The Truth About Guns
Virtually everything you think you know about guns is probably wrong. I found this out myself when I reviewed the then rather meager literature on the subject of crime and guns around 1987, because I started teaching a criminology section in my advanced social problems course. At that time I owned no guns and had never fired (or even handled) a handgun. My opinions were the standard ones that there is a positive association between the number of guns and crime, that registration is a reasonable step, etc. If you ever have reason to look at the evidence in this area, and there is a lot more now than there was then, you will find it a voyage of discovery. Here is a little of what you will find. If you want, I can bury you in references.
(1) There is no consistent positive correlation between the number of guns and crime/violence rates. This is true at every level, i.e., cities, states, or regions. It is true in spite of the fact that during periods of high crime people will tend to buy guns, a fact which should bias things toward a positive association. Within the population, demographic subgroups that own the most guns have the lowest crime rates (other than the comparison between men and women).
(2) Despite the fact that the stock of guns in the society has increased enormously during the past 20 years, the rates and, incredibly, the absolute numbers of accidental death and injury from firearms have declined dramatically. (The number of accidents is always inflated somewhat because some suicides are misclassified as accidents.) In 1980 there were 1,955 fatal gun accidents (FGA's), in 1990 there were 1416, in 1996 there were 1,134. For kids ages 0-9, there were 227 FGA's in 1974, 100 in 1984, and 66 in 1993. The NRA and its safety programs deserve much of the credit for this. Far more children 0-4 now die each year from drowning in buckets than from firearms accidents.
(3) CDC data for accidental deaths, 1997: Ages 0-14/15-19
(4) Combining age groups, most firearms deaths each year are suicides. Studies in the U.S. and other countries have repeatedly shown that when access to guns is limited, the number of gun suicides goes down. But the total suicide rate does not go down. In other words, people use alternative means, typically poisons.
(5) With reference to the data, you will find that virtually everything put out by Sarah Brady's Handgun Control Inc. (HCI) is either completely false or involves serious distortions of interpretation. For example, it is claimed over and over that 13 children die from guns every day. But this is almost completely a product of 16-19 year-old gangbangers shooting each other over drugs and turf (see data under #3 above). Most people would not classify these people as "children", something HCI, Clinton/Gore, et al. surely know. HCI sometimes includes the 20-24 age group in its data for "children".
(6) HCI, et al., like to talk about how many gun murders are committed by acquaintances, and how murderers are just like you and me, trying to make the point that the presence of a gun is the critical thing. They do not tell you that more than 80% of "acquaintance" murders involve passengers shooting cab drivers, gang members shooting each other, prostitutes shooting their pimps, and shootings that occur between pushers and customers in drug deals gone bad, and similar. These are all classified as "acquaintance" murders. In fact, all available data shows clearly that in terms of their prior contact with the law, the typical murderer has a long criminal record and is not at all like you and me. Of the true acquaintance murders that do occur, the bulk involve a woman who shoots a husband or boyfriend following a long history of abuse (justifiable homicides are counted as murders).
(7) Gun homicide numbers/rates per 100,000 in 1997, ages 15-19 (CDC data):
The point here is that the rate for non-Hispanic whites is not much different from what you find in nations with stringent gun control laws, even though Non-Hispanic whites have a higher rate of gun ownership than the other groups. Guns are really not the cause of the problem of violence in the U.S., certainly not guns owned by the law-abiding.
(8) The CDC has been on a campaign to place gun violence within its disease model, and to make the case for an epidemic. This is advocacy research, and it has turned out to practically define the term junk science. This is where the claims that a gun in the home makes you "X times less safe" have come from. The studies (by Kellerman and others) have been thoroughly discredited by criminologists. I can provide you with references, but if you have the April 1997 issue of Reason, look at the article by Kates, et al., pp. 24-29. There is much more to say than you will find there, including false citations of other people's research and refusal to provide primary data for re-analysis. What has gone on in the CDC in this area is generally considered a scandal in scientific circles, something that has not stopped HCI, Clinton/Gore, et al. from continuing to constantly cite this garbage. But we already knew that integrity is not this crowd's long suit, didn't we?
