Date: Fri, 23 Aug 1996 08:46:22 -0700
From: Joe Horn <[6 mysmesa] at [1eagle1.com]>
To: Sixth Mesa <[6 mysmesa] at [1eagle1.com]>
Subject: NY POST: Don't disarm the good guys.

Posted to texas-gun-owners by Joe Horn <[6 mysmesa] at [1eagle1.com]>
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New York Post, August 22, 1996
"DON'T DISARM THE GOOD GUYS"
by Irwin M. Stelzer

     Crime in New York City is down.  You can read about it in the newspaper,
and you can feel it in the city's streets.  People feel safer - for very good
reason that they <I>are</I> safer.
     Serious crimes - murder, burglary, robbery, sex crimes, grand larceny and
auto theft - fell by almost 12 per cent in the first six months of the first
half of 1995.
     Although we are headed towards the lowest homicide rate since 1968, the
city still remains a shooting gallery when the sun goes down and even in the
broad light of day.
     Almost three murders are committed every day.  And with robberies and
burglaries running at a combined annual rate of over 170,000 (not including car
thefts), or almost 500 every day, we can hardly say that the war on crime has
been won.  Indeed, with a bulge in the crime-prone young male population about
to hit us, now is the time to reexamine our strategies.
     The generally accepted view seems to be that more and more stringent
gun-control laws must be part of any continuing effort to keep the crime rate
headed down.  But experience and new academic studies call that view into
serious question.
     The first thing that experience teaches is that even the strictest gun
control laws do not keep handguns out of the hands of the bad guys.  Or of the
demented.  Two of the jurisdictions with the tightest controls are Washington,
D.C. and New York City: both are rife with illegal weapons, especially cheap
handguns known as "Saturday night specials."
     The second lesson we have learned - thanks to Rudy Giuliani and Bill
Bratton - is that one way to disarm violent crooks is to enforce every law on
the books.  One of the first things then-Police Commissioner Bratton did was to
order his patrolmen to arrest those committing so-called minor offenses such as
defacing buildings with graffiti and urinating in the streets.
     Lo and behold, many of these minor offenders proved to be carrying weapons,
a practice less common among these sorts since it became clear that the police
might stop and search them, given plausible cause.  Result: safer streets.
     Interestingly, the crackdown on what proved to be not-so-minor crimes was
based on the academic studies by scholars such as California Prof. John Q.
Wilson.  He found that broken windows and graffiti signal to honest citizens
that the police have lost control of the streets - as a consequence of which the
good citizens stay home, ceding the streets to the thugs.
     So we can't ignore the latest product of university research into ways to
lower the crime rate - a study recently completed by law professor John Lott,
Jr. and economist David Mustard, both of the University of Chicago.  They
studied crime data for all 3,054 counties in the United States from 1977 to
1992.
     Crooks, of course, do not turn into honest citizens for fear of being blown
away by a potential victim.  Some turn instead to co-called "stealth" crimes, in
which they are highly unlikely to come into contact with the victim, such as
auto theft and burglaries of unoccupied residences.
     Earlier studies by both Lott and other scholars show that almost half the
burglaries in Britain and Canada, countries with strict gun control laws, are
so-called "hot burglaries" - they occur when residents are at home when the
criminal strikes.
     In the U.S., by contrast, crooks worry if their prey has a gun: 56 percent
of the felony prisoners in ten state jails said that they would not attack a
potential victim who was known to be armed.
     And they worry, too, if the victim is likely but not certain to be armed:
crooks operating in the states with the highest incidence of civilian gun
ownership say they worry most about running into an armed potential victim, and
so avoid late-night burglaries.  Result: the "hot burglary" rate in the US is
only 13 percent.
     Remember: When citizens are allowed to carry handguns, muggers and rapists
never can be sure who has and who has not availed himself of that right.  So
those who do carry guns end up providing protection for those who choose not to
go about armed.
     That's one reason some feminist groups favor right-to-carry laws.  Women,
they argue, should not be easy targets for muggers and rapists.  By carrying
guns in their purses and cars they give themselves the means with which to
resist.  And make rapists think carefully before approaching any woman, lest she
be one of those who, armed, can put paid to his career.
     Of course, anyone licensed to carry a gun must be trained in its use.  And
this appears to be the case, as shown by the infrequency of gun-related
accidents in America.
     In 1993, a year for which good data are available, police accidentally
killed 330 innocent individuals, compared to the 30 accidentally killed by
private citizens who mistook the victim for an intruder.
     All in all, say Lott and Mustard, allowing law-abiding, sane citizens to
carry handguns "deters violent crime and appears to produce and extremely small
and statistically insignificant change in accidental deaths."
     None of this is to suggest that New York should rush to follow the lead of
the 31 states with right-to carry laws (a dozen have enacted such statutes in
the past four years alone).  But it does seem that the subject should not be
considered taboo.
     The new academic studies cannot be ignored: Crooks prefer unarmed victims -
witness their greater willingness to break into occupied homes in Britain and
Canada than in America.
     Worth pondering before blindly sticking to a policy that disarms only the
good guys.
-----------------------------------
Irwin Stelzer is director of regulatory policy studies at the American
Enterprise Institute


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