5-+Enrichment

 =Impact of gun control laws is tough to determine =

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By Adam Liptak ====== Lurking behind the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling last week that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms were fascinating, disputed and now in many ways irrelevant questions. Do gun control laws reduce crime? Do they save lives? Is it possible they even cost lives? Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the dissenters in the 5-to-4 decision, surveyed a quite substantial body of empirical research on whether gun control laws do any good. Then he wrote, "The upshot is a set of studies and counterstudies that, at most, could leave a judge uncertain about the proper policy conclusion." There is no question, of course, that guns figure in countless murders, suicides and accidental deaths. Over the five years ending in 1997, the Justice Department says, there was an average of 36,000 firearms-related deaths a year. (Fifty-one percent were suicides, and 44 percent homicides.) Determining whether particular gun control laws would have, on balance, prevented some of those deaths is difficult. Take the District of Columbia, whose near-total ban on handguns in the home was on the receiving end of last week's decision. At the crudest level, as Breyer wrote, violent crime in the U.S. capital has increased since the ban took effect in 1976. "Indeed," he continued, "a comparison with 49 other major cities reveals that the district's homicide rate is actually substantially higher relative to these other cities than it was before the handgun restriction went into place." Those statistics by themselves prove nothing, of course. Factors aside from the gun ban, like demographics, economics and the drug trade, were almost certainly in play. "As students of elementary logic know," Breyer wrote, "after it does not mean because of it." But Gary Kleck, a professor at the Florida State University College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, whose work Breyer cited, said there were good reasons for making a definitive judgment. "We know the D.C. handgun ban didn't reduce homicide," he said in an interview. Not everyone agrees. A 1991 study in The New England Journal of Medicine compared Washington with its suburbs before and after the gun law took effect. It found that the law was linked to a 25 percent drop in homicides involving firearms and a 23 percent drop in such suicides. The study found no drops in other kinds of homicides and suicides in Washington, and no changes in the suburbs. Kleck was critical of the study, saying the period it studied was too short and that the suburbs were a poor point of reference. "The place most like D.C. is Baltimore," he said, describing his own approach. "It's a virtual twin city." Kleck conducted what he called "an elaborate before-and-after study" of Washington and Baltimore that took into account trends before the implementation of the ban and included "a good long follow-up" because the ban "didn't immediately take anyone's guns away." <span style="color: #000000; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Baltimore did not have a similar law, yet its crime rate mimicked that of Washington. <span style="color: #000000; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">"The law itself had no effect one way or the other," Kleck said. <span style="color: #000000; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Even if he is right, his conclusion is not an indictment of all efforts to regulate guns. There are many flavors of gun control, and many problems of definition and measurement. <span style="color: #000000; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">"It's very hard to wrap your head around," said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA, whose work supporting an individual-rights view of the Second Amendment was cited three times by the majority in the decision last week. "You have to think about the particular kind of gun control at work, and you have to subdivide gun users and gun abusers." <span style="color: #000000; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">There is some evidence, Volokh said, that denying guns to people who might use them in self-defense, usually merely by brandishing them, tends to increase crime rates. There is also evidence that the possibility of confronting a victim with a gun deters some criminals. <span style="color: #000000; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">In addition, criminals are the people least likely to obey gun control laws, meaning that the laws probably have a disproportionate impact on law-abiding individuals. <span style="color: #000000; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">"For the typical gun control law," Volokh said, "you'll have very little positive effect but a possible negative effect." <span style="color: #000000; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">A brief defending the Washington law filed by the American Public Health Association and other groups said there were other collateral positive effects, including reductions in suicides and accidents, that gun control opponents overlook or underestimate. <span style="color: #000000; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">More generally, the brief said, "banning handguns in Washington, D.C., appears to have reduced suicide and homicide rates." It cited the New England Journal study and statistics showing that Washington has an exceptionally low suicide rate. <span style="color: #000000; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Asked what sorts of gun control laws seem to work, Kleck mentioned two. <span style="color: #000000; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">"Background checks in general at the state level did show lower homicide rates," he said, adding: "I'd improve the enforcement of laws against unlicensed carrying of guns in public places." <span style="color: #000000; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The international experience is no less complex. Breyer cited one study finding, in the justice's words, "that strict gun laws are correlated with more murders, not fewer." <span style="color: #000000; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">According to the study, published last year in The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, European nations with more guns had lower murder rates. As summarized in a brief filed by several criminologists and other scholars supporting the challenge to the Washington law, the seven nations with the most guns per capita had 1.2 murders annually for every 100,000 people. The rate in the nine nations with the fewest guns was 4.4 .