A Detour into Gun Law, pt. 4

The debate following the Newtown shootings has not died down. Nor should it. There's plenty to talk about here, as America's love of gun violence strikes at the very heart of its ability to engage in meaningful and effective public governance. Unfortunately, the debate is attracting all sorts of nonsense in the process. Awr Hawkins over at Breitbart.com wants you to believe that blunt weapons are more dangerous than guns, in a spin off of the hoary reactionary argument of "this is dangerous why not ban it too?" As he writes in an article titled "FBI: More People Killed with Hammers, Clubs Each Year Than Rifles,"

According to the FBI annual crime statistics, the number of murders committed annually with hammers and clubs far outnumbers the number of murders committed with a rifle.

This is an interesting fact, particularly amid the Democrats' feverish push to ban many different rifles, ostensibly to keep us safe of course.

However, it appears the zeal of Sens. like Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) is misdirected. For in looking at the FBI numbers from 2005 to 2011, the number of murders by hammers and clubs consistently exceeds the number of murders committed with a rifle.

Hawkins' argument is a classic case where statistics don't lie, but people lie with statistics. There's two games going on here, and both rely on an assumption that Hawkins' readers are too lazy to actually check the data that he cites. Limiting it to rifles is Hawkins first obvious attempt to deceive, assuming that guns and rifles would be considered equivalent. If you actually look at the tables kept by the FBI, you'd find that most of the deaths are attributed to uncategorized firearms. For the table listed by the FBI, firearms accounted for 67.5 percent of the murders they recorded, i.e. more than all other sources combined. 

Second, total murders =/= total deaths. Suicides and accidents nearly triple the death rates for firearms; hammers don't show up all that often as a cause of death here (although, to be fair, suicide by hammer is as ballsy a death as they come). You can find this data in tables 18 and 19 of the National Vital Statistics Report.

I know that this is a politicized debate, and we all benefit from a variety of viewpoints, but stuff like this that shows that Hawkins and his editors at Breitbart.com are simply not reliable sources. They put partisanship ahead of telling the truth, and their readers are worse off because of it. Readers would be better off looking at sources like The American Conservative. At least they're honest.

Of course, there's more at stake here than just the shaming of another Breitbart columnist. The suicide stuff is especially sad, since plenty of research from the Harvard School of Public Health show that means matter. Ninety percent of people who survive a suicide attempt will not die from suicide in the future. Suicide attempts are predominantly impulsive responses to periods of extreme stress, something most people only rarely experience. One prevention is as good as a life saved.

Unfortunately, higher gun ownership rates mean higher suicide rates; this is true between different states and different countries. This is mostly due to the fact that a gun ensures that a suicide attempt is successful. Households with guns do not see higher numbers of attempted suicides.. They also don't have higher rates of mental illness, or report higher frequencies of factors that lead to suicide. The only differentiating factor is gun ownership.

The suicide rate is an important part of this debate, since it is able to control for many of the factors that lead to confusion when we look at violent crime alone. As a previous post mentioned, many different factors contribute to a nation's crime rate, and guns are not often the most prominent factor. At the same time, high amounts of gun ownership lead to higher rates of homicide than we would expect otherwise. 

This becomes obvious once we look at suicide. People all throughout the world have mental health issues, and many attempt suicides. There is little to be done to eliminate this problem, just as there is little to be done about crazy people wanting to attack children. But the extremely high firearm suicide rate rate in the US, can only be explained through high gun ownership rates. Having a firearm magnifies the socially destructive tendencies of certain people. They are, essentially, a public health risk, and they should be treated thusly.

Spend enough time with the data and you start to see the scope of the public health risk posed by guns. These statistics are often abstract and lack a suitable reference point, which is why its easy to get it mixed up. Putting it in context helps. For example, Colorado is already one of ten states where death from firearms is more common than death from car accidents. If the current trend holds, we'll be saying the same thing for the nation as a whole by 2015.

To own a car, you must be licensed and carry liability insurance. Most economists recommend the same situation for firearms. Justin Wolfers explains the issue well. As he writes,

The real problem with gun ownership is that they involve "externalities," which is economist-speak for the fact that your gun may be used to hurt others. For instance, when Nancy Lanza purchased her Bushmaster AR-15, she probably weighed the benefits of owning the gun—the joy of ownership—with the price (about $800). But it's unlikely she considered the loss, pain and grief that might follow if it were used by her son to kill 26 innocents. When people fail to consider the broader social costs of choices like buying a gun, they're more likely to do them, and society suffers.
 
The economic answer is simple: Make potential gun-owners take account of these potential social costs. One way to do this would be to charge an annual license fee for each gun you keep. Research by economists Phil Cook and Jens Ludwig suggests that the typical social cost of one more gun-owning household is somewhere between $100 and $1800 per year. While that's a wide range, if we set a gun ownership license fee this high, it would force gun owners to face the true social costs of their choices, which would lead many fewer to buy guns.

The economic solution to gun violence is surprising in that it allows us to circumvent the debate of fundamental rights and prohibition. The US can fully respect the second amendment while demanding that people display proper gun ownership skills during licensing checks and prove that they're willing to pay both the public and private costs of exercising their rights. Coupled with a voluntary buyback program, licensing and insurance could be a very effective way of actually reducing the number of guns out there; who would be capable of paying tens of thousands of dollars a year in order to maintain a personal arsenal? The already steep punishments for driving without a license show that the penalty for illegal gun ownership would be sharp as well.