Pundits have been filling the airwaves and national cable news about what our society should do about gun violence in the aftermath of the atrocities in Tucson on 8 January 2011. Let's look at the three prominent arguments.
Would harsher penalties decrease gun violence?
Most crime is committed because the criminal either doesn't think he is going to get caught or because he is impulsive -- I say "he" because most crime is committed by males. With this in mind, harsher, stricter, and more punitive laws don't deter criminals; it doesn't matter how harsh the punishment is for the criminal who doesn't expect to get caught. However, certainty of punishment is more important than the severity of punishment. So certainty of punishment would be effective in many cases, but not when someone is impulsive or deranged.
So, would less access to guns lead to less gun violence?
It makes sense: no guns, no gun violence. Anyone from Europe will likely tell you that the problems with gun violence in America is that we have too many guns. And if you read The Crime Drop in America by renowned criminologist Albert Blumstein, you might find a very compelling case for "less guns." However, if states banded together and repealed the Second Amendment, I'm not sure that would solve our gun problem. When the U.S. banned alcohol in the 18th Amendment (Prohibition), it did nothing to curb the desire for alcohol. It may have made the taboo even more desirable. Prohibition was so unsuccessful that it was eventually overturned with the 21st Amendment. We could expect to see the same thing with guns. Additionally, when thinking about tighter restrictions, it is easier to restrict guns from law-abiding citizens than it is from criminals.
But would more access to guns lead to less gun violence?
The argument goes that if a woman is carrying a gun, she can stop a would-be assailant. This assumes, however, that she won't be approached by surprise, that she is able to draw her gun in time to use it, and that she will be able to use it accurately in the heat of a moment. Such a scenario could result in a gun in the hands of a criminal if any one of those steps doesn't go as planned.
What if a spectator at the rally in Tucson had a firearm?
There have been a number of cases when a law-abiding citizen is able to self defend with the use of a gun. However, if a law-abiding spectator opens fire on a criminal shooter there is no guarantee the criminal is going to be stopped since the spectator might miss, or the spectator could become another casualty in a shootout, or the spectator fires and hits another innocent bystander. Also, there exists the possibility that the law-abiding citizen shoots at the wrong person. Anything can go wrong.
There is a convincing argument that "more guns means less crime." Packed with correlations and statistics about the relationship between more guns and less crime, this economic-based argument, however, makes many incorrect assumptions about human behavior and as such conclusions are flawed.
Arizona has some of the most liberal "right to carry firearms" laws in the country, yet Arizona is ranked the 9th most dangerous state by CQ Press.
So, if we can't get tougher on penalties, and there are flawed arguments for more guns, and flawed arguments for less guns, what can be done?
Let's consider that there are many causes of illness and many solutions. The doctor's objective is to pair the illness with the appropriate treatment. It's the same challenge with crime. There are different types of criminals who carry or use guns for different reasons and there are solutions appropriate to the diversity of situations.
The problem is that public policy reforms are too often made in broad sweeps and are not specific enough to target the different types of gun crime (no pun intended).
Another problem is political: what is an acceptable solution to one party often isn't acceptable to another. The reality is that public safety often isn't independent of partisan politics.
There are effective ways to reduce gun crimes, but implementation and political hurdles are thorny; the specifics are beyond the scope of this opinion.
The point here is that if there were a simple solution, it would probably have been done by now.
Editor's Note: This post has been modified by the blogger.
The First step is to take advantage of high profile incidents.
The Second step is to marginalize legal gun use and historic precedent.
The Third step is to make some guns seem more dangerous than others, even if they are not.
The Fourth step is to register every sale.
The Fifth step is a robust “Shall Issue” permitting process.
The Final step is to encourage and incentivize the forfeiture of arms.
http://tinyurl.com/4k346he
Inaccurate statement. The pistol was not drawn. The only justification this non-event to be breathtakingly close was to speculate on the after-the-fact comments by the legal firearm holder, who was very clear that there wasn't much chance that he would draw his weapon.
And one of the reasons that AZ has such a high crime rate is that it is on the front line in the battle against both illegal immigration and Mexican gangs. A simple correlation of violence to firearm ownership is insufficient to disparage the right to personal firearms in AZ.
More facts that slipped by your article is that the majority of deaths due to firearms is from suicide by firearm. Banning firearms has no effect on the suicide rate, just on the method. Of the remaining deaths, the majority of them are criminals shooting other criminals--deaths that are unlikely to change.
Finally, you completely ignore the times that personal firearms are used in self-defense. This number has been determined multiple times to be in the hundreds of thousands of times a year (the most reliable may be the one done by the Clinton Justice department in 1997). Often not reported to the police because brandishing the weapon is often sufficient to deter a crime, elimination of personal ownership of firearms would also eliminate the ability of law-abiding citizens to protect themselves and their families.
What I DO imply is that there are cyclical social and socio-economic problems in society which exacerbate violent crime, more notably within urban areas where poverty, single parent households, high-school dropout rates, teen pregnancy. overpopulation, decaying infrastructure etc... exist in great prevalence. Unfortunately, these social inequalities appear, statistically, to affect our minority population at glaringly disproportionate rates. But we can't target gangs because it "unfairly targets minorities." We can't have a civil discussion about crime and race because it is only fodder for partisanism ("see Joe Public! I told you those nasty GOP'ers are southern racists!") We can't address the real problems associated with crime because proposing just one more gun control law is much cheaper than devoting the time and financial resources it would take to tackle these social problems.
So we'll continue to try to find ways to throw blanket policies over our crime, social, and socio-economic problems which convince the general populace that someone is "doing something", while ignoring the obvious problems which are statistically verified by a simple google search.
