The Colorado Shooting and Gun Laws

 I almost cannot bring myself to discuss last week’s massacre, but at the same time cannot help but address it. 

When I turned on the news Friday morning and heard about the movie theater shooting, commentators invariably turned to the question of whether gun control would become an issue in the Presidential campaign.  And the answer was, invariably: no.  Neither candidate would likely find it in their interest to emphasize the issue.

I don’t purport to be a Second Amendment expert, and have never focused intensely on the issue.  But the shooting not only sickened me, it made me wonder what the available data is regarding whether, as an empirical matter, the right to bear arms yields a net benefit or not in terms of public safety.

My initial searches revealed, not surprisingly, that the answer depends on the source of the data. …

I tried to disregard obviously biased sources, but still found the data somewhat equivocal.  One posting from the University of Utah Medical School included the following:

In the U.S. for 2010, there were 31,513 deaths from firearms, distributed as follows by mode of death: Suicide 19,308; Homicide 11,015; Accident 600. This makes firearms injuries one of the top ten causes of death in the U.S….The number of non-fatal injuries is considerable--over 200,000 per year in the U.S….The cumulative lifetime cost in 1985 for gunshot wounds was estimated to be $911 million, with $13.4 billion in lost productivity. (Mock et al, 1994)

The number of firearms injuries remains high in the United States, compared with most of the rest of the world. Firearm suicide rates are strongly impacted by the rate of gun ownership. (Kaplan and Geling, 1998) There is a positive correlation between homicide rates and availability of guns in developed nations. (Hemenway and Miller, 2000)….

The issue of "home defense" or protection against intruders or assailants may well be misrepresented. A study of 626 shootings in or around a residence in three U.S. cities revealed that, for every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides (Kellermann et al, 1998)….In another study, regardless of storage practice, type of gun, or number of firearms in the home, having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and suicide in the home (Dahlberg, Ikeda and Kresnow, 2004). Persons who own a gun and who engage in abuse of intimate partners such as a spouse are more likely to use a gun to threaten their intimate partner. (Rothman et al, 2005). Individuals in possession of a gun at the time of an assault are 4.46 times more likely to be shot in the assault than persons not in possession (Branas et al, 2009).

At the same time, another site which clearly has a conservative slant cited a variety of studies which claims that guns are used to dissuade or repel violent crimes hundreds of thousands of times per year:

*A 1993 nationwide survey…found that…at least 0.5% of households had members who had used a gun for defense during a situation in which they thought someone "almost certainly would have been killed" if they "had not used a gun for protection." Applied to the U.S. population, this amounts to 162,000 such incidents per year…..

  * Based on survey data from a 2000 study published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, U.S. civilians use guns to defend themselves and others from crime at least 989,883 times per year.

    * A 1994 survey conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that Americans use guns to frighten away intruders who are breaking into their homes about 498,000 times per year.

This same site also questioned the reliability of the study that found that the homicide of a household member is three times higher in a household with a gun.  (Admittedly, I did not check any of the sources cited on either of these sites, or others that I looked at.)

I realize that to a large extent, people’s views on this issue are not going to be entirely data driven.  For example, even if one could prove that gun ownership harmed more innocent civilians than it helped, many would view the cost as worth it because they see a primary value of gun ownership is to prevent the government from having a monopoly on weaponry.  Many on the other side are likely similarly entrenched for various reasons.

I have heard the view expressed that no gun laws, no matter how strict, can prevent the occasional madman from wreaking havoc, and that gun policy should not be based on such aberrations.  But, for better or worse, we exist in a realm where catastrophes, natural or man-made, wake us up from our stupor and shine the light on certain issues, be it an airplane crash, a hurricane, an oil spill, or a shooting spree.

I have also heard it said that more stringent reporting or registration laws wouldn’t have prevented this particular tragedy.  That may be.  And yet a recent story about the nature of the weapons used persuaded me that it is folly to argue that nothing can or should be done:

The semi-automatic rifle used in the Colorado theater killings jammed during the rampage, apparently because of a problem with the 100-shot magazine feeding it, a law enforcement source with direct knowledge of the investigation said Sunday.

The military-style AR-15 had a separately purchased drum magazine, which can have trouble feeding bullets into the firing chamber if the gun is fired rapidly, the source told CNN.

"These after-market extended magazines have a tendency to jam," the source said.

One of the survivors of the early Friday assault, Josh Nowlan, said Saturday that he would not have been alive if the suspect's gun had not jammed.

Investigators say the rifle was one of three guns used by Colorado massacre suspect James Holmes in the early Friday killings, along with a shotgun and a .40-caliber pistol. The handgun also had an extended magazine that held 40 rounds, the source said.

It seems to me there are two legitimate purposes for gun ownership:  self-defense, and hunting.  Even if brandishing a weapon can scare off an attacker or home intruder, and even if that happens hundreds of thousands of times per year, in how many of those instances did the fact that the gun had a 40- or 100-round magazine make the difference in scaring off the attacker?  And how many hunters need dozens or hundreds of rounds to shoot a deer?

Admittedly, I am a city dweller who has never handled a gun, so I may be speaking from ignorance.  But there should be a baseline of assumptions about gun control—such as it should not be possible to purchase a 100-round magazine for a semi-automatic assault rifle—that most reasonable people should agree on, and that no politician should find it dangerous to endorse.  That is the naively optimistic part of me.  The realist knows it is not so.  But if we resign ourselves to the idea that these massacres are simply part of the “cost of doing business” associated with the right to bear arms, that is a tragedy unto itself.

 

 

 

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