The solutions offered are ineffective, or target one kind of gun crime when meant for another, or run up against fundamental realities of American culture.
The solutions offered are ineffective, or target one kind of gun crime when meant for another, or run up against fundamental realities of American culture.
T here is little doubt that the past two years have seen a serious crime spike in the United States. The gun-crime rise has been especially disturbing. Using 2019 — before the pandemic and the protests — as a baseline, gun homicides rose 35 percent by the end of 2021, and mass shootings (four or more injured or killed in a single incident) leapt an eye-popping 66 percent.
After all this bloodshed, why, two decades into the 21st century, can’t we get our gun-crime problem in hand? Before we launch with the usual nostrums — ban semi-automatic weapons, increase background checks on purchasers, enforce strict gun-licensing laws — we need to think about the nature of the gun problem and why it is so intractable. The first thing to realize is that there are multiple gun problems, not just one, and policies addressing one issue don’t work for the others.
It is estimated that 42 percent of U.S. households own at least one gun. And since guns continue to be manufactured, sold, and traded, there are many opportunities to obtain firearms. Their ready availability in part accounts for the fact that more than three-quarters of our homicides involve guns. Comparable countries have nowhere near our gun-death figures. In the United Kingdom, guns account for only 6.5 percent of killings, and in Canada it’s 39 percent.
Forging national firearm policies is made more difficult by the uneven distribution of gun culture across the country. While none of the northeastern states have ownership rates above the national average, 13 southern states, ten western states, and seven midwestern states do. Unsurprisingly, 46 percent of rural residents own guns, but only 19 percent of city dwellers do. Support for gun control tracks these regional differences. But gun control is not synonymous with crime control; otherwise, cities such as New York would have very little gun crime.
There are three different types of gun-crime issues, each requiring its own policy response. First is the urban youth-gang and armed-robbery problem. Second are personal disputes among acquaintances (excluding gang members) and domestic conflicts. Third are mass shootings.
Urban gun crimes are committed with handguns, so bans on long guns, such as semi-automatic rifles, would make no difference to the occurrence of these offenses. Robbers and gang members manage to acquire handguns, despite stringent laws against their possession, by theft, straw purchases in states in which the purchase is lawful, black-market sales, loans from family and friends, and other backdoor methods. A surprisingly small proportion of these guns are stolen, though unlicensed possession is illegal even if the weapon is not.
Sentence enhancements for crimes committed with guns have been the principal response to the urban gun problem. We’ve also tried pedestrian stops-and-frisks and voluntary gun-buyback programs, with mixed success. The latest plans are for anti-gang interventions, offering both carrots and sticks to gang members, and stepped-up gun-transport interdiction. Each of these policies may help, but none is a panacea.
They certainly won’t affect personal disputes among acquaintances or domestic conflicts. Acquaintance murders account for four out of ten slayings in the United States, and killings of family members one in five. These incidents do not involve some other crime, such as robbery or drug dealing. In fact, about three-quarters of all murders in the United States are unaccompanied by a felony.These lethal events are facilitated by the ready accessibility of guns in the home or in motor vehicles, and as long as all those firearms are legal, which is the case in most of the United States, they will provide a tragic coda to interpersonal conflict. Enhancing penalties for gun crimes accompanied by felonies will not affect such violent disputes or domestic crimes.
As for mass shootings, some are gang clashes, and the urban measures mentioned above are relevant. But some are carried out by ideologues, such as in the Tree of Life Synagogue killings; terrorists, as with the Naval Air Station attack in Pensacola, Fla.; or the mentally unstable, as we’ve seen with several school shootings.
Some propose renewing the ban on ownership of assault weapons (semi-automatic rifles) to curtail mass shootings. We had such a ban in place from 1994 to 2004. It wasn’t effective. A study by Mother Jones magazine found that assault weapons were involved in four of the 18 (22 percent) public mass murders before the law, four of 16 (25 percent) when the law was applicable, and nine of 38 (24 percent) since. There simply are too many loopholes for such a ban to work. Thousands of assault weapons are already in private possession. Millions of alternative weapons, such as semi-automatic handguns, would be outside the ban, and are frequently used by mass killers.
A second option is to do more to prevent irresponsible users — especially young males with mental disorders — from acquiring weapons. This too is easier said than done. It is true that a disproportionate number of mass public shootings are carried out by psychotics (studies estimate roughly 25 percent), as evidenced by the indiscriminate nature of the killings. Nevertheless, over 99 percent of seriously mentally ill people never do such horrible things, and most psychotics are not violent at all. Our problem is the lack of predictive capability. Mental-health experts can identify the disorders and prescribe treatments, but they usually cannot predict extreme behavior.
Moreover, if we widen the net and compel mental-health providers to report a larger number of patients, it might compromise the necessary trust between therapist and patient. Increased reporting requirements might even discourage those who need help from seeking it — especially if they want to buy a firearm.
Certainly there should be better information sharing between local and state authorities and the FBI’s background-check system (NICS). The feds should have a complete list of people who are not supposed to purchase weapons because of mental infirmities or criminal convictions. We could even expand the list to misdemeanants convicted of more than one gun-possession offense or a violent crime involving a gun. While a NICS fix is sensible, it, too, will not close the back-door channels to weapons. Friends, family, and black marketers will fill the void.
Whatever policy prescriptions we choose, we need to keep in mind that when it comes to gun crime, one size doesn’t fit all, so answers to one aspect of the problem are unlikely to resolve the rest of the predicament.