Note: this article was a part of another, larger article composed in December of 2015.
I honestly don’t even know where to begin on the data I’ve looked at over the last week or so. There are so many conversations about homicide, suicide, and guns you could have that any number of different arguments are going to be put forward. And there’s an onus, if you are being intellectually honest, to go through all of them. In lieu of more thorough editing, I’ll start with the tabs I opened the furthest back.
1. The conversation on guns in America obviously tends to focus on America, and homicides tend to be the major topic of interest. Guns are the predominant murder weapon in US homicides, accounting for 2/3rds of them. The step in logic anti-gun folks often then make is that reducing the prevalence of guns could therefore decrease homicide rates. But homicides are homicides; it makes no functional difference what a man is killed with; he’s dead either way. If people are prone to murder, removing guns may just shift the modus by which murder is committed. Or, it might not.
Anti-gun folks will look at other countries and point out that they have lower gun crime… depending on what countries you look at. It is generally taken for granted that the US has a lower homicide rate than, say, Venezuela. That there is a tacit admission that developing nations are expected to be prone to violence is an interesting one, but a bit of a separate topic. Out of Europe, the US and Canada, and a couple east Asian countries, America has the most gun crime. They also have a completely different culture and history regarding guns, so to what extent is that a trenchant insight?
To put gun violence into context, one also wants to look at national homicide rates in general. In that case, the US is a lot worse than Western and Central Europe, although on par with Eastern Europe, but half of Russia’s (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate ). The caveat with this is how reliable these data are. Many nations do not have detailed or reliable records. Yemen strikes me as a salient example. Their table puts them at 6.6 homicides per 100,000 people. How does, say, the Al Qaida insurgency factor into this? Or their ongoing civil war? Or this recent insurgency? Or this one?
The varying national homicide rates seem to be fairly complex, and don’t seem to correlate well with much in the way of a couple specific factors, let alone gun laws.
But what if you look at mass shootings, which tend to kick off these kinds of debates? Germany has fewer mass shootings, yes, but it also has a quarter of the size of the US, for example, so again, it’s rates you’re looking for, not sheer numbers.
These numbers are hard to come by, probably because not every country on earth collects data like the FBI. I came across two articles with data, but they seem to be proprietary on both accounts. Politifact is a non-partisan subsidiary of the Tampa Bay Times, and Crime Prevention Research Center appears to be an independent organization on the pro-gun side of the spectrum–they actually reference and critique the PolitiFact article. The PolitiFact data show a higher rate of incidences in the US, but the CPRC has the US somewhat in the middle, reflecting the differences in data acquisition. In both sets of data, Switzerland, Finland, and Norway all have higher mortality rates than the US in mass shootings.
Australia is frequently held up as a paragon of a successful implementation of gun control laws in an otherwise gun-laden nation. The first thing that jumped out at me is, like with most comparisons of American and other countries, ignoring the fact that America is absolutely massive compared to any other individual Western nation. Size and population wise, it’s more or less comparable to Europe as a whole (excepting Russia). That’s not even considering the socioeconomic differences. Australia has a population of about 24 million, comparable to the State of Texas’ 27 million people. Australia’s entire population is less than 1% of the US’. So ceteris paribus, any given event is going to be more than 100 times more likely to occur in all of America than all of Australia. Australia instituted fairly substantial restrictions on gun ownership in 1996 in the wake of the Port Arthur massacre. It culminated in a gun buyback program. The Wikipedia entry does a lovely job summarizing it.
One argument is that Australia hasn’t had any mass shootings since the implementation of the ’96 restrictions. This is part of a huge semantic battle being waged to fight for either side: the definition of a mass shooting. The FBI uses a minimum of 4 fatalities in a single incident to qualify (see http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44126.pdf ), but obviously there are other ways to define a mass shooting. A man shooting but not killing his 4 family members could reasonably qualify as a mass shooting–then again, a guy going berserk and killing his family isn’t the same scenario as the guy walking into a shopping mall an opening fire. But if that’s not the definition data collectors are using in statistics reports, the arguments you make with one set of data are not going to be comparable to others, and people have nasty habit of conflating those kinds of data. Australia has actually had multiple mass shooting by the FBI definition since the ’96 law changes (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Australia ). These were all incidents of familicide. They had a public shooting with the Monash Universiy shooting in 2002. However, there were only 2 fatalities, so it wouldn’t count as a mass shooting for the FBI statistics.
