[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 13]
[Senate]
[Pages 18460-18461]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




               DISASTER RECOVERY PERSONAL PROTECTION ACT

  Mr. VITTER. Mr. President, as the Senate author of the Disaster 
Recovery Personal Protection Act of 2006 and a cosponsor of the 
District of Columbia Personal Protection Act, I believe we must work to 
support the ability of law-abiding citizens to defend and protect 
themselves and their families from criminal activity. It has been 
proven time and time again that prohibiting law-abiding citizens from 
owning a legal and constitutionally protected firearm does not reduce 
crime but, as this article which I will ask to have printed in the 
Record states, in fact, increases crime.
  I ask unanimous consent that an article published in the August 7 
issue of Legal Times entitled ``The Laws That Misfire: Banning guns 
doesn't work--in the District or anywhere else'' authored by Don B. 
Kates be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                    [From Legal Times, Aug. 7, 2006]

                         The Laws That Misfire

                           (By Don B. Kates)

       The District of Columbia is now suffering from what its 
     police chief on July 11 called a ``crime emergency.''
       In 1976 the District banned handguns and required that all 
     other guns be kept unloaded and disassembled, making them 
     unavailable for self-defense. The result is that for 30 
     years, only lawbreakers have had guns readily available for 
     use in the District.
       Is that effective policy? Is it a sensible way to respond 
     to a crime emergency? Those policy questions, in addition to 
     purely legal issues, arise in pending litigation that brings 
     a Second Amendment challenge against the District's gun bans.
       I recently filed a Brandeis amicus brief supporting this 
     constitutional challenge. My co-counsel were 12 other law 
     professors, and the amici we represent include 16 American, 
     Australian, and Canadian social scientists and medical school 
     professors.
       The case in question, Parker v. District of Columbia, is 
     currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. 
     Circuit, after an unfavorable ruling in the District Court. 
     The plaintiffs include a woman under a death threat for 
     reporting neighborhood drug-dealing to police and a gay man 
     who used his handgun to defend himself against a hate crime. 
     This brief was filed pro bono, and the amici are not being 
     paid.
       What this amicus brief shows is significant, and the 
     information it contains may surprise some. For the truth 
     about gun bans is that they are policy failures even on their 
     own terms: More guns don't mean more death, and fewer guns 
     don't mean less death. Gun bans like the District's simply 
     don't work.


                           BRITAIN'S FAILURE

       Before the District adopted these policies in 1976, its 
     murder rate was declining. Shortly after the District adopted 
     the gun bans in an effort to reduce crime and violence, its 
     murder rate became the highest of any large American city. It 
     has remained the highest throughout the 30 years these 
     policies have been in force (excepting the few years when the 
     District ranked second or third).
       To excuse this disastrous history, anti-gun advocates 
     assert that gun bans covering only a single city are 
     unenforceable.
       True enough, but experience shows that gun bans covering an 
     entire nation are also unenforceable In the United Kingdom, 
     decades of severe gun control failed to stem steadily rising 
     violent crime. So in 1997 the United Kingdom banned and 
     confiscated all legally owned handguns. Yet by 2000 the 
     United Kingdom had the highest violent-crime rate in the 
     Western world--twice ours--and it still does today.
       Gun bans are far from working even in a relatively small 
     island nation, the report of England's National Crime 
     Intelligence Service laments: Although ``Britain has some of 
     the strictest gun laws in the world [i]t appears that anyone 
     who wishes to obtain a firearm [illegally] will have little 
     difficulty in doing so.''
       American anti-gun advocates used to cite the United 
     Kingdom, Canada, and Australia as nations where low violence 
     stemmed from severe gun restrictions. But in recent decades 
     those nations' violent-crime rates have skyrocketed, first 
     matching and now far surpassing ours.
       In the 1990s those nations moved from severe controls to 
     outright bans and confiscation of half a million guns. Today, 
     Australia and Canada join the United Kingdom in having the 
     highest violent-crime rates in the Western world--more than 
     double ours.


