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Good rebuttal to gun control lies. Worth reading
THE LAW-ABIDING GUN OWNER AS DOMESTIC AND ACQUAINTANCE MURDERER
Taken from "Guns, Murders, and the Constitution: A Realistic
Assessment of Gun Control," by Don B. Kates, February, 1990,
pp.45-49. Mr. Kates' entire work is available from the Pacific
Research Institute for Public Policy, 177 Post Street, San
Francisco, CA 94108, (415) 989-2411. The numbers embedded in
this file refer to the references at the end.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Conceding that banning handguns would not disarm terrorists,
or assassins, the anti-gun argument portrays those people as
exceptions to the generality, which is "previously law-abiding
citizens committing impulsive gun-murders while engaged in
arguments with family members or acquaintances."1 The anti-gun
crusaders claim most murders result from gun ownership among
ordinary citizens: "That gun in the closet to protect against
burglars will most likely be used to shoot a spouse in a moment
of rage . . . The problem is you and me--law-abiding folks."2
If this portrayal of murderers were true, a gun ban might
drastically reduce murder because the primary perpetrators (law-
abiding citizens) might give up guns even though hardened
criminals, terrorists, and assassins would not. Unfortunately
for this appealingly simple nostrum, every national and local
study of homicide reveals that murderers are not ordinary
citizens--nor are they people who are likely to comply with gun
laws. Murderers (and fatal gun accident perpetrators) are
atypical, highly aberrant individuals whose spectacular
indifference to human life, including their own, is evidenced by
life histories of substance abuse, automobile accident, felony,
and attacks on relatives and acquaintances.3
1. Prior Felony Record of Murderers
The FBI's annual crime reports do not regularly compile data
on the prior criminal records of murderers, and no such data are
otherwise available on a national basis. But in a special data
run for the Eisenhower Commission, the FBI found that 74.7
percent of murder arrestees nationally over a 4-year period had
prior arrests for violent felonies or burglaries.4 In another 1-
year period 77.9 percent of murder arrestees had priors.5 Over
yet another 5-year period nationally, arrested murderers had
adult criminal records showing an average prior criminal career
of at least 6 years duration, including four major felony
arrests; 57.1 percent of these murder arrestees had been
convicted of at least one prior adult felony; and 64 percent of a
national sample of convicted murderers who had been released were
rearrested within 4 years. 6
These data have been confirmed by numerous local studies
over the past 40 years.7 For instance, a profile showed that a
typical murderer in Washington, D.C., had six prior arrests,
including two for felonies, one for a violent felony.8 Note that
these data do not begin to reflect the full extent of murderers'
prior criminal careers--and thus cannot illustrate how different
murderers are from the ordinary law-abiding person. Much serious
crime goes unreported. Of those crimes that are reported, a
large number are never cleared by arrest; of those so cleared,
many are juvenile arrests that are not included in the data
recounted above. At the same time we know that most juvenile,
unsolved, or unreported serious crimes are concentrated in the
relatively small number of people who have been arrested for
other crimes.9
2. Prior Violence History of Wife Murderers
Intrafamily murderers are especially likely to have engaged
in far more previous violent crimes than show up in their arrest
records. But because these attacks were on spouses or other
family members, they will rarely have resulted in an arrest.10
So domestic murderers' official records tend not to show their
full prior violence, but only their adult arrests for attacking
people outside their families. Therefore, only about "70 to 75
percent of domestic homicide offenders have been previously
arrested and about half previously convicted."11 As to how many
crimes they perpetrate within the family, even in a relatively
short time, "review of police records in Detroit and Kansas City"
shows that in 90 percent of the cases of domestic homicide,
police had responded at least once to a disturbance call at the
home during the two-year period prior to the fatal incident, and
in over half (54 percent) of the cases, they had been called five
or more times.12
A leading authority on domestic homicide notes: "The day-to-
day reality is that most family murders are preceded by a long
history of assaults . . ." Studies (including those just cited)
"indicate that intrafamily homicide is typically just one episode
in a long-standing syndrome of violence."13 Nor is "acquaintance
homicide" accurately conceptualized as a phenomenon of
previously law-abiding people killing each other in neighborhood
arguments. The term "acquaintance homicide" covers, and far more
typically is exemplified by, examples such as a drug addict
killing his dealer in the course of robbing him; a loan shark or
bookie killing a nonpaying customer; or gang members, drug
dealers, and members of organized crime "families" killing each
other.14
3. Non Sequitur and Fabrication in Labeling Murderers as Ordinary
Citizens
In contrast to these evaluations, neither of the data sets,
which are cited as supporting claims that murderers "are good
citizens who kill each other," is persuasive. the National
Coalition to Ban Handguns' assertion that "most murders are
committed by a relative or close acquaintance of the victim"15 is
conceptually unpersuasive because it is a non sequitur: it simply
does not follow that because a murderer knows or is related to
his victims, he must be an ordinary citizen rather than a long-
time criminal. The conclusion would make sense only if ordinary
citizens differed from criminals by neither knowing anyone nor
being related to anyone.
The other data set that supposedly shows murderers as
ordinary citizens is Lindsay's assertion that "most murders (73
percent in 1972) are committed by previously law-abiding citizens
committing impulsive gun-murders while engaged in arguments with
family members or acquaintances."16 While there is nothing
conceptually wrong with this statement, it is empirically
unpersuasive because it is simply a fabrication. Lindsay claims
his figures are from the FBI 1972 Uniform Crime Report. But that
report offers no such statistic; rather it and other FBI data
diametrically contradict the statement. Far from showing that 73
percent of murderers nationally were "previously law-abiding
citizens," the report shows that 74.7 percent of persons arrested
for murder had prior arrests for a violent felony or burglary.17
As the abstract to the NIJ Evaluation18 concludes:
It is commonly hypothesized that much criminal violence,
especially homicide, occurs simply because the means of
lethal violence (firearms) are readily at hand and, thus,
that much homicide would not occur were firearms generally
less available. There is no persuasive evidence that
supports this view.19
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I emphasize that this statement does NOT refute the case for gun
control, including rationally tailored gun bans. The fact that
murderers are "real criminals" with life histories of violence,
felony, substance abuse, and auto accident highlights the danger
in such people having handguns--or guns of any kind!20 But it is
very misleading when homicide statistics that are idiosyncratic
to gun misusers are presented as arguments for banning guns from
the whole populace. Idiosyncratic statistics provide no basis
for the claim that precautionary gun ownership by average
citizens seriously endangers their friends or relatives.
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