Control: Exposing the Truth About Guns (4 page)

And that’s exactly what has happened.

Since the Constitution is not a “living” document, it has guaranteed generations of Americans that the bedrock principles of freedom will endure.

But Lawford is wrong for another reason as well. By focusing on this one letter, he’s missing a much larger point: even if laws were reviewed, Jefferson would have always insisted that any new constitution respect the natural rights of mankind. As he affirmed in his writings, including the Declaration of Independence, the essential purpose of government is to protect our God-given rights.

Whether a law was to expire in ten years, twenty years, or one hundred years is irrelevant—Jefferson would always be against any effort to suppress our inalienable rights. Like the other Founders, Jefferson believed there were many different ways in which a government could be structured, but that every legitimate government must protect—and never violate—the natural rights of mankind.

Finally, if Lawford is really so supportive of Jefferson’s idea, then he also must be willing to throw out every major current gun control law that is more than twenty years old. That would wipe out the vast majority of federal gun control laws—including the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the Gun Control Act of 1968. Most state gun control laws would disappear as well. The result? The United States of 2013 would look a lot like the United States of 1788—a nation with no constitutional guarantee about the right to bear arms, but also a nation with a lot of guns and almost no laws restricting them.

“You have by far the worst rate of gun
murder and gun crime of any of the civilized countries of this world . . . . ”

—PIERS MORGAN,
December 18, 2012

This all sounds pretty plausible—which is probably why this line is repeated so often. Yet things are a lot more complicated than they seem.

It’s not clear exactly what countries Morgan has picked when he says other “civilized” countries, but it is possible to generate almost any kind of result by picking the “right” set of countries.

First, let’s just be clear that lots of nations, including “civilized” ones, suffer from higher overall murder and gun murder rates than America. In 2011,
the U.S. murder rate was 4.7 per 100,000 people and
the gun murder rate was 3.2. Much of Eastern Europe, most of Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, Africa, all but one South American nation, and all of Central America and Mexico suffer from higher murder rates than we do. For example, despite very strict gun control,
homicide rates in Russia and Brazil have averaged about four to five times higher than ours over the last decade. As the
Washington Post
reported:

The dubious distinction of having the most gun violence goes to Honduras, at 68.43 homicides by firearm per 100,000 people, even though it only has 6.2 firearms per 100 people. Other parts of South America and South Africa also rank highly, while
the United States is somewhere near the mid-range.

In fact, if you look across all nations and not just a select few, what you find is that those with the strictest gun control laws also tend to have the highest murder rates. Gun control advocates prefer to use the very questionable data from the pro-gun control “Small Arms Survey” to make their case—but even that data proves that
higher rates of gun ownership correlate with fewer deaths. (See charts.)

“[T]he American murder rate is roughly 15 times that of other wealthy countries, which have much
tougher laws controlling private ownership of guns.”

—NEW YORK TIMES
(editorial), December 17, 2012

Oh, okay, so now it’s “wealthy” countries instead of just “civilized” ones and it’s
overall
murder instead of gun murder.

Still totally wrong.

The U.S. homicide rate in 2011 was 4.7 per 100,000 people. That is very high, and I’m certainly not going to defend it or make the case that we shouldn’t be trying to reduce it—but it’s
nowhere near
what the
New York Times
claims.

I took a look through
the United Nations data on homicide rates for the twenty “wealthiest” countries in the world by gross domestic product (GDP). As you’d expect, the per capita rates are all over the place, but in only one case (Singapore—where they still lash people with canes) was the U.S. murder rate “15 times” higher. Most of the countries that reasonable people would consider to be “wealthy”
and
“civilized,” like Switzerland, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Germany, and France,
have rates between 0.7 and 2.5.

“[G]un control has worked very successfully in Britain, in Australia, in Japan. Japan has the toughest gun control in the world.
They have two or three murders a year. You have 11,000 to 12,000.”

—PIERS MORGAN
,
December 17, 2012

Piers Morgan grew up in Britain, so he thinks he understands how simple this is: take away the guns (like they did) and gun deaths
go away. But that is way too simplistic. You have to look systematically across time and across as many countries as possible if you care about making a fair comparison and finding the truth—not just helping your political agenda.

The United Kingdom has enjoyed very low overall crime rates for a long time—since long before Piers Morgan was even born, back in the days when gun ownership was much more widespread. In fact, murder and armed robberies were almost nonexistent. It might sound unbelievable, but back in 1904, London—a city with a population of around 7 million and the envy of the civilized world—
reported just two gun murders and five armed robberies.

