The political pressure for gun control, however, is also prompting some to point out it doesn’t work, as illustrated by a Harvard study released in 2007 that compared the correlation between violent crimes and gun control in numerous countries, Boston Magazine reports.
The article “Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide?” was published in Harvard’s Journal of Public Law and Policy by criminologist attorney Don B. Kates and Canadian criminologist professor Gary Mauser. …
The data shows “correlations that nations with stringent gun controls tend to have much higher murder rates than nations that allow guns,” they wrote.
The study relies on data from the Centers for Disease Control, U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the United National International Study on Firearms Regulation to illustrate its point, according to BeliefNet.com.
Comparing the U.S. with England, which banned most guns by the late 1990s, researchers found “a negative correlation” showing “where firearms are most dense violent crime rates are lowest, and where guns are least dense, violent crime rates are highest.”
That’s the same conclusion researchers with the U.S. National Academy of Sciences reached in a 2004 study, as did a U.S. Centers for Disease Control study the year before, Kates and Mauser wrote.
“Armed crime, never a problem in England, has now become one. Handguns are banned but the Kingdom has millions of illegal firearms,” they wrote. “Criminals have no trouble finding them and exhibit a new willingness to use them. In the decade after 1957, the use of guns in serious crime increased a hundredfold. In the late 1990s, England moved from stringent controls to a complete ban on all handguns and many types of long guns. Hundreds of thousands of guns were confiscated from those owners law-abiding enough to turn them in to authorities.”
At the same time, “despite constant and substantially increasing gun ownership, the United States saw progressive and dramatic reductions in criminal violence,” according to the Harvard study.
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