The triumph? The Supreme Court upheld the partial birth abortion ban today. However, in their ruling they said that the ban "does not violate a woman's constitutional right to an abortion". Constitutional right? What about the constitutional right of the child to pursue "life, liberty, and happiness"? With so many families looking to adopt today, an unwanted pregnancy does not equal being stuck with a child, only the inconvenience of pregnancy. How selfish is that, to deny another person their life so that you don't have to be inconvenienced?
The tragedy? That anti-gun lobby's would use the terrible shooting at Virginia Tech (33 killed, monday) to try to ban all guns. Virginia has a concealed carry law, but Virginia Tech told its students that it didn't apply to campus. We need to be pushing for just the reverse of a gun ban. Criminals are less likely to commit violent crimes when they know that the citizens could be armed. And historically, armed citizens have stopped violent crimes. I think the debate should be over how we enact a concealed carry law in every state, city, and university. See the statistics below:Violent crime rates are highest overall in states with laws severely limiting or prohibiting the carrying of concealed firearms for self-defense. (FBI Uniform Crime Reports, 1992) The total Violent Crime Rate is 26% higher in the restrictive states (798.3 per 100,000 pop.) than in the less restrictive states (631.6 per 100,000). The Homicide Rate is 49% higher in the restrictive states (10.1 per 100,000) than in the states with less restrictive CCW laws (6.8 per 100,000). The Robbery Rate is 58% higher in the restrictive states (289.7 per 100,000) than in the less restrictive states (183.1 per 100,000). The Aggravated Assault Rate is 15% higher in the restrictive states (455.9 per 100,000) than in the less restrictive states (398.3 per 100,000). Using the most recent FBI data (1992), homicide trends in the 17 states with less restrictive CCW laws compare favorably against national trends, and almost all CCW permittees are law-abiding. Since adopting CCW (1987), Florida's homicide rate has fallen 21% while the U.S. rate has risen 12%. From start-up 10/1/87 2/28/94 (over 6 yrs.) Florida issued 204,108 permits; only 17 (0.008%) were revoked because permittees later committed crimes (not necessarily violent) in which guns were present (not necessarily used). Of 14,000 CCW licensees in Oregon, only 4 (0.03%) were convicted of the criminal (not necessarily violent) use or possession of a firearm. Americans use firearms for self-defense more than 2.1 million times annually. By contrast, there are about 579,000 violent crimes committed annually with firearms of all types. Seventy percent of violent crimes are committed by 7% of criminals, including repeat offenders, many of whom the courts place on probation after conviction, and felons that are paroled before serving their full time behind bars. Two-thirds of self-protective firearms uses are with handguns. 99.9% of self-defense firearms uses do not result in fatal shootings of criminals, an important factor ignored in certain "studies" that are used to claim that guns are more often misused than used for self-protection. Of incarcerated felons surveyed by the Department of Justice, 34% have been driven away, wounded, or captured by armed citizens; 40% have decided against committing crimes for fear their would-be victims were armed.
4 comments:
Ian, way to go dude with the clarity in this post. I indeed made the effort to wade through the numbers, and they tell an interesting story. It makes sense that banning guns is just a knee-jerk reaction.
I was wondering if you have any stats on other countries. Like for example, I know that gun crime is so minimal in England to the point that most cops just don't have guns. Is there something about the culture of crime in America where the only way to defend yourself is with a gun? It seems really unfortunate that this is the case.
In fact I do, see below. World wide, the lack of an armed populace is correlated with higher crime numbers.
The other concern is the rise of totalitarian governments. The founders of our country were very wise to include it as a basic right to own guns. It prevents the government from forcing itself on the citizens, which would sorta negate the idea of a representative government. Examples of this were the de-arming of Nazi Germany before the holocaust began, and the Stalin's de-arming of Russia's citizens during the rise of Communism. Which is interesting, because Communism was brought in by force from the armed populace. Then they turn around and take everyone's guns away. Anyway, here are the promised stats:
(the chart got funky when I pasted it, here's the link to the original website: http://www.gunowners.org/sk0703.htm
Myth #3: Gun Control Has Reduced The Crime Rates In Other Countries
1. Fact: The murder rates in many nations (such as England) were ALREADY LOW BEFORE enacting gun control. Thus, their restrictive laws cannot be credited with lowering their crime rates.1
2. Fact: Gun control has done nothing to keep crime rates from rising in many of the nations that have imposed severe firearms restrictions.
* Australia: Readers of the USA Today newspaper discovered in 2002 that, "Since Australia's 1996 laws banning most guns and making it a crime to use a gun defensively, armed robberies rose by 51%, unarmed robberies by 37%, assaults by 24% and kidnappings by 43%. While murders fell by 3%, manslaughter rose by 16%."2
* Canada: After enacting stringent gun control laws in 1991 and 1995, Canada has not made its citizens any safer. "The contrast between the criminal violence rates in the United States and in Canada is dramatic," says Canadian criminologist Gary Mauser in 2003. "Over the past decade, the rate of violent crime in Canada has increased while in the United States the violent crime rate has plummeted." 3
* England: According to the BBC News, handgun crime in the United Kingdom rose by 40% in the two years after it passed its draconian gun ban in 1997.4
* Japan: One newspaper headline says it all: Police say "Crime rising in Japan, while arrests at record low."5
3. Fact: British citizens are now more likely to become a victim of crime than are people in the United States:
* In 1998, a study conducted jointly by statisticians from the U.S. Department of Justice and the University of Cambridge in England found that most crime is now worse in England than in the United States.
