“More Guns, More Murder”: Largest Gun Study Ever, Household Gun Ownership Correlates With Firearm Homicide Rate
The largest study of gun violence in the United States, released Thursday afternoon, confirms a point that should be obvious: widespread American gun ownership is fueling America’s gun violence epidemic.
The study, by Professor Michael Siegel at Boston University and two coauthors, has been peer-reviewed and is forthcoming in the American Journal of Public Health. Siegel and his colleagues compiled data on firearm homicides from all 50 states from 1981-2010, the longest stretch of time ever studied in this fashion, and set about seeing whether they could find any relationship between changes in gun ownership and murder using guns over time.
Since we know that violent crime rates overall declined during that period of time, the authors used something called “fixed effect regression” to account for any national trend other than changes in gun ownership. They also employed the largest-ever number of statistical controls for other variables in this kind of gun study: “age, gender, race/ethnicity, urbanization, poverty, unemployment, income, education, income inequality, divorce rate, alcohol use, violent crime rate, nonviolent crime rate, hate crime rate, number of hunting licenses, age-adjusted nonfirearm homicide rate, incarceration rate,and suicide rate” were all accounted for.
No good data on national rates of gun ownership exist (partly because of the NRA’s stranglehold on Congress), so the authors used the percentage of suicides that involve a firearm (FS/S) as a proxy. The theory, backed up by a wealth of data, is that the more guns there are any in any one place, the higher the percentage of people who commit suicide with guns as opposed to other mechanisms will be.
With all this preliminary work in hand, the authors ran a series of regressions to see what effect the overall national decline in firearm ownership from 1981 to 2010 had on gun homicides. The result was staggering: “for each 1 percentage point increase in proportion of household gun ownership,” Siegel et al. found, “firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9″ percent. A one standard deviation change in firearm ownership shifted gun murders by a staggering 12.9 percent.
To put this in perspective, take the state of Mississippi. “All other factors being equal,” the authors write, “our model would predict that if the FS/S in Mississippi were 57.7% (the average for all states) instead of 76.8% (the highest of all states), its firearm homicide rate would be 17% lower.” Since 475 people were murdered with a gun in Mississippi in 2010, that drop in gun ownership would translate to 80 lives saved in that year alone.
Of course, the authors don’t find that rates of gun ownership explain all of America’s gun violence epidemic: race, economic inequality and generally violent areas all contribute to an area’s propensity for gun deaths, suggesting that broader social inequality, not gun ownership alone, contributes to the gun violence epidemic. Nevertheless, the fact that gun ownership mattered even when race and poverty were accounted for suggests that we can’t avoid talking about America’s fascination with guns when debating what to do about the roughly 11,000 Americans who are yearly murdered by gunfire.
By: Zack Beauchamp, Think Progress, September 13, 2013
“Mandatory Ineffectiveness”: Mandatory Minimum Prison Sentences Don’t Make Us Safer
There are many reasons to oppose mandatory minimum sentencing laws. They frequently require excessive punishments, they put too much power into the hands of prosecutors (at the expense of judges), and they are expensive. Defenders of such laws say they’re worth it because they keep society safe. They argue that crime rates drop whenever mandatory sentences are enacted and rise when they are repealed or reduced. But after 30 years of experience with mandatory sentences at the federal and state level, we know that’s not true.
Congress passed strict mandatory sentences for buying and selling cocaine, marijuana, heroin and other drugs in 1986. Selling even small amounts of these drugs resulted in automatic five-year prison sentences (10 years for higher quantities). Beginning in 1987, when the new mandatory sentencing law took effect, the violent crime rate actually rose over the next four years by a startling 24 percent and did not return to its 1987 level until a decade later.
Before it reached that point, however, Congress acknowledged that the new mandatory minimum prison sentences were sometimes excessive, and in 1994 voted to exempt certain first-time, nonviolent and low-level drug offenders from mandatory minimums. In those cases, courts were authorized to impose individualized sentences based on the defenders’ role in the crime.
So crime went up, right? Not even close. Since the mandatory minimum carve-out, known as the “safety valve,” was implemented, roughly 80,000 drug offenders have received shorter sentences, and the crime rate has dropped by 44 percent. Needless to say, a theory that says mandatory sentences reduce crime cannot explain how the crime rate dropped so far and so fast when tens of thousands of drug offenders were spared the full weight of such sentences.
