Op-ed: Gun Control Emotions vs. Gun Control Facts

by John R. Lott

Just 24 hours after the shooting in Tucson, politicians were calling for more gun control. And the drumbeat has continued.

On Sunday, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called for using the information supplied on people's applications to join the military to determine whether they will be banned from buying guns. Sens.Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Richard Lugar, R-Ind., promised a new push for renewing at least part of the federal assault weapons ban. The previous week had been filled with calls for everything from gun show regulations to a thousand-foot gun-free zone around politicians.

But while the emotional reaction to a mass shooting is understandable, the fact is that some of the proposals would at best only make people feel better and at worst make them less safe.

Schumer's proposal, for example, would try to pick up criminal activities included in military applications for which there are no criminal convictions. But the military has a good reason to maintain confidentiality when it interviews new recruits: It wants to get the most honest answers it can.

With Schumer's proposed change, new recruits would be more reluctant to tell the military that they'd been smoking marijuana, for example, knowing that any answers they gave could haunt them the rest of their lives, with serious consequences such as being banned for life from being able to own a gun.

And while it would be wonderful if these background checks were able to keep pot smokers, criminals or the insane from getting guns, existing regulations have been extremely ineffective at keeping those prohibiting from buying guns from getting them.

Indeed, the evidence shows that the only people inconvenienced by the Brady Act background checks for gun purchases -- which have been in place since 1994 -- are law-abiding citizens. In fact, over 99.9 percent of those purchases initially flagged as being illegal under the law were later determined to be misidentified.

Take the numbers for 2008, the latest year for which data are available. The 78,906 initial denials resulted in only 147 cases involving banned individuals trying to purchase guns. Of those 147 cases, prosecutors thought the evidence was strong enough to proceed on only 105, and they won convictions in just 43. But few of these 43 cases stopped career criminals or those who posed real threats. The typical case was someone who had misdemeanor convictions for an offense he didn't realize prevented him from buying a gun.

Given this, it's not surprising that no academic studies by economists or criminologists have found that the Brady Act or other state background checks have reduced violent crime.

Click here to read the entire op-ed at AOL.com.