guns in DC
The other biased Washington paper:
Consider these eye-opening FBI and Metropolitan Police Department statistics: Since 1976, when the District of Columbia imposed its ban on guns, the city’s murder rate, which had been declining, started to increase; between 1976 and 1991 it rose 200 percent, while the U.S. murder rate rose just 9 percent.
Did not know that. Also, I found this bit interesting:
“The legislation is long overdue,” said the National Rifle Association, referring this week to the “District of Columbia Personal Protection Act,” introduced in each house by Rep. Mark Souder, Indiana Republican, and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, Texas Republican.
If passed, the legislation in each House would restore the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” by ending the city’s unique prohibition on allowing guns for self-defense in one’s home, while retaining stiff penalties for illegal gun possession and gun crimes.
Err, I thought that was what the judiciary did and not congress. Of course, the judiciary has basically been full of shit when it comes to anything regarding the second amendment.
August 2nd, 2006 at 12:27 pm
Actually, both. Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment expressly authorizes Congress to “enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
August 2nd, 2006 at 6:23 pm
The judiciary isn’t basically full of shit when it comes to 2A issues. They are monumentally, deluxe, magnum, super-sized, grand proportions full of shit.
August 2nd, 2006 at 8:35 pm
between 1976 and 1991 it rose 200 percent
What happened after 1991?
I ask because I suspect the implementation of the gun ban is coincidental to the change in rate. I’ve never seen anything that conclusively ties gun laws (pro- or con-) to violent crime rates (up or down), at least not significantly.
Actually, the 1976 starting point is suspiciously convenient for someone trying to make a point, but it doesn’t correlate very well to the change in murder rate. From 1976 to 1985, the murder rate in DC was relatively stable. It started at nine-year low of 26.8 (per 100K residents) in 1976, gradually climbing to 31.5 in 1980 (which is still lower than almost any year from 1969 to 1975 except for 1970), and then declining back down to 23.5 in 1985 — that was the lowest it had been in almost 20 years.
The actual increase started in 1987, with the double-digit year-over-year rate increases shooting the rate up to a peak of 80.6 in 1991. So whatever your culprit is, it isn’t your 1976 gun ban. It’s something that happened between 1985 and 1987. And then something happened in 1992 or 1993 that started a downward trend, which really gets statistically interesting aound 1996. By 2000, the murder rate was down to 41.8, down nearly 50% from its 1991 peak — but still substantially higher than its 1969-1986 average.
Source
August 2nd, 2006 at 9:11 pm
This is very bad and damn the NRA for doing this. Yes, you heard me right.
Parker vs DC is going to hit the supreme court and possibly give us a very favorable 2nd = individual right ruling. The only thing that could possibly sink the case right now would be if some clown got rid of the law that they are suing to overturn.
August 2nd, 2006 at 9:17 pm
tom, i tend to concur that bans don’t affect crime either way.
August 2nd, 2006 at 10:14 pm
Beerslurpy, I disagree. Yes, Parker v. DC could result in a favorable Supreme Court ruling. No, there’s no guarantee that it would. Why risk it now, when in all likelihood we’ll have a more pro-2A Supreme Court by 2009?
August 2nd, 2006 at 10:35 pm
I doubt we can be sure of a successful confirmation battle leading to a pro-gun SCOTUS judge. Bush hasn’t been pushing overly hard for gun rights, een though he is better than the other choices.
August 3rd, 2006 at 12:02 am
We dont even know if republicans will control the senate in another 6 months. Do you think a pro-gun nominee would get past a judiciary committe chaired by Ted Kennedy?
August 3rd, 2006 at 9:43 am
It would be tough, no doubt about it. For this reason, I’d rather that the Repubs resign themselves to the fact that the Dems will get to run the relatively inconsequential House for two years, and focus 100% of their resources on preserving their majority in the Senate. Even if that fails – and it would have to fail in a big way for the Dems to take an actual majority in the Senate – we’ve still got better odds with the next Supreme Court than with the current one. The four conservatives aren’t going anywhere, but two of the worst liberals might well be, and even with Kennedy’s committee running the show, the odds of Bush appointing anyone as far to the left as Ginsburg or Stevens are slim to none. Hell, even if no one retires between now and ’09, and both retire in President Hillary’s first term, I don’t think even she could get any Justices through the Senate who are as far out in left field as those two. Under every plausible scenario but one, a delayed Second Amendment case brings the same ding-dang issue before a more sympathetic Supreme Court than the one we have now. And under that one, worst case scenario, it ends up before a Supreme Court that is exactly like the one we have now, no better and no worse. And even that nighmare scenario might be a little better, as one of the bad guys on the Court – Justice Kennedy – is fond of constitutionalizing “consensus” opinions. Remember when executing minors and prohibiting sodomy were constitutional, until enough states changed their laws for a faux “consensus” to arise that both were wrong? Having even D.C.’s handgun ban repealed might well be the straw that broke gun control’s back.
