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Long-Term Nonrelationship of Widespread and Increasing Firearm Availability to Homicide in the United States

Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy

DANIEL D. POLSBY

George Mason University

This article seeks to examine the common view that widespread availability of firearms is a major cause, or even the principal cause, of high American rates of homicide. Reasonably accurate data as to both homicide rates and the acquisition and ownership of firearms in the United States are available back to the mid-1940s. These data do not show a correlation over the long term between the distribution of firearms in the population at large and homicide rates. The two variables do cross occasionally, but they do not do so consistently. Rather, the trend in the period 1973-1997 was one of very large increases in firearms accompanied by essentially flat, even diminishing, homicide rates. That is the general rule for the period since the end of World War II to date.

Homicide Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2, 185-201 (2000)
DOI: 10.1177/1088767900004002004


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