BTW, I wonder if the author ever googled "knife crime" in those european anti-gun utopias of which he speaks so fondly?
Crime is a product of social and socio-economic disparities which affect different people at different rates. Isn't it time to address these issues rather than pushing legislation which has historically only affected the law-abiding.
The author of this post, while at first glance seems to be offering an objective and unbiased piece, let's us in on his hidden agenda by attempting to discredit the notion that law-abiding citizens have always, and will continue to use firearms in self defense at a rate at least (based on the FBI's 80,000 defensive gun uses/year figures) 5-6x that of the "gun homicide" rate (approx 13(k)/yr).
The inconvenient truth that no one wants to talk about is that as a society, we completely fail at protecting the law-abiding public from violent criminals, evidenced by the US's recidivism rate for violent offenders. The primary reason for this is because we're not allowed to specifically target a problem if it highlights a sub set of individuals with a correlation to race:
"In 2005, homicide victimization rates for blacks were 6 times higher than the rates for whites.
"In 2005, offending rates for blacks were more than 7 times higher than the rates for whites."
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/homicide/race.cfm
Now, before the cacophony of "You're A Racist!(tm)" begins, let me add a few disclaimers:
1) I am not a racist.
2) I am not implying that crime is solely a black or minority problem.
3) I do not believe that laws should target individuals based on race, religion, or creed.
A 53-year-old woman got out of the shower NAKED and was SURPRISED to discover a 34-year-old man armed with a knife in her bathroom. She tried to fight him off with a shower rod but he forced her into the bedroom, probably to rape and then kill her. She was able to retrieve her .22 LR pistol and shoot the criminal several times, killing him.
http://peachtreecorners.patch.com/articles/police-release-911-tape-reporting-duluth-shooting-6
Explain to that woman that she doesn't really need a firearm to fight off a younger, stronger, armed male assailant because a curtain rod should suffice, and because she probably wouldn't be able to use her firearm "accurately in the heat of a moment".
Even many modern repeating arms are of designs pushing 100 or more years old.
Having lived, shot, and hunted in Europe, I can tell you that there are a lot of people who will not tell you that, but rather would point to our violent TV and video games, lack of parenting, and poor education and poor ethics.
"Having "shot and hunted" is redundant. "
One can shoot without hunting. During my time in Europe, I took part in several competitions, got in general range time with the locals, etc as well as hunting. The terms are not redundant.
Vermont has the same laws and where are they ranked?
One did, and came breathtakingly close to shooting the spectator who had disarmed Jared Loughner."
Umm... Not quite.
The armed responder was not a spectator, he was a shopper in a nearby store. He dropped his intended purchase, ran out the door, and had to run some 50 yards to the scene of the shooting. By the time he arrived, Loughner was already disarmed. The armed responder never drew his firearm and upon seeing the slide of Loughner's firearm slide locked to the rear, knew the lethal threat no longer existed and therefore simply tried to take the firearm away from the man holding it.
Vermont has had more liberalized gun laws than Arizona, and has had them for longer (Arizona has only had universal carry for about a year). But Vermont doesn't share a border with a country spiraling into chaos, so it has almost immeasurably low violent crime rates.
For example, some have said that 90% of the firearms recovered in Mexico are traced to the US. But what the data actually said was that 90% of the firearms recovered, submitted for tracing, and succefully traced came from the US. That worked out to about 18 percent of the firearms recovered. Many firearms were never submitted for tracing simply because it was readily apparent that they did not come from the US civilian market. Full-auto AK-47s and M-16s, for example. Any firearms marked as Mexican military or mexican police property are another example. Any firearms with obliterated serial numbers are not submitted.
Of those submitted, a large percentage cannot be traced by the BATFE. Why? Because the BATFE can generally only trace firearms which legally came through the US. A firearm made in Brazil and exported to Costa Rica is usually not going to show up in the BATFE database.
So saying that 90% or 70% of the firearms the BATFE were able to trace came from the US is kind of a "duh!" statement. It is like saying that of the planes registered in the US, the FAA has information on 90% of them.
Para-Ord = Canadian
Beretta = Italian
Walther = German
SIG = Swiss/German
Taurus = Brazilian
H&K = German
FN = Belgian
Norinco = Chinese
There are two simple solutions to reducing "gun violence" in the US, and neither involve more "gun control" laws. While simple (i.e. they aren't complex) they do require money and political will.
Most "gun deaths" in the US are suicides. If better and more available mental health treatment for depression was available the number of "gun deaths" in the US could potentially be cut in half.
A large percentage of both homicide perpetrators and homicide victims have previous arrest records. Many homicides are a related to the black market in illegal drugs. Ending the "War on Drugs" would eliminate the violence associated with the drug black market, just as ending the Prohibition of alcohol eliminated the violence associated with that black market.
Better treatment of depression and eliminating the black market for drugs would do far more to reduce "gun violence" than all of the silly "gun control" laws (closing the "gun show loophole", magazine capacity limits, "assault weapon" ban, etc. etc.) that have been proposed.
Excellent post.
For example: "Arizona has some of the most liberal 'right to carry firearms' laws in the country, yet Arizona is ranked the 9th most dangerous state by CQ Press." Yet Utah, which got a score of zero from the Brady Campaign, is ranked as the 6th safest state (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/20/10-most-peaceful-states_n_849768.html#s264559&title=6_Utah). How can this be?
For some actual data about law-abiding citizens using firearms to stop an intruder in their home, see the National Center for Injury Prevention and control study where they estimated "497,646 (95% CI = 266,060-729,231) incidents occurred in which the intruder was seen and reportedly scared away by the firearm." (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9591354)