The Criminology Of Firearms

Don Kates | JURIST | February 27, 2013

JURIST Guest Columnist Don Kates of The Independent Institute says that empirical evidence has shown that gun bans are not only ineffective at reducing violent crime, but may even be counterproductive...


In 2004, the National Academy of Sciences reviewed 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications and some empirical research of its own about guns. The Academy could not identify any gun restriction that had reduced violent crime, suicide or gun accidents.

Why don't gun bans work? Because they rely on voluntary compliance by gun-using criminals. Prohibitionists never see this absurdity because they deceive themselves into thinking that, as Katherine Christoffel has said: "[M]ost shootings are not committed by felons or mentally ill people, but are acts of passion that are committed using a handgun that is owned for home protection."

Christoffel, et al., are utterly wrong. The whole corpus of criminological research dating back to the 1890's shows murderers "almost uniformly have a long history of involvement in criminal behavior," and that "[v]irtually all" murderers and other gun criminals have prior felony records — generally long ones.

While only 15 percent of Americans have criminal records, roughly 90 percent of adult murderers have prior adult records — exclusive of their often extensive juvenile records — with crime careers of six or more adult years including four major felonies. Gerald D. Robin, writing for the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, notes that, unlike ordinary gun owners, "the average murderer turns out to be no less hardened a criminal than the average robber or burglar."

Throughout this essay I highlight dramatic recantations by criminologists who previously endorsed stringent gun control. For example, Professor David Mustard has stated in an article [PDF] for the University of Pennsylvania Law Review...