Good grief.
You know the world is shifting off its axis when a Harvard study comes to the conclusion that more guns means less crime.
As a reminder of how this plays out in the real world, here’s Jew Without a Gun, Seraphic Secret’s most widely read post about the 1992 L.A. riots, in which Karen and I and the children were trapped for several frightening hours. We were unarmed, helpless save for our wits. The police were conspicuously absent, and the bad guys, frequently armed with heavy weapons, owned the streets. It was a defining moment in my life.
Anyhoo.
Ordinarily, Seraphic Secret is not a fan of academic studies. Most of them are nonsensical. But when a study comes to a common sense conclusion, we do sit up and take notice.
This is because we are big fans of common sense — which is in rather short supply these days.
From our friends at Breitbart.com.
A Harvard Study titled “Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide?” looks at figures for “intentional deaths” throughout continental Europe and juxtaposes them with the U.S. to show that more gun control does not necessarily lead to lower death rates or violent crime.
Because the findings so clearly demonstrate that more gun laws may in fact increase death rates, the study says that “the mantra that more guns mean more deaths and that fewer guns, therefore, mean fewer deaths” is wrong.
For example, when the study shows numbers for Eastern European gun ownership and corresponding murder rates, it is readily apparent that less guns to do not mean less death. In Russia, where the rate of gun ownership is 4,000 per 100,000 inhabitants, the murder rate was 20.52 per 100,000 in 2002. That same year in Finland, where the rater of gun ownership is exceedingly higher–39,000 per 100,000–the murder rate was almost nill, at 1.98 per 100,000.
Looking at Western Europe, the study shows that Norway “has far and away Western Europe’s highest household gun ownership rate (32%), but also its lowest murder rate.”
Read the full story at Breitbart.com.
Gloria has a Luger – not a pistol normally associated with women!
On gun crime I came across a very interesting statistic a few days ago. If you took away the statistics from the top 4 US cities – New Orleans was the only one I could remember – but take away their victims and the US, as a whole, would rank much further down the list of countries and gun violence.
And of these cities of course most of the violence is gang related.
So rather than face the real problem of gangs and crime they want “gun control”.
Great point, Bill. If true, and I’ve no reason to doubt it, this is something that should be front and center.
This report will be ignored by the MSM and forgotten on a scale worthy that would make Orwell’s Ministry of Truth proud. It just can’t be true because the Piers Morgans of the world know full well that guns can only kill innocent people. It’s the easy access to guns that make criminals out of otherwise law-abiding Nobel Peace Prize candidates.
The truth can appear suddenly in the oddest places.
I’m not disputing the idea that more guns equals less crime, but I wonder if it makes sense to compare Russia to Finland and Norway. These countries are culturally very unlike.
This needs a little more attention from post-partum Piers Morgan.