Is More Gun Control the Answer?
Although some particularly grotesque incidents of murder have been in the news of late, the unfortunate fact is that murder has been on a strong upward swing for a full seven years, after having fallen dramatically in the 23 years before then. In my post here, I explored the possible explanations that, for a time not so long ago, we were so successful at bringing down murder (or “gun violence” as it’s tendentiously called). Toward the end of that exploration, I concluded that “the incidence of gun ownership has essentially no relationship to the murder rate.”
I want to emphasize that my conclusion was not pre-fab or ideologically driven. Probably most of the law enforcement people I know favor more gun control, simply because, given the nature of their jobs, the police would rather see fewer rather than more guns on the street. I personally don’t own a gun and feel a little uneasy around them. And, as President Biden correctly says (for once), the Second Amendment is not absolute — not that this is any surprise. In his famous dictum for the Heller majority, Justice Scalia wrote:
Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.
So we already knew that the Second Amendment is not absolute, just as the First Amendment isn’t (shouting fire in a crowded theater and all that), or the Sixth Amendment (you have a right to counsel, but not to one who’s been kicked out of the state bar or who has a conflict of interest with a co-defendant, etc.). And because the Second Amendment is not absolute, any number of forms of gun control legislation have passed constitutional muster.
But to say that some forms of gun control are permissible is hardly to say that they’ll provide what is now loudly being claimed they will — a reduction in murder.
Whether they will has been studied a good deal, much more than the current wailing might lead you to believe. David French takes a deep dive in “The French Press,” in his own Substack article here. In relevant part, he says:
[H]omicide rates don’t easily track with rates of gun ownership….Combine the homicide chart with the gun ownership chart, and you’ll note a few things. First, America stands alone in gun ownership rate. By far. We’re the only nation with more than one gun per person. No other nation comes close. But there are many nations with higher homicide rates, including nations with small fractions of America’s rate of gun ownership.
Russians, for example, possess only 12.3 guns per 100 citizens, yet Russia’s murder rate is substantially higher than America’s, and we possess a whopping 120 guns per 100 citizens. Brazilians possess only 8.3 guns per 100 citizens, yet its murder rate is up to six times higher than America’s.
Even in the United States, statewide homicide rates aren’t dependent on rates of gun ownership. On Sunday Barnard College professor Rajiv Sethi published a fascinating essay comparing rates of gun ownership in American states with homicide rates. His conclusion? While gun suicide rates correlated with rates of gun ownership, homicide rates did not.
Professor Sethi’s findings mirror those of multiple earlier studies. Back in 2015, my former National Review colleague Robert Verbruggen compiled the available research:
There is actually no simple correlation between states’ homicide rates and their gun-ownership rates or gun laws. This has been shown numerous times, by different people, using different data sets. A year ago, I took state gun-ownership levels reported by the Washington Post (based on a Centers for Disease Control survey) and compared them with murder rates from the FBI: no correlation. The legal scholar Eugene Volokh has compared states’ gun laws (as rated by the anti-gun Brady Campaign) with their murder rates: no correlation. David Freddoso of the Washington Examiner, a former National Review reporter, failed to find a correlation even between gun ownership in a state and gun murders specifically, an approach that sets aside the issue of whether gun availability has an effect on non-gun crime.
Indeed, pulling away from the state-by-state comparison, our national story is far more complicated than merely stating that more guns means more gun crime. For example, between 1970 and 2015, the American murder rate declined by roughly 50 percent, even as more Americans bought guns and gun laws substantially relaxed in states from coast-to-coast [emphasis added by WGO].”
Why belabor these points? For a few reasons. First, if we want to be rigorous about our policy analysis, it’s just wrong to equate more guns with more crime and fewer guns with less crime. We know there can be more crime with fewer guns, both from our own national experience and the experience of multiple nations around the globe.
Second, this extraordinary high rate of criminal violence illustrates the fundamental rationality of armed self-defense in the United States. The extraordinarily low rate of criminal violence in much of Europe helps explain why Europeans are so mystified by the American zeal for self-protection. To apply Miles’ Law—where you stand is based on where you sit. And if you feel very safe where you sit, it’s hard to comprehend standing for gun rights.
The entire article is well worth the read, but what I’ve quoted is more than adequate to establish the point. If, as we are so often lectured, public policy should follow the data, there is simply no reason to believe that the principal claim of gun control advocates — that we’ll have less murder — is true. We will, however, have fewer opportunities for self-defense. As the old saying goes, “When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.” Accordingly, entirely apart from the Second Amendment, the case for more stifling gun control simply isn’t there.