Yesterday, Joey Buttattaafuuuoococooo and Amy Fisher went on a much publicized date (which will later become part of a reality TV show). Datehole was lucky enough to be across the street in the Park with a long-range listening device “barrowed” from the leftover prop box from Copola’s The Conversation. What follows is an excerpt of what you’ll eventually hear…
This starts about 15 minutes in…
Amy: But behind the rhetoric are some startling numbers. Last year alone, Americans bought nearly two million guns, spending $3 billion on firearms and ammunition.
Joey: If the central question is whether gun control can reduce crime, the prior question is whether gun control laws can reduce guns or the number of them or the market share that they have in the commission of violent crimes. It’s extraordinary to me how little evidence there is on that prior question. We know that people, individuals differ very markedly in terms of their disposition to comply with the law. By far, most guns that are out there are innocuous in terms of crime.
Amy: Well, there’s deep public support, deep support, for these gun control laws. And it’s because of facts like that, in 2005 alone, there were two gun crimes for ever thousand people in this country. The intellectually interesting and politically important question is, are these policies worth the cost?
Joey: If there is no such evidence that supports stricter control policies, why are you so much in favor of them? I mean, New York City has quite strict gun control laws and yet also has a good deal of crime.
Amy: Are you claiming that laws designed to control gun ownership are at best a waste of time?
Joey: All of those medical studies, the ones that say you’re 43 times more likely to be shot to death than to kill a burglar, or you’re three times more likely to be murdered if you keep a gun in your house … aren’t those statistics based on groups of extremely “at-risk” individuals, with long histories of drug abuse, domestic violence, criminality and alcohol abuse? What do those studies say about the hazards of owning a gun for the average person, who has a clean criminal record and no history of drug or alcohol abuse or domestic violence?
Amy: Do you believe in any restrictions on the ownership of guns?
Joey: I am saying that different gun control laws have both costs and benefits. I don’t take an absolute position on the issue, but what you have to ask yourself is who is most likely to obey the law. We all want to try to take guns away from criminals, but if it is the law-abiding citizens who are more likely to obey them and not criminals, you can actually make the situation much worse. Take the Virginia Tech case. Virginia Tech has rigorously enforced its gun-free zone policy and suspended students with concealed hand-gun permits who have tried to bring hand guns on to school property. But whether it is the three-year prison terms that can await those who take guns on to school propioerty in most states, or the suspensions and expulsions at universities, these penalties are completely meaningless for someone intent on killing. The outcome there was not to make potential victims safer, but to make it so that the criminal has less to worry about.
Amy: Isn’t it true that Professor Donahue at Harvard University has found that the passing of conceal carry laws were uniformly associated with crime increases?
Joey: No. Donahue added one year of data to the original set. The results were unaffected by adding that year. If you look at their year-by-year estimates, murder, rape and robbery rates immediately fall after right-to-carry laws are adopted. Their graphs purport to show that once one gets 15 or so years after adoptage, murder rates raise. The problem with their graphs is that they are change the set of states available.
Amy: What about a limitation on assault weaponry? Why does Joe Blow need that sort of firepower? Why isn’t a “traditional” handgun enough? Or hunting rifle type guns? Again, why should anyone be allowed to own “military-type” weaponry?
Joey: The term assault weapon is an invented term. These are not weapons used by the military, they are civilian versions of these weapons. When the federal assault-weapons ban expired on Sept. 13, 2004, gun crimes were predicted to surge dramatically. Sarah Brady, a leading gun-control advocate, warned it would “arm our kids with Uzis and AK-47s.” Well, what happened? On Oct. 18, the FBI released the final data for 2004. It shows clearly that in the months after the law sunset, crime went down. During 2004 the murder rate nationwide fell by 3 percent, the first drop since 2000, with firearm deaths dropping by 4.4 percent.
Amy: Wanna’ get the pie?
Joey: I missed you Muffin.
Amy: You’re handsome as eveh’ Jo Jo.
Stay tuned to Datehole for information on the full date.
