The Patriot Post® · Harvard Study: More Guns Does NOT Mean More Crime

Given the renewed assault on the Second Amendment from the Left, let’s revisit a Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy study regarding the correlation between crime and firearms. For years, the Left has argued that because America leads the world in firearms ownership, it also leads the world in the number of deaths by firearms. The solution, they say, is more gun control measures with the goal of a “gun-free” America. However, the Harvard study’s authors, Don Kates and Gary Mauser, note, “Since at least 1965, the false assertion that the United States has the industrialized world’s highest murder rate has been an artifact of politically motivated Soviet minimization designed to hide the true homicide rates.” The authors assert that the mantra of less guns leads to less crime is a product of old Soviet propaganda designed to paint life behind the Iron Curtain in a more rosy light. However, after Perestroika in the ‘80s and collapse of the Soviet Empire in the '90s, it became apparent that the murder rate in Russia was actually three times higher than that of the U.S., though gun possession in Russia was illegal. In fact, Western nations with high rates of gun ownership such as Austria, Germany and Switzerland, have low murder rates, implying that there is a correlation between more guns and less crime. Turns out, an armed society is a polite society, unless that society has institutionalized cultural devolution as the Left has done in the U.S.