Reply With Quote
A 2013 literature review in the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior, written by the University of Utrecht psychologist Wolfgang Stroebe, starts with Kellermann but rejects the idea that firearm possession is "a primary cause of either suicide or homicide." However, he writes, "since guns are more effective means for [actually killing someone] than poison or other weapons, the rate of firearm possession can be expected to be positively related to overall rates of suicide and homicide." But even then we can't be sure of causality, since guns might be the choice of people with more serious lethal intent, against themselves or others, to begin with.
Stroebe notes that the two major post-Kellermann studies most often used to demonstrate an association between gun ownership and risk of homicide shared one of Kellermann's fatal flaws: They offer no information about whether the gun used to kill the gun owners was their own. And despite Kellermann's finding that living alone was very risky, one of the follow-ups, a 2004 study by Linda Dahlberg and colleagues, found that it was only those with roommates who faced a higher risk of a specifically gun-related homicide.
Public health—long associated with the prevention of communicable diseases—got into the gun social science game with a vengeance in the 1990s. These scholars commonly viewed weapons as nothing more than vectors for harm; leading lights, such as a professor at Harvard's School of Public Health, could happily declare: "I hate guns and cannot imagine why anybody would want to own one. If I had my way, guns for sport would be registered, and all other guns would be banned." The CDC earlier in 1987 published a study openly recommending confiscating guns in the name of public health.
Public health scholars have continued to research from a place of hostility to firearms. An October 2015 special issue of the journal Preventive Medicine dedicated to guns began with an editorial that praised the role the public health movement played in spreading vaccines and reducing tobacco use, then cut to the quick: "It is the editorial position of this journal that there is one overtly visible and low-hanging fruit left in the tree, one that has surprisingly eluded concerted action from public health: gun violence prevention." Alas, there is an obstacle: the "peculiar proclivity that much of the American population has with firearms."
That proclivity is indeed vast. In addition to those owning guns for reasons of self-defense, there is the massive recreational component. A 2011 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service survey found that "13.7 million people, 6% of the U.S. population 16 years old and older, went hunting." The National Sporting Goods Association says there were at least 20 million recreational target shooters in the U.S. as of 2014.
Less quantifiable, but still quite real, are the sense of self-fulfillment and iden y that guns and gun culture bring to Americans, the same way any other recreation from surfing to sailing to car culture does. Attempts to scientifically demonstrate the "social costs" of guns—for example, a 2006 Journal of Public Economics paper called "The Social Costs of Gun Ownership," by Duke's Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig (then of Georgetown)—typically don't rigorously address these benefits.
While most of the articles in the Preventive Medicine issue were standard anti-gun material, one piece perhaps inadvertently undermined a popular argument for expanding background checks. "Sources of Guns to Dangerous People: What We Learn By Asking Them," by Philip Cook and colleagues, surveyed a set of jailed criminals in Cook County, Illinois. It found that they "obtain most of their guns from their social network of personal connections. Rarely is the proximate source either direct purchase from a gun store, or theft." So the go-to remedy for gun control advocates seeking to limit homicides might not have much impact on actual gun criminals.
How Often Are Guns Used Defensively?
One of the most powerful narratives gun advocates have on their side is the image of a woman pulling a handgun out of her clutch to prevent a rape, or a man ing a shotgunat a burglar to defend his family.
Many social scientists who research this issue of "defensive gun use" (DGUs) say such scenarios are vanishingly rare, arguing that owning a gun is more likely to lead to harm for the owner than be his or her savior in a pinch.
There are no even halfway thorough do entations of every such event in America. They are not all going to end up reported in the media or to the police. The FBI and the CDC will have no reason to record or learn about the vast majority of times a crime was prevented by the potential victim being armed. So our best estimates come from surveys.
The survey work most famous for establishing a large number of DGUs—as many as 2.5 million a year—was conducted in 1993 by the Florida State University criminologists Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. Kleck says they found 222 bonafide DGUs directly via a randomized anonymous nationwide telephone survey of around 5,000 people. The defender had to "state a specific crime they thought was being committed" and to have actually made use of the weapon, even if just threateningly or by "verbally referring to the gun." Kleck insists the surveyors were scrupulous about eliminating any responses that seemed sketchy or questionable or didn't hold up under scrutiny.
Extrapolating from their results, Kleck and Gertz concluded that 2.2 to 2.5 million DGUs happened in the U.S. each year. In a 2001 edition of his book Armed, Kleck wrote that "there are now at least nineteen professional surveys, seventeen of them national in scope, that indicate huge numbers of defensive gun uses in the U.S." The one that most closely matched Kleck's methods, though the sample size was only half and the surveyors were not experienced with crime surveys, was 1994's National Survey of the Private Ownership of Firearms. It was sponsored by the U.S. Justice Department and found even more, when explicitly limiting them to ones that met the same criteria as Kleck's study—4.7 million (though the research write-up contains some details that may make you wonder about the accuracy of the reports, including one woman who reported 52 separate DGUs in a year).