Now that I’ve offered a gazillion reasons why repealing the ban and leaving the court case for another day is a good idea, perhaps Beerslurpy or anyone else can provide one reason why it is not? And perhaps someone else can explain why John McCaslin thinks the bill has anything to do with the equal protection clause (given that the existing ban disarms all citizens equally), or why that is even necessary to mention it (given that Congress has plenary lawmaking power over DC and the territories)?
August 3rd, 2006 at 10:30 am
tgirsch: you can track DC crime rates after 1991 here:
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/dccrime.htm
The rate went down as the crack fad passed and the dealers killed each other off or were locked away like neighborhood hero Rayful Edmond.
Also, the 1976 starting point is ABSOLUTELY NOT ‘suspiciously convenient’. It is the year the ban was imposed on DC by the council. Please note that citizens never voted to disarm themselves. That said, DC voters are reliable sheep and certainly would have done as instructed by their Democrap overlords.
The tripling of the murder rate in the 15 years after the ban was passed is significant because it categorically disproves the “anti’s” claims that banning guns would reduce crime and murder. Clearly it did not. DC is the Poster Child for liberal policy failure. All the ban did was leave the law-abiding helpless, and turn citizens into subjects.
“http://www.nraila.org/Issues/Articles/Read.aspx?ID=123”
DC is still a national leader in property crime and murder. And in fact crime is up again this year. Despite this, it is still against the law in DC to defend your home against criminal attack by using a firearm.
As an example of how patently absurd DC law (and by extension the morons who came up with it) is, I offer this: It is not a crime to shoot someone in self defense in the district (this is actually a question on the written test that DC longarm owners are forced to take). It is a crime to unlock or assemble the firearm such that it is operable. It is a crime to load the firearm. It is a crime to even possess the firearm if it happens to be a pistol that is perfectly legal anywhere else. It is a crime to discharge the firearm without prior written consent from the chief of police. So technically, if you were the victim of a home invasion robbery, I suppose you could ask the dirtbags to wait until the next business day so you could go get permission from the chief. And if perhaps they were de-icing the wings of the pigs flying around a frozen over hell that day, and chief Ramsey were to grant you persission, you could return to the house and shoot the dirtbags before they had a chance to kill you and your family. Of course, afterwards, you would still be charged with the crime of having an operable firearm, and for loading it, and would be carted off to jail for saving your family.
Please note that DC police would almost certainly confiscate all of your other legally owned arms, so the dirtbags friends would then know your family was helpless, and they would return the next night to eliminate any witnesses.
Welcome to DC!
August 3rd, 2006 at 4:04 pm
Anon:
If you’ll notice, your source is the same as mine.
I recognize that 1976 is when the ban was passed. But I called the 1976 date “suspiciously convenient” because the author compares the murder rate in 1976 to the rate in 1991. Presumably, s/he does this to give the impression that the gun ban caused the increase in the murder rate. He even says that the rate “started to increase” in 1976; as I pointed out, sort of. The increase was minor, and a few years later, it started to decrease again, to the point where it actually got lower than it had been in ’76.
So what I’m arguing is that this is disingenuous use of statistics by the author. S/he wanted to make the case that not only was the gun ban ineffective, it was counterproductive, and so simply compared the 1976 figure to the worst figure since then, without paying any attention to what else happened. That’s just plain misleading.
None of what I’m saying should be construed as either support of, or opposition to, the DC gun ban. I’m just opposed to bullshit use of statistics.
August 3rd, 2006 at 6:55 pm
Well, the statistics clearly show that the ban was ineffective. And in so much as it trampled the rights of the law-abiding with no discernible benefit, it was also clearly counterproductive (setting aside the fact that disarming the law-abiding IS a liberal goal). So I’d say the article is spot on. Additionally, the article never posits a causal relationship, but rather notes the extremely strong correlation from the inception of the ban going forward to the worst point.
