URL: https://www.thetrace.org/2018/
URL: https://www.rand.org/pubs/rese
URL:
https://www.americanviolence.o
one&customCompareInterval&cust
hly&selectedCensusTractsIds&se
alse×pan=last12Months
“So, the next time someone tries to tell you that gun control is about
saving lives, look at these facts and remember these words from Noah
Webster: “Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed.”
******************************
The RAND Corporation's March 2018 Gun Policy in America initiative is a
unique attempt to systematically and transparently assess available
scientific evidence on the real effects of firearm laws and policies. Good
gun policies require consideration of many factors, including the law and
constitutional rights, the interests of various stakeholder groups, and
information about the likely effects of different laws or policies on a
range of outcomes. This report seeks to provide the third — objective
information about what the scientific literature examining gun policy can
tell us about the likely effects of laws. The study synthesizes the
available scientific data on the effects of various firearm policies on
firearm deaths, violent crime, the gun industry, participation in hunting
and sport shooting, and other outcomes.
By highlighting where scientific evidence is accumulating, the authors hope
to build consensus around a shared set of facts that have been established
through a transparent, nonpartisan, and impartial review process. In so
doing, they also illuminate areas where more and better information could
make important contributions to establishing fair and effective gun
policies.
Despite Modest Scientific Evidence, the Data Support a Few Conclusions
* Of more than 100 combinations of policies and outcomes, surprisingly
few have been the subject of methodologically rigorous investigation.
Notably, research into four of the outcomes examined was essentially
unavailable at the time of the review, with three of these four outcomes
representing issues of particular concern to gun owners or gun industry
stakeholders.
*
* Available evidence supports the conclusion that child-access
prevention laws, or safe storage laws, reduce self-inflicted fatal or
nonfatal firearm injuries among youth, as well as unintentional firearm
injuries or deaths among children.
*
* There is moderate evidence that background checks reduce firearm
suicides and firearm homicides, as well as limited evidence that these
policies can reduce overall suicide and violent crime rates.
*
* There is moderate evidence that stand-your-ground laws may increase
homicide rates and limited evidence that the laws increase firearm homicides
in particular.
*
* There is moderate evidence that violent crime is reduced by laws
prohibiting the purchase or possession of guns by individuals who have a
history of involuntary commitment to a psychiatric facility.
*
* There is limited evidence these laws may reduce total suicides and
firearm suicides.
*
* There is limited evidence that a minimum age of 21 for purchasing
firearms may reduce firearm suicides among youth.
Recommendations
* When considering adopting or refining child-access prevention laws,
states should consider making it a felony to violate these laws; there is
some evidence that felony laws may have the greatest effects on
unintentional firearm deaths.
* States that currently do not require a background check
investigating all types of mental health histories that lead to federal
prohibitions on firearm purchase or possession should consider implementing
robust mental illness checks, which appear to reduce rates of gun violence.
*
* To improve understanding of the real effects of gun policies,
Congress should consider lifting current restrictions in appropriations
legislation that limit research funding and access to data. In addition, the
administration should invest in firearm research portfolios at the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and
the National Institute of Justice at levels comparable to its current
investment in other threats to public safety and health.
*
* To improve understanding of outcomes of critical concern to many in
gun policy debates, the U.S. government and private research sponsors should
support research examining the effects of gun laws on a wider set of
outcomes, including crime, defensive gun use, hunting and sport shooting,
officer-involved shootings, and the gun industry.
*
* To foster a more robust research program on gun policy, Congress
should consider eliminating the restrictions it has imposed on the use of
gun trace data for research purposes.
*
* Researchers, reviewers, academics, and science reporters should
expect new analyses of the effects of gun policies to improve on earlier
studies by persuasively addressing the methodological limitations of earlier
studies, including problems with statistical power, model overfitting,
covariate selection, and poorly calibrated standard errors, among others.
******************************
John R. Lott, Jr., author of More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and
Gun Control Laws
“This sophisticated analysis yields a well-established conclusion that
supports the wisdom of the Second Amendment to the United States
Constitution rather than of those who would limit the right of law-abiding
citizens to own and carry guns.… Lott has done us all a service by his
thorough, thoughtful scholarly approach to a highly controversial
issue.”—Milton Friedman
“A compelling book with enough hard evidence that even politicians may have
to stop and pay attention. More Guns, Less Crime is an exhaustive analysis
of the effect of gun possession on crime rates.… Mr. Lott’s book—and the
factual arsenals of other pro-gun advocates—are helping to redefine the
argument over guns and gun control.”—James Bovard, Wall Street Journal
“Law and economics professor John R. Lott Jr. presents reams of evidence
that violent crime decreases in places where laws are passed permitting
concealed weapons. His explanation is that even criminals respond logically
to benefits and costs: they don’t like to attack people who might be packing
heat.… Lott’s pro-gun argument has to be examined on the merits, and its
chief merit is lots of data.… If you still disagree with Lott, at least you
will know what will be required to rebut a case that looks pretty near
bulletproof.”— Peter Coy, Business Week
______________________________
_____
This interview was conducted in 1998, when More Guns, Less Crime was first
published.
