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Want To Reduce Gun Violence? Go After The Guns Which Cause The Violence.

August 15, 2018

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , 1 Comment

If there is one argument that has found its way into every, single comment ever made by every, single gun-control organization, it’s the idea that the U.S. suffers from an extraordinary high level of gun violence because Americans own so many guns. The basis for this argument is research published by our good friend David Hemenway, who explains the fact that the U.S. homicide rate is 7 times higher than other advanced countries, driven by a gun-homicide that is 25 times higher, thanks to all those guns we have floating around.

chicago cops             Since we don’t require universal or even partial gun registration (no mater what Gun-nut Nation says) we actually have no idea how many guns are in private hands. The estimates go from a low of 270 million to a high of nearly 400 million, so let’s say that the real number is somewhere in between. Nevertheless, whether we take the high or the low estimate, we are still the only country whose per-capita gun ownership number approaches or exceeds one, even if the percentage of Americans who actually have a gun in their residence is somewhere between 30 and 40 percent.

The only problem is that while it appears to be an obvious argument bottom line that our fatal violence rate is a function of the existence of all those guns, the argument happens to be wrong. Why? Because most of the guns sitting around in basements, garages or even in living rooms or bedrooms happen to be guns that are just lying around.  And if a particular type or model of gun doesn’t play any role in the events which we refer to as ‘gun violence,’ then why should the existence of this type of gun be counted as having anything to do with gun violence at all?  It shouldn’t, but it is.

The more guns = more gun violence argument is undercut by some data published by our friends at The Trace, who analyzed the types of guns recovered by the Chicago cops in 2014. Of the total 4,505 guns picked up by the cops that year, nearly 40% (1,757 guns) appear to be the most popular handgun models, and while less than 4% of the confiscated weapons were shotguns, the total number of assault rifles was exactly five. How many bolt-action hunting or target rifles were picked up? None.

Of the 1,757 most popular handguns confiscated by Chicago PD, most of those models, like the Smith & Wesson VE and the various Glocks, didn’t even exist prior to 1985.  And 1985 is an important year to use as a yardstick for estimating the size of the civilian gun arsenal, because that was the year, according to Gary Kleck (Point Blank, Guns and Violence in America) that the number of weapons in private hands approached or exceeded 200 million guns.

Since 1985, the gun industry has manufactured another 140 million guns, of which roughly half are shotguns and rifles, the latter including at least 10 million or so assault rifles, which are rarely picked up by the cops. What this all boils down to is that the total number of civilian-owned guns which wind up contributing to gun violence is somewhere around 70 million or less. It’s certainly not the 300 million figure that is bandied around by Gun-control Nation and their research friends in public health.

If we calculate per capita gun ownership based on the guns used in violent crimes, rather than all guns held within the civilian population, the U.S. gun-ownership number drops from being way ahead of everyone else to somewhere in the middle of the pack. Would a per-capita gun ownership number which would be a fraction of the number currently used change the degree to which gun ownership could explain our excessively high rate of fatal crime? It would.

Want to use laws to reduce gun violence?  Base the laws and regulations on a better understanding of how guns are and aren’t used in violence and crime. It’s not like the data isn’t there.

Want To Avoid Getting Shot? Stay Away From Where The Shootings Occur

November 15, 2013

mikethegunguy Blogs, Crime, Guns , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Lotka-Volterra equation

Lotka-Volterra equation

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that what the novelist Walter Mosley said about guns is true: “If you carry a gun, it’s bound to go off sooner or later.”  Which is kind of obvious because after all, if you don’t carry a gun it can’t go off, right? But the trick, if you’re concerned about gun violence, is figuring out when and why a gun goes off, and once you know that, what to do about it. We seem to be much better at figuring out the when and the why, but an article published yesterday in the Journal of Public Health, may point a way towards also figuring out the what.

The authors, two Yale sociologists, Andrew Papachristos and Christopher Wildeman, have constructed a model for predicting gun violence based on studying gun homicides from 2006 to 2011 in an area of Chicago that had some of the highest rates of gun violence in a city that’s know for gun violence.  The study found that 6% of the area’s population was involved in 70% of the murders, and nearly everyone in this population group had prior contact with criminal justice or public health.  The data allowed the authors to construct a predictor of future gun homicides based primarily on social networks, a methodology that is now going to be used by the police to identify and visit with these high-risk kids and adults.  As Papachristos puts it, “It’s who you hang out with that gets you into trouble.”

Papachristos and Wildeman are planning to extend their research to cover the entire city of Chicago, and perhaps the Chicago PD will be able to mount a citywide program to monitor the social networks that breed the violent use of guns.  But the idea that guns are being used to commit violent crimes by people who know each other and band together is hardly new.  In fact, it’s not only humans who behave this way – the same type of behavior can be found in animals and even insects, and this has been known for nearly a hundred years.

Back in the 1920s a statistician named Alfred Lotka and a mathematician named Vito Volterra developed a statistical analysis (known as the Lotka-Volterra equations) that are used by ecologists to predict how different species occupy and protect their home territories.  This equation was then picked by a UCLA anthropologist, Jeffrey Brantingham, to study the territoriality of street gangs in Los Angeles and the links between each gangs’ territorial imperatives and gun violence.  What Brantingham found was that the further away from the gang’s headquarters, the less gun violence was committed by members of each gang.  The closer to the gang headquarters, the more shootings took place.  The behavior of the gangs was no different from the behavior of hyenas or bees. Want to avoid being attacked? Stay away from the place where the guys with the guns are found.

The research just published by Papachristos and Wildeman defines gun violence territory not from a geographic, but from a social network perspective.  It’s not about which street you walk on, it’s who you hang out with that predicts whether you’ll get shot or use a gun to shoot someone else. But when all is said and done, aren’t the findings by Papachristos and Wildeman on the one hand, and Brantigham on the other, really two sides of the coin?  After all, people tend to spend their time with people they know.  Call them a ‘group,’ a ‘gang’ or whatever, the tendency of humans to associate with one another in an organized manner is as old as humanity itself. It also seems to be as old as the existence of all living species.  Maybe the cops should spend a little less time giving out parking tickets and spend a little more time at the zoo.

 

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