The experience of the states is even more devastating to mandatory sentencing’s defenders. Over the past decade, 17 states took steps to reduce their prison populations, including by repealing or curtailing their mandatory sentencing laws. In all 17 states, prison populations fell, and so did their crime rates.
What we have learned is that, while punishment is important, mandatory prison sentences for everyone who breaks the law don’t make us safer. University of Chicago economist and “Freakonomics” author Steven Levitt was perhaps the most influential supporter of pro-prison policies in the ’90s. He said that sending more people to prison was responsible for as much as 25 percent of the decade’s crime drop. Proponents of mandatory sentences cited Levitt at every turn.
But recently, Levitt concluded that as the crime rate continued to drop and the prison population continued to grow, the increase in public safety diminished. He told The New York Times earlier this year, “In the mid-1990s I concluded that the social benefits approximately equaled the costs of incarceration.” But today, Levitt says, “I think we should be shrinking the prison population by at least one-third.” No one in Congress is proposing anything that radical. But reducing our nation’s prison population and crime rate are achievable goals.
Next month, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on a bipartisan bill introduced by Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., which would give federal courts more discretion to depart from ill-fitting mandatory minimum sentences. The bill, the Justice Safety Valve Act of 2013, would build on the success of the 1994 legislation. Thirty years of evidence suggests this approach will make us safer.
By: Julie Stewart, U. S. News and World Report, September 2, 2013
“Correlation Does Not Imply Causation”: The Myth Of Murderous Chicago, Neat, Simple And Wrong
A neatly typed letter arrived at the office the other day. It included a check made out to the National Rifle Association, on my behalf.
The reader, disgruntled by my call for reasonable gun control laws, thought it pertinent to take another lick at one of the right wing’s favorite whipping boys: Chicago. “If one thinks that gun control works,” he wrote, “I would ask them why Chicago, with some of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation, had over 500 homicides in 2012.”
For those who don’t watch Fox News or regularly peruse WorldNetDaily, this is a favorite theme on the right. Chicago is the murder capital of the nation, and also its gun control capital. I will disprove that first contention in a moment, but first let’s take the implied argument at face value: Gun control laws permit more murders to happen.
Correlation does not imply causation, but for a moment let’s enter the wingnut world where it does. In 2012, there were 507 homicides in Chicago. Ten years earlier, the statistic was 656. Ten years before that, it was 943. Holy cow! Chicago’s anti-gun laws must be working!
Not so fast. The murder rate has declined sharply across the country in the last 20 years. Chicago might still be at the top of the heap for murders. Indeed, 507 is a big number, the biggest of any city in the U.S. in 2012. But Chicago is a big place. The key is to take the number of murders, multiply by 100,000 and then divide by the population. That gives you the standard expression of the homicide rate: murders per 100,000.
How does Chicago stack up? Turns out it’s a dangerous place, but not even in the top 20 most deadly cities. Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn unraveled the myth of his city in a July piece that crunched preliminary FBI data on homicides, noting Chicago was safer than, among others places, Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Little Rock, Kansas City, Montgomery, Memphis and Richmond.
And in 2013, Chicago’s homicide numbers are down. Zorn pointed out that in the first six months of 2013, there were 26 percent fewer murders than the prior year, the lowest raw number since 1965.
Explaining changes in the murder rate on the basis of a single factor, such as stricter gun control laws, is at best quack social science. Peruse the list of the top 20 cities by homicide rate and you will see metropolises in Northern blue states and Southern red ones, on the East Coast and the West Coast and smack in the heartland – all with gun restrictions that vary with regional preference.
So why do conservatives love to portray Chicago as a wasteland of bloodshed? Simple. Chicago is President Obama’s hometown, long a political stronghold for Democratic politics. For many, that’s reason enough to demonize the city, to degrade it by twisting something as dire as murder to fit an ideological narrative.
This is not an argument that everything in Chicago is hunky-dory. What about August reports that with the opening of Chicago’s public schools, hundreds of city employees were necessary to escort students through dangerous parts of town? And what about all of those headlines from the summer, like 4th of July weekend, during which 72 people were shot and 12 killed?
All true.
However, what citywide statistics don’t show is that over the last 20 years a great divide has opened up between Chicago neighborhoods in terms of safety, even as murders have dropped by half. As Daniel Hertz, a masters student at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, put it in his blog, City Notes, “at the same time as overall crime has declined, the inequality of violence in Chicago has skyrocketed.”
