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Parting Shot Or Crime Prevention?

?Campers may now pack heat along with their sleeping bags when they travel to national parks,? the San Francisco Chronicle reported yesterday in a clever imitation of a news story. By ?heat? the reporter/comic, Peter Fimrite, did not mean electric socks.

The Bush administration on Friday struck down federal regulations banning loaded guns in most national forests, a move that was widely seen as a parting shot on behalf of the National Rifle Association.

The ruling overturned a 25-year-old federal regulation severely restricting concealed firearms in national parks and wildlife refuges. The new rule, which would take effect in January, would apparently allow anyone who already has a concealed weapons permit in his or her state to also tote a gun in federal parks within state boundaries.

No doubt this decision to have the feds desist from displacing state law in some remote areas was indeed ?widely seen? as a sop to the NRA by occupants of the newsrooms of the major media and other inhabitants of liberal precincts. Predictably, much of this criticism ranged from unsupported to silly ? or both, as in the comment of Bryan Faehner, associate director of the National Parks Conservation Association, quoted in the Chronicle editorial article:

This is pretty outrageous. We're concerned that there is going to be an increase in gun-related accidents in parks and opportunistic poaching.

Faehner, of course, presented no evidence that states with liberal concealed carry laws have more gun-related accidents than states that don?t, or that the number of such accidents increased after the more permissive concealed carry laws were passed. Nor is it likely that holders of state-issued concealed carry permits are going to launch an epidemic of ?opportunistic poaching? of bear, bison, moose, or other wild game with their short-barreled, concealable handguns.

Moreover, it is equally true, though largely unreported, that the new regulation was also ?widely seen? by many others as either inconsequential or a positive step in the right direction.

Indeed, given the findings of scholars such as Gary Kleck and John Lott, it is more likely than not that an increase in the number of armed national park visitors will reduce rather than increase crime and incidents of gun violence.

The recent terrorist attack on civilians in Mumbai makes the ongoing debate over our own domestic gun policy more relevant than it otherwise be, though the connection is not often made. John Lott is someone who did:

In India, victims watched as armed police cowered and didn?t fire back at the terrorists. A photographer at the scene described his frustration: ?There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything. At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, ?Shoot them, they?re sitting ducks!? but they just didn?t shoot back.?

Meanwhile, according to the hotel company?s chairman, P.R.S. Oberoi, security at ?the hotel had metal detectors, but none of its security personnel carried weapons because of the difficulties in obtaining gun permits from the Indian government.?

India has extremely strict gun control laws, but who did it succeed in disarming?

Someone else who made the connection, at least implicitly, is Mickey Kaus. Commenting on the fact, mentioned by many bloggers linking to this story from the Belfast Telegraph and others, that the Indian police ?had lots of guns, and no problem seeing who and where the terrorists were, but they wouldn?t shoot at them,? Kaus comments (among other good points):

Maybe we Americans are trigger happy. But do we think that a handful of terrorists could have gone on a similar rampage in New York City without quite quickly encountering a fair number of cops who would have shot back ? let alone armed civilians who did the same.

I think Mickey is half-right, maybe two thirds right, here. Certainly no American cops, in any city, would have failed to shoot, but I suspect that the preponderance of ?armed civilians? in New York City either aren?t citizens or are not armed legally. Indeed, because of New York?s stringent gun control policy, I would expect there would be almost no armed civilians of any kind in the fancy hotels similar to the one attacked in Mumbai.

There is another relevant issue in the domestic gun debate that is relevant to discussion of Mumbai-type attacks that has been insufficiently discussed, if indeed it has been mentioned at all. Opponents of stringent gun control argue (persuasively, I believe) that the presence ? even the possible presence ? of even a few armed civilians acts as a strong deterrent to crime. As John Lott noted two years ago:

* The British government banned handguns in January 1997 but recently reported that gun crime in England and Wales nearly doubled in the seven years from 1996 to 2003. Since 1996, the rate of serious violent crime has soared by 88%, armed robberies by 101%, rapes by 105% and homicide by 24%.

* Australia's 1996 gun-control regulations banned many types of guns and the immediate aftermath was similar. While murder rates remained unchanged, armed robbery rates averaged 59% higher in the eight years after the law was passed (from 1997 to 2004) than in 1995.

* The Republic of Ireland banned and confiscated all handguns and all center-fire rifles in 1972, but murder rates rose five-fold by 1974 and in the 20 years after the ban has averaged 114% higher than the pre-ban rate (never falling below at least 31% higher).

* Jamaica banned all guns in 1974, but murder rates almost doubled from 11.5 per 100,000 in 1973 to 19.5 in 1977, and soared further to 41.7 in 1980

Note particularly the dramatic increase in the rate of armed robberies after the passage of gun control noted above.

