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The Fellowship of the Pig
In England, if you commit a crime, the police donāt have a gun and you donāt have a gun. If you commit a crime, the police will say, āStop, or Iāll say stop again.ā
āRobin Williams
But if someone has a gun and is trying to kill you . . . it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun.
āThe Dalai Lama
To my left, Joe yells, āPigs, Ken, pigs! Right in front of you.ā I start up from my reverie, and see two fat pigs, one brown and one black, charging toward me. I raise up my shotgun, snug it in tight to my shoulder as Iāve been taught, ready for the big kick that everyone has warned me about. I fire, and a big puff of dirt kicks up behind the larger, black pig. The pig squeals, and cuts to its left. I reload, hastily shoulder the gun once again, and fire, missing for a second time. My pig, as I have already begun to think of him, is now in full flight, and I have barely time enough to squeeze off one more shot before he is out of range. I fire for a third time, and this time he squeals with something sounding more like pain than fear, but he keeps on running down the hill, perhaps a touch slower than before.
āI think you got him!ā yells Mack, who takes off, sprinting down the hill in hot pursuit. I am a bit dubious, figuring that I have given the pig only a good fright, but I trudge off slowly after Mack, shotgun dangling from my side. My hunting trip to the Independence Ranch in Gonzales, Texas, is now in its sixth hour, but this is the first time that I have fired my gun all day. And truth be told, outside of a hastily arranged trip to a skeet-shooting range outside of D.C. in preparation for my visit to Texas, this is the first time I have ever fired any gun at all.
I have long had settled views on gun control, despite the fact that I had only the sketchiest knowledge about guns, gun statistics, and the science of violent crimes. Living in Washington, D.C., I am surrounded by people with guns. We have the highest density of armed law enforcement in the world: D.C. police, U.S. Capitol Police, uniformed Secret Service, U.S. Park Police, Homeland Security policeāand that does not even count military and FBI personnel who are endemic to the city. But other than that, by and large I have been able to go through life fairly confident that the other people around me are probably not armed. To the extent that I have given it any thought, I would have said thatās the way it should be: people with badges have guns, people without should not.
But guns and gun regulation are increasingly a cleavage issue in American life, reflective of politics, geography, and culture, and I am convinced that understanding the other side means grappling with the uniquely American gun culture and the uniquely American gun problem. Easier said than done. My bubble is not just a liberal bubble; it is a cultural bubble as well. There just arenāt a whole lot of hunters, gun collectors, survivalists, or military personnel, for instance, hanging around Hobart Street or NPR or Yale Law School, and I donāt think I have ever heard anyone in my circle carry on about āSecond Amendment rights,ā other than to argue that the Founders meant to confer rights on militias, not every yahoo who practices saying āgo ahead, punk, make my dayā in front of a mirror.
I confess that I have never seen much utility in private gun ownership, but I am willing to try to clear my mental slate and see guns from a different point of view. So letās start with the most obvious facts: America is awash in guns, in excess of 300 million guns by most estimates, enough to arm every man, woman, child, and baby in this country. And we have a murder rate that well exceeds virtually every developed country, some 25 times the United Kingdom, for instance, and roughly on a par with Equatorial Guinea, Uzbekistan, and Belarus, to name a few comparison points that should make us all proud.
If your understanding of gun violence in the United States is dictated principally by news coverage (or worse, by social media), you would understandably think that mass shootings using assault weapons, and accidental deaths, especially of small children, are the dominant form of gun violence. You would also be badly mistaken. Gun deaths in the United States come from two sources, almost exclusively: suicides, and urban violence involving handguns. In 2013, there were 21,335 firearm-related suicides in the United States, 63 percent of all firearm deaths.1 Letās pause on this for a second, because it is a shockingly high component of gun violence. While gun homicide has decreased substantially in the last decade, gun suicide has increased slightly over the same time period, and, if there is a gun violence epidemic, it is at the juncture of alcohol, mental illness, white working-class despair (we will come to that later), and firearm access. There are no doubt important public policy aspects of suicide by gun, which frankly far too few people talk about, but they are clearly distinct from the larger gun control debate.
But what we are talking about is gun homicides, and the numbers in that category are in their own way equally surprising. Of gun homicides, a significant majority (about 60 percent) take place in our urban centers, are typically concentrated in poor areas, and are overwhelmingly associated with gangs and drugs.2 And those crimes are quite different from the typical mass shootings (though there may be mass shootings among them) that fuel so much of our concern about gun safety. These crimes are almost always committed with handguns, since handguns are ubiquitous, cheap, and easier to conceal, a key attribute in urban crime, and those guns are almost always obtained through the black market or through friends or family.3 Because there are so many ways to obtain guns in a weapons-saturated market, restrictive ownership laws, such as in Chicago, have never really reduced violence; however, better policing, smarter drug control laws, and shared economic success have. Itās not that guns donāt kill peopleātry shooting someone without oneābut controlling gun violence often has less to do with the guns themselves than you might initially think.
