Every time the Democrats have a majority in both chambers on Capitol Hill and a Democrat sitting in the Oval Office, my friends in Gun-control Nation ramp up the call for more gun laws. Know what happens? They get squat.
The last federal gun law was passed in 1993, which was the Brady law, and required an instant background check for any over-the-counter transfer of a gun.
Know how many victims of gun-violence events there were in the five years leading up to Brady? Try 172,856 homicides, suicides and people shot by cops.
Know how many victims of gun-violence events there were in the five years leading up to and including 2020? Try 338,606 homicides, suicides and people shot by cops.
Wow! The Brady law made a big difference, right? Yea, right.
The per-100,000 homicide rate before Brady was 13.48, now it’s 20.41. That’s only an increase of 50 percent. No big deal, right? No big deal at all.
What the hell are we talking about here? A ban on ‘ghost’ guns? When I was a kid, we called them ‘zip’ guns. Those guns only fired a 22-caliber round. You think a 22-caliber bullet isn’t lethal if it hits you in the head?
I love those members of Congress like that schmuck from Arizona, Andy Biggs, who says he’s not concerned about ghost guns because he needs to ‘fight’ for the ‘rights’ of gun owners to be protected by the 2nd Amendment.
But the truth is that the two sides in the gun debate keep saying the same, goddamn thing every time. And I’m not surprised to hear the same goddamn thing from my friends in Gun-nut Nation, because what are they supposed to say? They don’t believe that laws which regulate legal gun ownership make any real difference in terms of the number of Americans who are killed or wounded by guns.
Know what? The gun-violence numbers I gave you above from the CDC happen to prove that schmucks like Andy Biggs may be right. There really hasn’t been a correlation either way between gun laws and gun violence, and for that matter, there doesn’t even seem to be a connection between how many guns are bought legally and how many people get shot with guns. Our friends who do gun research at UC-Davis couldn’t find any direct relationship between increases in violent crime during the Pandemic and increases in the sale of guns.
Here’s what we do know for sure about the relationship between guns, laws, and violent crime. And we know this because it has been studied and published multiple times going back some fifty years to when it was first studied and published by Marvin Wolfgang. What he found was that the most violent and vicious criminals who committed most of their criminal behavior between 16 and 35 (afterwards they were either dead or in jail), were almost all serial delinquents by their mid-teens.
This research was then supplemented by the research of Al Lizotte, who found that the men who committed crimes with guns first got interested in guns in their mid-teens, the same years which they were already exhibiting serious and sustained delinquent behavior.
In other words, we suffer from gun violence not because we don’t have enough gun regulations on the books, but because we lose track of the boys who begin to exhibit criminal behavior and get into guns at the same time.
I have yet to see one, single gun-control advocacy organization show the slightest interest or even awareness of the connection between adolescence, delinquency, and guns, even though this knowledge has been out there, published and validated, for fifty years.
My friends in Gun-control Nation face a serious choice. They can keep saying the same thing they have been saying about how we need more gun laws, whether these laws really help reduce gun violence or not. Or they can come up with a strategy which deals with the fundamental reason why someone picks up a gun, points it at someone else and pulls the trigger – on average – 275 times every day.
Apr 22, 2022 @ 13:54:57
Hi Michael. I looked at one CDC source and while homicides are going up, they have “…The homicide rate in the United States saw a massive increase of 30% between 2019 and 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2020, there were 7.8 homicides per 100,000 people, an increase from 6 homicides per 100,000 people in 2019. ..”
Other than that, 100% agreement. Either one gets rid of all the (hand) guns, or one gets rid of the motive and you are spot on as far as New Mexico. Otherwise, we are spinning our wheels.
Apr 22, 2022 @ 14:37:44
“What the hell are we talking about here? A ban on ‘ghost’ guns? When I was a kid, we called them ‘zip’ guns. Those guns only fired a 22-caliber round. You think a 22-caliber bullet isn’t lethal if it hits you in the head?”
I’ve always wondered about the economics around that. Why were kids making zip guns when in a lot of places you could buy a WWII vintage military handgun by mailorder for not much over $10? (Check the “Ye Olde Hunter” ads in the early 1960s editions of gun magazines you can still find online – .38 S&W Enfield revolvers for $13.88.) Now they’re using handguns that are a bit rich for MY blood.
I think a problem is too many things including our culture changed at the same time, defying attempts at analysis.
Apr 22, 2022 @ 14:51:40
“Do We Need Any More Stinkin’ Gun Laws?” Answer: No, but “…everybody who abides by the law should get one.”
https://www.fox29.com/news/police-mayfair-resident-fatally-shoots-armed-home-intruder-impersonating-police-officer
When it is said that both sides in the gun debate keep saying the same, goddamn thing every time, I wonder what, if anything, has been accomplished by either side.
When Andy Biggs (R-AZ) says he’s not concern about ghost guns because he needs to fight for the rights of gun owners. Lets take a look at some of the accomplishments at the state level these gun-nuts have had in 2021 alone:
Emergency powers laws in seven more states — so the government can’t take away your Right to Keep and Bear Arms in times of emergency; laws have been strengthened in the right to self-defense in 20 additional states; gun bans and magazine bans in more than a dozen states have been derailed; five more states have passed constitutional carry laws.
