By Ken Stern
Thursday, November 02, 2017
I have always looked at the gun problem and assumed that
there is a “commonsense” 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 solutions—and 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 “worth a look.”
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 “something.” This would seem to suggest that people who don’t agree
with policy for window dressing’s 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 don’t like it very much.
Proposed Laws
Would Rarely Have Stopped Recent Attacks
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.
I’m not terribly impressed with surveys like this, but I
don’t 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.
Yes, We Have High
Violence Rates, But It’s Not Guns’ Fault
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, “What 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.”
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 Brazil, and a little
safer than Latvia, none of which is likely to be bulletin-board material for
our national tourism agency. And what is most disturbing is that we are not
even a close 31. Our homicide rate is ten times the rate in Japan and three
times the rate in Canada, for instance.
It’s truly depressing stuff, unless you are planning to
move to England, where the writer Bill Bryson recently reported, in all
seriousness, and with some satisfaction, that you are more likely to be killed
by walking into a wall than by being murdered. I’ve pondered that statement
quite a bit, trying to figure out what impels so many Britons to rush into
walls, presumably headfirst, at speeds high enough to kill themselves, and
haven’t found any adequate explanation, but the sentiment expressed by Bryson
is still true: England is an amazingly safe place. There were only 573 murders
in all of England and Wales in 2015 (Chicago by itself is on pace to hit about
700 in 2017) and only about 40 of those murders were with firearms.
I couldn’t find statistics to confirm Bryson’s running-into-walls
comparison, but it is true that in England you are about twice as likely to die
from falling out of or through a building as you are to be killed with a gun,
and about six times more likely to die from “malaise or fatigue.”
Those numbers are deeply satisfying to gun control
advocates—and to the Brits as well, I should think—but it’s not clear what they
mean for the United States. Gun control advocates link the low murder rate in
England, for example, to the 1997 Firearms Act, which effectively outlawed
private ownership of handguns, but in truth the homicide rate in England was
low long before the Firearms Act and it has actually increased modestly since
1997.
Gun Prevalence Is
Not the Key Cause of Crime
And the relationship between the number of guns and
murder rates is not always very clear. If you are to believe the Small Arms
Survey, countries like Russia and Brazil have relatively low firearms ownership
rates, but apparently all those guns are in the hands of killers and thieves,
and high-ownership countries like Switzerland and Finland have comparatively
low murder rates.
Switzerland, for instance, is awash in guns—a “gun in
every closet” is integral both to the national defense plan and the national
culture—and there is roughly one gun for every two people in the country. And
yet the murder rate is pleasingly low, not so different from England itself. It
is not that there is no relationship between gun availability and homicide
rates—of course there is—but the story of violence and the means of controlling
it are far more complicated and nuanced than advocates on either side of the
story would have us believe.
I started off this process thinking, as do many of my
political coreligionists, that reducing gun violence is simply a matter of
will, and of overcoming the Neanderthals at the National Rifle Association
(NRA). But I have learned that it is not, and that if we really want to reduce
gun violence, we should be focusing not first upon the weapons but on a lot of
things around it: poverty, drugs, race, and addressing mental illness,
opportunity, and gangs, to name just a few.
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