Harvard study concludes that gun control does not prevent murders, other
violent crime
8/30/13 | by Jennifer Cruz
*Remove guns, reduce death? Not according to a Harvard study. *
A study which was recently published by Harvard took a look at firearm
ownership, gun laws and violent crime, and suicide rates around the world.
The authors sought to answer the question would banning firearms reduce
murder and suicide?
The study, which was conducted by Don B. Kates, an American criminologist
and constitutional lawyer, and Gary Mauser, a Canadian criminologist and
university professor, offered a stark truth: More guns does not equal more
deaths and less guns does not equal less deaths.
Kates and Mauser claim in the study that while some international
comparisons have been viewed as evidence that more guns equals more deaths
and therefore to reduce guns will reduce deaths, they indicate that some of
these studies use inaccurate or misleading information to obtain the
results.
According to the study, the so-called fact that the reason the murder rate
is so high in the United States compared with other modern developed
countries is due to the U.S. having uniquely easy access to guns, is simply
not true. The study indicates those homicide rates are not an accurate
representation and moreover, that those rates have nothing to do with the
number of firearms in the country.
While gun ownership in the U.S. is high, the unusually high murder rate is
not the norm. The study compares other developed countries with high gun
ownership rates, including Norway, Finland, Germany, France and Denmark.
These countries all have significantly lower murder rates than the U.S. as
well as those countries in which gun ownership is much more uncommon. In
other words, the high murder rate of the U.S. is the exception, not the
rule, when comparing homicide rates to gun ownerships rates.
For example, in Luxembourg handguns are completely banned and gun ownership
of any kind is extremely rare. However, the country’s murder rate is nine
times that of Germany’s, despite Germany having gun ownership rates 30,000
times higher than Luxembourg.
In another instance, the study compares the U.S. with Russia. It
cites that once the Soviet Union succeeded in disarming the majority of
civilians, beginning in the 1960s murder rates skyrocketed. By the 1990s
murder rates had become so high that the basically gun-less Russia was left
with the highest murder rate of the civilized world, three times higher
than that of the U.S., despite the country’s long-standing strict and
stringent gun control policies.
In addition, other countries of the former Soviet Union, which have held on
to the strict gun control policies, including the Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia,
Lithuania, as well as various other now-independent European nations, all
have similar murder rates.
The fact that these countries have very few firearms has not reduced the
rate of violent crimes. In fact, according to the study, “Homicide results
suggest that where guns are scarce other weapons are substituted in
killings.”
In comparing gun ownership rates with homicide rates, the study concludes
that “where firearms where are most dense violent crime rates are lowest,
and where guns are least dense violent crime rates are highest.”
Just as the United States’ unusually high murder rate is used in the
argument for gun control, England’s unusually low murder rate prior to the
1990s along with the country’s low rate of gun ownership presently is often
cited as factual evidence that gun control reduces violence.
Yet, according to the study, what fails to be acknowledged is that first,
England was already experiencing an all-time low in violence before gun
control measures were introduced. Secondly, in the late 1990s England
started to initiate stricter gun control policies, resulting in a complete
ban of handguns as well as many long guns. Hundreds of thousands of
firearms were confiscated from law-abiding citizens. By the year 2000,
violent crime in England had increased so much that it had one of the
highest violent crime rates in all of Europe, evening higher than that of
the U.S.
In addition, England’s most recent crime statistics have been grossly
misrepresented. In 2006 the criminal justice system, in an attempt to
conserve resources, initiated a policy in which the police would no longer
investigate “minor” crimes, such as burglary and minor assault. If a
mugger, robber, burglar or others engaged in minor criminal activities are
caught, the police simply give them a warning – a virtual slap on the wrist
– then send them on their way, without filing charges, arresting or
prosecuting them. In other words, crime has not gone down in England, but
rather “minor” crimes are simply no longer counted as crime.
Moreover, after years of England’s police forces not even carrying guns,
with violent crime on the rise, many departments are now opting to arm
their officers.
Meanwhile, as England initiated stricter gun control for its residents, the
U.S. was loosening gun laws, which eventually allowed for citizens to
legally carry firearms in 40 states. Concealed carry permit holders are now
estimated to be at 3.5 million.
And as states adopted statutes to allow the carrying of firearms, the U.S.
saw a dramatic drop in violent crime, particularly homicides. Additionally,
states that approved residents to carry firearms saw a greater decrease in
crime than those who did not.
However, the theory that gun ownership reduces crime is a highly
controversial one. And as the study points out, even though the correlation
is clear, there still remains other factors that may have influenced the
drop in crime in the U.S. as well.
One study indicated that the drop in violent crime was partially the
outcome of the legalization of abortion, which “resulted in the non-birth
of vast numbers of children who would have been disproportionately involved
in violent crime had they existed in the 1990s.”
The same study also questioned if the possibility of the increase in both
prison populations, from 100 to 300 per 100,000, and executions, from five
each year to 27, resulted in reduced violent crime.
Regardless of the reason – or reasons – the fact remains that the U.S. has
seen the lowest violent crime rate in the last 15 years.
The study then skims the surface of the societal problems of violent crime,
citing that most violent criminals – and especially murders – almost always
have a long history of criminal behavior. “So it would not appreciably
raise violence if all law-abiding, responsible people had firearms because
they are not the ones who rape, rob, or murder. By the same token, violent
crime would not fall if guns were totally banned to civilians.”
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