Gun Control

Gun violence effects some 63 million American adults Goss, Assistant Professor of Public Policy Studies at Duke University, 2006 [Kristin A., Disarmed, p. 2] Columbine was a shock but not a surprise. The United States witnesses sensational shootings with numbing regularity. The nation also experiences an epidemic of gun violence about once a decade. In recent surveys, one in three American adults reported that someone "close" to them such as a friend or relative," had been shot.' This means some 63 million American adults have been secondary victims of gun violence. More to the point, polls back to 1973 consistently have found that about 20% of Americans have been threatened by a gun or shot at. Thus, in any given year, between 25 million and 46 million people report having had a close call with a gun at some point in their life. "That the private ownership of handguns should be banned in the United States." Donna L. Hoyert, PhD, et al., "Deaths: Final Data for 1999," National Vital Statistics Report 49, no. 8 (2001): 68 and the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Supplementary Homicide Report, 1999. Analysis performed by the Violence Policy Center. A gun is far more likely to be used in a suicide, homicide, or unintentional shooting than to kill a criminal. Using federal government figures, for every time a citizen used a firearm in 1999 in a justifiable homicide, 185 lives were ended in firearm homicides, suicides, and unintentional shootings. Cook, Professor of Public Policy Studies at Duke University, and Ludwig, , Professor of Public Policy at Georgetown University, 2003 [Philip J. and Jens, "Guns and Burglary," in Evaluating Gun Policy etd by Jens Ludwig and Philip J Cook, p 76] The importance of such empirical work stems in part from the fact that theoretical considerations do not provide much guidance in predicting the net effects of widespread gun ownership. Guns in the home may pose a threat to buglars but may also serve as an inducement, since guns are particularly valuable loot. Other things equal, a gun-rich community provides more lucrative burglary opportunities than one in which guns are more sparse. The net result for burglary rates and "hot" burglary rates depends in part on the extent to which burglars can discriminate between occupied and unoccupied homes, and on how they assess the relevant risk-reward trade-off. The new empirical results reported here provide no support for a net deter-rent effect from widespread gun ownership. Indeed, our analysis concludes that residential burglary rates tend to increase with community gun prevalence, while the "hot" proportion of these burglaries is unaffected. The challenge to establishing a causal interpretation to these results comes from the possibility that gun ownership may be both cause and effect of local burglary patterns or that both variables may be driven by some unmeasured third factor. Although there is no entirely persuasive way to rule out such competing explanations, our findings are robust to a variety of empirical approaches. Professor of Public Policy Studies at Duke University, and Ludwig, 2003 [Philip J. and Jens, "Guns and Burglary," in Evaluating Gun Policy etd by Jens Ludwig and Philip J Cook, p 104] This chapter is motivated by the plausible although untested claim that wide-spread gun ownership deters burglars and diverts them from occupied homes. Previous evidence on this point is indirect, anecdotal, or based on flawed data, and in any case provides no clear conclusion. The new results reported here suggest that if there is such a deterrent effect, it may well be swamped by other factors associated with gun prevalence-most likely, it seems to us, that guns are particularly attractive loot. Cross-section analysis of the NCVS and panel-data analysis of the UCR yield similar findings: a 10 percent increase in our measure of gun ownership increases burglary rates by 3 to 7 percent. These results do not seem likely to occur because of reverse causation: among other evidence on this matter is the findings from our instrumental-variable estimates, which are con-sistent with the OLS results. Most important, we find that gun prevalence has little effect on the fraction of residential burglaries in which someone is at home, and that the hot-burglary victimization rate tends to increase with gun prevalence. These results are robust to alternative specifications and data sets. We con-clude that keeping a gun at home is unlikely to provide a positive externality in the form of burglary deterrence. If anything, residences in a neighborhood with high gun prevalence are at greater risk of being burglarized, hot and otherwise. There is an irony here: guns are often kept to protect the home, but the aggregate effect of individual decisions to keep guns at home may be an increase in the victimization rate. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, 2001. In 1980, pistols—semiautomatic handguns—accounted for only 32 percent of the 2.3 million handguns produced in the United States. The majority were revolvers. By 1999 this ratio had reversed itself—pistols accounted for 75 percent of the 1.3 million handguns produced that year. Guns are less tightly regulated and more easily purchased in the United States than in other Western nations. To be more specific, American fire-arms regulations are comparatively less restrictive in at least five senses. First, the laws have concentrated more on penalizing misuse than on con-trolling access; the laws are post hoc (punitive) more than ex ante (preven-tive). Second, broad availability has been taken for granted. Thus, regula-tions have focused on keeping guns from certain groups (minors, felons, addicts, the mentally ill) rather than restricting availability to a small class of potentially vulnerable individuals who can show a particular need to own a firearm (security guards, small-business owners in high-crime areas, women threatened by stalkers). Third, the laws have been relatively decentralized; as a result, gun control regulation has varied widely across jurisdictions, with strict controls concentrated in a handful of cities and states and most places having relatively few restrictions. Fourth, regulation has centered on sales conducted through primary markets, such as federally licensed gun stores; relatively few policies have sought to regulate or circumscribe informal sales. Fifth, laws have been subject to political compromise, leaving multiple "loopholes" whose shortcomings can be exploited by both gun control and gun rights advocates. The modern gun control forces' most far-reaching achievement in twenty-five yearsthe Brady Law, enacted in 1993-did little more than plug part of an existing loophole by requiring criminal background checks on a limited category of gun buyers. Copyright The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 1999 [Promising Strategies To Reduce Gun Violence, February, http://ojjdp.ncjrs.org...] Gun violence represents a major threat to the health and safety of all Americans. Every day in the United States, 93 people die from gunshot wounds,1 and an additional 240 sustain gunshot injuries.2 The fatality rate is roughly equivalent to that associated with HIV infection—a disease that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recognized as an epidemic. In addition to the human suffering caused by these injuries and fatalities, gunshot wounds account for approximately $40 billion in medical, public service, and work-loss costs each year.3 In short, gun violence is a significant criminal justice problem and a public health problem. There are estimated to be some 240 million guns in America, considerably more than there are adults, and around a third of them are handguns, easy to conceal and use. Had powerful guns not been available to him, the deranged Cho would have killed fewer people, and perhaps none at all. But the tragedies of Virgi