Copyright <https://www.press.uchicago.ed
******************************
An interview with
John R. Lott, Jr.
Author of More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws
Question: What does the title mean: More Guns, Less Crime?
John R. Lott, Jr.: States with the largest increases in gun ownership also
have the largest drops in violent crimes. Thirty-one states now have such
laws—called “shall-issue” laws. These laws allow adults the right to carry
concealed handguns if they do not have a criminal record or a history of
significant mental illness.
Question: It just seems to defy common sense that crimes likely to involve
guns would be reduced by allowing more people to carry guns. How do you
explain the results?
Lott: Criminals are deterred by higher penalties. Just as higher arrest and
conviction rates deter crime, so does the risk that someone committing a
crime will confront someone able to defend him or herself. There is a strong
negative relationship between the number of law-abiding citizens with
permits and the crime rate—as more people obtain permits there is a greater
decline in violent crime rates. For each additional year that a concealed
handgun law is in effect the murder rate declines by 3 percent, rape by 2
percent, and robberies by over 2 percent.
Concealed handgun laws reduce violent crime for two reasons. First, they
reduce the number of attempted crimes because criminals are uncertain which
potential victims can defend themselves. Second, victims who have guns are
in a much better position to defend themselves.
Question: What is the basis for these numbers?
Lott: The analysis is based on data for all 3,054 counties in the United
States during 18 years from 1977 to 1994.
Question: Your argument about criminals and deterrence doesn’t tell the
whole story. Don’t statistics show that most people are killed by someone
they know?
Lott: You are referring to the often-cited statistic that 58 percent of
murder victims are killed by either relatives or acquaintances. However,
what most people don’t understand is that this “acquaintance murder” number
also includes gang members killing other gang members, drug buyers killing
drug pushers, cabdrivers killed by customers they picked up for the first
time, prostitutes and their clients, and so on. “Acquaintance” covers a wide
range of relationships. The vast majority of murders are not committed by
previously law-abiding citizens. Ninety percent of adult murderers have had
criminal records as adults.
Question: But how about children? In March of this year [1998] four
children and a teacher were killed by two school boys in Jonesboro,
Arkansas. Won’t tragedies like this increase if more people are allowed to
carry guns? Shouldn’t this be taken into consideration before making gun
ownership laws more lenient?
Lott: The horrific shooting in Arkansas occurred in one of the few places
where having guns was already illegal. These laws risk creating situations
in which the good guys cannot defend themselves from the bad ones. I have
studied multiple victim public shootings in the United States from 1977 to
1995. These were incidents in which at least two or more people were killed
and or injured in a public place; in order to focus on the type of shooting
seen in Arkansas, shootings that were the byproduct of another crime, such
as robbery, were excluded. The effect of “shall-issue” laws on these crimes
has been dramatic. When states passed these laws, the number of
multiple-victim shootings declined by 84 percent. Deaths from these
shootings plummeted on average by 90 percent, and injuries by 82 percent.
For other types of crimes, I find that both children as well as adults are
protected when law-abiding adults are allowed to carry concealed handguns.
Finally, after extensively studying the number of accidental shootings,
there is no evidence that increasing the number of concealed handguns
increases accidental shootings. We know that the type of person who obtains
a permit is extremely law-abiding and possibly they are extremely careful in
how they take care of their guns. The total number of accidental gun deaths
each year is about 1,300 and each year such accidents take the lives of 200
children 14 years of age and under. However, these regrettable numbers of
lives lost need to be put into some perspective with the other risks
children face. Despite over 200 million guns owned by between 76 to 85
million people, the children killed is much smaller than the number lost
through bicycle accidents, drowning, and fires. Children are 14.5 times more
likely to die from car accidents than from accidents involving guns.
Question: Wouldn’t allowing concealed weapons increase the incidents of
citizens attacking each other in tense situations? For instance, sometimes
in traffic jams or accidents people become very hostile—screaming and
shoving at one another. If armed, might people shoot each other in the heat
of the moment?
Lott: During state legislative hearings on concealed-handgun laws, possibly
the most commonly raised concern involved fears that armed citizens would
attack each other in the heat of the moment following car accidents. The
evidence shows that such fears are unfounded. Despite millions of people
licensed to carry concealed handguns and many states having these laws for
decades, there has only been one case where a person with a permit used a
gun after a traffic accident and even in that one case it was in
self-defense.
Question: Violence is often directed at women. Won’t more guns put more
women at risk?
