Invincible Ignorance

[_Droopy]

Invincible Ignorance
By Thomas Sowell
12/18/2012


Must every tragic mass shooting bring out the shrill ignorance of "gun control" advocates?

The key fallacy of so-called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.

If gun control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive.

Places and times with the strongest gun control laws have often been places and times with high murder rates. Washington, D.C., is a classic example, but just one among many.

When it comes to the rate of gun ownership, that is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, but the murder rate is higher in urban areas. The rate of gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, but the murder rate is higher among blacks. For the country as a whole, hand gun ownership doubled in the late 20th century, while the murder rate went down.

The few counter-examples offered by gun control zealots do not stand up under scrutiny. Perhaps their strongest talking point is that Britain has stronger gun control laws than the United States and lower murder rates.

But, if you look back through history, you will find that Britain has had a lower murder rate than the United States for more than two centuries-- and, for most of that time, the British had no more stringent gun control laws than the United States. Indeed, neither country had stringent gun control for most of that time.

In the middle of the 20th century, you could buy a shotgun in London with no questions asked. New York, which at that time had had the stringent Sullivan Law restricting gun ownership since 1911, still had several times the gun murder rate of London, as well as several times the London murder rate with other weapons.

Neither guns nor gun control was the reason for the difference in murder rates. People were the difference.

Yet many of the most zealous advocates of gun control laws, on both sides of the Atlantic, have also been advocates of leniency toward criminals.

In Britain, such people have been so successful that legal gun ownership has been reduced almost to the vanishing point, while even most convicted felons in Britain are not put behind bars. The crime rate, including the rate of crimes committed with guns, is far higher in Britain now than it was back in the days when there were few restrictions on Britons buying firearms.

In 1954, there were only a dozen armed robberies in London but, by the 1990s-- after decades of ever tightening gun ownership restrictions-- there were more than a hundred times as many armed robberies.

Gun control zealots' choice of Britain for comparison with the United States has been wholly tendentious, not only because it ignored the history of the two countries, but also because it ignored other countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States, such as Russia, Brazil and Mexico. All of these countries have higher murder rates than the United States.

You could compare other sets of countries and get similar results. Gun ownership has been three times as high in Switzerland as in Germany, but the Swiss have had lower murder rates. Other countries with high rates of gun ownership and low murder rates include Israel, New Zealand, and Finland.

Guns are not the problem. People are the problem-- including people who are determined to push gun control laws, either in ignorance of the facts or in defiance of the facts.

There is innocent ignorance and there is invincible, dogmatic and self-righteous ignorance. Every tragic mass shooting seems to bring out examples of both among gun control advocates.

Some years back, there was a professor whose advocacy of gun control led him to produce a "study" that became so discredited that he resigned from his university. This column predicted at the time that this discredited study would continue to be cited by gun control advocates. But I had no idea that this would happen the very next week in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

[_beastie]

Oh, I thought you were announcing your new screen name.

[_Bret Ripley]

Oh, I thought you were announcing your new screen name.

I reported this post for revealing in real life information.

[_beastie]

Oh, I thought you were announcing your new screen name.

I reported this post for revealing in real life information.

Guilty as charged.

[_ludwigm]

I like the jokes one should not explain.

- and without smilies...

[_madeleine]

We need a solution, and saying guns don't have anything to do with violence is like saying an oven doesn't have anything to with baking. It's the cook, not the oven, who baked that cake.

If all gun advocates have is more blah, blah, blah, like this, I think you will find you have less and less support. People aren't listening to the "everything is alright" lullaby, any more.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2 ... ntrol.aspx

[_MeDotOrg]

I love the phrase "Gun Control Zealots". If you are for the regulation of firearms, does that make you a 'zealot'? Is there no rational limit to the amount of firepower any one individual should own?

Mr. Sowell never addresses the issue of semi-automatic weapons, or high capacity magazines. What logical or rational purpose do these have in our society?

Places and times with the strongest gun control laws have often been places and times with high murder rates. Washington, D.C., is a classic example, but just one among many.

As long as we don't have more uniform gun control laws, it will always be easy to move guns from place to place.

He correctly points out that gun ownership is higher in rural and suburban areas, but more gun homicides occur in cities. True, but more mass killings (like Sandy Hook, Aurora, etc.) occur in rural or suburban areas.

Gun control zealots' choice of Britain for comparison with the United States has been wholly tendentious, not only because it ignored the history of the two countries, but also because it ignored other countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States, such as Russia, Brazil and Mexico. All of these countries have higher murder rates than the United States.

So the United States has more history in common with Mexico, Brazil or Russia's history than Great Britain? Yeah, that's logical. All right, let's forget about comparing Great Britain with the United States. Why not talk about Japan, where the gun homicide rate is 21 times lower than the U.S.? Or France? Or Italy, home of the Mafia?

Obviously guns are not the cause of violence. But guns act as very effective amplifiers.

I ask you, what stable Western Democracy would look at United States gun laws and say, "Yeah, let's be more like them?"

For every 100 people in this country we have 88 guns. No other country comes close. Yemen, a dysfunctional country in a state of perpetual civil war, comes second with 55.

And yet people are saying that the tragedy in Sandy Hook could have been prevented if the Principal had an M4. Yes, only when Elementary School Principals are armed with semi-automatic assault rifles will we really be safe. Only in the United States would he answer to "too many guns" be "more guns".

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AonYZs4MzlZbdExSbktqRWpLMjNUMkFGVk5VODRyTnc#gid=0