Australia’s regulations are hardly a panacea, but one could still make the argument that they decreased homicide rates, or even suicide rates–more on that tangent in a moment. So here’s what the data say on that.
It’s hardly conclusive, but the fact that there isn’t a blatant “definitely decreased” implies no strong effect. Even if you don’t want to read the whole article, look at the graphs. Look how completely non-linear both homicide and suicide rates are. It’s not clean enough to say definitively “legislation X made outcome Y”.
Total suicides have been gradually increasing since the 40’s, but the trace for the last century is almost sinusoidal. There was a massive plunge in the 90’s, sure, but there have been several throughout the last century.
Firearms suicides and homicides have been declining since the mid to late 80’s, pre ’96 restrictions. Overall homicides are still above their pre 1970’s levels. Those traces are pretty volatile, and a pox on anyone who says with casual certainty that the regulations worked, let alone that the results would be replaceable in a nation with over 100 times as many people and a myriad of other demographic differences.
Then, in any analysis of the statistics, understanding trends is hugely important, and often completely ignored. In the US, homicide, as well as crime in general, has been dropping precipitously since the early 90’s. Homicide rates today are literally half of what they were in ’93 (you have to scroll down a bit to get to the modern US). But if you look back a few decades, we’re back to what we were at in the 50’s. So was violence down then and now, or was it up in the 70’s? What caused the changes? Even if you want to argue that something like the Brady firearms bill (in effect in ’94) that doesn’t explain why, say, assault–which is a non-gun crime–declined as well. This can cut both ways: it’s hard to prove any given gun law relaxation tipped the scales so drastically. Snapshots may paint a picture, but one has to use caution. For the math inclined: there’s a difference between a function and the derivative of a function (inb4 f(x)=e^x).
By the way, each country’s data are going to look different. So when you’re comparing, say, homicide in the US with the UK, you also need to be aware of differences in the trends in each country. England’s homicide rate has been hovering around the 1 in 100,000 for decades, although it has been gradually increasing since the 70’s. So there’s say, no major correlation between UK homicide rates and the ’88 or ’97 gun regulations (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_the_United_Kingdom).
Nonetheless, here’ a snapshot of gun ownership rates and homicide in the US.
And here’s something that looks at the change over time.
The whole paper is behind a paywall, unfortunately. I’m not sure how the legality works on this kind of thing, so I’m not sure I can suggest that you do something like, say, go to a site like this and search the title and get the full article.
The Mises article shows no correlation. The Siegel et al. paper shows a relationship between the rate of ownership and crime. By the way, the rate is 5 times higher for black people.So if we’re going to have a conversation about gun data, and we start looking at demographic trends, we have to be prepared to address these kinds of findings. That these data can be used to justify racism is unfortunate, but that does not change the reality of the data. The Siegel paper goes back to the 80’s when homicide was double the rate it is today. So how applicable are those data to now? The Siegel paper also looks at something called the GINI coefficient, a measure of income disparity in a population. If your country has a large GINI coefficient (that is, closer to 1), you have more income disparity. So do countries with greater socioeconomic disparity have different rates of crime? A bit, yeah.
Does this mean that income inequality itself causes the violence? To an extent, that’s plausible, but what is much more likely is that factors that cause income inequality also contribute to violence. Take America’s absolutely insane incarceration rates. Throwing people into cells with violent criminals sabotages your financial prospects for sure, and it’s not insane to wonder if that contributes to crime. Anyway, the GINI coefficient as a proxy measurement is worth looking at vis-a-vis Europe. European countries tend to have lower GINI coefficients than the US. European countries, compared to the whole US, tend to be more socioeconomically homogeneous. Something to take into consideration every time you see any comparison between the whole US and European countries individually.
