An old article. I have no idea what the statistics are today. Last paragraph is an eye-catcher.

LINK

In the wake of the shootings at Columbine High School in April 1999 and other schools across the country, there has been a chorus calling for more gun-control measures to prevent similar incidents and to control crime in general. Setting aside the obvious emotional response that such tragedies always engender, is it realistic to expect that more gun-control laws will make our schools and streets safe? To answer that question, we need to understand the relationship between gun control and crime control.

The cry for gun control to solve crime problems, although not new, is finding greater acceptance today among Americans. Throughout most of our history, people armed themselves in response to increased danger from criminals, bandits, marauding Indians, invaders (British in 1814 and Pancho Villa in 1916), or abusive government (as in the case of the American Revolution and the Civil War), a move considered normal and rational until recently.

Today, there are numerous well-funded lobby groups, such as Handgun Control, Inc. (renamed the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence in 2001), the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, and Million Mom March, that advocate the disarming of Americans as a means to prevent and reduce crime. These organizations use tragedies such as Columbine to focus public attention and influence public opinion in their favor.

At the opposite end of the gun-control spectrum are such organizations as the National Rifle Association, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, and Gun Owners of America, which believe that gun control is an ineffective crime-fighting tool.

Who is right? With the assumption that history is a better guide than good intentions, let’s consider the arguments pro and con and draw our own conclusions.

Despite thousands of gun laws at the federal, state, and local levels, gun-control advocates insist that guns are still too readily available. They point to statistics that indicate that violent crime is down since the Brady Law (February 1994) and the assault-weapon ban (September 1994) went into effect. For example, a 1999 study by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U.S. Department of Justice, shows that violent juvenile crime by minors 10-17 years old was down 30 percent between 1994 and 1998, the lowest since 1988.

Gun-control proponents advocate everything from gun-free zones, waiting periods, background checks, limited-capacity magazines, safe-storage regulations, gun registration, owner licensing, and owner-only locks to banning firearms entirely from the hands of everyone but the military and police.

On the surface, it seems logical to conclude that making guns more difficult to obtain will keep them from the hands of some criminals. But what does the record of past gun-control measures show?

John Stossel reported correctly in the October 22, 1999, edition of ABC’s 20/20 that despite the headlines, schoolyard killings are down 50 percent since 1992. Gun-rights advocates point out that crime began declining two years before the Brady and assault-weapon laws went into effect, because of increased imprisonment rates and improved prosecution.

Gun-control advocates look at guns only as a means to harm others even though they are more often used to prevent injury. According to a 1995 study entitled “Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun” by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, published by the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology at Northwestern University School of Law, law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year.

That means that firearms are used 60 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to shoot with criminal intent. Of these defensive shootings, more than 200,000 are by women defending themselves against sexual abuse. About half a million times a year, a citizen carrying a gun away from home uses it in self-defense. Again, according to Kleck amd Gertz, “Citizens shoot and kill more criminals than police do every year [2,819 times versus 303].” Moreover, as George Will pointed out in an article entitled “Are We a Nation of Cowards?” in the November 15, 1993, issue of Newsweek, while police have an error rate of 11 percent when it comes to the accidental shooting of innocent civilians, the armed citizens’ error rate is only 2 percent, making them five times safer than police.