Gun Control - for all you Liberals! :-)

Here is an excellent article regarding Gun Control: By JOHN R. LOTT -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IT takes a lot to shock today's jaded movie audiences, especially those at a Hollywood preview. Yet Mel Gibson's new film on the Revolutionary War, "The Patriot," drew loud gasps at a recent screening. The outrageous scene? Gibson's character hands over guns to his 10- and 13-year-old sons to help fight off British soldiers. Few critics were soothed when the screenwriter noted that the scenes accurately portrayed the complexities of war, or when Gibson said that he would let his own children use guns in self-defense. With the Clinton administration blaming the recent school violence on the greater accessibility of guns, it is hardly surprising that some are shocked by children using guns. Many people, including George W. Bush and Al Gore, support making it a crime for anyone under age 21 to possess a handgun. Yet gun availability in America has never been as restricted as it is now. As late as 1968, it was possible for children like those in the movie to walk into a hardware store, virtually anywhere in the United States, and buy a rifle. Few states even had age restrictions for buying handguns. Buying a rifle through the mail was easy. Private transfers of guns to juveniles were unrestricted. But nowhere were guns more common than at school. Until 1969, virtually every public high school in New York City had a shooting club. High-school students carried their guns to school on the subways in the morning, turned them over to their homeroom teacher or the gym coach and retrieved them after school for target practice. The federal government gave club members their rifles and ammunition. Students regularly competed in citywide shooting contests for university scholarships. Contrast that with what is happening today across the country: college and elementary students expelled from school for even accidentally bringing a water pistol; elementary school students suspended for carrying a picture of a gun; kindergarten students suspended for playing cops and robbers and using their hands as guns; a school superintendent losing his job for even asking whether someone at a school should have a gun to protect the students. Since the 1960s, the growth of federal gun control has been dramatic. Laws that contained 19,907 words in 1960 quadrupled to 88,413 words by last year. For example, it was not a federal crime for those under 18 to possess a handgun until 1994. State laws have grown similarly. Even a "gun friendly" state government such as Texas has gun-control provisions of more than 41,000 words. None of this even begins to include the burgeoning local regulations. But whose access has really been restricted by these laws? While their object is obviously to disarm criminals, the laws are primarily obeyed by good people. There is no academic study showing that waiting periods and background checks have reduced criminal access, or resulted in less crime or youth violence. But plenty of research indicates the reverse is true. The Brady law's waiting periods have delayed access to guns; since its passage, rape rates of women being stalked or threatened have increased. In Virginia, rural areas have a long tradition of high-school students going hunting in the morning, before school. The governor tried in vain to get the state Legislature in 1999 to enact an exemption to the federal "gun-free schools" law in order to let high-school students store their guns in their cars in the school parking lot. Interestingly, one reason why few students have been prosecuted for possessing a gun on school grounds is that so many offenses involve these very types of cases. Prosecutors find it unreasonable to send good kids to jail simply because they had a rifle locked in the trunk of their car and didn't park sufficiently far enough off of school property. Attempts in Congress to mandate prosecutions will take away this prosecutorial discretion and produce unintended results. "The Patriot" illustrates some benefits of letting people defend themselves with guns. It is something that has been sorely missing in the current debate. People use guns to stop school shootings or other violent crimes - 2 million defensive uses a year. Yet, when was the last time the national evening news carried a story about someone using a gun to save lives? The horror with which people react to guns is inversely related to how accessible guns are. Whether it was colonial times or 30 years ago, people had more association with guns but less fear. Gun-control advocates face something of a dilemma: If guns are the problem, why was it that when guns were really accessible, even inside schools by students, we didn't have the mass school shootings and other problems that plague us now? --- John R. Lott is a senior research scholar at Yale University Law School. The second edition of his book, "More Guns, Less Crime," was released this month. Mavi forum