Bishop Hill Shall we try something different?
Apr 7, 2007 Crime
Another day, another murder.
And another. There's more too. We are beset by violence. I've listed a few of the other headlines from the BBC England page below:
Woman quizzed over stab death
Two held after woman stabbed
Man charged over fatal stabbing
Gunshots fired at car and house
Woman stabbed by intruder
Body of man found in garden
Man arrested after fire at flats
Man suffers serious head injuries
Anyone would think it was a good day to bury bad news.
If anyone from the metropolitan elite can rouse themselves sufficiently, we'll probably get the calls for tighter laws and fiercer punishments (these just days after announcing that we were going to have to put fewer people in prison). Lots of handwringing too, if experience is anything to go by, and if they get out of bed the right side, the powers that be might even declare knife or firearms amnesties which are at least good for a photocall.
The level of violent crime is now getting to the stage where anyone who is really thinking about the policy implications has to be asking themselves if we are barking up the right tree. We have had progressively tighter controls over arms for nearly a hundred years. It would be nice if we could point at any significant falls in violent crime to accompany these, but we can't. At every step of the way the numbers have just kept rising.
Can anyone really conclude from this that further laws will work? Where is the evidence? Of course there isn't any. Believing in legislation as the answer to violent crime is a matter of convenience for politicians, who find it gives them the appearance of activity. For others it's a religious belief engendered by the "yuk" factor they feel for weaponry. They have no choice but to back the politicians.
These are not rational approaches to the issue.
How about something completely different? How about repealing all the firearms laws, and take us back to the situation at the start of the twentieth century, when firearms were available to anyone who wanted them? We can exclude convicted criminals and minors from this, of course, but in essence everyone can have a gun.
Why should this work in theory? The answer is that the economic incentives for the criminal are dramatically changed. Attempting to steal someone's wallet changes from a "dead cert" option for the bad guy armed with a knife, into one of potential death. He can no longer know that he has the "military" advantage over his intended victim. And his attempted mugging could lead to his being killed, which fundamentally alters the risk/reward calculation he makes before his attack. Would he still mug someone if he risked death to do so?
What then would be the practical implications? Would we end up with a bloodbath, as so many people argue? The evidence from America is strongly against this. Most US states now have laws allowing, and in many cases, requiring issue of concealed carry firearms permits. As each state has liberalised its laws, a little experiment has been performed to allow us to test the theory.
The results are hotly disputed, but in some ways it's actually rather surprising that this is the case. According to this page (which I've chosen because it looks reasonably neutral) the major study on this issue by Lott & Mustard, which found that relaxing the firearms laws reduced crime. Their study was critiqued by Black & Nagin who argued that Lott & Mustard couldn't support their findings. What Black and Nagin didn't say, however, was that Lott & Mustard's figures indicated that looser laws raised crime.
So it looks as if at worst, liberalised firearms laws make little difference. Certainly, they don't seem to lead inexorably to bloodbaths and carnage.
This being the case, our worst fears about what would happen if our neighbours started to carry guns appear to be unfounded. We have made an inanimate object into a bogeyman and we torture ourselves about what might happen if things were to change. We should recognise this as irrational, and try to deal with the question purely by reason. We shoudn't fear trying something different.
It might just work.
Reader Comments (1)
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,264896,00.html
Paul.