Control: Exposing the Truth About Guns (5 page)

According to Piers Morgan’s assumption, overall murder rates should have initially plummeted after the gun buyback and then risen back up over time as Australians replenished their guns. But that simply did not happen. Instead, total homicides have basically remained at the same very low rate they were at since before the buyback.

Several major studies that have researched the buyback have reached similar conclusions. One, done by Wang-Sheng Lee and Sandy Suardi of the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, at the University of Melbourne, concluded that the “results of these tests suggest that the
NFA [the 1996–97 National Firearms Agreement] did not have any large effects on reducing firearm homicide or suicide rates.”

A second study, done by Jeanine Baker of the Sporting
Shooters Association of Australia and Samara McPhedran of the University of Sydney, and published in the
British Journal of Criminology,
reached a similar conclusion: “Homicide patterns (firearm and non-firearm) were not influenced by the NFA, the conclusion being that the
gun buy-back and restrictive legislative changes had no influence on firearm homicide in Australia.”

One final note on the agreement’s impact on Australian crime. Armed robberies exploded after the new laws,
from about 6,000 in 1996 to around 10,000 between 1998 and 2001, before declining to pre-buyback levels in 2004. In other words, fewer guns resulted in more armed robberies and roughly the same number of murders—not exactly a shining example of the utopian society that awaits all of us if only we’d agree to ban semi-automatics.

Finally, Japan—a nation that, unlike Australia and the United Kingdom, has not experienced any sudden changes in gun policies and is therefore more difficult to fairly evaluate.
Japan has imposed strict gun control for centuries, long before crime data began to be systematically collected. Guns are allowed for hunting—there were more than 400,000 registered firearms in 2011—
but handguns are banned.

Control enthusiasts love to point to Japan, which has a very low murder rate, as the prime example of how fewer guns equates to less crime and far fewer homicides. But if that theory were true, then it should always be true. And it’s simply not.

Take Switzerland, for example. As I mentioned earlier, Switzerland has the third-highest rate of firearms per capita in the world. So, it stands to reason, then, that Switzerland’s streets must be flowing in blood, right?

Not even close.

Switzerland had a gun homicide rate of 0.5 per 100,000 people in 2010.
Their overall homicide rate was 0.7, ranking the country
well below other gun control havens like Australia (1.0), the United Kingdom (1.2), and Canada (1.6).

This theory falls apart when you look at it from the other side as well. The Netherlands, for example, has one of
the lowest rates of gun ownership in Europe at 3.9 per capita, but its homicide rate (1.1) is nowhere near the bottom. Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway, and Sweden
all have lower murder rates than the Netherlands—and far more guns per capita.

It’s easy to cherry-pick data or point to one country and say that it proves a theory—it’s much harder, but far more worthwhile, to look across entire sets of data and see whether that theory holds up. In this case, it simply doesn’t.

Americans have seen this same pattern play out here at home in cities like Washington, D.C., and Chicago and in states like Massachusetts—all of which have implemented very tough gun control laws or outright bans.

D.C.’s handgun ban (which also mandated that other firearms, including rifles and shotguns, be kept unloaded and disassembled) went into effect in early 1977. Since then, there has been only one year (1985) when that city’s murder rate fell below what it was in the year before the ban. If this were a general, nationwide trend, then we should see the murder rate in other cities also increase during that time. But that’s not what happened. In the twenty-nine years of data we have since the ban,
D.C.’s murder rate ranked in the top four among the fifty largest U.S. cities in 19 of those years. In 15 of those 19 years D.C. ranked either first or second in the country. Prior to the ban, D.C. was never ranked that high. They ranked in the top fifteen just once.

Was there something special about D.C. that kept the ban from working? Probably not, since we often see this same trend play out in other cities with restrictive gun control. Before Chicago’s ban in 1982, its murder rate per 100,000 people, which was falling from 27 to 22 in the prior five years,
suddenly stopped falling and instead rose slightly to 23 in the five years afterward. Tracing that change directly to the handgun ban is, of course, impossible,
but it’s pretty stunning when you look at what happened in the counties surrounding the city of Chicago over this same time. According to John Lott, “
Chicago’s murder rate fell from being 8.1 times greater than its neighbors in 1977 to 5.5 times in 1982, and then went way up to 12 times greater in 1987.”

And Massachusetts, which passed laws in 1998 aimed at making it very difficult to own a gun (and banning semi-automatic “assault weapons” outright), has experienced the same kind of results. While the laws did work to make it difficult for law-abiding people to own guns (
there were 1.5 million active licenses in 1998 and only 200,000 four years later), it had no effect on people who generally ignore laws anyway. Those people are sometimes referred to as “criminals.”

According to a February, 2013 article in the
Boston Globe,
“Murders committed with firearms
have increased significantly,
aggravated assaults and robberies involving guns
have risen,
and
gunshot injuries
are up,
according to FBI and state data.” (emphasis added)

In 2011, Massachusetts had 122 firearm homicides. This was, according to the
Globe,
“
a striking increase from the 65 in 1998.” Other categories of violent crime—
from aggravated assault (up 26.7 percent) to armed robbery (up 20.7 percent)—also increased.

Of course, gun control advocates claim that none of these locations was a fair test for gun bans or extremely strict regulations. They say that, unless guns are banned across the entire country, criminals in one location can simply drive to another to obtain them. But if that’s true, then in a worst-case scenario, you might expect homicide and violent crime rates to continue on whatever trend they were already on. In other words, if the ban simply doesn’t work, then it should have no impact and each location’s homicide and crime rate should continue at whatever pace it was on relative to the locations around it that did not implement bans.

