Gun Control Witness Video
This video shows a great example of why we need to be protected and have the right to bear arms. A great testimony before Congress.
Also, there has just been a new report released by some professors at Harvard. They concluded that More Guns Lead To Less Crime. Imagine that. Here is a summary of that report. If you want to view the whole report, which would make a great resource for you kids needing resources for a school report, check the link at the bottom of this post.
More Guns, Less Crime
The ability of law-abiding citizens to possess firearms has helped reduce violent crime in America.
According to a study recently released by Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, worldwide gun ownership rates do not correlate with higher murder or suicide rates. In fact, many nations with high gun ownership have significantly lower murder and suicide rates. In their study entitled Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and some Domestic Evidence, Don B. Kates and Gary Mauser bring out the notion that more guns actually do lead to less crime and disprove “the mantra that more guns mean more deaths and that fewer guns, therefore, mean fewer deaths.” Here are a few excerpts from their findings:
“Norway,” they note, “has far and away Western Europe’s highest household gun ownership rate (32%), but also its lowest murder rate. The Netherlands,” in contrast, “has the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe ( 1.9%) … yet the Dutch gun murder rate is higher than the Norwegian.”
“murder in Europe was at an all-time low before the gun controls were introduced.” As the authors note, “strict controls did not stem the general trend of ever-growing violent crime throughout the post-WWII industrialized world.”
Citing England, for instance, they reveal that “when it had no firearms restrictions [in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries], England had little violent crime.” By the late 1990s, however, “England moved from stringent controls to a complete ban on all handguns and many types of long guns.” As a result, “by the year 2000, violent crime had so increased that England and Wales had Europe’s highest violent crime rate, far surpassing even the United States.” In America, on the other hand, “despite constant and substantially increasing gun ownership, the United States saw progressive and dramatic reductions in criminal violence in the 1990s.”
“the fall in the American crime rate is even more impressive when compared with the rest of the world,”
The reason that gun ownership doesn’t correlate with murder rates, the authors show, is that violent crime rates are determined instead by underlying cultural factors. “Ordinary people,” they note, “simply do not murder.” Rather, “the murderers are a small minority of extreme antisocial aberrants who manage to obtain guns whatever the level of gun ownership” in their society.
Therefore, “banning guns cannot alleviate the socio-cultural and economic factors that are the real determinants of violence and crime rates.” According to Dr. Kates and Dr. Mauser, “there is no reason for laws prohibiting gun possession by ordinary, law-abiding, responsible adults because such people virtually never commit murder. If one accepts that such adults are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than to commit it, disarming them becomes not just unproductive but counter-productive.”
- CFIF.ORG
LINK: View PDF of Whole Report
4 comments August 30th, 2007
