Guns and Control

A Nonpartisan Guide to Understanding Mass Public Shootings, Gun Accidents, Crime, Public Carry, Suicides, Defensive Use, and More

Guy Smith

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781510760080
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Controllo degli armamenti

A Nonpartisan guide that arms both sides of the gun control debate. The slogan of the Gun Facts Project is"We are neither pro-gun nor anti-gun. We are pro-math and anti-BS." From project creator Guy Smith comes Guns and Control: A Nonpartisan Guide to Mass Public Shootings, Gun Accidents, Crime, Public Carry, Suicides, Defensive Use, and More. No matter what side of the aisle one is on, people are baffled by gun control. This book is designed to be a guide to thoughtful discussion; it arms readers with facts and the logic behind conflicting arguments and leaves emotional rhetoric to the pundits and focuses on the thorny issues of the debate. Guns and Control will: • Guide readers step-wise through each of the major gun control topics: mass public shootings, assault weapons, street crime, suicide, private carry, defensive gun use, gun availability, and more.
• Help readers gain the broad perspective and the full set of important, true facts, just in time for the 2020 Presidential Election.
• Arm readers against some of the more egregious misinformation.
• Support readers in formulating their own conclusions. Guns and Control will grant high-level perspectives—for example, that mass public shootings are a global phenomenon, occurring in nearly all developed nations—and explore details to understand the causes, and thus possible cures, of gun violence-related problems. Was the push for de-institutionalization in mental health management a contributing factor to the rise in mass public shootings? Guns and Control will help readers find answers to such questions.What the public lacks is a clear, unbiased, broad perspective on the realities of guns, explained in simple, straightforward, and entertaining ways. Guns and Control will demystify these misunderstood aspects of who uses and misuses guns.

CHAPTER 1

Gun Availability

You cannot commit a gun crime without a gun.

Fifty-four percent of counties in the United States have zero murders, much less gun homicides.

GUNS AND THEIR AVAILABILITY ARE a classic coin metaphor. Guns are indeed used to commit crimes. They are also used to prevent crimes. They can contribute to accidental deaths but are unlikely to do so if precautions are taken.

The problem with modern discussions about the mere availability of guns is that all competing factions see it as a one-sided coin, an object that has never existed. To understand how private ownership of guns affects society, you have to flip the coin . . . repeatedly.

The critical take-aways

• There is weak correlation between guns per capita and homicides

• Gun violence is strongly associated with specific geographies and subcultures

• Few guns used for crime come from retail sources, but many come from underground networks

Availability and confounding variables

I have a long-running joke I give when speaking to audiences:

Last time I checked, the annual NRA convention was about seventy thousand members. These are people that own guns and know how to use guns. They are in a confined space with lots of guns. But nobody gets killed. Now, take seventy thousand garden variety street gang members and put them into the same building with the same stockpile of guns. You’ll need plenty of mops and buckets to clean up the blood.

The point of this exaggerated contrast is to demonstrate that the mere availability of guns is not deterministic to their misuse. Other factors are at play. In this particular and silly comparison, there is a clear difference in the cultural values of the two groups. NRA members are largely “law and order” types. Street gang members have little or no respect for any law, and from crime statistics, no respect for gun laws. Two heavily armed groups but with very different cultural norms produce two very different outcomes. Likewise, comparing the homicidal tendencies of the United States, which has the highest per capita gun ownership rate in the world, with the Falkland Islands or Yemen (the second and third gun ownership rate countries¹) would present equally confusing results.

Despite these complications, looking at countries around the world provides both insight and statistical landmines. To get a handle on all these gruesome details, let’s look at dead people.

Criminologists who have explored guns and policy tend to focus most ardently on homicides. The reason is that there is little debate over whether a person is dead from one country to another, whereas the definitions for assault, robbery, rape, and other acts of violence vary quite a bit. That being said, an “honor killing” might be ignored in Afghanistan and thus not be tallied in crime statistics, but the same act would earn a court-ordered lethal injection in Texas. By and large, however, the major classifications for what constitutes a homicide are consistent across borders and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes tries to keep global definitions and the resulting data aligned as much as is humanly possible.

If the availability of guns was a major factor in public endangerment, then in theory—and with all other factors being equal—the countries with the highest rate of private gun ownership should have the most bloodshed. But all other factors are far from being equal.

Ownership rate: Small Arms Survey 2017; Homicide rate: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

The huge spike in gun ownership rates on the right side of the chart is the United States. The homicide rate (murders per one hundred thousand people) per gun ownership rate for each country is plotted from the highest—Uganda at 31,262% the rate of the United States—to the lowest— Luxembourg, where homicides appear to be an afterthought in the course of day-to-day life.

But this comparison is loaded with problems. Small population countries, especially with frontier living circumstances, can have a very high gun ownership rate and be so sparsely populated that there is little chance to murder anyone. Poor countries can have very low gun ownership rates due to their poverty but have high homicide rates, as witnessed by the Rwanda Massacre in 1994 where machetes were a primary weapon and upwards of a million people died. To get a clearer picture, we need to compare countries with similar status in the world.

But what constitutes a similar “status”?

