WILL YOU BE SAFER IF GUNS ARE BANNED?
By David Kopel and Jarret Wollstein
"Violence is out of control. Guns are a major cause. They all should be banned
-- the sooner the better." That's what many Americans seem to believe. As
a result, a nationwide movement to ban all guns is growing.
Legislation is now pending in Congress to confiscate all handguns, register all
guns, and tax ammunition up to 500%. Others want to go much farther. Within a
few years it could be illegal for you to buy any guns or ammunition.
If you already own guns, you may be required to turn them in to the government
-- under penalty of fine and imprisonment.
On February 28, 1994, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen announced the
reclassification of several 12-gauge revolver-action shotguns. The Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) announced they would trace the owners, and
order them to be fingerprinted and register with the BATF within 30 days or face
a $250,000 fine and 10 years imprisonment.
In some cities -- like Chicago -- police have already begun warrantless,
door-to-door searches of public housing projects for guns.
Will gun prohibition make you and your family safer? The evidence from cities in
the US where guns have already been virtually banned is not reassuring.
BANNING GUNS DOESN'T KEEP THEM OUT OF THE HANDS OF VIOLENT CRIMINALS.
If banning guns worked, Washington, D.C. and New York would be the safest cities
in the country. Since 1976, it's been illegal in Washington, D.C. to own any
handguns or to keep any type of gun in your home unlocked and fully assembled.
However, Washington D.C. is the "murder capital of the United States."
New York City has had severe gun control laws since 1911, yet it also ranks
among the most dangerous places in the country. In both cities, violent
criminals can easily obtain the most deadly weapons on the streets within
minutes.
A national gun ban won't help. With an estimated 220+ million guns now in the
U.S., an un-policeable 12,000 miles of borders and coastlines, and the world's
largest stock of precision machine tools, criminals will always be able to buy,
steal, or make guns and ammunition.
A competent backyard mechanic can build a rifle or handgun. Even Afghan
peasants, using tools considerably inferior to those in the Sears catalog, have
built machine guns capable of firing Soviet AK-47 cartridges.
Illegal home production of handguns is already a fact of life; a BATF study
found that one-fifth of the guns seized by police in Washington, D.C. were
homemade.
THE POLICE CANNOT PROTECT YOU -- BUT YOU CAN PROTECT YOURSELF.
If a criminal attacks you on the street or in your home, you cannot afford to
wait 30 minutes, 20 minutes, or even 10 minutes for the police to arrive --
assuming that you even get the chance to call police and they respond. Ten
minutes is more than enough time for a thug to rob, rape, murder, or cripple you
for life.
Making guns illegal will primarily disarm peaceful citizens. That gives a green
light for violent criminals to attack everyone -- both gun owners and non-owners
alike.
In Los Angeles, during the 1992 "Rodney King Riots," police abandoned entire
neighborhoods. Live TV broadcasts showed hoodlums burning homes and businesses,
and dragging innocent motorists from their cars -- beating and killing them. The
police did nothing to protect them. The only thing that prevented entire
communities from being burned to the ground were community residents barricading
their streets and using their guns to protect their homes and families.
In fact, the Supreme Court has ruled that you as an individual have no right to
protection by the police. Their only obligation is to protect "society" --
whatever that means. So if you want to protect your home and family, you have to
rely upon yourself. And self defense does work, for example.
"Her family taken hostage by her daughter's ex-boyfriend, Barbara Holt of
Kearns, Utah and her husband were threatened with death, then forced into the
bathroom of their home. When the man, armed with a rifle, went into the kitchen
with her daughter, Holt slipped into the bedroom and got her .22 pistol. Holt
fired a single shot, hitting the assailant in the head, stopping the attack."
[From the Salt Lake City Tribune.]
"Thomas Terry of Anniston, Alabama was eating in a local restaurant late one
evening when several armed men came in and announced a robbery. As the robbers
tried to herd everyone into a walk-in cooler, Terry tried to escape through a
locked door but alerted the crooks to his presence. When one approached the
table where he was hiding, Terry pulled his .45, killed that man in an exchange
of shots, and wounded his accomplice. A third criminal fled." (The Star,
Anniston. Ala.)
