Do Gun Control Laws Control Guns?
by Thomas Sowell
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The gun control
controversy is only the latest of many issues to be debated almost
solely in terms of fixed preconceptions, with little or no examination
of hard facts.
Media discussions
of gun control are dominated by two factors: the National Rifle
Association and the Second Amendment. But the over-riding factual
question is whether gun control laws actually reduce gun crimes
in general or murder rates in particular.
If, as gun
control advocates claim, gun control laws really do control guns
and save lives, there is nothing to prevent repealing the Second
Amendment, any more than there was anything to prevent repealing
the Eighteenth Amendment that created Prohibition.
But, if the
hard facts show that gun control laws do not actually control guns,
but instead lead to more armed robberies and higher murder rates
after law-abiding citizens are disarmed, then gun control laws would
be a bad idea, even if there were no Second Amendment and no National
Rifle Association.
The central
issue boils down to the question: What are the facts? Yet there
are many zealots who seem utterly unconcerned about facts or about
their own lack of knowledge of facts.
There are people
who have never fired a shot in their life who do not hesitate to
declare how many bullets should be the limit to put into a firearm's
clip or magazine. Some say ten bullets but New York state's recent
gun control law specifies seven.
Virtually all
gun control advocates say that 30 bullets in a magazine is far too
many for self-defense or hunting – even if they have never gone
hunting and never had to defend themselves with a gun. This uninformed
and self-righteous dogmatism is what makes the gun control debate
so futile and so polarizing.
Anyone who
faces three home invaders, jeopardizing himself or his family, might
find 30 bullets barely adequate. After all, not every bullet hits,
even at close range, and not every hit incapacitates. You can get
killed by a wounded man.
These plain
life-and-death realities have been ignored for years by people who
go ballistic when they hear about how many shots were fired by the
police in some encounter with a criminal. As someone who once taught
pistol shooting in the Marine Corps, I am not the least bit surprised
by the number of shots fired. I have seen people miss a stationary
target at close range, even in the safety and calm of a pistol range.
We cannot expect
everybody to know that. But we can expect them to know that they
don't know – and to stop spouting off about life-and-death issues
when they don't have the facts.
The central
question as to whether gun control laws save lives or cost lives
has generated many factual studies over the years. But these studies
have been like the proverbial tree that falls in an empty forest,
and has been heard by no one – certainly not by zealots who have
made up their minds and don't want to be confused by the facts.
Most factual
studies show no reduction in gun crimes, including murder, under
gun control laws. A significant number of studies show higher rates
of murder and other gun crimes under gun control laws.
How can this
be? It seems obvious to some gun control zealots that, if no one
had guns, there would be fewer armed robberies and fewer people
shot to death.
But nothing
is easier than to disarm peaceful, law-abiding people. And nothing
is harder than to disarm people who are neither – especially in
a country with hundreds of millions of guns already out there, that
are not going to rust away for centuries.
When
it was legal to buy a shotgun in London in the middle of the 20th
century, there were very few armed robberies there. But, after British
gun control zealots managed over the years to disarm virtually the
entire law-abiding population, armed robberies became literally
a hundred times more common. And murder rates rose.
One can cherry-pick
the factual studies, or cite some studies that have subsequently
been discredited, but the great bulk of the studies show that gun
control laws do not in fact control guns. On net balance, they do
not save lives but cost lives.
Gun control
laws allow some people to vent their emotions, politicians to grandstand
and self-righteous people to "make a statement" – but all at the
cost of other people's lives.
January
22, 2013
Thomas
Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.
To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other
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