Citation

Fagan J. Criminol. Public Policy 2003; 2(3): 359-362.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2003, American Society of Criminology, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1745-9133.2003.tb00001.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Some Americans believe that the armed individual citizen is the best guarantor of public safety. These notions are rooted in a roiling admixture of deeply held cultural beliefs and concepts drawn from classical theories of deterents. In recent years, a handful of empirical studies animated in going to Torrance story, especially work on defensive gone use by Kleck and right to carry laws by for example, Lot and Mustard. Despite critical research disputing these findings and pointing out their scientific shortcomings, these studies were persuasive enough to arm are small group of adherents to lobby sometimes successfully for laws that would use the way for citizens Carry weapons, whether visible or concealed. Opponents of these right to carry laws were equally passionate in their beliefs that these measures would only increase a severe and frightening violence problem in the US, And that stronger regulatory measures were needed to reduce the collateral damage from the high prevalence of gun carrying see Cook and Ludwig, Zimmering and Hawkins. For more than a decade, this contentious and narrow empirical literature on the impacts of gun policy, and especially on the heated debate on right to carry laws, confounded the deliberations both of policymakers and citizens in evaluating gun policy. As a result of this complexity, citizens seem more likely to form views on gun policy and options for regulation based on emotion, their sense of personal risk, and their cultural beliefs about guns, been on convincing scientific evidence, see Kahn and Bringmann 2003. For social sciences, the evidence supporting various regulatory proposals on gun possession fell well shard of the rules of inference and standards of social science that are fundamental to the development of causal theories and good policy. For policymakers, this vacuum compromised rational and informed debate and opened the door to policy by anecdote and political coercion...

Language: en