One’s first reaction to the horrific killings of 32 people on Monday on Virginia Tech campus is: “why on earth don’t the Americans bring in gun control?” It seems the obvious answer.
If you have been listening to the BBC coverage you will probably have been subtly encouraged to view it this way. The attitude on some of its programmes seems to be: the Americans are bone-headed about this. They should be like us civilised Brits and ban gun ownership. But the facts about guns are not what you might expect.
Yes, it is true that guns are widely owned by American people. They can be found in two out of every five homes. It is also true that the homicide rate in America is tragically high at 5.9 deaths per 100,000 people each year.
But guns are also widely held in peaceful Switzerland. They are in 27 per cent of homes. Yet the rate of homicides in Switzerland is only 1.1 per 100,000 people which is lower than in Britain. So the idea that there is a simple connection between guns being out there and people getting killed is not reliable.
In Norway gun ownership also quite common with a third of homes having one. And what is the rate of homicide there? Fewer than one per 100,000, far lower than in Britain. The rate in England and Wales is 1.5 and and in Scotland it is 2.2.
People will think that Swizerland and Norway are different sorts of countries with different cultures. But that is the whole point. The culture of a country – the way people live and think – vitally affects the extent at which people kill each other. The question of whether or not people are allowed to own guns is far less significant.
This can be shown by another little-known fact: Americans kill each other at such a high rate that even if you excluded the deaths caused there by the use of guns, their homicide rate would still higher than ours. In other words, even if there were not a single gun in America, there would still be more murders and manslaughters than in Britain. Bringing in gun control in America would not stop it being a country where a lot of people get killed.
The cause of the high number of homicides in America is a matter for conjecture. Perhaps it is because only a century and a half has passed since the American west was still pretty wild. Perhaps it is an echo of the organised crime that became so common during the dark days of alcohol prohibition. Perhaps it is a reflection of a more urgent demand among Americans that they should be treated with respect – something not completely unlike the spirit in Britain some centuries ago that made aristocrats fight duels rather than accept a slur on their honour. It is hard to say.
You might reply, “however that may be, tough gun control should stop rampage killings such as this appalling one in Virginia”. Well yes, it might stop some of them. But actually the deaths caused by such killings are a tiny minority of all homicides in the USA. The New York Times did a survey of 100 ‘rampage killings’ over 50 years and found that they account for only one per cent of all homicides.
Meanwhile, there are some genuine arguments in favour of letting people own guns. It is certainly arguable that widespread gun ownership deters criminals from using guns. A criminal is less likely to rob a bank at gunpoint if he knows that he might himself get shot in the process. The state of New Jersey adopted particularly strict gun control laws in 1966 and two years later the murder rate was up by a half and reported robberies had nearly doubled. In 1976, Washington D.C. introduced some of the most severe restrictions on gun control in America. Since then, the murder rate, according to National Center for Policy Analysis, has risen by 134 per cent while that of the USA as a whole has dropped 2 per cent. In these cases – extraordinary as it may seem – tougher gun controls appear to have led to more deaths and more violence.
A fifth of all homicides in America take place in just four cities: New York, Chicago, Detroit and Washington D.C. All of these have strong controls on gun ownership.
And what about here in Britain? We have extremely strict laws on gun ownership, yet deaths from guns have risen. Gun laws provide very fallible protection and, to some extent at least, they take guns out of the hands of good, law-abiding people while still not preventing criminals and delinquents getting holding of them.
Gun ownership appears to deter violent crimes such as robberies. America has had remarkable success is reducing violent crime in recent times. There was a 16 per cent fall in the five years to 2,000. Meanwhile, here in Britain, violent crimes are on a major long term rising trend.
Yes, of course there are many other factors to consider. There are what Tony Blair used to call “the causes of crime”. Indeed these are surely far more important than whether or not guns are legally permitted. A long-established culture of violence can affect the homicide rate. It makes a difference if lots of children are brought up in workless households and go to sink schools not far from bad council estates and then get into gangs.
It is hard – even with the most scrupulous use of statistics – to disentangle causes, effects and co-incidences when it comes to guns, killings and violent crime. But banning guns is not a cure-all. Yes, guns can kill. But it takes a person to pull the trigger.
(The above is the unedited version of an article which may be published in the Daily Express tomorrow.)
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime
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As usual, a sober, thoughtful piece, with relevant, honestly-reported statistics. Keep it up.
