November, 2007
Get Your Hands Off of My Arms
David Polakoff
Allow me to juxtapose two situations:
- Kennesaw, Georgia. After a violent shooting in 1982, Kennesaw required that all heads of a household must own and maintain a handgun with ammunition, unless one is morally opposed to owning a handgun, is a convicted felon, cannot afford a handgun, or has a disability of some kind. Pundits all over predicted that the city would turn into “Gun Town USA” where there would be wild west-style shootouts to resolve disagreements.
- After 16 students and their teacher were shot and killed in 1997, Britain banned citizen use of handguns.
And here we are in 2007. Logic would tell you that Britain is a place free of guns where people walk around smiling while Kennesaw is a ghost town after everyone shot each other. So let’s catch up with the two situations.
Over the past ten years, gun crimes in Britain have doubled; in 2005-06 there were 4,671 crimes in which guns were used. In addition to the rise in number of crimes, there is another shocking trend - the average age of the victims of gun crimes has dropped tremendously. According to the Times Online, “figures from the Metropolitan Police show that the average age of gun crime victims in London fell from 24 to 19 between 2004- 06 and that there was a similar trend among suspects charged in connection with shootings.”
As for Kennesaw, there has not been a single fatal shooting in the last 25 years. The burglary rate has dropped 89%. The crime rate is one of the lowest in the area, significantly lower than Atlanta or Marietta. Family Circle just named it one of the 10 best towns for families. The crime rate before the law - and when the population was just 5,242 people - was 4,332 per 100,000, which was higher than the national average of 3,899 per 100,000. In 25 years the population has grown to 28,189, and the crime rate has plummeted to 2,027 per 100,000.
The obvious response to this information by someone supporting stricter gun control would be that Kennesaw and England are two completely different places - one, a small city in the United States, and the other, one of the strongest countries in the world. It’s a fair argument, one that warrants delving deeper into the statistics.
The gun law in Kennesaw was enacted in response to a gun prohibition in Morton Grove, Illinois, a similar small city in the U.S. In those 25 years the population of Morton Grove has dropped slightly to 22,202. Immediately after the gun ban was enacted, the city’s crime rate increased by 15.7 percent, even though the overall crime rate in Cook County rose only 3 percent. Their crime rate is now at 2,268 per 100,000, still higher than the crime rate in Kennesaw.
One can compare England with Switzerland, another European country. The UK has the previously mentioned gun ownership laws. By comparison, 14% of Switzerland homes have fully automatic assault rifles. Switzerland’s murder rate from 1999-2001 was 1.2 per 100,000, while England and Wales was 1.61, Scotland was 2.16, and Northern Ireland at 2.65. The Irish Republic, with laws similar to Britain’s, had a rate of 1.42.
Finally, let’s take a look at our own country as a whole. In 1993 Congress passed the Brady Law and in 1994 they passed an assault weapons ban. Since that time, murder rates have dropped - from 1991 to 1998, murder rates fell 31%. Guns were used in 58.2% of murders in 1991, prior to the Brady Law. In 1998, they were used in 64.9% of murders, a pretty large increase despite the bans. From 1991 to 1998 the gun murder rate fell 28.3%; at the same time, the non-gun murder rate fell 46.1%. Can you conclusively draw a correlation between the gun laws and the drop in gun murders, considering the overall drop in murders over that time is even larger than the drop in gun murders? I think not.
Simply stated, there is no evidence pointing to the effectiveness of gun control laws. In fact, the statistics often suggest that the opposite is true: fewer gun laws lead to less crime.