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  3. 　　At the fall 2001 Social Science History Association convention in Chicago, the Crime and Justice network sponsored a forum on

　　At the fall 2001 Social Science History Association convention in Chicago, the Crime and Justice network sponsored a forum on

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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. 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.
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 文章表达的是要加强对枪支的控制，因此A项正确；由文章第二段的第二、三句可知，在19世纪50年代以前，很少有美国人拥有枪支，因而枪支对杀人率的作用不大，B项的时间范围没有确定，因此不正确；由第二段第一句可知，Bellesiles认为枪支和美国的“枪支文化”是导致美国高谋杀率的原因，而非结果。因此C项与文意不符；第二段最后两句提到Bellesiles低估了早期美国冲突中的枪支拥有量，而且由于早期历史学家的研究是无法再现的，其呈现的每个数据或者是误导的或者是错误的，因此D项表述错误。
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