Authors: Dan Baum
America continues this fruitless argument, they write, because it’s easier than the alternative. “Many politicians and policy analysts no doubt realize that the gun debate is really about culture, not consequences. But precisely to
avoid
committing the law to picking sides in the struggle between the egalitarian and solidaristic proponents of control, on the one hand, and the hierarchic and individualistic opponents of it, on the other, they prefer the seemingly neutral idiom of econometrics.”
A lot of the political energy in favor of shall-issue laws derived from examples of egregious favoritism. The California Senate, for example, voted in June 2011 to exempt its members from the near impossibility of obtaining a carry permit in California, according to “One Law for Us, Another for You,” an editorial that ran on June 6, 2011, in
The Washington Times
. And on February 18, 2011,
The New York Times
published an article, “The Rich, the Famous, the Armed,” that detailed
how such wealthy and well-connected people as Roger Ailes, Morgan Stanley chair John J. Mack, and talk-show host Sean Hannity—none of whom even lived in the city—had been able to obtain concealed-carry permits in New York.
That thirty-seven states had gone shall-issue comes from
USACarry.com
, which has interactive maps showing where one’s carry permit is valid. The laws change constantly; it’s worth checking.
For a quick look at what the Justice Department believed happened to homicide in the United States from 1975 to 2005, see
Homicide Trends in the U.S., Age, Gender, and Race Trends
, published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics on January 17, 2011. More complete data on the drop in crime comes from the Uniform Crime Reports. For a quick glance at the trend over time, see Table 1 of “Crime in the United States: 2010,” which shows both the numbers and rates of violent crime overall and also breaks it down by murder, rape, robbery, property crime, burglary, motor vehicle theft, and larceny-theft. The rate of violent crime per 100,000 people fell from 758.2 in 1991 to 403.6 in 2010. The murder rate fell from 9.8 to 4.8, rape from 42.3 to 27.5, robbery from 272.7 to 119.1, and aggravated assault from 433.4 to 252.3.
Some states published the number of concealed-carry permits they issued. Others did not. The National Shooting Sports Foundation estimated in 2011 that 6.8 million people, out of an adult U.S. population of 230 million, had concealed-carry permits.
Evidence of the relative good behavior of concealed-carry permit holders comes, ironically, from an organization that strongly opposed concealed carry: the Violence Policy Center. According to its 2010 report
Concealed Carry Killers
, 402 people had been killed by people holding carry permits from May 2007 to the end of 2010. A few were multiple killings, and a few were murder-suicides, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume one killer for each murder. Given that about six million people had concealed-carry permits then, that means that in round figures, one carry-permit holder in 15,000 had committed murder during that time. How does that compare with the rest of the adult population? In that same period, about 56,702 murders took place in the United States.
*
Assuming again one murderer per murder, if you divide the murders into 200 million, which was about the size of the adult population, you get, in rough figures, one murderer in every 3,500 adults. That means that, according to the VPC’s figures, concealed-carry permit holders were four times
less
likely to commit murder than members of the general adult
population. Even if you consider that only about half of all murders are committed with guns, that still makes concealed-carry holders half as likely to kill with a gun as the general population. Perhaps the Violence Policy Center, instead of resisting concealed carry, should have been fighting to make it mandatory.
The high priest of the “more guns, less crime” theory was John Lott, an independent researcher who started out at the American Enterprise Institute and wrote the book
More Guns, Less Crime
. Lott and his book were lauded by the NRA and its allies and vilified by those supporting stricter gun control. Professor John J. Donohue III of Stanford, in the July 2003 edition of
Criminology and Public Policy
, published a detailed essay titled “The Final Bullet in the Body of the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis,” which only proved that when it comes to research on the effects of guns on crime, nothing is ever the final bullet. Nine years after Donahue’s article, Lott continued to be quoted by the gun-rights community, Fox News, and many media outlets. Setting aside the validity of his research, Lott himself was an odd duck. In 2003, a blogger named Julian Sanchez, tracing IP addresses, discovered that one of John Lott’s tireless defenders in online forums—a woman identifying herself as Mary Rosh—was in fact John Lott himself.
