Results of a Massive Crime Study
by Ted Drane
Australian Shooters Journal
June 1997
Firearm owners now know that Australian authorities are not interested in facts about whether so-called gun control does indeed control the guns that should concern us all, those few which are used to commit crime.
As we all know, instead of facts, against us there have only been assumptions and emotional assertions. The government in Australia has set out to remove as many as possible of the legally held guns from the continent, without giving any rational argument that doing so will bring down murder and or other armed crime rates.
One of the reasons that the Attorney-General's office has displayed no facts in favour of Australia's new gun laws is that the evidence is all against them, not in favour of them.
It so happens that the academic world has recently been astonished by the release of the most significant study in gun legislation that has ever been completed. This may sound like an over-enthusiastic description, but the reader will soon be in a position to judge.
In July of 1996, Dr John R Lott of the School of Law and David B Mustard from the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago released a study which is being carefully overlooked by people like gun-control monomaniacs, health-advocacy zealots, and officials of our Justice Department.
Before we go into this, there is a significant point to make.
Serious research literature by tertiary level teachers and scholars is all subject to the process of peer review. This is the case in almost every field of endeavour, regardless of the subject.
In the matter of gun legislation, health-advocacy workers have taken it upon themselves to go into the public arena with commentary which has not been subject to this kind of scrutiny. As we all know, it is often nothing more than ridiculous exaggeration spurred on by the emotional commitment that these people have to a preconceived agenda.
For instance, a well-known professor who actually works for an Australian university has attended gun control meetings where in whipping up public emotion he has announced that military ammunition at the target spreads to the diameter of a dinner plate, a nonsense that if it were true would no doubt be of great interest to military experts.
Shameless spouting of rubbish is not possible where the process of peer review is followed. This is why the anti-gun propaganda is for all practical purposes never peer reviewed. It would wilt.
As an example of the standard of our opponents, there is one such American study that is pivotal in the Australian non-debate, and that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1993. It was called "Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home" and was by Arthur Kellermann.
It was criticized so widely that it became an academic laughing stock. Much of the data for it was collected by telephone calls, as is often the case in health-advocacy "research", when the householder is simply phoned and asked leading questions. There are many people who are going to feel justified in being, shall we say, misleading, when they are telephoned in the evening by a stranger and asked whether they have a gun in the house.
At any rate, this "study" purported to have used 388 people as a basis for its conclusions. When examined, the number reduced to a lot closer to a mere 316.
The methodological validity aside, what is important for this discussion is simply the numbers; in order to make out some kind of an anti-firearm case, the anti-gun people referred to under 400 people and the result was used against firearm owners in Australia.
The new Mustard and Lott study could not be more different. Carried out independently, it examined all the FBI crime figures for 3,054 entire counties in the United States. Just this huge size difference between the two studies should be enough to tell its own story.
However, this is only the beginning.
As we look into it, we find that not only did Kellermann after his work refuse to submit his raw data for other scholars to examine - it is harder to be proved wrong if nobody ever sees the figures - but in contrast the Mustard and Lott study was actually placed before other scholars, likely critics, before publication, so that any criticisms could be taken into account for an even fairer outcome.
This kind of approach is completely foreign to the people who are set on illustrating that lawful gun ownership equates to crime.
Why the Debate Rages in the US
It must be borne in mind
that the United States has more than 20,000 gun laws put up by health-advocacy
champions such as Australia's Simon Chapman and Rebecca Peters. These laws
have failed to reduce crime. As a result, after nearly thirty years of increasingly
restrictive legislation, the Americans have started off in a different direction.
State after state has now passed right-to-carry laws, where a person who satisfies basic criteria is allowed to own a firearm. However, not only may that firearm be a handgun, something unthinkable to the authorities in Australia, but it may also be carried concealed on the person.
The very idea naturally caused gasps of horror throughout the United States, where it was predicted that citizens would be killing each other wholesale in arguments over parking places.