Hertz points out that crime and violence were never evenly distributed in Chicago, but that if you compare the present to the “bad old days” of the early 1990s – as he did, using Chicago Police data – you see that the relatively safe areas advanced to Toronto levels of security, while some marginal neighborhoods (including those near the city center and those in or near gentrifying areas) made stunning progress. Sadly, some neighborhoods, particularly on the South and West Sides, are more violent than they were in the 1990s, which is staggering to imagine.
Another way to put it is that violent crime, like income and wealth, is unevenly distributed in Chicago – and that this maldistribution is getting more extreme. I don’t have the data to say for sure, but I would guess that the same story is repeated in most of the other contenders for America’s murder capital.
Do you really want to solve the violent crime problem? Start by recognizing that guns travel. They go unimpeded from jurisdictions where they are easily gotten to places where they are not. Violence stays put.
Easy access to guns is just the icing. It’s the explosive fuse atop a long stack of community woes. There’s a 20th-century problem we haven’t solved: the inequality between races, between city and suburb, between ghetto and the leafier urban districts that Americans are falling in love with again. Every shooting in Chicago should remind us that we have failed.
By: Mary Sanchez, The Kansas City Star, Published in McClatchy, August 30, 2013
“The Need For Self Validation”: About The “Outrage” In The Killing Of Christopher Lane
I have nothing to say about the murder of Christopher Lane.
Except this:
The killing of this Australian man, allegedly by a group of boys who were bored and could think of nothing better to do, suggests chilling amorality and a sociopathic estrangement from the sacredness of life. The fact that these teenagers were able to get their hands on a gun with which to shoot the 22-year-old student in the back on Aug. 16 as he was jogging in the small Oklahoma town of Duncan leaves me embarrassed for my country — and thankful I am not the one who has to explain to his country how such a thing can happen.
None of this will satisfy the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people who have written me emails demanding (it is always interesting when people think they can demand a column) that I write about this drive-by shooting as an act of racial bigotry, an inverse of the Trayvon Martin killing, if you will. There is a numbing repetitiveness to these screeds: Where is Jesse Jackson, they demand. Where is Al Sharpton? Where are you? Or as one subject line puts it: “Why no outrage!!!!”
Actually, I have plenty of outrage. Just not the flavor of outrage they would like me to have.
It is, for some people, a foregone conclusion that any time violent crime crosses racial lines, some kind of racial statement is intended. But violent criminals are not sociopolitical theoreticians and violent crime is not usually a social manifesto. With relatively rare exceptions — we call them hate crimes — the fact is, if a thug shoots you, it is not because you are white, black, gay or Muslim, but because you are there.
So is Lane’s shooting one of those exceptions? A case can be made that it is. One of the young black suspects, after all, tweeted his anti-white bigotry back in April. The hashtag: HATE THEM.
But a case can also be made that it isn’t. Of the remaining two suspects, one is reportedly white and the other, the alleged shooter, apparently has a white mother. The prosecutor told the Duncan Banner newspaper there’s no evidence Lane was targeted because of his race and in any event, bringing hate crime charges is a moot point. In Oklahoma, hate crimes are misdemeanors; the boys are already facing felonies.
Again, none of this will satisfy those dozens, if not hundreds, of email writers, not to mention the authors of similar screeds on right-wing websites. What they’re doing is simple. They are using tragedy to play a cynical game of tit-for-tat: “I’ll see your Trayvon Martin and raise you a Christopher Lane.” In other words, they want to use this tragedy to validate their view that white people are victims of black racism.
And if all that was meant when African-Americans decry racism is that sometimes white people do violence against you, then the email writers and right-wing pundits might have a point. But it isn’t and they don’t.
No, what is meant is that even when violence is done against you, you may automatically be considered the “suspect” and your killer set free. What is meant is that judges are harder on you, doctors less aggressive in treating you, banks more apt to deny you, landlords less likely to show you apartments, hiring officers more likely to round-file your application. What is meant is good luck hailing a cab in midtown Manhattan. What is meant is that other people will airily dismiss the reality of those things, or, as has many times happened to me, admit the reality but advise that you should accept your lot in silence.
Then in the next breath, those same people will ask you to empathize with how racially victimized they are. The sheer, blind gall of it beggars imagination.
Last week, Christopher Lane was killed for no good reason, apparently by three morally defective boys.
Sorry, but he’s the victim here. White America is not.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., The National Memo, August 28, 2013
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