Don B. Kates Jr.

Don B. Kates Jr. is a criminological policy analyst with the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco and coauthor, with Gary Kleck, of The Great American Gun War: Essays in Firearms and Violence. Kates contends in the following viewpoint that an increase in private gun ownership over the last fifty years has not resulted in higher rates of gun violence. He concedes that there have been brief periods when gun buying and murder rates did increase together, but he contends that gun buying did not cause the increase in murders. On the contrary, Kates asserts that it is more likely that more people bought guns to defend themselves in response to increasing murder rates.

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