here is part of Lotts testimony,
i remember the story about the 3x data being provided but can't find a link right now...
it is prolly somewhere here:
http://mcdl.org/MD_Info/1999/ChildproofGunsReport.pdf
http://mcdl.org/MD_Info/2000/Lott_HB280_2000.htm
John Lott testimony in "opposition" to Maryland HB280/2000 - Tax Credit for Gun Safety Devices
The following is the testimony that was given by Professor John Lott in "opposition" to HB 280/2000 - Tax Credit for Gun
Safety Devices on Wednesday, February 16, 2000. Professor Lott is an articulate spokesman on this important subject.
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Thank you Madam Chairwoman Hixson. I appreciate being invited here to testify by Delegate James Rzepkowski.
The tax credit proposal for gun locks is advocated as being able to reduce the rate of accidental gun deaths and suicides
among children as well as to make it more difficult to steal guns. I think that the proposed tax credit is bad law both because
the tax system is a clumsy and inefficient way to micromanage individual behavior and because it is bad public policy.
The bottom line for everyone is whether this type of law will save lives. 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 might believe, and I believe that I can
provide numbers that will answer questions raised earlier by Delegate Davis. Consider Maryland during the five years from
1992 to 1996. With over 1 million children under the age of fifteen, according to the Centers for Disease Control, there were
only two accidental gun deaths in that age range -- an annual rate of .4 deaths. Including any suicides committed with guns,
raises the average to 2.4 deaths per year. With 1.2 million adults in Maryland owning at least one gun in 1996, the
overwhelming majority of gun owners must be extremely careful or the figures would be much higher.
Studies consistently show that those who fire a gun accidentally are not your typical person. Shooters overwhelmingly have
problems with alcoholism, drugs, 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.
Academic studies of safe storage and gun lock laws have also overwhelmingly found no evidence that they reduce the total
number of suicides even if a few studies have found some small reductions in suicides committed with guns. There are simply
too many ways to commit suicide. Thus, if people are intent on killing themselves, they will still do it, with or without a gun.
However, the law poses real risks. 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, many mechanical
locks (such as barrel or trigger locks) also require that the gun be stored unloaded. Loading a gun obviously requires yet more
time to respond to a criminal. For so-called "smart" guns serious reliability issues exist. Fingers that are slightly dirty or not
placed exactly on the finger print reading device may prevent the gun from firing.
Guns clearly deter criminals, with Americans using 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. 98 percent of the time simply brandishing the weapon is
sufficient to stop an attack. Even though the police are extremely important at 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 the states in the United States
from 1977 to 1996, found that safe storage laws had no impact on either type of death. However, what did happen was that
law-abiding citizens were less able to defend themselves against crime. The fifteen 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.
There were several misleading statements made earlier here today. One involved the claim that has frequently been made by
the Clinton administration that 13 children a day die from guns. While the public service ads that frequently make this claim
fear exclusively children under 10, that is not representative of what this number represents not does the number justify guns
locks as President Clinton argues. The number represents all gun deaths (homicides, suicides, accidents, and justifiable
homicides) for people under the age of 20. Nine of those 13 deaths per day involve 17, 18, and 19 year olds and these deaths
overwhelmingly involved homicides in urban areas from gangs. 11 of the 13 deaths per day are 15 to 19 year olds. 1.9 of the
deaths per day are for those under age 15, and less than .4 deaths per day are for those under the age of 10. It is not
obvious why the number of 13 deaths per day provides useful information upon which to base a law encouraging people to
buy gun locks.
Another misleading claim is that the family gun is more likely to kill you or someone you know than to kill in self-defense. The
few studies yielding such numbers never actually inquired as to whose gun was used in the killing. Instead, if a household
owned a gun and if a person in that household or someone they knew was shoot to death while in the home, the gun in the
household was blamed. In fact, virtually all the killings in these studies were committed by guns brought in by an intruder. No
more than fourteen percent of the gun deaths can be attributed to the homeowner's gun. The very fact that most people
were killed by intruders also surely raises questions about why they owned guns in the first place and whether they had
sufficient protection. Also ignored is that 98 percent of the time when people use a gun defensively merely brandishing the
weapon is sufficient to stop an attack. The attacker is killed less than one out of every thousand times that a gun is used
defensively.
There are real risks to exaggerating the dangers of having a gun in the home. Laws frequently have unintended
consequences. Sometimes even the best intentioned ones cost lives.
