Aurelio Arteta, catedrático de Filosofía Moral y Política de la UPV, hace un extraordinario despliegue de demagogia en un artículo publicado en la Tribuna de El País sobre la libertad de armas en Estados Unidos. No aporta ningún dato ni contrasta sus afirmaciones.
Un párrafo de muestra (énfasis mío):
También en Estados Unidos se encomienda esa protección individual al poder soberano, aun cuando la ley no obliga a ceder el derecho de defenderse a uno mismo con las armas en la mano y son millones los ciudadanos preparados para ejercerlo. Pero el caso es que las armas adquiridas como medios defensivos -porque las carga el diablo- se vuelven ofensivas a la menor oportunidad. De suerte que ese derecho a la autoprotección ha de provocar un riesgo mucho más general que si fuera denegado. En cuanto un ciudadano sepa o tan sólo sospeche que su vecino dispone de una pistola para prevenir su eventual agresión, ya cuenta con una razón (con tantas razones como vecinos armados) para sentirse amenazado y procurarse la herramienta para repeler su ataque. Aumentarán las medidas de vigilancia, pues ahora cualquiera resulta un criminal en potencia. En definitiva, allí donde cada uno puede portar armas mortíferas hay sobrado fundamento para que todos se teman mortalmente entre sí.
Ahora leed el texto que copio a continuación extraído del artículo Is There a Right to Own a Gun?, de Michael Huemer (en esta entrada dije que era el mejor artículo que he leído hasta ahora sobre la libertad de armas).
Datos sobre el uso defensivo y ofensivo de las armas de fuego (notas al pie y referencias en el ensayo original):
Guns are used surprisingly often by private citizens in the United States for self-defense purposes. Fifteen surveys, excluding the one discussed in the following paragraph, have been conducted since 1976, yielding estimates of between 760,000 and 3.6 million defensive gun uses per year, the average estimate being 1.8 million. Probably among the more reliable is Kleck and Gertz’ 1993 national survey, which obtained an estimate of 2.5 million annual defensive gun uses, excluding military and police uses and excluding uses against animals. Gun users in 400,000 of these cases believe that the gun certainly or almost certainly saved a life. While survey respondents almost certainly overestimated their danger, if even one tenth of them were correct, the number of lives saved by guns each year would exceed the number of gun homicides and suicides. For the purposes of Kleck and Gertz’ study, a “defensive gun use” requires respondents to have actually seen a person (as opposed, for example, to merely hearing a suspicious noise in the yard) whom they believed was committing or attempting to commit a crime against them, and to have at a minimum threatened the person with a gun, but not necessarily to have fired the gun. Kleck’s statistics imply that defensive gun uses outnumber crimes committed with guns by a ratio of about 3:1. While Kleck’s statistics could be an overestimate, one should bear three points in mind before relying on such a hypothesis to discount the defensive value of guns. First, Kleck’s figures would have to be very large overestimates in order for the harms of guns to exceed their benefits. Second, one would have to suppose that all fifteen of the surveys alluded to have contained overestimates. Third, it is not clear prima facie that an overestimate is more likely than an underestimate; perhaps some respondents either invent or misdescribe incidents, but perhaps also some respondents either forget or prefer not to discuss their defensive gun uses with a stranger on the telephone. (...)
Sobre el efecto disuasivo de las armas y el estudio de John Lott analizando la relación estadística entre la criminalidad y las restricciones a la libertad de armas en 3054 condados de Estados Unidos, de 1977 a 1992:
John Lott and David Mustard conducted a study, probably the most rigorous and comprehensive study in the gun control literature, on the effects of nondiscretionary laws on crime rates. Lott’s study uses time-series and cross-sectional data for all 3,054 counties in the United States from 1977 to 1992. Overall, states with shall-issue laws have a violent crime rate just over half (55%) of the rate in other states. This alone does not establish that the more restrictive gun laws are a cause of the dramatically higher violent crime rates in the states that have them, since the correlation could be explained by the hypothesis that states that already have higher crime rates are more likely to pass restrictive gun laws. The latter hypothesis, however, would not explain why violent crime rates fell after states adopted shall-issue concealed carry laws. After performing a multiple-regression analysis to control for numerous other variables—such as arrest and conviction rates, prison sentence lengths, population density, income levels, and racial and gender makeup of counties—Lott found that upon the adoption of shall-issue laws, murder rates declined immediately by about 8 percent, rapes by 5 percent, and aggravated assaults by 7 percent, with declines continuing in subsequent years (Lott explains the latter fact by the gradually increasing numbers of individuals obtaining permits).
Gun control proponents may find these statistics theoretically surprising: increasing the availability of one important means of committing violent crimes, they believe, should increase the violent crime rate. But an alternative theory gives the opposite prediction: Increased availability of guns to citizens, including the ability to carry concealed weapons, increases the risks to would-be criminals of experiencing undesired consequences as a result of attempting a violent crime. These consequences include being shot, being detained by the would-be victim until the police arrive, and simply being unable to complete the crime. Thus, other things being equal, increased availability of guns to the general public should result in decreased violent crime.
Me cuesta creer que Arteta, o cualquiera que mantenga su misma postura, no se viera invadido por la duda si leyera el artículo que recomiendo (asumiendo que sea intelectualmente honesto).
Paco Capella, en su flamante blog, también critica el artículo de Arteta.
