Harvard: Gun control doesn’t work

NDFan4Life

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“Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence” in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy is the stuff of gun grabber’s nightmares. Don B. Kates and Gary Mauser have compiled a heavily foot-noted academic report that is nonetheless very compelling and relatively easy to digest.

Small Government Times offers a summary:

The Harvard study attempts to answer the question of whether or not banning firearms would reduce murders and suicides. Researchers looked at crime data from several European countries and found that countries with HIGHER gun ownership often had LOWER murder rates.

Russia, for example, enforces very strict gun control on its people, but its murder rate remains quite high. In fact, the murder rate in Russia is four times higher than in the “gun-ridden” United States, cites the study. ”Homicide results suggest that where guns are scarce other weapons are substituted in killings.” In other words, the elimination of guns does not eliminate murder, and in the case of gun-controlled Russia, murder rates are quite high.

The study revealed several European countries with significant gun ownership, like Norway, Finland, Germany and France – had remarkably low murder rates. Contrast that with Luxembourg, “where handguns are totally banned and ownership of any kind of gun is minimal, had a murder rate nine times higher than Germany in 2002.

The study found no evidence to suggest that the availability of guns contributes to higher murder rates anywhere in the world. ”Of course, it may be speculated that murder rates around the world would be higher if guns were more available. But there is simply no evidence to support this.”

The authors also took a look at the effect of gun control laws in various U.S. states, gun ownership in rural and urban areas, and across racial lines. The long and short of it is that a small number of extremely active criminals with lengthy criminal records are responsible for the overwhelming super-majority of all gun crimes, and these criminals are psychopaths that ignore all laws.

The study also cited a previous report that was unable to find a single gun control law implemented in the United States that is proven to have reduced violent crime.

Harvard: Gun control doesn’t work | Field & Stream

Link to Harvard study:

http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf
 

Black Irish

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The long and short of it is that a small number of extremely active criminals with lengthy criminal records are responsible for the overwhelming super-majority of all gun crimes, and these criminals are psychopaths that ignore all laws.

Well, how about that? It's like they would somehow find a way to obtain guns to use for crimes even if it was illegal to own guns.
 

alaskandomer

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First, I'm a rarity, an Alaskan who doesn't own a gun. The year we moved here, Washington, DC, where we had lived, had over 500 murders. Anchorage had 32 (DC was 2 1/2 times the size of Anchorage, so do the math), which was one of the worst years on record here.You can't (legally) buy a gun in DC, while probably 70% of Alaskan drivers are armed when driving. We have our problems here-very high rates of alcoholism, domestic violence, and suicide (The three tend to go together), but not murder. Just an observation.
 

cody1smith

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Wait, but if there was a law against owning guns murderers would not have them right? Thus eliminating all gun related crimes over night.
 

GATTACA!

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Wait, but if there was a law against owning guns murderers would not have them right? Thus eliminating all gun related crimes over night.

I think you meant to put that in italics. If not the answer is absolutely no. The FBI estimated that there are over 300,000,000 guns in the United States, those guns don't magically disappear if a law is changed. Also mentioned above criminals are criminals for a reason they break laws, if they are willing to kill they will be willing to steal a gun.
 

Irishnuke

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I think you meant to put that in italics. If not the answer is absolutely no. The FBI estimated that there are over 300,000,000 guns in the United States, those guns don't magically disappear if a law is changed. Also mentioned above criminals are criminals for a reason they break laws, if they are willing to kill they will be willing to steal a gun.

There is a movement on IE to stop using italics.
 

Bluto

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So it seems that the key to reducing gun violence is to move more towards a European style social welfare state. Makes sense.
 

Bluto

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Ahuh, it's worked so well in Chicago and Detroit.

I'm talking society wide. Implying Detroit and Chicago are modeled after the European Social Welfare state is kind of ridiculous. We seem to be the champions of creating sociopaths. Maybe it has something to do with the social construct we've created in this country. If we want to reduce gun violence shouldn't we emulate the social models of those societies were its really low (ie Canada and most of Europe)?
 
