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Three Decades Later --
Gun Laws Still Don’t Work
By Neal Knox
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Jump to Part 2
The June and July 1966 Guns & Ammo magazines contained my attached article challenging Sen. Thomas Dodd’s (D-Ct.) bogus statistical arguments for what eventually became the Gun Control Act of 1968. It was, I believe, the first widely published footnoted study of the failure of gun laws to reduce crime.
As I noted in the article, "Senator Dodd has added a new dimension to the old emotional gun control arguments -- statistics purporting to show that availability of guns has a direct relationship upon the incidence of crime, particularly murder rates."
Sound familiar?
I recently reread that piece and decided to reprint it (with Guns & Ammo’s permission) and post it on my web site (http://www.nealknox.com/). While the crime statistics have changed – crime, and crime with guns is far greater despite all the gun laws in the last three decades -- the principles are just as sound today as they were a third of a century ago.
The article shows that anti-gunners’ penchant for twisting crime statistics is not a new phenomenon.
Neither is the overwhelming hatred of guns and gunowners by the news media. The press and much of the public was inflamed because of the assassination of President Jack Kennedy with a mail-order Italian Army Carcano bolt action rifle. And Officer Tippet, killed during the search for the assassain, was shot with an inexpensive "mail order" handgun.
During the 1964-65 Senate Juvenile Delinquency Committee hearings concerning "Mail-order Guns," surplus imports, and "Saturday Night Special" handguns, Chairman Dodd (father of the present Sen. Christopher Dodd) blistered pro-gun witnesses, particularly NRA Executive Vice President Franklin Orth and then-G&A Editor Tom Siatos.
They were accused of lying about his bill and the press dutifully parroted his statistical distortions. The gun-owning public didn’t know who to believe; Dodd and the press had succeeded in the never-ending objective of discrediting the pro-gun leadership.
My reason for including footnotes wasn’t to make it a scholarly piece but simply to make it more credible. I had no idea where, or if, the article would appear, but I wanted to show that every significant statement could be verified so gunowners could quote from that article with confidence. The published version had 40-odd footnotes, about a third of the longer original version. The footnotes in this HTML version are hot-linked -- you can jump from footnote back to the text by clicking the note number.
With the benefit of hindsight, some sections are somewhat embarrassing – particularly my emphasis on hunting and recreational shooting. Though I well knew that the Second Amendment wasn’t about preserving guns for sport, I was trying to jar awake the mass of hunters and casual gun owners who were either oblivious to Congressional dangers to their gun rights, or utterly convinced that the Supreme Court would strike down any Federal gun law on Second Amendment grounds.
We still have the same apathy problems now – although far more are awake today than in 1966.
The basic arguments that I made then are equally valid today, and the evidence just as persuasive, although despite the Gun Control Act gun crime rose to incredible heights over the next quarter-century. Irrespective of additional restrictive gun laws, crime rates finally began to recede only when states started locking up violent repeat offenders, as I recommended in 1966.
Because of the broad wording of key sections of Dodd’s bill, I noted – as NRA’s Frank Orth had – that regardless how the sponsors claimed the law would be enforced, it would allow regulations that went far beyond its obvious provisions. Sure enough, ten years after the law passed, when I was the Executive Director of NRA-ILA, the BATF attempted to rewrite the regulations to create a total registration system.
I gingerly mentioned in the 1966 article that during the uproar after the Kennedy assassination NRA had endorsed the Dodd bill, even after he had amended it apply to long guns. I was shocked by that endorsement, which I learned about while reading the hearings, particularly since NRA had led the members to believe they were opposing it. The NRA Board, after getting hammered by members, rescinded the endorsement a few months later.
One outright error in the piece was my claim that Congressional committee chairmen usually didn’t preside over their own bills, much less badger the bills’ opponents. It was and is done that way all the time, but I didn’t know it until I had spent some time on Capitol Hill. I got a first-hand taste in early 1967 when, as editor of Gun Week, I testified against the Dodd bill before Dodd in his Senate subcommittee and before House co-sponsor and Judiciary Committee Chairman Emanuel Cellar (D-N.J.).
I know of only one earlier attempt to determine whether gun laws had any relationship to crime rates. That was an obscure study done in 1960 by the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Library.
The Wisconsin legislature, under pressure to enact additional gun laws, had asked their researchers to determine whether new gun laws were likely to have any positive effect. As I wrote in G&A, "That report, which includes several pages of detailed comparisons of crime to gun laws and other factors, concludes: ‘From the foregoing statistics it would be difficult to determine the effect that either licensing or nonlicensing of firearms has on the extent of crime in a State, particularly upon the murder rate per 100,000 population.’" (About 1967 that study was replicated and expanded by Dr. A.S. Krug, and widely distributed by National Shooting Sports Foundation.)
My effort was miniscule compared to the massive studies which have followed it, particularly University of Massachusetts (Amherst) Sociologist James D. Wright’s review (funded with an almost-$200,000 grant by the Carter Administration’s Justice Department and grudgingly released by the Reagan Justice Department in 1981).
