Original post: Every place that has banned guns (either all guns or all handguns) has seen murder rates go up. You cannot point to one place where murder rates have fallen, whether it’s Chicago or D.C. or even island nations such as England, Jamaica, or Ireland.
For an example of homicide rates before and after a ban, take the case of the handgun ban in England and Wales in January 1997 (source here see Table 1.01 and the column marked “Offences currently recorded as homicide per million population,” UPDATED numbers available here). The gun control laws in Northern Ireland (1972 handgun ban) are different than those of England and Wales.
Law-abiding individuals had already registered their handguns and were required to turn in their guns “at designated police stations” by May 14, 1997. After the ban, clearly homicide rates bounce around over time, but there is only one year (2010) where the homicide rate is lower than it was in 1996. The immediate effect was about a 50 percent increase in homicide rates. Firearm homicide rate had almost doubled between 1996 and 2002 (see here p. 11). The homicide and firearm homicide rates only began falling when there was a large increase in the number of police officers during 2003 and 2004. Despite the huge increase in the number of police, the murder rate still remained slightly higher than the immediate pre-ban rate.
The peak in firearm homicides occurred in 2001/02. The peak in total homicides occurred in 2002/2003 partly as a result of including mass murders by Dr. Harold Shipman. Our point was that the drop in homicides only occurred after the large increase in police. Subtracting Dr. Harold Shipman’s homicides from the 2002/03 totals doesn’t change the point that the drop in homicides occurred after the big increase in the number of police. In terms of total homicides, there was a 32% increase between 1996 and 2002.
There are a lot of issues about how different countries measure homicide or murders differently, but that isn’t really relevant for the discussion here as we are talking about changes over time within a country.
Other information for Ireland and Jamaica.
Jamaica’s crime data were obtained from a variety of sources. Its murder data from 1960 to 1967 were obtained from Terry Lacey, Violence and Politics in Jamaica, 1960–70 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977). Professor Gary Mauser obtained the data from 1970 to 2000 from a Professor A. Francis in Jamaica and the data from 2001 to 2006 from the Statistical Institute of Jamaica (http://www.statinja.com/stats.html). Jamaica’s population estimates were obtained from NationMaster.com (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ peo_pop-people-population&date=1975).
UPDATE: See also information on Venezuela available here. It is also true for the Solomon Islands, which even appear to have only had mass public shootings after the 1999 gun ban.
How about for DC and Chicago (Figures taken from More Guns, Less Crime)? (Click on figures to enlarge.) Regressions that try to account for lots of other factors are available in that book from the University of Chicago Press.
The raw data for DC over a long period of time is available here (the crime rates are available on the bottom half of the screen).
Now Australia didn’t have a complete ban on guns, they didn’t even ban all semi-automatic guns, but a discussion on the changes in their crime rates from their gun buyback is available here (see also particularly here).
Regarding Japan, the point to make clear is that Japan has had a very low murder rate for as long as data is available. Gun ownership by private citizens was banned or extremely heavily regulated for hundreds of years, with no significant change in the number of people allowed to own guns. Some point to the drop in homicides after the 1958 gun law, but they ignore the 1946 regulations under the Allied Occupation and the 1950 Order that continued “the general prohibition of possession of guns by civilians.” We have consulted Professor Mark Ramseyer at the Harvard Law School, probably the leading US-based expert on the Japanese legal system. He believes that handguns were effectively banned for years long before crime data existed in Japan despite some minor variations in the law over time. Hence, a comparison of crime rates before and after a ban isn’t possible.
The issue here is to separate whether it is gun control or something else different about Japan that is important. Unless you can see a change before and after a change in gun control laws, it is difficult to infer anything about the impact of gun control laws. There are currently about 208,961 Japanese who currently own rifles or shotguns.
For a discussion of what happened in New Zealand see here.
Much of the debate over gun control focuses on what is called “cross-sectional” data. That is crime rates are examined at one particular point of time across different places. Here are two paragraphs from John Lott’s The Bias Against Guns that explain the basic problem with cross-sectional analysis.
First, the cross-sectional studies: Suppose for the sake of argument that high-crime countries are the ones that most frequently adopt the most stringent gun control laws. Suppose further, for the sake of argument, that gun control indeed lowers crime, but not by enough to reduce rates to the same low levels prevailing in the majority of countries that did not adopt the laws. Looking across countries, it would then falsely appear that stricter gun control resulted in higher crime. Economists refer to this as an “endogeniety” problem. The adoption of the policy is a reaction to other events (that is, “endogenous”), in this case crime. To resolve this, one must examine how the high-crime areas that chose to adopt the controls changed over time —not only relative to their own past levels but also relative to areas that did not institute such controls.
