Posted by Phil Lee (216.250.238.24) on September 22, 2001 at 21:08:
Violence with handguns is significantly increasing in Britain despite a total ban on handguns since 1997, proving once again that in any society there are always enough guns available, legally or illegally, to arm the violent.
The true determinant of violence is the number of violent people running freely on the streets, not the availability of a particular weapon. Guns contribute to murder in the trivial sense that they help violent people kill. But owning guns does not turn responsible, law-abiding people into killers. In fact, ownership of guns by responsible people actually reduces violence as research by Professor John Lott and others have shown. And why should we find that surprising? If the violent have all the guns they can use, what other effect would you expect from arming the law-abiding but occasionally a violent crime would be prevented by an armed decent citizen?
If the general availability of guns were as important a contributor to violence as the Brady Bunch gun-grabbers imply, the vast increase in firearm ownership in America during the past two decades should have led to a vast increase in homicide. Instead, murders with guns have been decreasing since 1992 despite a 20% increase in the number of handguns in circulation.
While the number of handguns have doubled since the early 1970's, handgun murders actually are at the lowest level since the 1950's. Homicides have held constant or declined for every major population group except young urban black men and gun ownership is far less common among urban blacks than among whites or rural blacks.