The Daily Newarker

??New York Times??: “In Newark, Proposing a First Step in Regulating Guns”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/nyregion/17newark.html. The Times reports on a partnership between Governor Corzine, federal authorities, and local mayors (including Mayor Booker) to provide access to a federal gun database. The move is intended to empower local police with the data to track movement of gun crime and illegal gun purchases across state lines because — as Booker has been keen to point out of late — this problem is a national dilemma.

In the latest in a series of law-enforcement steps following the killing of three people here 12 days ago, Mayor Cory A. Booker unveiled what he called a “model ordinance” on Thursday that would make it easier for the police to track illegal firearms back to the places where they were purchased.

The new policy calls for local laws that would require the registration of all firearms in Newark and the reporting of lost or stolen guns. And though there are currently no gun dealers in the city, another ordinance would prevent any future ones from selling in residential areas or near schools.

“There was no local municipal ordinance dealing with gun crime, dealing with gun violence, or dealing with the regulation of guns whatsoever within the city of Newark,” Mr. Booker noted. “If you are a legal gun owner and your gun gets stolen, right now you just go about your business and that gun can now be involved in criminality.”

I had a conversation with a friend over drinks this week and discussed the issues that Booker has been fighting and my general disgust at the current White House administration over their lack of attention to issues that plague inner cities, poverty and gun crime among them. My friend jumped on the gun control aspect, explaining that he thought rampant gun crime was the result of fewer gun freedoms, such as the illegality of concealing weapons in New Jersey. “If students were allowed to carry weapons at Virginia Tech [a gun-free campus] like they can everywhere else in the state, that shooting wouldn’t have happened — or at least would have been diminished.”

On the face of his argument, sure, some VT students might have been saved if other students were allowed to pack heat on the college campus. But, I’m not sure we’re comparing apples to apples with that example. So, let’s take a different approach. The general argument for relaxed gun laws goes like this: my likelihood of committing a gun crime against you decreases as the odds of your also having a gun increase. Or, more colloquially: they don’t have a violent gun crime problem in Texas (which has one of the most relaxed policies in the union). From the Economist article, “Standing their ground”:http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9044921:

The state’s gun laws are lax, and becoming more so all the time. In March Governor Rick Perry signed a bill into law that gives increased discretion to open fire. Previously, Texans were justified in killing someone only if “a reasonable person in the actor’s situation would not have retreated”. The new law, which takes effect in September, eliminates the need for escape attempts. It assumes that the otherwise law-abiding citizen had a good reason for standing their ground. It also gives shooters immunity from civil suits.

This begs the question: is Texas safer from violent gun crime? Well, to get a general picture, I pulled some data from the “Bureau of Justice Statistics”:http://bjsdata.ojp.usdoj.gov/dataonline/Search/Homicide/State/StatebyState.cfm?NoVariables=Y&CFID=565808&CFTOKEN=24671153. Normalized for population (TX is about three times bigger than NJ), TX still has 45% more homicides over a ten year period from 1995 to 2005 as compared to NJ:

Here’s the “full spreadsheet of my analysis”:http://dailynewarker.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/guns.pdf (I used the 2000 census population for each state across the 10 years for simplicity). So, is Texas any safer? No, relaxed gun laws does not seem to have a positive impact on reducing violent crime.

Besides the raw data, this just makes sense: folks from older generations are often keen to point out that fights in their day used to be settled with a few punches, and now they’re “settled with bullets”:http://dailynewarker.com/2007/05/25/shooting-in-central-ward-no-arrests/. Putting more guns into a community escalates fatalities in violent crime and also makes retaliatory shootings possible. Not to mention increasing the likelihood of “shooting innocent bystanders”:http://dailynewarker.com/2007/07/23/eight-year-old-girl-hit-by-driveby-gunfire/.

The partnership that Corzine and Booker announced should help enforce the existing gun laws we have in place. If a weapon is in the federal database, local police will have an easier time tracking down criminals. Merchants selling guns irresponsibly — to people with criminal records, for example — will be able to be tracked and prosecuted with this data. In short, Newark has just received another helpful tool to fight this war against violent crime.