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

77th Street and East McDowell Road. No shots were fired." ("In Arizona, High Numbers of Concealed-Weapon Permit Holders Are Found in the Suburbs," Arizona Republic, Mar. 17, 1996.)

12. "Mom Saves Self and Child with Handgun," Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 12, 1996, p. E2.

13. See Los Angeles Times, Jan. 28, 1997, p. Bl. Similarly, Pete Shields, Handgun Control, Inc.'s founder, wrote that "the best defense against injury is to put up no defense—give them what they want or run. This may not be macho, but it can keep you alive." See Pete Shields, Guns Don't Die, People Do (New York: Arbor, 1981).

14. Problems exist with the National Crime Victimization Survey both because of its nonrepresentative sample (for example, it weights urban and minority populations too heavily) and because it fails to adjust for the fact that many people do not admit to a law-enforcement agency that they used a gun, even defensively; such problems make it

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difficult to rely too heavily on these estimates. Unfortunately, this survey is the only source of evidence on the way the probability of significant injury varies with the level and type of resistance.

15. Lawrence Southwick, Jr., "Self-Defense with Guns: The Consequences," Managerial and Decision Economics (forthcoming), tables 5 and 6; see also Kleck, Point Blank.

16. For example, see David B. Kopel, The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1992), p. 155; and John R. Lott, Jr., "Now That the Brady Law Is Law, You Are Not Any Safer Than Before," Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 1, 1994, p. A9.

17. James D. Wright and Peter Rossi, Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms (Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter Publishers, 1986).

Examples of anecdotes in which people successfully defend themselves from burglaries with guns are quite common. For example, see "Burglar Puts 92-Year-Old in the Gun Closet and Is Shot," New York Times, Sept. 7, 1995, p. A16. George F. Will, in "Are We 'a Nation of Cowards'?" Newsweek, Nov. 15, 1993, discusses more generally the benefits produced from an armed citizenry.

18. See Wright and Rossi, Armed and Considered Dangerous, p. 150.

19. Ibid., p. 151.

20. Baltimore Sun, Oct. 26, 1991; referred to in Don Kates and Dan Polsby, "Of Genocide and Disarmament," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 86 (Fall 1995): 252.

21. Rebecca Trounson, "Anxiety, Anger Surround Return of Young Survivors," Los Angeles Times, Mar. 14, 1997, p. Al.

22. It is possible that both terrorists and citizens are worse off" because of the switch to bombings if shootings would have involved targeted attacks against fewer citizens.

23. David Firestone, "Political Memo: Gun Issue Gives Mayor Self-Defense on Crime," New York Times, Mar. 7, 1997, p. Bl.

24. Using an on-line retrieval search, it is easy to find many news articles and letters to the editor that repeat this common claim. For example, one letter to the Newark Star-Ledger (Oct. 12, 1996) stated that "over half the firearm homicides are committed not by criminals but by friends, family members, and lovers—people with no criminal record."

25. The sum of these percentages does not equal precisely 100 percent because fractions of a percent were rounded to the nearest whole percent.

26. Captain James Mulvihill recently testified before the U.S. Senate that "the greater L. A. area suffers under the weight of more than 1,250 known street gangs, whose membership numbers approximately 150,000. These gangs are responsible for nearly 7,000 homicides over the last 10 years, and injury to thousands of other people." (Prepared testimony of Captain James Mulvihill, commander of the Safe Streets Bureau for Sheriff" Block of Los Angeles County before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Apr. 23, 1997.)

27. I would like to thank Kathy O'Connell of the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority for taking the time to provide me with such a detailed breakdown of these data.

28. Many such murders also end up in the "undetermined relationship" category.

Probably the best known study of who kills whom is by Daly and Wilson. They examined nonaccidental homicide data for Detroit in 1972. In contrast to my emphasis here, however, they focused exclusively on trying to explain the composition of murders when relatives killed relatives. Of the total of 690 murders committed in Detroit in 1972, 243 (47.8 percent) involved unrelated acquaintances, 138 (27.2 percent) involved strangers, and 127 (25 percent) involved relatives. Of this last category, 32 (4.6 percent) involved blood relatives, and 80 (11.6 percent) victims were spouses (36 women killed by their husbands, and 44 men killed by their wives). The percentage of Chicago's murders involving relatives in 1972 was very similar (25.2 percent), though by the 1990—95 period the percentage of murders involving relatives had fallen to 12.6 percent (7.2 percent involving spouses). For the information about Detroit, see Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Homicide (Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter Publishers, 1988).

29. Kathy O'Connell of the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority provided these data.

30. See also Daniel D. Polsby, "From the Hip: The Intellectual Argument in Favor of Restrictive Gun Control Is Collapsing. So How Come the Political Strength of Its Advocates Is Increasing?" National Review (Mar. 24, 1997): 35—36.

31. In these seventy-five largest counties in 1988, 77 percent of murder arrestees and 78 percent of defendants in murder prosecutions had criminal histories, with over 13 percent of murders being committed by minors, who by definition cannot have criminal records. This implies that 89 percent of those arrested for murders must be adults with criminal records, with 90