Explaining the Gun Debate

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, May 29, 2022

 

Q: They didn’t have to worry about this kind of thing 100 years ago, did they?

 

A: Of course they did. We are coming up on the 100th anniversary of the worst school massacre in American history, which happened in Bath, Mich., in 1927, and saw the deaths of 44 victims plus the perpetrator. The outlines of the Bath attack are in some ways familiar — the perpetrator, who was the treasurer of the local school board, was known to be troubled, had financial problems, and killed his wife before going to the school — and in some ways different: The killer was 55 years old, and he mostly used bombs instead of guns.

 

Q: So how important is access to guns?

 

A: By most meaningful measures, not very important. The deadliest act of terrorism in American history was carried out by men armed with box cutters; the third-deadliest was executed by means of a fertilizer bomb. The one between those, the “Black Wall Street” massacre in Tulsa, Okla., in 1921, was an episode of mob violence involving firearms, arson, and possibly even aerial attack from civilian airplanes armed with homemade firebombs, carried out with the assistance of at least some law-enforcement personnel.

 

So, guns don’t seem to be the important variable.

 

Americans buy more guns today than they did in the 1990s (the number of National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) checks performed in 2021 was about four times the number of NICS checks performed in 1999), but violent crime has decreased radically since those years, with homicides falling almost by half between 1991 and 2020 (from 9.71 per 100,000 to 4.96 per 100,000). In 1990, New York City had 2,605 murders; in 2021, it had 485, meaning that the murder rate was reduced by about 80 percent. Most other American cities saw large reductions in murders over the same period. There isn’t much reason to believe that the increase in gun ownership led to less crime, but it is a matter of historical fact that it was not accompanied by more crime.

 

Q: But isn’t our country awash in guns?

 

Most American families aren’t, no. But a relatively small number of households are.

 

In spite of the panicked emoting you hear in the media and online, the number of Americans living in households in which there is a gun present has actually declined quite a bit over the past several decades: In 1973, only a minority of Americans (49.5 percent) lived in a household with no firearm, but by 2014 almost two-thirds of Americans (64.3 percent) did. So the typical American is less likely to reside in a household with a firearm in it today than 50 years ago.

 

At the same time, the total number of firearms owned by Americans has climbed substantially over the past few decades, with today’s gun-owning Americans likely to own more guns than gun-owning Americans did a generation ago. Much of this is driven by the popularity of shooting sports and recreational shooting; some of it is driven by collectors; some of it is driven by fear. There is not much reason to believe that a lone psychopath with 50 rifles is much more dangerous than a lone psychopath with one rifle.

 

Q: So gun owners are basically a bunch of insecure white guys with basements full of AR-15s?

 

A: No. A good deal of the increase in the American domestic arsenal has been driven by women’s acquisition of firearms. In 1973, the rate of gun ownership among men was 40 percentage points higher than the rate of ownership among women; as more women have become gun owners, that lopsided figure has declined by almost half, to 23 percentage points.

 

Q: But isn’t the United States an outlier compared to other countries?

 

A: Certainly, though not in the way you may have been told. There are mass-killing events in other countries, and, just as is the case in America, some of them are perpetrated by lone-wolf shooters, some of them are organized terrorist plots, and some of them are acts of mob violence. The mix of these is different across different countries, and cultural particularities will show themselves: The Rwandan genocide of April–July 1994 claimed something on the order of 1 million lives and was carried out mostly with machetes.

 

The United States has more guns per capita than any other country, but there are many countries with relatively high rates of gun ownership and very little violent crime. The Geneva-based Small Arms Survey finds that Switzerland has more guns per capita than any country other than the United States and Yemen. Its murder rate is about one-ninth the U.S. rate. Switzerland has about 8.6 million people to Cook County’s 5.1 million, but Switzerland saw only 47 homicides in 2021 (14 by shooting) while Cook County saw more than 1,000. Switzerland is an interesting case: Because it has a citizen militia rather than the sort of large standing army most developed countries have, its prime criminal demographic — young men — has ready access not to what our gun-control activists dishonestly call “military-style” weapons but to actual military-issue weapons. Yet Zurich doesn’t look very much like Chicago or New Orleans when it comes to violent crime. Other countries with relatively high gun-ownership rates, such as Finland, see similar results.