Some advocacy groups think comparing “rich” nations is appropriate. It is not. “Rich” is a slippery term. Does it mean total gross domestic product? If that were the criteria, the United States (number one GDP) would be compared to China (number two GDP). Those nations have vastly different ways of dealing with social issues and China’s crime data collection and reporting routines are a little suspect. Per capita GDP—the average amount of wealth per person—at first sounds like a possibility, but this mixes Luxembourg and Norway with Macau and Qatar. Oil dictatorships with small populations have high per capita GDP, but all the wealth is held by a very small part of the population.

As our somewhat absurd NRA and gang example illustrated, there needs to be some cultural alignment as well as economic similarities. Cultural sophistication is often associated with both economic development (e.g., industrialization) and education. A common measurement is a “socioeconomic index” which encapsulates both. Though imperfect, as is everything, it gets us to a much closer approximation of cultural sensibilities toward sociability and antisocial behaviors. It also provides quite a surprise.

Ownership rate: Small Arms Survey 2017; Homicide rate: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

Looking at just the top 25 percent of nations on the socioeconomic index,² we again see some things that are surprising and not surprising at all. It is predictable that the modern and dictatorial Russia heavily restricts private gun ownership and also has a higher homicide rate per owned gun than all contenders. Japan has some of the strictest gun control in the world, and thus is tied with Singapore for the lowest gun ownership rate, and this makes their homicides/gun appear artificially high. But after that, the picture begins normalizing and we see a disconnect from gun ownership and homicide rates, with the United States finally logging into position number twenty-one in terms of the number of murders per gun in circulation. This too is a little misleading because the United States has the second highest homicide rate and the highest gun ownership rate. Still, the correlation between gun availability and overall homicide rate is weak (an R² value— common statistical measure of correlation—of 0.1, where zero means no correlation and one means perfect correlation). But even when we reduce this list to just North American nations and those in Western, Northern, and Southern Europe (eliminate Asia and Eastern European issues) the picture remains the same.

This brings to the fore an ugly reality, namely that there are many ways of committing homicide. Humans are inventive creatures and over time we have discovered and invented many, many ways of violating the sixth commandment. We have created technologies that are taking us to different planets, and we have thought up thousands of ways of killing. These are mankind’s two claims to fame—the intelligence to advance ourselves while simultaneously eliminating one another. Ever since Cain got annoyed with Abel and whacked in his head with a rock, people have committed homicides. In countries with few guns, killing can be routine and stones are just one of the tools handy for the job. This “substitution of means,” different ways of achieving a specific outcome, applies to murder and becomes more apparent when we look at Hungary, a country with a homicide rate half that of the United States, yet they own less than one tenth the number of guns per capita. Homicidal Hungarians show some preference for knives and axes, paralleling the Rwandan machete fondness.

The other side of the coin—prelude

Guns can be used offensively and defensively. I devote a complete chapter to that side of the coin, but defensive gun uses (DGUs) are worth mentioning now due to the confusing homicide comparisons above, and the other confusing violent crime statistics later.

One criminologist³ gathered together a dozen surveys and studies conducted by various academics, polling companies, and news organizations. The average number of American DGUs per year was slightly below two million. This criminologist’s own study concluded there were 2.5 million DGUs, and his estimate wasn’t even the highest of the group. A deeper dive into survey respondents also produced an estimate that four hundred thousand of these DGUs prevented death or serious injuries. This illuminates one open and eternal question about guns, namely how many murders are prevented using a gun when compared to how many murders are committed with them. Another highly unsettling question explored in the DGU chapter is if a lack of guns might be an endangerment to any subsegment of a population, in particular to women. But for now, we’ll focus on the availability of guns and the harm they can cause.

Where is the gun violence and who is doing it?

As we dive specifically into American use and misuse of the available gun supply, we’ll see that our NRA vs. gang duality is not misplaced. Much of American gun play is highly isolated. In fact, one research organization discovered that in their year of study, 54 percent of counties in America had no homicides whatsoever and that 2 percent of US counties had 51 percent of the nation’s homicides.⁴ This agrees with original research done by the Gun Facts Project where we found:

1. The top twenty cities for homicides …

2. Had 7 percent of America’s population, but …

3. Produced 21 percent of its murders

Whenever you see a massive skewing of the location for homicides, we can begin to explore what variables are at play. Since 72 percent of American homicides in 2017 involved guns, this will tell us much about the nature of guns and their use in violence—homicides, assaults, and robberies.

A big note about gun ownership rates

One bedevilment in the gun research is knowing how many guns there are. This applies to the national stockpile. It applies to state-level estimates. It applies to even rough guesses about how many households have one or more guns.

The fact is nobody knows for certain. Some people think the lack of gun registration in America is a bug, others think it is a feature. For our purposes, it is a minor nightmare but one we can work around.

Until recently, two of the three major tracking polls (Gallup, ABC, and Pew) that measured household gun ownership noted that the level of ownership had been more or less steady for a couple of decades. The third poll showed a declining rate of household ownership. When it was discovered that the third poll was surveying everyone, not just registered voters, they adjusted their process and came to the same conclusion as the other two polls.

This lack of precision has led to no end of confusion for the public, and the confusion will ...