More Guns = More Gun Crime, Right? I’m Not Sure.
On December 16, 1993 a United States Senator named Joe
Biden gave a speech at the Rotary Club in Wilmington, Delaware. At the time, ‘Sleepy Joe’ chaired the Senate
Judiciary Committee, which meant he was a key figure in the spate of gun-control
bills (Brady, Assault Weapons Ban) that became law during Bill Clinton’s first
term. In speaking about those bills, as well as the more expansive crime bill
which nearly doubled the size of incarcerated population, Biden said, “the
United States is the most dangerous country in the world. No country in the
world has a higher per capita murder rate than the United States.”
Sound familiar? Add to that the 350 million guns
floating around, which gives the U.S. a per capita gun-ownership rate six times
higher than any other OECD country, a causal argument that David
Hemenway and his public health colleagues have been promoting for the past 20
years, and you now have the standard gun-control mantra trotted out every time
Gun-control Nation says what it says about guns.
There’s only one little problem. And the problem has to
do with the fact that the argument which ties gun-violence rates to the number
of civilian-owned guns does not correspond in any way to what we know about the
number and availability of guns. From 1986 until today, the size of the
civilian arsenal probably grew by 50 percent. We don’t know how many guns were
in civilian hands in the early 1980’s, but if we take the 1994 estimate
of 190 million, then subtract the 50 million guns manufactured between 1980 and
1994, we wind up in 1980 with roughly 140 million civilian-one guns.
Now let’s look at additions to the civilian arsenal
between 1981 and 2017, and the numbers from ATF add up to another 150 million
guns, which brings us up to somewhere around the 300 million which is often
cited for the total number of guns floating around today. Now here’s where
things get interesting, okay?
The national violent injury death rate (from CDC) averaged
8.83 from 1981 through 1998. From 1999
through 2017, the rate averaged 5.80, going as low in 2014 as 4.98. From 1981
through 1998, the violent injury death rate involving guns was 5.77, the rate
from 1999 through 2017 was 3.95. In other words, over the last thirty-six years,
the rates of violence and rates of gun violence both fell by roughly one-third.
From
1981 through 1998, there were 397,912 homicides, of which 260,275 involved the
use of guns, or 65 percent. From 1999 through 2017, there were 334,215
homicides involving 227,717 guns, or 68 percent. So the overall violence rate declined by
roughly one-third from 1981 through 2017, but the proportion of murders where a
gun was used remained the same. Meanwhile, during this same thirty-six year
period, as many as 1,500,000 new guns entered the civilian arsenal. If there is a causal connection
between our high rate of homicide and out high ownership rate of guns, how come
the use of guns to commit gun violence hasn’t changed?
I’ll
tell you why it didn’t change, or better yet, I’ll tell you why we don’t know
why it didn’t change. There’s one very simple reason. With a few exceptions
that are probably statistically insignificant, the number of gun murders which
occur each year are overwhelmingly committed by people who aren’t supposed to
own guns.
Most gun
murders are committed by individuals who can’t, under law, own a gun. Since these
individuals aren’t about to disclose gun access to anyone, how can you make a
plausible cause-and-effect argument about the overall number of guns and how
they are being used? At best such an argument is just a numbers game, at worst
its academic sophistry and should be ignored.
I don’t
care whether we own 300 million or 300 billion guns. The numbers alone simply
can’t sustain the argument that more guns equals more gun crime.