After homicide, the conversation can switch to suicide. In the US, over half of the 40,000 or so suicides each year are from firearms. So again, the argument is that decreasing firearms access will lead to a decrease in suicide. Along the lines of homicide, you then again have to ask whether or not people will just pick a different method of suicide. Looking at other countries, there isn’t necessarily a correlation between guns and suicide. Japan and South Korea have huge suicide rates, but very little in the way of guns. But the culture is obviously completely different. If you look at the UK, its suicide rate is half of the US’, so one might be inclined to say that, ah ha!, industrialized white people don’t commit suicide as much with fewer guns. But Sweden’s rate, for example, is comparable to the US’ in spite of their stricter gun laws. Suicide is also a complicated thing. Again, interestingly, the middle east has extremely low suicide rates. And a fact I noticed, although not germane to this conversation, is that only four countries (Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, and Iraq) have higher rates of suicide for females than males.
After suicides you have gun accidents. In 2013, there were 505 determined accidental firearms fatalities in the US. There were about 3,400 drownings, more than 2,700 death from fires, 30,000 from falls, and over 37,000 from motor vehicle accidents (see http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf (table 18)). So keep that in mind for perspective.
A segue and digression from that is the number of “legal intervention” firearms fatalities, aka police action. Those numbers may actually need to be higher.
A sizable number of high-profile shootings occur at schools, and are perpetrated by youths. Therefore, a focus of gun discussion often falls upon talking about school mass shootings, and how to prevent those. Here’s a few articles that focus on that, if you’re interested:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00008.x/full
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11392351
I realise that is an abstract only, and that the rest is behind a paywall. I’m not sure how the legality works on this kind of thing, so I’m not sure I can suggest that you do something like, say, go to a site like this and search the title and get the full article
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/iscs13.pdf
There don’t appear to be much in the way of obvious insights. There’s hardly a “for sure” profile of a teen school shooter. They’re male. That’s pretty much the only given. Some tend to be “loners”, have suffered bullying or abuse, etc. But not all by a long shot. And then there’s the converse: most people who are bullied, abused, etc, never kill anyone. Mental illness gets bandied about a lot. The Meloy et al. paper found only 23% of their subjects had documented psychiatric history. One could argue there’s undiagnosed issues, but it’s hardly in the majority. There’s the argument by tautology that you’d have to be mentally ill to walk into a class and shoot people, but alas, by our current standards of mental health, that is not the case. So even if the clamors for “improved mental health treatment” that arise after these incidents go answered and do what their proponents expect, you’re still leaving a lot of these incidents unsolved. On a related note, while this is not an academic paper, it’s still a nice conversation piece on the topic.
It appears that depression is the most commonly cited clinical mental illness associated with these types of event. Of course you can note that there’s a pretty huge overlap between suicides and depression too.
So what’s to be done about these guns? The proposed solutions are myriad, and they all fall under the annoyingly vague umbrella of “gun control”. There are any number of superficial tweaks concerning the weapons themselves that come up. Limiting ammunition magazines to certain sizes, limiting the number of attachments or modifications to a firearm, that kind of thing
Limiting a handgun to a 7 round magazine will not cut lethality from suicides or accidents at all–those are obviously single-bullet incidences. I suppose in theory that it could cut down on the murder rate, but it’s hard to see how. The difference between, say, a 7 and 8 round magazine is the time it take to get off shot number 8. If you’ve taken an econ class, we could call it the marginal rate of discharge, or something like that. In an 8 round magazine, the time it takes between firing round 7 to get off round 8 is a split second. In a 7 round magazine, that time is however long it takes you to reload, which even for someone extremely well trained is several seconds. Those seconds can be the difference between life and death. At least in theory. How many times do civilians in self-defense situations need to shoot before they’re safe? Well, punch it into Google and this is the top result at the time of this writing.
The URL suggests this is a pretty pro-gun site, and they use self-reported data collected by the NRA, so I think it’s safe to assume that the bias would run in favor of a “whatever you need to be safe” attitude. Nonetheless, in only 3 of the 482 incidents (0.6%) did people ever reload at all, and one of those was a dude fighting a lion with a .32 revolver. The average number of shots fired was 2. Almost universally, the first shot or two would either kill the target or cause them to flee, even when there were multiple actors (which was the case in about a third of incidents).
Folks on the pro-gun side will sometimes point to police figures which suggest needing multiple rounds per incident. I couldn’t find national data on a cursory search, but the NYPD has data that will probably suffice.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/nyregion/08nypd.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.theppsc.org/Staff_Views/Aveni/OIS.pdf
Police do in fact use more rounds, averaging around 5 or 6 in shootout events. So the practical necessity of needing magazines that aren’t significantly restricted is demonstrable in those incidences. But of course, the police are not in the same boat as civilians. They are not bound by the same legal obligation to retreat, and they are quite literally paid to pursue criminals, who tend to be more likely than the general populace to pull a weapon on you. And for the most part, gun control folks don’t seem to be asking for these restrictions to apply to police–although when New York instituted a magazine capacity limit, initially, they forgot to except police from this rule, but it was quickly changed.
