Commentary. Ironies Abound When Seeking to Understand Our Nation s Gun Violence

Transcription

1 Commentary Ironies Abound When Seeking to Understand Our Nation s Gun Violence Gregg Lee Carter October 5, If there is ever a time to improve the public s understanding of gun violence, it is when its attention has been grabbed, which sadly is exactly what a mass shooting does especially when it is on the scale of the tragedy that occurred in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017 (59 shot dead; another 527 injured). Key questions involving mass shootings include their incidence and whether stronger gun control laws can reduce not only them, in particular, but also gun violence in general. Examination of these questions reveals multiple ironies, ironies that indicate how difficult it has become to resolve the national gun debate. Incidence Although not an everyday experience, most people are generally not shocked to hear that several gang members have been shot by a member of a rival gang especially if drugs are involved. On the other hand, the kind of mass shooting that has repeatedly shocked the nation in recent years is what the FBI labels as active shooter incidents, those involving mass killings that are not drug- or gang-related and that often occur in public settings such as schools, workplaces, shopping areas, concerts, and places of worship. Even though generally agreed that such incidents do not include those with gang or drug connections, different researchers use different operational definitions for what constitutes an active-shooter mass shooting. For example, Stanford University (2017) researchers consider such an incident to involve at least 3 shooting victims (not necessarily fatalities), while other researchers require multiple homicides to be involved (e.g., Carter, 2017, examines those incidents with at least 3 fatalities). No matter what definition is used, all of them indicate a dramatic rise in such incidents over the past two decades. Ironically, while these incidents have been on the rise, the nation s overall and gunrelated murder rates have been on the decline:

2 Curves Moving in Very Different Directions: U.S. Homicide and Firearm-Homicide Rates vs. Active-Shooter, Mass-Murder Events and Fatalities (a) Homicide Rates (per 100,000 population) (b) Active-Shooter, Mass-Murder Events and Fatalities* *Note: As defined here, an active-shooter, mass-murder event is one that is nongang- and nondrug-related, with at least three homicide victims; the curves in (b) do not include the 2016 Pulse Nightclub massacre, with 49 fatalities, nor the 2017 Las Vegas Route 91 Harvest concert mass shooting (59 fatalities). Source: Carter, 2017.

3 3 A related irony is that although activeshooting mass murders involve only a tiny fraction of the total number of murders that occur each year, they receive by far and away the most press coverage and the strongest public reactions. The estimated 5,900 gun homicides occurring during the first 6 months of this year apparently have not shocked the nation, but the 59 that occurred at the Las Vegas concert most certainly did (the gun homicide estimate is based on extrapolations from the past few years). Would Stronger Gun Control Laws Help? Another irony is that even though stronger national gun control laws would reduce gun violence (including mass shootings) and even though the U.S. public generally favors laws that would reduce such violence, the institution representing the public at the national level, the U.S. Congress, will not move forward with such legislation (for extended analyses of these social and political facts, see Carter, 2012, 2017; Donohue, 2015; Harvard Injury Prevention Center, 2017; Spitzer, 2015). Such laws include universal background checks of prospective gun purchasers, the banning of high-capacity ammunition magazines, and requiring guns in the home to be safely stored. But the final and biggest irony is that none of the public health, criminological, or crossnational data in the current gun debate matter to those at the forefront of the debate. For example, strong gun rights advocates don t really care that those states with the most restrictive gun laws tend to have fewer gun violence deaths than those states with weaker gun laws; nor do they really care that Australia has all but eliminated mass shootings by greatly strengthening its gun laws after the 1996 mass shooting in Port Arthur (in which a gunman wielding semiautomatic weapons killed 35 individuals, shocking the nation into action). On the other side, strong gun control advocates seem to ignore the curves in the above chart revealing the large drop in the murder rate, including by firearm, that occurred in the same time period during which U.S. state gun laws were relaxed and during which the number of guns in circulation increased by the tens of millions. Ultimately, the debate over guns in American society boils down to a philosophical argument about the role of government in contemporary society. To scholars, policymakers, politicians, and thoughtful citizens who believe in strong gun control, the problem is the massive destruction to human life created by the presence of guns in the United States mainly from homicide and suicide, much less so but no less important from accident and from activeshooter incidents (in total, 30,000 to 33,000 lives per year lost to homicides, suicides, and accidents; plus tens of thousands of serious injuries). They view this state of affairs as a public health problem, akin to the classic public health problems of infectious diseases or uncontrolled dangerous products and substances (e.g., leadbased paint). The public health approach does not ignore the importance of individual choices, attitudes, and behaviors but the emphasis tends toward the more sociological, the more structural, the more regulatory. That is, set up the situation so that when bad individual choices are made, the cumulative negative effects are minimized. The conquest of infectious disease via vaccination, sewage control, and quarantine is the archetype of this approach. Selected national gun laws could do the same for gun violence. To scholars, policy-makers, politicians, and thoughtful citizens who believe in strong

