via BuzzPo
Looking at the bio at the end of this article, you may find it difficult to believe what you are about to read was written by a pro-gun American, defined as a supporter of your right to own and carry firearms if you so desire.
But can such a supporter admit uncomfortable truths about guns? Reject certain myths? And are there elements of truth in both liberal and conservative viewpoints? Conversely, could there be distractions from both sides that mask the heart, or important parts, of the issue?
Moving past distractions from liberals
There are certain arguments that simply delay any meaningful conversation on national gun policy.
During debate, leftists point to studies that show in households with guns, your chance of being murdered by a family member skyrockets; women are most at risk. Households with guns are also hugely more likely to see suicide.
When you look at these studies, note what they conclude: It is not (merely) that people in these homes are more likely to be murdered with a gun, but more likely to be murdered, period. It is not (merely) that people in these homes are more likely to commit suicide with a gun, but more likely to commit suicide, period.
This is unspeakably tragic, yet predictable. The worn-out conservative response “people will just find another way to kill family or themselves” is surely true in some cases, but the data undeniably shows “another way” often isn’t found. Guns make killing easy (physically and psychologically), their absence making it difficult. Murder and suicide are often impulsive decisions; without guns, fewer people act. If “another way” was found in each case, we would not see homes with guns more likely to experience murder and suicide; homes with guns and without would be about even across the board.
Plus, non-gun suicides rates are about the same in states with many guns and those with few. Fewer guns does not mean more suicide via slitting wrists, jumping off buildings, etc. You will note below that in places like Australia gun control measures did not affect non-gun homicides and suicides.
via Naples Herald
While these arguments from the left are very wise reasons to choose not to own a gun (and show the idea that “guns keep you safe,” while not without merit, is not entirely truthful), they simply don’t have a relevant place in the debate about gun law (save, of course, as reason to keep guns out of the homes of felons and the insane). Unless one wants to posit that gun ownership must be outlawed outright, which would create a highly profitable black market, as demonstrated by illegal liquor, drugs, abortion, and prostitution in U.S. history, such statistics are a distraction when it comes to State gun control.
Similarly, liberals must end the misuse of certain statistics. For instance, using a study showing that Texas felons with conceal carry permits were nearly 5 times more likely to have threatened someone with a firearm than felons without permits as evidence that carrying a gun increases aggressiveness. It somehow seems predictable that people with a propensity to carry might be in a position to more often have a gun to stick in someone’s face. This is not the research you want. There is actual evidence that carrying a gun increases aggressiveness (see below), so there is no need to misuse such statistics.
Finally, liberals must abandon the use of absolutes: “Guns don’t stop crimes. Guns don’t stop mass killings.” In fact, they do, as you will read below, and in a nation with so many guns and so many responsible gun owners, it would be strange if this were otherwise.
Moving past distractions from conservatives
The right offers distractions of its own, and these tend to border on both irrelevancy and complacency (weak excuses designed to favor inaction).
For example, conservatives love to point out that more people die in automobile accidents than by guns. Surely cars don’t kill people, but rather their operators, people, kill people. Are we to outlaw cars? (Note: this statistical comparison will soon be obsolete, as this year it is expected that deaths by guns will meet and surpass the 30,000-plus Americans killed in or by automobiles each year.)
This nonsense of course ignores the fact that probably no one supports outlawing cars but probably everyone supports common sense regulations like licensing, titling and registration, seat belts, traffic laws, etc. More importantly, however, it amounts to a morally bankrupt irrelevancy, essentially saying, “No need to make this safer, there’s a lot of other unsafe things that kill more people.”
It’s almost inconceivable that people who consider themselves rational would bother saying something like this (here I will include myself, as I used to parrot this argument). Another distraction is pointing out the percentage of Americans killed by guns is extremely low, or that most gun owners are never involved in gun violence. We are trying to save lives anyway; one might wonder just how many people need to die before it becomes unacceptable, before action is taken. A distraction along similar lines is the fact that 60% of gun deaths are suicides. As if that justifies doing nothing in the name of the other 40%.
A morally justifiable stance would be to seek out new, creative, effective, common sense ways to make both cars and guns safer to live with (or reduce both suicides and homicides). We should aim to lessen harm in all aspects of society, not just one (or worse, none).
via ABC News
Finally, the misuse of absolutes should not prohibit action. For example, many mass shooters passed criminal background checks when buying their weapons. Thus conservatives crow, “Background checks don’t work!” There is clearly truth in this. A new killer may not have a criminal history.
