Don B. Kates Jr.

About the author: Don B. Kates Jr. is a criminological policy analyst with the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco and the coauthor, with Gary Kleck, of Armed: New Perspectives on Gun Control.

Gun control advocates are fond of claiming that guns are a major cause of homicide and other violent crimes, but there is no statistical data to support this conclusion. Rates of gun ownership increased at a much greater pace throughout the twentieth century than murder rates did, and from 1973 to 1997 murder rates declined significantly while rates of gun ownership increased. In shorter periods when both crime rates and rates of gun ownership increased, the likely explanation is that people bought guns in response to rising crime rates, not that gun purchases caused crime rates to increase.

Anti-gun...