Crime Study Backs Expansion of Gun Laws
A study appearing today in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. suggests that laws prohibiting murderers, rapists and other felons from buying weapons should be broadened to cover people who have been convicted of petty theft, drunken driving or any other misdemeanor offense.
Such an expansion of the law would affect millions of potential gun buyers nationwide.
The study, conducted by the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis, tracked the criminal records of 5,923 randomly selected California handgun buyers for 15 years. The Research Program, whose studies frequently support gun control positions, found that people who had committed at least one misdemeanor before they bought their weapons were 7 1/2 times as likely to commit another crime as were gun buyers with clean records.
About half of the gun owners with prior misdemeanors were later arrested for another crime, with one in four charged with violent offenses including murder, rape and armed robbery.
“The study shows that the not so law-abiding handgun buyers--those with misdemeanor criminal records--are substantially more likely to be charged with new crimes than handgun buyers with no criminal record,” said Dr. Garen Wintemute, a medical school professor and director of the Research Program.
Gun advocates dismissed the significance of the study, saying that it merely purports to document the obvious--that people who have committed crimes are likely to strike again.
“I’d put it in the ‘well, duh’ category,” said Paul Blackman, research director for the National Rifle Assn.
Nevertheless, the study is prompting action to broaden the laws in California and the United States. Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles) plans to introduce such legislation next year, and officials of the Washington-based Violence Policy Center said they are working on similar measures.
“The findings speak volumes about why there is so much gun violence,” Villaraigosa said Tuesday. “This study cries out for a legislative solution.”
He said the legislation, if carefully drawn so as not to be overly broad, would probably attract overwhelming bipartisan support.
“If someone got, say, a misdemeanor graffiti conviction 10 or 15 years ago, we would want to give them a break,” he said.
Gun control activists Jim Brady, the former presidential press secretary who was shot in the 1981 assassination attempt on then-President Reagan, and his wife, Sarah, favor prohibiting people who have committed violent misdemeanors from buying guns, but stop short of expanding the restrictions to all misdemeanors. Sarah Brady is chairwoman of Handgun Control Inc.
Wintemute says his study breaks ground because it focuses only on gun owners and documents their propensity for crime, while other studies dealt with members of the general population, regardless of whether they owned firearms.
He studied people who bought weapons in 1977, the year that California started a registry of handgun buyers, and researched their criminal records before the purchase and for the 15 years afterward.
Slightly more than half of the 5,923 had one or more misdemeanor convictions when they bought their guns.
Although half of them committed new offenses over the next 15 years, less than 10% of gun owners with clean records broke the law after buying guns. Fifteen percent of gun owners with prior misdemeanors later committed murder, rape or other serious crimes, but last than 3% of those with no previous convictions engaged in such violence.
Wintemute found that men with two or more convictions of minor incidents of violence were the most dangerous of legal gun owners. They were 10 times as likely to commit new violent offenses as gun owners with no criminal histories and 15 times as likely to commit murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery or aggravated assault.
At the other end of the scale, gun owners who had committed a misdemeanor that didn’t involve violence or guns were only four times as likely to commit another crime as those with no misdemeanor convictions.
Federal law already forbids gun purchases by felons, fugitives and people convicted of domestic violence or adjudicated as mentally ill. The Brady law, named after Jim Brady, requires background checks of prospective gun buyers to identify such people.
Several states, including California, do not let people who have been convicted of some violent misdemeanors such as domestic abuse, buy guns.
But no state extends that restriction to people with nonviolent misdemeanors.
Another recent study--this one appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine--reported on two national surveys showing that 95% of the population, including 91% of gun owners, favor prohibiting gun purchases by people convicted of any misdemeanors.
But such a law would have some drawbacks.
A law expanding the list of ineligible gun owners would require more money to computerize misdemeanor records or an amendment to the Brady law extending the waiting period for gun purchases to give authorities more time to check such records.
A Times special report, “Outgunned: The Holes in America’s Assault Weapons Laws,” is available on The Times’ Web site: https://www.latimes.com/outgunned
