From: conley@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
Subject: Yet further tripe from Richard Reeves
Date: 28 Sep 92 23:53:17 CDT
Organization: University of Kansas Academic Computing Services


[ from Kansas City Star, 9/28/92. Reprinted without permission ]


STUDIES _PROVE_ GUN CONTROL WORKS

by Richard Reeves

Homicides and Suicides Decrease Significantly in Cities
Where Strict Procedures Govern Purchase and Possession.


Seattle (UP) For reasons not clear to me, it has always been
difficult to get up-to-date and relevant statistics on the
relationships between guns and crime. But some more patient
researches than I, using the numbers of the 1980's, have
shown - proved, I would say, what we all know: guns don't
kill people; people with guns kill people - including themselves.

Three studies that impressed me appeared first in the New England
Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medial Association:

  o  "Handgun Regulation, Crime, Assaults and Handguns", in the NEJM
     ( by a group headed by John Henry Sloan ), compared homicides and
     suicides here in Seattle and in Vancouver, B.C. for the years
     1980-1986, finding that almost everything about the cities, 140
     miles apart, was the same except gun-control laws and homicide
     rates. Your chances of being shot were eight times greater in
     Seattle.
  o  "Effects of Restrictive Licensing of Handguns on Homicide and
     Suicide in the District of Columbia" appeared in the same
     journal ( by a team headed by Colin Loftin) and indicated that
     despite Washington's self-description as a murder capital, the
     District of Columbia's gun-control laws did reduce homicides
     by more than 25% over a decade.
  o  "The Presence and Accessibility of Firearms in the Homes of
     Adolescent Suicides" in JAMA ( by David Brent and team ),
     found that teen-agers in homes with guns are 75 times more
     likely to kill themselves than teen-agers living in homes
     without guns.

Those studies were discussed, together with others, in the current
issue of The American Prospect, a liberal political journal, by
Carl T. Bogus, a professor of law at Rutgers in New Jersey. He led
with the Seattle-Vancouver comparison, pointing out that the two
cities, one the the US, one in Canada, had about the same population,
the same household income, the same unemployment, the same crime
rate, and whose citizens even watched the same television shows
during the six years of the study.

"Burglary rates in Seattle and Vancouver were nearly identical",
wrote Bogus. "There were almost identical rates of assaults with
knives, clubs and fists, but there was a far greater rate of assault
with firearms in Seattle. During the seven years of the study, there
were 204 homicides in Vancouver and 388 in Seattle."

The reason for that difference - and the fact that the adolescent
suicide rate in Seattle is 10 times higher - is the availability
of guns. Is is simply easier for people to kill themselves with
the power of a gun in their hands. There were then guns in 41% of
Seattle homes, but in only 12% of Vancouver homes.

When people get angry enough or depressed enough to want to kill
someone or kill themselves, they grab the heaviest weapon around.
If that weapon is a knife or a club, there will probably be blood,
broken bones and bruises. If a gun is handy, it is more likely
there will be a corpse on the floor or the street.

The difference, then, is gun control. A Canadian needs a certificate
from the police to buy a gun and must go through an identification
and investigation process, during which the citizen must demonstrate
need and reason for gun ownership - and self-defense is not an
acceptable reason. The penalty for illegal possession of a handgun
is two years in prison. In Seattle, you do not need a reason, but
there is a five-day waiting period for gun purchases.

The study of the city of Washington compared gun-related violence
for the nine years before and the nine years after the District of
Columbia, in 1976, re-registered firearms and prevented new
handgun purchases within the city. Gun-related homicides dropped
25% and suicides by 23% through 1985, although there was no reduction
in gun-related incidents in the communities surrounding the city.
Then, Washington rates began to climb again, a violence generally
associated with the rise in the use of crack cocaine.

In The American Prospect, Bogus wrestles with a paradox: Polls
indicate that as many as 95% of Americans favor strictor gun control - 
a Gallup poll figure on questions about longer waiting periods for
handgun purchases - but nothing ever happens.

This has never occurred in modern American politics. What that many
people want, good or bad, they generally get.

Is the NRA, which represents gun manufacturers, really that powerful?
Bogus thinks not. Gun control, he argues, is like solar energy -
people think it's a great idea but they don't believe it can work.
The reason Bogus collected those studies was to try to begin to begin
proving that no matter what you hear on television, gun control can
work. Give it a chance.

-- 
|Dennis R. Conley, Computer Science Dept., University of Kansas (913)864-7372|
|conley@hawk.cs.ukans.edu			    conley@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu|
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