* "You are more likely to be mugged in England than in the United States," stated the Reuters news agency in summarizing the study. "The rate of robbery is now 1.4 times higher in England and Wales than in the United States, and the British burglary rate is nearly double America's."6 The murder rate in the United States is reportedly higher than in England, but according to the DOJ study, "the difference between the [murder rates in the] two countries has narrowed over the past 16 years."7
* The United Nations confirmed these results in 2000 when it reported that the crime rate in England is higher than the crime rates of 16 other industrialized nations, including the United States.8
4. Fact: British authorities routinely underreport crime statistics. Comparing statistics between different nations can be quite difficult since foreign officials frequently use different standards in compiling crime statistics.
* The British media has remained quite critical of authorities there for "fiddling" with crime data. Consider some of the headlines in their papers: "Crime figures a sham, say police,"9 "Police are accused of fiddling crime data,"10 and "Police figures under-record offences by 20 percent."11
* British police have also criticized the system because of the "widespread manipulation" of crime data:
a. "Officers said that pressure to convince the public that police were winning the fight against crime had resulted in a long list of ruses to 'massage' statistics."12
b. Sgt. Mike Bennett says officers have become increasingly frustrated with the practice of manipulating statistics. "The crime figures are meaningless," he said. "Police everywhere know exactly what is going on."13
c. According to The Electronic Telegraph, "Officers said the recorded level of crime bore no resemblance to the actual amount of crime being committed."14
* Underreporting crime data: "One former Scotland Yard officer told The Telegraph of a series of tricks that rendered crime figures 'a complete sham.' A classic example, he said, was where a series of homes in a block flats were burgled and were regularly recorded as one crime. Another involved pickpocketing, which was not recorded as a crime unless the victim had actually seen the item being stolen."15
* Underreporting murder data: British crime reporting tactics keep murder rates artificially low. "Suppose that three men kill a woman during an argument outside a bar. They are arrested for murder, but because of problems with identification (the main witness is dead), charges are eventually dropped. In American crime statistics, the event counts as a three-person homicide, but in British statistics it counts as nothing at all. 'With such differences in reporting criteria, comparisons of U.S. homicide rates with British homicide rates is a sham,' [a 2000 report from the Inspectorate of Constabulary] concludes."16
5. Fact: Many nations with stricter gun control laws have violence rates that are equal to, or greater than, that of the United States. Consider the following rates:
High Gun
Ownership Countries
Low Gun
Ownership Countries
Country
Suicide
Homicide
Total*
Country
Suicide
Homicide
Total*
Switzerland 21.4
2.7
24.1
Denmark 22.3
4.9
27.2
U.S. 11.6
7.4
19.0
France 20.8
1.1
21.9
Israel 6.5
1.4
7.9
Japan** 16.7
0.6
17.3
* The figures listed in the table are the rates per 100,000 people.
** Suicide figures for Japan also include many homicides.
Source for table: U.S. figures for 1996 are taken from the Statistical Abstract of the U.S. and FBI Uniform Crime Reports. The rest of the table is taken from the UN 1996 Demographic Yearbook (1998), cited at http://www.haciendapub.com/stolinsky.html.
6. Fact: The United States has experienced far fewer TOTAL MURDERS than Europe does over the last 70 years. In trying to claim that gun-free Europe is more peaceful than America, gun control advocates routinely ignore the overwhelming number of murders that have been committed in Europe.
* Over the last 70 years, Europe has averaged about 400,000 murders per year, when one includes the murders committed by governments against mostly unarmed people.17 That murder rate is about 16 times higher than the murder rate in the U.S.18
* Why hasn't the United States experienced this kind of government oppression? Many reasons could be cited, but the Founding Fathers indicated that an armed populace was the best way of preventing official brutality. Consider the words of James Madison in Federalist 46:
Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger . . . a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands.19
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1Kleck, Point Blank, at 393, 394; Colin Greenwood, Chief Inspector of West Yorkshire Constabulary, Firearms Control: A Study of Armed Crime and Firearms Control in England and Wales (1972):31; David Kopel, The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy: Should America Adopt the Gun Controls of Other Democracies (1992):91, 154.
2Dr. John R. Lott, Jr., "Gun laws don't reduce crime," USA Today (May 9, 2002). See also Rhett Watson and Matthew Bayley, "Gun crime up 40pc since Port Arthur," The Daily Telegraph (April 28, 2002).
3 Gary A. Mauser, "The Failed Experiment: Gun Control and Public Safety in Canada, Australia, England and Wales," Public Policy Sources (The Fraser Institute, November 2003), no. 71:4. This study can be accessed at http://www.fraserinstitute.org/shared/readmore.asp?sNav=pb&id=604.