 

The important variable does not seem to be guns. Americans shoot each other to death at a much higher rate than do citizens of most other countries, but they also stab each other to death, beat each other to death, burn each other to death, etc., much more frequently than do citizens of other countries. In fact, the number of murders committed by Americans armed with nothing more than their bare hands each year exceeds the number of murders committed by Americans with so-called assault rifles. The United States has unusually high rates of criminal violence across the board rather than just an unusually high rate of gun-related violence.

 

My conclusion: The problem with America isn’t that it is full of guns — the problem with America is that it is full of Americans.

 

Q: What is the point of allowing civilians to have military weapons?

 

A: In the most immediate sense, we don’t: The semiautomatic 5.56mm rifles that are dishonestly characterized as “weapons of war” are not generally issued to the U.S. military or to any other major national military. Military rifles tend to be “select fire,” meaning that they can fire in fully automatic mode — i.e., they are what is generally meant by the term “machine guns.” A semiautomatic rifle is sort of like an automatic rifle in the same way a bicycle is sort of like a motorcycle.

 

Q: But isn’t it easy to modify these rifles to make them fully automatic?

 

A: Not really. It can be done, but it requires some real expertise and tools that most people don’t just have lying around the house. (I could explain to you how it is done, but even providing that information is a felony under federal law.) In fact, under U.S. law, semiautomatic firearms that are “readily convertible” into fully automatic firearms are legally classified — meaning prohibited — as fully automatic weapons, even if they are never converted. Good data on this are hard to find, but there do not seem to be very many cases of semiautomatic weapons modified to shoot full-auto being used in crimes. I haven’t been able to find any examples in the newspapers. (If you know of one, please send it to me.) The killer in the Las Vegas massacre used so-called bump stocks on some of his rifles, and many people have suggested that these should be banned. The problem with that is that bump-firing is a technique, not a piece of equipment, and you don’t need a bump stock to do it.

 

The few fully automatic weapons that are legally owned by U.S. civilians have been used in 0.00 murders according to the best information I can find. There may have been one in 1992; the reports about the episode are in conflict. There has been one non-civilian murder with a legally owned fully automatic weapon reported: The 1988 assassination of a Dayton, Ohio, police informant by a Dayton police officer. For that matter, the use of illegally owned machine guns in American crimes is pretty rare, too, for obvious reasons, including the fact that they are very expensive and the fact that being in possession of one is a crime in itself, and the kinds of organized-crime outfits that might have use for that sort of firepower are actually quite risk-averse.

 

I’ve fired a fair number of fully automatic weapons over the years, and my theory is that criminals don’t use these or modify semiautomatic weapons to fire full-auto simply because full-auto fire isn’t actually very useful for criminal purposes. I think that’s why most criminals use ordinary handguns and rarely use rifles at all, with all rifles together accounting for only about 2.5 percent of homicides.

 

Q: But aren’t these new rifles 200 times more lethal than the old Revolutionary War muskets that were being used when the Second Amendment was written?

 

A: No, that figure is based on fabricated evidence that Professor Saul Cornell of Fordham simply made up and then pretended was part of a 1964 U.S. Army study of battlefield effectiveness of military weapons from the Revolutionary War through Vietnam. Slate, having no journalistic standards, continues to pretend that it is something other than a fabrication. The gun-control debate is, unfortunately, full of such intellectual dishonesty on the part of both journalists and academics.

 

Q: But surely a modern semiautomatic rifle is a more effective weapon than a muzzle-loading musket?

 

A: Absolutely.

 

Q: Isn’t the Second Amendment and all that militia stuff just outmoded in the 21st century?

