Targeting Guns

Firearms and Their Control

Gary Kleck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351486965
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This new paperback comprehensively reviews the research evidence on the links between guns, violence, and gun control, and reports results of the author's own research as well. In Targeting Guns, Kleck follows the line of argument and careful statistical inference of his earlier prizewinning volume, Point Blank, while updating the literature reviews and statistical information, and adding two chapters.

1
Introduction

In the war over guns, the first casualty was the truth.

Why does the Issue Matter? Violent Uses of Guns

Guns are heavily involved in violence in America. In 1993, about 71% of homicides and 63% of suicides involved guns. While it is not obvious whether there would be fewer deaths if there were fewer guns, or whether gun laws could reduce gun availability among those who would use guns for violent purposes, there is no doubt that a big share of America’s fatal violence involves the use of firearms. Table 1.1 provides a comprehensive tabulation of the major forms of gun violence, covering deaths, nonfatal injuries, and nonfatal violent crimes.

Deaths

In 1993, about 39,595 persons were killed with guns, the highest number in the nation’s peacetime history (Table 1.1, Panel A). Nearly half of these deaths, 48%, were suicides, 47% were homicides, 4% were fatal gun accidents, and 1% each were due to legal intervention (police officers killing suspects in the line of duty and legal executions) and to death where it was undetermined whether injury was intentionally or accidentally inflicted.

Nonfatal Gunshot Woundings

Whereas the death data are generally quite reliable, the figures concerning nonfatal gunshot woundings in Table 1.1, Panel B, are more questionable because there is no national system for gathering comprehensive nonfatal injury data, and because many, perhaps most, nonfatal gunshot wounds are neither reported to the police nor treated by any medical professional and therefore go uncounted. Surveys of the general population such as the National Health Survey (U.S. National Center for Health Statistics 1976) cover samples that, although large, are not large enough to get even minimally precise estimates of rare events such as gunshot injuries. Similarly, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), a survey of a large national sample of households, generates estimates of nonfatal gunshot woundings connected with assaults that are far too low even compared just to the number known to police (Cook 1985a). Most other estimates are based on hospital data concerning only persons who were medically treated (for a review, see Annest, Mercy, Gibson, and Ryan 1995:1753).

The estimates in Table 1.1 are instead extrapolations based on the fairly reliable death counts, multiplied by estimates of the ratio of nonfatal gunshot wounds to fatal wounds. The estimates of these ratios are based on local studies of fairly small numbers of medically treated cases, but they seem reasonable. One would expect the nonfatal-to-fatal ratio to be highest for accidents, since the shooters were not trying to hurt anyone, and to be lowest for suicide attempts, since these commonly involve close-range wounds to the head (Chapter 8). Consistent with these expectations, the ratios used here are 14.5 for accidents, 5.25 for intentional assaults, and 0.181 for suicide attempts.

The total estimated number of medically treated nonfatal gunshot wound victims for 1993 was about 125,000. Eight earlier national estimates of the number of nonfatal “firearm-related injuries” ranged from 55,800 to 236,000, averaging 147,228 (Annest et al. 1995:1753). The 125,000 estimate is well within the 95% confidence interval estimate of 56,325–141,725 nonfatal firearm gunshot wound cases produced using reports from a national probability sample of 91 hospitals, and only slightly higher than that study’s point estimate of 99,025 (ibid.:1751).

The NCVS, as is usually the case with gun-related estimates, provides a grossly deviant estimate: only about 34,000 gunshot woundings in 1992 [3% of 917,500 nonfatal handgun victimizations in 1987–1992 (U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics 1994b), adjusted upward to also include the 19% of gun crimes that involve long guns (rifles and shotguns) (U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics 1994a:83)]. The most likely explanation is that most victims of gunshot woundings are themselves criminals, who are not adequately represented in the NCVS samples and who fail to report criminal incidents in which they were shot.

The Underreporting of Nonfatal Gunshot Woundings

The best of these estimates rely on data concerning only persons medically treated for gunshot wounds. All such estimates underestimate, probably severely, total nonfatal woundings because many less seriously wounded persons do not seek medical treatment of any kind. While this is foolish from a narrow medical standpoint, it is a perfectly reasonable course for many gunshot victims, in light of three facts: (1) most gunshot victims are criminals, (2) most doctors are required to report treatment of gunshot wounds to the police, and (3) most gunshot wounds are survivable without professional treatment.

First, most victims of nonfatal gunshot assaults (who account for about 78% of nonfatal wound victims—see Panel B of Table 1.1) are criminals. Lumb and Friday (1994:8) found that, in a sample of 545 adult gunshot victims, 71% had been previously arrested, and 64% had been convicted of a crime, with an average of eleven arrests among those with a prior arrest record. This is consistent with recent findings concerning victims of fatal gun assaults: 67% of Philadelphia gun homicide victims in 1990 had a prior arrest record, with an average of four previous arrests on eleven criminal counts. Further, many of the gun homicide victims had engaged in criminal behavior shortly before their deaths, since 61% showed evidence of intoxicants in their blood, with most of these victims having used cocaine (McGonigal, Cole, Schwab, Kauder, Rotondo, Angood 1993:534). Likewise, Tardiff et al. (1994) found that 31% of New York City homicide victims in 1990–1991 tested positive for cocaine. Further, among juveniles, self-report surveys indicate that admitted delinquents claim a majority of juvenile assault and robbery victimizations, and are two to three times as likely as nondelinquents to be a victim of these crimes (Lauritsen, Sampson, and Laub 1991:278; Sampson and Lauritsen 1990). Among youthful (age twenty-one and below) victims of gun or knife homicide in Boston in 1992–1995, 75% had been arraigned in Massachusetts courts, with an average of 9.5 offenses per victim with a record (Kennedy, Piehl, and Braga 1996:22–23). In short, the typical victim of gun violence is a criminal, who has strong reasons for avoiding the police, especially if wounded while committing a crime.

Second, medic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations Frequently Used in the Book
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Illegitimate Practices In Summarizing Research On Guns And Violence
• 3 The Ownership and Acquisition of Guns
• 4 Searching For “Bad” Guns: The Focus On Special Gun Types
• 5 Guns And Self-Defense
• 6 Carrying Guns For Self-Protection
• 7 Guns And Violent Crime
• 8 Guns And Suicide
• 9 Firearms Accidents
• 10 Public Opinion And The Bases Of Support For Gun Control
• 11 The Impact Of Gun Control On Violence Rates
• 12 Conclusions
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index