Posted by: Ian Bennett at April 18, 2007 10:09 AM
"Bringing in gun control in America would not stop it being a country where a lot of people get killed."
True. But less people would be killed. It's the old liberty/security dilemma again...
Posted by: MArk Andrich at April 18, 2007 11:07 AM
It appears that one political party in the UK supports your position. Nigel Farage of UKIP was asked about the UK's gun law on the box yesterday and said,
He said: "We have not got it right. It was knee-jerk reaction. Hungerford was awful, Dunblane was quite horrific and just like the Dangerous Dogs Act, we overreacted, we put in place a piece of legislation which means our Olympic pistol team have to go to France to practice, they are not allowed to practice in the UK. It is because politicians think that if you see a problem if you put a piece of legislation that will solve the problem. Clearly it doesn't."
"I am not against a proper licensing system; that is sensible and that is what we should be doing.
"But to bring in a total ban and for Mr Blair to stand up in the Commons and say that by doing this gun crime would be brought under control, well we know that gun crime is far worse now than it was before handguns were banned."
"I do not think we are complacent. I have a son at school in south London and he is very conscious that guns and knives are out there on the streets in very big numbers. Legislation is not the answer, but having real police on the beat might just be."
Posted by: Elaib at April 18, 2007 11:24 AM
Its worth noting that the campus of VT had very strict gun control (not even allowed locked inside a vehicle I believe) so the BBC coverage is even more unreliable than it first appears.
Posted by: David at April 18, 2007 01:14 PM
Banning guns in the USA would be akin to holding back a tsunami with a garden fence. It just isn't going to work. Ever. It would be about as effective as banning alcohol considering the amount of guns already in the country and its porous land borders.
Posted by: Vasey at April 19, 2007 04:40 PM
Comparisons with Switzerland, Norway and elsewhere don't undermine the case for tougher gun control in the States. They underline it. Yanks are not fit to own guns.
Posted by: GeoffH at April 19, 2007 07:37 PM
Oisin Commane opines that "It would have been far harder for this bloke to kill 32 if he couldn't have got his hands on semi automatic weapons", which is exactly the sort of view that might be expected from someone who neither owns or uses them.
And it's siply wrong.
A revolver and a speedloader (or half-moon clips with rimless cartridges) has a rate of fire not far off that of a semi-auto.
Not that it's particularly relevant because neither rate of fire nor speed of reload are a factor in a situation where 30-odd people are shot in a period of minutes.
For heaven's sake, most of the people killed in the Rawandan genocide were clubbed to death with sticks.
In each of these situations, the rampage would have ben stopped if the victims had been armed.
It's also completely wrong to represent British society as one without a history of carrying arms for personal protection.
Until the 1903 Pistols act there was no legislation on firearms in the UK, and "self defence" was only removed fron the Home Office list of "good reasons" for the issue of a Firearms Certificate in 1934 (IIRC).
Until then the carriage of a pistol for personal protection was pretty commonplace. The 1903 Pistols Act made it illegal to sell a pistol to a lunatic, but the general availability of firearms wasn't seen as a social problem at all.
The 1920 Firearms Act was passed (if you care to read the Cabinet papers) because the Government were afraid of a Bolshevik-inspired uprising, not because of any fear of armed crime.
"I just can't see this happening"? This is a failure of your logic and imagination, not of the idea.
jd
jd
Posted by: John Daragon at April 22, 2007 04:38 PM
In addition to the arguments above, people should remember that an unarmed population is far more likely to be subject to state tyranny than an armed one. In the former, the state has a dangerous monopoly on the use of deadly force. This is something I suspect liberty-loving Americans understand far better than British people do at the moment. If the state begins to terrorise us how do we fight back?
Posted by: Lance Grundy at April 27, 2007 04:31 PM
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Not all guns are the same. It would have been far harder for this bloke to kill 32 if he couldn't have got his hands on semi automatic weapons. It's one thing to allow a citizen to own a gun, quite another for the state to pay very little attention to just what sort of weapon they can buy.
As for British gun laws “taking guns out of the hands of good, law-abiding people” well it is not in the British culture for people to carry guns. Are you really suggesting if guns were easier for British people to own more people would carry them for protection and this would lead to a fall in violent crime? I just can't see this happening.
Posted by: Oisin Commane at April 17, 2007 11:50 PM