Admittedly, since there is no control group, any conclusions regarding cause drawn from the statistics should be taken with a grain of salt. But all things considered, it is plainly obvious that the ban was an abject failure – and to suggest otherwise is pure folly.
Ban Criminals, Not Guns.
August 3rd, 2006 at 10:07 pm
Anon:
Well, the statistics clearly show that the ban was ineffective.
On that much, I’d agree. But that’s not how the excerpt is written. The excerpt is written as if to suggest that the ban was responsible for the increase, which is simply not borne out in the stats. Someone arguing in favor of the ban could just has easily have argued that because the rate had dropped by 1985, that the ban was responsible for that drop. And that someone would be just as wrong.
setting aside the fact that disarming the law-abiding IS a liberal goal
Not for this liberal, it ain’t.
Additionally, the article never posits a causal relationship, but rather notes the extremely strong correlation from the inception of the ban going forward to the worst point.
It doesn’t come right out and say it, but it does strongly imply it. And the fact is, the correlation isn’t at all strong, never mind “extremely” strong. The stats from 76-85 are consistent with no impact at all, good or bad. So the author would have done a more effective job of convincing those who didn’t already agree simply by pointing out that the law didn’t seem to do anything, that it didn’t help at all (clearly true based on the stats) rather than trying to stretch and make a weak point.
The entire excerpted section is, in my opinion incredibly misleading. The rate “had been declining” before 1976? For two whole years. The rate “started to increase” after 1976? Slightly, sure, but every year until 1985 was still lower than it had been in 1975, a year before the ban passed. And after 1985, it started to decline again. The rate “rose 200%” from 1976 to 1991? Again, by looking at the endpoints and ignoring what happened in between, it paints the misleading picture that the gain was constant over that time, when in fact it was not. The big increase didn’t start until 1988, fully twelve years after the ban passed. You yourself acknowledge that any number of other factors could have caused that increase (and probably did).
That’s not even close to what I’d call “spot on.” If he argued simply that the gun ban failed to reduce the murder rate, he’d have had a great point. Instead, he chose the path of “lies, damn lies, and statistics,” and tanked his credibility, as far as I’m concerned.
August 4th, 2006 at 9:50 am
tgirsch I find it amusing that you decry the author for cherry picking statistics for the article, and then do the same to counter it.
And I reiterate: the article never posits a causal relationship. That’s something that you are reading into it as a result of your warped politics. Go back to Daily Kos.
August 4th, 2006 at 10:38 am
That’s why God invented regression analysis. Based on everything else we know about crime, it ought to be possible to tease out other measurable factors and predict (postdict?) how much D.C.’s crime rate would have risen or fallen during the same period if the gun laws had been left alone. The difference – whether it results in an absolute increase or decrease, or just a smaller increase or decrease than would otherwise have obtained – can and should be attributed to the change in the gun laws.
It’s one thing to say changes in the gun laws are only a minor factor in determining crime rates – that’s probably true. It’s another to say we can’t measure the impact of gun laws on crime – that’s probably not true, but it’s at least defensible. But to say that gun laws have no impact on crime in either direction defies reason. On the one hand, all rational people ought to be able to agree that of course lax gun laws will allow some crimes to occur that might otherwise have been hampered by a combination of stricter laws and more consistent enforcement, and that of course strict gun laws enable some different crimes by rendering their law-abiding victims defenseless. Without knowing what either of these numbers are, I can only say it would be a very odd coincidence for these two, generally unrelated numbers to perfectly cancel each other out.
Personally, my view is that gun laws have a significant impact on a narrow class of crimes, and a negligible impact on the rest, resulting in a small, barely measurable impact on the total crime rate. The basic idea behind shall-issue CCW is that some criminals – not all, nor necessarily even most, but some – are more likely to attack potential victims they believe to be unarmed than the ones they believe might be armed. To test that theory, we ought to look at only the relatively small class of crimes where a prospective assailant is likely to believe his putative victim is armed under one scenario and unarmed under the other. That’s the relatively rare case of hardened criminals committing violent offenses against random, presumably law-abiding citizens, who almost certainly won’t be armed now, but might well become so if the law changes in their favor. Is CCW going to have a significant impact on that particular class of crimes? It damned well better.
The signal to noise ratio gets pretty bad, however, when you lump this narrow class of crimes in with the much broader class of scum-to-scum crime, where both the perp and the victim are hardened criminals, and both knew all along that the other was almost certainly armed. In their case, whatever deterrent effect CCW may have is already built into the equation, so when the law changes, the dynamics of this particular murder do not. These gangster-on-gangster, dealer-on-dealer murders tend to be the lion’s share of the total murder rate, so it’s not hard to see how their inclusion in the analysis can make CCW look ineffective, when in fact it’s highly effective at doing a few specific things, and irrelevant to everything else.
