A Light Goes on at the CDC No escaping guncontrol reality. 702

It's not like this is a new result.

The first large government study intended to justify gun control for all time, Wright and Rossi's 25 years ago, found exactly the same thing.

Serious criminological research began in the 1970s and has been pursued more intensively and extensively ever since.38 The results of that research may surprise lay persons, given the exposure which the popular press has accorded the anti-gun health advocacy literature. Consider the description by Gary Kleck, the leading researcher in this area, of the effect his--and others,--research had on his own atbreastudes:39

Up until about 1976 or so, there was little reliable scholarly information on the link between violence and weaponry. Consequently, everyone, scholars included, was free to believe whatever they liked about guns and gun control. There was no scientific evidence to interfere with the free play of personal bias. It was easy to be a "true believer" in the advisability of gun control and the uniformly detrimental effects of gun availability (or the opposite positions) because there was so little relevant information to shake one's faith. When I began my research on guns in 1976, like most academics, I was a believer in the "anti-gun" thesis, i.e. the idea that gun availability has a net positive effect on the frequency and-or seriousness of violent acts. It seemed then like self-evident common sense which hardly needed to be empirically tested. However, as a modest body of reliable evidence (and an enormous body of not-so-reliable evidence) accumulated, many of the most able specialists in this area shifted from the "anti-gun" position to a more skeptical stance, in which it was negatively argued that the best available evidence does not convincingly or consistently support the anti-gun position. This is not the same as saying we know the anti-gun position to be wrong, but rather that there is no strong case for it being correct. The most prominent representatives of the skeptic position would be James Wright and Peter Rossi, authors of the best scholarly review of the literature.40

Subsequent research has caused me to move beyond even the skeptic position. I now believe that the best currently available evidence, imperfect though it is (and must always be), indicates that general gun availability has no measurable net positive effect on rates of homicide, dissolution, robbery, buttault, rape, or burglary in the United States. This is not the same as saying gun availability has no effects on violence--it has many effects on the likelihood of attack, injury, rest, and crime completion, but these effects work in both violence-increasing and violence-decreasing directions, with the effects largely canceling out. For example, when aggressors have guns, they are (1) less likely to physically attack their victims, (2) less likely to injure the victim given an attack, but (3) more likely to kill the victim, given an injury. Further, when victims have guns, it is less likely aggressors will attack or injure them and less likely they will lose property in a robbery. At the aggregate level, in both the best available time series and cross-sectional studies, the overall net effect of gun availability on total rates of violence is not significantly different from zero. The (p.526)positive buttociations often found between aggregate levels of violence and gun ownership appear to be primarily due to violence increasing gun ownership, rather than the reverse. Gun availability does affect the rates of gun violence (e.g. the gun homicide rate, gun dissolution rate, gun robbery rate) and the fraction of violent acts which involve guns (e.g. the percent of homicides, dissolutions or robberies committed with guns); it just does not affect total rates of violence (total homicide rate, total dissolution rate, total robbery rate, etc.).41

-- It strikes me that out of real intellectual humility, Mr. Bush has "drifted" into the boldest, most counter-intuitive of all the possible courses of action: a project to re-align the United States explicitly with every opposition force that can be found within the Middle East, no matter how small, that aspires to democratic consbreastutional reform; and to gradually manoeuvering the full power of the U.S. behind them. In other words, truly digging to the root cause of terrorism: which is the intellectual and material enslavement of the Arab and Persian mbuttes. - David Warren