The Australian Spectator ran an article on the claimed benefits of the UK’s 1997 handgun ban. Dr. John Lott submitted this letter, but the magazine chose not to run it. The information used in this letter can be found here , but more detailed information is available in my book from the University of Chicago Press (third edition, 2010) titled “More Guns, Less Crime.”
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Dear Letters Editor:
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Supporters of Britain’s 1997 handgun ban argue that the law made the country safer (Chris Mullin, One Morning in March: Dunblane and the Shooting That Changed Britain). Yet in the seven years after the ban, the homicide rate in England and Wales rose by over 50 percent. Total homicides peaked in 2002/2003, partly because the figures included the mass murders committed by Dr. Harold Shipman. Even excluding those cases, however, homicides increased substantially. Indeed, over the same period, the firearm homicide rate nearly doubled.
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Fifteen years after the ban, the homicide rate had finally fallen back to roughly its pre-ban level. But that decline followed a massive increase in policing: from 2001 to 2004, authorities expanded the number of police officers by about 18 percent.
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Britain’s experience is not unique. Each time governments have banned either all guns or all handguns anywhere in the world, murder and homicide rates have risen, often by several fold or more. These increases have occurred not only in U.S. jurisdictions such as Washington, DC, and Chicago, where handgun bans were implemented, but also in island nations such as the Republic of Ireland and Jamaica.
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Random variation alone would suggest that at least once a ban would coincide with falling or stable murder rates. Instead, murder and homicide rates have increased every time.
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Sincerely,
John R. Lott, Jr., Ph.D.
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