Personal tools
 
Views

Argument:"Guns don’t kill people – people kill people"

From Debatepedia

Jump to: navigation, search
[Edit]

Parent debate

[Edit]

Extended argument and supporting evidence

  • "Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International Evidence", Don B. Kates and Gary A. Mauser, 2006 - "This article examines a broad range of international data that bear on two distinct but interrelated questions: first, whether widespread firearm access is an important contributing factor in murder and/or suicide, and second, whether the introduction of laws that restrict general access to firearms has been successful in reducing violent crime, homicide or suicide. Our conclusion from the available data is that suicide, murder and violent crime rates are determined by basic social, economic and/or cultural factors with the availability of any particular one of the world’s myriad deadly instrument being irrelevant."
  • Argument that many states have low availability of guns, but high murder rates: Kates and Mauser cite the former USSR states as an example of states that, despite very stringent gun-control laws that have largely disarmed its citizens, have had some of the highest murder rates in the world from the 60s to present. As of 1998-2004, Russian murder rates were nearly four times higher than American rates. According to Kates and Mauser, "much higher murder rates than the U.S. ever had also characterize the Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and various other now-independent European parts of the former U.S.S.R. Thus in the U.S., the former Soviet Union, and current-day Russia, 'homicide results suggest that where guns are scarce, other weapons are substituted in killings.'"
  • Argument that many states have a high availability of guns, but low murder rates: - While American gun ownership is quite high, and with a high murder rate as well, many other developing nations have high gun rates, but much lower murder rates, including Norway, Finland, Germany, France, Switzerland, Greece, Denmark.
  • Argument that high gun-ownership among normal citizens may help protect society and lower crime: He concludes that concealed hand-guns have a positive effect in reducing crime-rates. The basic argument is that the concealed carrying of weapons by responsible citizens enables defensive crime-control actions by such citizens in heated moments. Using crime statistics from 3,000 U.S. counties over 18 years, he concludes that where right-to-carry laws are enacted, the crime rates - particularly the rates of the violent crimes of murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault - immediately go down significantly, and continue to go down over time. He further works out that the drop in the crime rate in any jurisdiction is proportional to the number of permits issued in that jurisdiction. He concludes that the greatest benefit in terms of reduced crime due to concealed carry is enjoyed by women, blacks, and residents of densely populated urban areas.
    • Evidence in England that supports the above claims: Joyce Lee Malcolm's book, "Guns and Violence, The English Experience" (2002) concludes that there is a "negative correlation" between the wide-spread gun-ownership and death rates, meaning that areas with more guns held by good citizens in England have apparently experienced lower levels of gun-violence.
    • Colin Greenwood, Cambridge University Institute, "Firearms control: Armed Crime and Firearms Control in England and Whales", 1972[1] - "Half a century of strict controls has ended, perversely, with a far greater use of [handguns] in crime than ever before. No matter how one approaches the figures one is forced to the rather startling conclusion that the use of firearms in crime was very much less [in England before 1920] when there were no controls of any sort and when anyone, convicted criminal or lunatic, could buy any type of firearm without restriction."
    • Contention that legal gun owners very rarely commit crimes, and thus, that increasing their weapon use has little potential to increase crime: "Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International Evidence", Don B. Kates and Gary A. Mauser, 2006 - "One reason the extent of gun ownership in a society does not spur the murder rate is that murderers are not spread evenly throughout the population. Analysis of perpetrator studies shows that violent criminals, (and this is especially true of murderers) 'almost always have a long history of involvement in criminal behavior.' So it would not appreciably raise violence if all law abiding, responsible people had firearms because they are not the ones who rape, rob or murder. By the same token violent crime would not fall if guns were totally banned to civilians. As the respective examples of Luxembourg and Russia suggest, the kinds of people who murder will either find guns despite severe controls or will find other weapons with which to kill."
    • A number of sources cite the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre as an instance in which, if a good citizen and student had been armed and killed Cho Seung-hui, that many lives would have been saved.[2]