Unfortunately, many contemporary discussions rely on misinterpretations of cross-sectional data. The New York Times recently conducted a cross-sectional study of murder rates in states with and without the death penalty, and found that “Indeed, 10 of the 12 states without capital punishment have homicide rates below the national average, Federal Bureau of Investigation data shows, while half the states with the death penalty have homicide rates above the national average.” However, they erroneously concluded that the death penalty did not deter murder. The problem is that the states without the death penalty (Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Vermont) have long enjoyed relatively low murder rates, something that might well have more to do with other factors than the death penalty. Instead one must compare, over time, how murder rates change in the two groups – those adopting the death penalty and those that did not.
More information is available in chapters 2 and 10 of More Guns, Less Crime (University of Chicago Press, 2010, third edition).
A cross country comparison and the problems with such a comparison is available here and here.
Why not scroll down to Fact Check and see their take on Australian crimes?
Fact Check’s discussion on this is very primitive. For a more detailed discussion see the links in our post above or go directly here.
http://crimeresearch.org/2014/10/cprc-testimony-today-on-gun-control-before-the-australian-senate-legal-and-constitutional-affairs-references-committee/
UK homicide numbers had been increasing steadily since 1961. Is there any reason why you have not mentioned that the spike at “2003” can be explained by the numbers for that year (i.e. 2002/03) include 172 aggregated victims of Harold Shipman, without which the rate would have been 15.2?
Exactly Nick. I was going to say the same thing. Then I saw your comment. I think the author is trying to hoodwink us!
According to Wikipedia, he was arrested on Sept. 7, 1998, 5 years before 2003.
He was, but an accurate counting of his victims was not entered into the records until 2003, when the initial Shipman Inquiry figures were released, I believe.
BBC reports same information, arrested 7 Sept 1998. You have to love the people spreading misinformation.
The UK have a strange method of counting homicides. They have a separate count for coroner suspects homicide. Long story short, the official homicide count gets included only AFTER a conviction. This means the running homicide rate is artificially lower but you will see occasional spikes based on trial results.
Gotta love people raising objects that have already been addressed and proved baseless.
Doesn’t change anything, of course. 2003 at 15.2 per M remains significantly higher than 1996 at 11.4, 6 years post-ban.
i am weird
no leo I am weird plues you don’t exest
Nick Cooper, please note that the peak in murders occurred in 2001/02. Our point was that the drop in homicides only occurred after the large increase in police. Subtracting Dr. Harold Shipman’s 172 homicides from the 2002/03 totals would only have shown the drop after the big increase in the number of police. How would raising that point have changed any of my discussion? I don’t see it.
Right, so you think that somehow having more police on the streets can somehow affect the number of homicides, most of which don’t actually occur on those streets? The bottom line is that you’re trying to push the idea that “every place that has been banned guns has seen murder rates go up,” as if there is a causal effect, but in the case of England & Wales omit to mention that number and rate of homicides had been steadily rising since 1961. It’s not like it was flatlining and then suddenly spiked after less than 0.1% of the population had their handguns banned. Handguns that, of course, where only licensed for sporting uses, and definitely not self-defence. Are you seriously trying to say that would-be murderers suddenly felt safer at the thought of, “Wow! The chances of my victim having a handgun almost certainly inaccessible locked up in a gunsafe have just dropped from 1 in 1200 to zero, but the much higher chances of them having a different type of firearm or a shotgun effectively remain the same!” The idea is utterly preposterous.
Youre so right! gun control is a joke! Criminals totally follow laws btw! liberals and democrats are so ignorant.
No, the point in the UK is that there has never been widespread firearms ownership, so restricting part of it was never going to make a difference to crime in general, not least because the vast majority of which does not involve the criminal use of firearms. Most British criminals don’t use guns, so banning firearms that most of the population never had wasn’t going to have any effect.
I guess the bigger point would be that if removing the guns wasn’t going to have an effect as you stated, why do it?
Dear Nick:
This is false. If you would like a good book on the history of gun ownership in the UK, see Joyce Lee Malcolm’s Guns and Violence from Harvard University Press. Up until at least 1920, gun ownership was extremely common in the UK. Even a brief look at newspapers of the day would show many ads for guns in many forms (e.g., umbrella guns, cane guns, book guns). Indeed, it is mind boggling how many different ways that people in the UK disguised guns for protection.
