Arm and Assimilate
<p>A current Weekly Standard article, <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/266umtwb.asp"><br />
Crime Without Punishment</a>, observes that European crime rates are<br />
soaring to levels that match or exceed the U.S.&#8217;s even while U.S crime<br />
rates decline for the tenth consecutive year.  <em>Schadenfreude</em><br />
is not a pretty emotion, but it&#8217;s hard not to feel a twinge of it<br />
after so many years of listening to snotty Europeans lecture us<br />
Americans on how U.S. crime rates demonstrate that we are a nation of<br />
violent barbarians who can be saved only if we swallow European social<br />
policies entire.</p>
<p>The article proposes as an explanation that local control of<br />
policing is more effective than Europe&#8217;s system of large centralized<br />
police agencies.  This may well be true; in fact, it probably is true.<br />
But it fails to explain the time variance &#8212; because that structural<br />
difference is not new, but the flipover in relative crime rates<br />
between the U.S. and Europe is recent.</p>
<p>If that&#8217;s not what is going on, what is?  The article passes over<br />
two potential explanations far too quickly.  One: differences in<br />
patterns of civilian firearms ownership. Two: the novel presence of<br />
large unassimilated minority groups in European cities.</p>
<p>The article correctly notes that &#8220;John Lott has shown that greater<br />
gun ownership reduces crime&#8221; but then dismisses this with &#8220;gun<br />
ownership levels are about the same as they were when crime hit its<br />
all-time highs in America 30 years ago&#8221;.  However, the<br />
<em>distribution</em> of firearms has changed in relevant ways.  As<br />
Gary Kleck noted ten years ago, the composition of the U.S. firearms<br />
stock in the early 1970s was dominated by rifles and shotguns.<br />
Nowadays it is dominated by pistols.  Americans, aided by a recent<br />
state-level trend towards right-to-carry laws, are packing concealed<br />
weapons on the street in greater numbers than ever before &#8212; and those<br />
are the weapons known to have the most dramatic effect in suppressing<br />
crime.  Indeed, one of the principal results of Lott&#8217;s regression<br />
analysis is that encouraging civilians to carry concealed is both a<br />
cheaper and a more effective way to deter crime than increasing police<br />
budgets.</p>
<p>The article dismisses immigration with &#8220;violence and theft have<br />
also spiked in countries that let in few immigrants&#8221;.  Again, there is<br />
an issue of distribution here.  American experience tells us that it<br />
is not the absolute number of unassimilated poor that matters, but the<br />
extent to which they are concentrated in subsidized ghettos with<br />
little contact with the mainstream and no incentive to assimilate.<br />
After the repeated news stories observing that skyrocketing crime in Paris<br />
is largely a phenomenon of Arab thug-boys from bleak government-run<br />
housing projects, this should not be a difficult concept to grasp.</p>
<p>What&#8217;s new in Europe is not comparatively poor policing, but rather<br />
the combination of two trends: laws disarming civilians and the<br />
formation of persistent, crime-breeding ghetto cultures analogous to<br />
the U.S.&#8217;s urban underclass.  Both trends are clearest in Great<br />
Britain, where violent assaults and hot burglaries have shot up 44%<br />
since handguns were banned in 1996, and police now find they have to<br />
go armed to counter gangs of automatic-weapon-wielding thugs in the<br />
slum areas of Manchester and other big cities.</p>
<p>The prescription seems clear: arm and assimilate.  Arm the victims<br />
before they become victims and assimilate the criminals before they<br />
become criminals.  Raising the frequency of civilian concealed carry<br />
of firearms will deter crime, just as it does in the U.S.<br />
Assimilating the new wave of poor Third-World immigrants and breaking<br />
up the ghettos will drain the stagnant pools in which crime<br />
breeds.</p>
<p>And the next Euro-snob to lecture me on how America&#8217;s &#8220;gun culture&#8221;<br />
causes crime is going to get both barrels of this prescription right<br />
in his face&#8230;</p>
<p>UPDATE: The Boston Globe is running a story on the <a href="http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/146/focus/Targeting_a_myth+.shtml">failure<br />
of gun control in Great Britain</a>.</p>
<p>UPDATE: A reader points out that I was inexplicit about what has<br />
led to the formation of a ghettoized underclass in Europe&#8217;s cities.<br />
It is, of course, the same blunder that started the same process in<br />
American cities forty years ago &#8212; the social-welfare state,<br />
subsidizing poverty.</p>
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