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Perspectives
on Guns
How
to Stop Mass Public Shootings
Commentary
By John R. Lott, Jr.
When
citizens are allowed to carry concealed weapons, death and injuries from
shootings decline.
It is too bad Barbra
Streisand won’t debate Charlton Heston over the meaning of the 2nd
Amendment. Yet, as entertaining as that debate would be, the more important
question is: Would gun control have prevented the horrific shootings discussed
in her movie based on Colin Ferguson’s rampage, which took six lives on the
Long Island Railroad in 1993?
In Streisand’s movie, the
solution is clear: more regulations of guns. However, what might appear to be
the most obvious policy may actually cost lives. When gun-control laws are
passed, it is law-abiding citizens, not would-be criminals, who adhere to them.
Police officers or armed guards cannot be stationed everywhere, so gun-control
laws risk creating situations in which the good guys cannot defend themselves.
Other countries have
followed a different solution. Twenty or so years ago in Israel, there were many
instances of terrorists pulling out machine guns and firing away at civilians in
public. However, with expanded concealed-handgun use by Israeli citizens,
terrorists soon found ordinary people pulling pistols on them. Suffice it to
say, terrorists in Israel no longer engage in such public shootings. The one
recent shooting of schoolchildren in the Middle East further illustrates these
points. On March 13, 1997, seven Israeli girls were shot to death by a Jordanian
soldier while they visited Jordan’s so-called Island of Peace. The Times
reported that the Israelis had "complied with Jordanian requests to leave
their weapons behind when they entered the border enclave. Otherwise, they might
have been able to stop the shooting, several parents said."
Hardly mentioned in the
massive news coverage of the school-related shootings during the past year is
how they ended. Two of the four shootings were stopped by a citizen displaying a
gun. In the October 1997 shooting spree at a high school in Pearl, Miss., which
left two students dead, an assistant principal retrieved a gun from his car and
physically immobilized the shooter while waiting for the police.
More recently, the
school-related shooting in Edinboro, Pa., which left one teacher dead, was
stopped only after a bystander pointed a shotgun at the shooter, when he started
to reload his gun. The police did not arrive for another 10 minutes. Who knows
how many lives were saved by these prompt responses?
Anecdotal stories are not
sufficient to resolve this debate. Together with my colleague William Landes, I
have compiled data on all the multiple-victim public shootings occurring in the
U. S. from 1977 to 1995. Included were incidents where at least two people were
killed or injured in a public place; to focus on the type of shooting seen in
the Ferguson rampage, we excluded gang wars or shootings that were the byproduct
of another crime, such as robbery. The U.S. averaged 21 such shootings annually,
with an average of 1.8 people killed and 2.7 wounded in each one.
We examined a range of
different gun laws, such as waiting periods as well as methods of deterrence,
such as the death penalty. However, only one policy was found to reduce deaths
and injuries from these shootings: allowing law-abiding citizens to carry
concealed handguns.
The effect of
"shall-issue" concealed handgun laws, which give adults the right to
carry concealed handguns if they do not have a criminal record or a history of
significant mental illness, was dramatic. Thirty-one states now have such laws.
When states passed them during the 19 years we studied, the number of
multiple-victim public shootings declined by 84%. Deaths from these shootings
plummeted on average by 90%, injuries by 82%. Higher arrest rates and increased
use of the death penalty slightly reduced the incidence of these events, but we
could not conclusively determine such an effect.
Unfortunately, much of the
public policy debate is driven by lopsided coverage of gun use. Horrific events
like the Colin Ferguson shooting receive massive news coverage, as they should,
but the 2.5 million times each year that people use guns defensively --
including cases in which public shootings are stopped before they happen -- are
ignored.
Concealed handgun laws also
deter other crimes from occurring. I recently analyzed the FBI’s crime data
for all 3,054 counties in the United States from 1977 to 1994. After concealed
handgun laws have been in effect for 5 years, murders declined by at least 15%,
rapes by 9% and robberies by 11%. Permit holders were found to be extremely
law-abiding, and data on accidental deaths and suicides indicate there were no
increases.
The possibility of a
law-abiding citizen carrying a concealed handgun is apparently enough to
convince many would-be killers that they will not be successful. Without
permitting law-abiding citizens the right to carry guns, we risk leaving victims
as sitting ducks.
John R. Lott, Jr., the John
M. Olin Law and Economics Fellow at the University of Chicago School of Law, is
the author of "More Guns, Less Crime" (University of Chicago Press,
1998)
Copyright
Los Angeles Times
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