Linda Gorman and David B. Kopel

About the author: Linda Gorman is a senior fellow and David B. Kopel is the research director at the Independence Institute in Golden, Colorado.

Antigun activists frequently point to other nations to show that gun control laws can reduce crime, but in reality other nations' experiments with gun control have provided lessons in why gun control does not work. Japan's restrictive gun control laws have been successful in keeping crime down only because of the Japanese tradition of obedience to the government, and thus are not a model for the United States. Great Britain more closely resembles the United States in terms of demographics and culture, and its gun control efforts have been a disaster: British rates of assault and robbery are twice those of the...