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A mass shooting in Roseburg, Oregon, revived interest in a number of memes about gun control, among them the above-reproduced claim involving the town of Kennesaw, Georgia. According to the graphic shown here, Kennesaw mandated gun ownership for all households in 1982, and as a result, local crime rates dropped dramatically. But even the most basic element of the claim, about the imposition of mandatory gun ownership in that town, wasn't quite true. The law in question stated: In other words, Kennesaw residents were required to own guns ... save for those Kennesaw residents who couldn't afford guns, couldn't use guns, couldn't legally own guns, or simply didn't want to have guns. Essentially, Kennesaw residents were never actually required to own guns, making most assertions about mandatory gun ownership and crime rates in that town highly problematic. That law was a direct response to a (since repealed) ban on the possession of handguns that was implemented in Morton Grove, Illinois, in 1981. An important point of distinction between the two examples was that Morton Grove's was enforceable while Kennesaw's was largely symbolic and was never intended to be enforced. The latter, therefore is clearly not an exceptionally good indicator of the effect of such a mandate on crime statistics. As Kennesaw Police Department's Lt. Craig Graydon explained, gun ownership wasn't truly compulsory in Kennesaw (nor was it ever intended to be): Lt. Graydon's sentiment was also expressed in an April 1987 New York Times article: Much of the claim hinged on the passage of time for plausibility. Hard statistics for the crime rate in a small Georgia city before 1982 were difficult to come by in 2015 (more than three decades later), but the author of a 18 March 1982 New York Times editorial titled The Guns of Kennesaw squeezed those numbers from the initially reticent Mayor Darvin Purdy and Chief of Police Robert Ruble: Soon afterwards, the narrative claiming a reduction in crime had begun to develop (even as Mayor Stephenson conceded he had no idea how many residents newly became gun owners because of the law): In 1981, the year before the ordinance was adopted, Kennesaw recorded 55 house burglaries. The next year there were 26, and in 1985 only 11. As the news excerpt referenced above indicated, a drop in homicides owing to a mandatory gun ownership law would be difficult to measure, as the number of murders that took place in Kennesaw the year prior to the law's implementation was zero and therefore could drop no lower. And the increased number of armed robberies from 1980 (one) to 1981 (four) represented a sample so low that a subsequent reduction in such crime didn't provide any meaningful data from which a conclusion about mandatory gun ownership and crime rates could be drawn. Another aspect to consider is whether Kennesaw's crime rates were observed elsewhere in the state. In the decade bracketing the law's passage (1976 through 1986) there was a significant drop in murders, burglaries, property crimes, the property crime rate, and the burglary rate in Georgia as whole (despite Kennesaw's outlier status with the gun law in question). Statewide, the murder rate similarly dropped in a fairly dramatic fashion after 1982 without a statewide law requiring gun ownership.
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