Regarding the dispute described on
this page
, Gary Kleck published his findings of 2.5 million annual defensive gun uses as “Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self Defense with a Gun,” in
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
, vol. 86, no. 1, 1995, and defended them in such articles as “Carrying Guns for Protection: Results from the National Self-Defense Survey,” in the May 1998 issue of
Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency
. David Hemenway published his rebuttal to Kleck in, among other places, the Spring 2009 Harvard
Bulletin
(“Comparing the Incidence of Self-Defense Gun Use and Criminal Gun Use”) and
The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
(“Survey Research and Self-Defense Gun Use: An Explanation of Extreme Overestimates,” vol. 87, no. 1, 1997).
The National Research Council attempted to evaluate the Kleck/Hemenway defensive-gun-use dispute in its book
Firearms and Violence
in 2005. After churning through both researchers’ work, the NRC’s conclusions boiled down to this, on
this page
: “The committee concludes that with the current evidence it is not possible to determine that there is a causal link between the passage of right-to-carry laws and crime rates.”
A great analysis of the whole brouhaha over defensive-gun use can be found in “A Call for Truce in the DGU War,” by Tom W. Smith, in
The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
, vol. 87, no. 4, 1997.
A related disagreement continues over whether a family is safer with a gun in the home or without it. Gun-control advocates often argued that a family was “47 times
safer” without a gun, a figure lifted from an article in the
New England Journal of Medicine
by Arthur Kellerman and Frederick Rivara, titled “Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home” (October 7, 1993, vol. 329, no. 15, pages 1084–1090). Kellerman and Rivara found that people keeping guns at home were forty-seven times more likely to kill a friend or family member than an intruder. The problem with their reasoning, from the point of view of gun-rights proponents, is that people who keep guns at home rarely kill the intruder. Usually, the gun is used to frighten off the intruder, and sometimes to wound. Also, gun guys say, Kellerman wasn’t making distinctions. Guns properly locked up or left loaded in the nightstand? Homes with children or without? Guns owned by careful and trained shooters, or guns bought to stick under the mattress and never practiced with? Gun guys also pounce on this quote from Kellerman in
Health
magazine, vol. 8, no. 2,
this page
: “If you’ve got to resist, your chances of being hurt are less the more lethal your weapon. If that were my wife, would I want her to have a thirty-eight special in her hand? Yeah.”
In an earlier paper, Hemenway, along with Sara J. Solnick and Deborah R. Azrael, both of Harvard’s Injury Control Center, argued that while more than half of gun owners say they own guns for self-defense, their guns lowered the
perceived
(their italics) safety of others in the community. “This Article provides suggestive evidence that possession of firearms imposes, at minimum, psychic costs on most other members of the community,” they wrote in “Firearms and Community Feelings of Safety,” in
The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
, vol. 85, no. 1, 1995. Senator Dianne Feinstein apparently agrees. The Associated Press quoted her on November 18, 1993, as saying, “Banning guns addresses a fundamental right of Americans to feel safe.”
Robert Bork tried out a similar argument in 1971 in defense of prosecuting such victimless crimes as drug abuse. In “Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment Problems,” in
Indiana Law Journal
(Fall 1971, page 20), Bork argued that “knowledge that an activity is taking place is a harm to those who find it profoundly immoral.” It was as bad an argument when Hemenway and Feinstein made it as when Bork made it. We may not like it that other people are doing things we revile—smoking pot, enjoying pornography, making gay love, or carrying a gun—but if we aren’t adversely affected by it, the Constitution and common decency argue for leaving it alone. People may have
felt
less safe because people kept guns in their homes and on their persons, but the data suggested that they weren’t less safe.
