Thomas Sowell: The Invincible Ignorance of the "Gun Control" Crowd

Must every tragic mass shooting bring out the shrill ignorance of "gun control" advocates?

The key fallacy of so-called gun control laws is that such laws do
not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens,
while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.

If gun control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have
discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual
studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun control laws
being not merely futile but counterproductive.

Places and times with the strongest gun control laws have often been
places and times with high murder rates. Washington, D.C., is a classic
example, but just one among many.

When it comes to the rate of gun ownership, that is higher in rural
areas than in urban areas, but the murder rate is higher in urban areas.
The rate of gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks,
but the murder rate is higher among blacks. For the country as a whole,
hand gun ownership doubled in the late 20th century, while the murder
rate went down.

The few counter-examples offered by gun control zealots do not stand
up under scrutiny. Perhaps their strongest talking point is that
Britain has stronger gun control laws than the United States and lower
murder rates.

But, if you look back through history, you will find that Britain has
had a lower murder rate than the United States for more than two
centuries-- and, for most of that time, the British had no more
stringent gun control laws than the United States. Indeed, neither
country had stringent gun control for most of that time.

In the middle of the 20th century, you could buy a shotgun in London
with no questions asked. New York, which at that time had had the
stringent Sullivan Law restricting gun ownership since 1911, still had
several times the gun murder rate of London, as well as several times
the London murder rate with other weapons.

Neither guns nor gun control was the reason for the difference in murder rates. People were the difference.

Yet many of the most zealous advocates of gun control laws, on both
sides of the Atlantic, have also been advocates of leniency toward
criminals.

In Britain, such people have been so successful that legal gun
ownership has been reduced almost to the vanishing point, while even
most convicted felons in Britain are not put behind bars. The crime
rate, including the rate of crimes committed with guns, is far higher in
Britain now than it was back in the days when there were few
restrictions on Britons buying firearms.

In 1954, there were only a dozen armed robberies in London but, by
the 1990s-- after decades of ever tightening gun ownership
restrictions-- there were more than a hundred times as many armed
robberies.

Gun control zealots' choice of Britain for comparison with the United
States has been wholly tendentious, not only because it ignored the
history of the two countries, but also because it ignored other
countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States, such as
Russia, Brazil and Mexico. All of these countries have higher murder
rates than the United States.

You could compare other sets of countries and get similar results.
Gun ownership has been three times as high in Switzerland as in Germany,
but the Swiss have had lower murder rates. Other countries with high
rates of gun ownership and low murder rates include Israel, New Zealand,
and Finland.

Guns are not the problem. People are the problem-- including people
who are determined to push gun control laws, either in ignorance of the
facts or in defiance of the facts.

There is innocent ignorance and there is invincible, dogmatic and
self-righteous ignorance. Every tragic mass shooting seems to bring out
examples of both among gun control advocates.

Some years back, there was a professor whose advocacy of gun control
led him to produce a "study" that became so discredited that he resigned
from his university. This column predicted at the time that this
discredited study would continue to be cited by gun control advocates.
But I had no idea that this would happen the very next week in the 9th
Circuit Court of Appeals.

Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of The Housing Boom and Bust.