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Due to last month's shooting at the U.S. Capitol,
some members of Congress are trying to revive gun-control proposals
that were overwhelmingly defeated just two week ago. Yet how new
federal laws requiring gun locks or Sen. Dick Durbin's (D-Ill.)
bill making parents criminally liable for gun use by children
under 18 years of age would have prevented the tragedy on Capitol
Hill is not explained. No gun lock would have stopped the alleged
killer, 41-year-old Rusty Weston Jr. from firing his gun. Unfortunately,
despite the obvious feel-good appeal of gun-lock rules, they are
more likely to cost lives than to save them.
To understand why, consider how many accidental gun
deaths occur in the U.S.: In 1996, there were 1,400 such deaths,
and 200 of those involved children under 15. In comparison, 2,900
children died in motor-vehicle crashes, 950 children drowned and
more than 1,000 children died from residential fires. Hundreds
more children die in bicycle accidents each year than die from
all types of firearm accidents. For children under age 5, cigarette
lighters kill five times as many as die from all accidental gunshots
(150 versus 30). Yet when was the last time that a child's death
from a bicycle or cigarette lighter received national news coverage?
As the father of four young children, it is difficult
for me to imagine losing one of them for any reason. But it is
puzzling why accidental gun deaths of young children get so much
more coverage than other threats that pose even greater dangers
to our children. With around 80 million people owning a total
of 200 million to 240 million guns, the vast majority of gun owners
must be fairly careful or such gun accidents would be much more
frequent.
It's hardly consoling that accidents involving such
common home fixtures as swimming pools and space heaters are more
lethal than guns. Yet people understand that there are trade-offs
in life and that the very rules that seek to save lives can result
in more deaths. Banning swimming pools would help prevent drowning,
for example, but if fewer people exercised, life spans would be
shortened. Heaters may start fires, but they also keep people
from getting sick or from freezing to death. So whether we want
to allow pools or space heaters depends not only on whether some
people may be harmed by them, but also on whether more people
are helped than hurt.
Similar trade-offs exist for gun locks. Mechanical
locks that fit either into a gun's barrel or over its trigger
require the gun to be unloaded, and may prevent a few children's
deaths. But locked, unloaded guns offer far less protection from
intruders, and so requiring locks would likely greatly increase
deaths resulting from crime. Under the proposed rules, the costs
of gun locks would fall far more heavily on law-abiding citizens
than on criminals--decreasing the numbers of innocent people who
could use guns to protect themselves. So the debate over gun locks
should be how many of the 200 accidental child deaths would be
avoided versus how much such rules will reduce people's ability
to defend themselves.
Unfortunately, despite the best of intentions, safety
rules do not always increase safety. President Clinton has argued
many times that "we protect aspirin bottles in this country
better than we protect guns from accidents by children."
However, Harvard economist W. Kip Viscusi has shown that child-resistant
bottle caps have resulted in "3,500 additional poisonings
of children under age 5 annually from (aspirin-related drugs)
. . . (as) consumers have been lulled into a less safety-conscious
mode of behavior by the existence of safety caps." If Clinton
were aware of such research, he surely wouldn't refer to aspirin
bottles when telling us how to deal with guns.
Other research shows that guns clearly deter criminals.
Polls by the Los Angeles Times, Gallup and Peter Hart Research
Associates show that there are at least 760,000, and possibly
as many as 3.6 million, defensive uses of guns per year. In 98
percent of the cases, such polls show, people simply brandish
the weapon to stop an attack.
In my book examining gun
ownership rates across states, I found that higher gun ownership
rates are associated with dramatically lower crime rates. Further,
it is the poorest people in the most crime-prone areas who benefit
most from gun ownership. Safety rules that raise the costs of
gun purchases would reduce gun ownership and hit these people
the hardest.
So if gun locks are unlikely to save lives, indeed
if they are likely to cost lives, then who would benefit from
them? Answer: plaintiffs' lawyers.
The General Accounting Office reported in 1991 that
mechanical safety locks are unreliable in preventing children
over 6 years of age from using a gun. Indeed gun locks or gun
safes were unsuccessfully employed in four of the five school
shootings over the past year. Will manufacturers meet the requirements
of proposed laws if their products carry disclaimers saying the
gun locks may not work? Without such a disclaimer, imagine the
lawsuits manufacturers would face for supplying locks that they
know would fail to guarantee protection. Research into similar
liability involving children's vaccines suggests that such liability
account for an amazing 96 percent of the price of a product.
Proposals to make parents criminally liable for their
children's using guns have their own problems, but they raise
broader issues of what is motivating the new rules. If holding
parents criminally liable is such a good idea, why apply it to
only one type of crime committed by children?
Laws frequently have unintended consequences. Fortunately,
it's not too late to stop the new gun "safety" laws
before they produce the same headaches--and much worse--that the
aspirin-bottle rules have caused.
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