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Posted on 1/8/2005, 3:40:50 PM by knighthawk
Last month, the National Academy of Sciences issued a 328-page report on gun control laws. The big news is that the academy's panel couldn't identify any benefits of the decades-long effort to reduce crime and injury by restricting gun ownership. The only conclusion it could draw was: Let's study the question some more (presumably, until we find the results we want).
The academy, however, should believe its own findings. Based on 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, a survey that covered 80 different gun control measures and some of its own empirical work, the panel couldn't identify a single gun control regulation that reduced violent crime, suicide or accidents.
From the assault weapons ban to the Brady Act to one-gun-a-month restrictions to gun locks, nothing worked.
The study was not the work of gun-control opponents. The panel was set up during the Clinton administration, and all but one of its members (whose views on guns were publicly known before their appointments) favored gun control.
It's bad enough that the panel backed away from its own survey and empirical work; worse yet, it didn't really look objectively at all the evidence. If it had, it would have found not just that gun control doesn't help solve the problems of crime, suicide and gun accidents, but that it may actually be counterproductive.
The panel simply ignored many studies showing just that. For example, the research on gun locks that the panel considered examined only whether accidental gun deaths and suicides were prevented. There was no mention of research that shows that locking up guns prevents people from using them defensively.
The panel also ignored most of the studies that find a benefit in crime reduction from right-to-carry laws. It did pay attention to some non-peer reviewed papers on the right-to-carry issue, and it also noted one part of a right-to-carry study that indicated little or no benefit from such laws. What the panel didn't point out, however, is that the authors of that particular study had concluded that data in their work did much more to show there were benefits than to debunk it.
James Q. Wilson, professor of public policy at UCLA, was the one dissenting panelist and the only member whose views were known in advance not to be entirely pro-gun control. His dissent focused on the right-to-carry issue, and the fact that emphasizing results that could not withstand peer-reviewed studies called into question the panel's contention that right-to-carry laws had not for sure had a positive effect.
Wilson also said that conclusion was inaccurate given that ''virtually every reanalysis done by the committee'' confirmed right-to-carry laws reduced crime. He found the committee's only results that didn't confirm the drop in crime ''quite puzzling.'' They accounted for ''no control variables'' -- nothing on any of the social, demographic and public policies that might affect crime -- and he didn't understand how evidence that wouldn't get published in a peer-reviewed journal would be given such weight.
While more research is always helpful, the notion that we have learned nothing flies in the face of common sense. The National Academy of Sciences panel should have concluded as the existing research has: Gun control doesn't help.
Instead, the panel has left us with two choices. Either academia and the government have wasted tens of millions of dollars and countless man-hours on useless research (and the panel would like us to spend more in the same worthless pursuit), or the National Academy is so completely unable to separate politics from its analyses that it simply can't accept the results for what they are.
In either case, the academy, and academics in general, have succeeded mostly in shooting themselves in the foot.
John R. Lott Jr. is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns.
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I think Washington D.C. is all the evidence one needs.
BTTT
This is just like piling manure on top of manure. It is still manure!!
No Guns ~ No Rights!
Funny thing about gun control militants.. They never seem to address the issue that most of your gun-related crimes are committed by people who:
1. Don't legally own the weapon in question
2. Could not legally own a firearm
3. Have generally shown to have a lack of regard for the legal system
So who are they trying to keep from owning guns??
I have more than I need, but not 'smany as I want.
If true, you think gun control doesn't work because contraband guns still remain readily available to criminals?
If gun control could keep guns out of the hands of criminals, it might be effective. Since it can't, all it does is take them out of the hands of law-abiding citizens. That can only hope to decrease the suicide and accidental death rate, but not the homicide rate.
Not sure what you mean. Are you for, or against, gun control?
In our part of the country, we say, "Support gun control: use both hands!" I guess that's an old one.
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Done!
Before you can agrue on this subject you must realize
The leaders of the Control movement are NOT interested in reducing crime
That is just a ruse they use to implement their goal of disarming and making the public more and more dependent on government
Most of the followers are just liberal boobs who mouth the standard liberal line on any issue . It makes them feel intelligent and superior and a memebr of the elite
I think you speak for most of us here! As my wife says every time I buy another, "More toys for the boys?"
On the contrary, gun control works very well indeed - if the agenda is to promote a general climate of lawlessness, and institute a widespread fear of criminal assault among the citizenry. In such a situation, the need for greater and greater government involvement in individual lives is strengthened and extended. The local government now becomes the protector and guarantor of liberty and property rights. Unfortunately, there are insufficient funds to provide for an adequate police coverage, so we must raise taxes and assume even more control of voting patterns, even stepping in and voting for the individual citizens who have the misfortune to die or be incarcerated at inconvenient times.
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