Whatās left after removing suicides and urban crime is comparatively small, a grab bag of some 4,000 to 5,000 deaths that include the occasional rural and suburban murder, accidental shootings, and mass shootings. Let us not minimize the impact of several thousand deaths, especially when they come in large clusters, but letās also put them in perspective in a nation of more than 300 million people. The amount of reporting on accidental gun deaths among children is significant, understandably so, but perspective is important. ā[A]ccording to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), 346 children under age five drowned in bathtubs between 2006 and 2010. By contrast, only ninety-four children under five died from accidental gunshots over the same period. That is a difference of nearly a factor of four. In fact, more children under five died from drowning in bathtubs than children under ten or even fifteen from accidental gun shots (174 and 298 respectively).ā4
Because much of the public debate on guns has been fueled by reports of mass shootings, and specifically mass shootings that take place outside the less affluent parts of our urban centers, there is great attention on āassault weaponsā in general and on the AR-15, a semiautomatic rifle manufactured originally by ArmaLite, in particular. The AR-15 has at once widespread notoriety and widespread popularity.
It is the most popular rifle in America, coveted because it is lightweight, easy to operate, has interchangeable parts, and reminds many people of the guns they had in the military. It is notorious because it has become the weapon of choice of mass murderers, deployed at Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, and Aurora, and it has proven, even in semiautomatic mode, to be an extremely efficient weapon. The vast majority of people use the gun for hunting, range shooting, and competitive shooting. And, despite its menacing look and pedigree, it is not different in operation from other rifles, though it is versatility, ease of use, and adaptability that has made it particularly attractive to gun lovers and mass murderers alike. On the surface, given the notoriety of the AR-15, banning it and its cousins such as the SIG Sauer MCX (used in Orlando) would be a logical decision, except they are used for illegal purposes rather infrequently outside of a few mass-casualty events.5 Rifles of all types are implicated in only about 4 percent of all gun murders, with the AR-15 being present in some unidentified subset of those. To put that in perspective, about six times more people are killed each year with knives than with rifles, and Colonel Mustard with the candlestick is decidedly more dangerousāalmost twice as many people were killed in 2014 with a blunt instrument as with any type of rifle, let alone an AR-15.
The AR-15 guns are unquestionably effective tools, but they are neither unique nor irreplaceable as killing machines. You could ban the sale of new AR-15s in this country tomorrowāI would not be bothered a whit if you didābut it would make no discernible difference in the overall homicide rate or in the severity of mass killings. Thatās not really an opinion. Sales of assault weapons were banned in the United States from 1994 to 2003 with little effect on homicides. The most authoritative study on the assault rifle ban came in 2004 from Christopher Koper, a criminologist then at the University of Pennsylvania. āIn general we found, really, very, very little evidence, almost none, that gun violence was becoming any less lethal or any less injurious during this time frame. So on balance, we concluded that the ban had not had a discernible impact on gun crime during the years it was in effect.ā6 Koper did hold open the possibility that an extension of the ban could someday produce a small reduction in shootings, and perhaps that would have happened, but it is very difficult in light of the facts to conceive of the Assault Weapons Ban as a meaningful part of any effort to reduce gun violence in this country.
I have always looked at the gun problem and assumed that there is a ācommonsenseā solution if the gun lobby would just get out of the way and people would just screw their heads on right. Like most Americans, I still support efforts to improve the efficacy of the background-check system, but I now understand them to be common sense but not solutionsāand potentially distractions from the core social questions of economic despair and shuttered opportunity, which plague both poor minority neighborhoods and the white working class alike.
Over the past year, I have from time to time posted the most mild-mannered of comments on Facebook, suggesting that the gun issue is more complex than one might think. I am not exactly fearless on social media, anxious about the cultural disapprobation that comes with conservative views in my circles. My posts have been exceptionally mealy-mouthed, timid suggestions that the gun issue is tricky or perhaps a particular National Review article is āworth a look.ā My reading suggestions have not been well received. My liberal friends have rather disdainfully rejected the facts offered, not usually with their own facts but with the statement that we just need to get on with doing āsomething.ā This would seem to suggest that people who donāt agree with policy for window dressingās sake are somehow hunky-dory with thousands of gun deaths every year. It is a little window into the sanctimony of some liberals, and I donāt like it very much.
Virtually all of the guns used in mass-murder situations in the past decade were lawfully obtained, and could have been lawfully obtained under proposed laws, such as the extension of background checks to private sales (eighteen states already do so). The Aurora, Newtown, and Orlando shootings were all committed with lawfully obtained guns, or with guns taken from licensed owners. And it is just not credible to think that restricting private sales at places like gun shows will substantially reduce urban violence. The most recent, though admittedly still dated, surveys of prisoners, which were undertaken back in the 1990s, indicate that only about .6 percent of guns obtained by criminals were from gun shows.7 Iām not terribly impressed with surveys like this, but I donāt have any reason to dispute the conclusions: that there are just too many lawful and unlawful ways to obtain a gun to believe that new restrictions will make a material impact on outcomes. And even if new laws reduced gun transactions in a meaningful way, people would still continue to steal guns at a frightful rate. Somewhere between 300,000 and 600,000 guns are stolen each year, enough to cover every gun-related crime in the country, several times over.8
One of the key arguments for gun control is the unfavorable comparison between gun violence in the United States and in other developed countries. As President Obama noted in 2015, āWhat we also have to recognize is, is that our homicide rates are so much higher than other industrialized countries. I mean by like a mile. And most of that is attributable to the easy ready availability of firearms, particularly handguns.ā9 And it is true; out of the 35 countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United States ranks 31st in homicide rates, though gun proponents hasten to note that the United States is far safer than Russia, Mexico, and B...