That guns were more easily available pre-1920 does not necessarily mean that they were widely owned. Certainly the number of firearms returned in police amnesties show diminishing returns after both World Wars:
1933 = 16,409
1935 = 8,469
1937 = 14,000
1946 = 76,000
1961 = 70,000
1965 = 41,000
1968 = 25,088
1988 = 42,725
If ownership had been “extremely common” before 1920, what exactly happened to them? The idea that anything but a small minority retained possession of unlicensed firearms is a complete fantasy.
“The idea that anything but a small minority retained possession of unlicensed firearms is a complete fantasy”…
Nick, that is just your opinion. According to those numbers, far less than 1% of the total UK population handed in a gun (total number of guns handed in (divided by) the total population). I find it very hard to believe that only a small fraction (less than 1%) of the UK population purchased guns when they were readily available.
In the Police Review of 7 January 1988, Michael Yardley, one of Britain’s leading experts on firearms, estimated the figure of illegal guns at a remarkable 4 million. Some indication of the size of the stockpile of illegally-owned weaponry is given by the number of firearms handed in during amnesties, in which the police encourage the public to hand in uncertified weapon for a period of several weeks, with no questions asked.
Nick,
My question was asked by someone else, but you never addressed it. I am not going to say the murder rate is higher. Why take away guns when it does nothing to change the homicide rate? You yourself acknowledged that Shippman was the cause of the big spike. Therefore, that means that the murder rate did not change. Does it make you feel better that the victim was run over by a lorrie? You may not like guns, but why should you take away my right to self-defense? I just want to hear from the other side in this argument. I have found that people who do not like/fear guns aren’t very rational or knowledgeable on the subject.
Mark,
Even when they were available with few (if any) restrictions, few people bought them simply because they generally had no need to do so. Army officers had to buy their own sidearm, and anyone venturing to “less civilised” parts of the would be apt to buy one also, but neither accounted for a significant chunk of the population.
There is also very little to justify Yardley’s putative 4 million figure, despite it being widely repeated. Even in 1988 only 882,000 Shotgun Certificates and 155,400 Firearms Certificates were on issue – just over a million in total, but obviously there would have been an overlap with some people holding both types. It’s not really credible to suggest that “illegal” firearms outnumbered Certicate holders by a ratio of 4:1, is it? It’s probable that at that time both types of certificate covered around 2.2 million firearms, in relation to which 4 million supposedly illegal ones still looks doubtful.
Charles,
Semi-automatic rifles larger than .22 LR and cartridge handguns were banned because licensed ones were used to kill a lot of people in two mass shootings, the second being in a school. They were not banned in an effort to reduce firearms crime in general (although it was hoped that cutting down the legimate supply would impact the illicit market), but simply because people didn’t like the idea of people using legally-sanctioned guns to commit mass murder (especially kids).
are you stuped this is serius, dumb boy.
Says the one who spelled stupid and serious wrong.
-A 6th grader
So you think that just because the police are IN the streets, and the crimes happen, according to you, mostly OFF the streets, that the extra policing has no effects on the crime rate in a city. I mean if there are cops all over the place Im probably not going to risk shooting my roommate, in the backyard or even IN the house. And if the peak is such a big deal to you, ignore it, you still have a significant rise in homicides starting in 98/99.
Nick Cooper I’m not entirely educated on this but first of all, there are several examples that do show murder rates increase. This may not be the case in every area, but with the amount of areas that do show an increase it is safe to say that there is some sort of connection. Now to call out the author on just one of his examples doesn’t prove this theory wrong, and if that is, in fact, what you are trying to do here then please research the other examples before calling it “preposterous”. In my own research on gun bans I have read persuasive passages from both sides but the most interesting one so far generally states that banning guns will both leave them vulnerable, and encourage those willing to commit these crimes to do so, knowing their victim will not have a firearm. By stating this I am not trying to prove you wrong or disrespect you, I’m simply putting the general idea into my own opinion based off of the research I have done.
Except that the vast majority of crime in the UK does not involve the use of firearms. British criminals do not react to their would-be victims being (generally) unarmed by arming themselves.
When the shall-issue concealed carry laws were being debated in the USA, the question was not whether crime would decrease uniformly and monotonically in every precinct in every state, but whether blood would run in the streets for 200 miles as deep as the horses’ bridles or only up to the stirrups. Similarly, when considering whether to confiscate guns that are legally owned by citizens with no criminal history – especially here in the USA where we do have a written constitution that is supposed to protect us from oppression by the government – the burden of proof rests squarely on the enemies of human freedom to justify their depredations by showing a clear and present danger that they can rescue us from. If the best you can do is say that maybe gun control laws have not always caused an increase in crime, I don’t think that meets the requirements. Keep the change, I’ll keep on clinging to my guns 🙂
When DC passed its handgun ban, the US Conference of Mayors published a paper claiming to show that murder decreased. The Congressional Research Service looked over the same data and found that the earlier report used an ” … ingeniously specious manipulation of the data” to show good results where none existed.
