It is really not terribly shocking that making it harder to get your hands on machines designed to kill people results in fewer people being killed
By M.S.
PREPPING for an appearance on Dutch TV this week to talk about the new gun-control measures that take effect in Maryland starting October 1st has afforded me a priceless opportunity to watch lots of gun-rights videos. My favourite, I think, is Ice-T's appearance on CNN, where he seems not to grasp the concept of laws. ("I'll give up my gun when everybody else does," he says, with a wry, superior glare. Well, ah, yes. That's how laws work; they impose the same rules on everyone, all at once, to overcome prisoners' dilemmas like this one.) Another good one is this savvy, funny rabble-rousing speech by Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, at a rally in Idaho. Mr Rhodes opens up by scolding the crowd for being too lightly armed: "Where's your rifles? You know what your handgun is for, right? (Scattered crowd response.) To fight your way to your rifle!"
On a more serious note, conservative millennial pundit Ben Shapiro of Breitbart News had an interesting conversation after the Newtown shootings with liberal DIY news-show producer David Pakman. Mr Shapiro argued that it's hard to determine whether gun laws work, since less restrictive areas such as New Hampshire have low gun-violence rates while highly restrictive areas such as Chicago have high gun-violence rates. "It comes down to culture, and how do we inculcate a culture that really takes violence seriously and takes gun ownership seriously," Mr Shapiro says. "The truth is this: Britain has a lot of gun laws on the books, they have five times our violent crime rate."
That isn't the least accurate crime-stat quote I've ever heard, but it's not accurate, and more importantly it's very misleading. The total prevalence of violent crime in America in 2010, according to the National Crime Victimisation Survey, was 10.8 per 1,000 people; that is, you had about a 1.1% chance of being a victim of a violent crime. In England and Wales, according to the British Crime Survey, it was 3.1%. This makes England's violent crime rate three times as high as America's, not five times. That's still a striking difference. But counterintuitively, "violent crime", in both America and Britain does not include homicide. (Violent-crime stats are usually based on survey data rather than police reports, since many crimes are never reported to the police; but homicide victims tend not to respond to surveys.) Homicide is a separate category, and here the difference is startling: as we reported this summer, the homicide rate in America is four times as high as that in England and Wales. There were 622 homicides in England and Wales in 2011. In America, with a population 5.5 times as large, there were 14,022.
How much of that difference should be chalked up to the presence of guns? Well, gun-rights advocates often argue that there's no point taking away people's guns, because you can kill someone with a knife. This is true, but in practice people are nowhere near as likely to get killed with a knife. In America, of those 14,022 homicides in 2011, 11,101 were committed with firearms. In England and Wales, where guns are far harder to come by, criminals didn't simply go out and equip themselves with other tools and commit just as many murders; there were 32,714 offences involving a knife or other sharp instrument (whether used or just threatened), but they led to only 214 homicides, a rate of 1 homicide per 150 incidents. Meanwhile, in America, there were 478,400 incidents of firearm-related violence (whether used or just threatened) and 11,101 homicides, for a rate of 1 homicide per 43 incidents. That nearly four-times-higher rate of fatality when the criminal uses a gun rather than a knife closely matches the overall difference in homicide rates between America and England.
Then there's the related argument that people have a right to defend themselves against aggressors carrying firearms, and that if you criminalise gun ownership, only criminals will have guns (which is perhaps what Ice-T was getting at). That may be valid in the abstract. In practice, 0.8% of victims of gun violence say they responded to their attackers by either using or threatening to use a gun. Not much of a risk for the criminal, it seems. Perhaps that was because too few Americans own guns or carry them on their persons to have a substantial effect, but it's hard to imagine driving those numbers up much higher; Americans already own twice as many guns per person as any other nation. How many more Americans would need to carry weapons in public in order to create a serious criminal deterrent? Five times as many? Ten? Is this even possible, let alone desirable?
None of this should be particularly surprising. We know that overall, firearm deaths are lower in states with stricter gun-control laws. More recently, we've learned that the expiration of America's assault-weapons ban was responsible for a substantial portion of the subsequent increase in gun deaths in northern Mexico. It's really not terribly shocking that making it harder to get your hands on machines designed to kill people results in fewer people being killed. But we've worked very hard over the past few decades to convince ourselves otherwise.