On the other hand, as far as limiting damage goes, what does effect does magazine capacity have on homicide rates? A study using data from Jersey City (a fairly high-crime area) compared pistols to revolvers to investigate that in a sense, as pistols are higher capacity than revolvers.
The military uses a quarter million rounds per kill, by the way. Not super relevant to the debate, I know, but it’s an interesting factoid. Most of the military’s shots are actually suppressing fire, not close-range shootouts.
Homicides averaged 2-3 shots. So on that basis, limiting capacity doesn’t seem like it’d do much of anything. The pistol uses had a slightly higher incidence of injuring (but not killing) a second person, so one could make the case that capacity limitation might cut down on injuries by a few percent. The revolver incidents induced more fatalities though. The major limiting factor with this is the other differences between pistols and revolvers, either with the guns themselves or how they are wielded. Revolvers have a slower rate of fire physically, the caliber of bullets tend to be different, and the anatomical area people were shot in were different (revolvers had way more head shots). So this is hardly evidence that capacity restrictions will slash injury rates.
In the mass shooting incidents, the capacity limitations are again also pretty much useless. The guys who walk into a school and open fire bring more ammo with them than they’ll ever use. The couple second delay in reloading isn’t going to make a huge difference in injuries or fatalities.
Source data is a pain to find, but secondary sources put the mass shooting deaths as under 1% of homicide deaths averaging around 130 deaths per year the last few years. Even still, many of those incidents involve targeting family members, not just walking into a building an opening fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/21/mass-shootings-domestic-violence-nra/1937041/
As for the attachments and modifications restrictions, these are ergonomic and aesthetic additions, and don’t actually increase lethality. Having a collapsible stock on a rifle isn’t going to make the gun more dangerous. A forward grip or a fancy scope isn’t going to make the gun any more dangerous if someone walks into a room of unarmed people and starts shooting at point-blank.
The gun attachment restrictions are germane in so-called assault weapons regulations. This is probably a good place to take a brief detour on some definitions. If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone ask “why does a civilian need an semi-automatic weapon?”, I could buy my own lobbyist. Same goes for “assault weapon”.
A semi-automatic firearm is, speaking simply, a gun that fires one shot every time you pull the trigger. The vast majority of civilian firearms are semi-automatic. Your standard pistol is semi-auto, as are many rifles, for example. This is in contrast to guns like pump-action shotguns, where you pump to reload between each shot; bolt-action rifles, where you slide bolt back in between each shot; or a lever action rifle, where you ratchet a lever forward and back between each shot. Revolvers are technically single or double action, but outcome-wise, modern revolvers are essentially semi-automatic. This is also in contrast to fully-automatic, which is where you pull the trigger, and it keeps firing until you run out of ammo. These are also called machine guns.
An assault rifle is a rifle that is capable of select-firing, that is, switching between modes of fire. This usually includes semi-automatic and either fully automatic, or a burst fire (firing a couple rounds per trigger pull).
An assault weapon is a rather arbitrary US legal term. It involves any number of fairly superficial or non-important distinctions. Most of them involve firearms with a detachable magazine (most pistols and rifles), as opposed to, say, rifles where you insert the rounds individually; a pistol grip (all pistols and a lot of rifles), which is just a grip that looks like a pistol’s, as opposed to rifles that don’t have the stick-shaped grip dropping down vertically; and any number of attachments such as collapsible butt stocks, barrel shrouds, and sundry things.
Many people bandy about these words out of complete ignorance because they sound scary. “Semi-automatic” rifle sounds much more dangerous than just a plain old vanilla rifle. But banning semi-automatics specifically would be kind of weird. So revolvers and machine pistols are okay, but not handguns? A bolt-action was good enough to take down JFK, so it should be good enough for you? Banning automatic weapons at least as a sense of logic to it: weapons that can fire a lot of bullets in extremely quick succession at least sounds like it might be more dangerous.