But that’s not what happened. In Massachusetts, for example,
the state’s lowest per capita
homicide rate occurred in 1997, the year before the ban. By 2011 it had increased by 47 percent, bucking the national trend, which was down. Nationwide, the homicide rate over that same time period was
down
31 percent.

And you can’t blame a regional quirk, either. The year the ban took place Massachusetts had a murder rate that was roughly 70 percent of other states in the Northeast (New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire). But now? Homicides in Massachusetts are 125 percent of the average of those other states.

If all of this data doesn’t do it for you, then there’s another response to those who say that none of these bans are good tests, a response that is more about common sense than studies and stats: if those who proposed these bans
expected
violent crime rates to increase, why didn’t they warn us in advance?

“[I]t’s so unbelievable. And it only happens in America. And it happens again and again. There was another shooting yesterday. Three people killed, I think in a hospital. We kill people in schools. We kill them in hospitals. We kill them in religious organizations. We kill them when they’re young. We kill them when they’re old.
And we’ve just got to stop this.”

—MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG
,
December 22, 2012

“No other country in the world has
the problem that America has with gun massacres.”

—RACHEL MADDOW
,
January 11, 2011

Because America has the most guns, many people seem to believe that multiple-victim public massacres are an exclusively American phenomenon. But that’s simply not the case. Most of the countries in Western Europe, for example, have much tougher gun laws than the United States, but have experienced many of the worst gun massacres in history. (By the way, you’ll notice that, whenever possible, I do not use the term “shooter” or “mass shooting” when talking about these events. I believe those phrases have been co-opted by people who want to paint everyone who shoots a gun with the same broad stroke. I won’t play that game. Those who hunt or use their guns for sport are “shooters”—those who kill innocent people with them are murderers and glory killers.)

In 2011, a thirty-two-year-old man visited the island of Utoya, Norway. There, in a place where his victims couldn’t shoot back,
he murdered 69 people and injured at least 110. This remains the worst massacre ever committed by a single person. In Mumbai, India,
on November 26, 2008, 164 people were killed and another 308 wounded when terrorists wielding machine guns and grenades invaded hotels, a train station, and a Jewish cultural center. Both of those massacres eclipsed anything that has occurred in the United States.

Up until the attack in Newtown, Connecticut, the three worst K–12 public school massacres in the world had all occurred in Europe. The worst occurred in 2002 in a high school in Erfurt, Germany, when eighteen were killed. The second-worst was the Dunblane massacre in Scotland, in which
sixteen kindergartners and their teacher were killed. The third-worst, with fifteen dead, happened in Winnenden, Germany. (By the way, most of the mass murderers I reference did what they did to be famous. I refuse to give them that satisfaction and will not mention their names in this book.)

When guns aren’t as easily available, psychopaths often turn to other weapons. In 2009, a twenty-year-old man armed with a knife and a hatchet attacked a day-care center in Belgium, where he hacked and stabbed two adults and thirteen babies.
Two nine-month-old babies and one day-care worker were killed. Media reports state that the killer dyed his hair red and was obsessed with the Batman movie
The Dark Knight.
He committed the massacre on the one-year anniversary of the death of Heath Ledger, the actor who played the Joker in that movie.

In 2008, a thirty-seven-year-old man entered an elementary school in Osaka, Japan, armed with a kitchen knife.
He murdered eight children and seriously wounded thirteen other kids, along with two teachers.

Throughout the three-year period 2010–2012, a series of attacks on elementary schools and day-care centers were committed in the People’s Republic of China using knives, cleavers, hammers, axes, and box-cutters.
China has suppressed and censored much of the news about these attacks—partially to prevent copycat crimes, and partially to protect themselves from intense national horror and embarrassment—but here are a few that we do know of:

2010

—A forty-one-year-old man stabbed an unknown number of students in an elementary school.
Eight were reported to be killed.

—A thirty-three-year-old man
stabbed sixteen students and a teacher in an elementary school. Death toll unknown.

—A forty-seven-year-old man
stabbed twenty-eight students, two teachers, and one security guard in a kindergarten. Most of the students were four years old. Death toll unknown.

—A man (age unknown)
armed with a hammer attacked children in a preschool. He then committed suicide by dousing himself in gasoline and setting himself on fire. The number of injured and killed is unknown.

—A forty-eight-year-old man, armed with a cleaver, attacked a kindergarten class, where he
murdered seven children and two adults and injured eleven others.

—A twenty-six-year-old man
slashed more than twenty children and staff at a kindergarten,
killing three children and one teacher.

2011

—An employee at a child-care center (age unknown), armed with a box-cutter, slashed eight children, all aged four or five. Death toll unknown.

—A thirty-year-old man, armed with an axe,
murdered a one-year-old and a four-year-old and four adults who where taking their children to a nursery school.

2012

—A thirty-six-year-old man hacked and
stabbed an elderly woman and twenty-three children at an elementary school. It was reported that, due to immediate trauma care in three different hospitals, none of the victims died, although some were seriously injured,
with fingers and ears cut off.

—A seventeen-year-old man
stabbed to death nine people and wounded four others with a knife in China’s Liaoning Province following an argument with his girlfriend.