Would banning firearms reduce murder and suicide? A review of international and some domestic evidence

Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Spring, 2007 by Don B. Kates, Gary Mauser

The legitimate question is not whether victim gun possession allows for self-defense and deters criminal violence, but how extensive and important these benefits are. See KLECK & KATES, supra note 64, at 213-342; LOTT, supra note 11; Philip J. Cook & Jens Ludwig, Defensive Gun Uses: New Evidence from a National Survey, 14 J. QUANTITATIVE CRIMINOLOGY 111 (1998); Philip J. Cook & Jens Ludwig, Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms, Nat'l Inst. Just.: Research in Brief (U.S. Dep't of Justice, Washington, D.C., 1997); Marvin E. Wolfgang, A Tribute to a View I Have Opposed, 86 J. CRIM. L. & CRIMINOLOGY 188 (1995).

(84.) Kates, supra note 29, at 63.

(85.) KLECK, supra note 8, at 74 (collecting survey responses).

(86.) Kates, supra note 29, at 64.

(87.) JACOBS, supra note 11, at 14 (collecting studies).

(88.) Kates, supra note 29, at 70 (collecting studies).

(89.) LOTT, supra note 11; John R. Lott & David B. Mustard, Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry, 26 J. LEGAL STUD. 1 (1997); David B. Mustard, Culture Affects Our Beliefs About Firearms, But Data are Also Important, 151 U. PENN. L. REV. 1387 (2003). These studies are highly controversial. See Kates, supra note 29, at 70-71, for discussion of critics and criticisms.

Id. at 234 & n.10.

(90.) Toch & Lizotte, supra note 11, at 232. Professor Toch was a consultant to the 1960s Eisenhower Commission, and until the 1990s he endorsed its conclusions that widespread handgun ownership causes violence and that reducing ownership would reduce violence. Franklin Zimring, one of the architects of those conclusions, has admitted that they were made speculatively and essentially without an empirical basis. FRANKLIN E. ZIMRING & GORDON HAWKINS, THE CITIZEN'S GUIDE TO GUN CONTROL xi-xii (1987) ("In the 1960s after the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, it [gun control] became a major subject of public passion and controversy ... [sparking a debate that] has been heated, acrimonious and polarized.... It began in a factual vacuum [in which] ... neither side felt any great need for factual support to buttress foregone conclusions. In the 1960s, there was literally no scholarship on the relationship between guns and violence and the incidence or consequences of interpersonal violence, and no work in progress." (emphasis added)).

As for the findings of the subsequent body of research, Professor Toch has written:

   [W]hen used for protection firearms can seriously inhibit aggression
   and can provide a psychological buffer against the fear of crime.
   Furthermore, the fact that national patterns show little violent
   crime where guns are most dense implies that guns do not elicit
   aggression in any meaningful way.... Quite the contrary, these
   findings suggest that high saturations of guns in places, or
   something correlated with that condition, inhibit illegal
   aggression.

(91.) KLECK, supra note 8, at 71.

(92.) See MALCOLM, supra note 10, at 232-33; Alfred Blumstein, Youth Violence, Guns, and the Illicit-Drug Industry, 86 J. CRIM. L. & CRIMINOLOGY 10, 21 (1995).