Overview - Guns and Crime

It’s been estimated that over 200 million firearms have been manufactured in the United States since the turn of the 20th century. Most of these are still in circulation. The large majority are owned by law abiding, responsible gun owners. I myself own several, including 20 gage single and pump shotguns, a 12 gage pump, a 30-06 deer rifle, a 6.5 Mannlicher Schoenauer deer rifle (a handmade collector's piece which dates from the post WW II era), and an official issue 9 mm semi-automatic Luger carried by a German officer during WW II. Over the years I have hunted and target shot with these weapons and there is a rich history behind each one. Countless other sportsmen and target shooters nationwide share similar histories with their pieces, enjoy them for sporting and target uses in a responsible manner.

Unfortunately, a small but significant minority of gun owners and distributors are not responsible with their weapons. These are ultimately the source of a significant, and disturbing, supply chain of illegal firearms to criminals or those whose mental and emotional history puts them at risk for criminal behavior. Together, these have resulted in a wave of gun violence in America that is unprecedented anywhere else in the developed world. There has been a great deal of scientific research on guns and violence in recent years. For the most part, this research is equivocal as to whether or not guns actually increase or decrease crime rates. One or two high profile studies by gun opponents and proponents have attempted to argue otherwise without success.

To date, nearly every one of these studies have been found to be based on flawed analyses and/or datasets. The most notable such study is probably that of Olin fellow John Lott, author of the book "More Guns, Less Crime". In 1997, Lott and his colleague D. Mustard, published research which, based on a multiple regression model of American crime rates and "shall issue" laws, argued that each 1 percent increase in gun ownership in America results in a 3.3 percent decrease in homicide rates. Lott and Mustard's study had barely been out one year when it was refuted on mathematical grounds by another team of researchers who used Lott and Mustard's dataset to demonstrate that the removal of one data point from it (namely, a county in Florida) caused their results to disappear. Needless to say, this has had very little impact on Lott's popularity in pro-gun and ultra-conservative circles, where his work is defended with almost religious fervor.

There is however, indisputable evidence that guns have a significant proxy impact on the severity of violent crime. The United States has, by at least an order of magnitude, the largest per capita homicide rate in the developed world—larger than the combined rates of the next closest 11 countries. This is despite the fact that many developed nations actually have higher rates of violent crime. The U.K. is a case in point. The per capita violent crime rate there is significantly higher than in the U.S.—a fact fondly pointed out by the NRA and other extreme pro-gun advocacy groups)—yet their homicide rate is only a fraction of that in the U.S. (another fact many pro-gun groups either studiously avoid, or challenges based on faulty or non-existent research). This is because, due to the absence of firearms there, most violent assaults are bludgeonings or stabbings, which are far less likely to be lethal than gunshots.

Furthermore, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, (which tracks violent crime as a public health problem), there is a nearly direct correlation (0.9815) between legal handgun sales and homicide rates in the U.S. While this does not, by itself, prove the two are causally related, the degree of statistical significance in the dataset is startling, and together with a wide range of other data, the relationship between the two is on quite solid ground.

"Guns don't kill people—people kill people!" Few other mantras have been proclaimed with more passion in pro-gun circles where it is almost granted the status of divine revelation. Yet it completely misses the point. Certainly people, and not their weapons, choose violent behavior. But violent behavior is far more destructive when these people have easy access to highly lethal weapons. A violent crime committed with a street sweeper or a machine pistol with a high capacity magazine leaves far more spilt blood and grief in its wake than one committed with a club or knife—regardless of whether we believe it was the gun or the gun wielder that committed the crime. Matches don't cause fires either, people do. BUt rsponsible parents don't give their kids easy access to matches.

It’s also widely believed that law abiding citizens and criminals both obtain their weapons independently of each other. One of the most persistent myths in existence among pro-gun lobbies has been the idea that "if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns". This argument presumes that law abiding citizens and criminals obtain their guns from one or more sources independent of both, and that restrictions on the general flow of firearms to legal purchases will have little or no impact on criminal access. In fact, this is not, and never has been, the case.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearm's Youth Interdictive Crime Initiative studies of firearm trace statistics traces the “time-to-crime” history of firearms used in criminal activities and publishes reports of their finding annually. According to year’s worth of their records, the large majority of all firearms used in criminal acts (close to 85 percent) originated as legal purchases. These weapons were then stolen, sold under the table privately or in gun shows in the many states where such transactions are still legal, lost or given away thoughtlessly—all acts which amount to a failure to secure the weapon from unauthorized use.

As such, more stringent control of who can legally own firearms, under what conditions, and what penalties there will be for irresponsibility on the part of otherwise legal gun owners, will have a direct impact on the flow of illegal firearms to criminals. The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of firearms used in criminal activities originate as legal purchases by otherwise law abiding consumers who then fail to adequately secure their weapons from unauthorized use. When these weapons are stolen, sold, lost, loaned or given away in a careless manner they all too frequently end up on the street (at the time of this writing, average "time to crime" is about 6 years). This speaks directly to the relevance of various potential responses to firearm trafficking, such as the use of trigger locks and/or gun safes, possible restrictions on under the table private sales at gun shows (allowed by currently existing legal loopholes) or the private exchange of weapons, new restrictions on the general sale of firearms or increased enforcement of existing restrictions, and a wide range of other potentially helpful ideas that have been vigorously opposed by many pro-gun advocates.

Impassioned mantras and Second Amendment rhetoric aside, it is a demonstrable fact that legal gun purchases by citizens who are entirely within the law when purchasing them are ultimately the single largest pipeline to the criminal use of guns. Until this fact is faced by all, especially the pro-gun lobby—there will be little progress on firearm related violent crime in America.