Constitutional Law

Thought for the day

The modern antis' theme of "commonsense gun control"....

Sometimes a theme comes upon a group or movement almost by accident. Decades ago I heard a statistician describing just how the pro-2A side must have read public opinion surveys and discovered that "enforce current laws instead" had more support than "enact more laws," and decided to make that a theme. One of those present, who played a major role in adopting that theme, afterward chuckled "if only he knew." Nobody had studied surveys, they'd come up with argument by instinct. Perhaps it's the same here. Anyway....

Back in the 60s and 70s there was essentially zero hard data on the gun control question. I seem to recall two attempts, one by Alan Krug that just compared crime rates to a rather arbitrary concept of strictness of gun control , and found no correlation, and one by somebody else. who crudely adjusted for a few items (using race as a surrogate for poverty and lack of education!) and found some correlation. Both sides were flying blind.

Things are quite different today. Back in the 70s and 80s there were several studies, now I forget the authors, of crime rates and gun ownership in Illinois' hundred or so counties, concluding that when other factors were compensated for there was no effect. There's Gary Kleck's detailed surveys on self defense, concluding several million incidents per year, and John Lott's elaborate studies of liberalized CCW, concluding that it lowers crime rates, and his critics (who to my knowledge dispute whether it lowers them, but do not contend that it increases them). There's even the meta-study, now I forget by whom, the study of all studies to date, that concluded there was no evidence that gun control in any form affected violent crime rates. And for details, the two surveys by the Bureau of Justice Statistics that found gun shows were the source of well under 1% of criminals' guns.

In face of all this hard data, the antis' theme has become "commonsense gun control." That, I think, is more than just "we only want a moderate amount of gun control." I think it also has a nuance of "don't expect us to cite hard data, just back whatever sounds like a good idea." Gun shows are "a loophole" that must be closed -- don't ask whether they're a source of criminal guns. Liberalized CCW is a terrible idea, will lead to street massacres -- don't expect us to show that it has ever had that result. Etc. "Commonsense gun control" thus equates to "we lost the battles over the hard data, and don't want to talk about them."

Full post as published by Of Arms and the Law on December 11, 2009 (boomark / email).