Guns

by David Albert, Olympia Friends Meeting (7/9/2024)

So I hate guns. Always have, I think. They scare me. Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever even held one, other than my beloved Davey Crockett rifle at the age of 6.

I grew up in New York City. Many from my parent’s generation fought in World War II. My father “invaded” Normandy. He was shot up on the beach. From what I know, he never even fired his weapon. Not a single one of these relatives ever owned a gun. My stepfather, who fought in WW II, ran a pharmacy in Harlem for 30 years. Never owned a firearm, and apparently never felt the need. Nor in the following two generations. Somebody else owns my family’s share of firearms.

So I clearly enter this discussion with rather extreme bias. I don’t think I object to hunters using guns to kill Bambi’s mom (if they will eat her), though I think it would be more sporting if Bambi’s mom could shoot back. Not in my backyard, please.

But the data (as far as I can tell), don’t lie. Homicides, gun homicides, aggravated assaults, domestic violence arrests, etc. all seem to have peaked around 1993, and have been steadily (though with fits and starts) decreasing since then. According to the Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, the firearm homicide rate decreased 41% overall from 1993 to 2018 (from 8.4 to 5.0 homicides per 100,000 persons age 12 or older), reaching a low of 4.0 per 100,000 in 2014 before rising to 5.0 per 100,000 in 2018. The rate of nonfatal firearm violence for persons age 12 or older declined 76% from 1993 to 2018, dropping from 7.3 to 1.7 victimizations per 1,000, and ranging from 1.1 to 1.8 per 1,000 from 2014 to 2018. The vast majority of these were from handguns. After a blip upwards during Covid, all of these are trending downward again.

Now even one of these incidents is too many. But the chances of that happening are much, much lower than they were 30 years ago.

Yet, the number of new firearms in private possession each year is more than ten times higher than it was in 1993. There are roughly 200 million guns in private hands in the U.S. It would seem that the potential lethality of these weapons has increased as well, with many more semi-automatic weapons or those capable of multiple firings.

More guns, less gun-related violent crime? It took me awhile to get my head around it. But I worked in public health for more than 20 years, so that while I am extremely biased against guns, I am more biased in favor of sound data.

So what explains the radical decline in gun crime? Does having many more guns result in fewer homicides? Has policing gotten so much better or are they so many more police? (In most homicides, police only show up after the fact.) Did the economy improve so much during this period, resulting in fewer violent incidents? Did accessibility of mental health care radically improve? Did availability of illicit drugs related to gun crime decline substantially? Is there significantly less “moral decay”? Do violent video games have a cathartic effect among users, resulting in fewer people acting out in real life with real weapons? Were gun control laws, the few that we have and, it seems, fewer all the time, so much more effective? Did “gun education” in schools really work?

There have to be other things operating. I have my own hypothesis, with data.* But that’s not the point. The point is we can easily see that stricter gun laws, decreased availability of weapons (pretty much a non-starter), bans on certain types of weapons (never handguns) - the usual liberal panaceas – have no explanatory power, and advocating for them, might only not have the desired effects, but might lead us away from looking for what has really worked. And make no mistake: whatever we did, it worked!

Time to congratulate ourselves that we are now so much safer than we used to be, and to figure out why.

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*Efforts to curb low-level lead poisoning might seem to account for most, if not all of it, and as efforts to curb it further have waned, one can expect an uptick in gun violence. The impacts only show up 15-20 years after the efforts. https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime-roundup-for-2018/ https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/07/lead-poisoning-and-domestic-violence/ If this is true, then we should now see violence rates rise, as the low-hanging fruit has already been picked, and the violence impact of chronic low-level lead toxicity occurs at less than 1/10th the EPA action level.