The point is not whether it is wise or foolish, for people to decide they need guns in order to defend themselves against violence in their neighborhood. The point is each person has the right to decide this on their own, without a well-intentioned but ultimately over-reaching and misinformed government telling them they know what’s best.

By a 5-4 vote the United States Supreme Court recently struck down a city of Chicago handgun ban, just as it had done two years before with the Washington, D.C. law that barred private handgun ownership.

Why are these bans over-reaching?

Primarily because they are – as the Supreme Court has ruled – in violation of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

But there is also a real-life story behind this particular Supreme Court case. The lawsuit challenging the Chicago ban on personal handgun ownership – McDonald v. Chicago – stems from an elderly black man’s desire to enjoy that most basic of American rights: the right to feel safe in his own home and neighborhood.

According to the Washington Post, Otis McDonald, now 76, “said he needed a gun to protect himself… from young black ‘gangbangers’ who were terrorizing his suburban Chicago neighborhood.”

Chicago city leaders – including Mayor Richard Daley – supported the gun ban and they oppose last month’s Supreme Court decision.

They are right in stating Chicago is already an exceptionally violent place. The weekend immediately before the Supreme Court ruling, 29 Chicagoans were shot – three of them fatally. The weekend before that, 50 shooting incidents left 10 city residents dead.

But disarming honest, law-abiding people won’t stop the bad guys from having – and using – guns.

Furthermore, there now comes this out of Harvard University, which one might presume is not a haven for hotheaded gun nuts.

According to a Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy study, gun ownership rates do not correlate with high rates of murder or suicide.

According to the study – entitled “Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence” – there is no objective data to support the conventional wisdom “that more guns means more deaths and fewer guns means fewer deaths.”

For example: The Soviet Union’s murder rate far exceeds that of the United States, despite the Soviet Union’s strict gun prohibitions.

Furthermore other nations cited in the study – such as Germany, France, Norway, Finland and Denmark – maintain higher rates of gun ownership, yet possess murder rates much lower than nations in which gun ownership is more restricted.

For example: Handguns are outlawed in Luxembourg, a country which has a murder rate nine times higher than Germany’s.

“Norway,” the study notes, “has far and away Western Europe’s highest gun ownership rate, and its lowest murder rate.”

The study further notes that England had few gun restrictions, in the 19th and early 20th century, and also had little violent crime.

Now, England has tough restrictions on firearms ownership – and its violent crime rate surpasses America’s.

Harvard’s social scientists have apparently come to the same conclusion as gun-rights advocates who travel in less rarified company: When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.