What To Do About Guns In America
In pursuit of a Grand Compromise
The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed
In a provocative new column for The New York Times, Bret Stephens draws the ire of the right by calling for the Second Amendment’s repeal. In the wake of Las Vegas, the largest mass shooting by a single gunman in modern U.S. history, Stephens argues it’s time we abandon one of the bedrock principles enshrined in our Bill of Rights.
Stephens does not arrive at this position recklessly. He explores the issue from all the relevant perspectives: from law-and-order, personal-safety, national-security, and personal liberty standpoints.
Yet this is the way the debate always goes after such events. Restrictions are called for but the only ones that are potentially highly effective are the restrictions that would infringe on the Second Amendment. We appear stuck in a perpetual battle in which gun enthusiasts fear their arms will be confiscated or severely curtailed and gun control proponents settle for proposals of questionable effectiveness.
Let me offer a compromise that plots a different way forward. First, some data.
The gun control debate is awash in statistics and studies of one kind or another. (For a critique of this trend, see this piece by Josh Marshall from earlier this week, which FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver took to be a swipe at work of this kind.) Each side has become quite competent at trotting out the standard studies that support their favored approach.
On the right, the narrative supported by statistics goes as follows: “There are more guns now than ever while crime has decreased. Guns, therefore, are not only correlated with a decrease in crime but are also probably its cause, due to their deterrent effect. Increased gun ownership lowers crime.”
Charts such as this support that assertion:
On the one hand, this presents a problem for the gun control side. The number of guns has increased drastically while the crime rate has decreased. Case closed? Let’s examine further.
So what’s happening here? As the number of guns in America has increased, the number of gun owners has fallen 17 percent — from its peak of 53 percent ownership to a rate of 36 percent.
Fewer people, call them gun enthusiasts, are buying an increasing share of the weaponry in the United States. One further implication is that as the violent crime rate has fallen from its peak in the early 1990s of 760 incidents per 100,000 people to approximately 400 incidents per 100,000, the gun ownership rate has decreased. That is to say, one could just as easily make the argument that the decrease in gun ownership best explains the correlation with the decrease in violent crimes.
It’s possible that crime and gun ownership have a strong causal connection. As crime increases, people feel insecure and seek out weapons of their own for self-defense purposes. As crime decreases, that impetus is removed. What’s less likely to be true is that greater gun ownership is causally responsible for a lowered crime rate.
To see this, we can look at individual localities.
The right likes to point to Chicago, with its high violent crime rate (with an especially high murder rate at 28.7 homicides per 100,000 residents) and its tight gun control policies, as evidence gun control doesn’t work. A comparison between New York City and Houston could help us here.
New York has one of the lowest gun ownership rates in the nation at 10.3 percent. Texas has one of the highest, especially among the largest states, at nearly 36 percent. But New York City’s violent crime rate of 586 per 100,000 residents beats out both Houston and Dallas in violent crime rates (967 and 694 respectively). New York City has almost half the violent crime and a quarter of the rapes as Houston, despite its gun ownership rate being one-third that of Texas.
This data should burst quite a few narratives on all sides.
The amount of guns in the U.S. is not causing an increase in criminal firearms usage. In fact, criminal firearms homicides fell from a peak of about 15,000 deaths in 1993 to approximately 10,000 deaths on average in the last few years. The most common number you see is the 33,000 gun deaths per year statistic; sadly, almost two-thirds of those deaths are suicides by firearm.
But higher gun ownership rates do not lower crime rates either.
What can we conclude? More selective gun ownership and not limiting gun sales is the grand compromise.
Concealed carry permit holders tend to commit crimes at a much lower rate than the population average. Why? They are motivated people. The license typically requires some training, which costs time and money, and a registration with the state. One cannot casually obtain such a permit. California, which has a gun ownership rate of 20 percent, requires a firearms safety permit before purchasing a firearm. California also has one of the lower suicide by guns rate in the nation. It is not difficult to see that putting up moderate but meaningful barriers can pay dividends in lowering violence and self-harm.
Gun control efforts that limit guns are mostly futile in the current legal and cultural environment. Gun enthusiasts recoil at any threats to curtail or limit their gun types or gun usage, even though restricting the guns themselves is a measure that is easily bypassed. Gun enthusiasts, for their part, seem to want to expand gun ownership mainly to create an environment where there are fewer calls to take or limit their weaponry. We do not have to do either of these things.
Screen out the casual gun purchaser and the amount of rash decision buyers successfully obtaining a weapon in order to commit a crime or inflict self-harm is reduced. The fewer casual gun owners the less likely a gun will be misused — whether intentionally or accidentally. And allow gun enthusiasts free access to their weapons.
The right likes to say: “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” If that logic holds, then let’s be more selective about the people and stop worrying as much about the guns themselves.
