Escalating crime and violence lead to calls for control, registration, and eventual confiscation of guns, measures which are facilitated by the decline in concern for individual rights. (The motivation behind gun-control measures is also partly political, as will be seen in our analysis of Graph 4.) Common citizens then find it difficult or impossible to obtain defensive weapons unless they operate outside the law and hence have access to black markets. Consequently, criminal aggressors encounter less resistance. While the logical conclusion—namely, that gun controls tend to encourage crime and violence—does not depend on empirical statistics, the latter are certainly consistent with it. For instance, the International Crime Victims Survey (more information), administered by Leiden University in the Netherlands and published in 2001, compared crime rates in the leading industrialized countries. The highest per-capita rates of violent crime were observed in Australia, England, and Wales, where crime has skyrocketed in recent years in response to unusually stringent gun controls. In the culturally similar United States, where private legal gun ownership so far remains less restricted, violent crimes, burglaries, and automobile thefts were far less rampant.

More generally, as private property rights come to be seen as less significant in the mixed-economy society than "public order" (meaning total state control), prohibitions and court decisions are instituted against individuals who seek to defend themselves against criminal aggressors. Such measures permit such aggression to spread largely unchecked.