Fully automatic weapons have been heavily regulated in the US since the 1930’s. Civilians do not have an easy time getting their hands on automatic weapons legally. Nonetheless, there are somewhere around a quarter million legally owned automatic weapons out there. It’s hard to find statistics on fatalities caused by legally owned handguns. One website puts the figure at a mere two incidents since 1934. It’s an argument from silence, which is not ideal, but a left-wing pro-gun-control website picked up the same report and endorsed the numbers. So the opposition doesn’t seem to disagree with it, at least.
So then there’s illegally owned automatic weapons. The FBI doesn’t appear to keep national data on the subject. The state of California does have some data on it, though, from a 2009 sample of firearms taken into evidence from criminal investigations. Out of the 32 firearms involved in homicide incidents, only one (4% of the total) had automatic capabilities. Alas, this is obviously a very small sample, and it doesn’t provide good data about lethality compared to non-automatic firearms.
Assault rifles, being capable of burst or full-auto fire, fall under the umbrella of heavily controlled firearms. Assault weapons have included semi-auto rifles. Again, the distinction of “assault” is purely rhetorical, not a functional distinction. Even if the assault weapons ban could somehow prevent any rifle homicide from occurring, that would still only reduce homicides by about 5%.
On a similar note, there is a complaint that floats around that is critical of people owning “high-powered” rifles. Technically, they mean energy, but regardless, this is an argument that seems to be borne out of an ignorance of firearms mechanics. The amount of kinetic energy in a bullet can be calculated by the equation .5*mass*(velocity squared). This velocity comes from the explosion generated by the ignition of the powder in the cartridge. So even a small caliber (sized) round can have higher energy if it is fired with more combustible powder (which effects a higher velocity). So plenty of bolt-action hunting rifles have more “power” than a fully decked-out AR-15 “assault” weapon. The argument about the relationship between bullet energy and lethality is an ongoing debate, and if you ever want to start a row in firearms enthusiast circles, state an opinion on the matter. It’s part of a larger concept called “stopping power“–that is, how well a bullet can stop a target.
Back to mass murder, which is where a huge push for gun control usually stems from–at least the volume tends to be the loudest after these incidences. The Congressional Research Service put out a solid document on the topic earlier this year.
A number of things of note. One paragraph worth looking at:
“It is also noteworthy that these FBI classifications of multiple homicides—double, triple, mass, spree, and serial—were largely conceptualized to aid law enforcement in investigations through criminal profiling and not for statistical data collection purposes. When the cases of individual offenders are evaluated, there sometimes exists potential for overlap among these classifications, particularly for mass and spree murders, and less so for mass and serial murders. Consequently, for statistical purposes, these classifications are not always mutually exclusive, which in some cases can present difficulties for researchers and can result in different judgments and varying findings with regard to the frequency and deadliness of these incidents. ”
That is, be careful when looking at long term statistics, because the definitions aren’t always consistent, and the specifics you’re looking for may not always be there. The FBI seems to have some of the world’s best data on homicide, and even they have any number of limitations.
A paragraph with some statistics people will want to see:
“DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) estimated that there were 987 four or more victim homicide incidents from 1980 to 2011, or an average 31 per year. However, while the bulk of those incidents were mass murders, it is probable that some of those incidents were serial murders committed over extended time periods, or spree murders that lasted longer than roughly 24 hours. For that 31-year period, four or more victim homicides incidents accounted for 0.19% of all murders and nonnegligent manslaughter incidents and 0.87% of all victims who perished in those incidents.” Nota bene that this covers a span prior to the decline of the homicide rate that started in the 1990’s.
In 2011, 0.6% of all deaths in the US were homicides.
That same year, 150 deaths were attributed to mass shooting events, for a total of less than 0.006% of all fatalities.
Looking at five year averages, mass shooting incidents can be broken into three main groups based on sample incidents (which may suffer from selection bias, so caveat when extrapolating the numbers out). Very roughly, about 40% of the incidents are familicide, where the perpetrator kills their family at home or in secluded areas; 40% were the product or related to another underlying crime, such as a robbery that turned into a shootout; 20% were the incidents involving someone going to a public place and opening fire.
