Guns Kill
There are two basic arguments against legislation restricting the possession of a firearm. The first is the National Rifle Association (NRA) argument that we are guaranteed the right to “keep and bear” whatever weapons we so choose by the Second Amendment. The other is that guns actually save lives. By outlawing guns, the argument goes, we will actually be endangering law-abiding citizens. The first argument is easy enough to refute. The second one, which is really the important one when discussing what policies should be enacted, is a little bit more difficult to address. However, all present statistics on the issue tend to support the opposite conclusions: guns increase the death rate.
The NRA reaches its conclusion by not only ignoring the opening clause to the Second Amendment but also by ignoring the US Supreme Court. Despite what the NRA tries to tell us, the full text of Amendment II of the US Constitution states, “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.” The only time the US Supreme Court dealt directly with the question of what this right actually entails was in US v. Miller (1939), in which they ruled,
In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a 'shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length' at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense. (p. 178)
Therefore, handguns and all other firearms with barrels shorter than 18 inches, which constitute the vast majority of all weapons used in homicides in the United States (Crime in the United States, 2004, p. 19), are not Constitutionally protected.
Now that it has been established that guns can be banned, the discussion needs to shift to whether or not they should be banned. Common sense should dictate that introducing weapons with such high lethality will increase the chances that an assault will end in death. After all, murder is more often than not a crime of passion that occurs spontaneously. It is not usually calculated in advance. By removing guns from the equation, the odds that one will die in an attack can be greatly reduced.
Firearms are used in less than 20% of all reported aggravated assaults yet are responsible for 66.9% of all homicides (Crime in the United States, 2004, p. 19, 38). Of the 173,501 reported assaults involving a firearm in the US in 2003, 5.6% resulted in a fatality whereas only 0.7% of the 698,828 non-gun aggravated assaults resulted in death (ibid, p. 19, 37). These figures indicate that adding a firearm into an assault increases the chances of death by 814 percent!
Some will argue that the choice of a firearm simply indicates greater intention on the part of the offender to kill his or her victim and that the intention of the attacker, rather than the existence of guns, is the cause of these higher death rates. If that were true, though, there would be similar “success” rates—the number of successful homicides per 1000 attempts—throughout the country. However, this is not the case. In Mississippi, which has the highest rate of gun ownership in the country (55% of all households), the death rate is 50.7 per 1000 attempts (Crime in the United States, 2004, p. 82-92; Miller, Azrael, & Hemenway, 2002, p. 522). On the other side of the spectrum, in Hawaii and Massachusetts, which have the lowest rates of gun ownership, the death rate is 11.8 and 7.0 per 1000 attempts respectively (ibid.). Overall, for the six states with the highest ratio of gun ownership (Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, West Virginia, and Wyoming), the “success” rate is 27.5 per 1000 attempts, whereas in the six states with the lowest gun ownership rate (Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New York), it is only 16.9 (ibid.). These numbers clearly translate into a greater number of deaths in places where guns are more prevalent. In New England, the region with the lowest gun ownership rate, the murder rate was 2.2 per 100,000 in 2003; in the South Atlantic, the region with the highest level of gun ownership, it was three times that at 6.7 per 100,000 (ibid.).
Yet, is it not possible that there are more guns in the South Atlantic strictly because of the higher rate of violence, not the other way around? After all, the violent crime rate in the South Atlantic is 602.1 per 100,000, nearly twice the rate of 347.4 per 100,000 in New England (ibid.). Yet, this phenomenon does not fully explain the disproportionate homicide rate in the South Atlantic. It also offers evidence against the argument that guns prevent crime. If guns were effective at preventing crime, one would expect areas with high gun ownership to actually have lower crime rates than areas with low gun ownership rates.
However, maybe the South just has a more violent culture. Maybe they really do need firearms to protect themselves from the inordinate amount of violence experienced in the Southeastern United States. Perhaps without guns their homicide rate would actually go up. The evidence suggests otherwise. According to the National Criminal Justice Commission,
Rarely are firearms used successfully in self-defense—a gun in the home is forty-three times more likely to be used to kill a family member than to kill an intruder. In relation to people without a gun in the home, people with a gun are eight times more likely to kill or be killed by a family member or friend, three times more likely to kill or be killed by someone in the home, and five times more likely to commit suicide or have a family member commit suicide (Donziger, 1996, p. 213-214).
