The myth of law-abiding firearm owners who just "snap"

[gorfle]

One of the frequent arguments of anti-firearm people, especially when presented with the data that demonstrates that well over 90% of firearm owners are not involved in firearm crime, is that "All firearm owners are law-abiding until they are not". The implication, of course, is that all firearm owners are potential criminals, being just one shooting away from the other side of the law.

We need to dispel this myth.

http://www.cardozolawreview.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=138:kates201086&catid=20:firearmsinc&Itemid=20

In this article from the Cardozo Law Review, author Don Kates provides the data that demonstrates how, contrary to the myth, most people who commit crimes with firearms were not model citizens right up to the point where they committed their first firearm crime. In fact, the vast majority of people who commit crimes using firearms have extensive prior criminal records, usually violent in nature.

Kates summarizes it thusly:

"The lie on which gun prohibitionists centrally rely asserts that most murders are committed by ordinary citizens because they happened to have a firearm in a moment of anger. This lie is repeated time and again in countless supposedly scholarly books and articles. For instance, the medical school professor and gun prohibition lobbyist Katherine Kaufer Christoffel solemnly asserts: “most shootings are not committed by felons or mentally ill people, but are acts of passion that are committed using a handgun that is owned for home protection.”2 To the same effect, other mendacious gun control advocates commonly claim that:

ost would be considered law-abiding citizens prior to their pulling the trigger<;>3

More than half the homicides in this country involve people who are not criminals. . . . These so-called “mom and pop” murders, the result of heated arguments or accidents, are rarely premeditated<; and>4

are neither felons nor crazy, people involved in family fights and fights over jobs and money, and people who are sad or depressed.5"

He then debunks it by showing:

"For instance, though only fifteen percent of Americans have criminal records, roughly ninety percent of adult murderers have adult records (exclusive of their often extensive juvenile records), with an average adult crime career of six or more years, including four major felonies.14 Moreover, leading American criminologists know the prior criminality of murderers is so well established by dozens of homicide studies as to rank among the axioms of criminology.15"

He continues,

"What differentiates criminals and violent psychopaths from ordinary people is not their experiencing hatred or rage, but the ease with which those emotions are prompted and the acts to which they give rise. Killers exhibit an absence of impulse control and a seemingly inexplicable (to ordinary people) propensity to explode into extreme violence over the most trifling matters. Ordinary people virtually never kill, while the kind of people who murder often do so over things so trivial that we are left aghast not only at the fact of killing but at the inconsequential grievance that engendered it.27 The triviality of motive further confirms the extreme deviance of murderers.

To reiterate, the claim of gun prohibition advocates that most murderers are ordinary people is preposterous, devoid of even a shred of supporting evidence."

Emphasis mine.

Clearly the myth that all firearm owners are just one snap action away from being murderers is just that - a myth. Most violent crimes are not committed by people who just one day decided to kill someone, but rather by people with a long history of crime.

This is why people like me are adamant that firearm laws should target the people most likely to commit crime and not inconvenience those who are least likely to commit crime. It is unacceptable to burden all the law-abiding firearms for the sake of the criminals.