The National Research Council, Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2005, $4795, pp 328 ISBN 0309091241

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A committee of the National Research Council in the United States was charged with providing an assessment of the strengths and limitations of the existing research and data on gun violence In December 2004, the committee issued its final report, in book form The book contains nine chapters, and five appendices, on such topics as firearms data, patterns of firearm violence, self-defense gun use, right-to-carry laws, firearms and suicide, and criminal justice interventions

The committee consisted of 15 highly respected scientists—experts in economics, criminology, epidemiology, statistics, sociology, psychiatry, psychology, and public policy By design, they were not experts on firearms issues Unfortunately, none were injury control professionals, and few have worked directly in the public health field

Nonetheless, injury control professionals can fully support the committee’s major recommendation that “the federal government needs to support a systematic program of data collection and research” (p 3) to give policymakers a solid empirical and research base for decisions about …

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Firearms and violence: a critical review

BACKGROUND: The Forty-Ninth World Health Assembly recently declared violence a worldwide public health problem. Improved understanding of cross-national differences is useful for identifying risk factors and may facilitate prevention efforts. Few cross-national studies, however, have explored firearm-related deaths. We compared the incidence of firearm-related deaths among 36 countries. METHODS: Health officials in high-income (HI) and upper-middle-income countries (UMI) with populations greater than one million were asked to provide data using ICD-9 codes on firearm-related homicides, suicides, unintentional deaths and deaths of undetermined intent, as well as homicides and suicides for all methods combined. Thirty-six (78%) of the 46 countries provided complete data. We compared age-adjusted rates per 100,000 for each country and pooled rates by income group and geographical location. RESULTS: During the one-year study period, 88,649 firearm deaths were reported. Overall firearm mortality rates are five to six times higher in HI and UMI countries in the Americas (12.72) than in Europe (2.17), or Oceania (2.57) and 95 times higher than in Asia (0.13). The rate of firearm deaths in the United States (14.24 per 100,000) exceeds that of its economic counterparts (1.76) eightfold and that of UMI countries (9.69) by a factor of 1.5. Suicide and homicide contribute equally to total firearm deaths in the US, but most firearm deaths are suicides (71%) in HI countries and homicides (72%) in UMI countries. CONCLUSIONS: Firearm death rates vary markedly throughout the industrialized world. Further research to identify risk factors associated with these variations may help improve prevention efforts.

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Firearm-related deaths in the United States and 35 other high- and upper-middle- income countries

Over 30,000 deaths each year result from gunshot wounds. Two decades of systematic research on weapons and personal violence indicate a pervasive influence of weapon type on the patterns and outcomes of violent encounters. The likelihood that an assault will result in death depends (among other things) on the lethality of the weapon. The evidence that weapon lethality affects the likelihood of death in suicide is somewhat weaker. Assailants' weapon choice depends on a number of factors, including the relative vulnerability of the intended victim and the general availability of firearms. National Crime Survey data indicate that guns are used only about 80,000 times each year in self-defense.

The Technology of Personal Violence

What drives punitive beliefs?: Demographic characteristics and justifications for sentencing

Valid measures of macro-level gun levels are essential to assessing the impact of gun levels on crime and violence rates, yet almost all prior research on this topic uses proxies that are either invalid or whose validity has been assumed rather than demonstrated. The present study uses city, state, cross-national, and time series data to assess the criterion validity of over two dozen gun indicators. The criterion measures used are primarily direct survey measures of household gun prevalence. The results indicate that (1) most measures used in past research have poor validity, making past findings uninterpretable, (2) the best measure for cross-sectional research is the percentage of suicides committed with guns, and (3) there are no known measures that are valid indicators of trends in gun levels, making credible longitudinal research on the subject impossible at present.

Measures of Gun Ownership Levels for Macro-Level Crime and Violence Research

LL.B. 1966, Yale Law School. Member of the California, District of Columbia, Missouri and United States Supreme Court Bars. Partner, Benenson, Kates and Hardy (San Francisco office). Of counsel, O'Brien & Hallisey, San Francisco, California. Mr. Kates authored one of the petitions for certiorari in Quilici v. City of Morton Grove. — Ed. The author wishes to thank the following for their assistance: Professors William Van Alstyne (Law, Duke University Law School), Roy Wortman (History, Kenyon College), and Stephen Halbrook (Philosophy, George Mason University); Dr. Joyce Malcolm (Law Fellow, Harvard Law School), Dr. David I. Caplan, Mr. Willis Hannawalt (Pillsbury, Madison and Sutro, San Francisco), and Mr. David Hardy (Office of the Solicitor, U.S. Interior Department, Washington, D.C.). Of course, the responsibility for any errors of fact or interpretation is the author's alone. 1 Such legislation could, for example, take the form of a restrictive permit requirement designed and administered to exclude more than 99% of the civilian population from handgun ownership. On the constitutionality of restrictive permit systems, see notes 253-54 infra and accompanying text. 2 See J. ALVIANI & W. DRAKE, HANDGUN CONTROL: ISSUES AND ALTERNATIVES 48-54 (U.S. Conference of Mayors, 1975) (quoting resolutions to that effect from: The Board of Church and Society, United Methodist Church, Common Cause, National Alliance for Safer Cities, Union of America Hebrew Congregations and Unitarian Universalist Association). [Copyright © 1983 Michigan Law Review. Originally published as 82 MICH. L. REV. 204-273 (1983). For educational use only. The printed edition remains canonical. For citational use please obtain a back issue from William S. Hein & Co., 1285 Main Street, Buffalo, New York 14209; 716-882-2600 or 800-828-7571.]

