I don’t think we’ll ever get to the point where we suffer societal breakdown, but I won’t be too surprised if it happens in some European countries. We’ve already seen the challenges faced by disarmed Brits during recent riots in the United Kingdom.
In the NRA interview, I pointed out that law enforcement is one of the few legitimate functions of government, so it is utterly despicable when politicians fail to fulfill that responsibility and also deprive households from having the ability to protect themselves.
December 2011
If policymakers are truly interested in harm reduction, they should pause to consider how many crimes—murders, rapes, assaults, robberies—are thwarted each year by ordinary persons with guns. …The study by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz…found that there were somewhere between 830,000 and 2.45 million defensive gun uses per year in the United States.
…The National Survey of Private Ownership of Firearms (NSPOF) was performed in 1994. It…found approximately 1.5 million defensive gun uses. …The high-end figures on defensive gun uses may well suffer from exaggeration or outright lies. …Since the survey data has severe limitations with respect to defensive gun uses, collecting accounts of self-defense as they are reported in news outlets may be a better method of assessing the frequency and nature of self-defense with firearms. The data set supporting this paper is derived from a collection of news stories published between October 2003 and November 2011.
After Colorado’s 2003 concealed carry law was enacted, Colorado State University decided to allow concealed carry,while the University of Colorado prohibited firearms. The former observed a rapid decline in reported crimes, while the latter, under the gun ban they claimed was for safety,observed a rapid increase in crime. Crime at the University of Colorado has risen 35 percent since 2004, while crime at Colorado State University has dropped 60 percent in the same time frame.
Many people support gun control regulations because they are convinced that the average citizen is either incapable of using a gun in self-defense or will use the gun in a fit of anger over some petty matter. Those assumptions are false. The evidence on this point has grown so strong that even President Obama has had to chide gun safety advocates to accept the proposition that“almost all gun owners in America are highly responsible.”And, as the scores of incidents described in this study show, gun owners stop a lot of criminal mayhem—attempted murders, rapes, assaults, robberies—every year. …Policymakers interested in harm reduction should thus refrain from treating ordinary gun owners as hoodlums or loose cannons and adopt policies that respect the ownership and carrying of arms by responsible individuals.
Dan J. Mitchell, Ph.D.
Dan J. Mitchell, Ph.D. is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, Washington’s premier free-market think tank.
Visit his Website at: http://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/
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