Harvard Law School Gun study-

[Blackhawkpaul]

Here is the link:

Harvard Gun Study

 

http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/j...auseronline.pdf

 

And this came out of the Harvard Law School of all places! This needs to be widely distributed! Everything below my name here at the top is a directly copied quote (plagiarized if you prefer )

Lee.

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In fact, many nations with high gun ownership have significantly lower murder and suicide rates.

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Harvard Journal Study of Worldwide Data Obliterates Notion that Gun Ownership Correlates with Violence

Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy Confirms that Reducing Gun Ownership by Law-Abiding Citizens Does Nothing to Reduce Violence Worldwide

 

By now, any informed American is familiar with Dr. John R. Lott, Jr.'s famous axiom of "More Guns, Less Crime." In other words , American jurisdictions that allow law-abiding citizens to exercise their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms are far safer and more crime-free than jurisdictions that enact stringent "gun control" laws.

 

Very simply, the ability of law-abiding citizens to possess firearms has helped reduce violent crime in America.

 

Now, a Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy study shows that this is not just an American phenomenon. According to the study, worldwide gun ownership rates do not correlate with higher murder or suicide rates. In fact, many nations with high gun ownership have significantly lower murder and suicide rates.

 

In their piece entitled Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and some Domestic Evidence, Don B. Kates and Gary Mauser eviscerate "the mantra that more guns mean more deaths and that fewer guns, therefore, mean fewer deaths." In so doing, the authors provide fascinating historical insight in to astronomical murder rates in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and they dispel the myths that widespread gun ownership is somehow unique to the United States or that America suffers from the developed world's highest murder rate.

 

To the contrary, they establish that Soviet murder rates far exceeded American murder rates, and continue to do so today, despite Russia's extremely stringent gun prohibitions. By 2004, they show, the Russian murder rate was nearly four times higher than the American rate.

 

More fundamentally, Dr. Kates and Dr. Mauser demonstrate that other developed nations such as Norway, Finland, Germany, France and Denmark maintain high rates of gun ownership, yet possess murder rates lower than other developed nations in which gun ownership is much more restricted.

 

For example, handguns are outlawed in Luxembourg, and gun ownership extremely rare, yet its murder rate is nine times greater than in Germany, which has one of the highest gun ownership rates in Europe. As another example, Hungary's murder rate is nearly three times higher than nearby Austria's, but Austria's gun ownership rate is over eight times higher than Hungary's. "Norway," they note, "has far and away Western Europe's highest household gun ownership rate (32%), but also its lowest murder rate. The Netherlands," in contrast, "has the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe (1.9%) ... yet the Dutch gun murder rate is higher than the Norwegian."

 

Dr. Kates and Dr. Mauser proceed to dispel the mainstream misconception that lower rates of violence in Europe are somehow attributable to gun control laws. Instead, they reveal, "murder in Europe was at an all-time low before the gun controls were introduced." As the authors note, "strict controls did not stem the general trend of ever-growing violent crime throughout the post-WWII industrialized world."

 

Citing England, for instance, they reveal that "when it had no firearms restrictions [in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries], England had little violent crime." By the late 1990s, however, "England moved from stringent controls to a complete ban on all handguns and many types of long guns." As a result, "by the year 2000, violent crime had so increased that England and Wales had Europe's highest violent crime rate, far surpassing even the United States." In America, on the other hand, "despite constant and substantially increasing gun ownership, the United States saw progressive and dramatic reductions in criminal violence in the 1990s."

 

Critically, Dr. Kates and Dr. Mauser note that "the fall in the American crime rate is even more impressive when compared with the rest of the world," where 18 of the 25 countries surveyed by the British Home Office suffered violent crime increases during that same period.

 

Furthermore, the authors highlight the important point that while the American gun murder rate often exceeds that in other nations, the overall per capita murder rate in other nations (including other means such as strangling, stabbing, beating, etc.) is oftentimes much higher than in America.

 

The reason that gun ownership doesn't correlate with murder rates, the authors show, is that violent crime rates are determined instead by underlying cultural factors. "Ordinary people," they note, "simply do not murder." Rather, "the murderers are a small minority of extreme antisocial aberrants who manage to obtain guns whatever the level of gun ownership" in their society.

 

Therefore, "banning guns cannot alleviate the socio-cultural and economic factors that are the real determinants of violence and crime rates." According to Dr. Kates and Dr. Mauser, "there is no reason for laws prohibiting gun possession by ordinary, law-abiding, responsible adults because such people virtually never commit murder. If one accepts that such adults are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than to commit it, disar ming them becomes not just unproductive but counter-productive."

 

John Lott couldn't have stated it better himself.

[ilphil]

Imagine that...law abiding people don't go around committing murder. It took a couple Harvard Phds to figure that out?

 

Why wasn't this a headline story in the New York Times or Tribune?

And it definitely should have been a lead story on CNN.

Oh, but wait a minute, it tells the truth not the truth as the media would prefer it to be.

 

That's why the story never saw the light of day.

[junglebob]

I read somewhere that some European countries only count murders when there is a conviction for murder. Also some U.K. police officers falsified records so the crime rate was lower to encourage tourism.

 

I read a article about a company that sells protective vests that is getting a large number of orders from parents buying them for their grade school children because of the high incidence of students beeing stabbed with knives.

[junglebob]

P.S. That company selling the vests was in the U.K. selling to parents. They had previously just sold to law enforcement. The owner said that they get orders for vests so small they can't supply them.

[junglebob]

I read somewhere that some European countries only count murders when there is a conviction for murder. Also some U.K. police officers falsified records so the crime rate was lower to encourage tourism.

 

I read a article about a company that sells protective vests that is getting a large number of orders from parents buying them for their grade school children because of the high incidence of students beeing stabbed with knives.

[Ocellairs]

I read somewhere that some European countries only count murders when there is a conviction for murder. Also some U.K. police officers falsified records so the crime rate was lower to encourage tourism.

 

I read a article about a company that sells protective vests that is getting a large number of orders from parents buying them for their grade school children because of the high incidence of students beeing stabbed with knives.

 

 

...I really would be interested in a link about the UK Bobbies falsifying records!

[GarandFan]

Thanks Blackhawk: I've head about this recent Kates and Mauser study, but had yet to download, print, and read. Your link makes that easy!

 

But just to clarify something....this study is not a "Harvard study", even though it was published in the "Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy." Journals like that accept articles and studies from academic types worldwide, not just those done at Harvard or by Harvard associates. The editor of the journal then submits it for "peer review" which is 2-3 other academics that know a lot about the subject of the paper. They attempt to review it as objectively as they can, and also to suggest ways the authors can improve their study, the analysis, the writing, etc. I say objective...they try to be objective and to get the truth because their reputations are on the line. They want to get it right for their own good. Then the authors are given these recommendations, and they submit a revised version. Then if it is acceptable, it's published. The rejection rate for some of those journals can be as high as 75% (meaning 75% of the papers submitted are so crappy that they won't publish them).

 

Don Kates is at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco, probably a private organization.

 

Gary Mauser is a professor at Simon Fraser University in BC, Canada.

 

But that their study was published in this particular journal means alot....it's a high-quality, well-known journal, "prestigious" if you will. Basically, they publish only what is considered top-quality research. I love to see articles like these in journals like that.

 

I suspect that the Supreme Court justices have, or are reading, this very paper.