David Kopel, among others, has discussed

the major role that widespread gun ownership plays in reducing the rate of home invasion burglaries (a.k.a "hot burglaries"). Because potential burglars cannot tell which homes possess guns, most burglars choose to avoid entry into any occupied home, for fear of getting shot. The entry pattern of American burglars contrasts sharply with that of burglars in other nations; in Canada and Great Britain, burglars prefer to find the residents at home, since alarms will be turned off, and wallets and purses will be available for the taking.
....
The overall Canadian burglary rate is higher than the American one, and a Canadian burglary is four times more likely to take place when the victims are home.

In Toronto, forty-four percent of burglaries were against occupied homes, and twenty-one percent involved a confrontation with the victim. Most Canadian residential burglaries occur at night, while American burglars are known to prefer daytime entry to reduce the risk of an armed confrontation....

A 1982 British survey found fifty-nine percent of attempted burglaries involved an occupied home.... In the Netherlands, forty-eight percent of residential burglaries involved an occupied home. In the Republic of Ireland, criminologists report that burglars have little reluctance about attacking an occupied residence.

And from an earlier Kopel article:

Rather than reducing crime -- as the Canadian government and some American researchers claim -- Canada's restrictive gun laws may well cause crime.  The crime that gun ownership best deters is burglary of occupied residences.  While only one in ten American burglaries is committed against an occupied home, half of all Canadian burglaries are.  Since the 1977 law took effect, the Canadian breaking and entering rate rose 25%, surpassing the American rate, which has been declining. (The situation is even worse in Britain, where gun control is stricter, and 59% of burglaries are attempted against occupied residences.)

And why is it that American burglars, unlike burglars in Canada and Europe, are so reluctant to invade occupied homes? ?The answer cannot be,? Kopel writes, ?that the American criminal justice system is so much tougher than the systems in other nations,? for it isn?t. ?Could the answer be,? Kopel continues, ?that American criminals are afraid of getting shot??

Could be.

One out of thirty-one burglars has been shot during a burglary. On the whole, when an American burglar strikes at an occupied residence, his chance of being shot is about equal to his chance of being sent to prison. If we assume that the risk of prison provides some deterrence to burglary, it would seem reasonable to conclude that the equally large risk of being shot provides an equally large deterrent. In other words, private individuals with firearms in their homes double the deterrent effect that would exist if government-imposed punishment were the only deterrent.
....
The most thorough study of burglary patterns was a St. Louis survey of 105 currently active burglars. The authors observed, ?One of the most serious risks faced by residential burglars is the possibility of being injured or killed by occupants of a target. Many of the offenders we spoke to reported that this was far and away their greatest fear.? Said one burglar: ?I don?t think about gettin? caught, I think about gettin? gunned down, shot or somethin?...?cause you get into some people?s houses...quick as I come in there, boom, they hit you right there. That?s what I think about.? [Citations omitted]

Kopel also cites a good deal of evidence demonstrating the deterrent effect of armed citizens. A few examples:

In Orlando in 1967, the police responded to a rape epidemic by initiating a highly publicized program training women in firearms use. While rape increased in the nation and in *357 Florida over the next year, the rape rate fell eighty- eight percent in Orlando, and burglary dropped twenty-two percent.

The same year, rising rates of store robberies prompted a similar (but smaller-scale) program in Kansas City, Missouri, to train store owners in gun use. The next year, while the robbery rate in Missouri and the United States continued to rise significantly, the rate fell in the Kansas City metro area. The trend of increasing burglary in the area also came to an abrupt end, contrary to state and national patterns.

In 1982, the town of Kennesaw, Georgia, passed an ordinance requiring every home to have a gun. Exceptions were made for conscientious objectors, people with criminal records, and for people in various other categories. In the seven months before the ordinance, there had been forty-five residential burglaries; in the seven months after the ordinance, residential burglaries declined eighty-nine percent. Over the next five years, the residential burglary rate in Kennesaw was eighty-five percent below the rate before the enactment of the ordinance. [Citations omitted]

I?ve quoted heavily from David Koppel, but other scholars have made similar points with similar evidence. Thus Joyce Lee Malcolm, one of the leading scholars of gun control in America, wrote in 2002, discussing the effect of gun control in England:

In the two years following the 1997 handgun ban, the use of handguns in crime rose by 40 percent, and the upward trend has continued. From April to November 2001, the number of people robbed at gunpoint in London rose 53 percent....

... [I]n the four years from 1997 to 2001, the rate of violent crime more than doubled. Your chances of being mugged in London are now six times greater than in New York. England's rates of assault, robbery, and burglary are far higher than America's, and 53 percent of English burglaries occur while occupants are at home, compared with 13 percent in the U.S., where burglars admit to fearing armed homeowners more than the police....

Unless international terrorists planning future Mumbai-type attacks on Americans, Jews, and other infidels are dumber than American burglars, don?t you think they would choose a city where they are less likely to encounter armed civilians?

Full post as published by Discriminations on December 07, 2008 (boomark / email).