                              MURDER RATES

       For decades anti-gun advocates claimed that America, with 
     the world's highest gun-ownership rate (true), had the 
     highest murder rate (false).
       In fact, the recently revealed Russian murder rate for the 
     past 40 years has been consistently higher than the American 
     rate. The Russian murder rate in the 1990s and 2000s has been 
     almost four times higher than the U.S. rate. All this despite 
     Russia's 70 years of banning handguns and strictly 
     controlling long guns--laws that it enforced with police-
     state methods. Various European nations, including 
     Luxembourg, also ban handguns but have much higher murder 
     rates than the United States does.
       Gun bans reflect a quasi-religious belief that more guns 
     (particularly handguns) mean more violence and death, and, 
     concomitantly, fewer guns mean fewer deaths.
       This belief is quasi-religious because the believers cling 
     fanatically to it despite scores of studies around the world 
     finding no such correlation.
       Consider the 2004 U.S. National Academy of Sciences 
     evaluation: Having reviewed 253 journal articles, 99 books, 
     43 government publications, and some empirical research of 
     its own, the academy could not identify any gun law that had 
     reduced violent crime, suicide, or gun accidents.
       American statistics on both the numbers of guns and murder 
     rates are available from immediately after World War II to 
     the present. In 1946, with about 48 million guns in the 
     country, the U.S. murder rate was 6 per 100,000 people.
       By 2000 the number of guns had increased fivefold (to more 
     than 260 million), but the murder rate was almost identical 
     (6.1). It remained there as of year-end 2004, despite the 12 
     million guns added to the American gun stock since 2000.
       In the 60 years since World War II, U.S. murder rates 
     dramatically increased and dramatically decreased--but not in 
     relation to gun ownership, which increased substantially 
     every year.
       In the 1950s our murder rate held steady despite the 
     addition of roughly 2 million guns per year. In the mid-'60s 
     through the early '70s, the murder rate doubled, while 2.5 
     million to 3 million guns were added annually. In the late 
     '70s, the murder rate held steady and then declined, even as 
     4 to 5 million more guns were added annually. Murder rates 
     skyrocketed with the introduction of crack in the late '80s, 
     but in the '90s they dramatically decreased, even as 
     Americans bought 50 million more guns.
       In sum, between 1974 and 2003, the number of guns doubled, 
     but murder rates declined by one-third. So much for the 
     quasi-religious faith that more guns mean more murder.
       Multinational studies also discredit that faith. An 
     American criminologist's comparison of homicide- and suicide-
     mortality data with gun-ownership levels for 36 nations 
     (including the United States) for the period 1990-1955 showed 
     ``no significant (at the 5% level) association between gun 
     ownership and the total homicide rate.''
       A somewhat later European study of data from 21 nations 
     found ``no significant correlations [of gun-ownership levels] 
     with total suicide or homicide rates.'' When you look at the 
     data, guns aren't increasing murders.


                               who kills

       The myth of more-guns-meaning-more-murder makes sense to 
     people who think most murders involve ordinary people killing 
     in moments of ungovernable rage because guns were available 
     to them.
       But ordinary people do not commit most murders, or many 
     murders, or almost any murders. Almost all murderers are 
     extreme aberrants with life histories of violence, 
     psychopathology, substance abuse, and other crime.
       Only about 15 percent of Americans have criminal records. 
     But homicide studies reveal nearly all murderers have adult 
     criminal records (often showing numerous arrests), have been 
     diagnosed as psychotic, or have had restraining orders issued 
     against them.
       Obviously, such dangerous aberrants should not be allowed 
     any instrument more deadly than a toothpick. Unfortunately, 
     they disobey gun laws just as they disobey laws against 
     violence. But law-abiding adults do not murder, guns or no 
     guns, so there is little point is trying to disarm them.


                         DEFENDING THE INNOCENT

       Worse, banning guns to the general public is not just 
     useless but also counterproductive. Criminals prefer victims 
     who are weaker than they are. The unique virtue of firearms 
     is that they alone allow weaker people to resist predation by 
     stronger, more violent ones.
       A recent criminological evaluation states: ``Reliable, 
     durable, and easy to operate, modern firearms are the most 
     effective means of self-defense ever devised. They require 
     minimal maintenance and, unlike knives and other weapons, do 
     not depend on an individual's physical strength for their 
     effectiveness. Only a gun can allow a 110 pound woman to 
     defend herself against a 200 pound man.''
       Research has shown guns are six times more often used by 
     victims to repel criminals than by criminals committing 
     crimes.
       But Handgun Control Inc. tells victims not to resist rape 
     or robbery in any way: ``The best defense against injury is 
     to put up no defense--give them what they want or run.'' This 
     anti-gun position, too, is bereft of criminological support. 
     Twenty years of National Institute of Justice data show that 
     victims who resist with guns are less likely to be injured, 
     and much less likely to be

[[Page 18461]]

     raped or robbed, than victims who submit. Indeed, in more 
     than 80 percent of cases where a victim pulls a gun, the 
     criminal turns and flees whether he has a gun or not.
       When speaking at universities here and abroad, I am often 
     asked, ``Wouldn't it be a better world if there were no 
     guns?''
       I am a criminologist, not a theologian. If you want a world 
     without guns and you think there is a God, pray for him to 
     abolish guns. Human laws cannot disarm lawbreakers, but only 
     the law-abiding.
       Firearms are the only weaponry with which victims can 
     reliably resist aggressors. In their absence, the ruthless 
     and strong can oppress the weak.
       Such oppression in the District is really the crime 
     emergency. And as the District responds, it should take an 
     unbiased look at the social-science data. It should rethink 
     its gun bans now under legal challenge. And after 30 years of 
     failed prohibition, it should now let its law-abiding 
     citizens arm themselves for their own protection.

                          ____________________