Spencer: Gun-control proposals are useless

[larrymeyer]

I intend to write him and thank him for a thoughful editorial

Posted on Tue, Dec 11, 2007
Spencer: Gun-control proposals are useless
By GIL SPENCER, Times Columnist, gspencer@delcotimes.com


It’s nice to see that state Rep. Thaddeus Kirkland, police chiefs John Finnegan and Mike Chitwood and Gov. Ed Rendell all agree on one thing. It’s just too bad that what they agree on happens to be more useless gun control laws.

At a rally in Harrisburg, they gathered for the benefit of the media to jawbone the issue.

“Pennsylvanians know what’s right and they want to see common-sense, anti-violence measures enacted,” said Rendell. “We need lawmakers to listen and to act now.”

Or what? The Black Caucus, led by Kirkland, D-159, will protest by walking off the House floor again? Big whup.

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Having had his proposed legislation blocked, Rendell and the others say the rally was just their way of keeping the issue alive.

They have the people on their side, they say.

Rendell cited polls that suggest 96 percent of Pennsylvanians favor requiring the reporting of lost and stolen guns, 70 percent support limiting handgun purchases to one per month and 60 percent approve allowing local communities to decide their own handgun laws.

But all you have to do is ask those questions a different way and those numbers would plummet.

To the first, add “under penalty of a fine and possible imprisonment;” to the second, simply ask a follow-up like: Should we also limit the sale of cars, cheeseburgers, or golf clubs?

After all, who needs to buy more than one car a month? Very few people. Is that a good enough reason to outlaw such sales?

The easiest one to dispatch is the last. The Second Amendment may not be some people’s favorite, but the founders did think it important enough to include in the Constitution. How about allowing local communities to decide how far to curtail the First Amendment? I don’t think so.

The real problem with all this is the complete ineffectiveness of the whole regime of gun-control measures that have been put in place since the 1960s.

Not even the Centers for Disease Control, hardly a conservative pro-gun organization, can find any evidence that such laws are effective.

Yet, despite a complete lack of supporting evidence that their regulations have worked to reduce gun violence, anti-gun activists continue in their mission to make it more difficult and socially unacceptable to privately own firearms. And they continue to misconstrue the social science in study after study.

For instance, a few years back, the University of Pennsylvania said in a press release, “If you keep a gun in your home you dramatically increase the odds that you will die of a gunshot wound.”

The implication being that owning a gun is, in and of itself, not only dangerous, but very dangerous.

What’s being confused here is the difference between correlation and causation.

As law professor Eugene Volokh has pointed out before:

“Gun ownership is correlated with gun deaths. But that two things are correlated doesn’t prove that one causes the other. The sex-crime rate is correlated over time with the use of air conditioning, but not because air conditioning causes sex crime; rather, both rise during the summer months. Likewise, whether someone in your home has been to the hospital recently is correlated with death in your home, but not because hospital care tends to kill people (though sometimes it does). Rather, both hospital stays and deaths often have a common cause: serious illness.”

Think it through.

Can it be a surprise to anyone that a disproportionate number of the victims of gun violence are drug dealers, gang members or other criminals? Is it surprising that many of them own guns, themselves, almost always illegally?

As Volokh writes, “Criminals do dangerous things and deal with dangerous people ... Hardcore criminals are especially likely to own guns — and to be killed by guns.”

So what about all the innocent people killed by gun violence? How do we better protect them? It’s pretty simple really. You lock up and keep locked up violent criminals. Pass laws and procedures to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally deranged. And you not only allow law-abiding citizens to keep and carry guns, you actively encourage them to do so.

Such advice is horrifying to anti-gun activists. They believe, contrary to all evidence, that if citizens are allowed to carry concealed weapons on the street, they will use them at the slightest provocation. (They don’t. And every study done in the last 10 years proves that.)

The scared-of-guns crowd also ignores the hundreds of thousands of times each year that law-abiding citizens protect themselves, their children and their communities by brandishing and/or using firearms.

Most recently, a female church volunteer in Colorado Springs shot a crazed gunman on a killing spree. Moments later, he fired a bullet, taking his own life. If not for this church-goer being armed, it’s conceivable many more of her fellow worshippers that day would have been killed.

If that church had been a sanctimonious “gun-free zone” like the one the administrators at Virginia Tech imposed on their campus, 33 people might have been murdered, instead of just four.

Disarming law-abiding citizens does nothing to help protect any community.

So to gun-banners, if you want to impose a gun-free zone at your church, school, community or place of business, fine, just take responsibility for it. That’s the idea behind the Gun-Free Zone Liability Act.

Any deaths that occur as a result of your preventing other citizens from carrying weapons for their self-protection, you can be held liable for, personally and financially.

Such laws have been introduced in Arizona and Georgia. They have as much chance of being passed as the gun bans do. But that’s fine. As long as the one cancels out the other.

Gil Spencer’s column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. E-mail him at gspencer@delcotimes.com.