Effective Gun Control: A Cock and John Bull Story?

Opponents of gun rights have for years claimed Great Britain as the paragon of effective gun control. An article by Joyce Lee Malcolm in the November 2002 issue of Reason Magazine (unfortunately not available at ReasonOnline) casts serious doubt on that claim. Although the rates of murder and rape are still much higher in the U.S. than in Great Britain, it turns out that Britain now has substantially higher violent crime rates in every other category, from assault to armed robbery to burglary. Moreover, the rise in violent crime across the pond has followed the passage of ever stricter gun control laws, most notably the outright ban of all handguns in 1997. The article observes that "[y]our chances of being mugged in London are now six times greater than in New York" (p. 22).

This is journalism, of course, not social science. It would take a more careful study (like John Lott's work on concealed carry laws in the U.S.) to convince me that gun control laws are really to blame for Britain's rise in crime. But a couple of factoids in the article jumped out at me. First, for those who would focus on the murder rate and ignore the rest, it's worth noting that Britain has always had a relatively low murder rate, even in the days before either country implemented gun control laws: "A government study for the years 1890-92, for example, found only three handgun homicides, an average of one a year, in a population of 30 million" (p. 22). (I would be curious to know the homicide rate with all forms of gun.)

Second -- and this is the point that really piqued my interest -- the murder rate is calculated differently in Britain. "The FBI asks police to list every homicide as murder, even if the case isn't subsequently prosecuted or proceeds on a lesser charge, making the U.S. numbers as high as possible. By contrast, the English police 'massage down' the homicide statistics, tracking each case through the courts and removing it if it is reduced to a lesser charge or determined to be an accident or self-defense, making the English numbers as low as possible" (p. 25). Even so, the two countries' murder rates have been converging. In 1981, ours was 8.7 times as high; in 1995, 5.7 times as high; and in the most recent study (no year stated), 3.5 times as high (p. 25).

As a responsible academic, I should point out that none of this constitutes definitive proof that gun control causes more crime. Further research is required to separate out the effects of (for instance) business cycles, different policing strategies, severity of criminal punishments, etc. Rather, it means that gun controllers can no longer (fairly) make the opposite claim that gun control reduces crime. Their most famous exemplar isn't so exemplary after all.