Crime differs across nations and over time for a vast array of reasons, some of which we may never fully understand. However, for countries that have abruptly changed their rules regarding gun ownership or gun carrying, we can look at what happened right after the changes.

And what do we find? The results might surprise you:
In every single place that all guns or handguns were banned, murder rates went up.

Let’s take another look at Great Britain first—a place where guns have never been as freely available as they have been in the United States.

We previously looked at the overall gun control time line, but now let’s zero in on a few key parts. According to Joyce Lee Malcolm, a professor at George Mason University Law School and author of
Guns and Violence: The English Experience,
“Since 1920, anyone in Britain wanting a handgun had to obtain a certificate from his local police stating he was fit to own a weapon and had good reason to have one. Over the years, the definition of ‘good reason’ gradually narrowed. By 1969,
self-defense was never a good reason for a permit.”

In 1987, after a massacre in Hungerford, England, killed sixteen people and wounded fourteen others (since no one else had a gun, including the police, the killer roamed for eight hours), the government cracked down.
Semi-automatic rifles were banned and shotguns were regulated like handguns.

Nine years later, the Dunblane massacre in Scotland resulted in the final blow to gun ownership. The Firearms Act of 1997 banned handguns almost entirely—
forcing lawful owners to turn them in or face ten years in prison.

What happened next? Professor Malcolm has summarized it well:

The results have not been what proponents of the act wanted. Within a decade of the handgun ban and the confiscation of handguns from registered owners, crime with handguns had doubled according to British government crime reports. Gun crime, not a serious problem in the past, now is. Armed street gangs have some British police carrying guns for the first time. Moreover, another massacre occurred in June 2010. Derrick Bird, a taxi driver in Cumbria, shot his brother and a colleague then drove off through rural villages
killing 12 people and injuring 11 more before killing himself.

The homicide rate in Britain rose dramatically for seven years after the ban,
from 1.1 homicides per 100,000 people in 1996 to 1.8 in 2003. At that point, fed up with the sudden increase in murder and violent crime,
the police force was expanded by 16 percent between 2001 and 2005. Unsurprisingly, more police meant less crime. Still, even with the increased police presence,
crime generally remained higher than before the Firearms Act.

Australia was Morgan’s second example, and the numbers there paint an even less convincing picture, especially when you study how certain crime rates changed after their gun ban.

But, before we get to the stats, a quick primer on Australia is in order. Unlike the United States, Australia does not have a Bill of
Rights or a constitutional guarantee to bear arms. As a result, guns were never really a big part of the Australian culture. In fact, even before the strict gun control laws were passed, owning a gun in Australia generally meant being a member of a hunting or sporting group, or showing an occupational need to own a handgun. And
after the laws were passed many of these same people continued to own guns—either by obtaining a need-based exemption, or by choosing a style of gun that was not part of the ban.

Since Australians were not big gun owners anyway, there have never been a large number of gun-related deaths. In the six years preceding the buyback,
the country averaged only about 550 gun-related deaths per year (accidents, murders, suicides, and “other” combined).

In 1996, after a massacre is Tasmania, a major new gun control effort began across Australia. This consisted of new bans on semi-automatic weapons along with a major buyback of existing (and now illegal) firearms.
More than 650,000 guns were turned in or confiscated from 1996 to 1997 as a result of this buyback—a number equivalent to about one-fifth of all outstanding guns at the time. (Ironically, the gun buyback did not have the intended result, as Australians quickly
bought more single-shot guns, bringing the total back to 3.2 million after about fourteen years.)

After the buyback, gun-deaths averaged about 356 a year over the next five years. Gun homicides—which is the part of the figure that Morgan specifically mentioned—
averaged 82 per year from 1991 to 1996, and 58 per year from 1997 to 2001. Did those averages move down a bit? Sure—but there are two issues with claiming a win based on that: first, the overall numbers are so small that the change is statistically irrelevant, and second, people have found ways to kill that don’t involve a gun.

If instead of looking only at gun-related homicides you look at the
overall
number of homicides before and after the ban, you find that there’s not a lot of difference. Non-gun homicides averaged
about 240 per year from 1991 to 1996 and
increased to about 255 per year from 1997 to 2001. Does that mean that the gun control laws forced more people to become killers? No, of course not, but it very well may mean that
those who would’ve used a gun instead use something else, like a knife.