Control: Exposing the Truth About Guns Read online

  —LETTER FROM THOMAS JEFFERSON, in Paris, to James Madison, September 6, 1789

  While this letter makes Jefferson sound as though he could be a member of the Center for American Progress, there’s actually an important lesson here: Jefferson lost. His views were in the extreme minority. Most Americans, including James Madison, hoped that the new Constitution of 1787 would provide long-term stability to the United States.

  And that’s exactly what has happened.

  Since the Constitution is not a “living” document, it has guaranteed generations of Americans that the bedrock principles of freedom will endure.

  But Lawford is wrong for another reason as well. By focusing on this one letter, he’s missing a much larger point: even if laws were reviewed, Jefferson would have always insisted that any new constitution respect the natural rights of mankind. As he affirmed in his writings, including the Declaration of Independence, the essential purpose of government is to protect our God-given rights.

  Whether a law was to expire in ten years, twenty years, or one hundred years is irrelevant—Jefferson would always be against any effort to suppress our inalienable rights. Like the other Founders, Jefferson believed there were many different ways in which a government could be structured, but that every legitimate government must protect—and never violate—the natural rights of mankind.

  Finally, if Lawford is really so supportive of Jefferson’s idea, then he also must be willing to throw out every major current gun control law that is more than twenty years old. That would wipe out the vast majority of federal gun control laws—including the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the Gun Control Act of 1968. Most state gun control laws would disappear as well. The result? The United States of 2013 would look a lot like the United States of 1788—a nation with no constitutional guarantee about the right to bear arms, but also a nation with a lot of guns and almost no laws restricting them.

  THE UNITED STATES HAS THE HIGHEST GUN MURDER RATE IN THE DEVELOPED WORLD.

  “You have by far the worst rate of gun murder and gun crime of any of the civilized countries of this world . . . . ”

  —PIERS MORGAN, December 18, 2012

  This all sounds pretty plausible—which is probably why this line is repeated so often. Yet things are a lot more complicated than they seem.

  It’s not clear exactly what countries Morgan has picked when he says other “civilized” countries, but it is possible to generate almost any kind of result by picking the “right” set of countries.

  First, let’s just be clear that lots of nations, including “civilized” ones, suffer from higher overall murder and gun murder rates than America. In 2011, the U.S. murder rate was 4.7 per 100,000 people and the gun murder rate was 3.2. Much of Eastern Europe, most of Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, Africa, all but one South American nation, and all of Central America and Mexico suffer from higher murder rates than we do. For example, despite very strict gun control, homicide rates in Russia and Brazil have averaged about four to five times higher than ours over the last decade. As the Washington Post reported:

  The dubious distinction of having the most gun violence goes to Honduras, at 68.43 homicides by firearm per 100,000 people, even though it only has 6.2 firearms per 100 people. Other parts of South America and South Africa also rank highly, while the United States is somewhere near the mid-range.

  In fact, if you look across all nations and not just a select few, what you find is that those with the strictest gun control laws also tend to have the highest murder rates. Gun control advocates prefer to use the very questionable data from the pro-gun control “Small Arms Survey” to make their case—but even that data proves that higher rates of gun ownership correlate with fewer deaths. (See charts.)

  OKAY, BUT THE OVERALL U.S. MURDER RATE IS MUCH HIGHER THAN OTHER WEALTHY COUNTRIES’.

  “[T]he American murder rate is roughly 15 times that of other wealthy countries, which have much tougher laws controlling private ownership of guns.”

  —NEW YORK TIMES (editorial), December 17, 2012

  Oh, okay, so now it’s “wealthy” countries instead of just “civilized” ones and it’s overall murder instead of gun murder.

  Still totally wrong.

  The U.S. homicide rate in 2011 was 4.7 per 100,000 people. That is very high, and I’m certainly not going to defend it or make the case that we shouldn’t be trying to reduce it—but it’s nowhere near what the New York Times claims.

  I took a look through the United Nations data on homicide rates for the twenty “wealthiest” countries in the world by gross domestic product (GDP). As you’d expect, the per capita rates are all over the place, but in only one case (Singapore—where they still lash people with canes) was the U.S. murder rate “15 times” higher. Most of the countries that reasonable people would consider to be “wealthy” and “civilized,” like Switzerland, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Germany, and France, have rates between 0.7 and 2.5.

  BUT OTHER COUNTRIES HAVE STRICT GUN CONTROL AND VERY FEW MURDERS.

  “[G]un control has worked very successfully in Britain, in Australia, in Japan. Japan has the toughest gun control in the world. They have two or three murders a year. You have 11,000 to 12,000.”

  —PIERS MORGAN, December 17, 2012

  Piers Morgan grew up in Britain, so he thinks he understands how simple this is: take away the guns (like they did) and gun deaths go away. But that is way too simplistic. You have to look systematically across time and across as many countries as possible if you care about making a fair comparison and finding the truth—not just helping your political agenda.

  The United Kingdom has enjoyed very low overall crime rates for a long time—since long before Piers Morgan was even born, back in the days when gun ownership was much more widespread. In fact, murder and armed robberies were almost nonexistent. It might sound unbelievable, but back in 1904, London—a city with a population of around 7 million and the envy of the civilized world—reported just two gun murders and five armed robberies.

