December 19, 2012
Announcing Wednesday that he would send proposals on
reducing gun violence in America to Congress, President Obama mentioned a
number of sensible gun-control measures. But he also paid homage to the
Washington conventional wisdom about the many and varied causes of this
calamity -- from mental health issues to school safety. His spokesman, Jay
Carney, had said earlier that this is “a complex problem that will require a
complex solution.” Gun control, Carney added, is far from the only answer.
In fact, the problem is not complex, and the solution is
blindingly obvious.
People point to three sets of causes when talking about
events such as the Newtown, Conn., shootings. First, the psychology of the
killer; second, the environment of violence in our popular culture; and, third,
easy access to guns. Any one of these might explain a single shooting.
What we should be trying to understand is not one single
event but why we have so many of them. The
number of deaths by firearms in the United States was 32,000 last year. Around
11,000 were gun homicides.
To understand how staggeringly high this number is,
compare it to the rate in other rich countries. England and Wales have about 50-gun
homicides a year -- 3 percent of our rate per 100,000 people.
Many people believe that America is simply a more violent,
individualistic society. But again, the data clarify. For most crimes -- theft,
burglary, robbery, assault -- the United States is within the range of other
advanced countries. The category in which the U.S. rate is magnitudes higher is
gun homicides.
The U.S. gun homicide rate is 30 times that of France or
Australia, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, and 12 times higher
than the average for other developed countries.
So, what explains this difference?
If psychology is the main cause, we should have 12 times
as many psychologically disturbed people. But we don’t. The United States could
do better, but we take mental disorders seriously and invest more in this area
than do many peer countries.
Is America’s popular culture the cause? This is highly
unlikely, as largely the same culture exists in other rich countries. Youth in
England and Wales, for example, are exposed to virtually identical cultural
influences as in the United States. Yet the rate of gun homicide there is a
tiny fraction of ours. The Japanese are at the cutting edge of the world of
video games. Yet their gun homicide rate is close to zero! Why? Britain has
tough gun laws. Japan has perhaps the tightest regulation of guns in the industrialized
world.
The data in social science are rarely this clear. They
strongly suggest that we have so much more gun violence than other countries
because we have far more permissive laws than others regarding the sale and
possession of guns. With 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States
has 50 percent of the guns.
There is clear evidence that tightening laws -- even in
highly individualistic countries with long traditions of gun ownership -- can
reduce gun violence. In Australia, after a 1996 ban on all automatic and
semiautomatic weapons -- a real ban, not like the one we enacted in 1994 with
600-plus exceptions -- gun-related homicides dropped 59 percent over the next
decade. The rate of suicide by firearm plummeted 65 percent. (Almost 20,000
Americans die each year using guns to commit suicide -- a method that is much
more successful than other forms of suicide.)
There will always be evil or disturbed people. And they
might be influenced by popular culture. But how is government going to identify
the darkest thoughts in people’s minds before they have taken any action?
Certainly, those who urge that government be modest in its reach would not want
government to monitor thoughts, curb free expression, and ban the sale of
information and entertainment.
Instead, why not have government do something much simpler
and that has proven successful: limit access to guns. And not another toothless
ban, riddled with exceptions, which the gun lobby would use to “prove” that
such bans don’t reduce violence.
A few hours before the Newtown murders last week, a man
entered a school in China’s Henan province. Obviously mentally disturbed, he
tried to kill children. But the only weapon he was able to get was a knife.
Although 23 children were injured, not one child died.
The problems that produced the Newtown massacre are not
complex, nor are the solutions. We do not lack for answers.
What we lack in America today is courage.
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