I was raised in the gutters of America and I know two immutable facts of the street. #1 any weapon, drug, or contraband is easily accessible for a price and when that item is illegal then small and large crime organizations will rally to capitalize. #2 if you cannot protect yourself and your loved ones then doom will befall you, law enforcement is an after the fact affair and 911 is a number you call for a clean up crew. Utopia is only a concept that does not work in practical application. The poor are getting poorer and desperation is the most deadly human attribute and it is running rampant in this country. Gangs have always recruited from our most poverty-stricken and subjugated citizens and radical Islam is doing the same. All this bickering and posturing by well off people is just distraction tactic while our government does business as usual and the disease continues merrily on. WAKE UP!! poverty is our enemy and inequality is the cancer that will rot this teenage country to nothing.
I keep reading all this stuff gun’s did this or gun’s did that the thing is gun’s are like any tool no better or worse than the person using it. Gun’s don’t kill people , people kill people the gun is the tool. I am sure you remember the Boston Tea Party, The war for our freedom against the British, The Civil War what do you think will happen to the United States if gun confiscation happen’s. I see a war in this country there are to many gang’s, and other group’s who are not just going to turn in there gun’s. That is what all the thug nation’s are waiting for so they can attack the U. S. to. As an older Army Veteran I hate to think of this happening if the Government doesn’t wake up the United States as we have known it will cease to exist.
Has that happened in other western first world countries with gun bans? I’m pretty sure it hasn’t. The only way you could really come to that conclusion is if you believe the US is less civilized than Britain or France or Germany. I don’t believe this is the case, and I have a hard time believing that you think this is the case either.
This isn’t reliable data at all because guns were exceptionally hard to get licenses for for the majority of the 20th century. Making them illegal in 1997 was more of a formality. Nobody really had or wanted guns anyway.
The very first statement made in this article is false which causes readers to question every other claim made.
This is the statement in this article that I’m referring to:
“Every place that has been banned guns (either all guns or all handguns) has seen murder rates go up. You cannot point to one place where murder rates have fallen, whether it’s Chicago or D.C. or even island nations such as England, Jamaica, or Ireland.”
Here is an article to disprove that statement:
http://www.snopes.com/crime/statistics/ausguns.asp
Clearly, you haven’t read the entire piece. One Australia didn’t either all gun or all handguns. Indeed, Australia required new licensing and had other restrictions. That said, the crime rates and suicide rates did not follow the pattern predicted by gun control advocates. There is a link down in this piece to our deeper discussion about Australia.
https://crimeresearch.org/2014/10/cprc-testimony-today-on-gun-control-before-the-australian-senate-legal-and-constitutional-affairs-references-committee/
Here in America blacks are 14% of the population, black males make up 7% of that and after taking away the very old and the very young we are left with 4%. Now take the law abiding black males away from that and we got 2%. That 2% of the population of America is responsible for OVER HALF of all murders and violent crime since 1975. This comes from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports and it is fact. Can you imagine if all of us killed at the same per-capita rate as blacks kill?… it would be the end of humanity. As reported that 2% also raped nearly 40,000 white women last year. (FBI estimates only a third of all rapes are reported) Do you know how many black women reported being raped by white men last year.. ONE!! ” As long as these people are allowed to walk freely amung us.. We need our guns.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_6_murder_race_and_sex_of_vicitm_by_race_and_sex_of_offender_2013.xls
While this smoke and mirrors might be easily swallowed whole by those on this site eager for any handwaving nonsense the supports their preordained position, it is unfortunate for them that the claims made herein are complete and utter nonsense, and don’t pass even a cursory statistical analysis. Even a first semester stats student could see through the holes in the arguments made.
In fact, the claims made here, and the “data”: on which they are based, are throughly bogus.
• it makes no difference if the firearms-related crime rate went down after the police force was increased, because first, it had been steadily declining for many years, and second almost no police in the U.K. are armed. So both these facts work AGAINST your argument that fire-arms related crime went up as a result of gun control, since it introduces a clear and obvious independent variable.
• Firearms-invovled crime nevertheless, was back below pre gun control levels in absolute numbers by 2011 and have steadily fallen almost every year since..
• 1997 is a bogus year to use as a metric for a number of statistical reasons, anyhow, not least of which is the fact that 1997 and 1998 were a statistical aberration.