  Crime differs across nations and over time for a vast array of reasons, some of which we may never fully understand. However, for countries that have abruptly changed their rules regarding gun ownership or gun carrying, we can look at what happened right after the changes.

  And what do we find? The results might surprise you: In every single place that all guns or handguns were banned, murder rates went up.

  Let’s take another look at Great Britain first—a place where guns have never been as freely available as they have been in the United States.

  We previously looked at the overall gun control time line, but now let’s zero in on a few key parts. According to Joyce Lee Malcolm, a professor at George Mason University Law School and author of Guns and Violence: The English Experience, “Since 1920, anyone in Britain wanting a handgun had to obtain a certificate from his local police stating he was fit to own a weapon and had good reason to have one. Over the years, the definition of ‘good reason’ gradually narrowed. By 1969, self-defense was never a good reason for a permit.”

  In 1987, after a massacre in Hungerford, England, killed sixteen people and wounded fourteen others (since no one else had a gun, including the police, the killer roamed for eight hours), the government cracked down. Semi-automatic rifles were banned and shotguns were regulated like handguns.

  Nine years later, the Dunblane massacre in Scotland resulted in the final blow to gun ownership. The Firearms Act of 1997 banned handguns almost entirely—forcing lawful owners to turn them in or face ten years in prison.

  What happened next? Professor Malcolm has summarized it well:

  The results have not been what proponents of the act wanted. Within a decade of the handgun ban and the confiscation of handguns from registered owners, crime with handguns had doubled according to British government crime reports. Gun crime, not a serious problem in the past, now is. Armed street gangs have some British police carrying guns for the first time. Moreover, another massacre occur
red in June 2010. Derrick Bird, a taxi driver in Cumbria, shot his brother and a colleague then drove off through rural villages killing 12 people and injuring 11 more before killing himself.

  The homicide rate in Britain rose dramatically for seven years after the ban, from 1.1 homicides per 100,000 people in 1996 to 1.8 in 2003. At that point, fed up with the sudden increase in murder and violent crime, the police force was expanded by 16 percent between 2001 and 2005. Unsurprisingly, more police meant less crime. Still, even with the increased police presence, crime generally remained higher than before the Firearms Act.

  Australia was Morgan’s second example, and the numbers there paint an even less convincing picture, especially when you study how certain crime rates changed after their gun ban.

  But, before we get to the stats, a quick primer on Australia is in order. Unlike the United States, Australia does not have a Bill of Rights or a constitutional guarantee to bear arms. As a result, guns were never really a big part of the Australian culture. In fact, even before the strict gun control laws were passed, owning a gun in Australia generally meant being a member of a hunting or sporting group, or showing an occupational need to own a handgun. And after the laws were passed many of these same people continued to own guns—either by obtaining a need-based exemption, or by choosing a style of gun that was not part of the ban.

  Since Australians were not big gun owners anyway, there have never been a large number of gun-related deaths. In the six years preceding the buyback, the country averaged only about 550 gun-related deaths per year (accidents, murders, suicides, and “other” combined).

  In 1996, after a massacre is Tasmania, a major new gun control effort began across Australia. This consisted of new bans on semi-automatic weapons along with a major buyback of existing (and now illegal) firearms. More than 650,000 guns were turned in or confiscated from 1996 to 1997 as a result of this buyback—a number equivalent to about one-fifth of all outstanding guns at the time. (Ironically, the gun buyback did not have the intended result, as Australians quickly bought more single-shot guns, bringing the total back to 3.2 million after about fourteen years.)

  After the buyback, gun-deaths averaged about 356 a year over the next five years. Gun homicides—which is the part of the figure that Morgan specifically mentioned—averaged 82 per year from 1991 to 1996, and 58 per year from 1997 to 2001. Did those averages move down a bit? Sure—but there are two issues with claiming a win based on that: first, the overall numbers are so small that the change is statistically irrelevant, and second, people have found ways to kill that don’t involve a gun.

  If instead of looking only at gun-related homicides you look at the overall number of homicides before and after the ban, you find that there’s not a lot of difference. Non-gun homicides averaged about 240 per year from 1991 to 1996 and increased to about 255 per year from 1997 to 2001. Does that mean that the gun control laws forced more people to become killers? No, of course not, but it very well may mean that those who would’ve used a gun instead use something else, like a knife.

  According to Piers Morgan’s assumption, overall murder rates should have initially plummeted after the gun buyback and then risen back up over time as Australians replenished their guns. But that simply did not happen. Instead, total homicides have basically remained at the same very low rate they were at since before the buyback.

  Several major studies that have researched the buyback have reached similar conclusions. One, done by Wang-Sheng Lee and Sandy Suardi of the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, at the University of Melbourne, concluded that the “results of these tests suggest that the NFA [the 1996–97 National Firearms Agreement] did not have any large effects on reducing firearm homicide or suicide rates.”

