NCJ Number
127648
Date Published
1990
Length
5 pages
Annotation
Disputing the claim that a gun ban might drastically reduce murder because law-abiding citizens might give up guns, studies reveal that murderers are not ordinary citizens nor are they people who are likely to comply with gun laws.
Abstract
Intrafamily murderers are especially likely to have engaged in far more previous violent crimes than show up in their arrest records. But because these attacks were on spouses or other family members, they will rarely have resulted in an arrest. So domestic murderers' official records tend not to show their full prior violence, but only their adult arrests for attacking people outside their families. Most family murders are preceded by a long history of assaults. Far from showing that 73 percent of murderers nationally were previously law-abiding citizens, the FBI 1972 Uniform Crime Report shows that 74.7 percent of persons arrested for murder had prior arrests for a violent felony or burglary. It is very misleading when homicide statistics that are idiosyncratic to gun misusers are presented as arguing for banning guns from the whole populace. Idiosyncratic statistics provide no basis for the claim that precautionary gun ownership by average citizens seriously endangers their friends or relatives. 19 notes