An article recently published in the anti-gun Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) indicates that the Brady Act has had no significant impact on violent crime. The research itself, however, is hardly ground breaking, merely confirming what NRA and other researchers have said for years. The article's authors, Jens Ludwig and Philip J. Cook, are notoriously anti-gun, and their work was funded by the anti-gun Joyce Foundation. Prior research on the Brady Act has been far more thorough, looking at areas Ludwig and Cook failed to explore, such as the law's effect on robbery, rape, and aggravated assault. Ludwig and Cook studied only homicide and suicide -- and their study of homicide included incidents where law-abiding citizens defended themselves against violent criminal attack. Yale University School of Law Senior Research Scholar John R. Lott, Jr., in contrast, studied the Brady Act's impact on all violent crime, and found that its waiting period had no significant impact on murder and non-negligent manslaughter (rather than homicide) and robbery rates, and was associated with a small increase in rape and aggravated assault rates. Furthermore, Ludwig and Cook didn't account for variables such as the death penalty, arrest rates, conviction rates, prison-sentence lengths, other gun control laws, or Right to Carry laws -- variables normally associated with crime deterrence. Lott's research took these variables and many others into account. So why are anti-gun researchers so interested in promoting research that seems to support pro-gun views? The answer is simple -- they are attempting to promote federal regulations on the private transfer of firearms. The gun ban extremists at HCI have already started using the Ludwig/Cook study to promote firearms registration schemes and NICS checks on all private transfers of firearms, stating that "Ludwig and Cook assert that the effectiveness of the Brady Law is undermined by the unregulated secondary market." But, if the Brady Act approach were really crime-preventing, it should have had some beneficial impact on crime. The Brady Act was enacted, after all, based on the insistence of its promoters that a significant minority of criminals obtained their guns from dealers -- and the Brady Act would put a stop to this.
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