Another Clinton-era try to prove ''more guns = more crime'' goes down in flames
Last year, the Centers for Disease Control released results of a sweeping federal review (started during the Clinton-era) of the nation's gun control laws - including mandatory waiting periods and bans on certain weapons.
The task force reviewed 51 published studies about the effectiveness of eight types of gun- control laws. The laws included bans on specific firearms or ammunition, measures barring felons from buying guns, and mandatory waiting periods and firearm registration. In every case, a CDC task force found "insufficient evidence to determine effectiveness."
Fourteen months later, another government study, this time by the National Academies' National Research Council, and again originating during the Clinton years, has failed again to find any evidence that gun control works:
Like the CDC before it, the NRC has concluded that since evidence supporting the idea that gun control can reduce crime was not found, more research needs to be done.
As Dr. John Lott pointed out in a L.A. Times op-ed from 2001, even THESE findings deserve careful scrutiny, because "government officials simply cannot resist injecting politics into anything they touch."
Click on the "Read More..." link below for the entire op-ed, written by Dr. John Lott and published in the Los Angeles Times at the outset of this very same National Academy of Sciences Research project.
August 31, 2001
Los Angeles Times
Gun Panel Hears With an Ear Shut
Isn't it obvious that the government should fund academic research?
Yet as clear as the benefits seem, there is a downside: Government officials simply cannot resist injecting politics into anything they touch. Denying that politics enters science is like denying that politics plays a role in what weapons systems are developed by the military. Surely the academics who stand togain the research money for stem cell or AIDS research, for
example, are prone to exaggerate what they hope to accomplish.
But there is a more insidious problem from government funding: Politicians
want research that supports their positions. Only certain types of questions get to be studied, with funding restricted to select,
pre-approved researchers or institutions.
Take the new National Academy of Sciences panel set to study firearms research. The panel, meeting for the first time this week was started during the last days of the Clinton administration. Its report
is scheduled to be released right before the 2004 elections.
The project scope set out by the Clinton people was carefully planned to
examine only the negative side of guns. Rather than compare how firearms
facilitate both harm and self-defense, the panel was asked only to examine "firearm violence" or how "firearms may become embedded in [a] community." It is difficult to come up with a positive spin on terms
like "embedded."
President Clinton could never bring himself to mention that guns can be used for self-defense, so it is not surprising that the project scope never mentions defensive use. But there are academic studies
showing that people use guns defensively 2 million times a year. Failing to consider this makes it difficult to see how any panel could seriously "evaluate various
prevention, intervention and control strategies." What if a new law disarms law-abiding citizens rather than criminals? Might that not increase crime?
Moreover, while not everyone on the committee has taken a public stand on
firearms, roughly half the members are known for supporting gun control. One
member, Benjamin R. Civiletti, attorney general in the Carter administration,
has said, "The nation can no longer afford to let the gun lobby's distortion of the Constitution cripple every reasonable attempt to implement an effective
national policy toward guns and crime." Another, Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, wrote that despite there not being any research showing that the Brady Act had reduced crime, opposition to the act rests on emotions that are "immune to scientific assessment."
Also, it is odd that the panel is accepting supplemental funding only from
private foundations, such as the Joyce Foundation, that have exclusively
supported gun control in the past.
So how well does this panel represent the academic spectrum on this issue?
Pretty poorly. Two years ago, 294 academics from universities such as
Harvard, Stanford, UCLA, the University of Chicago and Northwestern signed an
open letteron gun control asking that Congress "before enacting yet
more new laws...investigate whether many of the existing laws may have contributed to the problems we currently face." These academics concluded that "new legislation is ill-advised." Yet not a single one of them was included on the National Academy of Sciences panel.
Is this how we want government research money spent--on a stacked panel asked to examine one side of an issue and report right before a presidential election? Is this what science really means to the U.S.
government?
John R. Lott Jr., a resident scholar at
the American Enterprise, Institute, is the author of "More Guns, Less Crime"
(University of, Chicago Press, 2000)
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