Here are some major points on the public mass shootings:
“Offenders used firearms that could be characterized as “assault weapons” in 18 of 66 incidents (27.3%), in that they carried rifles or pistols capable of accepting detachable magazines that might have previously fallen under the 10-year, now-expired federal assault weapons ban (1994-2004). In one of those incidents, the assault weapon had been illegally converted into a machine gun. In another case, an off-duty police officer used a legally registered machine gun that had been issued to him by his department. In 38 incidents, the offender carried a single firearm. In 28 out of 66 incidents (42.4%), offender or offenders carried multiple firearms.”
“Out of 68 offenders, 39 offenders committed suicide (57.4%), 8 were killed by police, 2 were wounded and then arrested, and the remaining 18 were arrested. One offender was female. All but two of these incidents involved single offenders. Those two incidents included the April 20, 1999, Columbine, CO, high school shooting and the October 3, 2002, Washington, DC, area sniper attacks. The average and median age of offenders was 36 years old, the mode was 42. Three offenders were juveniles (less than 18 years old), including the two co-conspirators in the Columbine, CO, and DC-area shootings.”
Figure 9 in the report is worth looking at, as it demonstrates that there is no association between the homicide rate and the mass shooting rate.
Going back to the “assault weapon” ban arguments, they note: “In summation, out of 317 ‘mass shootings,’ offenders used firearms that could be characterized as ‘assault weapons’ in 31 incidents (9.78%), or roughly 1 out of 10 incidents. In some, but not all, of these incidents, the capabilities of these firearms arguably led to higher victim counts in terms of both killed and wounded. In other incidents, however, like the familicide described above, the fact that the firearm used to kill one of the victims could be characterized as an ‘assault weapon,’ does not arguably inform the gun control debate a great deal, because the offender did not fire multiple rounds with that firearm to murder multiple victims, nor did he reload. If an authoritative and comprehensive dataset of types of firearms used, numbers of shots fired, and reloads made in mass shooting incidents could be established, Congress and other policymakers would arguably have an improved basis from which to assess proposals regarding the capacity of detachable magazines and semiautomatic firearms capable of accepting those magazines.”
So how do mass shootings end? Pro-gun circles often toss around the aphorism that “the only person who can stop a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun.” For the more pro-gun, that would include law-abiding firearms carriers, and for both pro- and anti- gun control folks, that includes the police. The FBI has a good paper that covers active shooter incidents, which are defined as “an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area.” It’s not a comprehensive mass shooting paper, basically, but there’s a lot of applicable insight.
The section titled “resolutions” has a lot of interesting numbers:
“The majority of the 160 incidents (90 [56.3%]) ended on the shooter’s initiative—sometimes when the shooter committed suicide or stopped shooting, and other times when the shooter fled the scene. There were at least 25 incidents where the shooter fled the scene before police arrived. In 4 additional incidents, at least 5 shooters fled the scene and were still at large at the time the study results were released. In other incidents, it was a combination of actions by citizens and/or law enforcement that ended the shootings. In at least 65 (40.6%) of the 160 incidents, citizen engagement or the shooter committing suicide ended the shooting at the scene before law enforcement arrived.
Of those: In 37 incidents (23.1%), the shooter committed suicide at the scene before police arrived. In 21 incidents (13.1%), the situation ended after unarmed citizens safely and successfully restrained the shooter. In 2 of those incidents, 3 off-duty law enforcement officers were present and assisted. Of note, 11 of the incidents involved unarmed principals, teachers, other school staff and students who confronted shooters to end the threat (9 of those shooters were students). In 5 incidents (3.1%), the shooting ended after armed individuals who were not law enforcement personnel exchanged gunfire with the shooters. In these incidents, 3 shooters were killed, 1 was wounded, and 1 committed suicide. The individuals involved in these shootings included a citizen with a valid firearms permit and armed security guards at a church, an airline counter, a federally managed museum, and a school board meeting. In 2 incidents (1.3%), 2 armed, off-duty police officers engaged the shooters, resulting in the death of the shooters. In 1 of those incidents, the off-duty officer assisted a responding officer to end the threat.
Even when law enforcement arrived quickly, many times the shooter still chose to end his life. In 17 (10.6%) of the 160 incidents, the shooter committed suicide at the scene after law enforcement arrived but before officers could act. In 45 (28.1%) of the 160 incidents, law enforcement and the shooter exchanged gunfire. Of those 45 incidents, the shooter was killed at the scene in 21, killed at another location in 4, wounded in 9, committed suicide in 9, and surrendered in 2.”