(9) Related to #8, have you ever wondered why there don't seem to be any well-respected criminologists on the anti-gun side? The reason is that many -- Gary Kleck (Florida State), John Lott (U.Chicago, Yale), Marvin Wolfgang (U. of Penn.), Peter Rossi (U.Chicago), Daniel Polsby (Northwestern), and others -- are political liberals who started out anti-gun but couldn't sustain that position based on the evidence. In general, criminology has ended up in a position it had no intention of occupying. Advocacy junk science never does that.
(10) Related to #9, the key to analyzing the effect of guns is to recognize that you have to focus on the NET effect. It is not enough to say that guns are responsible for X number of deaths and injuries if you do not also look at the benefits of guns in terms of deaths and injuries avoided. Estimates vary, but guns are used about 2 million times by citizens each year to thwart crimes or criminal attacks. In the vast majority of these cases, a gun is shown or brandished, not fired. Estimates for the number of defensive uses of guns vary from around 700,000 to 3.5 million incidents per year; the estimates come from the Dept. of Justice Victimization Survey and similar. Under-reporting is certain, because some people defend themselves with guns in jurisdictions (like D.C. or Chicago) where it is illegal to have a handgun. No matter what estimate you choose, it is clear that guns are used far more often to prevent crime than to commit crime.
(11) 31 states now have non-discretionary shall-issue concealed carry laws. "Shall-issue" means that the local authorities must issue the permit unless they can demonstrate a reason not to. Most states require a training course as a prerequisite. John Lott's massive 1998 study of all U.S. counties and a huge raft of control variables showed that the effect of concealed carry laws is to significantly reduce violent crime, especially rape, murder, robbery, and aggravated assault. If you extrapolate his data to the states that do not allow concealed carry, it indicates that if those states had adopted CC in 1992, the result by 1996 would have been 9 additional accidental handgun deaths and about 1,500 fewer murders. Fears about road-rage shootouts between armed citizens have not come to pass. For example, by Oct 1996, Florida alone had over 376,000 active permit holders and a falling violent crime rate. HCI and Clinton/Gore will, of course, attack Bush for having signed the Texas concealed carry law, as he should have. In contrast to the CDC hacks, Lott has made his data immediately available to every academic who requests it, 24 universities so far, including Harvard, Stanford, U. Penn, Emory, Vanderbilt, LSU, Mich State, Florida State, U. Texas, U. of Maryland, Georgetown, and Wm and Mary. There have been no reported failures to replicate. His book is called "More Guns, Less Crime", U. of Chicago Press, 1998; Chapter 7 "The political and academic debate" is a fascinating and depressing look at the mentality and tactics of the anti-gun zealots.
(12) Britain is the opposite case from the U.S., as private ownership of firearms for self defense has been outlawed. (They are now confiscating airguns, and carrying any kind of knife is illegal. A workman who has a utility knife may be asked by the police if he would use that knife to defend himself if he were attacked. If he answers Yes, he can be charged with a felony for carrying an offensive weapon.) "Hot" burglaries are those that occur when the premises are occupied. In the U.S., only a small proportion of burglaries are hot (around 12%). In Britain, well over half of burglaries are hot burglaries. Why not? Your chances of being mugged on the street in England is now significantly higher than in the U.S., and the burglary rate is much higher. Something similar may be happening in Australia following the introduction of stringent gun laws, with many categories of crime, including home invasions, showing sudden increases. Crime in the U.S. has been declining steadily, meanwhile.
(13) There is no good reason for registering guns, except to make them easy to confiscate -- as has always eventually followed registration in other countries. An exception is New Zealand, where an existing registration system was abandoned in the 1980's at the request of the police, who found it a waste of time. In fact, an interesting project would be to find a single case anywhere in which registration of firearms aided in the solving of a crime. The U.S. Surpreme Court has already ruled that a criminal can not be required to register his illegal gun, due to the 5th Amendment guarantee against self-incrimination.
(14) Pay attention to the major media, especially the network news. When is the last time you saw any of them, or the Washington Post, carry a story about someone using a gun in self-defense? Their bias on this issue is virtually total, and their level of knowledge is abysmal. Spouting HCI nonsense about how many children perish each day from gun violence is easy; combing through the evidence is way, way too hard for these airheads. Coverage of the upcoming Million Moron March will no doubt set a new standard for mindless reporting. If you think I've exaggerated any of this, or tried to cover you in NRA bullshit, check it all out for yourself. I can supply all the references.
