New CDC Study Does Not Support Proposed Gun Control Laws

On December 14, 2012, a 20-year-old madman shot his own mother 4 times in the head. The murderer then took his mother’s rifle to Sandy Hook Elementary School, where he killed twenty children and six more adults. The murderer shot himself in the head when he heard police arrive at the scene.

This horrific tragedy sparked a national discussion about violence in the United States and how to reduce the number of people killed and injured by firearms. Some of the proposals were to (1) require background checks for all transfers of firearms; and (2) prohibit civilian possession of “assault weapons.” Indeed, states across the country have enacted laws implementing these ideas. In addition, President Obama issued an executive order “directing the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to research the causes and prevention of gun violence.”

The CDC has now released the report – which establishes that the new laws are highly unlikely to achieve the intended goal of reducing the societal costs associated with the illegal use of firearms.

For example, the purpose of background checks is to “curtail gun sales to prohibited persons, such as felons, the severely mentally ill, domestic violence perpetrators, and minors.” The CDC found that increasing background checks serves little to no purpose because “[m]ost felons report obtaining the majority of their firearms from informal sources” and “through straw purchases.” In other words, the people who use guns illegally are willing to obtain guns illegally. In real world terms, background checks deter firearm ownership by law-abiding citizens.

This deterrence is problematic because the CDC concluded “[d]efensive uses of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence” “at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year[.]” Moreover, the CDC found that “studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was “used” by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.” Simply put, guns are commonly and effectively used to prevent crime. Burdensome background checks benefit violent criminals by reducing the number of law-abiding citizens who can effectively defend themselves.

Bans on “assault weapons” also serve no practical purpose. The CDC observed that the vast majority of violence committed with firearms is committed with handguns – not rifles. The reason is easily explained: “Surveys of felons found a preference for larger-caliber handguns that are easily concealable.” Carrying a rifle around draws attention, something that virtually all violent criminals wish to avoid. Nor would an “assault weapon” ban reduce the casualty rate in mass shootings. Preliminarily, the CDC concluded that “Mass shootings are a highly visible and moving tragedy, but represent only a small fraction of total firearm-related violence.” Moreover, the single worst school shooting in U.S. history was committed by a madman armed with two pistols (with most of the casualties resulting from .22 bullets). Thus assault weapons bans burden law-abiding citizens without having any measurable impact on limiting crime.

I strongly urge anyone interested about firearms in the United States to read the report for themselves – its conclusions are starkly different than what the major media organizations are telling us.