"Morgenthau Is Wrong About Guns and the Constitution"

A response in the WSJ in the letters section to Robert Morgenthau’s support for gun control. Here is one of the letters.

Robert Morgenthau’s “The Last Thing New York Needs Is More Guns” (op-ed, July 22), regarding the Thune Amendment, asserts that “We need fewer guns on our streets, not more.” This statement is wrong, and has been definitively known to be wrong for over a decade.

Prof. John Lott exhaustively examined every county in the U.S. and found that violent crime rates were lowest in jurisdictions that made it easiest to own and carry firearms. Furthermore, Mr. Lott found that violent crime rates dropped rapidly and precipitously when new laws were passed allowing more carry permits to be issued.

Mr. Lott’s conclusion, in his book “More Guns, Less Crime,” is counterintuitive only to liberals and intellectuals. Criminals much prefer an unarmed population on which to prey, and Mr. Lott shows that when carry rates in a jurisdiction increase even modestly, violent crime drops.

If law-abiding people are permitted to own guns, crime rates drop. If law-abiding people are prevented by law from owning guns, crime rates increase. It is that simple.

James H. Fink

Laurel Park, N.C.