Guns and crime
Both sides actively debate the relevance of self-defense in modern society. Some scholars, notably John Lott, claim to have discovered a positive correlation between gun control legislation and crimes in which criminals confront citizens.
Some criminals have asserted that they do not obey gun control laws. The numbers of lives saved by gun ownership are disputed.
See gun politics
Is this worth wordsmithing in?
- The 1993 US Brady Bill is an example of a gun control law that has been generally correlated with a decrease, not an increase, in overall crime levels. Critics argue that the reduction was more driven by improving economic and other factors than by the gun control regulations. Because the Brady Bill was a national law, the measurement of its results must be treated as a single sample. That is, it has no more nor less weight than the findings after a change in the laws of a single state or municipality.
Robert Ehrlich, in his book Nine Crazy Ideas in Science (ISBN 0691094950), examines this issue in Chapter 2, "More Guns Means Less Crime". He revisits John Lott's original data and concludes that the data was somewhat manipulated to "prove" a point. For example, many graphs are fits to the data and do not show the data itself. The raw data does not support Lott's thesis the way the fitted graph did. Ehrlich's conclusion is that more guns does not mean less crime, though it does not necessarily mean more crime either.
Referenced By
Sullivan Act
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