In 1978 ILA’s researchers and I had met with Dr. Blair Ewing of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which conducted criminological research for the Justice Department. I complained that all LEAA’s research was focussed on what type of gun law to pass rather than whether gun laws reduced crime, their ostensible purpose.
Because ILA had just succeeded in cutting $4.2 million from BATF’s budget for attempting the previously mentioned national firearms registration regulations, we had the attention of all Washington’s bureaucrats – and LEAA was doubly nervous, for their agency was about to be eliminated.
As a result of that meeting, and confident that objective research would show the benefits of "gun control" laws, LEAA granted almost $200,000 to Dr. Wright, a published advocate for "gun control" laws. To the undoubted surprise and disappointment of his sponsors, Dr. Wright really was objective. He told me several years later that he expected his research to make him "the hero of the gun control movement" because he expected to determine what type of gun law was most effective. Instead, he became their goat.
Dr. Wright’s research found that no gun law or combination of gun laws could be shown to have reduced crime. His book Under The Gun, by Wright, Rossi and Roll, is based on that earthshaking study.
The next major milepost was Florida State University Criminologist Gary Kleck’s surveys which indicate up to two million crimes per year are foiled because of self-defense with privately owned guns – most of which never had to be fired. He describes his work in Point Blank. Like Wright, Kleck’s findings were doubly effective because he describes himself as a "doctrinaire liberal."
Dr. John Lott Jr.’s massive 1997 study went the next critical step. He statistically analyzed the crime rates in the 3,000-plus U.S. counties following the passage of concealed carry licensing laws during the past two decades.
After controlling for virtually every conceiveable factor, from demographics to imprisonment rates, he showed that arming the citizenry through concealed carry laws had resulted in significant crime reductions. He also predicted the percentage of crime reduction and lives saved if more states passed such laws.
And to make his message explicit, he titled his book More Guns, Less Crime, (University of Chicago Press).
Dr. Lott’s heresy, and his evangelism for concealed carry laws (though he didn’t even own a gun when he began his research), has brought him under ferocious personal attack. But his enemies can’t challenge his finding – except by twisting the statistics as Tom Dodd pioneered in the 1960’s.
These three landmark studies provide all the evidence one could wish that, as I wrote a third of a century ago, prohibitive gun legislation "has been attempted for half a century. It has not worked. It will not work."
See Part 2
Gun Laws Still Don’t Work
By Neal Knox
Jump to Part 1
Jump to Part 2
The June and July 1966 Guns & Ammo magazines contained my attached article challenging Sen. Thomas Dodd’s (D-Ct.) bogus statistical arguments for what eventually became the Gun Control Act of 1968. It was, I believe, the first widely published footnoted study of the failure of gun laws to reduce crime.
As I noted in the article, "Senator Dodd has added a new dimension to the old emotional gun control arguments -- statistics purporting to show that availability of guns has a direct relationship upon the incidence of crime, particularly murder rates."
Sound familiar?
I recently reread that piece and decided to reprint it (with Guns & Ammo’s permission) and post it on my web site (http://www.nealknox.com/). While the crime statistics have changed – crime, and crime with guns is far greater despite all the gun laws in the last three decades -- the principles are just as sound today as they were a third of a century ago.
The article shows that anti-gunners’ penchant for twisting crime statistics is not a new phenomenon.
Neither is the overwhelming hatred of guns and gunowners by the news media. The press and much of the public was inflamed because of the assassination of President Jack Kennedy with a mail-order Italian Army Carcano bolt action rifle. And Officer Tippet, killed during the search for the assassain, was shot with an inexpensive "mail order" handgun.
During the 1964-65 Senate Juvenile Delinquency Committee hearings concerning "Mail-order Guns," surplus imports, and "Saturday Night Special" handguns, Chairman Dodd (father of the present Sen. Christopher Dodd) blistered pro-gun witnesses, particularly NRA Executive Vice President Franklin Orth and then-G&A Editor Tom Siatos.
They were accused of lying about his bill and the press dutifully parroted his statistical distortions. The gun-owning public didn’t know who to believe; Dodd and the press had succeeded in the never-ending objective of discrediting the pro-gun leadership.
My reason for including footnotes wasn’t to make it a scholarly piece but simply to make it more credible. I had no idea where, or if, the article would appear, but I wanted to show that every significant statement could be verified so gunowners could quote from that article with confidence. The published version had 40-odd footnotes, about a third of the longer original version. The footnotes in this HTML version are hot-linked -- you can jump from footnote back to the text by clicking the note number.
With the benefit of hindsight, some sections are somewhat embarrassing – particularly my emphasis on hunting and recreational shooting. Though I well knew that the Second Amendment wasn’t about preserving guns for sport, I was trying to jar awake the mass of hunters and casual gun owners who were either oblivious to Congressional dangers to their gun rights, or utterly convinced that the Supreme Court would strike down any Federal gun law on Second Amendment grounds.
