Maybe This Is How We Can Have A More Productive Discussion About Guns
Focusing on the Second Amendment distracts from actionable research
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When I was a freshman in high school, someone was shot in my lunchroom. It wasn’t anything like the mass shootings that make national news — like the nightmarishly horrific killing of 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
One kid shot another kid, and the story I was told was that it was an accident when the shooter was showing off a gun. My main memory was of hearing a nearby pop, thinking it was probably someone blowing up a milk carton and stepping on it (which happened constantly), and only later seeing the paramedics come in.
My senior year in high school, there were a number of shooting deaths of students, some near the school. In response, one of my classmates, Sarah Silins, led an anti-violence march of hundreds of people through town. She called the effort “First Step" — as in, I think, only a first step toward doing something about gun violence.
Only many years later did I realize how impressive her efforts were. I just now looked back at Chicago Tribune coverage of the march, and remembered that her anti-violence work led to her being elected as our homecoming queen. “I'm not exactly the homecoming queen type," she told the Tribune.
All these years later, it feels like we haven’t advanced past the first step.
Much of the argument I see online right now comprises hot takes and the typical digital yelling about whether guns kill people or people kill people. I find this argument frivolous. Clearly, people with guns kill people. And rather than jumping to debate the Second Amendment, I think it might be useful if we could have a more nuanced discussion about useful steps that might realistically be taken soon.
I do not pretend to know the best way to go about this, so let me just share some of the food-for-thought that my brain has been chomping on.
Way More Guns. More Gun Deaths?
I know the U.S. has many, many more civilian guns (more than citizens) than any other country. But I was wondering if that translates into more gun deaths than any other country.
Per this New York Times analysis, the U.S. has way more mass shooters (four or more victims) than other countries. It’s not close.
In terms of per capita mass shooters, the U.S. is a distant second place to Yemen.
One mass shooter is one too many, but in the overall picture of gun deaths, mass shootings are a relative rarity. Different sources have slightly different counts depending on their definition, but every one I've seen puts deaths from mass shootings at well less than one percent of the 40,000 or so gun deaths in the U.S. each year.
So I was wondering: where does the U.S. stack up in gun deaths overall?
At just more than 4 gun homicides per 100,000 citizens, the U.S. is way behind countries like El Salvador and Venezuela, which both have more than 30 gun homicides per 100,000 citizens. Nonetheless, the U.S. is an orbit apart from other rich countries — more than four times the rate of Canada; more than 30 times the rate of England; and more than 100 times the rates of Japan, Singapore, and South Korea.
Of course, homicides are only a portion of gun deaths. The U.S. is second only to Greenland in the rate of death by suicide with a gun.
A common argument, though, is that if those people didn’t shoot themselves, they would have just found some other way.
Ample evidence (like this, and this) points to the contrary — that easy access to lethal means, like guns, increases the numbers of deaths by suicide overall. As Harvard School of Public Health professor David Hemenway put it:
“Studies show that most attempters act on impulse, in moments of panic or despair. Once the acute feelings ease, 90 percent do not go on to die by suicide.”
This reminded me of the study by Richard H. Seiden of the University of California at Berkeley, in which he followed up on 515 people who were planning to jump from the Golden Gate Bridge, but who were restrained and prevented at the last minute. Many years later, 94 percent of those people were either still alive, or had gone on to die of natural causes. A lot of suicidal behavior, Seiden wrote, “is crisis-oriented and acute in nature.”
If a gun is not readily available in the moment of crisis, it seems, a life has probably been saved for the long run.
The Second Amendment Isn’t Going Anywhere, So What Should We Talk About?
What if, instead of the Second Amendment, we focused discussions on the details of gun violence prevention?
I was, at one point, a crime reporter in New York City. In that work, I started to realize that certain types of guns, made by certain manufacturers, and bought from certain sellers were more likely than other guns to be involved in crime. A police officer once complained to me about a specific store. What if, I wondered, we focused on making things more difficult for those wellsprings of gun crime?
I never dug deep into that data, and I’m not going to right now either. But just from a cursory search, it seems like there’s low-hanging fruit that might make for effective policy or enforcement targets.
Past research by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), for example, found that more than a quarter of pawnbrokers who sell guns were missing at least one gun from their inventory — presumably either stolen or sold illegally — and 7 percent of them couldn’t account for more than 25 guns.
Overall, a report to the U.S. Department of Justice did not reflect well on pawnbrokers who sell guns. Their guns were more likely to be involved in crimes, and those sellers were more likely to have infractions when inspected by ATF. As the report noted:
“The concentration of crime gun sales among a relatively small percentage of dealers, particularly high-volume dealers and pawnbrokers, provides an obvious focus for regulatory and law enforcement efforts.”
That’s just one example of the concept. An actual deep dive into gun data would, I’m sure, produce myriad findings that could inform specific policy and enforcement. A quick scan of the nonprofit news site The Trace, which exclusively covers gun violence, suggests that plenty of evidence-based gun violence prevention tactics are indeed out there. And here is a short, fascinating article on non-regulation options, with links to counterintuitive research findings, like that repealing juvenile curfews would decrease gunfire in cities.
What Now?
I'm certainly no expert on gun violence, and I haven’t pored over gun research. What I do know is that I’m just tired of the binary back and forth of “people kill people” versus “guns kill people,” and of focus only on one side or the other of the Second Amendment.
I’d like to hear your ideas. What second steps do you suggest? I assure you I will earnestly read and try to learn from every civil comment on this post. I know this is a heated discussion, but also one we need to keep having.
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Until next time…
David
P.S. My former employer, ProPublica, tracks politicians' deleted tweets here. This can be an interesting resource to search in the aftermath of tragedies. (h/t @charlesornstein for the reminder)
Photo credit: Steve Prezant / Getty Images