2aguy
Diamond Member
- Jul 19, 2014
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- #81
wrong....normal people are not shooting each other over beer, especialy in Britain but even here......normal people do not commit murder or gun murder.......again..here is the actual research twit.........
The Kate and Mauser study.......
http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf
I. VIOLENCE: THE DECISIVENESS OF SOCIAL FACTORS
One reason the extent of gun ownership in a society does not spur the murder rate is that murderers are not spread evenly throughout the population. Analysis of perpetrator studies shows that violent criminals—especially murderers—“almost uniformly have a long history of involvement in criminal behav‐ ior.”37 So it would not appreciably raise violence if all law‐ abiding, responsible people had firearms because they are not the ones who rape, rob, or murder.38 By the same token, violent crime would not fall if guns were totally banned to civilians. As the respective examples of Luxembourg and Russia suggest,39 individuals who commit violent crimes will either find guns despite severe controls or will find other weapons to use. 40
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III. DO ORDINARY PEOPLE MURDER?
The “more guns equal more death” mantra seems plausible only when viewed through the rubric that murders mostly in‐ volve ordinary people who kill because they have access to a firearm when they get angry. If this were true, murder might well increase where people have ready access to firearms, but the available data provides no such correlation. Nations and
areas with more guns per capita do not have higher murder rates than those with fewer guns per capita.53
Nevertheless, critics of gun ownership often argue that a “gun in the closet to protect against burglars will most likely be used to shoot a spouse in a moment of rage . . . . The problem is you and me—law‐abiding folks;”54 that banning handgun posses‐ sion only for those with criminal records will “fail to protect us from the most likely source of handgun murder: ordinary citi‐ zens;”55 that “most gun‐related homicides . . . are the result of impulsive actions taken by individuals who have little or no criminal background or who are known to the victims;”56 that “the majority of firearm homicide[s occur] . . . not as the result of criminal activity, but because of arguments between people who know each other;”57 that each year there are thousands of gun murders “by law‐abiding citizens who might have stayed law‐abiding if they had not possessed firearms.”58
These comments appear to rest on no evidence and actually con‐ tradict facts that have so uniformly been established by homicide studies dating back to the 1890s that they have become “crimino‐ logical axioms.”59 Insofar as studies focus on perpetrators, they show that neither a majority, nor many, nor virtually any murder‐ ers are ordinary “law‐abiding citizens.”60
Rather, almost all mur‐ derers are extremely aberrant individuals with life histories of violence, psychopathology, substance abuse, and other dangerous behaviors. “The vast majority of persons involved in life‐ threatening violence have a long criminal record with many prior contacts with the justice system.”61 “Thus homicide—[whether] of a
stranger or [of] someone known to the offender—‘is usually part of a pattern of violence, engaged in by people who are known . . . as violence prone.’”62
Though only 15% of Americans over the age of 15 have arrest records,63 approximately 90 percent of “adult mur‐ derers have adult records, with an average adult criminal career [involving crimes committed as an adult rather than a child] of six or more years, including four major adult felony arrests.”64
These national statistics dovetail with data from local nineteenth and twentieth century studies. For example: victims as well as offenders [in 1950s and 1960s Philadelphia murders] . . . tended to be people with prior police records, usually for violent crimes such as as‐ sault.”65
“The great majority of both perpetrators and victims of [1970s Harlem] assaults and murders had previous [adult] arrests, probably over 80% or more.”66 Boston police and probation officers in the 1990s agreed that of those juvenile‐perpetrated murders where all the facts were known, virtually all were committed by gang members, though the killing was not necessarily gang‐ directed. 67 One example would be a gang member who stabs his girlfriend to death in a fit of anger.68 Regardless of their arrests for other crimes, 80% of 1997 Atlanta murder arrestees had at least one earlier drug offense with 70% having 3 or more prior drug of‐ fenses.69
A New York Times study of the 1,662 murders committed in that city in the years 2003–2005 found that “[m]ore than 90 percent of the killers had criminal records.”70 Baltimore police figures show that “92 percent of murder suspects had [prior] criminal records in 2006.”71 Several of the more recent homicide studies just reviewed
