Today we’re upset that the NRA, the GOP and, for all we know, the Dark Lords of the Sith, have once again succeeded in blocking funding for research into gun violence.
Good for them.
Suppose for a moment that the Republicans had agreed to allow funding, but only if the investigators were equally balanced between supporters of gun control and opponents and were required to come up with a real consensus in their final report?
How about a different approach that might be more palatable (and passable) and might yield some real insights?
While I would oppose funding any studies the focus solely on gun violence, which accounts for 56.8% of violence-related deaths (self-harm including attempted suicide, assault, suicide, non-negligent manslaughter and murder) but only 4.4% of violence-related injuries, I would definitely support research into violence, including guns, knives and bare hands. After all, 43.2% of violence-related deaths and 97% of violence-related injuries are caused by means other than guns.
There is a very troubling rise in the suicide rate. In California, for example, the rate of firearm-related suicides dropped 10.4% over the period from 1999 to 2013 but the total suicide rate rose 14.3%. The number of suicides jumped 30.8% over the same period, outpacing the 14.4% increase in the state’s population.
Wyoming, which has a high suicide rate due to its much smaller population and has the largest percentage of households with one or more firearms, saw an increase in both rates, reaching a 15-year peak in 2012 and then falling sharply in 2013.
Whites are much more likely to kill themselves (17.05 per 100,000) than Asian/Pacific Islanders (6.02 per 100,000), blacks (5.62 per 100,000) or HIspanics (5.30 per 100,000). The only racial/ethnic group with a higher suicide rate is Native Americans (18.27 per 100,000).
Another problem is the a huge gap in the homicide rates between white, non-Hispanic Americans and black Americans. Even though polls indicate that whites are more likely to own guns, blacks are far more likely to be murdered with them. In 2103, the homicide rate among whites was 2.50 per 100,000 of the white population; 19.48 per 100,000 of the black population. Native Americans (5.41 per 100,000) and Hispanics (4.75 per 100,000) also have higher homicide rates. Pretending that the difference is all due to the accessibility of firearms or dismissing it as black-on-black or gang crime is not only disingenuous, it ignores the larger problem of violence and its causes.
The black rate is more than three times the white rate even in homicides that don’t involve firearms. This is significant because blacks are 30% more likely than whites to be killed with a gun.
Incidentally, these are all 2013 figures from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. They are all available for public access, no research grant or funding needed.
The desire to limit studies to only firearm-related raises all sorts of red flags for the simple reason that most previous studies have had the taint of politics, one way or the other. Furthermore, even the most conscientious researcher is hampered by the fact that too much of the necessary data is anecdotal, at best, and a scientific wild-assed guess as a rule.
I have seen estimates of the number of gun owners ranging from a third to almost half of the adult population of the U.S. — anywhere from 70 million to more than 100 million. Estimates of the number of legally owned firearms run from 250 million to 300 million. The government has no idea of how many legal guns there are in civilian hands; it doesn’t know how many citizens own them or where they are. Recent efforts by Connecticut and New York State to register certain firearms and high-capacity magazines indicate that the American people are in no rush to tell the government any of this. Connecticut’s compliance rate is perhaps 20% of the estimated number of such guns in the state and New York’s rate is a thoroughly embarrassing 4%.
But trying to solve the problem of violence by studying the methods by which it is committed is a dead-end street. It’s reasonably easy for a coroner to determine how a person was killed and good police work will usually reveal whether the death was a suicide, accident or one of the varying degrees of homicide.
It’s far more important to learn why a person died. In the case of a homicide or non-negligent manslaughter, motive is one of the keys to identifying the killer.
The “why” is especially important in studying trends such as the rise in white suicide or the high rate of homicide with black victims. Understanding the motivation to kill oneself or another is far more important in reducing the number of these deaths than a pile of statistics of how they were carried out.
It is often claimed that the availability of firearms is a causative factor in violence. Yet there is really no basis for that claim. That’s the same as believing someone says, “Here I’ve got a bright, shiny new gun. Therefore I am going to kill myself” or “Got my gun, gotta find someone to waste with it.” It’s also ignoring the very large number of deaths and injuries inflicted by other means.
A gun might be an enabler, but the same thing can be said of a a knife, a tire iron, a bat or any other the other methods of leveraging force that are available.
The last point I would like to make is that by studying violence, regardless of the instrument used, you make an end-run around the National Rifle Association and the rest of the pro-gun activists. They can hardly object to an investigation of this type without becoming a laughingstock or appearing to support violence itself.
That alone should be worth the switch.