Deltoid

Dean Payne writes:

“For example, in 1974 Massachusetts passes the Bartley-Fox Law, which requires a special license to carry a handgun outside the home or business. The law is supported by a mandatory prison sentence. Studies by Glenn Pierce and William Bowers of Northeastern University documented that after the law was passed handgun homicides in Massachusetts fell 50% and the number of armed robberies dropped 35%.”

Actually Pierce and Bowers found that the number of GUN robberies dropped 35%. The number of armed robberies only fell by 15%.

According to Kleck (”Point Blank…”), many reports misrepresented the findings of the various Bartley-Fox studies.

Including that of Kleck if the below is any guide.

Pierce and Bowers (1981) did not study total homicide or armed robbery.

I have their paper (Annals, AAPSS, 455, May 1981) in front of me. They most certainly DID study total homicide and armed robbery, and found decreases in both (gun homicides fell 56% and non-gun homicides 20%). I should note here that the rates for Middle Atlantic cities also fell (gun homicides fell by 28% and non-gun homicides by 12%), so it is unlikely that the law was responsible for all of the decrease.

They did find that both non-gun armed assaults and total armed assaults increased far more than the gun assault rate declined.

Yes, they found a 40% increase in non-gun armed assaults and only a 12% reduction in gun assaults. However, they suggest that the law may have made it more likely that gun assaults without battery were reported, and that a better measure of the change in gun assaults was the 37% reduction in gun assaults involving battery. In any case, the number of armed assaults did not decrease.

Deutsch and Alt (1977) and Hay and McCleary (1979) also studied Bartley-Fox. Both found no change in total homicide rates.

True, but their data only covered the six months after the law.

They split over whether or not total armed robbery was reduced (the former said yes, the later said no).

Deutsch (1979) has heavily criticised Hay and McCleary’s analysis.

Both agreed that gun assaults dropped, but neither studied non-gun armed assaults nor total assaults.

Kleck says:

“In sum, the best available evidence indicates that Bartley-Fox had no detectable effect on homicide, may or may not have reduced robbery, and increased both total assaults and assault injuries.”

Talk about putting a pro-gun spin on the research! Where did assault injuries come from? How could he miss Pierce and Bowers on homicide and armed robbery?

(C. D. Tavares) writes:

Report to the Nation on Crime and Justice, Second Edition, U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, NCJ-105506, March 1988.

For 1985, for robbery and assaults, the following is how many incidents involved a firearm and how many involved a knife.

          Robbery  Assault
          -------  -------
Firearm   23%      12%
Knife     21%      10%

In both robbery and assault, a gun was actually fired and hit the victim only 4% of the time in all incidents in 1985. Victims were actually stabbed in 10% in the incidents involving knives.

Gun and knife robberies are equally like to result in serious injury. The fatality rate in gun robberies is three times that of knife robberies. (Cook, J of Criminal Law and Criminology 78:357-76)

In Point Blank, by Gary Kleck, pg 165:

(He cites a study by Wilson and Sherman, 1961)

“At least one medical study compared very similar sets of wounds (’all were penetrating wounds of the abdomen’), and found that the mortality rate in pistol wounds was 16.8%, while the rate was 14.3% for ice pick wounds and 13.3% for butcher knife wounds.

Kleck is misrepresenting this study. Those are mortality rates of patients who survive long enough to reach the hospital alive. From that same paper: “…the preponderance of stab wounds is more apparent than real because a significant percentage of patients wounded by gunshot die before reaching hospital.” In any case, the percentages quoted to three significant figures above are based on such small numbers as to be meaningless (e.g. 14.3%=2/14, and 13.3%=2/15).

A single knife wound is roughly equivalent to a single .38 gunshot wound.

I think you just made this up, cdt. What evidence do you have for this claim?

The problem here is that a knife attack usually involves more than a single strike.

And what evidence do you have for this? Perhaps you would care to tell us how the fatality rate for knife assaults compares with that for gun assaults?