What Drives Gun Crime?
Dear Editor,
There are several problems that pop up when trying to understand what drives gun crime. One of the first is that many people do not understand guns - I refer to the mechanical tools that use a burning propellant to generate high-pressure gases and send a bullet down the barrel and toward the target. So impractical or unworkable "solutions" for the misuse of these tools are often proposed by (sometimes) well-intentioned but ignorant legislators and citizens. I don't propose to explain all these issues here - just want to mention that they exist....
Another problem is that information about guns and the misuse of guns is generally not available in one place. The people concerned with gun crime (and crime generally) don't usually pay serious attention to the workings of the guns even when it impacts the data. And they don't always take into account the situations under which guns are used in crime. Or, more correctly, the situations under which crimes of all types are committed.
Statistics are nice and clean. No interpersonal relations there. Emotional appeals may feel good, but they are often devoid of rationality. Consider the very high murder rate (mostly with handguns) in Chicago. These are committed mainly by young gang members. They kill each other over "turf" fights or over supposed slights and insults that normal people would not even consider a provocation to reply to, let alone murder over. Ethnic and cultural issues may have an impact here; "gun control" is unlikely to have much effect; certain types of somewhat intrusive law-enforcement practices (as New York City has discovered) can have a very great effect.
The totally different problem of insane mass-murderers looking for attention or "revenge" against the rest of society or whatever moves them will not be solved by any practical "gun-control" measures. The current lists of proposals being debated will make people feel good until the next mass-murder occurs. One hopes that at some point, we can come to grips with the problems caused by the last 30 or 40 years of changes in our mental health care system. At that point, we may have a better handle on the mass-murder problem.
Economics is ultimately not so much the "dismal science" of the study of numbers as they relate to monetary transactions, but of human motivation - "Human Action" to use the terminology of Ludwig von Mises - and so some economists have studied crime and the effects of gun availability and gun laws on it, and come to the conclusion, as John Lott put it in the title of his book, "More Guns, Less Crime."
These investigations are mainly based on statistical data, available from the FBI Crime Reports, the BATFE reports on gun sales, the number of self-defense gun uses and so forth. Another interesting datum is that violent criminals support strict gun control, as it decreases their chances of running into an armed citizen whilst about their depredations. We have some interesting data from right here in Massachusetts: prior to the passage of the current strict MA gun law in 1998, violent crime was falling in MA, as it was nationally. After the 1998 gun law passed, and it was reported (a number I am very suspicious of, but never mind that) that the number of licensed gun owners in MA had dropped from about 1.5 million to about 250 thousand, violent crime began to increase, and has continued to climb ever since. The crime rate for the rest of the nation has continued its downward trend, even as the number of gun owners in the USA has increased dramatically. I think MA sent the wrong message to its criminal population....
Of course, these additional gun owners are the law-abiding citizens who purchased their guns through legal channels. Most criminals (the major exception is those insane persons who have not been adjudicated to be a danger to themselves or others) obtain their guns through a black market of mainly stolen guns or guns smuggled in through our porous borders - particularly the southern border.
The point here is, that the idea, popular among the gun control crowd, that more guns equals more crime seems to be 180 degrees wrong. That is not to say that we should require that every household have a gun - that is an absurdity in a free nation - but simply that gun ownership should be a matter of free choice for law-abiding citizens, given that criminal predators of all sorts have no respect for age or beauty or even poverty, but they do respect a potential threat to their lives....
Sincerely yours,
Brooks Lyman
Townsend Road