August 4th, 2006 at 3:24 pm
Anon:
I’m not “cherry-picking” anything. I’m pointing out that the underlying statistics do not support the implications the author was making — which they don’t. And if you don’t think the author was trying to at least suggest a causal relationship, along the lines of “not only did the ban not help, it seemed to hurt,” then I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
If “it didn’t help” was his only point, he could have made that point by stating that the current murder rate is “worse than double” what it was before the ban went into effect. Instead, he chose to highlight the worst post-ban number, and say that after the ban, the rate increased to that horrible number. Which is technically true, but people who read that without going to look at that sentence and think that the increase he talks about started nine or ten years after the ban — which is what the numbers actually show. Many, if not most people, are going to read that implicitly as “immediately after the ban,” or “not long after the ban,” both of which would be false readings.
Maybe it’s not disingenuous on the part of the author. Maybe it’s just a piss-poor piece of writing, with no intentional deceit. But those are your two choices, as I see it: incredibly sloppy, or intentionally misleading.
That’s something that you are reading into it as a result of your warped politics. Go back to Daily Kos.
I apologize to Uncle if this violates his commenting policy, but Fuck You. I’m sorry if a political liberal who supports gun rights counts as “warped politics” to you; that’s not my problem. I’ve tried to keep the discourse civil, but it’s obvious that you have no interest in that. Go back to LGF.
Xrlq:
But to say that gun laws have no impact on crime in either direction defies reason.
If I ever said that there was no impact on crime, I certainly didn’t mean it. What I have argued (or, at least, tried to argue) is that at first blush, the impact on the murder rate doesn’t appear to be statistically significant, and that if there’s something that shows otherwise, I haven’t seen it. And in this particular case, I don’t think that the statistics support the case that the author appears to be trying to make.
As to the larger issue of the impact of gun laws, I simply haven’t seen any substantial impact on, say, the murder rate. I’ve seen people argue, for example, that CCW in Florida lowered its murder rate, but that doesn’t seem to withstand scrutiny, since murder nationwide declined at roughly the same rate over the same period, and that during that same time, some states with similar murder rates experienced a greater decline than Florida, without those other states having changed their gun laws in any way.
Bottom line is, as far as I can tell from the statistics I have access to, if gun laws (pro- or con-, bans or expansions) have any measurable impact on the rates of even specific violent crimes, that impact seems to be vanishingly small. Given that the impact of such restrictions (or relaxations) seems to be so negligible, I’d argue that we should err on the side of liberty, and against the bans/restrictions, unless and until someone convincingly proves otherwise.
Finally, I don’t think I’m ready to say that CCW is “highly effective” at deterring much of anything, at least not on a macro scale. As I said, if it is, I simply haven’t seen good evidence that this is the case, whatever common sense might seem to suggest. Given the complexity of the systems involved, it would be very difficult at all to make such a case one way or the other. I think that part of it boils down to the deterrent effect of CCW, if there truly is any, comes not from whether or not carry is legal, but from how many people actually carry. I suspect that a good number of CCW holders would carry anyway, even if doing so were illegal.
It would certainly be a fascinating subject to do a study on, but it’d be hard to get a clean study. Both the pro-gun and the anti-gun interests are so rabid, it would be nigh impossible to get a study that was free from the influence of either group.
August 4th, 2006 at 10:33 pm
TGirsch, I second your “fuck you” to Anon. That comment was uncalled for. As to pinpointing the deterrent effect of CCW, I think the number who actually carry is useful only in attempting to determine how many crimes are deterred by an armed confrontation. The number “deterred” in the sense of the perp not even trying would have to depend on the criminals’ perception of how many are carrying, adjusted for how good the criminals think they are at sniffing out who is armed and who isn’t. If they think they can tell who’s packing, one would expect a shift between victims, not a significant drop in the number of violent attacks. But as I mentioned before, none of these numbers are going to move much unless you limit the analysis to the subset of violent crimes where concealed carry laws will significantly impact the odds of either (1) the victim actually being armed or (2) the perp thinking the victim is likely to be armed. And criminal-on-criminal attacks generally don’t fit that mold.
August 7th, 2006 at 3:45 pm
X:
That’s an even better way of putting it.