Cost of gun locks too high
More deaths, crime and reliability problems aren't worth it.Back to the Protecting Yourself
Saturday, June 2, 2001
Archive | Commentary
By John R. Lott Jr.
Will the New Jersey General Assembly follow the state Senate and mandate that guns can be sold only if operated exclusively by someone with the correct fingerprint or wearing a special electronic ring?
Such locks are touted as being able to reduce the rate of accidental gun deaths and suicides among children. Who can oppose such a law?
But despite the obvious feel-good appeal of these rules, gun locks and safe storage laws are more likely to cost lives than to save them.
Accidental gun deaths among children are fortunately much rarer than most people believe. Consider New Jersey from 1994 to 1998. Among 1.5 million children under the age of 15, there were only two accidental gun deaths - an annual rate of 0.4 deaths. Suicides committed with guns raise the average to 1.4 deaths per year. With 1.1 million adults in New Jersey owning at least one gun in 1996, the overwhelming majority of gun owners must be extremely careful or the figures would be much higher.
According to national studies, the person who fires a gun accidentally is not your typical person. Shooters overwhelmingly have problems with alcoholism and long criminal histories, particularly arrests for violent acts. They are also disproportionately involved in automobile crashes and are much more likely to have had their driver's license suspended or revoked. The problem is that those who are most at risk are the least likely to obey the law. It is the low-risk, law-abiding citizens who will obey.
Academic studies of safe-storage and gun-lock laws have also overwhelmingly found no evidence that they reduce the total number of suicides - although a few studies have found some small reductions in suicides committed with guns. There are simply too many ways to commit suicide. If people are intent on killing themselves, they will still do it, with or without a gun.
The gun-lock law poses real risks. The most obvious is that gun locks are costly. My research indicates that it is those who are most threatened by crime - poor people, particularly blacks living in high-crime urban areas - who benefit the most from being able to protect themselves. "Smart" locks, even when they become reliable, will add hundreds of dollars to the price of guns and stop many poor people from being able to protect themselves and their families.
Locked guns are also not as readily accessible for defensive gun uses. Since criminals are deterred by potentially armed victims, gun locks may therefore increase crime. Exacerbating this problem are serious reliability issues. Fingers that are slightly dirty or not placed exactly on the finger print reading device may prevent the gun from firing. There is also the concern that smart locks relying on radio signals can be jammed by criminals.
Guns clearly deter criminals. Americans use guns defensively over 2 million times each year - five times more frequently than the 430,000 times guns were used to commit crimes in 1997. Ninety-eight percent of the time, simply brandishing the weapon is sufficient to stop an attack. Even though the police are extremely important in reducing crime, they simply can't be there all the time and virtually always end up at the crime scene after the crime has been committed. Having a gun is by far the safest course of action when one is confronted by a criminal.
Even if one has young children, it does not make sense to lock up a gun if one lives in a high-crime urban area. Laws, or for that matter exaggerations of the risks involved in gun ownership, make people lock up their guns or cause them not to own a gun in the first place, will result in more deaths, not fewer deaths.
Recent research that I have done examining juvenile accidental gun deaths or suicides for all U.S. states from 1977 to 1996, found that safe storage laws had no impact on either type of death. What did happen, however, was that law-abiding citizens were less able to defend themselves against crime. The 15 states that adopted safe-storage laws during this period faced over 300 more murders and 3,860 more rapes per year. Burglaries also increased dramatically.
Laws frequently have unintended consequences. Sometimes even the best intentioned ones cost lives.
John R. Lott Jr., a senior research scholar at the Yale University Law School, is the author of "More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws."