More Guns Do Not Stop More Crimes, Evidence Shows - Scientific American
"For clues on how guns affect violence, Kennesaw is an obvious place to start. On March 15, 1982, this city 24 miles north of Atlanta passed a controversial law: to “provide for and protect the safety, security and general welfare of the city and its inhabitants,” Kennesaw would require that every head of a household own a firearm and ammunition...
While burglary numbers did drastically decline in Kennesaw after 1981, those statistics can be misleading. McDowall took a closer look at the numbers and noticed that 1981 was an anomaly—there were 75 percent more burglaries that year than there were, on average, in the previous five years. It is no surprise that the subsequent years looked great by comparison. McDowall studied before-and-after burglary numbers using 1978, 1979 or 1980 as starting points instead of 1981 and, as he reported in a 1989 paper, the purported crime drop disappeared. Kennesaw has always had pretty minimal crime, which may have more to do with the residents and location than how many guns it has.
Yet the sense I got in Kennesaw—which feels like a typical small city, not some gun-frenzied town—is that data don't matter to a lot of people. It was similar in other places I visited. What matters more is apparent logic: guns stop criminals, so they keep people safer...
So what does the research say? By far the most famous series of studies on this issue was conducted in the late 1980s and 1990s by Arthur Kellermann, now dean of the F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, and his colleagues. In one, published in 1993 in the New England Journal of Medicine and funded by the CDC, he and his colleagues identified 444 people who had been killed between 1987 and 1992 at home in three U.S. regions—Shelby County, Tennessee, King County, Washington State, and Cuyahoga County, Ohio—and then collected details about them and their deaths from local police, medical examiners and people who had been close to the victims. They found that a gun in the home was associated with a nearly threefold increase in the odds that someone would be killed at home by a family member or intimate acquaintance.
These findings directly contradict the rationale I kept hearing in Georgia, and that could be because human behavior is a lot messier than simple logic predicts. Researchers posit that even if keeping a gun at home does thwart the odd break-in, it may also change the gun owner's behavior in ways that put that person and his or her family more at risk...
There's also the fact that where there are more guns, more opportunities exist for people to steal them and use them nefariously. Indeed, one of Kennesaw's crime problems, Graydon told me, is gun theft, so the Kennesaw Police Department encourages residents to lock their guns up. The NRA, on the other hand, opposes legislation that requires secure gun storage...
The initial work by Kellermann and his colleagues was criticized for not using enough statistical controls. So they went on to publish other studies confirming the link between guns and more violence. In one, they found that a gun in the home was tied to a nearly fivefold increase in the odds of suicide. (More Americans die from gun suicides every year than gun homicides.) In another, published in 1998, they reported that guns at home were four times more likely to cause an accidental shooting, seven times more likely to be used in assault or homicide, and 11 times more likely to be used in a suicide than they were to be used for self-defense.
The research made headlines in the New York Times and the Washington Post. It also infuriated the gun lobby, which launched a war against gun research that persists today...
“The NRA started a multipronged attack on us,” he recounted. “They called the CDC a cesspool of junk science.” Indeed, soon after Kellermann's early studies were published, the NRA ran an article in its official journal, the American Rifleman, encouraging readers to protest the CDC's use of tax dollars to “conduct anti-gun pseudo-scientific studies disguised as research.” The association also asked the National Institute of Health's Office of Scientific Integrity to investigate Kellermann and his colleagues, but it declined. Todd Adkins, current director of research and information at the NRA's Institute for Legislative Action, told me via e-mail that the association was reacting because CDC scientists had started a campaign to persuade Americans that firearms are a menace to public health and ignored data that did not support this idea.
As the dispute continued, Representative Jay Dickey of Arkansas introduced a rider into the CDC's 1996 spending bill mandating that none of its funding be used to advocate or promote gun control. Congress also cut out $2.6 million of the CDC's budget, the exact amount that had been allocated for firearm research the previous year. (Later, that funding was restored but was earmarked for traumatic brain injury.) Harvard's Hemenway says that the move “was a shot across the bow: ‘We're watching you.’” He adds that “the CDC recognized that they better be really, really, really, really careful about guns if they wanted to have an Injury Center.”
Dickey's addition to the CDC's funding bill has been renewed every year since. In fact, in 2011 the language was extended to cover all Department of Health and Human Services agencies, including the NIH. But Dickey later said that he did not intend to put a stop to all gun research—and he wished that he hadn't...
The CDC's hands are still tied...
Garen Wintemute, a physician and noted gun violence researcher at the University of California, Davis, is not terribly surprised that everything went down the way it did. “It's like doing work in any other controversial field that threatens established interests. Those interests respond in a way to minimize the threat”...
More than 30 peer-reviewed studies, focusing on individuals as well as populations, have been published that confirm what Kellermann's studies suggested: that guns are associated with an increased risk for violence and homicide. “There is really uniform data to support the statement that access to firearms is associated with an increased risk of firearm-related death and injury,” Wintemute concludes. Gun advocates argue the causes are reversed: surges in violent crime lead people to buy guns, and weapons do not create the surge. But if that were true, gun purchases would increase in tandem with all kinds of violence. In reality, they do not.
When I asked people I met on my trip to Georgia for their thoughts on how guns influence violence, many said they couldn't believe that guns were a root cause. “It's easier to go after the object than it is to go after the motive,” Graydon told me. He does have a point: A growing body of research suggests that violence is a contagious behavior that exists independent of weapon or means. In this framework, guns are accessories to infectious violence rather than fountainheads. But this does not mean guns don't matter. Guns intensify violent encounters, upping the stakes and worsening the outcomes—which explains why there are more deaths and life-threatening injuries where firearms are common. Violence may be primarily triggered by other violence, but these deadly weapons make all this violence worse...
“I promise you, everybody here that wants a gun has got one or 100,” Phillips told me, drawling out the number so it sounded like “hunnerd.” I asked how many times Scottsboro residents had used their guns to protect themselves. “I've been doing this for 35 years, and I just can't recall one,” the sheriff answered. Harnen, though, suddenly remembered something. “We did have a lady that was in one of our firearms classes. She had a guy try to break into her house,” he recalled. “She yelled and said, ‘I've got a gun,’ and she opened the door, and he was running away—she fired at him.”
But they could not think of any other examples. Graydon, back in Kennesaw, also could not remember a time when a resident used a gun in self-defense, and he has been working for the police department for 31 years.
The frequency of self-defense gun use rests at the heart of the controversy over how guns affect our country. Progun enthusiasts argue that it happens all the time...
The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS)... suggests that victims use guns for self-defense only 65,000 times a year. In 2015 Hemenway and his colleagues studied five years' worth of NCVS data and concluded that guns are used for self-defense in less than 1 percent of all crimes that occur in the presence of a victim. They also found that self-defense gun use is about as effective as other defensive maneuvers, such as calling for help. “It's not as if you look at the data, and it says people who defend themselves with a gun are much less likely to be injured,” says Philip Cook, an economist at Duke University, who has been studying guns since the 1970s.
Kleck and Getz's survey and the NCVS differ in important ways that could help explain the discrepancy between them. The NCVS first establishes that someone has been the victim of an attack before asking about self-defense gun use, which weeds out yes answers from people who might, say, wave their gun around during a bar fight and call it self-defense. Kleck and Getz's survey could overestimate self-defense use by including such ambiguous uses. Kleck counters that the NCVS might underestimate self-defense because people who do not trust government surveyors will be afraid to admit that they used their gun. Yet people who participate in the NCVS are told at the start that they are protected under federal law and that their responses will remain anonymous...
Most Americans with concealed carry permits are white men living in rural areas, yet it is young black men in urban areas who disproportionately encounter violence. Violent crimes are also geographically concentrated: Between 1980 and 2008, half of all of Boston's gun violence occurred on only 3 percent of the city's streets and intersections. And in Seattle, over a 14-year-period, every single juvenile crime incident took place on less than 5 percent of street segments. In other words, most people carrying guns have only a small chance of encountering situations in which they could use them for self-defense...
