The News Tribune featured an opinion piece yesterday by multiple-Pulitzer-Prize winning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof that talked quite a bit about how Liberals have gun violence all wrong. Tellingly, while the facts Kristof quotes are correct, they continue to get gun violence all wrong — just in a different way. Gun violence in the U.S. is not what you think it is.
It’s not what the liberal narrative says it is. It’s not what the conservative narrative says it is. It’s not what the media narrative says it is. (The irony of being some small part of the media while I write this is not lost on me.)
Here’s what absolutely no one is saying about gun violence that desperately needs to be understood.
The Decline in Crime Has Nothing to Do with Guns – In Either Direction
Kristof’s article says “The number of guns in America has increased by more than 50 percent since 1993, and in that same period the gun homicide rate in the United States has dropped by half.”
This is a wickedly misleading statistic. Here’s the truth:
Gun violence dropped off enormously between 1993 and 1997, and has remained at essentially the same level (with a much smaller persistent decline in 2010) for the last 18 years. Meanwhile, gun sales in the US only really started spiking when Obama started coming for everyone’s guns:
That’s a chart of how many guns were sold each year — meaning that the decline in gun violence between 1993 and today is completely unrelated to the existence (or non-existence) of guns in the hands of Americans. The leading theory is that the decline in crime is due to a huge number of politically unrelated factors, chief among them the legalization of abortion (less unwanted babies means less grownups desperate and willing to shoot people) and the quashing of the inner-city crack epidemic.
In other words, the correlation Kristof strongly implies in his piece — that the rise in guns and the drop in crime have anything to do with each other — is fictional. (Worthy of note: in the 5-year period between 2007 and 2011, guns were used to threaten or attack criminals in less than one percent of all recorded criminal incidents, so the myth that guns “keep you safe” is pretty safe to call bunk at this point.) On the other hand, it is obviously not the case that increases in gun ownership cause an increase in crime, either.
So what about gun injuries? Or what about gun-related deaths/injuries of children? Sorry, nope. The National Center for Injury Prevention and Control‘s statistics — summarized here for convenience — show almost no meaningful change in those numbers from 2000-2010. So the ever-increasingly-large numbers of guns being added to the US every year aren’t causing more deaths or injuries to children, either.
So what is increasing as guns become more and more prevalent?
- Mass shootings.
- Suicides.
- Domestic violence ending in serious injury or death.
All three of these events show a direct and powerful correlation with the number of guns per capita in the United States. That’s because of a simple but unavoidable phenomenon: the more guns there are, the more likely it is that any given person in a moment of fury, hopelessness, or intoxication will be able to get their hands on a gun and do something that they will never be able to undo.
That is the REAL story of gun violence in the United States. It’s not a story of criminals with guns vs. good guys with guns. It’s not a story of ‘defending’ anything. It’s not a story of ‘mental illness.’ It’s a story of people having a bad day, and the easy access to guns making it a very short step from “a bad day” to “you, your loved one(s), or a whole bunch of people you’re mad at are taken from this Earth never to return.”
All you have to do is look at the headlines to see it:
- Suburban Man Shot Wife in Dispute Over Coffee Maker
- Son, dad had altercation before son emptied ‘clip’ into dad
- Lafayette woman charged with attempted murder in domestic dispute
…these go on and on and on, literally dozens per day. The reason we need gun control isn’t because of criminals, or accidents, or premeditated shootings — it’s because having a bad day shouldn’t be something that turns into a mass shooting or an everyday American losing their spouse and being put in jail for decades.
(Featured image courtesy of kcdstm via Flickr, shared using a Creative Commons 2.0 license.)
