NCJ Number
127640
Date Published
1990
Length
5 pages
Annotation
The needle-in-the-haystack argument is designed to minimize the potential of gun regulation to reduce firearm-related violence. It is argued that a general reduction in firearms availability would be unlikely to be accompanied by a reduction in the availability of firearms to criminals.
Abstract
It is said that the number of firearms presently available in the U.S. is so great that the time to do anything about them has long since passed. It is simply not true that 99 percent of all guns are never involved in crime. Instead, fewer than 1 percent of all guns are involved in criminal misuse in any given year, however, that does not make gun-related crimes a small problem cumulatively. The career risk of guns being misused is very much greater. The available evidence suggests that probably more than 10 percent of all handguns are used in crime or serious violence, usually within a decade of first sale. The fallacy involved in the needle-in-the-haystack argument is the assumption that the available information on existing gun ownership and gun uses in crime provides an adequate springboard for an inferential leap to a general conclusion. In fact, it can serve as no more than a starting point for analysis. The attempt to use that information as a basis for sweeping policy appraisals involves a substantial misapprehension of the nature of the problem of devising effective gun control mechanisms. 4 references