Even as the belief that we are all future crime targets has taken hold, violent crime rates have actually dropped in the U.S. in recent decades. According to the FBI, rates were a whopping 41 percent lower in 2015 than they were in 1996. The NRA attributes this decrease to the acquisition of more guns. But that is misleading. What has increased is the number of people who own multiple guns—the actual number of people and households who own them has substantially dropped.
Recently researchers have tried to assess the value of self-defense gun use by studying “stand your ground” laws, which gained notoriety after teenager Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman in Florida in 2012. These laws allow people to kill in self-defense when they feel they are in danger. Progun groups argue that they should deter crime because criminals will know that victims have no reason not to fight back. But a January 2017 study reported that when “stand your ground” was passed in Florida, the monthly homicide rate went up by nearly a quarter. And a 2012 study found that states that adopted these laws experienced an abrupt and sustained 8 percent increase in homicides relative to other states. Mark Hoekstra, a co-author of the 2012 paper and an economist at Texas A&M University, put it this way: “We found that making it easier to kill people resulted in more dead people.”...
John Donohue, an economist at Stanford University, reported in a working paper in June 2017 that when states ease permit requirements, most violent crime rates increase and keep getting worse. A decade after laws relax, violent crime rates are 13 to 15 percent higher than they were before. And in 2004 the National Research Council, which provides independent advice on scientific issues, turned its attention to firearm research, including Lott's findings. It asked 15 scholars to reanalyze Lott's data because “there was such a conflict in the field about the findings,” recalls panel chair and criminologist Charles Wellford, now a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland. Lott's models, they found, could be tweaked in tiny ways to produce big changes in results. “The analyses that we did, and that others have done, show that these estimates are very fragile,” Wellford explains. “The committee, with one exception, concluded that you could not accept his conclusion that more guns meant less crime.” Wintemute summarized it this way: “There are a few studies that suggest that liberalizing access to concealed firearms has, on balance, beneficial effects. There are a far larger number of studies that suggest that it has, on balance, detrimental effects.”
Lott, who now runs the nonprofit Crime Prevention Research Center, says the panel was biased and “set up to try to go against my work.” The NRA takes a related tack: it says research highlighting the danger of weapons is part of a gun-control agenda to confiscate firearms.
It is crucial, though, to distinguish the leadership of progun organizations from their constituents, who often have more nuanced opinions... According to a 2015 survey published by Johns Hopkins University researchers, 85 percent of gun owners support background checks for all gun sales, including sales through unlicensed dealers—even though the NRA strongly opposes them...
“There's a lot of stuff that the NRA does that I don't agree with,” he said, standing behind a glass case filled with handguns. “They've gone farther right than the other side left. They're throwing common sense out the window.” Indeed, the NRA of today is actually more extreme than the organization used to be. In the 1930s NRA president Karl Frederick testified in Congress in support of the National Firearms Act, which restricted concealed carrying. “I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns,” Frederick said.
The belief that more guns lead to fewer crimes is founded on the idea that guns are dangerous when bad guys have them, so we should get more guns into the hands of good guys. Yet Cook, the Duke economist, says this good guy/bad guy dichotomy is a false and dangerous one. Even upstanding American citizens are only human—they can “lose their temper, or exercise poor judgment, or misinterpret a situation, or have a few drinks,” he explains, and if they're carrying guns when they do, bad things can ensue. In 2013 in Ionia, Mich., a road rage incident led two drivers—both concealed carry permit holders—to get out of their cars, take out their guns and kill each other...
The popular gun-advocacy bumper sticker says that “guns don't kill
people, people kill people”—and it is, in fact, true. People, all of us,
lead complicated lives, misinterpret situations, get angry, make
mistakes. And when a mistake involves pulling a trigger, the damage
can't be undone."
Clearly the only bias possible is anti-gun - pro-gun researchers are never biased