Bud
(1) There is no consistent positive correlation between the number of guns and crime/violence rates. This is true at every level, i.e., cities, states, or regions. It is true in spite of the fact that during periods of high crime people will tend to buy guns, a fact which should bias things toward a positive association. Within the population, demographic subgroups that own the most guns have the lowest crime rates (other than the comparison between men and women).
(2) Despite the fact that the stock of guns in the society has increased enormously during the past 20 years, the rates and, incredibly, the absolute numbers of accidental death and injury from firearms have declined dramatically. (The number of accidents is always inflated somewhat because some suicides are misclassified as accidents.) In 1980 there were 1,955 fatal gun accidents (FGA's), in 1990 there were 1416, in 1996 there were 1,134. For kids ages 0-9, there were 227 FGA's in 1974, 100 in 1984, and 66 in 1993. The NRA and its safety programs deserve much of the credit for this. Far more children 0-4 now die each year from drowning in buckets than from firearms accidents.
(3) CDC data for accidental deaths, 1997: Ages 0-14/15-19
Firearms 142/164
(gun homicides 346/2,216
gun suicides 127/1,135)
Drownings 965/349
Poisoning 81/249
Suffocation 659/71
Motor Vehicles 2,900/5,213
Cycling 225/80
(4) Combining age groups, most firearms deaths each year are suicides. Studies in the U.S. and other countries have repeatedly shown that when access to guns is limited, the number of gun suicides goes down. But the total suicide rate does not go down. In other words, people use alternative means, typically poisons.
(5) With reference to the data, you will find that virtually everything put out by Sarah Brady's Handgun Control Inc. (HCI) is either completely false or involves serious distortions of interpretation. For example, it is claimed over and over that 13 children die from guns every day. But this is almost completely a product of 16-19 year-old gangbangers shooting each other over drugs and turf (see data under #3 above). Most people would not classify these people as "children", something HCI, Clinton/Gore, et al. surely know. HCI sometimes includes the 20-24 age group in its data for "children".
(6) HCI, et al., like to talk about how many gun murders are committed by acquaintances, and how murderers are just like you and me, trying to make the point that the presence of a gun is the critical thing. They do not tell you that more than 80% of "acquaintance" murders involve passengers shooting cab drivers, gang members shooting each other, prostitutes shooting their pimps, and shootings that occur between pushers and customers in drug deals gone bad, and similar. These are all classified as "acquaintance" murders. In fact, all available data shows clearly that in terms of their prior contact with the law, the typical murderer has a long criminal record and is not at all like you and me. Of the true acquaintance murders that do occur, the bulk involve a woman who shoots a husband or boyfriend following a long history of abuse (justifiable homicides are counted as murders).
(7) Gun homicide numbers/rates per 100,000 in 1997, ages 15-19 (CDC data):
Whites (incl. Hispanics) 852/5.62
Blacks (incl. Hispanics) 1282/43.27
Non-Hispanic whites 364/2.84
The point here is that the rate for non-Hispanic whites is not much different from what you find in nations with stringent gun control laws, even though Non-Hispanic whites have a higher rate of gun ownership than the other groups. Guns are really not the cause of the problem of violence in the U.S., certainly not guns owned by the law-abiding.
(8) The CDC has been on a campaign to place gun violence within its disease model, and to make the case for an epidemic. This is advocacy research, and it has turned out to practically define the term junk science. This is where the claims that a gun in the home makes you "X times less safe" have come from. The studies (by Kellerman and others) have been thoroughly discredited by criminologists. I can provide you with references, but if you have the April 1997 issue of Reason, look at the article by Kates, et al., pp. 24-29. There is much more to say than you will find there, including false citations of other people's research and refusal to provide primary data for re-analysis. What has gone on in the CDC in this area is generally considered a scandal in scientific circles, something that has not stopped HCI, Clinton/Gore, et al. from continuing to constantly cite this garbage. But we already knew that integrity is not this crowd's long suit, didn't we?
(9) Related to #8, have you ever wondered why there don't seem to be any well-respected criminologists on the anti-gun side? The reason is that many -- Gary Kleck (Florida State), John Lott (U.Chicago, Yale), Marvin Wolfgang (U. of Penn.), Peter Rossi (U.Chicago), Daniel Polsby (Northwestern), and others -- are political liberals who started out anti-gun but couldn't sustain that position based on the evidence. In general, criminology has ended up in a position it had no intention of occupying. Advocacy junk science never does that.
