More Guns Less Crime by John Jr (ebook reader macos .txt) 📗

guns after Tasmania's horrible multiple-victim public shooting in 1996. But neither total crime nor total crime with guns has declined. In the first two years after the law, armed robberies had risen by 73 percent, unarmed robberies by 28 percent, assaults by 17 percent, and kidnappings by 38 percent. 134 Murders declined by 9 percent, but manslaughter rose by 32 percent. Another country that has recently banned guns is England, yet it now leads the United States by a wide margin in robberies and aggravated assaults, and although murder and rape is still higher in the United States, that difference has been shrinking. 135 It is seldom mentioned that other countries, like Brazil and Russia, with some of the toughest gun bans and restrictions in the world, have murder rates four times higher than what we have in the United States.

Another important source of regulation is the constant threat of legal action now faced by gun makers and those in anyway involved in handling guns. Colt has terminated a thousand field representatives and virtually stopped selling handguns to the civilian market. 136 Other gun makers have filed for bankruptcy protection. 137 Other businesses have also been affected. The Wall Street Journal notes that "In part to avoid becoming a target of new lawsuits," United Parcel Service is "tightening its rules for shipping handguns" and effectively tripling its prices. 138

What seems missing from so much of the public debate is that regulations have both costs and benefits. Consider, then, the costs and benefits of some other recent gun-control proposals that have not already been addressed directly in this book:

Prison sentences for adults whose guns are misused by someone under 18. Parents are already civilly liable for any wrongful actions committed by their chil-

dren, but these recent federal proposals would institute a three-year minimum prison term for anyone whose gun is used improperly by any minor (not necessarily their own child), regardless of whether the gun owner consented to or knew of the use. The rules are being created for just one product when we would never think of applying them to other products. This is draconian, to say the least—the equivalent of sending Mom and Dad to prison because an auto thief kills someone while driving the family car. What about other household products like the propane tanks from barbecues or trailer homes used to make bombs? If the motivation is to prevent accidental deaths, why not apply this rule to items that pose a much greater risk to children in the home? Criminal penalties would surely motivate parents to store everything from medicines to knives to water buckets more carefully. Most would consider such an idea extreme, and it would only add to the grief or agony already suffered by parents when their children are killed or hurt.

Age limits. Mr. Clinton proposes a federal ban on the possession of handguns by anyone under twenty-one. Under a 1968 federal law, twenty-one is already the minimum age to purchase a handgun, but setting the age to possess a handgun has been a state matter. While some people between eighteen and twenty-one use guns improperly, others face the risk of crime and would benefit from defending themselves. As discussed earlier in this book (p. 86), laws allowing eighteen- to twenty-one-year-olds to carry a concealed handgun reduce violent crime, just as they do for citizens over twenty-one.

New rules for gun shows. The Clinton administration has provided no evidence that such shows are important in supplying criminals with guns. Furthermore, it is simply false to claim that the rules for purchasing guns at a gun show are any different from purchases elsewhere. Dealers at a show must perform the same background checks and obey all the other rules that they follow when they make sales at their stores. Private sales are always unregulated whether they occur at a gun show or not.

If, as Mr. Clinton proposes, the government enacts new laws regulating private sales at gun shows, all someone would have to do is walk outside the show and sell the gun there. To regulate private sales, the government would have to register all guns. This is where the discussion will soon be headed, as it is certain that gun-control advocates will quickly point to the unenforceability of these new laws. Advocates of the new rules must know that the proposed rules are doomed to failure and should acknowledge openly whether they would advocate registration to close the new "loopholes" they are creating. The other goal here is set up fees and bureaucracy that will drive most gun shows out of business.

Background checks for buyers of bomb-making material. This will have little effect, simply because few items are likely to be covered. No one seriously discusses including fertilizer, used to make the bomb that killed 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995, or propane tanks like the ones found after the Littleton massacre. There are simply too many common household items that can be used to make bombs.

Yet without academic evidence that existing regulations such as the Brady law and gun locks produce desirable results, it is surprising that we are now debating what new gun-control laws to pass. With that in mind, 294 academics from institutions as diverse as Harvard, Stanford, Northwestern, the University of Pennsylvania, and UCLA released an open letter to Congress during 1999 stating that the proposed new gun laws are "ill advised." They wrote that "With the 20,000 gun laws already on the books, we advise Congress, before enacting yet more new laws, to investigate whether many of the existing laws may have contributed to the problems we currently face." 139

An effective as well as moving piece I recently read was written by Dale Anema, a father whose son was trapped for hours inside the Columbine High School building during the April 1999 attack. His agony while waiting to hear what