Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 24, 1990 TAG: 9007240356
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID B. KOPEL
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association published research demonstrating that the homicide rate for American males aged 15 to 24 is four to 40 times higher than the rate in other democracies with strict gun laws. Three-quarters of American homicides are committed with firearms. The simple conclusion is that America needs more stringent gun control.
Congress is currently considering prohibiting some kinds of guns and requiring police permission to buy most others. The comparison with foreign countries ought to spur Congress to enact tougher gun laws.
Or should it? The realities of foreign gun-control are more complex than the JAMA article would have us believe.
England, for example, has harsh gun laws and a very low homicide rate, but there seems to be no cause-and-effect relation between the former and the latter. The lowest rates of violent crime in England did not occur in the period with the strongest gun laws (the 1980s) but in the era with the weakest gun laws.
At the turn of the century, there was virtually no violent crime in England, and virtually no gun control. Anyone (children included) could buy any type of gun, in any quantity, no questions asked. There were no background checks, no forms to fill out, no waiting periods and no safety training. All that was needed was ready cash.
Yet gun crime and total violent crime rates were only a small percentage of current British rates. At the turn of the century, Victorian social morality was strong; it was a more effective check on British criminal impulses than are the rigid gun laws of today.
Canada is another country whose stricter gun laws are touted as a model for the United States. But as the University of Washington's Brandon Centerwall has pointed out, Canadian homicide rates are actually equal to or higher than those of most American states that border Canada.
After Canada enacted a comprehensive gun control system in 1977, there was a drop in the use of firearms in homicides, but that drop was matched by an increase in fatal knifings. Overall trends in the murder rate showed no change.
The JAMA authors emphasized a 1988 article in the New England Journal of Medicine that compared Seattle and Vancouver, and claimed that Canadian gun laws reduce killings. But apparently the JAMA authors were not aware that the New England Journal writers had retracted their conclusion about Canadian gun laws.
Japan essentially prohibits guns and has almost no gun crime. But it has almost no crime of any other type either. You can leave your purse on the sidewalk outside a department store and, after browsing in the store for an hour, find your purse just where you left it. It's difficult to believe that gun control really has much to do with the low crime rate in a society that's so meticulously law-abiding.
It is interesting that Japan's homicide rate is about the same as Switzerland's. The Swiss government doesn't prohibit guns; it issues every adult male a Sig-Sauer fully-automatic assault rifle to keep at home and trains him to use it.
Overall, there's little relation between the severity of gun laws and the homicide rate. Scotland has rigorous gun laws, but its murder rate is more than three times the Swiss rate. The 22 American states that impose waiting periods on gun buyers suffer killings at the same total rate as the 28 states that don't bother with waiting periods.
The JAMA authors assumed a simple relationship between rigid gun laws and low murder rates, but it's just not true. Because the authors (who work for Louis Sullivan, the anti-gun secretary of health and human services) fixated on gun control, they neglected to consider other explanations of why American males aged 15 to 24 are so much more likely to kill each other than are their counterparts in other nations.
America is the only country studied that has a three-and-a-half century history of enslaving and degrading a major part of its population. And the black homicide rate is seven times the white rate.
America is the only country where demand for drugs is sky-high. America is the only country with an all-out drug war, a war that has bred gang violence similar to that of alcohol prohibition in the '20s.
To bring down the high death rate for young males requires finding better solutions to the problems of racial justice and drugs. Simplistic anti-gun essays, like the one in the Journal of the American Medical Association, may be ammunition for the gun-control lobby, but they won't help us save lives.
by CNB