“Armed and Dangerous’s” Eric Raymond has a nice critique of this noteworthy Eli Lehrer Weekly Standard piece, “Crime Without Punishment,” which details rising European crime rates. Observes Raymond:
The article proposes as an explanation that local control of policing is more effective than Europe’s system of large centralized police agencies. This may well be true; in fact, it probably is true. But it fails to explain the time variance — because that structural difference is not new, but the flipover in relative crime rates between the U.S. and Europe is recent.
If that’s not what is going on, what is? The article passes over two potential explanations far too quickly. One: differences in patterns of civilian firearms ownership. Two: the novel presence of large unassimilated minority groups in European cities.
The article correctly notes that ‘John Lott has shown that greater gun ownership reduces crime’ but then dismisses this with ‘gun ownership levels are about the same as they were when crime hit its all-time highs in America 30 years ago’. However, the distribution of firearms has changed in relevant ways. As Gary Kleck noted ten years ago, the composition of the U.S. firearms stock in the early 1970s was dominated by rifles and shotguns. Nowadays it is dominated by pistols. Americans, aided by a recent state-level trend towards right-to-carry laws, are packing concealed weapons on the street in greater numbers than ever before — and those are the weapons known to have the most dramatic effect in suppressing crime. Indeed, one of the principal results of Lott’s regression analysis is that encouraging civilians to carry concealed is both a cheaper and a more effective way to deter crime than increasing police budgets.
The article dismisses immigration with ‘violence and theft have also spiked in countries that let in few immigrants’. Again, there is an issue of distribution here. American experience tells us that it is not the absolute number of unassimilated poor that matters, but the extent to which they are concentrated in subsidized ghettos with little contact with the mainstream and no incentive to assimilate. After the repeated news stories observing that skyrocketing crime in Paris is largely a phenomenon of Arab thug-boys from bleak government-run housing projects, this should not be a difficult concept to grasp.
What’s new in Europe is not comparatively poor policing, but rather the combination of two trends: laws disarming civilians and the formation of persistent, crime-breeding ghetto cultures analogous to the U.S.’s urban underclass. Both trends are clearest in Great Britain, where violent assaults and hot burglaries have shot up 44% since handguns were banned in 1996, and police now find they have to go armed to counter gangs of automatic-weapon-wielding thugs in the slum areas of Manchester and other big cities.
The prescription seems clear: arm and assimilate. Arm the victims before they become victims and assimilate the criminals before they become criminals. Raising the frequency of civilian concealed carry of firearms will deter crime, just as it does in the U.S. Assimilating the new wave of poor Third-World immigrants and breaking up the ghettos will drain the stagnant pools in which crime breeds.
Seems quite reasonable to me.
Related: Dave Kopel, “Gun Games.”
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