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autry_denson

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A few thoughts:

1) there is very little solid evidence available indicating that gun control policies reduce violence. Gun control advocates tend to ignore this lack of evidence, which is frustrating.
2) The evidence is entirely inconclusive on the issue. The main reason is that it’s really hard to determine the causal effect of policies on levels of violence or crime. Gun control policies are endogenous, meaning they are often implemented in response to a problem in the society. So comparing countries (or states, or cities) that have gun control policies on the books to those that don’t will not give you the right answer about the effect of the policy. To identify the effect of, e.g., reducing the supply of guns in a city or a nation one would need to find some natural shock that affected the supply of guns and that happened purely by chance, or else conduct an experimental study. There haven’t been many convincing examples of either of these types of studies, and thus we don’t know what the causal effect of gun control policy really is. Progressive gun control advocates refuse to acknowledge this.
3) This is not a “Harvard” study. It is published in what I believe is a second rate journal published through Harvard (I don’t know the quality, but it’s not the Harvard Law Review). It is written by a lawyer and a criminologist at other universities. It is kind of funny that the thread is titled in this way.
4) The study is awful. Lawyers are trained to make a case, not to conduct research. That is very visible here. There are good reviews of the literature out there, this is not one of them.
5) There are some people on this board who care about evidence and are interested in honest discussions of policy issues. There are many who don’t care about evidence and are interested in reading things that are consistent with their worldviews. If you consider yourself to be in the former group, my suggestion would be to start a thread on gun control policy and link to some different articles or papers that give some things to think about. Posting a terrible study and then mocking those who disagree with your view doesn’t seem all that productive.
 
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IrishGlory

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Because the "War on Drugs" really reduced the number of stoners and crackheads in our country. Did it really take a Harvard study to determine this conclusion? I really feel bad for my kids and I should apologize to them now. #forgiveme
 

phork

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A few thoughts:

1) there is very little solid evidence available indicating that gun control policies reduce violence. Gun control advocates tend to ignore this lack of evidence, which is frustrating.

Canada isn't solid I guess, perhaps gaseous.

Yes I understand that criminals are criminals and they'll get guns regardless. But if you can't see that having enough guns for every man, woman and child isn't a problem then I can't help you. As for your right to bear arms against your own government guess what? If there was any time to do it, its now.
 

irish1958

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Harvard should sue these morons. There doesn't appear to be any principle of logic not violated by this piece of garbage.
 

Irish Houstonian

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I'm talking society wide. Implying Detroit and Chicago are modeled after the European Social Welfare state is kind of ridiculous. We seem to be the champions of creating sociopaths. Maybe it has something to do with the social construct we've created in this country. If we want to reduce gun violence shouldn't we emulate the social models of those societies were its really low (ie Canada and most of Europe)?

Because if there's one thing the federal goverment is great at, it's changing peoples' psyches.
 

Irish Houstonian

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There is a really famous book called More Guns Less Crime that basically said most of this. The data might be stale since it's so old though.
 

autry_denson

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Canada isn't solid I guess, perhaps gaseous.

Yes I understand that criminals are criminals and they'll get guns regardless. But if you can't see that having enough guns for every man, woman and child isn't a problem then I can't help you. As for your right to bear arms against your own government guess what? If there was any time to do it, its now.

I get equally annoyed with mindless arguments that arise from the left as I do with mindless arguments that arise from the right. Pointing to a single case that supports your perspective and ignoring all cases that don't is not logical nor persuasive.

In this case, my own intuition is that if the US drastically reduced the supply of guns we would probably see a decline in violence. The intuition of others, which is very clear on this thread, is that this type of change would have the opposite effect. When our intuitive perspectives on issues clash, I think it's necessary to turn to evidence that will help us sort out the likely impacts of different approaches. In this case, the evidence is not great, but the imperfect evidence available does not make for a convincing case that gun control policies are likely to reduce violent crime. My sense is that gun control policies that are currently in the realm of possibility would probably have virtually no effect on rates of violence - they may prevent a few catastrophes, but they're not going to change the level of violent crime in the US. More drastic measures, such as what's been done in NYC, might have a greater effect - but that's speculation, we don't have strong evidence to tell us that gun policies in New York had a causal effect on the enormous crime drop that's happened here.
 

irishpat183

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Because the "War on Drugs" really reduced the number of stoners and crackheads in our country. Did it really take a Harvard study to determine this conclusion? I really feel bad for my kids and I should apologize to them now. #forgiveme

LOL....

Funny how we think by making Pot legal and more available will reduce pot related crime. But when it comes to guns, it won't work.
 

Black Irish

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Keep guns legal, but require that they all must be colored hot pink from now on. Boom, gun violence drops, because no one will want to be seen with a hot pink gun. Well, except my wife, I'm sure she'd love it.
 
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