International Gun Law Comparisons
Are statistics swayed to manipulate sympathy for gun control or gun advocacy?
I was on a show with Geraldo one time, and he put up some statistics to show how terrible it was in the United States, we had so many more murders than other countries. I said... I am sorry, well it was Geraldo, but also it was another guy who is not even on the air anymore... Can't remember... Phil Donahue. Phil Donahue had these data up. They had three or four different countries, of course the United States being one of them. Is said: 'Your producer left one country of the list'. 'Really? What was that?'. It was Switzerland. There every man between ages of 17 and 44 has a machine gun at home, and most of the rest of the country has all kinds of guns as well, and they have the lowest murder rates of any country in the world.
Are there fewer gun deaths in countries that ban guns?
Actually, we're finding that there are more deaths in countries that ban guns. And England is experiencing that very problem right now, something that I predicted when I debated one of their parliamentarians right before the gun ban was made law. And I told him based on our experience where we make it easier for people to have guns for self defense by your confiscating virtually all the guns in England, you're going to make it so criminals will have an easier time of it. And you're going to see your crime go up and of course he didn't agree with that. But now we know. The UN has found that England is the most violent of all of the industrialized countries in the world and their murder rate is rapidly rising. They have a terrible problem with crime being committed with guns and with knives. Crime is definitely on the rise, violent crime generally has just skyrocketed beyond anything that we would tolerate here in the United States, but then we shoot criminals here. They can't do that over there.
What is the high gun-low violence and low gun-high violence theory?
The conclusion that Dr. John Lott reached fits a bumpersticker; the title of his book "More Guns Less Crime". In some cases such as Washington D.C. and Northern Virginia, you've got adjacent jurisdictions where you can actually compare what happens when you make it easier for people to get guns and where you either don't change or make it even more restrictive for people getting guns. So, America is like a hodge podge of laboratories spread from one end to the other of the country and we can see that in fact what Lott is talking about is correct and it's year after year correct. More guns means less crime. By the way, Lott has made his data available the last count to nearly four dozen institutions and researchers unlike some of the leading "anti-gun" researchers and they have corroborated his work in all but two cases. When Lott went back and looked at what they had done, they had made simple mathematical errors.
What is the primary cause of death in countries that allow guns?
The primary cause of death in countries that allow guns is typically, heart attack, cancer, fire, automobile...
How are foreign gun deaths statistics compiled?
That is a very good question, and very hard to answer. Because, as the British media is now convinced that the British government is not reporting crime honestly, they will report as a robbery, a crime that started out as a robbery of a convenience store and ended up with shooting to death two people; those won't be two murders, that will just be a robbery. And so the media have now begun, even though they are not supportive of gun ownership, even conservatives in Britain, it is just a very different way of thinking, but they're attacking the Government for fudging the data.