The major outlier in the other direction, nearly always relied on for those downplaying the defensive benefits of guns, is the Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), a nationally representative telephone survey, which tends to find less than 70,000 DGUs per year.
In the October 2015 special issue on "gun violence prevention," Preventive Medicine featured the latest and most thorough attempt to treat the NCVS as the gold standard for measuring defensive gun usage. The study, by Harvard's Hemenway and Sara J. Solnick of the University of Vermont, broke down the characteristics of the small number of DGUs recorded by the NCVS from 2007 to 2011. The authors found, among other things, that "Of the 127 incidents in which victims used a gun in self-defense, they were injured after they used a gun in 4.1% of the incidents. Running away and calling the police were associated with a reduced likelihood of injury after taking action; self-defense gun use was not." That sounds not so great, but Hemenway went on to explain that "attacking or threatening the perpetrator with a gun had no significant effect on the likelihood of the victim being injured after taking self-protective action," since slightly more people who tried non-firearm means of defending themselves were injured. Thus, for those who place value on self-defense and resistance over running, the use of a weapon doesn't seem too bad comparatively; Hemenway found that 55.9 percent of victims who took any kind of protective action lost property, but only 38.5 percent of people who used a gun in self-defense did.
Kleck thinks the National Crime Victimization Survey disagrees so much with his own survey because NCVS researchers aren't looking for DGUs, or even asking about them in so many words. The survey merely asks those who said "yes" to having been a crime victim whether they "did or tried to do" something about it. (You might not consider yourself a "victim" of a crime you have successfully prevented.) Kleck surmises that people might be reluctant to admit to possibly criminal action on their own part (especially since the vast majority of crime victimizations occurred outside the home, where the legality of gun possession might be questionable) to a government surveyor after they've given their name and address. And as he argued in a Politico article in February 2015, experienced surveyors in criminology are sure that "survey respondents underreport (1) crime victimization experiences, (2) gun ownership and (3) their own illegal behavior."
The social science quest for the One True DGU Number is interesting but ultimately irrelevant to those living out those specific stories, who would doubtless be perplexed to hear they shouldn't have the capacity to defend themselves with a gun because an insufficiently impressive number of other citizens had done the same. Even if the facts gleaned from gun social science were unfailingly accurate, that wouldn't make such policy decisions purely scientific.
Could More Guns Mean Less Crime?
The most well-known proponent of the idea that widespread private gun ownership might reduce the rates of violent crime is John Lott, a law and economics professor who has held positions at Yale, UCLA, and the University of Chicago, and who now works as an independent scholar with an organization he runs called the Crime Prevention Research Center. In 1998 Lott published the controversial book More Guns, Less Crime (University of Chicago Press), which was updated with a third edition in 2010. Lott's main argument is that pro-gun policies, such as shall-issue right-to-carry (RTC) laws, tend to lower most crime rates against person and property.
Violent crime has been going down in America in the era when right to carry has spread, but social science is more complicated than simply pointing to two quan ies moving in opposite directions.
The most obvious and important fact in modern criminology—the huge decline in crime rates that started a quarter century ago—still lacks anything approaching a universally agreed-upon set of explanations. That fact should help contextualize the picayune and arcane level of argumentation over variables accounted for, specific data sets consulted, and number of different specifications tested when scholars try to buttress or refute Lott's thesis.
The range of contentious issues involved in Lott's techniques were summed up pretty thoroughly in a sympathetic but critical review of the third** edition in Regulation. The economist Stan Liebowitz of the University of Texas at Dallas wrote: "Should county level data or state level data be used? Should all counties (or states) be given equal weight? What control variables should be included in the regression? What violent crime categories should be used? How should counties that have zero crimes in a category, such as murder, be treated? How much time after passage of a law is enough to determine the effect of RTC laws? What is the appropriate time period for the analysis?"
Lott tried to demonstrate that on the county level, violent crime trends showed signs of improvement in counties that had or passed RTC laws compared to counties that had not, among other things checking both mean crime rates and the slope of crime rates before and after RTC passage. He attempted to control for many handfuls of other variables that might affect crime rates—indeed, some researchers accused him of accounting for too many variables, while others slammed him for failing to account for other factors, like conviction rates or length of prison sentences.
Trying to prove Lott wrong quickly became a cottage industry for others interested in the nexus of guns and public safety. The back-and-forths were so extensive that the latest edition of Lott's book is nearly twice as long, with his reactions to his critics.
