In this connection, two recent studies are pertinent. In 2004,
the U.S. National Academy of Sciences released its evaluation
from a review of 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government
publications, and some original empirical research. It failed to
identify any gun control that had reduced violent crime, sui-
cide, or gun accidents.15 The same conclusion was reached in
2003 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s review of then-
extant studies.16
Stringent gun controls were not adopted in England and
Western Europe until after World War I. Consistent with the
outcomes of the recent American studies just mentioned, these
strict controls did not stem the general trend of ever-growing
violent crime throughout the post-WWII industrialized world
including the United States and Russia. Professor Malcolm’s
study of English gun law and violent crime summarizes that
nation’s nineteenth and twentieth century experience as fol-
lows:
The peacefulness England used to enjoy was not the result of
strict gun laws. When it had no firearms restrictions [nine-
teenth and early twentieth century] England had little vio-
lent crime, while the present extraordinarily stringent gun
controls have not stopped the increase in violence or even
the increase in armed violence.17
Armed crime, never a problem in England, has now be-
come one. Handguns are banned but the Kingdom has mil-
lions of illegal firearms. Criminals have no trouble finding
them and exhibit a new willingness to use them. In the dec-
ade after 1957, the use of guns in serious crime increased a
hundredfold.18
In the late 1990s, England moved from stringent controls to a
complete ban of all handguns and many types of long guns.
Hundreds of thousands of guns were confiscated from those
owners law-abiding enough to turn them in to authorities.
Without suggesting this caused violence, the ban’s ineffective-
ness was such that by the year 2000 violent crime had so in-
creased that England and Wales had Europe’s highest violent
crime rate, far surpassing even the United States.19 Today, Eng-
lish news media headline violence in terms redolent of the
doleful, melodramatic language that for so long characterized
American news reports.20 One aspect of England’s recent ex-
perience deserves note, given how often and favorably advo-
cates have compared English gun policy to its American coun-
terpart over the past 35 years.21 A generally unstated issue in
this notoriously emotional debate was the effect of the Warren
Court and later restrictions on police powers on American gun
policy. Critics of these decisions pointed to soaring American
crime rates and argued simplistically that such decisions
caused, or at least hampered, police in suppressing crime. But
to some supporters of these judicial decisions, the example of
England argued that the solution to crime was to restrict guns,
not civil liberties. To gun control advocates, England, the cradle
of our liberties, was a nation made so peaceful by strict gun
control that its police did not even need to carry guns. The
United States, it was argued, could attain such a desirable
situation by radically reducing gun ownership, preferably by
banning and confiscating handguns.
The results discussed earlier contradict those expectations. On
the one hand, despite constant and substantially increasing gun
ownership, the United States saw progressive and dramatic re-
ductions in criminal violence in the 1990s. On the other hand, the
same time period in the United Kingdom saw a constant and
dramatic increase in violent crime to which England’s response
was ever-more drastic gun control including, eventually, banning
and confiscating all handguns and many types of long guns.22
Nevertheless, criminal violence rampantly increased so that by
2000 England surpassed the United States to become one of the
developed world’smost violence-riddennations.
To conserve the resources of the inundated criminal justice
system, English police no longer investigate burglary and “mi-
nor assaults.”23 As of 2006, if the police catch a mugger,robber,
or burglar, or other “minor” criminal in the act, the policy is to
release them with a warning ratherthan to arrest and prosecute
them.24 It used to be that English police vehemently opposed
the idea of armed policing. Today, ever more police are being
armed. Justifying the assignment of armed squads to block
roads and carry out random car searches, a police commander
asserts: “It is a massive deterrent to gunmen if they think that
there are going to be armed police.”25 How far is that from the
rationale on which 40 American states have enacted laws giv-
ing qualified, trained citizens the right to carry concealed guns?
Indeed, news media editorials have appeared in England argu-
ing that civilians should be allowed guns for defense.26 There is
currently a vigorous controversy over proposals (which the
Blair government first endorsed but now opposes) to amend
the law of self-defense to protect victims from prosecution for
using deadly force against burglars.27
The divergence between the United States and the British
Commonwealth became especially pronounced during the
1980s and 1990s. During these two decades, while Britain and
the Commonwealth were making lawful firearm ownership
increasingly difficult, more than 25 states in the United States
passed laws allowing responsible citizens to carry concealed
handguns. There are now 40 states where qualified citizens can
obtain such a handgun permit.28 As a result, the number of U.S.
citizens allowed to carry concealed handguns in shopping
malls, on the street, and in their cars has grown to 3.5 million
men and women.29 Economists John Lott and David Mustard
have suggested that these new laws contributed to the drop in
homicide and violent crime rates. Based on 25 years of corre-
lated statistics from all of the more than 3,000 American coun-
ties, Lott and Mustard conclude that adoption of these statutes
has deterred criminals from confrontation crime and caused
murder and violent crime to fall faster in states that adopted
this policy than in states that did not.30
