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Not surprisingly, the more guns there are, the more gun crime there is. Many correlational studies, some geographic and some temporal, have established a close relationship between gun availability and rates of gun violence at the population level (Cook 1981, 1991; Hawkins 1997; Reiss and Roth 1993; Wintemute 1987; Zimring and Hawkins 1997). The equation works for individuals, too; keeping a firearm in the home more than doubles the risk that a member of the household will be killed in a firearm homicide (Bailey et al. 1997; Cummings, Koepsell et al. 1997; Kellermann, Rivara, Rushforth et al. 1993).

Access to firearms facilitates particular types of crimes, such as robbery against “harder” targets (Cook and Moore 1999; Kleck 1991). This is particularly the case when the person committing the crime is a stranger to the victim, and such crimes now constitute 44 percent of all violent crimes in the United States (Rennison 1999). Firearms modify the consequences of crime. The use of a gun as opposed to some other weapon increases the likelihood that a violent crime will be completed, particularly in the cases of rape and robbery (Rand 1990, 1994).