On Guns and Safety
"Are areas in the US where gun ownership is high safer to live? Does gun ownership make people safer? Are there any statistics to prove it?"
“Are areas in the US where gun ownership is high safer to live? Does gun ownership make people safer? Are there any statistics to prove it?”
from Fred Lead.
The presence or lack of the presence of firearm ownership has little to do with safety. Safety depends mostly on the number of people that are motivated to break the law. While there isn’t hard evidence that creates obvious causation, there is a trend in data.
One thing to note right away; “ownership” is different than “possession”. That is a key point that completely changes the conversation. Most pro-gun-control arguments lump the two categories together in a way that is both misleading and unhelpful if you want to learn anything of value.
Here are some points that lead to a trend:
2% of US counties account for almost 70% of homicides; even in these counties, only a handful of areas have any homicides.
75% of murderers have an adult criminal record about 6 years long, over half of the rest are minors and thus cannot have an adult criminal record.
The majority of homicide victims have an adult criminal or juvenile record.
Only 39% of homicide victims without a criminal record knew of their assailant, while 73% of homicide victims with a criminal record knew of their assailant.
Between 15%-30% of homicide convicts will commit another violent offense after being released.
Approximately one-quarter of all crimes are committed by individuals out on bail.
Statistics from New York City show violent offenders commit between 2-6 crimes before being arrested.
Firearms in circulation have increased steadily while violent crime has decreased steadily. Gun ownership per capita and homicide rate have no correlation on a state-by-state basis. Rural areas have 2.4 times more firearms and 4 times less violent crime.
What we know is homicide overall is very concentrated in small areas, usually committed by criminals against other criminals using illegally obtained and possessed guns. We know if you associate with criminals and engage in illegal activities you are more likely to be in danger. We know firearm ownership rates have no correlation with crimes committed. While difficult to objectively quantify, we know firearms present the best self-defense tool and are used far more frequently in a legal manner than most people think.
Do firearms deter or create crime? I don’t think either position is something that can easily be argued because violent crime generally is geographically bound. There are some examples of a deterrence effect, like Detroit in 2014, but even that isn’t concrete or scalable to a national trend. It’s amazing how in some areas the crime map shows crime simply doesn’t cross the street in some areas.
The safer bet is that crime is a function of the number of criminals in the area. If you are a normal person living a lawful life without associating with people engaged in criminal activity your risk level can only be described as “non-zero”, meaning it is highly unlikely that anything will ever happen to you, but it is still technically possible.
How to Really Help People
If you’re genuinely concerned about people’s safety and well-being, get them to improve their overall health and fitness to reduce incidents of Heart Disease, Cancer, and Lower Respiratory Disease (67.1% of all deaths), and take a good defensive driving course to help reduce Road Incidents. These top four causes of death account for over 74% of all deaths in the United States. Meanwhile, Homicide and Terrorism combined account for 0.9%, but receive over 57% of the attention by the mass media.
Great column. (I found it through Active Response Training.) I am an emergency physician and have worked most of my career in the rural South/Appalachia. Shootings occur, of course, but are not common. Especially considering the number of firearms owned, or even in the vehicles in the hospital parking lot. I'd love to see some commentary from you on the recent talking points from the Surgeon General's report on gun violence. Thanks!
If our national gun homicide rate was even 50% of our traffic crash fatality rate, there would be NO guns in the US.
The carnage on our streets/highways is a nationwide disgrace. Let's tell our pols and the Media to leave our guns alone and concentrate upon making our streets/highways safer.