European Research, 2021: More Legal Firearms do not Lead to More Murders

 Logo of University of Leiden from Wikipedia

In 2021, Katharina Krüsselmann finished her PhD research on a possible link between legal firearms ownership and violent deaths in Europe. The news article was published by the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. From the article:

 Firearms are the most deadly weapons in common use. So you would expect that the more there are, the more murders are committed with them. But Katharina Krüsselmann did not find such a link when she compared studies on firearm use in Europe. She says this is in part because the murder rate is extremely low in many European countries, which makes small differences difficult to measure. In Europe, there are 3,000 firearm deaths each year. And European countries have strict rules and public information campaigns about safe weapon possession.

So why not let anyone buy a firearm in the shops if the number of murders won’t rise anyway? That would be jumping to the wrong conclusion, says Krüsselmann. ‘I didn’t find that higher firearm availability is associated with fewer homicides. So we cannot say that more firearms make a country safer.’

Krüsselmann found, in some countries, legal firearm ownership was associated with an increase in female homicide victims.  The number of female victims appears to be very small, too small to have a statistical effect. The result is surprising, as the research was done as part of Project Target, whose focus is shaped by the propaganda term “gun violence”. Katharina Krüsselmann emphasizes that European firearms ownership is already highly regulated. Some of the studies claim non-firearm homicide rates did not change when firearm homicide rates declined. Other studies, across more countries, dispute this conclusion.

Analysis: The study does not consider positive uses of firearms.  Krüsselmann honestly writes the poor quality and difficulty of research in this area. The effects are small enough that researchers opinions appear to bias the results. From my reading of the papers involved in the United States, the predominant philosophical basis for restricting firearms from the public is the hypothesis of: more guns mean more crime, especially more homicides. Krüsselmann’s paper diminishes the hypothesis, at least in Europe.  These are very small effects. When you have to use statistical methods to find small effects, it is difficult to make sure the effects are positive or negative.

Notice the totalitarian impulse: More firearms in legal hands do not increase violent deaths, nor did the study show they decreased violent deaths. They were neutral as far as homicides were concerned. So what is the response? It is not to maximize liberty. It is to keep control, even though it does not show a benefit in decreasing homicides. The analysis ignores the costs of restricting ownership. The costs to police and the bureaucracy involved is high. Resources are always limited. If the bureaucratic cost to prevent one firearm homicide is five million dollars, wouldn’t the money be better spent on health care? There are always tradeoffs. Similarly, increasing the cost of legal ownership is still an added cost imposed by the bureaucracy.

The paper confirms that in Europe, the thesis that widespread ownership of firearms is a threat to state security is admitted to be an important motivator. In the United States, the exact opposite view resulted in the Second Amendment. Widespread ownership of firearms, as seen by the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution, acts as an enhancement of state security.

©2025 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.

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