So to put the aphorism to the test, in about half of the incidents, the person who stops the bad guy with the gun is the bad guys him- (or her-, in a couple instances) self. Unarmed bystanders ended the situation over 4 times more than armed ones. The police end the situation in a bit over a quarter of incidents.
So what’s to be done, taking some of these data into account? Let’s go over some of the proposed gun controls again. We’ll say for simplicity’s sake that all rifles used in homicides are “assault weapons”, and that reinstating the assault weapons ban would eliminate all assault weapons fatalities–even though that certainly can’t be substantiated and is downright preposterous. We’ll also grant that magazines limited to an arbitrary five rounds would cut lethality from mass shootings by 50% due to reloading time, and that a capacity law can be implemented with 100% efficacy. We’ll say that targeted mental health interventions will prevent 100% of the roughly 25% of mass shooters who have had signs of mental illness, extrapolating from the Meloy et al. data (even though it only covered adolescents, we’ll say it would be the same for percentage for the adults too). How many lives do we save each year?
We’ll go with a number from the DOJ of 130 deaths per year on average from mass shootings, based on more recent years. 40% of those are familicides, unaffected by the clip or assault weapons regulations. The assault weapons ban shaves off 27% for the 20% of general mass shooters (-14), and 10% off the 40% mass shooters involved in other crimes (-3), per the BOJ stats. I’ll be generous and decrease the total by 33, representing the quarter reduction for the mental health (subtracting this after the others). So even rounding up, we cut the number of deaths in mass shootings by an average of 50 per year.
On to regular homicides: based on FBI data, we cut out all 323 confirmed rifles, plus another 401 for the unconfirmed, assuming that the distribution of rifles is the same in the confirmed as the unconfirmed. So that’s 724 there.
Now let’s say better regulations cut accident fatalities in half. That’s another 203 saved.
So without making major handgun restrictions, which I think would be fair to admit would be a more difficult to do politically, we’ve got 927 lives saved a year from gun homicide. Not too shabby. For some perspective, going back to the CDC data (table 18), that’s still less than the number of people pushed to their deaths (976). It’s about 3% as much as those who die from accidental falls; it’s less than a third of people who die in fires; it’s less than a quarter of people who drown; it’s less than 3% of the number of people who die in traffic accidents.
See http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf
So the, “we need common-sense gun control” arguments, from a statistics standpoint, don’t seem to merit the enthusiasm they’re given. Yeah, saving 900 lives a year would be great, obviously. But to what extent would the regulations actually have this desired effect, and is it worth the expense? It’s a fair point to discuss. I’m not saying this shuts down the argument. But the perspective might be worthwhile. The high-profile mass shootings, while obviously tragic, are such a small percentage of deaths.
The vast majority of non-suicide gun deaths are homicides that are handgun-based with individual victims. So even if gun control regulations worked, they would have to be targeting basic handgun use. Magazine capacity regulations don’t appear to be useful in that regard. Effective regulation would be intervening in the ability to own undeniably civilian-appropriate weaponry. Again, not saying the argument can’t be made, but it’d be absurd to say that the pro-gun side doesn’t have a leg to stand on. This would involve taking away a tool many, many Americans feel is appropriate for civilian self-defense. There would be a substantial practical cost, and a moral quandary you would have to argue down. How would we reduce the number of guns currently in circulation? How do we prevent people from making or importing guns? Would this stop criminals, I mean, they all ready break the law, why would they follow gun laws but not others? At what point do you have the right to tell people they can’t use a reasonable tool to defend their own person or their family? These are not questions to be taken flippantly.
The “fungibility” of murder weapons is something else to look at. There have been very high-profile vehicular mass murders in recent memory, including in Australia and France. Mass murder through arson is another thing, with high profile cases in Australia and Japan. While horrific and shocking, again, in the grand scheme of things, it’s difficult to determine whether or not there is some base-rate of mass murder we would expect to see. That is, if the US somehow did implement gun control measures that reduced firearms ownership rates, that doesn’t necessarily mean people would just find another way to commit mass murder at a comparable rate; it also doesn’t mean they wouldn’t. I just don’t think there are conclusive enough data.