Gun Control Doesn't Stop Gun Crime

As gun control laws were made ever tighter in Britain toward the ned of the twentieth century, murder rates rose by 34 percent, while murder rates in Canada and the United States were falling by 34 percent and 39 percent, respectively.  Britain, with its strong anti-gun ideology among the intellectual and political elites, was an exception to international trends.  Meanwhile, Americans’ purchases of guns increased during this same period, gun sales surging “to a peak in 1993 of nearly 8 million small arms, of which 4 million were handguns.”  Far from leading to more murders, this was a period of declining murder rates in the United States.  Altogether, there were an estimated 200 million guns in the United States, and rates of violent crime have been lowest in those places where there have been the highest incidence of gun ownership.  The same has been true of Switzerland.

Yet none of this has caused second thoughts about gun control among either the American or British intelligentsia.  In Britain, both ideology and government policy have taken a negative view of other measures of self-defense as well.  Opposition to individual self-defense by law-abiding citizens extends even beyond guns or imitation guns.  A middle-aged man attacked by two thugs in a London subway car “unsheathed a sword blade in his walking stick and slashed one of them” — and was arrested along with his assailants, for carrying an offensive weapon.  Even putting up barbed wire around a garden and its shed that had been broken into several times was forbidden by local authorities, fearful of being sued if a thief injured himself while trying to break in.  That such a lawsuit would be taken seriously is another sign of the prevailing notions among British officials, operating in a climate of opinion created by the British intelligentsia.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.285