  A second study, done by Jeanine Baker of the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia and Samara McPhedran of the University of Sydney, and published in the British Journal of Criminology, reached a similar conclusion: “Homicide patterns (firearm and non-firearm) were not influenced by the NFA, the conclusion being that the gun buy-back and restrictive legislative changes had no influence on firearm homicide in Australia.”

  One final note on the agreement’s impact on Australian crime. Armed robberies exploded after the new laws, from about 6,000 in 1996 to around 10,000 between 1998 and 2001, before declining to pre-buyback levels in 2004. In other words, fewer guns resulted in more armed robberies and roughly the same number of murders—not exactly a shining example of the utopian society that awaits all of us if only we’d agree to ban semi-automatics.

  Finally, Japan—a nation that, unlike Australia and the United Kingdom, has not experienced any sudden changes in gun policies and is therefore more difficult to fairly evaluate. Japan has imposed strict gun control for centuries, long before crime data began to be systematically collected. Guns are allowed for hunting—there were more than 400,000 registered firearms in 2011—but handguns are banned.

  Control enthusiasts love to point to Japan, which has a very low murder rate, as the prime example of how fewer guns equates to less crime and far fewer homicides. But if that theory were true, then it should always be true. And it’s simply not.

  Take Switzerland, for example. As I mentioned earlier, Switzerland has the third-highest rate of firearms per capita in the world. So, it stands to reason, then, that Switzerland’s streets must be flowing in blood, right?

  Not even close.

  Switzerland had a gun homicide rate of 0.5 per 100,000 people in 2010. Their overall homicide rate was 0.7, ranking the country well below other gun control havens like Australia (1.0), the United Kingdom (1.2), and Canada (1.6).

  This theory falls apart when you look at it from the other side as well. The Netherlands, for example, has one of the lowest rates of gun ownership in Europe at 3.9 per capita, but its homicide rate (1.1) is nowhere near the bottom. Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway, and Sweden all have lower murder rates than the Netherlands—and far more guns per capita.

  It’s easy to cherry-pick data or point to one country and say that it proves a theory—it’s much harder, but far more worthwhile, to look across entire sets of data and see whether that theory holds up. In this case, it simply doesn’t.

  Americans have seen this same pattern play out here at home in cities like Washington, D.C., and Chicago and in states like Massachusetts—all of which have implemented very tough gun control laws or outright bans.

  D.C.’s handgun ban (which also mandated that other firearms, including rifles and shotguns, be kept unloaded and disassembled) went into effect in early 1977. Since then, there has been only one year (1985) when that city’s murder rate fell below what it was in the year before the ban. If this were a general, nationwide trend, then we should see the murder rate in other cities also increase during that time. But that’s not what happened. In the twenty-nine years of data we have since the ban, D.C.’s murder rate ranked in the top four among the fifty largest U.S. cities in 19 of those years. In 15 of those 19 years D.C. ranked either first or second in the country. Prior to the ban, D.C. was never ranked that high. They ranked in the top fifteen just once.

  Was there something special about D.C. that kept the ban from working? Probably not, since we often see this same trend play out in other cities with restrictive gun control. Before Chicago’s ban in 1982, its murder rate per 100,000 people, which was falling from 27 to 22 in the prior five years, suddenly stopped falling and instead rose slightly to 23 in the five years afterward. Tracing that change directly to the handgun ban is, of course, impossible, but it’s pretty stunning when you look at what happened in the counties surrounding the city of Chicago over this same time. According to John Lott, “Chicago’s murder rate fell from being 8.1 times greater than its neighbors in 1977 to 5.5 times in 1982, and then went way up to 12 times greater in 1987.”

  And Massachusetts, which passed laws in 1998 aimed at making it very difficult to own a gun (and banning semi-automatic “assault weapo
ns” outright), has experienced the same kind of results. While the laws did work to make it difficult for law-abiding people to own guns (there were 1.5 million active licenses in 1998 and only 200,000 four years later), it had no effect on people who generally ignore laws anyway. Those people are sometimes referred to as “criminals.”

  According to a February, 2013 article in the Boston Globe, “Murders committed with firearms have increased significantly, aggravated assaults and robberies involving guns have risen, and gunshot injuries are up, according to FBI and state data.” (emphasis added)

  In 2011, Massachusetts had 122 firearm homicides. This was, according to the Globe, “a striking increase from the 65 in 1998.” Other categories of violent crime—from aggravated assault (up 26.7 percent) to armed robbery (up 20.7 percent)—also increased.

  Of course, gun control advocates claim that none of these locations was a fair test for gun bans or extremely strict regulations. They say that, unless guns are banned across the entire country, criminals in one location can simply drive to another to obtain them. But if that’s true, then in a worst-case scenario, you might expect homicide and violent crime rates to continue on whatever trend they were already on. In other words, if the ban simply doesn’t work, then it should have no impact and each location’s homicide and crime rate should continue at whatever pace it was on relative to the locations around it that did not implement bans.

  But that’s not what happened. In Massachusetts, for example, the state’s lowest per capita homicide rate occurred in 1997, the year before the ban. By 2011 it had increased by 47 percent, bucking the national trend, which was down. Nationwide, the homicide rate over that same time period was down 31 percent.