But more accurate would be: “Background checks don’t always work.” Believe it or not, when Americans with criminal histories try to buy guns at licensed firearms dealers, they are turned away because of failed background checks (1.5 million people over the last decade and a half). Fortunately for them, they can simply go to the 40% of gun sellers that do not legally have to check criminal histories. “Doesn’t work” indeed!
If this loophole did not exist, they would have to resort to theft, increasing the likelihood of being apprehended before committing murder. Or they would have to (illegally) borrow one from a friend, increasing the number of people with knowledge of a crime and fear of punishment. Or perhaps they would resort to less deadly weapons like knives, or weapons requiring the effort of construction, such as bombs. Or perhaps some would give up their plans altogether. According to a John Hopkins University study, when Missouri repealed its background check requirements in 2007, dealers gave more guns to more criminals, and the state saw a 25% increase in firearm homicide rates (and a 14% increase in overall homicides) from 2008-2012.
Is it not inane to say background checks don’t work, when in fact they sometimes do, and when there is a way to perhaps make them more effective?
Guns don’t kill people, horrific societal conditions kill people?
Guns are not the problem, people are the problem, to paraphrase a platitude. There is a bit of truth in this.
Despite the fact that guns make it much easier to kill (higher risk of death in the home) and kill more people (such as in mass shootings), gun ownership is only part of the problem. Societal conditions breed gun violence; we must treat all the diseases that cause the symptoms.
Mental illness is one of the diseases, hugely common when it comes to suicides, but overall rare when it comes to gun violence. Only 3-5% of crimes in the U.S. involve people with mental illness, and those who do are less likely to use guns during the crime than a citizen without mental illness. As a writer for the Washington Post noted, the U.S. has about the same mental health professionals and psychiatric beds per 10,000 people, and spends about the same GDP percentage on mental health care, as other advanced nations, but has 20 times the gun violence.
This is not to downplay the need to improve mental health care in the U.S., nor to ignore the fact that mass killers are often mentally unstable. A liberal magazine recently examined 62 mass shooters, and while finding 80% of them got their guns legally, about half had mental health problems. A 2001 study looked at 34 adolescent mass murderers from 1958-1999 and found 23% had a history of mental illness; 6% were judged to be psychotic at the time of the killing. These 34 killers were also affected by bullying, social isolation, substance abuse, and a preoccupation with guns.
Poverty is another disease. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, from 2008-2012,
Persons in poor households at or below the Federal Poverty Level…had more than double the rate of violent victimization as persons in high-income households… Persons in poor households had a higher rate of violence involving a firearm (3.5 per 1,000) compared to persons above the FPL (0.8–2.5 per 1,000).
via Huffington Post
States with the most gun violence also tend to have high poverty rates (also, very lax gun control; such states tend to be Republican-controlled). States with higher economic development, more college graduates, less inequality, and less overall poverty correlate with fewer gun deaths. As Attorney General Ramsey Clark once put it:
Mark the part of your city where crime flourishes. Now look at the map of your city. You have marked areas where there are slums, poor schools, high unemployment, widespread poverty; where sickness and mental illness are common, housing is decrepit and nearly every site is ugly—and you have marked the areas where crime flourishes… Poverty, illness, injustice, idleness, ignorance, human misery, and crime go together. That is the truth. We have known it all along. We cultivate crime, breed it, nourish it. Little wonder we have so much.
Other diseases include right-wing religious hatred, xenophobia, racism, political extremism: the massacre of blacks in Charleston in 2015, the attack on a Jewish center in Kansas City in 2014, the slaying of Sikhs in Wisconsin in 2012, the murder of a doctor who provided abortions in Wichita in 2009, etc.
The Paradox: Guns can absolutely stop crimes and prevent death…but also cause more of both overall
In a nation with so many guns and people who carry them, it is highly predictable that bystanders with guns would stop crimes: an Uber driver shoots a man who started firing into a crowd, a bystander with a gun forces a gunman’s surrender in a church, another bystander kills a man who open fired in a barber shop. As one conservative writer noted in 2012:
In December 2007, a man murdered two teenagers at the Youth with a Mission training center in the Denver suburbs. He then drove south to Colorado Springs and attacked the New Life megachurch in Colorado Springs. He killed two people in the parking lot and then entered the building, carrying hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Fortunately, a volunteer security guard for the church, Jeanne Assam, was carrying a licensed handgun, and she quickly shot the attacker. According to Pastor Brady Boyd, “she probably saved over 100 lives.”
