On Saturday, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) published her plan to combat gun violence on blogging site Medium.
The Daily Wire reported on the plan, noting that several of the measures being proposed by the presidential hopeful are rather controversial. Given the nature of the plan, we reached out to Dr. John R. Lott, economist and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), whose research in the field of gun violence is nearly unparalleled.
Here's what he had to say about Warren’s article.
First, as a prelude to her gun control pitch, the senator from Massachusetts claims that once the auto industry began introducing features like seatbelts, airbags, etc, deaths related to car accidents dropped precipitously.
"Over fifty years, we reduced per-mile driving deaths by almost 80% and prevented 3.5 million automobile deaths. And we're still at it," Warren writes.
Lott thinks this logic is misleading, and that it's important to understand why in the context of possible gun regulations:
It is pretty deceptive to claim that government regulations reduced motor vehicle deaths by 80%. Those deaths were falling much faster before the federal started regulating auto safety.
As indicated by the figures from my book, "The War on Guns": 1) it is easy to see that cars were getting safer from the time the very first data was released in 1921, long before there were mandated federal safety regulations, and 2) when you look over the entire period, the rate at which car safety improved actually slowed down after the federal government started regulating car safety. The first seatbelts were introduced in 1950 by car companies that were figuring out on their own how to make cars safer. But the New York Times’ graph doesn’t show the even faster drop in vehicle deaths per-mile-traveled that occurred before 1946.
It is important to note that accidental deaths from all sources are falling over time. Companies are competing against each other to provide customers with safer products, and items such as seat belts, shatter proof glass, padded dashboards, and safety cages were just some of the many safety features adopted by car makers long before the federal government got involved in regulating auto safety.
Government regulations slowed down safety regulations for a simple reason: the government micromanaged how companies would meet those safety improvements. It isn’t just that the government mandated that car companies had to use airbags in their cars, it is that the government would tell the companies exactly how to make those bags and how to install them. That forced car companies to wait on installing these safety features until the federal government told the companies exactly how they wanted the product made and installed. If the companies didn’t wait, they may find themselves spending hundreds of millions of dollars, or even billions of dollars, only to find that they had to redesign everything and start all over.
Regarding Warren's idea that private gun sales should require background checks, Lott states:
A lot of academic research by criminologists and economists on background checks on the private transfer of guns has found no effect on crime rates. There is a simple reason for this. A major source of illegal guns are drug dealers, who have weapons to protect their valuable property. You will have about as much success stopping drug dealers from selling guns as you have in stopping them from selling drugs, and if you think that you have stopped criminals from being able to buy illegal drugs, good luck thinking that you will stop them from being able to obtain guns.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/50504/crime-prevention-research-centers-john-lott-frank-camp