What happened was exactly the opposite, and it is proving very embarrassing to the anti-firearm proponents. The simple fact is that in the last two years sixteen states have begun or refined handgun carry laws, and at the same time these are still a substantial number which have not.
What the Study Found
The Lott study found that
if those states which still have not adopted the new laws had done so in 1992,
then the net gain within the United States would have been the avoidance of
approximately 1,800 murders and 3,000 rapes in each year since. The monetary
gain would have been over six billion dollars. Victim care and insurance are
expensive.
Those familiar with the peer-reviewed literature were fitted to accept this, but it must have come as a shock to the self-deluding politicians and others who swallow the media hyperbole and believe they know all about the firearms issue.
One standard argument against guns has come to be that crimes may be committed on the spur of the moment if a gun is available, and in the absence of the gun the possible perpetrator cools off and thinks better of it.
Instead, what the study found was quite different. In a society where there is a higher rather than lower density of legal guns, there are fewer of what the Americans call "hot" crimes. This is a way of describing crimes where the offender takes the risk of being confronted by the victim. Where there is an increased risk of finding an armed victim, the criminal turns instead to more passive crimes where people cannot be encountered.
It may be very quaint of the Institute of Legislative Action, but we feel that crime against the person is more significant than crime against property. A person suffering a home invasion stands to lose more than someone who has a parked car broken into.
Just as a basis for comparison, the "hot" burglary rate in Britain is about four times higher than that of the United States - and it is British laws that the Australian authorities want to see replicated here.
Yet even in Britain, where self defence with a gun is said not to be lawful, crimes against the person are fewer in counties where lawful gun ownership is higher. Whether our opponents like it or not, the deterrent effect is a positive one in favour of legal gun ownership, not against it.
Lott states in the American study: "When state concealed handgun laws went into effect in a county, murders fell by 8.5%, and rapes and aggravated assaults fell by 5% and 7%". He concludes: "Allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crimes and appears to produce no increase in accidental deaths or suicides."
The Sporting Shooters Association has never made a public statement in favour of being allowed to carry handguns. This article should not be construed as such.
However, there is one conclusion that is quite inescapable from the Mustard and Lott study, and that is as follows.
The authorities in Australia are erroneously continuing to operate on the assumption that there is a correlation between crime and the number of legally owned firearms. We have already pointed out the foolishness of this viewpoint, and made clear that it was an assumption that the Americans laboured under as a red herring that has cost many lives over thirty years.
However, we now find the largest study of its kind ever undertaken shows very clearly that society does not suffer a net loss of safety from an increased density of legal gun ownership.
The Mustard and Lott study makes handguns its focus, and we are all aware of how tight are the laws about pistol ownership in Australia. For the purposes of comparison, we must accept the principle not of gun registration, which has already been shown to be totally worthless, but of shooter licensing, because the right-to-carry laws are generally based on the applicant having the obvious requirements - no history of violence, no history of mental illness, and the willingness to undergo a background check.
The question is this. It has now been shown incontrovertibly that society has nothing to fear from licensing ordinary, qualified citizens to carry handguns, which are obviously concealable and also more readily used in crime. This being the case, what could it have to fear from the density of licensed longarm owners in the community?
There are plenty of other communities to test this against. Gun-banned Jamaica's latest murder rate is 31.88 per hundred thousand, against gun-dense New Zealand's 1.34 and gun controlled UK's 1.36. When these figures are broken down into those caused by firearms and those by other means, the proportions remain similar, and, once more, restrictive gun laws are shown up as useless in restricting the actions of the lawless.
What this means is, again, that once the shooter is properly accredited and licensed, there is no value in attempting other artificial restrictions on the basis of the barrel length of the firearm, the action type or anything else.
The Australian authorities' posturing about handguns - for instance, saying hunting with them is "not in the public interest" - and all the more so about longarms is shown up by this massive study to be so much nonsense.
Note: the study "Crime, Deterrence and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns" by John R Lott and David B Mustard is available at www.law.uchicago.edu/publications/working/guncont.html
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