Lott: Murder rates decline when either more women or more men carry
concealed handguns, but a gun represents a much larger change in a woman’s
ability to defend herself than it does for a man. An additional woman
carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for women by about 3 to
4 times more than an additional man carrying a concealed handgun reduces the
murder rate for men.
Question: Aren’t you playing into people’s fears and prejudices though?
Don’t politicians pass these shall-issue laws to mollify middle-class white
suburbanites anxious about the encroachment of urban minority crime?
Lott: I won’t speculate about motives, but the results tell a different
story. High crime urban areas and neighborhoods with large minority
populations have the greatest reductions in violent crime when citizens are
legally allowed to carry concealed handguns.
Question: What about other countries? It’s often argued that Britain, for
instance, has a lower violent crime rate than the USA because guns are much
harder to obtain and own.
Lott: The data analyzed in this book is from the USA. Many countries, such
as Switzerland, New Zealand, Finland, and Israel have high gun-ownership
rates and low crime rates, while other countries have low gun ownership
rates and either low or high crime rates. It is difficult to obtain
comparable data on crime rates both over time and across countries, and to
control for all the other differences across the legal systems and cultures
across countries. Even the cross country polling data on gun ownership is
difficult to assess, because ownership is underreported in countries where
gun ownership is illegal and the same polls are never used across countries.
Question: This is certainly controversial and there are certain to be
counter-arguments from those who disagree with you. How will you respond to
them?
Lott: Some people do use guns in horrible ways, but other people use guns
to prevent horrible things from happening to them. The ultimate question
that concerns us all is: Will allowing law-abiding citizens to own guns save
lives? While there are many anecdotal stories illustrating both good and bad
uses of guns, this question can only be answered by looking at data to find
out what the net effect is.
All of chapter seven of the book is devoted to answering objections that
people have raised to my analysis. There are of course strong feelings on
both sides about the issue of gun ownership and gun control laws. The best
we can do is to try to discover and understand the facts. If you agree, or
especially if you disagree with my conclusions I hope you’ll read the book
carefully and develop an informed opinion.
How U.S. cities stack up
URL: https://www.thetrace.org/2018/
There is no city more synonymous with violence in the United States than
Chicago. The Reverend Michael Pfleger, a prominent anti-violence activist
and pastor on the city’s South Side, has described his city
<https://www.nytimes.com/2016/
to reporters as “the poster boy of violence in America.”
To be sure, Chicago has a high number of murders: the city often records
the highest absolute total killings each year. But as The Trace has
<https://www.thetrace.org/2016
noted
<https://www.thetrace.org/2017
, the data tells us that Chicago’s murder rate is nowhere near the nation’s
worst. On a per-capita basis — murders per 100,000 residents — the city
regularly experiences fewer killings than places whose murder rates get far
less national attention, like Kansas City, Missouri, or Cleveland.
“Because Chicago has so many people, it can get a murder every day, and
that gets people’s attention,” John Pfaff, a professor of law at Fordham Law
School, recently told The Trace. “When you focus on numbers, not rates,
Chicago ends up looking worse because you forget just how big a city it is.”
[Daniel Nass/The Trace]
Chicago’s murder rate becomes even more unexceptional for a large city when
the category of homicides that inflates its level is factored out. When you
look at murders by how they were committed, the data shows that Chicago has
a much higher rate of gun homicides, specifically,
<https://www.thetrace.org/2017
than Los Angeles or New York. For non-gun homicides, the cities’ rates are
effectively equal. It’s because Chicago has so many more fatal shootings,
per capita, that it does not enjoy the same safety as those other
metropolises.
Mass shootings, though comprising less than 2 percent of all gun deaths,
can skew a local murder rate so drastically that some cities decline to
include fatalities from gun rampages when reporting their annual numbers to
the FBI. Las Vegas, for example, has decided to exclude
<https://www.reviewjournal.com
crime-decreased-in-2017/> victims of the 2017 Mandalay Bay massacre from
the homicide counts that they provide to the FBI.
The city of Orlando reported
<https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-
le-6/table-6-state-cuts/florid
Nightclub shooting to the FBI but added a footnote: “The 2016 murder
offenses include those victims of the Pulse Nightclub incident; therefore,
figures are not comparable to previous years’ data.”
According to American Violence, a project which aggregates the latest
available homicide figures from large U.S. cities, the majority of cities
saw homicide rates fall
<https://www.americanviolence.
e=year&customCompareInterval&c
nthly&selectedCensusTractsIds&
d=false×pan=thisYear> in the first six months of 2018 compared with
the same period last year.
https://www.americanviolence.o
none&customCompareInterval&cus
thly&selectedCensusTractsIds&s
false×pan=last12Months
******************************
EXCELLENT! STATS ON GUN VIOLENCE
Interesting statistics! This jives with the research of Professor Lott at
the University of Chicago, who is a noted expert on gun laws and stats and
the March 2018 RAND Corporation research article on guns and violence. The
RAND Corporation's Gun Policy in America initiative is a unique attempt to
systematically and transparently assess available scientific evidence on the
real effects of firearm laws and policies. The research examined thousands
of gun projects and studies and reduced the relevant studies to those that
made statistical significant conclusions.
