 |
Q: Ваши аргументы про то, что может остановить преступников, не раскрывают всей картины. Статистика показывает, что большинство людей погибают от рук тех, кого они знали?
|
|
|
|
Q: Разве не противоречит здравому смыслу то, что если всем разрешить носить огнестрельное оружие, снизится количество преступлений с его использованием? Чем вы аргументируете эти показатели?
A: Criminals are deterred by higher penalties. Just as higher arrest and conviction rates deter crime, so does the risk that someone committing a crime will confront someone able to defend him or herself. There is a strong negative relationship between the number of law-abiding citizens with permits and the crime rate — as more people obtain permits there is a greater decline in violent crime rates. For each additional year that a concealed handgun law is in effect the murder rate declines by 3 percent, rape by 2 percent, and robberies by over 2 percent.
Concealed handgun laws reduce violent crime for two reasons. First, they reduce the number of attempted crimes because criminals are uncertain which potential victims can defend themselves. Second, victims who have guns are in a much better position to defend themselves.
Q: Ваши аргументы про то, что может остановить преступников, не раскрывают всей картины. Статистика показывает, что большинство людей погибают от рук тех, кого они знали?
A: You are referring to the often-cited statistic that 58 percent of murder victims arc killed by either relatives or acquaintances. However, what most people don’t understand is that this “acquaintance murder” number also includes gang members killing other gang members, drug buyers killing drug pushers, cabdrivers killed by customers they picked up for the first time, prostitutes and their clients, and so on. “Acquaintance” covers a wide range of relationships. The vast majority of murders are not committed by previously law- abiding citizens. Ninety percent of adult murderers have had criminal records as adults.
Q: А как быть с детьми и подростками? В марте этого года в городе Джонзборо, штат Арканзас, два школьника убили четырех сверстников и учителя. Ведь трагедий станет больше, если почти у всех появится возможность иметь огнестрельное оружие? Вы считаете, что, идя на послабление закона о владении огнестрельным оружием, этой деталью можно пренебречь?
A: The horrific shooting in Arkansas occurred in one of the few places where having guns was already illegal. These laws risk creating situations in which the good guys cannot defend themselves from the bad ones. I have studied multiple victim public shootings in the United States from 1977 to 1995. These were incidents in which at least two or more people were killed and or injured in a public place; in order to focus on the type of shooting seen in Arkansas, shootings that were the byproduct of another crime, such as robbery, were excluded. The effect of “shall-issue” laws on these crimes has been dramatic.
|
|
|
When states passed these laws, the number of multiple-victim shootings declined by 84 percent. Deaths from these shootings plummeted on average by 90 percent, and injuries by 82 percent.
For other types of crimes, I find that both children as well as adults are protected when law-abiding adults are allowed to carry concealed handguns.
Q: Но ведь огнестрельное оружие может пойти в ход и в разборках на бытовом уровне, и в любых стрессовых ситуациях, когда люди «выясняют» отношения. Человек может стать очень агрессивным, например, в пробке на дороге или на месте аварии, он начинает кричать, драться. А если у него появится пистолет, он ведь и застрелить сможет?
A: During state legislative hearings on concealed-handgun laws, possibly the most commonly raised concern involved fears that armed citizens would attack each other in the heat of the moment following car accidents. The evidence shows that such fears are unfounded. Despite millions of people licensed to carry concealed handguns and many states having these laws for decades, there has only been one case where a person with a permit used a gun after a traffic accident and even in that one case it was in self-defense.
Q: А как обстоят дела в других странах? Многие утверждают, что, например, в Великобритании количество преступлений такого рода меньше, чем в США, поскольку достать огнестрельное оружие здесь намного сложнее.
A: The data analyzed in this book is from the USA. Many countries, such as Switzerland, New Zealand, Finland, and Israel have high gun-ownership rates and low crime rates, while other countries have low gun ownership rates and either low or high crime rates. It is difficult to obtain comparable data on crime rates both over time and across countries, and to control for all the other differences across the legal systems and cultures across countries. Even the cross country polling data on gun ownership is difficult to assess, because ownership is underreported in countries where gun ownership is illegal and the same polls are never used across countries.
The University of Chicago Press, 1998
Interview with Elliot Currie, a lecturer in the Legal Studies Program
at the University of California, Berkeley
Q: Почему в Америке уровень преступности выше, чем, скажем, в Западной Европе?
A: For the most part in our debate about crime and crime control policy in the United States we tend to think of ourselves as kind of an insulated, isolated country. We don’t look comparatively at the experience of other comparable countries. And I think that’s a big mistake, because when we do we see a number of very startling things, which I think give us clues as to why we have the crime problem that we do. First of all, it’s extremely important to keep in mind that our crime problem, when it comes to serious violent offending, things like homicide, things like forcible rape, armed robberies, gun assaults, the rates of those kinds of crime in the United States, even after our period of decline in the 1990s, are astronomically higher than they are in most comparable industrial societies in Europe and in Asia. And that varies, of course, between those societies, but basically we stand out like a sore thumb in the world of the advanced industrial societies.
|
|
|
|
|
|