 

A: In my view, that is really the most honest line of argument from the gun-control lobby. But that isn’t an argument for ignoring the Second Amendment — the law doesn’t stop being the law because of the private subjective judgment of political activists. It is an argument for repealing the Second Amendment. We have a process for amending the Constitution, and the Second Amendment could be repealed if enough Americans believed that to be the wise thing to do. I wouldn’t support that myself, but it is the proper course of action for those who want to eliminate the Second Amendment protections of Americans’ right to keep and bear arms.

 

Q: Isn’t there anything else that we could do short of a likely doomed effort to pass a constitutional amendment?

 

A: Yes, I’m glad you asked. There are many things we could do.

 

Both gun-control advocates and the National Rifle Association support stronger enforcement of “straw buyer” laws, meaning laws against buying a firearm on behalf of someone who is legally prohibited from purchasing one himself. But we don’t enforce these laws in most instances. Local prosecutors don’t want such cases, because they involve a lot of sympathetic defendants — mostly the girlfriends, grandmothers, and nephews of gang members and other career criminals — and federal prosecutors won’t touch them because they’re deemed a waste of time unless they are part of a bigger, sexier organized-crime investigation. As I first reported years ago and have been shouting about ever since, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois (meaning Chicago) declined to prosecute these cases as a matter of publicly stated policy.

 

Our police and prosecutors also decline in many cases to arrest people and prosecute them for violations such as illegal possession of a firearm. A very large share of our murders (more than 80 percent in New York City, according to the New York Times) are committed by people with prior arrest records, often by people with prior criminal convictions, and in a considerable number of cases by people with prior arrests on weapons charges. We keep letting them walk until they kill somebody.

 

Some criminal-justice-reform advocates worry that more robust enforcement of gun laws would end up being the next “war on drugs,” resulting in high rates of incarceration and felony convictions that would disproportionately affect young black men. I think that is the wrong way to think about it. Yes, the population of violent career criminals we would want to target seems to be disproportionately black (African Americans are about 12.5 percent of the population but more than half of those arrested for murder), but it is a tiny, unrepresentative sample of black America. In 2018, there were just under 3,000 black Americans arrested for murder — out of a population of 42 million. That’s 0.007 percent of the black population, while white Americans arrested for murder make up about 0.001 percent of the white population. Surely there is a way to police weapons violations more aggressively without targeting the black community as a whole. We should keep in mind that black men also make up a disproportionate share of the murder victims.

 

There are other things we could do. The federal NICS background-check system we use to screen gun buyers is not especially well-administered, and from time to time, people who are not legally eligible to buy a firearm are wrongly approved by NICS, or the sale simply proceeds because NICS doesn’t produce an answer within three business days and the check “times out,” at which point the sale may go forward. (Or it may not: Some dealers won’t make the sale without a positive approval.) In such cases, the federal government has the illegal buyer’s name and address, and other information about him. It has the make and model and a whole lot of other information about the gun that was sold to the illegal buyer. And what does the federal government do with all this information? Nothing. Uncle Sam doesn’t even send someone around to pick up the gun.

 

Likewise, we almost never prosecute people in “lie and try” cases, meaning cases in which people who are prohibited by law from buying a firearm try anyway on the chance (not negligible) that NICS will wrongly approve the sale. And we pretty rarely prosecute people who lie on the paperwork required in a firearms sale. All of which is to say that we lay a pretty heavy regulatory burden upon people who are inclined to follow the law while doing essentially nothing to those who violate the law.

 

These are things that could be done, and that might be more useful than yet another teary-eyed sermon from some tedious parasite seeking political office. These are the things Democrats and other gun-control advocates would be pushing for if they were serious about the problem, but they aren’t serious. So these things are off the table, because they mean irritating important Democratic constituencies: the local party bosses and full-time-activist class in mostly black communities in Democrat-run cities for one, and unionized government employees who are disinclined to get off their asses and do some actual work for another.

 

Which is why we get those teary-eyed sermons from office-seeking parasites rather than meaningful reforms that are likely to produce some good results and that are generally supported by gun-rights advocates and other well-informed people.

 

Any other questions?