Article 76953 of talk.politics.guns:
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From: [b--o--h] at [mdd.comm.mot.com] (Greg Booth)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
Subject: Criminology on Gun Control
Date: 3 Jan 1994 09:30:33 -0800
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9.	Criminology 

From [firearms politics Request] at [GODIVA.NECTAR.CS.CMU.EDU] Wed 
Jan 20 15:06:45 1993 To: att![firearms politics] at [cs.cmu.edu] Subject: 
Restrictions hamper law-abiding folks, not crooks Content-Length: 
4980 X-Lines: 91 Status: RO

This op-ed piece by David B. Kopel was in the Columbus 
Dispatch in early January 1993 . --

"Restrictions hamper law-abiding folks, not crooks"

As deaths from rampant gun violence mount and city dwellers 
from Boston to Los Angeles learn to distinguish the pop of a pistol 
from the blast of a shotgun, Americans rightly insist on action to 
combat the national crime epidemic. But the solution put forward 
by gun-control advocates -- a national waiting period and a ban on 
assault weapons -- will fail.

Opponents of gun control, formerly limited to basing their 
arguments on the Second Amendment's right to bear arms, now can 
cite a large body of recent social-science research that dispels 
the myth that gun control cuts down on crime. Much of this research 
has been produced by scholars who once believed that gun control 
was an obvious solution to crime.

The Carter administration, for example, provided a major 
research grant to sociology professor James D. Wright and his 
colleagues Peter Rossi and Kathleen Daly in the hope of building a 
case for comprehensive federal gun restrictions. When the 
researchers produced their report to the National Institute of 
Justice in 1982, they delivered a document quite different from the 
one they expected to write. Carefully reviewing all existing 
research, the three scholars found no persuasive evidence that 
America's 20,000 gun-control laws had reduced criminal violence.

The most thorough study of the efficacy of gun control has 
been performed by Florida State University's Gary Kleck, who 
analyzed data for all 170 U.S. cities with a population of more 
than 100,000, testing for the impact of 19 different types of gun 
control on suicides, accidents and five different types of crime. 
Kleck, a liberal Democrat and a member of the American Civil 
Liberties Union, found the only control that reduced crime was a 
strict penalty for carrying an illegal gun, which seemed to lower 
the robber rate. Waiting periods, licensing systems and 
registration had no impact.

In another National Institute of Justice study, this one 
involving the habits of American felons, Wright and Rossi 
interviewed felony prisoners in 10 states. They found that gun-
control had no effect on the ability of criminals to obtain guns. 
Only 12 percent of criminals, and only 7 percent of the criminals 
specializing in handgun crime, had acquired their weapon at a 
store. Of those, about one quarter had not bought the guns but 
stolen them, and many of the rest had probably procured their guns 
through a surrogate buyer or on the black market.

Waiting periods, because they now are the most-discussed 
method of deterring gun crime, deserve special attention. Although 
the waiting-period initiative is often called the "Brady bill," it 
would not have prevented John Hinckley from shooting then-President 
Ronald Reagan and his press secretary, James Brady. When Hinckley 
bought two handguns in October 1980, he had no felony record and 
no public record of mental illness. The routine background checks 
proposed by the Brady bill would have turned up nothing on him. And 
since Hinckley bought the guns more than five months in advance, a 
one-week wait would have made no difference.

Waiting periods can cost lives, too, preventing people from 
protecting themselves against criminal attack while they wait. In 
September 1990, a mail carrier named Catherine Latta of Charlotte, 
N.C., went to the police to obtain permission to buy a handgun. Her 
ex-boyfriend had previously robbed her, assaulted her several times 
and raped her. The clerk at the sheriff's office informed her that 
processing a gun permit would take two to four weeks.

"I told her I'd be dead by then," Latta later recalled. That 
afternoon, she bought an illegal $20 semiautomatic pistol on the 
street. Five hours later, her ex-boyfriend attacked her outside her 
house. She shot him dead. The county prosecutor decided not to 
prosecute Latta for either the self-defense homicide or the illegal 
gun.

A Wisconsin woman, Bonnie Elmasri, wasn't so lucky. On March 
5, 1991, she called a firearms instructor, worried because her 
husband -- who was subject to a restraining order to stay away from 
her -- had been threatening her and her children. When she asked 
the instructor about getting a handgun, the instructor explained 
that Wisconsin has a 48-hour waiting period. Elmasri and her two 
children were murdered by her husband 24 hours later.

Gun-control advocates claim their only concern is bringing 
violent crime to a halt. If so, the evidence should lead them to 
conclude that gun control is not the answer -- and can in many cases 
make matters worse.

--

David B. Kopel is director of the Second Amendment Project at 
the Independence Institute, a Colorado-based think-tank. This 
essay is adapted from Policy Review, the journal of the Heritage 
Foundation. -- Larry Cipriani, att!cblpf!lvc or [l v c] at [cblpf.att.com] 
"I just love the smell of gunpowder!" -- Bugs Bunny

-- 
Greg Booth BSc                          />_________________________________
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