Elsewhere in the United States, three school shootings have been stopped because teachers or other responsible adults had firearms: Edinboro, Penn.; Pearl, Miss.; and the Appalachian Law School in Grundy, Va.
Truly, these events happen frequently and are not difficult to find. Owning and carrying a gun can reduce your (and others’) risk of personal victimization. The question becomes: What other risks are increased at the same time? Do the risks on one side of the equation outweigh those on the other?
via NPR
It’s a matter of scale, proportion, ratio. In 2012, for every gun killing in self-defense, there were 34 criminal gun homicides.
Overall, statistics show gun ownership creates troublesome problems. Research indicates it tends to increase paranoia and a 2006 study showed
men exposed to firearms before an experiment had much higher testosterone levels and were three times more likely to engage in aggressive behaviour relative to the subjects not primed with a weapon.
Perhaps this explains why one study showed drivers carrying guns are 44% more likely to make obscene gestures at other motorists, and 77% more likely to aggressively tail others.
Statistically speaking, a gun on one’s person actually increases one’s risk of being shot during an assault (by a factor of 4.5 by one count, 5.5 by another). According to researchers:
A gun may falsely empower its possessor to overreact, instigating and losing otherwise tractable conflicts with similarly armed persons. Along the same lines, individuals who are in possession of a gun may increase their risk of gun assault by entering dangerous environments that they would have normally avoided. Alternatively, an individual may bring a gun to an otherwise gun-free conflict only to have that gun wrested away and turned on them.
States with the highest rates of gun ownership have a gun murder rate 114% higher than those with the lowest ownership rates, and, looking at 30 years of data in all 50 states, “for every one percent increase in a state’s gun ownership rate, there is a nearly one percent increase in its firearm homicide rate.”
After Australia implemented a gun buyback program, researchers “found that the places where the most guns were removed from public circulation also experienced the largest drops in intentional gun deaths.” Further,
the firearm homicide rate fell by 59 percent, and the firearm suicide rate fell by 65 percent, in the decade after the law was introduced, without a parallel increase in non-firearm homicides and suicides.
A recent analysis of mass shootings from 1966 to 2012 in 171 nations revealed that the correlation between nations with the highest rate of gun ownership and nations with the most mass shootings is undeniable. It held true for rich and poor nations, advanced and undeveloped, democratic and authoritarian, peaceful and unstable, large and small, etc. The researcher said:
The United States, Yemen, Switzerland, Finland, and Serbia are ranked as the top 5 countries in firearms owned per capita, according to the 2007 Small Arms Survey, and my study found that all five are ranked in the top 15 countries in public mass shooters per capita… That is not a coincidence.
U.S. states with more guns see higher rates of police deaths.
This all makes sense. More guns around, more deaths via gun. The U.S. has the highest gun ownership rate and the highest per-capita rate of gun-related deaths among developed countries. The evidence shows this is no coincidence. Even conservatives I’ve spoken to, who preach we need more guns, when confronted with statistics like these will admit this, because it is painfully predictable.
via Mother Jones
Others quickly counter: “For every study you give that shows more guns means more gun violence, I can give you one that shows the opposite!”
Take it from someone who used to use such studies, there is reason to be skeptical. For example, the libertarian Ludwig von Mises Institute presented data in 2015 that showed “There’s No Correlation Between Gun Ownership, Mass Shootings, and Murder Rates.” But the data only looked at a single year. That is far less reliable than studies that look at long-term trends, and of course the information was not peer-reviewed in the scientific method that the most trustworthy studies go through.
As another example, consider the 2007 study published by criminologists in the self-described conservative Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy that found more guns reduced crime. Unfortunately, this content was not peer-reviewed either, a critical component of locating and eliminating bias in research, that should quite frankly make any rational thinker start asking questions. Not that there isn’t bias in all research, but the most trustworthy sources are those that have gone through processes that reduce and uncover subjective findings.
The best evidence shows a stronger gun culture, more guns around, means more gun violence.
Despite how obvious such a statement is, the belief that more guns in more hands means fewer deaths persists. The notion that a massive increase in gun ownership has led to a drop in homicides in false. While the U.S. homicide rate spiked in the 1960s, and went up and down in the 70s and 80s (staying high), since the 1990s it’s fallen dramatically. Homicides by firearm in 1993 were 7 per 100,000 people, in 2013 3.6 per 100,000.
