Science and Sentiment: Balancing the Firearms Debate

Timothy Wheeler, MD

The following article is reprinted by permission of California Physician, copyright 1997. California Physician is the monthly magazine of the California Medical Association. It goes out each month to about 30,000 doctors in California. This article was printed in the January 1997 issue.

False is the idea of utility that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm those only who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.

Two centuries after criminologist Cesare Beccaria wrote those words, modern criminologists are now reaching the same conclusions. In a landmark study to be published in the Journal of Legal Studies, and already available on the Internet (http://law.lib.uchicago.edu/faculty/lott/guns.html) University of Chicago researchers John Lott and David Mustard found that allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crimes and it appears to produce no increase in accidental deaths. The authors studied 3,054 counties in the United States using controls for time periods, demographic differences, and changes in firearms laws over the study period. In states which passed liberal shall issue laws for concealed carry permits, the murder rate fell by 8.5%, and rapes and aggravated assaults fell by 5% and 7% respectively.

Physicians who follow the public health firearms debate may be shocked by these statistics. But the Lott study is no surprise to those who read the criminology literature. Similar studies go back as far as the Carter administration, which funded an extensive literature review on weapons and violent crime, published as the book Under the Gun: Weapons, Crime, and Violence in America. Authors James Wright, Peter Rossi, and Kathleen Daly's summation was that there is no compelling evidence that the private ownership of firearms among the general population is, per se, an important cause of criminal violence.

More recently Northwestern University's Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology published Kleck and Gertz's national survey showing as many as 2.5 million annual uses of firearms to defend against imminent violent crime.

How can it be that doctors have not learned the whole truth about guns and crime? The answer is simple. Most doctors have never considered gun crime to be germane to medicine, and have therefore not studied the subject. But the large body of research amassed by criminologists during the past 20 years mostly confirms what typical gun- owning citizens know intuitively: Gun violence is the work of a small minority of criminal aberrants, most of whom have a lifelong history of violent and antisocial behaviour.

This perspective is now accepted by many in the academic community outside of medicine. Charges against the National Rifle Association or the gun lobby fail to address the scientific issues raised by these reputable researchers and therefore contribute little to our understanding.

There are physicians who believe that criminologists have something to teach physicians about crime. They want to hear all the evidence and make up their own minds. The evidence increasingly tells us that gun ownership by good citizens is not only safe, but is a positive benefit in that it helps protect innocent human life.

Sarah Thompson, M.D.
PO Box 271231
Salt Lake City, UT 84127-1231
801-966-7278 (voice mail and fax)
http://www.therighter.com

Return to Homepage