4 4 gun rights, the problem of the significant destruction to human life created by the presence of guns in American society is regrettable, but is also one that can and should be mitigated by vigorous government enforcement of existing laws against gun misusers as well as by lawful armed self-defense. The ultimate aim of guns in the hands of the average nonviolent and mentally-stable citizen is to ensure that the individual, that the home, that the neighborhood, that the community, that the commonwealth, that property connected with any and all of these, is protected (via the efforts of law enforcement agencies, yes, but also, as is sometimes required, via individual wherewithal). Protected from marauders, villains, and active shooters when public law enforcement is not up to the task; protected from the government when those in power pervert it to serve their needs and not those of the people and are willing to use violence to ensure this. The venerated right to keep and bear arms guaranteed in the Second Amendment isn t primarily about protecting the joy of hunting or target shooting, it s about protecting the people individually and collectively, as affirmed by the 2008 (Heller) and 2010 (McDonald) landmark decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. To repeat the final and ultimate irony involved in the contemporary gun debate: Given the fundamentally different world views of those strongly for gun control versus those strongly for gun rights, the data on gun homicides, on suicides, on mass shootings really don t matter. In a society that has come to value evidencebased business and medical decisions, that has come to venerate big-data analytics, this final irony reveals why we have lost our way as a nation and have failed to resolve this critical debate over the greater or lesser regulation of guns. Further Reading Carter, Gregg Lee, ed Guns in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law, Second Edition. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO Gun Control in the United States: A Reference Handbook, Second Edition. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Donohue, John How U.S. Gun Control Compares to the Rest of the World. The Conversation, /how-us-gun-control-compares-to-the-restof-the-world Harvard Injury Control Research Center Firearms Research. hicrc/firearms-research. Spitzer, Robert J The Politics of Gun Control. 6th ed. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Stanford University Mass Shootings in America. Stanford Libraries, stanford.edu/projects/mass-shootingsamerica. MLA Citation Carter, Gregg Lee. Ironies Abound When Seeking to Understand Our Nation s Gun Violence. Issues: Understanding Controversy and Society, ABC-CLIO, 2017, issues.abc-clio.com/search/ Display/ Accessed 5 Oct

5 Gregg Lee Carter (Ph.D., Columbia University) is Professor of Sociology at Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island. He has authored or edited 24 books, including the first and revised editions of Guns in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law (ABC-CLIO, 2002; 2012) and Gun Control in the United States: A Reference Handbook (ABC-CLIO, 2006; 2017). His writings on contemporary social issues have also appeared in more than a dozen academic journals. He is a former president of the New England Sociological Association and a former associate editor of the journal Teaching Sociology. He is a recipient of the New England Sociological Association's Sociologist of the Year Award and the American Sociological Association's sectional Outstanding Contributions to Instruction Award ; he is also a recipient of Bryant University's Excellence in Teaching Award, Research & Publication Award, and Distinguished Faculty Member Award. 5