But during this time, gun ownership rates actually fell. In 1977, 54% of American households had a gun, by 2010 it was 32%. There may be more guns in the U.S. than there used to be (192 million privately owned firearms in 1994, 310 million in 2009), but they are held by fewer families. Today, only 22% of Americans personally own guns. 20% of gun owners have 65% of the guns! There is no correlation here that helps conservatives; the drop in homicides actually correlates better with less American exposure to lead poisoning!
There is simply little reason to believe an America without guns would fall into madness and violence, especially if we ease societal conditions like poverty, racism, and mental illness. The U.K., Japan, and other stable democracies have extremely low rates of gun ownership, strict gun regulations, and extremely low rates of homicide (by any method, not just by gun).
via Vox
The reforms
It might be smart to make it illegal for people on the federal terror watch/no-fly list to purchase firearms. Such individuals can’t fly legally, but have no problem legally buying arms. After the San Bernardino massacre, Republican senators blocked an effort to correct this. Background checks must include a look at the terror watch list.
The U.S. must make background checks universal. Though not a cure-all, it is lunacy to only require criminal background checks in only 60% of gun sales (those through licensed firearms dealers).
40% of guns are sold by private persons (the “gun show loophole”), requiring no processing of the buyer through the National Instant Criminal Background Check system (NICS). There is no paperwork, making it harder to match bullets to guns, as well as track where and how a violent criminal got his weapon. This must be fixed, and there must be harsh penalties for anyone who sells or gives a gun to another without following proper procedures.
The U.S. must enact universal gun licensing. In the same way one must have a license to drive a car, one must have a license to own or carry a gun. Not all states have this (some even ban such a law). It would be a simple, common-sense step, and it must be a serious felony to own, carry, or use a gun without an ownership license. A basic safety course, age minimum, and competency test might be desirable as a prerequisite to licensure.
via The Cabbage
The U.S. must enact universal gun titling and registration. It is not such a burden to require Americans to register their gun upon purchase in a national gun registry. Each gun must have a title, which can be signed over to another person during a sale, requiring the new owner to re-register the gun. An update to the NICS could then revoke a new felon’s license and registration, in the same way negligent drivers lose their licenses and driving privileges. This can help law enforcement track down the owners of guns found at crime scenes.
Vehicles are regulated in all these ways, because it is well understood that owning and operating a vehicle puts oneself and others at risk to a certain degree, and that people who use a car during criminal activity can more easily be hunted down.
Yet there are no Americans foaming at the mouth over “car control” and how the government is “coming for our cars.” These are simple regulations in the name of societal well-being, with potential to do enormous good and literally no harm, except of course to murderers and other felons.
As for gun-free zones, while we don’t have actual evidence that mass killers choose them purposefully (mass killers tend to attack places they are personally connected to, such as their schools and workplaces), it is sensible to increase security at government buildings, public schools, and other places that are both gun-free zones and frequent targets. The NRA suggestion of a police officer in every American school is an important reform.
Finally, it is important to make use of available technology. States with safe storage requirements and trigger lock laws correlate with fewer gun deaths per 100,000 people. And microstamping imprints the gun’s serial number on a bullet as it’s fired, helping police trace crimes to perpetrators. This could make people think twice about using a gun for crime. To prevent accidents and theft, there’s “smart guns” that only fire when held by their owner or other authorized user; despite the potential problems with current smart guns, this may be the weapon of the future.
The Right Direction
We don’t need to repeal the Second Amendment. We don’t need to outlaw gun ownership, or even conceal carry. But we do need to recognize why the gun debate seems to contain a paradox. That small scale facts can appear to contradict large scale facts, but in fact do no such thing. We need to gravitate toward scientific findings concerning gun ownership and gun violence that are most thoroughly vetted. We need to enact reforms that have proven effective, even if they aren’t a cure-all.
The U.S. is moving in the right direction on guns. The percentage of families with guns is falling. 85% of gun owners favor universal background checks. With every massacre, the call for smarter gun law grows louder.
America is giving up its gun fetish. With time, this and the alleviation of other societal problems will result in a country for our descendants with fewer gun owners, fewer guns, and, if the evidence is to be trusted, fewer deaths of many kinds.
The Australian prime minister wrote to America in 2013:
In the 18 years before the 1996 reforms, Australia suffered 13 gun massacres — each with more than four victims — causing a total of 102 deaths. There has not been a single massacre in that category since 1996.
Few Australians would deny that their country is safer today as a consequence of gun control.
Garrett S. Griffin is a political writer for Weekend Collective and the author of Racism in Kansas City: A Short History. A former religious conservative, he is now an atheist and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.