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Handgun Prohibition and the Original Meaning of the Second Amendment

The gun control debate is often obscured by strong emotions and unproven assumptions According to conventional wisdom accidents with handguns account for a significant number of deaths among children, gun owners endanger themselves more than they ward off potential criminal assailants, and there is a widespread legal consensus that the Second Amendment does not support the individual right to bear arms All of these assumptions, and many others, say researchers Gary Kleck and Don Kates, are contradicted by the weight of criminological and legal evidence Hoping to disentangle myth from reality, the authors summarize the results and policy implications of recent state-of-the-art research on guns and violence in accessible, nontechnical language Among the topics addressed are media bias in coverage of gun issues, the distorting effects that a covert prohibitionist agenda has on the debate over more moderate measures for reducing gun violence, the frequency and effectiveness of the defensive use of guns, and a close analysis of the Second Amendment This well-argued and scrupulously researched volume is essential for any full understanding of the complex gun issue

Armed : new perspectives on gun control

This article first rebuts charges made in Gun Crazy, an article which asserts that the near-unanimous consensus supporting the individual rights view of the Second Amendment among historians and legal scholars is the result of a sinister concerted effort by pro-gun professors and fellow travelers. Compelling textual, structural, historical, and criminological evidence supports the new consensus. The article then examines the merits of the interpretation proffered by opponents of an individual right to keep and bear arms: the militia-centric conception of the Second Amendment. Textual, historical, and structural considerations all argue against such an interpretation. Finally, the issue that is really motivating those who reject an individual rights interpretation in favor of a militia-centric conception of the Second Amendment is identified: the allegedly adverse effect of gun ownership on public safety.

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Under Fire: The New Consensus on the Second Amendment

The world abounds in instruments with which people can kill each other. Is the widespread availability of one of these instruments, firearms, a crucial determinant of the incidence of murder? Or do patterns of murder and/or violent crime reflect basic socio-economic and/or cultural factors to which the mere availability of one particular form of weaponry is irrelevant? This article examines a broad range of international data that bear on two distinct but interrelated questions: first, whether widespread firearm access is an important contributing factor in murder and/or suicide, and second, whether the introduction of laws that restrict general access to firearms has been successful in reducing violent crime, homicide or suicide. Our conclusion from the available data is that suicide, murder and violent crime rates are determined by basic social, economic and/or cultural factors with the availability of any particular one of the world's myriad deadly instrument being irrelevant.

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Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International Evidence

From the enactment of the Bill of Rights through most of the twentieth century, the second amendment seems to have been understood to guarantee to every law-abiding responsible adult the right to possess most ordinary firearms. Until the mid-twentieth century courts and commentaries (the two earliest having been before Congress when it voted on the second amendment) deemed that the amendment "confirmed [the people] in their right to keep and bear their private arms," or "their own arms." In a 1939 case which is its only full treatment, the Supreme Court accepted that private persons may invoke the second amendment, but held that it confines their freedom of choice to militia-type weapons, i.e., high quality handguns and rifles, but not "gangster weapons" such as sawed-off shotguns, switchblade knives and (arguably) "Saturday Night Specials." In the 1960s this individual right view was challenged by scholars who argued that the second amendment guarantee extends only to the states' right to arm formal military units. This states' right view attained predominance, and was endorsed by the ABA, the ACLU and such texts as Lawrence Tribe's American Constitutional Law. During the 1980s, however, a large literature on the amendment appeared, much of it rejecting the states' right view as inconsistent with the text and with new research findings on the legislative history, the attitudes of the authors, the meaning of the right to bear arms in antecedent American and English legal thought, and the role that an armed citizenry played in classical liberal political philosophy from Aristotle through Machiavelli and Harrington to Sidney, Locke, Rousseau and their various disciples. Indicative of the current Supreme Court's probable view is a 1990 decision which, though focussing on the fourth amendment, cites the first and second as well in concluding that the phrase "right of the people" is a term of art used throughout the Bill of Rights to designate rights pertaining to individual citizens (rather than to the states). Sanford Levinson speculates that the indifference of academics, and the legal profession generally, to the second amendment reflects "a mixture of sheer opposition to the idea of private ownership of guns and the perhaps subconscious fear that altogether plausible -- perhaps even 'winning' --interpretations of the Second Amendment would present real hurdles to those of us supporting prohibitory regulation." But Levinson and others who reluctantly embrace the individual right view are not always sympathetic to gun ownership, and certainly not to the gun lobby's obnoxious pretension that the amendment bars any gun control it happens to oppose, however moderate or rational. This may help account for the fact that, though the availability of guns for self-defense is of great import to the gun lobby, that issue plays little part in modern academic exposition of the individual right position. In contrast, proponents of the state's right view do focus on the issue of self-protection, straight-forwardly denying the existence of historical evidence that self-protection was one of the concerns underlying the second amendment. The purpose of this article is to explore the numerous and protean ways in which the concept of self-protection related to the amendment in the minds of its authors. Indeed, self-defense is at the core of the second amendment and was an element in the Founders' political thought generally. At the same time, it is important to recognize that the Founders' view of self-protection was not only stronger but also more inclusive than the concept described by many modern thinkers. To the Founders and their intellectual progenitors, being prepared for self-defense was a moral imperative as well as a pragmatic necessity; moreover, its pragmatic value lay less in repelling usurpation than in deterring it before it occurred. Language: en

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Don B. Kates

Papers

Handgun Prohibition and the Original Meaning of the Second Amendment

Armed : new perspectives on gun control

Under Fire: The New Consensus on the Second Amendment

Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International Evidence

The Second Amendment and the ideology of self-protection