Outcome from a conversation about gun control
I had a conversation with a friend the other day about gun control. He really liked the idea of banning guns because it would reduce murder. I tried to point out that there were already laws against murder — still, he insisted, it had to so something…..
This morning I woke up, considering the pending Supreme court case against Chicago (no guns allowed), and that I will probably never visit my friend in New York because of their weird gun licensing issues and I wondered…. In LA, while it wont last, the gun laws are very permissive compared to New York and Chicago.. So.. What is the murder rate in these 3 cities?
I found this nice CBS story which gave me some numbers for 2008… I decided to make a table.
| City | Gun Restrictions | # Murders 2008 | Population | #/100,000 |
| Chicago | Guns Banned | 426 | ~3,000,000 | 14.2 |
| New York | Guns Licensed | 417 | ~8,000,000 | 5.21 |
| Los Angeles | 10d wait | 302 | ~4,000,000 | 7.22 |
Hmm.. My exciting conclusion? Gun control seems to not be the deciding factor in determining murder rates.
Nothing new here… Here is a nice story from Gun Owners of America. Here is a well written summary from that article:
“The reason that European nations with more guns tend to have lower violence is political rather than criminological. Gun ownership generally has no affect on how much violent crime a society has. Violent crime is determined by fundamental economic and sociocultural factors, not the mere availability of just one of an innumerable bevy of potential murder instruments. Politicians in nations with severe crime problems often think that banning guns will be a quick fix. But gun bans don’t work; if anything, they make things worse. They disarm the law-abiding while being ignored by the violent and the criminal. Yet nations with severe violence problems tend to have severe gun laws. By the same token, the murder rates in handgun-banning U.S. cities — New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C. — are far higher than in states like Pennsylvania and Connecticut, where handguns are legal and widely owned.”
Pretty much sums it up… If you have high crime, restricting law abiding citizens makes things worse. On the other hand (Consider the 1992 Kansas City experiment), if you focus on enforcing the laws that take guns from criminals — that can work.
DC is an interesting example. They outlawed new gun ownership in 1976… Homicide fell for 12 years against the US average — because of the restriction? Perhaps… Then, perhaps due to drugs, it rapidly became the murder capital of the US. Gun control reduce crime, or, did it make for a fertile soil for the criminal element to come in? Here is the example of attempting to restrict law abiding citizens as well as criminals — of course the criminals don’t end up being very restricted in practice.