When gun control costs lives

Guns make it easier for people to kill, but guns also make it easier for people to defend themselves, especially for victims who are not strong physically. The question is not whether guns have costs, but what is the net effect. Do guns on net save lives or cost lives? What impact do they have on other crimes that threaten so many people?

Unfortunately, news coverage does not do a very good job of portraying the trade-offs we face. As the old saying goes, "if it bleeds, it leads." A dead body on the ground that has been shot to death, particularly if it is a sympathetic victim, is much more likely to get news coverage than a case where someone uses a gun to stop a crime. If a woman brandishes a gun and a would-be rapist runs away, where is the "newsworthiness"? No crime has been consummated, no dead body lies on the ground, no shots have even been fired.

Yet, there are many dramatic cases from public school shootings to bombings to people trying to blow up gasoline tankers, as well as many other crimes that have been stopped by citizens with guns well before the police arrived. In the October 1997 shooting spree at a high school in Pearl, Mississippi, which left two students dead, Joel Myrick, an assistant principal, retrieved a gun from his car and physically immobilized the shooter for about five minutes until police arrived. A Nexis search indicates that 687 articles appeared in the first month after the attack, but only nineteen stories mention Myrick in any way, and only about half of these mention that he used a gun to stop the attack. Some stories simply stated that Myrick was "credited by police with helping capture the boy" or that "Myrick disarmed the shooter." None of the network evening news broadcasts mentioned what Myrick had done. Similar heroism in other attacks also goes unreported.

SOME TELLING STATISTICS

Possibly because of such news coverage, few realize that Americans use guns defensively about 2 million times each year five times as frequently as the 430,000 times guns were used to commit crimes in 1997. Up to ninety-eight percent of the time, simply brandishing the weapon is sufficient to stop an attack. Even though the police are probably the single most important factor in reducing crime, they simply cannot be there all the time and virtually always end up at the crime scene after the crime has been committed.

Having a gun has been proven to be by far the safest course of action when one is confronted by a criminal. For example, women who behave passively when confronted by a criminal are 2.5 times as likely to end up being seriously injured as women who have a gun. And men who behave passively are 1.4 times as likely to be seriously injured as men who have a gun.

Not only do the states with the highest gun ownership rates have much lower crime rates, but, more importantly, those states that have had the largest increases in gun ownership over time have had the biggest relative drops in violent crime. Even after accounting for other factors (such as law enforcement, demographics, and poverty), each percentage-point increase in gun ownership produces a 4 percent drop in violent crime. Further, it is the weakest and poorest people, particularly women and blacks, who benefit the most from gun ownership.

A similar relationship exists across countries. Usually only six or so countries are compared, but, as Jeff Miron at Boston University and others have shown, when data is used for all countries from which it is available, the countries with the strictest gun-control laws tend to have the highest homicide rates.

REGULATIONS

Regulations have both costs and benefits, and rules that are passed to solve a problem can sometimes make it worse. The biggest problem with gun-control laws is that those individuals who are intent on harming others are the least likely to obey them. The issue is frequently framed in terms of whether hunters are willing to be "inconvenienced," but this misses the real question: will wellintended laws disarm potential victims and thus make it easier for criminals?

Consider, then, the following costs and benefits of some of the proposals that have been getting so much recent attention.

Licensing and Registration

In theory, if a gun is left at the scene of the crime, licensing and registration will enable it to be traced back to its owner. But, amazingly, despite police spending tens of thousands of labor hours administering licensing and regulation laws in Hawaii (the one state with both rules), as well as in big urban areas with similar laws such as Chicago and Washington, D.C., there is not even a single case in which the laws have been instrumental in identifying someone who has committed a crime.

The reasons are simple. First, criminals very rarely leave their guns at the scene of the crime. Second, would-be criminals also virtually never get licenses or register their weapons.

So what of the oft-stated claim that licensing will somehow allow even more comprehensive background checks and thus keep criminals from getting guns in the first place? Unfortunately, not one single academic study exists which concludes that background checks reduce violent crime.

Recently, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article showing that the Brady Act produced no reduction in homicides or suicides. Other more comprehensive and more careful research actually found that the waiting period in the Brady Law slightly increased rape rates.

While still asserting that the law "must have some effect," Janet Reno was reduced to saying on September 27 that "It might just take longer to measure [it]."

On the other hand, these laws have real costs. This last year it was estimated in Hawaii that proposed changes in its registration law were going to require 50,000 hours annually of police time to administer. The question is, how many crimes can be solved because of these laws versus how many crimes cannot be solved because police are administrating the licensing law and not actually being out in the field solving crimes? Given that no crimes have been solved because of these laws, it is hard to see how such laws will save lives.

There are still other forseeable problems with licensing. The added fees will reduce gun ownership, particularly among poor people who are the most likely victims of crime and who benefit the most from having the option to defend themselves. The processing time for a license will produce long delays in obtaining access to a gun. While even short waiting periods increase rape rates, waiting periods longer than ten days increase all categories of violent crime, with the greatest increase being for crimes involving women.

Mandatory Gun Locks

Gun locks are touted as reducing accidental gun deaths among children. But despite some intuitive plausibility, the evidence indicates that mandating gun locks is more likely to cost lives than to save them.

Accidental gun deaths among children are fortunately quite rare. With almost 35 million children under the age of ten, fortyeight children died in 1997 from all accidental gun shots, including five who were identified as dying from handguns. With more than 80 million adults owning at least one gun, the overwhelming majority of gun owners must be extremely careful, or the figures would be much higher. Almost as many children under five drowned in five-gallon water buckets.