4"Handgun crime 'up' despite ban," BBC News Online (July 16, 2001) at http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/uk/newsid_1440000/1440764.stm. England is a prime example of how crime has increased after implementing gun control. For example, the original Pistols Act of 1903 did not stop murders from increasing on the island. The number of murders in England was 68 percent higher the year after the ban's enactment (1904) as opposed to the year before (1902). (Greenwood, supra note 1.) This was not an aberration, as almost seven decades later, firearms crimes in the U.K. were still on the rise: the number of cases where firearms were used or carried in a crime skyrocketed almost 1,000 percent from 1946 through 1969. (Greenwood, supra note 1 at 158.) And by 1996, the murder rate in England was 132 percent higher than it had been before the original gun ban of 1903 was enacted. (Compare Greenwood, supra note 1, with Bureau of Justice Statistics, Crime and Justice in the United States and in England and Wales, 1981-96, Bureau of Justice Statistics, October 1998).
5"Crime rising in Japan, while arrests at record low: police," AFP News (August 3, 2001); "A crime wave alarms Japan, once gun-free," The Philadelphia Inquirer, 11 July 1992.
6"Most Crime Worse in England Than US, Study Says," Reuters (October 11, 1998). See also Bureau of Justice Statistics, Crime and Justice in the United States and in England and Wales, 1981-96 (October 1998).
7See BJS study, supra note 6 at iii.
8John van Kesteren, Pat Mayhew and Paul Nieuwbeerta, "Criminal Victimisation in Seventeen Industrialised Courtries: Key findings from the 2000 International Crime Victims Survey," (2000). This study can be read at http://www.unicri.it/icvs/publications/index_pub.htm. The link is to the ICVS homepage; study data are available for download as Acrobat pdf files.
9Ian Henry and Tim Reid, "Crime figures a sham, say police," The Electronic Telegraph (April 1, 1996).
10Tim Reid, "Police are accused of fiddling crime data," The Electronic Telegraph (May 4, 1997).
11John Steele, "Police figures under-record offences by 20 percent," The Electronic Telegraph (July 13, 2000).
12See supra note (Crime figures a sham...)
13Ibid.
14Ibid.
15See supra note (fiddling).
16Dave Kopel, Dr. Paul Gallant and Dr. Joanne Eisen, "Britain: From Bad to Worse," NewsMax.com (March 22, 2001).
17The number of people killed by their own government in Europe averages about 400,000 for the last 70 years. This includes Hitler's extermination of Jews, gypsies and other peoples (20,946,000); Stalin's genocide against the Ukrainian kulaks (6,500,000); and more. R.J. Rummel, Death by Government (2000), pp. 8 and 80.
18At our historic worst, murders in the United States approached 25,000 in 1993 -- or 23,180 to be exact. So even applying our highest single-year tally over the past 70 years would mean that Europeans have experienced 16 times as many murders as we have in the United States.
19THE FEDERALIST 46 (James Madison).
Okay matey, you almost had me convinced there, but you gave it away by posting the link...my man, if you want clarity, you should not cut and paste data from a website that says 'gunowners'org', oh c'mon....
So, with my suspicions that a pro-gun lobby group would post statistics that support their cause, I went on a good ol' web hunt of my own. To be fair, every website I came across, whether or not it was pro or anti-gun control, never banished my suspicion of cherry-picking.
But, prompted by this post:
http://timlambert.org/2004/07/cherrypicking5/
I found some pretty hard data for England, at no other but the British Home Office Crime Survey:
(warning this link opens a pdf)
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/hosb703chap456.pdf
The section on violent crime starts on page 75, have a look. The first thing I'd like to point out, on the 'police records' graph, is that there is no increase in 1998. (Labour came into power in 1997). Secondly, the Crime Survey points out the change in the police crime counting, which indicates the false sense of an increase in violent crime. More importantly, the consistent data collected by the Crime Survey shows a decrease in violent crime.
Three cheers for England!! The other thing I found out in my hunt, was that only 4% of Brits even own a gun, that's why I've hardly met a gun owner there. From my perspective, it seems that so many Americans do own guns because of the patriotism linked to the constitutional right to bear arms.
Finally, are you serious, in that there is a concern of the rise of a totalitarian government here in the US? It seems inexplicable to me that you could compare the statistics of deaths in extremist fascist/communist regimes in European history to a country that is democratic like the US...surely, if you want clarity, you'd want to compare the numbers between regimes where the people have the right to vote.
Germany was a democratic nation before the rise of the Nazi party. Some of the first things they did was take away the right to vote and disarm the populace. Please don't misunderstand, I don't think there is a serious threat of the rise of a totalitarian state in the US right now. What my point was is that the provision under the constitution was to ensure the freedom of US citizens in times to diminish such a threat. So, I don't think my comparison was so awry.
As far as data, I'm not sure who would be a good "neutral" source of data that we could agree on. I'm sure we'll both find data sources on both sides of the issue.
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