• Worst of all for your cause, is how the U.K country firearms crimes for the stats you rely on. First, the aggregate number often used by your ilk includes such things as fake, imitation guns, BB guns, airsoft weapons, and other non-lethal items that are not what most people would think are appropriate for the arguments you then make with them. Second, the weapons listed as actual live guns also include ANY item not explicitly identified as fake, and as such, most likely includes a large, and significant number of such non-weapons, especially as such weapons become harder and harder to acquire.
This is all just basic stats stuff, again, what any first semester student in a stats class would know, and your ignoring the clear and obvious statistics problems in your argument lays bear the dogmatic purposes behind your agenda, which is not founded on fact, but upon furthering your preexisting position.
Take your first argument: “it makes no difference if the firearms-related crime rate went down after the police force was increased, because first, it had been steadily declining for many years, and second almost no police in the U.K. are armed.”
— homicides had been flat and then over the next eight years it was increasing right up to the point that the additional police were hired.
— Even if most police aren’t armed in the UK, they can still help solve crime. Are you actually claiming that police in the UK don’t reduce crime at all? Even with a big increase in the number of police?
— So neither fact works against our point.
“1997 is a bogus year to use as a metric for a number of statistical reasons”
— As to 1997 being a bogus year, the data for a long period of time is provided and the pattern is still clear even if you removed 1997 from the graph.
“Worst of all for your cause, is how the U.K country firearms crimes for the stats you rely on. First, the aggregate number often used by your ilk includes such things as fake, imitation guns, BB guns, airsoft weapons, and other non-lethal items”
— The graph shows homicides, so unless you are having people killed with BB or airsoft guns, I don’t really understand your next point.
7 out of 10 States with the lowest gun related violent crimes also have the countries strictest laws governing guns.
Sorry, Aaron, but that is simply not accurate. Putting aside the extremely arbitrary way that the measures of gun laws are put together, you might find this interesting.
https://crimeresearch.org/2018/03/states-stricter-gun-control-laws-fewer-gun-deaths-no-fewer-homicides-suicides-definitely-no/
Charles Petzold and Timothy Renner question the validity of ranking countries in the way you did it. They say that even if you very strongly bias your initial estimate of a mass shooting’s chances of coming from the US towards “it’s not worse than anywhere else” you still get a really small chance of that actually being the case. The evidence against it is staggering.
http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2015/07/De-Obfuscating-the-Statistics-of-Mass-Shootings.html
https://timothyrenner.github.io/datascience/2015/07/12/a-second-look-at-the-statistics-of-mass-shootings.html
But it did not “work” in Australia. Violent crime rates rose there after the guns were taken from the citizens.
And it didn’t work in Australia. Crimes rates went up slightly there.
My brother lives in Australia, my neighbors from childhood in other cities and they are very happy with the low crimes in Australia. They recognize that nothing is perfect but the law is working very well and even the data showed above display the trend going . Usually the gunmen kill themselves or are killed by police. Death penalty has not bear in this event because they do not care to die. The data to observe here is the ups and downs of the gun crime during the establishment of the law.
Sorry, Benita, but according to the International Crime Victimization Survey Australia has a much higher violent crime rate than the US — about 50% higher. A copy of their report is available here.
“Low crime rates”? Sorry, Benita:
“Australia enacted its gun ban in 1996. Murders have basically run flat, seeing only a small spike after the ban and then returning almost immediately to preban numbers. It is currently trending down, but is within the fluctuations exhibited in other nations.”
http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/homicide.html
I often hear this topic discussed as follows:
1. Murder Rates
2. Homicide Rates
3. Firearm Related Murders
4. Firearm Related Homicides
My question is how do the Firearm related murders/homicides rates compare with murders/homicide rates by any means?
Do specifically Firearm related murders decrease in countries where they are banned? Are some of these bans touted as success when in reality the method of murder is simply substituted for another?
The statistics I have read say that murders by firearms go down, but murder by other means goes up. My question to the anti-gunners is, “Do you feel better that that poor victim died by rat poison/knife/automobile/etc.?”. To me, dead is dead regardless of the method.
“Do you feel better that that poor victim died by rat poison/knife/automobile/etc.?”. To me, dead is dead regardless of the method.
Of course not. The gun control laws are meant to decrease homicide by firearms which are powerful, fast and efficiently lethal a great number of victims. The objective made the guns less available to impulsive, unstable people who with powerful guns and ammunition in their hands murder innocent people in public places in a fast, random and surprising moment.
Sure they can, and have, in many countries, in eluding Britain.