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  3. At the fall 2001 Social Science History Association convention in Chicago,

At the fall 2001 Social Science History Association convention in Chicago,

游客2024-10-21  36
问题       At the fall 2001 Social Science History Association convention in Chicago, the Crime and Justice network sponsored a forum on the history of gun ownership, gun use, and gun violence in the United States. Our purpose was to consider how social science history might contribute to the public debate over gun control and gun rights. To date, we have had little impact on that debate. It has been dominated by mainstream social scientists and historians, especially scholars such as Gary Kleck, John Lott, and Michael Bellesiles, whose work, despite profound flaws, is politically congenial to either opponents or proponents of gun control.① Kleck and Mark Gertz, for instance, argue on the basis of their widely cited survey that gun owners prevent numerous crimes each year in the Untied States by using firearms to defend themselves and their property. If their survey respondents are to be believed, American gun owners shot 100,000 criminals in 1994 in self-defense—a preposterous number. Lott claims on the basis of his statistical analysis of recent crime rates that laws allowing private individuals to carry concealed firearms to deter murders, rapes ,and robberies, because criminals are afraid to attack potentially armed victims. However, he biases his results by confining his analysis to the year between 1977 and 1992, when violent crime rates had peaked and varied little from year to year. He reports only regression models that support his thesis and neglects to mention that each of ’those models find a positive relationship between violent crime and real income, and inverse relationship between violent crime and unemployment.
     Contrary to Kleck and Lott, Bellesiles insists that guns and America’s "gun culture" are responsible for America’s high rate of murder. In Belleville’s opinion, relatively few Americans owned guns before the 1850s or know how to use, maintain, or repair them. As a result, he says, guns contributed little to the homicide rate, especially among Whites, which was low everywhere, even in the South and on the frontier, where historians once assumed gun and murder went hand in hand. According to Bellesiles, these patterns changed dramatically after the Mexican War and especially after the Civil War, when gun ownership became widespread and cultural changes encouraged the use of handguns to command respect and resolve personal and political disputes. The result was an unprecedented wave of gun-related homicides that never truly abated. To this day, the United States has the highest homicide rate of any industrial democracy. Bellesile’s low estimates of gun ownership in early America conflict, however, with those of every historian who has previously studied the subject and has thus far proven irreproducible. Every homicide statistic he presents is either misleading or wrong.
     Given the influence of Kleck, Lott, Bellesiles and other partisan scholars on the debate over gun control and gun rights, we felt a need to pull together what social science historians have learned to date about the history of gun ownership and gun violence in America, and to consider what research methods and projects might increase our knowledge in the near future. ② [br] With which of the following will Bellesiles most probably agree?
选项 A、Gun control should be tightened.
B、Guns have little to do with murder.
C、Gun culture was the result of high homicide rates in America.
D、The statistics that earlier historians produced of gun ownership is reliable.
答案 A
解析 推理判断题。根据第二段第一句话可知：Bellesiles坚信是枪支和美国的枪支文化导致了枪击事件的发生，因此提倡应该加强枪支管制，所以选择A 。选项B 正好和他的观点相反；选项C 则颠倒了因果关系；关于前面历史学家的数据，Bellesiles只是说随着时代的改变，原来的模式已经发生变化，而并非他们的数据不可靠，所以排除选项D 。
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