What Do We Really Know About Gun Control Laws? | Eastern NC Now

    Publisher's note: The author of this post is Jon Guze, who is the Director of Legal Studies for the John Locke Foundation.

    In his response to the recent shootings at Umpqua Community College, President Obama made an impassioned plea for more gun control:


    And he backed this plea up with a claim about what "we know":


    Unfortunately, as a statement of what we know about gun control laws, this claim is misleading at best.

    As Glenn Kessler explains in The Washington Post's "Fact Checker" column, the President's claim is based on a chart that appeared in the National Journal that uses colored boxes (rather than statistical analysis) to show a strong negative correlation between "gun deaths" and gun laws, i.e., most of the states with a lot of gun laws have relatively low rates of gun deaths, and most of the states with few gun laws have relatively high rates.

    Kessler points out a number of problems with the chart, including the fact that there are notable exceptions to the rule — Hew Hampshire and Vermont both have few gun laws as well as low rates of gun deaths — and the fundamentally important fact that correlation does not prove causation. However the big problem with the chart is that, when it comes to the issues the President is talking about, it doesn't even show correlation because it uses the wrong metric:


    If rates of suicides tracked closely with more relevant kinds of gun deaths, homicides for example, this might not matter, but they don't. On the contrary, when Kessler revised the chart by excluding suicides "it made a huge difference":


    At the Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh, provides a more systematic analysis of the relationship between gun laws and homicides that suggests Kessler was being generous. Instead of using aggregated "gun deaths" and a crude, "check the boxes" approach to evaluating gun laws, Volokh uses 2012 Justice Department homicide data and gun law grades from the Brady Campaign. The result?


    The ten states with the lowest rates of homicide received an average Brady score of 15, compared to an average score of 13.2 for the ten states with the highest rates. Each group included three states with scores over 10.0 and three states with negative scores. Overall:


    Contrary to what the President has claimed, we don't know that the gun laws he advocates would reduce the rate of homicide, and we certainly don't know that they would put a stop to mass killings. And because we don't know these things we should be hesitant about supporting such laws. When it comes to using government force against ordinary Americans, the burden should always be on the would-be enforcer to show that the use of force is justified, and that's especially true in the case of Constitutionally protected rights like the right to bear arms.