Monday, October 06, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

EDITORIAL: 'Insufficient evidence'

CDC review can't prove that gun control laws are effective

A sweeping federal review of the nation's gun control laws -- including mandatory waiting periods and bans on certain types of weapons -- has found no evidence that such measures reduce firearm violence.

The review, released Thursday, was conducted by a task force of scientists appointed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That's significant because the CDC for years exceeded its charter -- it's supposed to research communicable diseases -- by trying to convert gun control into a "health" issue.

So blatant and intransigent were these federally funded doctors that Congress in 1996 finally barred the Atlanta-based agency from using any more of its money to promote more gun control laws.

Despite that ban, a CDC task force just finished reviewing 51 published studies about the effectiveness of eight types of gun-control laws. The laws included bans on specific firearms or ammunition, measures barring felons from buying guns, firearm registration and mandatory waiting periods for gun purchases. None of the studies was conducted by the federal government.

And the results are clearly not what the CDC and others in the gun control camp had hoped for.

In every case, the CDC task force found "insufficient evidence to determine effectiveness" of the laws.

While the final report was written, predictably, to recommend "the need for more study" (please send us more grant money), there's no escaping what's just happened: Even an outfit as devotedly anti-gun as the Centers for Disease Control now has to acknowledge they can't show gun control laws do anything to reduce firearms crime or violence.

This should hardly come as a surprise. In fact, a solid body of evidence compiled by researchers including the American Enterprise Institute's John Lott demonstrates gun control laws can actually promote crime. Crime rates have skyrocketed in England and Australia since handguns were banned there for law-abiding citizens (leaving them defenseless against armed criminals), whereas many American counties which have made it easier for law-abiding citizens to carry guns have actually seen their violent crime rates drop.

"Not one academic study has shown that waiting periods and background checks have reduced crime or youth violence," Mr. Lott, the author of the book "More Guns, Less Crime," wrote back in 1999 while he was a fellow in law and economics at the University of Chicago Law School.

Needless to say, gun control advocates responded to Thursday's CDC report by quickly calling on the government to fund "better" research, presumably meaning research with results more to their liking.

But the results are in. The only question remaining now is whether gun control advocates will ever admit that their attacks on America's law-abiding gun owners have utterly failed to achieve their objective.