained or deterred by gun controls.