Yet, conservatives will offer two counterpoints: many defensive gun uses are not reported and most of the time, people do not need to kill an attacker; they simply need to brandish a weapon in order to fend off an attack (Lott, 2001, p. 277). It is unreasonable, though, to assume that each defensive gun use saves a life. Of all reported violent crime in 2003, only 1.2% actually resulted in death (Crime in the United States, 2004, p. 70). However, just like not all defensive gun usages are reported, neither are all violent crimes. Murder, however, is almost always recorded. In almost every instance, there is a body that needs to be explained. Therefore murder is reported with nearly perfect accuracy. The other violent crimes, on the other hand, are highly underreported. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, there were 5.4 million violent crimes committed in 2003, nearly four times as many as reported by the FBI (“Criminal Victimization,” 2004; Crime in the United States, 2004, p. 70). If these figures are used, only 0.3% of all violent crimes result in death. In other words, in order to completely balance out the 9,638 firearm homicides in 2003 (note these figures exclude all firearm-related deaths not classified as homicide such as suicides and accidents) (Crime in the United States, 2004, p. 19), guns would need to prevent the commission of 3.2 million violent offenses!
Studying international homicide and crime rates will help shed some more light on the situation. According to the National Criminal Justice Commission, The US does not have an extraordinary crime rate when compared to other nations. “The one exception is murder. Largely because of the prevalence of firearms we have…about 10 times the per capita murder rate of most European countries” (Donziger, 1996, p. 10). Other studies confirm this. The United Nations reports that countries with more guns experience higher firearm related death rates (Walker, 1999, p. 170), and Killias (1993) discovered a .66 coefficient of correlation between gun ownership and overall homicide rates (p. 1723). Additionally, he noted that countries with low gun ownership rates did not resort to other means to commit murder more frequently than high-gun countries in order to compensate for the lack of guns (ibid, p. 1724). In a similar study, Carter (1997) found an extremely high .84 coefficient of correlation between handgun ownership and overall murder rates (p. 11).
Despite the correlations reported in the literature, critics will still occasionally point to nations like Israel or Canada that do not fit the trend. Yet, these countries are more statistical anomalies than general trends. After all, guns are not the root cause of murder; they simply make it more likely. Fewer guns in a society will mean fewer needless fatalities. There are many other factors, such as the availability of healthcare, drug and alcohol use, the poverty rate, and the level of industrialization, that can affect the homicide rate. The number of handguns, which are easy to transport, are often readily accessible, and are more lethal than larger barrel weapons, may be more important than the total number of firearms. For example, from 1999 to 2003, handguns were used in 78.2% of all firearm homicides in the United States (Crime in the United States, 2004, p. 19). Lastly, countries often restrict access to ammunition despite a high level of gun ownership, thereby reducing the ability to actually use a firearm (Killias, 1993, p. 1723).
Clearly, no single cause can be attributed to the rate of homicide. Guns are just one of many factors that influence how many people suffer violent deaths. There are certainly other things to combat, such as poverty, lack of affordable healthcare, unemployment and underemployment, inadequate social programs, and substance abuse, but why not at least remove guns from the equation? Just because they are not the only cause of murder does not mean they should not be outlawed. At least then there would be less likelihood of people dying in a physical confrontation. The numbers clearly show that the prevalence of firearms has a strong correlation to the homicide rate. Therefore, the federal government should carefully regulate handguns and automatic rifles (and their ammunition), thus allowing hunters and collectors to maintain their use of firearms for legitimate purposes while still removing those weapons used most in criminal violence (Donziger, 1996, p. 213).
Works Cited
Carter, G.L. (1997). The Gun Control Movement. New York: Twayne Publishers
Crime in the United States: 2003 Uniform Crime Reports (2004). Washington, DC: Federal
Bureau of Investigation.
“Criminal Victimization” (2004, Oct. 27). Retrieved November 18, 2004, from Bureau of
Justice Statistics Web Site: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/cvictgen.htm
Donziger, S.R. (Ed.) (1996). The Real War on Crime: The Report of the National Criminal
Justice Commission. New York: Harper Perennial.
Killias, M. (1993). “International Correlations Between Gun Ownership and Rates of Homicide
and Suicide.” Canadian Medical Association Journal, 148, 1721-1725.
Lott, Jr., J.R. (2001). “More Guns, Less Crime.” In R.C. Monk (Ed.) Taking Sides: Clashing
Views on Controversial Issues in Crime and Criminology, Sixth Edition (pp. 276-289). Guilford, CT: Dushkin/McGraw-Hill.
Miller, M., Azrael, D., & Hemenway, D. (2002). “Household Firearm Ownership and Suicide
Rates in the United States.” Epidemiology, 13, 517-524.
United States v. Miller et al. 307 U.S. 174 (1939).
Walker, J. (1999). “Firearm Abuse and Regulation.” In Newman, G. (Ed.) Global Report on
Crime and Justice (pp.151-170). New York: Oxford University Press.