More Guns Less Crime by John Jr (best free e book reader .txt) 📕

for self-defense? The results presented in this book are the first systematic national look at such gun laws, and if the national Uniform Crime Report data through 1994 or state waiting periods and background checks are any indication, the empirical evidence does not bode well for the Brady law. No statistically significant evidence has appeared that the Brady law has reduced crime, and there is some statistically significant evidence that rates for rape and aggravated assault have actually risen by about 4 percent relative to what they would have been without the law.

Yet research does not convince everybody. Perhaps the Supreme Court's June 1997 decision on the constitutionality of the Brady law's national background checks will shed light on how effective the Brady law was. The point of making the scope of the background check national was that without it, criminals would buy guns from jurisdictions without the checks and use them to commit crimes in the rest of the country. As these national standards are eliminated, and states and local jurisdictions discontinue their background checks, 9 will crime rates rise as quickly without this provision of the law as gun-control advocates claimed they fell because of it? My bet is no, they will not. If President Clinton and gun-control advocates are correct, a new crime wave should be evident by the time this book is published.

Since 1994, aside from required waiting periods, many new rules making gun ownership by law-abiding citizens more difficult have come into existence. There were 279,401 active, federal gun-dealer licenses in the nation when the new licensing regulations went fully into effect in April 1994. By the beginning of 1997 there were 124,286, a decline of 56 percent, and their number continues to fall. 10 This has undoubtedly made purchasing guns less convenient. Besides increasing licensing fees from $30 to $200 for first-time licenses and imposing renewal fees of $90, the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act imposed significant new regulatory requirements that were probably much more important in reducing the number of licensees. 11

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) supports this decrease largely because it believes that it affects federal license holders who are illegally selling guns. The BATF's own (undoubtedly high) estimate is that about 1 percent of federal license holders illegally sell guns, and that this percentage has remained constant with the decline in licensed dealers. 12 If so, 155,115 licensees have lost their licenses in order to eliminate 1,551 illegal traffickers. Whether this lopsided trade-off justifies stiffer federal regulation is unclear, but other than simply pointing to the fact that crime continued on its downward course nationally during this

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period, no evidence has been offered. No attempt has been made to isolate this effect from many other changes that occurred over the same period of time. 13

Changes in the law will also continue to have an impact. Proposals are being made by the U.S. Department of Justice to "require owners of firearms 'arsenals' to provide notice to law enforcement," where the definition of what constitutes an "arsenal" seems to be fairly subjective, and to "require gun owners to record the make, model, and serial number of their firearms as a condition of obtaining gun insurance." Other proposals would essentially make it impossible for private individuals to transfer firearms among themselves.

It is too early to conclude what overall impact these federal rules have had on gun ownership. Surely the adoption of the Brady law dramatically increased gun ownership as people rushed out to buy guns before the law went into effect, 14 and the evidence discussed in chapter 3 also indicates that gun ownership increased dramatically between 1988 and 1996. But without annual gun-ownership data, we cannot separate all the different factors that have altered the costs and benefits of gun ownership.

Other changes are in store during the next couple of years that could affect some of the discussion in this book. The Clinton administration has been encouraging the development of devices for determining at a distance what items a person is carrying. 15 Such devices will enable police to see whether individuals are carrying guns and can help disarm criminals, 16 but criminals who managed to acquire them could also use them to determine whether a potential victim would offer armed resistance. The ability to target unarmed citizens would lower the risks of committing crime and reduce the external benefits produced by concealed handguns. Since both police and criminals might use them, the net effect on crime rates of their use is not immediately clear.

Yet governmental use of these detection devices is not a foregone conclusion. Before granting the government the right to use such long-range devices, we must answer some novel questions regarding constitutional rights. For example, would the ability to take a picture of all the objects that a person is carrying amount to an invasion of privacy? Would it constitute an illegal search? 17

What implications does this study have for banning guns altogether? This book has not examined evidence on what the crime rate would be if all guns could be eliminated from society—no data were present in the data set for areas where guns were completely absent for any period of time, but the findings do suggest how costly the transition to that gun-free goal would be. If outlawing guns would primarily affect their

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ownership by law-abiding citizens, this research indicates that at least in the short run, we would expect crime rates to rise. The discussion is very similar to the debate over nuclear disarmament. A world without nuclear weapons might be better off, but unilateral disarmament may not be the best way to accomplish that goal. The large stock of guns in the United States, as well as the ease with which illegal items such as drugs find their way across borders implies that not only might the transition to a gun-free