by David A. Bell

Charles Krauthammer Friday morning gives a good example of how fatuous and unproductive the debate about gun control can be in this country. In a column on the Virginia Tech horror he writes the following:

[...] we should have no illusions about what laws can do. There are other ways to kill in large numbers, as Timothy McVeigh demonstrated. Determined killers will obtain guns no matter how strict the laws. And stricter controls could also keep guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens using them in self-defense. The psychotic mass murder is rare; the armed household burglary is not.

On first reading, this sounds convincing, but from the perspective of the social sciences, it is a classic example of a sloppy argument. To begin with, of course some determined killers will obtain guns even if the laws are tightened. Some, however, will not. In other words, while murders will not be eliminated by any means, their numbers will be diminished. Lives will be saved. At the same time, yes, stricter controls will certainly keep guns out of the hands of some law-abiding citizens, who will not bother to go through a more time-consuming procedure to get their weapons. But some will continue to buy guns legally despite the hassle. So lives will be lost this way. Will more lives be lost than saved? That is simply not a question that can be answered by recourse to sweeping generalizations of the sort Krauthammer offers. It can only be provided by empirical research, looking not at individual cases of killers who obtained guns illegally and the like, but at large-scale patterns. Of course, it is quite possible to argue for or against gun control on grounds of pure principle, and to say that even if lives are lost, the principle is worth it. But Krauthammer is not making such an argument. He is arguing on the basis of lives lost or saved, and implying that, in the end, stricter gun control will not save any lives. But he is doing so on the basis of absolutely no empirical evidence except the obvious statement that psychotic mass murders are far more rare than armed household burglary. And that, itself is a misleading piece of evidence, since the real piece of data needed here is not how many armed burglaries take place, but how many householders save their lives by using handguns to repel armed burglars.