Background image

terug

Guns as the solution?

Guns as the solution?

1     Sensing that he must introduce some government initiative to respond
 to the recent shootings at public schools, President Clinton proposed
 last week to make parents criminally responsible if their children obtain
 access to guns.
  
25     Some liberal commentators protest that this is an anemic response to a
 dreadful situation. Columnist Mary McGrory, a gun-control advocate,
 observes bitterly that “It might be simpler to go after guns than to try to
 make adults responsible.”
3     Gun control is one of the defining issues between liberals and
10 conservatives, and the recent school shootings illustrate the divide very
 well.
  
4     Gun-control advocates really think that they are more deeply concerned
 about schoolyard violence than gun defenders. They think that they are
 more peaceable folks than conservatives, more civil and more
15 concerned for children’s safety. Proof of their concern is their eagerness
 to ban handguns.
  
5     Those who oppose gun control, they assume, are willing to see a few
 dozen teenagers mowed down on the way to the next class as the price
 to pay for the Second Amendment of the US constitution. (Very similar
20 reasoning motivated liberals’ enthusiasm for the nuclear freeze in the
 early ’80s. Peaceable folks must oppose nuclear weapons, they
 reasoned. And those unwilling to engage in nuclear arms control must
 be warmongers.)
  
6     Personally, I would love to write columns in praise of gun control. I know
25 it would bring me prestige as an “independent thinker” not shackled by
 any particular ideology - and I would be given credit for concern about
 children.
  
7     But one cannot adopt a policy position based upon emotion alone. The
 facts are more important than how one feels. In the Cold War context, it
30 turned out that those who adopted a realistic view of the need for atomic
 weapons did far more to make the world a safer place than those who
 were arrogant enough to think that good people oppose nukes.
  
8     And the facts do not support gun control either. In fact, according to
 research by John R. Lott Jr., former chief economist for the U.S.
35 Sentencing Commission and a professor of law at the University of
 Chicago Law School, the very best way to stop mass shootings at
 schools or anywhere else is to adopt “concealed carry” laws.
  
9     Lott acknowledges that his own research results shocked him.
 Nevertheless, a survey of all multiple-victim public shootings in the
40 United States between 1977 and 1995 (excluding gang wars, organized
 crime hits and shootings in the course of a robbery or other crime)
 showed quite conclusively that nothing else works.
  
10     Lott and his research partner William Landes examined many other state
 attempts to reduce shootings. They found that the death-penalty had no
45 effect. Neither did raising arrest rates for murder, imposing waiting
 periods before gun purchases, or performing background checks for gun
 purchasers. Only one measure proved to have a dramatic effect on
 public shootings: “concealed carry” laws.
  
11     Thus five years after permitting law-abiding citizens to carry guns, 10
50 states had found that their murder rates had dropped by an average of 15
 percent, rape by 9 percent, and robberies by 11 percent. The likelihood of
 a mass shooting in those states had dropped from nearly 75 percent to
 zero.
  
12     In my view, concealed-carry laws help deter crime in two ways. They
55 keep criminals off balance because they cannot be sure which of their
 intended victims is armed, and they save lives when an armed citizen is
 able to overpower a criminal before the police arrive. In Jacksonville, Fla.,
 recently, a criminal with a gun threatened to start shooting people in a
 restaurant at the count of 10 unless the cash register were opened. At
60 the count of 8, two armed citizens with handgun permits stood up and
 shot him.
  
13     Not only do concealed-carry laws deter crime, they do not increase
 suicide rates, swell accidental shootings or result in citizens turning their
 guns on police officers - all dangers that opponents of concealed-carry
65 laws cite. By contrast, several police officers have had their lives saved
 by permit-holding citizens.
  
14     It’s hard to be enthusiastic about a weapon of death, but facts are facts:
 Guns save lives.
  
    Mona Charen, 'Daily Camera', July 12, 1998