Does the United States have a gun problem? There are facts and figures, and there are emotions. You are not a normal human being if you don’t react emotionally to certain kinds of events, and being in touch with these emotions can be a good guide to what you think is right and wrong. Then again, I believe any human being within the normal range can be trained to dig into the facts and evidence, draw appropriate conclusions and build their own personal mental model of the world. Once you have a sense of what you think is right and wrong, this is how you figure out what you think can and should be done about it. So, I’m going to quote from an article that caused a strong emotional reaction from me (warning, it’s probably upsetting to almost anyone but especially parents), and then I’ll go to some facts and figures that I find disturbing on an intellectual level, but also point toward some ideas about what can and should be done.
If you are not emotionally dead, you will be horrified by this stomach-churning New York Times article about children who are killed accidentally by guns.
It had been a good day for Tristan. He had used the potty for the first time. He and his mother had danced a little jig. Down the hall, Tristan entered the bedroom where his father had been staying because of quarrels with his wife. She had chided her husband in the past for forgetting to safely store his .45-caliber handgun. But he had recently put a lock on his door to keep out his wife and children. He thought he had locked the door before going out to cut the grass.
The lock, though, had failed to catch. Tristan found the loaded gun under the pillow on his father’s bed. He pointed it at his own forehead and pulled the trigger. Hearing the gunshot, Sergeant Underhill sprinted inside to find Tristan face down on the bed, the gun beneath him. When he called 911, the sergeant was screaming so hysterically that the dispatcher initially mistook him for a woman.
“My 2-year-old just shot himself in the head,” he said breathlessly. “He’s dead.”
There’s a picture of the kid alive and happy, which makes it infinitely worse. That’s one horrifying anecdote in this story. It goes on and on and on.
That’s the horror. Let’s turn to some cold facts and figures. Here’s a blog posting called “Deaths from assault over time in 40 relatively rich countries“. Other rich countries do not have the level of violence that we have in the United States. If you are the evidence-inclined type, have a look at the graphics and note that they are on a log scale. The United States has a rate of violent death 5-10 times higher than our close cultural cousins like Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. And all these places have a little bit higher rates than most of Western Europe and Asia. The places with rates equal or higher than the United States are developing countries and/or countries with organized crime on a large scale.
So is the easy accessibility of firearms the cause of violence? I tend to think tough guy culture (one thing that is unmistakable in both articles is that men and boys are the ones shooting and being shot), a history of inequality and racial discrimination, and the so-called war on drugs are the real drivers. These are the policy levers we need to be working in the medium to longer term. But being awash in guns certainly makes the violence that does occur more deadly. Common sense gun control policies would certainly be great in the short term to treat the symptoms, as long as they are backed up by policies to treat the disease. But hard-core, violent law enforcement approaches to treat the symptoms may actually make the disease worse in the long term, which is probably what happened in the 80s and 90s that we are continuing to pay for today.