Guns in the U.S. and U.K

Public Interest, Fall, 2002 by Jeremy Rabkin

GUNS and Violence: The English Experience was clearly intended as a contribution to the ongoing American debate about gun control. Several years ago, Joyce Lee Malcolm, an historian at Bentley College, published a careful study of the English legal background to the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment. That book lent support to the claim that America's Founders intended to safeguard an individual right to own guns. In her new book, Malcolm offers a wider historical survey, which strengthens the policy case for private gun ownership. She also offers intriguing hints about why American policy in this area differs so much from the English (or general European) consensus.

Most of Guns and Violence is a chronological survey of crime patterns in England since the High Middle Ages. The big picture is fairly clear: Century by century, as guns became more widely held, violent crime declined. In the decades since the Second World War, as British law limited private gun ownership and largely disarmed the population, rates of violent crime have increased dramatically. A long concluding chapter of the book sharpens the point: Over the past two decades, as gun ownership has become more prevalent in the United States, violent crime has steadily declined here. Meanwhile it has continued to climb in Britain, amidst nearly total bans on private gun ownership.

Malcolm cites many studies purporting to make sense of this pattern. Economist John Lott, in a survey of all American counties between 1977 and 1996, found strong correlations between the advent of laws allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons and a decline of violent assaults on citizens. Other studies have found that while half of all burglaries in Canada and Britain target houses where someone is at home, the comparable figure in the United States is just 13 percent. Surveys of convicted felons in the United States confirm that most are quite leery of confronting a victim who may be armed. And surveys of the general U.S. population indicate that each year there are hundreds of thousands of episodes of "defensive gun use," in which respondents claim to have averted a crime or saved someone from attack by displaying a firearm--in most cases without actually firing.

Nor, according to Malcolm's evidence, does the United States pay a high price for these crime-control benefits. Fatal gun accidents among children are very rare: More than twice as many children die each year from bathtub drownings. Guns do not, by themselves, turn family disputes into scenes of carnage among otherwise law-abiding individuals: Of those convicted of gun-related murders, 90 percent have prior criminal records, involving four or more felony arrests.

AS Malcolm acknowledges, however, gun-ownership rates are only one element in the overall crime pattern. Wider cultural patterns also make a difference. In the United States, violent crime is five times more likely to be committed by blacks than whites. The same relation holds true between blacks and whites in England, though the overall proportion of whites is much higher. Meanwhile, overall rates of violent crime in England and Wales had surpassed those in the United States by the late 1990s, but murder rates in the United States remained more than five times higher. Higher rates of murder in the United States are not simply a reflection of racial disparities; nor do they depend, one way or the other, on guns. American cities also witnessed more lethal violence two hundred years ago: "Even without guns," an English researcher found, "New Yorkers still managed to outstab and outkick ... Londoners by a multiple of 5.6."

Some of the contemporary difference, according to Malcolm, reflects differences in reporting techniques. Federal authorities in the United States have, for decades, classified incidents so as to magnify the "crime problem," while British authorities seem to have had the opposite impulse. American "homicide" figures include defensive uses of force, for example, even when subsequently endorsed by prosecutors or juries, while English statistics carefully weed out every case that can be reclassified. Rape rates--where the U.S. statistics still suggest a much larger problem than in Britain--may actually be comparable, when adjusted for different methods of record-keeping.

Overall crime figures probably respond more to public crime-control measures than to private action by gun owners. Over the past two decades, the United States has moved quite aggressively to prosecute and imprison those guilty of street crime, while Britain has, by comparison, taken a more lenient approach. That might be enough to explain most of the disparities. But Malcolm still offers plausible evidence that the availability of guns has helped Americans to defend themselves. Clearly, many millions of Americans believe that gun ownership improves their security. Almost half of American households now have a gun. The majority of owners are middle class, married, and law-abiding. Guns are more prevalent in rural areas and in the South, but the proliferation of guns in northern cities and suburbs indicates a widening respect for the defensive value of gun ownership.