1Reviews and everything / Gun ownership translation (Ru-En)

Alexander Kvartalny

Group 501

Gun Ownership Translation from Russian into English

As the nation is gripped by fear of crime the question of whether you should buy a gun to protect yourself has become essential. An increasing number of people are answering in the affirmative. What has truly shaken people is the seeming randomness of crime: carjackings, drive-by shootings and abductions in even the quietest suburbs have created the impression that everyone is vulnerable and that police cannot protect us.

The arguments for and against buying a gun for self-defence are shrill and confusing. Gun control advocates say having a gun at home represents a real danger and a false hope of safety. Their opponents say a gun at home may be your last line of protection. The debate over keeping and bearing of guns for self-defense is connected with the names of famous scientists who have made a significant contribution to the research in this field. Gary Kleck, a criminology professor, claims that he has evidence that each year millions of people use guns to defend themselves. And Arthur Kellerman from the Center for Injury Control in Atlanta has shown in his studies that having guns at home makes it 43 times more likely that a family member or friend will be killed, rather than an intruder.

Kleck got into the gun research in the 70s because it was an absolutely open field where somebody could really make a contribution. He produced a series of estimates on successful use of guns in self-defense and concluded that for this purpose guns were used between 800,000 and 2,45 million times a year. He also thinks that gun ownership has a deterrent effect. In most cases, the mere display of a weapon is sufficient to scare off the intruder. Americans probably use guns in self-defence more often than they use guns to commit violent crimes. Gun ownership among prospective victims may well have as large a crime-inhibiting effect as the crime-generating effects of gun possession among prospective criminals. If all this is true, measures that reduce public gun ownership may be counterproductive.

Kleck’s opponent is Doctor Kellerman. He has conducted 3 studies in the field of family conflicts and examined the relationship between having a gun in the home and family victimization. He concluded that restricting access to handguns may resual in the decline of the rate of homicide in a community. He says that the greatest threat to the lives of household members appears to come from within, and adds that a gun almost automatically makes any altercation potentially more lethal. According to Kellerman, the risks of having a gun in the home substantially outweigh the benefits. His most recent study concludes that people should be strongly discouraged from keeping guns in their homes.

It comes as something of a surprise that Kleck and Kellerman actually agree on a few things. Both, for instance, support the kind of background checks, see benefit of stricter regulation of federal firearms dealer’s licenses. In addition, both men would bar those convicted of violent misdemeanours from buying or owning guns. And finally, they agree that harsher sentencing will never be the total answer to gun violence.

2