Stephen Billings, an associate professor in finance at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado, Boulder, recently won an award for his research, which blames law-abiding gun owners for crimes committed against them.
Billings’ research, published in 2023 and titled “Smoking Gun? Linking Gun Ownership to Neighborhood Crime,” recently won the Greenwald Family Award for Firearm Violence and Injury Prevention Research Excellence.
According to this research, “while concealed carry permit holders are typically law-abiding citizens, a surprising trend emerges: They are significantly more likely to have their firearms stolen,” said Billings. “Stolen firearms often fuel neighborhood crime,” he added.
“If you buy a gun and carry it legally, you’re not necessarily a higher target for crime, but once it’s stolen, it can end up in the hands of someone who is not authorized to possess it. And that gun could then be used to commit crimes,” said Billings. “If you look at the data, it’s clear that more guns in a neighborhood mean more opportunities for theft, and more stolen guns mean more chances for them to be used in violent crimes.”
In other words, if a law-abiding citizen owns a gun, it could be stolen. Therefore, the law-abiding citizen must be responsible for any time a criminal steals their firearms, right? Such is Billings’ illogical conclusion.
Although he says law-abiding gun owners are not a higher target for crime, the first line of his conclusion contradicts this as it reads: “results highlight that gun owners are 68% more likely to be crime victims and victimization often involves having a gun stolen.”
Incredibly, the next line reads, “There is no evidence that legal gun owners are committing crimes themselves and in anything, once a [concealed handgun permit] is issued the recipient appears to be more law abiding.”
So although law-abiding gun owners are even more law-abiding, they are the ones at fault for those who break the law? Billings’ research is backwards from the start and his suggested solutions only move further away from the mark.
First, he writes, “My results suggest that policies that target gun security and storage may have substantial benefits beyond limiting the theft of guns including the prevention of future neighborhood violent crimes.”
This is a favorite narrative of gun-control groups and advocates who wish to have every firearm locked up for all eternity, but what of the criminals who, by definition, do not follow the law?
“Burdening law-abiding gun owners with more and more legal requirements has never been about safety; it’s about discouraging the exercise of your natural rights,” wrote America’s 1st Freedom Managing Editor Mel Dixon on this topic.
Billings then goes on to advocate for the use of “biometric recognition devices that limit gun use to only registered owners,” positing that one could easily see the adoption of such “in the near future.”
This was a preferred policy of former President Joe Biden (D), who did not seem to care that such technology does not exist, that it can fail, thereby leaving a law-abiding citizen helpless and more.
The NRA said officially: “The NRA doesn’t oppose the development of ‘smart’ guns, nor the ability of Americans to voluntarily acquire them. However, NRA opposes any law prohibiting Americans from acquiring or possessing firearms that don’t possess ‘smart’ gun technology.”
The NRA has also noted: “Gun-control supporters advocate laws to prohibit the sale of firearms that do not possess ‘smart’ technology, to prohibit the manufacture of traditional handguns, raise the price of handguns that would be allowed to be sold and, presumably, to imbed into handguns a device that would allow guns to be disabled remotely.”
Billings’ “research” is flawed from its inception. The law-abiding are not to blame for the actions of criminals and more laws are not going to stop criminals—who don’t have any regard for the rule of law—from breaking them. Leaving law-abiding Americans unable to defend themselves against such criminals in not the answer.
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