This month the National Academy of Sciences issued a 328-page report
on gun-control laws. The big news is that the academy's panel
couldn't identify any benefits of the decades-long effort to reduce
crime and injury by restricting gun ownership. The only conclusion it
could draw was: Let's study the question some more (presumably, until
we find the results we want).
The academy, however, should believe its own findings. Based on 253
journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, a survey that
covered 80 different gun-control measures and some of its own
empirical work, the panel couldn't identify a single gun-control
regulation that reduced violent crime, suicide or accidents.
From the assault-weapons ban to the Brady Act to one-gun-a-month
restrictions to gun locks, nothing worked.
The study was not the work of gun-control opponents: The panel was
set up during the Clinton administration, and all but one of its
members (whose views on guns were publicly known before their
appointments) favored gun control.
It's bad enough that the panel backed away from its own survey and
empirical work; worse yet is that it didn't really look objectively
at all the evidence. If it had, it would have found not just that gun
control doesn't help solve the problems of crime, suicide and gun
accidents, but that it may actually be counterproductive.
The panel simply ignored many studies showing just that. For example,
the research on gun locks that the panel considered, examined only
whether accidental gun deaths and suicides were prevented. There was
no mention of research that shows that locking up guns prevents
people from using them defensively.
The panel also ignored most of the studies that find a benefit in
crime reduction from right-to-carry laws. It did pay attention to
some non-peer-reviewed papers on the right-to-carry issue, and it
also noted one part of a right-to-carry study that indicated little
or no benefit from such laws. What the panel didn't point out,
however, is that the authors of that particular study had concluded
that data in their work did much more to show there were benefits
than to debunk it.
James Q. Wilson, professor of management and public policy at UCLA,
was the one dissenting panelist and the only member whose views were
known in advance to not be entirely pro-gun control. His dissent
focused on the right-to-carry issue, and the fact that emphasizing
results that could not withstand peer-reviewed studies called into
question the panel's contention that right-to-carry laws had not for
sure had a positive effect.
Wilson also said that that conclusion was inaccurate given that
"virtually every reanalysis done by the committee" confirmed
right-to-carry laws reduced crime. He found the committee's only
results that didn't confirm the drop in crime "quite puzzling." They
accounted for "no control variables," nothing on any of the social,
demographic, and public policies that might affect crime, and he
didn't understand how evidence that wouldn't get published in a
peer-reviewed journal would be given such weight.
While more research is always helpful, the notion that we have
learned nothing flies in the face of common sense. The NAS panel
should have concluded as the existing research has: Gun control
doesn't help.
Instead, the panel has left us with two choices: Either academia and
the government have wasted tens of millions of dollars and countless
man-hours on useless research (and the panel would like us to spend
more in the same worthless pursuit), or the National Academy is so
completely unable to separate politics from its analyses that it
simply can't accept the results for what they are.
In either case, the academy, and academics in general, have succeeded
mostly in shooting themselves in the foot.
