This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related article  • Similar articles in JAMA

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

To the Editor: The article by Dr Wintemute and colleagues¹ on the effect of denying handgun purchases to persons convicted of some misdemeanors contains a number of flaws. The most serious flaw, which undermines their approach to studying the effectiveness of gun laws, is that only legal handgun purchases were studied. However, in a survey cited by the authors,² barely one fourth of prisoners obtained guns from gun dealers. Also, Wintemute et al counted 546 arrests for new crimes among 1654 subjects over a 3-year period, during which time California reported almost 1 million adult FBI index crime arrests and about 600 000 arrests for violent or gun crimes.³ These data suggest that their sample is atypical.

In addition, there are problems in comparing so-called violent misdemeanants (the law merely defines various misdemeanors as disqualifying, not as violent, although several are) who purchased handguns in 1989-1990 and others who were denied . . . [Full Text of this Article]

RELATED ARTICLE

Subsequent Criminal Activity Among Violent Misdemeanants Who Seek to Purchase Handguns: Risk Factors and Effectiveness of Denying Handgun Purchase
Garen J. Wintemute, Mona A. Wright, Christiana M. Drake, and James J. Beaumont
JAMA. 2001;285(8):1019-1026.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT