deanf
Regular Member
Last edited:
I wonder if they will ever research the effects of gun control on overall crime and violence rates in an unbiased search for the facts... I say unbiased because these types of searches from anti groups usually end in the rare or made up statistics being focused on instead of the truth.
“It’s very hard to wrap your head around,” said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, whose work supporting an individual-rights view of the Second Amendment was cited three times by the majority in last week’s decision. “You have to think about the particular kind of gun control at work, and you have to subdivide gun users and gun abusers.”
There is some evidence, Professor Volokh said, that denying guns to people who might use them in self-defense, usually merely by brandishing them, tends to increase crime rates. There is also evidence that the possibility of confronting a victim with a gun deters some criminals.
In addition, criminals are the people least likely to obey gun control laws, meaning that the laws probably have a disproportionate impact on law-abiding individuals. “For the typical gun control law,” Professor Volokh said, “you’ll have very little positive effect but a possible negative effect.”
European nations with more guns had lower murder rates. As summarized in a brief filed by several criminologists and other scholars supporting the challenge to the Washington law, the seven nations with the most guns per capita had 1.2 murders annually for every 100,000 people. The rate in the nine nations with the fewest guns was 4.4.