Letters.

• Position: Letter to the Editor

Gun Control Twists

In "Gun Control's Twisted Outcome" (November),Joyce Malcolm claims that "in the four years from 1997 to 2001, the rate of violent crime [in England] more than doubled." She asserts that British gun control caused the increase.

It took me less than five minutes to find the official English crime statistics, at www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/hosb702.pdf. In the section on violent crime I found the following:

"Estimates from the BCS [British Grime Survey] reveal large and consistent falls in violent crime overall since 1995...Longer-term trends in violence overall continue to show significant declines. Comparison of results reported to the BCS in 2001-'02 with those for earlier years show a 17 per cent decline in BCS violence since 1999, a 22 per cent decline since 1997 and a 33 percent decline since 1995, all of these decreases being statistically significant....

"The fall in violent crime may seem surprising, given media attention to violent crime. However, the BCS suggests that violent crime in general has been falling for some time. Although BCS estimates present an average experience of violence, it is possible that the very rare but more extreme incidents of violence have increased at the same time. It is the latter that are more often reported in the media."

I trust that Malcolm will now withdraw her article and replace it with one attributing the violent crime decrease to gun control.

Tim Lambert

Sydney, Australia

reason's consistent defense of "gun rights" has distressed this longtime reader for years. It ought to distress any libertarian, perhaps even more than others' advocacy of gun prohibition. Gun control is at the cusp of a central difficulty of libertarian politics, and it needs much more subtle, balanced, and careful analysis than I have ever seen in reason.

A libertarian distinguishes between proper (coercive) functions of government and those that are improper. Roughly speaking, proper functions defend citizens against coercion, from abroad or from within. We typically focus our political action against improper functions such as welfare guarantees and prevention of self-harm.

But it is the recognition of proper government functions that distinguishes libertarians from anarchists. Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia went to great lengths to construct a libertarian argument for government. And here is the argument for gun control. I have a legitimate self-defense reason to fear and ask my government to take action against a neighbor's possession of and access to lethal weapons, not only after he uses them but before, if they are sufficiently dangerous. And a libertarian politics should recognize and support such a principle.

An individual does not have an absolute right to own a gun, except in an anarchy. Nozick's and other libertarian constructions of legitimate government recognize that rights to self-defense must be--in...