{"id":37307,"date":"2013-08-29T11:30:29","date_gmt":"2013-08-29T15:30:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=37307"},"modified":"2015-06-10T09:00:34","modified_gmt":"2015-06-10T13:00:34","slug":"harvard-journal-of-law-public-policy-more-guns-does-not-mean-more-deaths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=37307","title":{"rendered":"Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy: More Guns Does NOT Mean More Murders or Suicides"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, I wanna see how the\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 anti-gun tools and fools<\/del>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 gun control advocates are going to spin this one.\u00a0 I ran across it on Breitbart.com<\/a><\/strong> and found it interesting as hell.<\/p>\n

It seems as if some folks from academia recently decided to study<\/a><\/strong> the issue of whether the prevalence of guns in a nation\u2019s population is related to that nation\u2019s murder and suicide rates.\u00a0 The study is published in Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy<\/span>, Volume 30 (2), pp. 649-694.\u00a0 It examined data from both the US and Europe relating to both suicides and murders involving guns.<\/p>\n

The anti-gun lobby ain\u2019t gonna like the results.\u00a0\u00a0 But they certainly made me smile.<\/p>\n

The Harvard study found little or no connection<\/em> between the the prevalence of firearms among a nation’s population and the rate of murder or suicides.\u00a0 And they found some other interesting other bits of information as well.<\/p>\n

Here are some quotes:<\/p>\n

Since at least 1965, the false assertion that the United States has the industrialized world\u2019s highest murder rate has been an artifact of politically motivated Soviet minimization designed to hide the true homicide rates. Since well before that date, the Soviet Union possessed extremely stringent gun controls3 that were effectuated by a police state apparatus providing stringent enforcement. \u00a0So successful was that regime that few Russian civilians now have firearms and very few murders involve them. Yet, manifest success in keeping its people disarmed did not prevent the Soviet Union from having far and away the highest murder rate in the developed world. \u00a0In the 1960s and early 1970s, the gun-less Soviet Union\u2019s murder rates paralleled or generally exceeded those of gun-ridden America. While American rates stabilized and then steeply declined, however, Russian murder increased so drastically that by the early 1990s the Russian rate was three times higher than that of the United States. Between 1998-2004 (the latest figure available for Russia), Russian murder rates were nearly four times higher than American rates. Similar murder rates also characterize the Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and various other now-independent European nations of the former U.S.S.R. (pp. 650-651)<\/p>\n

Malcolm presents reliable trend data on both gun ownership and crime in England for the period between 1871 and 1964. Significantly, these trend data do not at all correlate as the mantra would predict: violent crime did not increase with increased gun ownership nor did it decline in periods in which gun ownership was lower. (p. 684)<\/p>\n

Also of interest are the extensive opinion surveys of incarcerated felons, both juvenile and adult, in which large percentages of the felons replied that they often feared potential victims might be armed and aborted violent crimes because of that fear. The felons most frightened about confronting an armed victim were those \u201cfrom states with the greatest relative number of privately owned firearms.\u201d (p. 686)<\/p>\n

Consider Norway and its neighbors Sweden, the Netherlands, and Denmark. Norway has far and away Western Europe\u2019s highest household gun ownership rate (32%), but also its lowest murder rate. The Netherlands has the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe (1.9%), and Sweden lies midway between (15.1%) the Netherlands and Norway. Yet the Dutch gun murder rate is higher than the Norwegian, and the Swedish rate is even higher, though only slightly. (p. 687)<\/p>\n

The mantra more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death is also used to argue that \u201climiting access to firearms could prevent many suicides.\u201d\u00a0 Once again, this assertion is directly contradicted by the studies of 36 and 21 nations (respectively) which find no statistical relationship. (pp. 690-691)<\/p>\n

There is simply no relationship evident between the extent of suicide and the extent of gun ownership. People do not commit suicide because they have guns available. In the absence of firearms, people who are inclined to commit suicide kill themselves some other way. (p. 691)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The mantra referenced in these quotes, of course, is the false assertion that “more guns mean more deaths and, therefore fewer guns means fewer deaths.”<\/p>\n

There are many more such gem quotes in the study.\u00a0 For anyone looking to counter the anti-gun lobby\u2019s propaganda with facts, it\u2019s a keeper – and it’s in downloadable PDF format, so it works on a Kindle or Nook.<\/p>\n

Our liberal “brethren” should accept it as Gospel, too.\u00a0 After all, it was published by freaking Harvard! (smile)<\/p>\n

These results don\u2019t surprise me whatsoever.\u00a0 I wrote much the same<\/a><\/strong> here myself, over a year ago, concerning domestic gun laws and their correlation with murder rate.\u00a0 I found essentially the same results – no correlation.<\/p>\n

Kudos to Don B. Kates and Gary Mauser, the study’s authors, for their work.\u00a0 Anyone with half a brain or some amount common sense already knew this – but that leaves out much of academia and virtually all of the libidiot<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 anti-gun tools and fools<\/del>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 gun control advocates.\u00a0 Now it’s been documented and published yet again.<\/p>\n

It’s not the guns that are causing the problem, folks.\u00a0 It’s the society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, I wanna see how the\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 anti-gun tools and fools\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 gun control advocates are going to … Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy: More Guns Does NOT Mean More Murders or Suicides<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":623,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[185,156],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-guns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/623"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37307\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}