So, for Gun-nut Nation it sounds/looks like they may be saying the same thing but they are also accomplishing many things.
And for when it is said that Gun-control Nation have ramped up the call for more gun laws and they have gotten squat…you just may be right.
Apr 22, 2022 @ 15:59:03
“So, for Gun-nut Nation it sounds/looks like they may be saying the same thing but they are also accomplishing many things.”
I’d only caution that as with Roe v. Wade’s imminent demise, no “accomplishment” is permanent. People will continue to say many things, from both sides, and not all of them are going to be true.
I’m going to be a little bit of a pollyanna and suggest the best we can hope for is that in an evolutionary way, the “best” will tend to survive, while the BS from both sides will tend to fall by the wayside over time. Though, less optimistically, that may take several cycles or iterations over many decades. Meanwhile, those decades will see many unpredictable “cultural changes.”
For example, I expect “constitutional carry” to survive in most states where it has been achieved, because there will not exist enough data to support that it is somehow making “gun violence” worse. But I also don’t think there are going to be enough “good guy with a gun” cases resulting from it to gain ground for the concept in states that fail to achieve it in this iteration. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to demonstrate that carry permits accomplish little or nothing. Another factor may be that the novelty of carrying will wear off in many places. Trends in states that go from “may issue” to “shall issue” may provide some interesting data regarding that.
Apr 22, 2022 @ 16:46:58
As a federal Prosecutor in Chicago told me long ago, nothing stops a bullet like a job. Fixing things for adolescent males, especially in poor communities, costs $$$$$. Good luck
Apr 23, 2022 @ 13:35:05
Costs $$$$$, how’s 1.9 billion?
This month Chicago’s Alderman Tom Tunney attended a public safety meeting, hosted by Mayor Lightfoot’s office where a list of the city’s anti-violence initiatives was presented and discussed. There were items addressing adolescent males, poor communities, violence disrupters, police cameras, “equitable growth and job creation,” and environmental justice priorities, along with many other programs. However, there were two words that were left out of the meeting and you won’t find in Tunney’s graphic that he presented to his constituents: arrest and prosecution. There was no mention of arresting more violent criminals, prosecuting more murderers, or — this may sound crazy — not allowing 95% of the people who shoot other people get away with the crime. And yes, 95% Chicago’s non-fatal shootings really do go unpunished.
https://www.44thward.org/news/recently-public-safety-investments/
It will be interesting to see how Chicago’s $1.9 billion plan to tackle violent crime will do in a year, two years, three years from now.
Apr 25, 2022 @ 10:04:52
I think the emphasis on arrests and convictions is playing a game of whack a mole if we don’t address the issue that Dr. Jim mentions before we even get to having to arrest people. When life is so bad that criminality is a viable option, even risking arrest, you are not getting out ahead of the ship before it hits the iceberg. Dr. Jim and I will fight about a lot of things, but he is spot on with that comment. But it’s easier to privatize prisons than to fix a broken society model.
Apr 25, 2022 @ 12:20:17
You may have a point and maybe even Dr. Jim, but while you are fixing things for adolescent males, especially in poor communities, what do you do when you are allowing 95% of the people who shoot other people get away with the crime.
Take a look at problems that Chicago has been experiencing since Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx took office:
https://www.chicagoappleseed.org/2020/09/30/prosecutorial-discretion-in-a-tumultuous-year/
Of the non-fatal arrests made by police the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office outright rejected 21% of those cases last year. And for homicides, at the end of last year, Kim Foxx office had approved 57% of the cases that police brought to them for review (43% of the cases were rejected).
And when felony cases are approved many of the people who are charged are released back into the community before trial. Just this past Friday a Chicago resident shot the mother of his children, weeks after he shot her current boyfriend in a separate incident. He skipped bail in a pending felony drug case when he shot the mother of his children.
In 2021 there were 29 people who were murdered by others who were on felony bond in Chicago, 38 attempt murder, 4 attempt murder of police, 15 aggravated battery with a firearm and many other offenses.
Since 2017, Chicago Police Department has made arrests in less than 5% of non-fatal shootings and 33% of murders, according to the city’s data. So, when Chicago is given $1.9 billion of tax payers money for public safety investments and there is no mention of arrest and prosecution by Alderman Tunney it will continue to be like playing a game of whack a mole.
Apr 23, 2022 @ 14:39:31
“nothing stops a bullet like a job”
Another way to say that is, “like having something to lose.”
When I first could afford to hang out with affluent people living in affluent neighborhoods it astounded me the nice stuff they could leave laying around without it being stolen by the kids in the neighborhood. When I was a poor kid it would have been gone in a minute. I realized all things are relative in economics, and no affluent person was going to risk their status for just a toy or trinket, unless they were straight-up sociopaths.
Members of earlier generations of my family, most of them second generation Americans, told me stories of extremely criminal behaviors when they were urban kids in the first half of the last century. But WWII or the subsequent boom times made them affluent, and converted them to model citizens in the process. That is, the ones who had not gone to prison when they were young.