Gun-lock laws do not reduce accidental shootings for two reasons: only a few cases involve children shooting other children, and the adults who fire these guns accidentally are also not your typical person. Shooters overwhelmingly have problems with alcoholism and have long criminal histories, particularly arrests for violent acts. They are disproportionately involved in automobile crashes and are much more likely to have had their driver's license suspended or revoked. In other words, the households most at risk are the least likely to obey the law. And in any case, no locking technology will stop adults from accidentally firing their own guns.

However, these laws create real problems. The increased time required to unlock the gun may be crucial. Exacerbating this problem, many mechanical locks (such as barrel or trigger locks) also require that the gun be stored unloaded, further reducing the ability for a quick response. Reduced deterrence may also embolden criminals.

Indeed, recent research examining juvenile accidental gun deaths or suicides for all the states in the United States from 1977 to 1996 found that safe-storage laws had no effect on either type of death. However, it also showed that lawabiding citizens were more vulnerable to crime. The fifteen states that adopted these laws faced an increase of more than 300 more murders and 3,860 more rapes per year relative to other states. Burglaries also increased dramatically.

Many other myths about guns endanger people's lives. Probably one of the more pernicious is the claim that the family gun is more likely to kill you or someone you know than to kill in self-defense. Yet, few know how this research was conducted. It never actually inquired as to whose gun was used in the killing. Instead, if a household owned a gun and if a person in that household or someone they knew was shot to death while in the home, the gun in the household was blamed. In fact, virtually all the killings in these studies were committed by guns brought in by intruders. Even including suicides, no more than 14 percent of the gun deaths can be attributed to the homeowner's gun.

Another problem with this claim is that the only measured benefits came when the attackers were killed, which is extremely rare. Only about one out of every thousand times that people use a gun is the attacker killed. No weight was given to cases where brandishing a weapon or firing warning shots broke off the attack.

Parents are already civilly liable for wrongful actions committed by their children, but President Clinton proposes a three-year minimum prison term for anyone whose gun was used improperly by any minor, regardless of whether the gun owner consented to or knew of the use. The rules are being created for just one product, and we would never think of applying them to other products. This is Draconian, to say the least, the equivalent of sending Mom and Dad to prison because an auto thief killed someone while driving the family car.

What about other household products such as the propane tanks from barbecues or trailer homes used to make bombs? If the motivation is to prevent accidental deaths, why not apply this rule to items that pose a much greater risk to children in the home? Criminal penalties would surely motivate parents to store everything from medicines to knives to water buckets more carefully, but most would consider such an idea extreme.

New Rules for Gun Shows

The Clinton administration has provided no evidence that such shows are important in supplying criminals with guns. What's more, it is simply false to claim that the rules for purchasing guns at a gun show are any different from those regarding gun purchases anywhere else. Dealers who sell guns at a show must perform the same background checks and obey all the other rules that they do when they make sales at their stores. Private sales are unregulated whether they occur at a gun show or not.

If the government enacts new laws regulating private sales at gun shows, all someone would have to do would be to walk outside the show and sell the gun there. To regulate private sales, the government would have to register all guns. This is where the discussion will soon be headed, as it is certain that gun-control advocates will quickly point to the unenforceability of such laws. Those who advocate them must know that such laws would be doomed to failure and should be willing to acknowledge openly if their real goal is registration.

Age Limits

The Clinton administration proposes a federal ban on possession of handguns by anyone under twenty-one. Under a 1968 federal law, twenty-one is already the minimum age to purchase a handgun, but setting the age to possess a handgun has been a state matter. While some people between eighteen and twenty-one use guns improperly, this age group also faces the greatest risk of crime and would benefit from defending themselves. My own research indicates that laws allowing those between eighteen and twenty-one years of age to carry a concealed handgun reduce violent crimes just as well as those applying to citizens over twentyone.

Right-to-Carry Concealed Handgun Laws

This is the only type of gun law that has shown significant reductions in violent crime. In fact, no national academic study has found a cost from these laws, while more than a dozen national academic studies show large benefits. My own research finds that for each additional year that right-to-carry laws are in effect, murder rates decline by an additional 1.5 percent, and rape, robbery, and aggravated assault fall by 3 percent. These are drops over and above any national or regional declines in crime and after literally thousands of other factors have been taken into account.

The largest drops in violent crimes occurred in the most populous and most urban counties with the highest crime rates. Concealed handguns also appear to be the great equalizer among the sexes. Murder rates decline when either more women or more men carry concealed handguns, but the effect is especially pronounced for women. An additional woman carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for women by about three to four times as much as an additional man carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for men.

CONCLUSION

The most surprising aspect of the debate over guns is the large gap between the public debate and academic research. For example, with all the benefits that the Clinton administration claims for the Brady Act, it is surprising that not a single academic study has found that the Act has reduced crime rates. Just last year, 294 academics from institutions as diverse as Harvard, Stanford, Northwestern, the University of Pennsylvania, and UCLA signed an open letter to Congress stating that the new gun laws being proposed then were "illadvised." They wrote that "With the 20,000 gun laws already on the books, we advise Congress, before enacting yet more new laws, to investigate whether many of the existing laws may have contributed to the problems we currently face."

Good intentions do not necessarily make good laws. What counts is whether the laws will ultimately save lives. The real tragedy of President Clinton's proposals is that they are likely to lead to the loss of more lives.

John R. Lott, Jr. is a senior research scholar at the Yale University Law School and the author of More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws (University of Chicago Press, second edition, 2000).

Copyright National Forum: Phi Kappa Phi Journal Fall 2000
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