Op-Ed: Gun Debate Is Hardly Over
By John R. Lott, Jr.
The Supreme Court may have confirmed that Americans have the right to own guns for protection, but the gun debate is hardly over.
The District of Columbia, whose handgun ban was struck down by the Supreme Court, is still planning on banning most handguns.
And the court decision has spurred the media into overdrive to paint guns as dangerous to their owners.
No one who has taken even a quick glance at the crime data can seriously argue that the D.C. gun ban lowered murder or violent crime rates.
The concerns being raised are not the threat from criminals, but that guns pose a risk to their owners.
In particular, buying a gun and having it in your home is said to increase the likelihood of suicide.
Mike Stobbe for the Associated Press emphasized the problem by pointing out that the majority of gun deaths are suicides.
He also noticed that Supreme Court Justice Breyer mentioned his concerns about gun suicides 14 times in his dissent.
By contrast, he mentioned accidental gun deaths rated only three times.
That is not surprising, given that the accidental death rate from guns is so low not only absolutely but in comparison to other common household items.
A nationally syndicated article by Shankar Vedantam, a Washington Post columnist, has a similar concern.
Vedantam points to a 1991 study in the New England Journal of Medicine that claims that after examining data from 1968 to 1987, "the gun ban correlated with an abrupt 25 percent decline in suicides in the city" and that the "decline was entirely driven by a decline in firearm-related suicide."
Yes, suicides did indeed decline after the ban.
However, it is unlikely to have much to do with banning guns as non-gun suicides fell even slightly faster than gun suicides...
Click here to read the entire Op-Ed at FOXNews.com.
Related News:
D.C. Rejects Heller's Handgun Application
- 1274 reads
