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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 th

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

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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 United 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 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 an 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 rates 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 white, which was low everywhere, even in the South and on the frontier, where historians once assume guns 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. Belleville’s low estimates of gun ownership in early America conflict, however, with those of every historian who has previously studied the subject and have thus far proven irreproducible. Every homicide statistic he presents is either misleading or wrong.
    Given the influence of Kleck, kott, 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.
The passage is primarily concerned with ______.
选项 A、resolving a public dispute over gun control
B、describing the effects of earlier studies on gun control
C、analyzing the flaws in the previous theories about gun control
D、summarizing the recent development in the studies of gun control
答案C
解析 本题中，A、B、D三项都不能表达文章的主要意思。综观全文，本文主要是围绕以前主流社会历史学家在枪支控制方面的错误论证方法而展开的。因此C项为正确答案。
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