On the other hand, although gun carriers felt safer when armed, they may not have been. In Philadelphia in 2009, five researchers from the University of Pennsylvania surveyed 677 people who had been shot in an assault between 2003 and 2006, and 684 control participants. Their conclusions, published in the
American
Journal of Public Health
, vol. 99, no. 11, November 2009, as “Investigating the Link Between Gun Possession and Gun Assault,” were that people carrying a gun were 4.46 times more likely to be shot than someone unarmed, and 5.45 times more likely to be shot if they had a chance to resist the assault.
And widespread concealed carry may actually have made criminals
more
dangerous. More than half of the felons surveyed by James D. Wright and Peter H. Rossi, when researching
Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms
, said the chance their victim might be armed was a very important reason for carrying a gun during a crime.
Regarding how it could be possible that guns are used defensively as often as the research suggested without any of us hearing about it, I turned to John Lott. Lott is problematic for a lot of reasons, but he makes two good points on page 224 of his 2003 book
The Bias Against Guns
. “While the government releases an annual report on the top ten crime guns, there is no corresponding list of top ten guns used defensively.” And “each year the government releases reports on the number of crimes committed with guns, but the government surveys don’t directly ask people the other side of the issue, whether they have used a gun to stop crime.”
The rates for gun accidents come from two sources. The first is a report from the Centers for Disease Control dated November 19, 1999, called
Nonfatal and Fatal Firearm-Related Injuries—United States, 1993–1997
, which found that fatal and nonfatal gun injuries decreased almost 41 percent in that period, from 40.5 per 100,000 people to 24. My second source was a chart generated on the CDC’s website, which has a fabulous feature called Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System, or WISQARS. One can punch in many parameters—type of injury, age of injured, relevant years—and it will generate a chart. One that I generated, titled “1999–2006, United States Unintentional Firearm Deaths and Rates per 100,000,” showed the rate, for deaths only, dropping from .3 in 1999 to .22 in 2006.
It must be said, though, that according to another WISQARS chart I generated, the rate of nonfatal gunshot injuries from assault rose from 2001 to 2008, from 14.4 per 100,000 to 18.62, even while the CDC’s count of fatal gun accidents and the UCRs’ count of gun murder both fell during the same period. A downturn in marksmanship might explain it, or, more likely, an improvement in emergency medical care. It’s possible, then, that more people were shooting each other as the first decade of the twenty-first century elapsed but that fewer were dying, because responses were quicker and care was better.
And when I generated a chart called “1999–2006 United States Homicide Firearm Deaths and Rates per 100,000,” I got a very different picture than that reported by the UCRs. According to CDC figures, the gun-homicide rate went up
from 1999 to 2006, from 3.88 per 100,000 people to 4.05—not a lot, but a big discrepancy from the UCRs.
The number of carry permits issued in Boulder comes from the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office.
That Boulder had a higher concentration of advanced degrees than other cities (page 33) comes from
Forbes
, October 20, 2011, in “In Pictures: America’s Smartest Cities,” which reported that 52.92 percent of Boulder’s residents over age twenty-four had bachelor’s degrees or higher, and 3.97 percent had Ph.D.s.
Despite what our police instructor says on
this page
, Massachusetts does not require citizens to retreat from their own homes in the face of a burglary. Section 8a, Chapter 278, Title II, Part IV of the state code states in its entirety: “In the prosecution of a person who is an occupant of a dwelling charged with killing or injuring one who was unlawfully in said dwelling, it shall be a defense that the occupant was in his dwelling at the time of the offense and that he acted in the reasonable belief that the person unlawfully in said dwelling was about to inflict great bodily injury or death upon said occupant or upon another person lawfully in said dwelling, and that said occupant used reasonable means to defend himself or such other person lawfully in said dwelling. There shall be no duty on said occupant to retreat from such person unlawfully in said dwelling.”
The line about never being in Condition White without being at home with the alarm on and your dog at your feet comes from “State of Awareness, the Cooper Color Codes,” by Tom Givens in
Sharpen the Blade
, 05-2004, published by the American Tactical Shooting Association at
teddytactical.com
.