By Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
The gun control controversy is only the latest of many
issues to be debated almost solely in terms of fixed preconceptions, with
little or no examination of hard facts.
Media discussions of gun control are dominated by two
factors: the National Rifle Association and the Second Amendment. But the
over-riding factual question is whether gun control laws actually reduce gun
crimes in general or murder rates in particular.
If, as gun control advocates claim, gun control laws
really do control guns and save lives, there is nothing to prevent repealing
the Second Amendment, any more than there was anything to prevent repealing the
Eighteenth Amendment that created Prohibition.
But, if the hard facts show that gun control laws do not
actually control guns, but instead lead to more armed robberies and higher
murder rates after law-abiding citizens are disarmed, then gun control laws
would be a bad idea, even if there were no Second Amendment and no National
Rifle Association.
The central issue boils down to the question: What are
the facts? Yet there are many zealots who seem utterly unconcerned about facts
or about their own lack of knowledge of facts.
There are people who have never fired a shot in their
life who do not hesitate to declare how many bullets should be the limit to put
into a firearm's clip or magazine. Some say ten bullets but New York state's
recent gun control law specifies seven.
Virtually all gun control advocates say that 30 bullets
in a magazine is far too many for self-defense or hunting -- even if they have
never gone hunting and never had to defend themselves with a gun. This
uninformed and self-righteous dogmatism is what makes the gun control debate so
futile and so polarizing.
Anyone who faces three home invaders, jeopardizing
himself or his family, might find 30 bullets barely adequate. After all, not
every bullet hits, even at close range, and not every hit incapacitates. You
can get killed by a wounded man.
These plain life-and-death realities have been ignored
for years by people who go ballistic when they hear about how many shots were
fired by the police in some encounter with a criminal. As someone who once
taught pistol shooting in the Marine Corps, I am not the least bit surprised by
the number of shots fired. I have seen people miss a stationary target at close
range, even in the safety and calm of a pistol range.
We cannot expect everybody to know that. But we can
expect them to know that they don't know -- and to stop spouting off about
life-and-death issues when they don't have the facts.
The central question as to whether gun control laws save
lives or cost lives has generated many factual studies over the years. But
these studies have been like the proverbial tree that falls in an empty forest,
and has been heard by no one -- certainly not by zealots who have made up their
minds and don't want to be confused by the facts.
Most factual studies show no reduction in gun crimes,
including murder, under gun control laws. A significant number of studies show
higher rates of murder and other gun crimes under gun control laws.
How can this be? It seems obvious to some gun control
zealots that, if no one had guns, there would be fewer armed robberies and
fewer people shot to death.
But nothing is easier than to disarm peaceful,
law-abiding people. And nothing is harder than to disarm people who are neither
-- especially in a country with hundreds of millions of guns already out there,
that are not going to rust away for centuries.
When it was legal to buy a shotgun in London in the
middle of the 20th century, there were very few armed robberies there. But,
after British gun control zealots managed over the years to disarm virtually
the entire law-abiding population, armed robberies became literally a hundred
times more common. And murder rates rose.
One can cherry-pick the factual studies, or cite some
studies that have subsequently been discredited, but the great bulk of the
studies show that gun control laws do not in fact control guns. On net balance,
they do not save lives but cost lives.
Gun control laws allow some people to vent their
emotions, politicians to grandstand and self-righteous people to "make a
statement" -- but all at the cost of other people's lives.
No comments:
Post a Comment