Our friends at The Urban Institute have just released a new report, ‘We Carry Guns to Stay Safe,’ which they say represents ‘perspectives on guns and gun violence from young adults living in Chicago’s West and South Sides.’ You can download the report from the Institute’s website, or from my website right here. The report is a sobering account of the reasons behind the decision by many inner-city youths to carry guns in a city where gun violence in certain neighborhoods exceeds gun violence just about anywhere else.
In 2017, Chicago experienced more homicides than New York City and Los Angeles combined; the Windy City’s population was 2.7 million; the total population of New York and LA was five times as great. But the fatal violence doesn’t occur in equal amounts throughout ChiTown; neighborhoods on the West Side like West Garfield Park or Englewood on the South Side have a killing rate above 80 per 100K. That’s higher than the killing rate of any country in the entire world.
To understand the degree to which this problem appears to be simply uncontrollable, the research team at The Urban Institute interviewed 345 residents of these killing zones, of which almost all were African-Americans between the ages of 18 and 26, and slightly more than half were males. The research teams strikes a somewhat defensive tone in discussing their methodology because they seem to believe that the manner in which they recruited respondents may have biased the selection and therefore skewed the results. Let me break it to Jocelyn Fontaine and her colleagues: to the degree that they believe their findings should be taken with a small grain of salt in terms of overall validity, the value and importance of this work goes far beyond what has previously been produced in the entire field of gun violence research. In other words, this report should be required reading for anyone and everyone concerned about how and why 125,000+ Americans get injured every year with guns. Period.
Why am I willing to describe this effort in such grandiose terms? The best way to answer that question is to let the researchers explain why they did what they did: “The purpose of this research was to learn from young adults firsthand whether and why they decide to carry guns, how they acquire firearms, how they experience gun violence, and what they view as the best strategies to reduce gun carrying and promote safety in their communities.” So, for the very first time, we learn about gun violence from the individuals most at risk for committing gun violence which, if nothing else, should serve as a reality jolt for all the public policy aficionados promoting this gun-control law and that gun-control law without ever speaking to the people whose behavior, it is hoped, will be positively influenced by new regulations and laws.
I’m not going to go through all the report’s findings because I don’t want to save anyone the ‘trouble’ of reading the report. But one point deserve special mention: Of the one-third who said they carried a gun, albeit illegally in most cases, more than 90% claimed the gun was for self-protection. Now it turns out that study after study confirms that guns increase, not decrease, the risk of injury. Yet every public opinion survey confirms that a majority of legal gun-owners Americans believe that their gun is a positive, self-protective device. Guess what? The illegal gun owners believe the same thing, if anything, to a much greater degree.
Advocates for gun control talk endlessly about imposing new regulations that will keep guns out of the ‘wrong hands.’ So here we have a survey in which virtually every respondent represents a pair of ‘wrong hands.’ Not only do they have no more trouble buying a gun than someone with ‘right hands,’ but the folks with the ‘wrong hands’ are becoming gun owners for the exact, same reason as the folks with the ‘right hands.’
Please read and think about this report, okay?
Oct 15, 2018 @ 09:37:42
The report is pretty good. The inherent bias of both you and the people reporting from the Urban Institute is a big turn off. Until you learn to speak without using the vocabulary and framing of the anti gun crowd you shouldn’t be surprised when your reporting continues to remain unnoticed.
The entire report never mentions suicide, the most common form of death from gun violence as reported everywhere. You all made the expression common usage, own it. In this instance the report is on firearm assault, not suicide. In your comments you mention that owning a gun leads to higher increased chance of an individual being harmed by a gun, (mostly via unmentioned suicide). Stop talking out of the side of your mouth, that goes for the people at the Urban Institute also.
Liberal gun owners have commented forever that we could put a serious dent in firearm assault and homicide simply by eliminating those pockets of poverty. Employment at a well paid job would be a heck of a start. I’d add a functioning justice system that protects people of every neighborhood. It’s understandable that young guys carry guns, here in the US the police are not required to protect you, all they do is try to arrest the guy that shot you, that’s it. People who live in safe places don’t need guns, if your chances of getting shot are 50/50 well maybe you’d best have a gun, legal or not.
Oct 16, 2018 @ 08:46:02
Actually, the suicide rate with or without guns is much higher among whites than among blacks. And nobody has ever tried to figure that one out either.
Oct 15, 2018 @ 16:22:04
In the whole history of survey taking, no one has answered… So I can more easily commit a crime. Of course they say it is for self defense. Keep in mind, armed robbery is a real thing in and around these places. The odds are pretty good that a few respondents would have done this themselves. When it comes to analyzing the motivation of legal cc holders, it is not complicated… because none of them ever commit armed robbery. Statistically.
Oct 16, 2018 @ 12:03:27
Some of this, i.e., interviewing residents of killing zones, reminds me of Phil Cook’s paper, “Sources of guns to dangerous people: What we learn by asking them”. The Chicago study makes perfect sense: in dangerous pockets of Chicago, people carry guns to protect themselves from other people carrying guns. Of course with so many people carrying guns and working at cross purposes, an insult, a drug deal gone bad, a guy who steps onto the wrong side of the street with his colors on, etc., and the place erupts in gunfire.
Sure, if we solved all the problems that create these pockets of violence, one would not have pockets of violence. I don’t see anyone working that angle either. The same folks who stick to their Second Amendment the strongest are somewhat correlated with those who would let the cities burn.
As far as suicide v homicide, I read somewhere (might have been Charles Blow in the NY Times) that roughly three quarter of white gun deaths are suicide and roughly three quarters of black gun deaths are homicides. The sociology likely matters. The commonality is the Final Solution with both urges.