We still have the same apathy problems now – although far more are awake today than in 1966.
The basic arguments that I made then are equally valid today, and the evidence just as persuasive, although despite the Gun Control Act gun crime rose to incredible heights over the next quarter-century. Irrespective of additional restrictive gun laws, crime rates finally began to recede only when states started locking up violent repeat offenders, as I recommended in 1966.
Because of the broad wording of key sections of Dodd’s bill, I noted – as NRA’s Frank Orth had – that regardless how the sponsors claimed the law would be enforced, it would allow regulations that went far beyond its obvious provisions. Sure enough, ten years after the law passed, when I was the Executive Director of NRA-ILA, the BATF attempted to rewrite the regulations to create a total registration system.
I gingerly mentioned in the 1966 article that during the uproar after the Kennedy assassination NRA had endorsed the Dodd bill, even after he had amended it apply to long guns. I was shocked by that endorsement, which I learned about while reading the hearings, particularly since NRA had led the members to believe they were opposing it. The NRA Board, after getting hammered by members, rescinded the endorsement a few months later.
One outright error in the piece was my claim that Congressional committee chairmen usually didn’t preside over their own bills, much less badger the bills’ opponents. It was and is done that way all the time, but I didn’t know it until I had spent some time on Capitol Hill. I got a first-hand taste in early 1967 when, as editor of Gun Week, I testified against the Dodd bill before Dodd in his Senate subcommittee and before House co-sponsor and Judiciary Committee Chairman Emanuel Cellar (D-N.J.).
I know of only one earlier attempt to determine whether gun laws had any relationship to crime rates. That was an obscure study done in 1960 by the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Library.
The Wisconsin legislature, under pressure to enact additional gun laws, had asked their researchers to determine whether new gun laws were likely to have any positive effect. As I wrote in G&A, "That report, which includes several pages of detailed comparisons of crime to gun laws and other factors, concludes: ‘From the foregoing statistics it would be difficult to determine the effect that either licensing or nonlicensing of firearms has on the extent of crime in a State, particularly upon the murder rate per 100,000 population.’" (About 1967 that study was replicated and expanded by Dr. A.S. Krug, and widely distributed by National Shooting Sports Foundation.)
My effort was miniscule compared to the massive studies which have followed it, particularly University of Massachusetts (Amherst) Sociologist James D. Wright’s review (funded with an almost-$200,000 grant by the Carter Administration’s Justice Department and grudgingly released by the Reagan Justice Department in 1981).
In 1978 ILA’s researchers and I had met with Dr. Blair Ewing of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which conducted criminological research for the Justice Department. I complained that all LEAA’s research was focussed on what type of gun law to pass rather than whether gun laws reduced crime, their ostensible purpose.
Because ILA had just succeeded in cutting $4.2 million from BATF’s budget for attempting the previously mentioned national firearms registration regulations, we had the attention of all Washington’s bureaucrats – and LEAA was doubly nervous, for their agency was about to be eliminated.
As a result of that meeting, and confident that objective research would show the benefits of "gun control" laws, LEAA granted almost $200,000 to Dr. Wright, a published advocate for "gun control" laws. To the undoubted surprise and disappointment of his sponsors, Dr. Wright really was objective. He told me several years later that he expected his research to make him "the hero of the gun control movement" because he expected to determine what type of gun law was most effective. Instead, he became their goat.
Dr. Wright’s research found that no gun law or combination of gun laws could be shown to have reduced crime. His book Under The Gun, by Wright, Rossi and Roll, is based on that earthshaking study.
The next major milepost was Florida State University Criminologist Gary Kleck’s surveys which indicate up to two million crimes per year are foiled because of self-defense with privately owned guns – most of which never had to be fired. He describes his work in Point Blank. Like Wright, Kleck’s findings were doubly effective because he describes himself as a "doctrinaire liberal."
Dr. John Lott Jr.’s massive 1997 study went the next critical step. He statistically analyzed the crime rates in the 3,000-plus U.S. counties following the passage of concealed carry licensing laws during the past two decades.
After controlling for virtually every conceiveable factor, from demographics to imprisonment rates, he showed that arming the citizenry through concealed carry laws had resulted in significant crime reductions. He also predicted the percentage of crime reduction and lives saved if more states passed such laws.
And to make his message explicit, he titled his book More Guns, Less Crime, (University of Chicago Press).
Dr. Lott’s heresy, and his evangelism for concealed carry laws (though he didn’t even own a gun when he began his research), has brought him under ferocious personal attack. But his enemies can’t challenge his finding – except by twisting the statistics as Tom Dodd pioneered in the 1960’s.
These three landmark studies provide all the evidence one could wish that, as I wrote a third of a century ago, prohibitive gun legislation "has been attempted for half a century. It has not worked. It will not work."
See Part 2
