WRT assignment--gun-control law

The article called “Controlling Legal Gun Ownership Does Not Reduce Crime” is a convincing argument which pertains to the sensitive gun-control issue in modern American society. Some members of the left side of American political spectrum consistently and repeatedly argue that federal government should reinterpret the second amendment of the constitution, because they believe that the pervasive crime in some regions of the United States should be ascribed to the second amendment of the US constitution, which guarantees people’s right to keep and bear arms. The article is eloquently written by John R. Lott Jr., a professor from the University Chicago Law School, as a response to the gun-control assumption made by the left. The crux of this essay is trying to convey the key proposition that legal gun ownership regulation by the federal government will not reduce the crime rate, and just the opposite, controlling legal gun ownership by the government regulation eventually will give rise to rampant crime rate in the United States. Lott extensively and successfully uses empirical evidence to illustrate his proposition.

As far as I am concerned, the purpose of this article is trying to debunk the stubborn and entrenched faulty assumption, which has not been demonstrated scientifically and logically, that gun-controlling law implemented by government mandate will reduce crime. The second amendment of the constitution of the United State clearly states that “a well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”. The founding father of the United States, John Adams, once incisively pointed out that facts are stubborn things. “Whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence”. Many notions and ideologies are believed by the public and academia simply because they have been asserted repeatedly, such as the assumption that gun-control law is a prerequisite of low crime rate. It is very dangerous that repetition has been accepted as a substitute for empirical evidence, which is true in a lot of current public political debates in the United States. In my opinion, Lott simply wants to reveal the gun-control fallacy that has had harmful effects on the well-being of millions of people in the United States. “The very size and strength of our results should at least give pause to those who oppose concealed handguns.”

Lott develops a sophisticated analytical structure to crystallize his major points. First, in the beginning, He simply describes a specific event. In the first paragraph, Lott mentioned the Democratic Party gun-control convention in 1996. During this convention, James and Sarah Brady tried to convince the audience by their suffering story that gun-control law is necessary to reduce the crime rate in the United States. The purpose that Lott mentions this story in the first paragraph is very clear: evoke the curiosity and sympathy of the potential audience of this article. It is very natural to deduce that gun-control law works when confronting high crime rate, and the author wants to exploit this natural reasoning of common people and foreshadow his empirical reasoning based on solid statistics in the following refuting paragraphs.

The author uses a plenty of comparisons and contrasts between intuitive reasoning and factual scenario in the article to convey his ideas. For example, In the third section “women are empowered”, the author mentioned that former president Bill Clinton played up his proposed expansion of the 1994 Brady law based on the presumption that the implementation of the Brady Law will shrink the high crime rate in some US cities, but the various empirical evidence suggests that the Law’s implementation is associated with more aggravated assaults and rapes. In essence, Lott concluded that “guns are the great equalizer between the weak and the vicious”, and “Mrs. Brady’s exaggerated estimates of the number of felons denied access the guns in her speech are a pool measure of the Law’s impact on crime rates”.

Moreover, Lott clearly uses a lot of numbers—statistical evidence to construct an argument based on scientific reasoning. The purpose of the numbers is to boil down the abstract conception and plain facts into scientific and cogent statistic evidence. The strong empirical evidence is the best instrument to undermine the fallacies which are indoctrinated by simple repetition. For example, according to Lott, the analysis of the FBI’s crime statistics for all 3,054 American counties from 1977 to 1992 indicates that by adopting shall-issue laws, states reduced murders by 8.5%, rapes by 5%, aggravated assaults by 7% and robbery by 3%. If those states that did not permit concealed handguns in 1992 had permitted them back then, citizens might have been spared approximately 1,570 murders, 4,177 rapes, 60,000 aggravated assaults and 12,000 robberies. Numbers can be very pervasive when dealing with crime issues.

Lott makes a pretty strong argument about the sensitive gun-control issue. I can’t agree with him more. The constitution of the United States guarantees that bearing weapons is an unalienable right which is endowed by the creator for American people to avoid the danger of dictatorship. And the government does not have the authority to limit law-abiding citizen’s access to weapons in order to defend themselves from dictatorships or other high crimes. The issue is very sensitive in American political arena, and from now and then, this issue is often exploited by some politicians as their own political capital. Lott successfully makes a solid argument which defends the legitimacy about bearing guns based on solid empirical evidences.