(10) Related to #9, the key to analyzing the effect of guns is to recognize that you have to focus on the NET effect. It is not enough to say that guns are responsible for X number of deaths and injuries if you do not also look at the benefits of guns in terms of deaths and injuries avoided. Estimates vary, but guns are used about 2 million times by citizens each year to thwart crimes or criminal attacks. In the vast majority of these cases, a gun is shown or brandished, not fired. Estimates for the number of defensive uses of guns vary from around 700,000 to 3.5 million incidents per year; the estimates come from the Dept. of Justice Victimization Survey and similar. Under-reporting is certain, because some people defend themselves with guns in jurisdictions (like D.C. or Chicago) where it is illegal to have a handgun. No matter what estimate you choose, it is clear that guns are used far more often to prevent crime than to commit crime.
(11) 31 states now have non-discretionary shall-issue concealed carry laws. "Shall-issue" means that the local authorities must issue the permit unless they can demonstrate a reason not to. Most states require a training course as a prerequisite. John Lott's massive 1998 study of all U.S. counties and a huge raft of control variables showed that the effect of concealed carry laws is to significantly reduce violent crime, especially rape, murder, robbery, and aggravated assault. If you extrapolate his data to the states that do not allow concealed carry, it indicates that if those states had adopted CC in 1992, the result by 1996 would have been 9 additional accidental handgun deaths and about 1,500 fewer murders. Fears about road-rage shootouts between armed citizens have not come to pass. For example, by Oct 1996, Florida alone had over 376,000 active permit holders and a falling violent crime rate. HCI and Clinton/Gore will, of course, attack Bush for having signed the Texas concealed carry law, as he should have. In contrast to the CDC hacks, Lott has made his data immediately available to every academic who requests it, 24 universities so far, including Harvard, Stanford, U. Penn, Emory, Vanderbilt, LSU, Mich State, Florida State, U. Texas, U. of Maryland, Georgetown, and Wm and Mary. There have been no reported failures to replicate. His book is called "More Guns, Less Crime", U. of Chicago Press, 1998; Chapter 7 "The political and academic debate" is a fascinating and depressing look at the mentality and tactics of the anti-gun zealots.
(12) Britain is the opposite case from the U.S., as private ownership of firearms for self defense has been outlawed. (They are now confiscating airguns, and carrying any kind of knife is illegal. A workman who has a utility knife may be asked by the police if he would use that knife to defend himself if he were attacked. If he answers Yes, he can be charged with a felony for carrying an offensive weapon.) "Hot" burglaries are those that occur when the premises are occupied. In the U.S., only a small proportion of burglaries are hot (around 12%). In Britain, well over half of burglaries are hot burglaries. Why not? Your chances of being mugged on the street in England is now significantly higher than in the U.S., and the burglary rate is much higher. Something similar may be happening in Australia following the introduction of stringent gun laws, with many categories of crime, including home invasions, showing sudden increases. Crime in the U.S. has been declining steadily, meanwhile.
(13) There is no good reason for registering guns, except to make them easy to confiscate -- as has always eventually followed registration in other countries. An exception is New Zealand, where an existing registration system was abandoned in the 1980's at the request of the police, who found it a waste of time. In fact, an interesting project would be to find a single case anywhere in which registration of firearms aided in the solving of a crime. The U.S. Surpreme Court has already ruled that a criminal can not be required to register his illegal gun, due to the 5th Amendment guarantee against self-incrimination.
(14) Pay attention to the major media, especially the network news. When is the last time you saw any of them, or the Washington Post, carry a story about someone using a gun in self-defense? Their bias on this issue is virtually total, and their level of knowledge is abysmal. Spouting HCI nonsense about how many children perish each day from gun violence is easy; combing through the evidence is way, way too hard for these airheads. Coverage of the upcoming Million Moron March will no doubt set a new standard for mindless reporting. If you think I've exaggerated any of this, or tried to cover you in NRA bullshit, check it all out for yourself. I can supply all the references.
Bud
posted by Byron | Friday, June 23, 2000
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