Every day, thousands of peaceful Americans successfully use guns to defend
themselves. A recent study by Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck
found that Americans use guns defensively 2.5 million times a year.
A GUN IN YOUR HOME?
Statistics are often quoted to argue that if you own a gun it's more likely to
be used to harm you -- by a family member or by an intruder -- than to be used
by you to protect yourself. For example, a widely quoted study published in the
New England Journal of Medicine found that gun owners were 2.7 times at risk of
being murdered as those without guns. But even the study's author admitted that
this doesn't prove that guns cause their owners to be murdered. After all,
people who are already at risk of being murdered are more likely to get guns for
self-protection.
The New England study also ignored all of the cases in which a gun in the house
was used defensively without causing a fatality. Such cases account for 99% of
all defensive uses of a gun. When this data is taken into account, you find you
are safer with a gun in the house.
Other data supports this finding. Between 1965 and 1985, the stock of
privately-owned handguns has increased rapidly -- by over 1 million a year. But
the rates of spousal homicide fell during the same period.
What about gun accidents? As
nationally-syndicated columnist Samuel Francis explained in a Washington Times
article, there are 220 million guns in the country. Your chance of dying from
accidental discharge of any one of these is extremely remote (one chance in
200,000). In fact, you are 29 times more likely to die from an automobile
accident than from the accidental discharge of a gun.
As long as you are a law-abiding, responsible person, owning a gun does not
endanger you and could save your life in an emergency.
GUN PROHIBITION WON'T WORK IN AMERICA
While a few Western democracies -- like Britain -- have successfully disarmed
their citizens, that would be impossible in the U.S. Our traditions of
independence and individual self-defense are simply not conducive to the
peaceful disarmament of America's estimated 80 million gun owners. As one
Congressman commented, "In Germany, if parliament passed a 45 mile-per-hour
speed limit, people would obey it -- then kick out their representatives in the
next election. In the U.S. no one would pay any attention to it. Americans wake
up every morning thinking 'What's the angle? How can I get around the law?' "
Disarming otherwise law-abiding citizens would simply put us at the mercy of
well-armed criminals. Given a choice between obeying the law and being able to
continue to defend our homes, our families, and our lives -- millions of
Americans will gladly break the law. Many already do.
Only 1% of residents of Denver and Boston have voluntarily complied with laws
requiring them to register their semi-automatic weapons. In New York City there
are an estimated 700,000 to 3 million unregistered firearms. In California, less
than 2% of the 2 million owners of semi-automatic rifles have registered their
guns in compliance with state law -- even though failure to register is a
felony!
It may not even be possible to enforce a gun ban. The New York State
commissioner of prisons testified that if 1% of illegal gun owners in New York
City were caught, tried, and sent to prison for a year, the state prison system
would collapse.
GUN PROHIBITION COULD DESTROY AMERICA
America was born as an armed society. Guns are an integral part of our
traditions and remain essential for the preservation of our safety and our
liberty.
Today more than ever we need our guns to protect ourselves from rampaging
criminals and to deter would-be tyrants. The mere presence of many guns in many
American households is enough to deter many would-be aggressors.
Gun prohibition won't keep guns out of the hands of criminals or make us safe.
But the attempt to ban guns could destroy this nation. The image of paramilitary
SWAT-teams invading our homes to confiscate our guns is abhorrent to everything
America stands for. Yet that is precisely where gun prohibition is taking us.
Regardless of the penalties for disobedience, millions of Americans will not
peacefully surrender their guns. Many normally honest and law-abiding citizens
will lie, evade, and perhaps kill to defend their rights. There are perhaps
millions who share the sentiments of George Mason University professor and
nationally syndicated columnist Walter Williams who recently editorialized,
"You'll know Williams is disarmedwhen Williams is dead."
The bitter irony of gun prohibition is that laws intended to make America safe
could spark the bloodiest violence in our history. Gun prohibition is not good
for you, your family, or America.
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* DAVID KOPEL is Research Director of the Independence Institute 14142 Denver
West Parkway, Ste 185, Golden, CO 80401 Tel: (303) 279-6536
* JARRET WOLLSTEIN is a member of the Board of Directors of ISIL.
======================================================================
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