    • [Hans Toch & Alan Lizotte, "Research and Policy: The Case of Gun Control", 1992] - "the fact that national patterns show little violent crime where guns are most dense implies that guns do not elicit aggression in any meaningful way. Quite the contrary, these findings suggest that high saturations of guns in places, or something correlated with that condition, inhibit illegal aggression."
    • Jacob Sullum of Reason Magazine 4/18/07 - "In shootings at other schools, armed students or employees have restrained gunmen, possibly preventing additional murders. Four years ago at Appalachian Law School in Grundy, Virginia, a man who had killed the dean, a professor, and a student was subdued by two students who ran to their cars and grabbed their guns. In 1997 an assistant principal at a public high school in Pearl, Mississippi, likewise retrieved a handgun from his car and used it to apprehend a student who had killed three people. Not only can guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens save lives in situations like these; they may even make such situations less likely."
    • Argument that murderers are almost always "bad" citizens with previous records of crime, opposed to "good" citizens that were tempted to commit crimes by the availability of guns (making the availability of guns a mute factor in inducing "ordinary" citizens to commit crime): "Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International Evidence", Don B. Kates and Gary A. Mauser, 2006 - "Insofar as studies (of which those detailed below are but a representative sample) focus on perpetrators they show that neither a majority, nor many, nor virtually any murderers are ordinary 'law abiding folks', 'law abiding citizens.' Rather, almost all murderers are extreme aberrants with life histories of violence, psychopathology, substance abuse and other dangerous behaviors. 'The vast majority of persons involved in life-threatening violence have a long criminal record with many prior contacts with the justice system."[48] Thus homicide – [whether] of a stranger or [of] someone known to the offender -- ‘is usually part of a pattern of violence, engaged in by people who are known ... as violence prone.’'[49] Though only 15% of Americans have criminal records,[50] roughly 90 percent of adult murderers have adult records, with an average adult career of six or more years, including four major felonies.[51]" (See this section of the essay for extended evidence on this point [pg 20-25])
    • Contention that American history shows a strong correlation between periods of broad diffusion of guns and periods of relatively low crime-rates: "Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International Evidence", Don B. Kates and Gary A. Mauser, 2006 - "Whether or not guns were the cause, homicide steadily declined over a period of five centuries coincident with their invention and diffusion throughout the continent. From the 17th through the early 19th Centuries in America murder was rare, and rarely involved guns, though gun ownership was universal by law and 'colonial Americans were the most heavily armed people in the world.' By the 1840s gun ownership had declined but homicide began a spectacular rise through the early 1860s. From the end of the Civil War to the turning of the 20th Century America experienced a tremendous spurt in ownership of higher capacity revolvers and rifles than had ever previously existed but murder sharply declined.[101]"
      • Daniel D. Polsby and Don B. Kates, "Long Term Non-Relationship of Firearm Availability to Homicide", Homicide Studies, 2000[3]. This study compared the number of guns to murder rates, and found that over the 25 year period 1973-97 the number of handguns owned by Americans had increased by 163%, and the number of all firearms had increased by 103%. Over that period, however, the murder rate declined by 27.7%. It continued its decline in the years 1998, 1999 and 2000 despite the addition in each year of two-three million handguns, and 5 million firearms of all kinds. By the end of 2000, the total number of guns in America was well over 260 million – 951.1 guns for every 1,000 Americans. Yet, the study points out that the murder rate had returned to the relatively low level prior to the increases of the mid-‘60s-‘70s period.
  • "Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review", National Academy of Sciences, 2004 - In its evaluation of 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications and some empirical research of its own, it did not identify any gun control that had reduced violent crime, suicide or gun accidents.
  • [http://kei.org.ua/files/MarkShaffer.PDF Gary Kleck, Kovandzic, Tomislav and Mark E. Schaffer. "Gun Prevalence, Homicide Rates and

Causality: A GMM Approach to Endogeneity Bias," Center for Economic Policy Research, 2006]

Retrieved from "http://debatepedia.idebate.org/en/index.php/Argument:%22Guns_don%E2%80%99t_kill_people_%E2%80%93_people_kill_people%22"

Problem with the site? 

Tweet a bug on bugtwits
.