Here are some facts.
There were 39.773 gun related deaths in 2018 by firearms. The U.S.
population is 326,766,748 as of December 31, 2018. Do the math: 0.00001217%
of the population dies from gun related actions each year. Statistically
speaking, this is insignificant! What is never told, however, is a breakdown
of these 39.773 gun related deaths, to put them in perspective as compared
to other causes of death:
55.31% of those deaths, 22,000,were by suicide, which would have been
minimally prevented by gun laws.
24.94%, 992, are by law enforcement in the line of duty and justified.
32.24%, 16,286, are through criminal activity, gangbangers and drug related
or mentally ill persons – better known as gun violence.
12.45%, 495, are accidental discharge deaths.
So technically in 2018, “gun violence” is not 39,773 in 2018, but drops to
16,286. Still too many. Now let’s look at how these gun violence deaths are
distributed across the nation in 2018.
562 homicides (3.45%) were in Chicago
324 homicides (1.99%) were in Baltimore
253 homicides (1.55%) were in Detroit
160 homicides (.98%) were in Washington D.C.
190 homicides (1.17%) were in St. Louis
255 homicides (1.57%) were in Los Angeles
340 homicides (2.09%) were in Philadelphia
282 homicides (1.73%) were in New York City
289 homicides (1.77%) were in Houston
148 homicides (.91%) were in Kansas City
85 homicides (.91%) were in Birmingham
146 homicides (.90%) were in New Orleans
165 homicides (1.01%) were in Cleveland
77 homicides (.47%) were in Newark
77 homicides (.47%) were in Milwaukee
76 homicides (.47%) were in Columbus
221 homicides (1.36%) were in Memphis
60 homicides (.37%) were in Cincinnati
3710-Total
So basically, 22.78% of all gun crime happens in 18 cities. All 18 of these
cities have strict gun laws, so it is not the lack of laws that are root
causes.
The remainder 2018 gun violence deaths are 12,576 for the rest of the
nation, or about 246.6 deaths per state, including the District of Columbia.
According to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (2014) the top 10
states for strict gun laws:
1. California
2. Connecticut
3. Massachusetts
4. New Jersey
5. New York
6. Hawaii
7. Maryland
8. Rhode Island
9. Delaware
10. Illinois
Now, who has the strictest gun laws by far? California, of course, but
understand, it is not guns causing this. It is a crime rate spawned by the
number of criminal persons residing in those cities and states. So, if all
cities and states are not created equal, then there must be something other
than the tool causing the gun deaths.
Are 16,286 deaths per year horrific? How about in comparison to other
deaths? All death is sad and especially so when it is in the commission of a
crime but that is the nature of crime. Robbery, death, rape, assaults are
all done by criminals. It is ludicrous to think that criminals will obey
laws. That is why they are called criminals.
But what about other deaths in 2018?
67,744+ died from a drug overdose–THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR THAT!
80,000 + people died from the flu, far exceeding the criminal gun deaths.
40,000 + people died in traffic fatalities(exceeding gun deaths even if you
include suicide).
Now it gets good:
250,000+ people die each year (and growing) from preventable medical
errors. You are safer walking in the worst areas of Chicago than you are
when you are in a hospital!
610,000+ people die per year from heart disease. It’s time to stop the
double cheeseburgers! So, what is the point? If the liberal loons and the
anti-gun movement focused their attention on heart disease, even a 10%
decrease in cardiac deaths would save twice the number of lives annually of
all gun-related deaths (including suicide, law enforcement, etc.).
A total of 37,587 persons died as the result of falls in 2018, accounting
for 15.5% of all injury deaths. There were 39.773 gun related deaths in 2018
by firearms. Perhaps we should outlaw multiple floor residences.
A 10% reduction in medical errors, 25,000, would be 62.9% of the total
number of gun deaths or 1.54 times the number of criminal homicides …………….
Simple, easily preventable 10% reductions! So, you have to ask yourself, in
the grand scheme of things, why the focus on guns?
It’s pretty simple:
Taking away guns gives control to governments. The founders of this nation
knew that regardless of the form of government, those in power may become
corrupt and seek to rule as the British did by trying to disarm the populace
of the colonies. It is not difficult to understand that a disarmed populace
is a controlled populace.
Thus, the second amendment was proudly and boldly included in the U.S.
Constitution. It must be preserved at all costs .
So, the next time someone tries to tell you that gun control is about
saving lives, look at these facts and remember these words from Noah
Webster: “Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed.”
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