By Marshall Lewin

Gun Control

   Just outside of Fenway Park, millions of Massachusetts Turnpike motorists pass a billboard that Stop Handgun Violence, a Boston gun-ban group, brags is “America’s largest.”
   That billboard recently claimed that in Massachusetts, “you’re more likely to live”—because of the state’s antigun laws.
   But the truth is just the opposite: Thanks to the Bay State’s anti-gun laws, you’re more likely to die in Massachusetts—violently—than anywhere else in New England.

   For the past 20 years, in dozens of states, we’ve seen how Right-to-Carry has cut crime and saved lives.
   As one state after another has expanded opportunities for law-abiding citizens to keep and carry guns, violent crime has retreated like cockroaches fleeing from a kitchen light.
   Today, the refrain of “more guns means less crime” has proven so reliably, consistently true that few even bother to argue otherwise anymore.
   But what about the reverse? If more guns equal less crime, do fewer guns, and fewer gun owners, equal more crime?
   We’ve seen that scenario happen in England, South Africa and Australia. Fortunately, here in the United States, we’ve had few places test the idea.
   Now, however, 10 years’ worth of hard data and harder lessons from Massachusetts prove the principle cuts both ways: Right-to-Carry saves lives, but gun bans can kill.

“Decade of Disaster”
   In 1998, the Massachusetts House and Senate passed, and Gov. Paul Cellucci signed into law, Chapter 180 of the Acts of 1998—otherwise known as the Gun Control Act of 1998.
   It was sold to the public as merely an “assault weapons” ban, but it was extraordinarily complicated, affecting 80 sections of law and effectively re-writing virtually every gun law for the commonwealth of Massachusetts.
   The Gun Owners Action League (GOAL), the NRA state association for Massachusetts, has been tracking the effects of this radical anti-gun monstrosity since it was passed 10 years ago. The conclusion: The Massachusetts Gun Control Act of 1998—a set of gun laws goal call the “worst in the nation”—has wrought a “decade of disaster” for the citizens of the Bay State.
   Why? Because not only did the new law cost a fortune in taxpayer dollars ...

   ... and not only did it fail to reduce crime as promised ...
   ... and not only did it radically reduce the number of lawful gun owners in the state ...
   ... it also reversed an eight-year trend of falling murder rates.

   So much for “gun control.” Ten years of trial and error prove it doesn’t work.
   Consider the following facts:
   As GOAL Executive Director Jim Wallace points out, a Massachusetts legislative committee’s report on firearm licenses show that, prior to the 1998 law there were approximately 1.5 million licensed gun owners in the state.
   Since then, the number of licensed gun owners has been reduced to roughly 240,000—a devastating decline of some 84 percent!

Gun-Grabbers’ Dream Come True
   How did the Massachusetts gungrabbers manage to cut the number of licensed gun owners by 1.26 million?
Easy: Pass a law that turns one license into two, and two licenses into three.
Turn a lifetime license into a four-year license. Hike the price from $5-for-life, to $25-every-four-years, to $100-until- Boston-needs-money-again. Require different licenses for different guns, a license for ammunition, a license for pepper spray, even a license to own a single #209 primer. Then make possession of that primer without a license a crime worthy of two years in jail.
   The 1998 law also lengthened the list of disqualifying offenses that would bar you from owning a firearm and it applied that proscription to any peccadillo in your past—retroactively to the day you were born.
   As a result, many gun owners had their supposed “lifetime licenses” pulled for life for minor offenses that were decades old.
   “I met a man in his 70s who had owned guns all his life,”GOAL’s Wallace said. “But suddenly he was disqualified from owning any gun—all because of a 1947 bar fight.”
   Moreover, the 1998 law’s prohibitions were just the latest layer of razor wire that Massachusetts wrapped around gun-owner rights.
   Massachusetts also gives the local police chief or sheriff complete authority to restrict a license, cook up constraints on a license, or deny a license altogether —for any reason or no reason at all. It might be because of a rumor, or because the sheriff never particularly liked an applicant, or because the chief simply doesn’t like guns.
   In the end, the net effect of all these bans, restrictions, licensing schemes, rules and fees, and the arbitrary ways in which they were applied, has been that the number of licensed gun owners in Massachusetts has fallen through the floor.
   They say you should be careful of what you wish for and the Massachusetts gun-ban lobby is surely reconsidering the wisdom of its anti-gun jihad. By radically reducing the ranks of lawful gun owners in Massachusetts, they established a set of circumstances that could prove whether those laws really work.
   And the truth is, they don’t.
   If the gun-ban lobby’s “logic” held any water, reducing the number of guns and gun owners in the state should have reduced the number of gun-related crimes and injuries as well. Instead, just the opposite occurred.

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