Gun Locks: Bound to Misfire
Point of View: March/April 2000
Recently, the Colorado Legislature defeated two bills to mandate the "safe storage" of guns. The legislature's decision generated loud protests from gun control activists. After all, who could be for "unsafe" storage?
Unfortunately, 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. While accidental gun deaths have claimed the lives of children, this happens much less often than most people might think.
Incidents Are Rare
Consider first how many accidental gun deaths occur in the state of Colorado. During the five years from 1992 to 1996, there were two accidental gun deaths involving a child under age 10--an average of 0.4 deaths per year, or less than 1 percent of all accidental deaths for this age group. With at least 1.4 million adult Coloradans owning at least one gun in 1996, the overwhelming majority of gun owners must be extremely careful, or such gun accidents would be much more frequent.
According to national studies, those who fire a gun accidentally are not your average person. Shooters overwhelmingly have problems with alcoholism and long criminal histories, particularly arrests for violent acts. They're also disproportionately involved in automobile crashes and much more likely to have had their driver's license suspended or revoked. The law-abiding citizens who tend to obey these laws are not the ones who are high-risk.
In addition, gun locks are costly. The actual expense of installing a lock is not the only "cost." Possibly even more important is the increased time it takes to get the gun ready to resist a violent criminal. Locked guns may not be as readily accessible for defensive uses. If criminals are deterred from attacking victims because they fear people might defend themselves, 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.
The Deterrent Effect
Guns clearly deter criminals. Americans use guns defensively over 2 million times every year--five times more frequently than the 430,000 times guns were used to commit crimes in 1997, according to research by Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck.
Even though the police are extremely important for reducing crime, they simply can't be in all places at all times. They almost always end up at the crime scene after the crime has been committed. According to U.S. Department of Justice data, having a gun is by far the safest course of action when one is attacked by a criminal.
In a recent book examining gun ownership rates across states over time, 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.
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 (and media exaggerations of the risks involved in gun ownership) that make people lock up their guns, or cause them not to own a gun in the first place, will result in more, 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 15 states with such laws during this period recorded 300 additional murders and 3,860 additional rapes per year than they otherwise would have because of the law. Burglaries and robberies also increased dramatically.
Proposals in Colorado compound these problems by making parents criminally liable for their children improperly using guns. Yet, if that notion of parental liability makes so much sense, why apply it only to one type of crime committed by children? Why not use it to stop the threats of other products that pose even bigger dangers to our children's lives?
Laws frequently have unintended consequences. Sometimes even the best-intentioned ones can cost lives.
John Lott is a senior research scholar at the Yale University Law School and the author of More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws (University of Chicago Press, 1998). Reprinted by permission from the Independence Institute.
