Gun Control

Guns don’t kill people; husbands that come home early do. Shouldn’t we as American citizens not only accept crime reducing policy but speak out and demand it? We should indeed, but we should not follow the misguided and misinformed ideas of demagogic advocates of gun control. A ban on firearms is not the end-all answer to crime in America. A ban on firearms would not only fail to reduce crime rates, but it might even increase the aggregate crime rate.

There is no evidence providing a link between guns available to law abiding citizens and crime rates. During the first thirty years of the twentieth century, firearms per capita remained very stable, yet homicides increased tenfold. Between the years of 1937 and 1963, handgun ownership increased 250 percent while the homicide rate fell 35.7 percent. To say gun ownership or the availability of guns is a directly proportional to crime rates is very untrue. So what effect do armed citizens have on crime?

Peter Rossi, former president of the American Sociological Association, with the aid of James Wright and Kathleen Daly, both of the University of Massachusetts, set out to find what effect, if any, guns have on criminal behavior. The results of these tests showed three-fifths of the prisoners studied would not attack a potentially armed victim. The other two-fifths claimed they had actually refrained from attacking a victim for fear of a gun. The criminals in states with higher civilian gun ownership rates proved to be the most concerned. So why would we want to remove guns from the hands of victims?

Orlando, Florida, was experiencing a widespread rape epidemic during and before 1966. The police of the city decided to create a program, which was heavily publicized, in which two thousand five hundred women were trained to shoot and given handguns. The next year, rape had fallen eighty-eight percent, and burglary was down twenty-five percent. Orlando was the only major city in America to experience a decrease in those areas. What is most amazing though, is the fact that not one of the women of the program fired a round at an attacker. The deterrent effect alone was enough to stifle eighty-eight percent of rapists.

Gun ownership is not responsible for higher crime rates; it actually deters criminal activity. The beginning of the century saw no relative increase in firearms but an astronomical increase in homicides. Criminals are very much afraid of armed citizens. It is detrimental to ourselves as citizens of a liberty-loving land to take away a powerful tool that protects us. A ban on firearms is not needed by a peaceful society, nor is it beneficial to a violent one.