Fresh on the heels of a particularly disturbing spate of gun violence comes an article in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy that demonstrates that the rate of legal gun ownership is statistically unrelated to the homicide and violent crime rate. The article is not yet posted on the Harvard JLPP website, but the abstract is here and a PDF of the full article is available at Professer Mauser’s website.
One of the more significant points in the article is the assumption that if the average person had a firearm, he could, in a moment of intense emotion, get the gun and commit murder. What research seems to show, however, is that the people who commit murder have been working on their criminal tendencies for a long time. To be sure, there are some “normal” people who kirk out, but by and large, killers are not law-abiding citizens with access to guns, they’re criminals with access to guns. That makes sense to me. It’s kinda like what I was saying last time. If I got a Glock for graduation, the possibility that I could shoot somebody would go up 100%, but the probability would be just about as low as it is right now, because I’m just not a violent person - or even prone to violent outbursts.
The question, I think, is not how keep people from having guns, it’s how do we keep guns out of the hands of criminals? I’m all for research that debunks emotionally appealling but factually unsubstantiated ideas. However, the important question is the one that leads to a solution, not a justification of the status quo.
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