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

Violence, in Washington. "The more guns people are carrying, the more likely it is that ordinary confrontations will escalate into violent confrontations" (William Tucker, "Maybe You Should Carry a Handgun," the Weekly Standard, Dec. 16, 1996, p. 30).

46. For these arguments, see P. J. Cook, "The Role of Firearms in Violent Crime," in M. E. Wolfgang and N. A. Werner, eds., Criminal Violence (Newbury, NJ: Sage Publishers, 1982); and Franklin Zimring, "The Medium Is the Message: Firearm Caliber as a Determinant of Death from Assault," Journal of Legal Studies 1 (1972): 97-124.

47. P. J. Cook, "The Technology of Personal Violence," Crime and Justice: Annual Review of Research 14 (1991): 57, 56 n. 4. Cook reported 82,000 defensive uses for an earlier period. The irony of Cook's position here is that his earlier work argued that the National Crime Victimization Survey radically underreports other violence-related events, including domestic violence, rapes, and gunshot woundings linked to criminal acts; see Gary Kleck, Targeting Guns (Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter Publishers, 1997).

It is easy to find people who argue that concealed handguns will have no deterrent effect. H. Richard Uviller writes that "more handguns lawfully in civilian hands will not reduce deaths from bullets and cannot stop the predators from enforcing their criminal demands and expressing their lethal purposes with the most effective tool they can get their hands on." See H. Richard Uviller, Virtual Justice: The Flawed Prosecution of Crime in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 95.

48. For instance, the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center states that reported gun-ownership rates are much lower in urban areas. In the nation's twelve largest cities, just 18 percent of all households report owning a gun. Women in rural areas

appear to own guns at about three times the rate that women in the twelve largest cities do. For a discussion about how these numbers vary between urban and rural areas generally or for women across areas, see James A. Davis and Tom W. Smith, General Social Surveys, 1972-1993: Cumulative Codebook (Chicago: National Opinion Research Center, 1993); and Tom W. Smith and Robert J. Smith, "Changes in Firearm Ownership Among Women, 1980— 1994," Journal ofCriminal Law and Criminology 86 (Fall 1995): 133-49. This issue is discussed further in chapter 3.

49. Gary Kleck provides an excellent discussion of the methodological weaknesses in the National Crime Victimization Survey. As an example, he writes, "Unfortunately, 88 percent of the violent crimes reported to the [National Crime Victimization Survey] in 1992 were committed away from the victim's home. Thus, by the time the self-protection question is asked, almost all the [respondents] who in fact had used a gun for self-protection know that they had already admitted that the incident occurred in a place where it would be a crime for them to have possessed a gun" (see Kleck, Targeting Guns).

50. Still another survey deals more directly with the number of lives potentially saved by defensive gun uses. It reports that potential victims believe that each year, 400,000 people "almost certainly" saved a life by using a gun, though even the researchers providing this estimate believe that the number is too high. See Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 86 (Fall 1995): 150, 153, 180, 180-2; see also Gary Kleck, "Critique of Cook/Ludwig Paper," undated manuscript, Dept. of Criminology, Florida State University). Recent evidence confirms other numbers from Kleck's and Gertz's study. For example, Annest et al. estimate that 99,025 people sought medical treatment for nonfatal firearm woundings. When one considers that many criminals will not seek treatment for wounds and that not all wounds require medical treatment, Kleck's and Gertz's estimate of 200,000 woundings seems somewhat plausible, though even Kleck and Gertz believe that this is undoubtedly too high, given the very high level of marksmanship that this implies for those firing the guns. Even if the true number of times that criminals are wounded is much smaller, however, this still implies that criminals face a very real expected cost when they attack armed civilians. For discussions of the defensive use of guns, see J. L. Annest et al., "National Estimates of Nonfatal, Firearm-Related Injuries: Beyond the Tip of the Iceberg," Journal of the American Medical Association (June 14, 1995): 1749—54; and Lawrence Southwick, Jr., "Self-Defense with Guns: The Consequences," Managerial and Decision Economics (forthcoming).

51. Information from telephone call to Susan Harrell, Administrator, Bureau of License Issuance for the state of Florida in Tallahassee. David Kopel writes that "in Florida as a whole, 315,000 permits had been issued by December 31, 1995. Only five had been revoked because the permit holder committed a violent crime with a gun." See David Kopel, "The Untold Triumph of Concealed-Carry Permits," Policy Review 78 (July—Aug. 1996); see also Stan Schellpeper, "Case for a Handgun-Carry Law," Omaha World-Herald, Feb. 6, 1997, p. 27; and Clayton E. Cramer and David B. Kopel, "'Shall Issue': The New Wave of Concealed-Handgun Permit Laws," Tennessee Law Review 62 (Spring 1995): 679, 691. An expanded version of this last article is available from the Independence Institute, 14142 Denver West Parkway, Suite 185, Golden, Colorado, 80401-3134.

52. Cramer and Kopel, "New Wave of Concealed-Handgun Permit Laws," pp. 691—92.

53. Bob Barnhart, "Concealed-Handgun Licensing in Multnomah County," mimeo (Intelligence/Concealed Handgun Unit: Multnomah County, Oct. 1994).

54. See Richmond Times Dispatch, Jan. 16, 1997.

55. Schellpeper, "Case for a Handgun-Carry Law," p. 27.

56. "Packin' and More Peaceful," Las Vegas Review-Journal, Aug. 5, 1996, p. 6B.

57. Kentucky State Police Trooper Jan Wuchner is also quoted as saying that he