I’m not a “gun guy”. While I do believe individuals should have the right to bear arms, I myself don’t own any firearms and I’ve never been terribly interested in buying one. I would be hard-pressed to explain the difference between a Sig Sauer and a Glock or the difference between a 22 caliber or a 45 millimeter. I’ve shot a gun 3 or 4 times in my life, and while I enjoyed myself, it was never an activity that I felt compelled to do again.
I’m sure much of this has to do with my upbringing. I was raised in a safe, suburban environment where it didn’t feel necessary to have a gun for protection and where hunting wasn’t an activity that it ever occurred to me to do. I want to make it very clear that I understand that not everybody shares the same experiences and absolutely do not intend to look down on gun owners or gun enthusiasts at all. Guns are just not something that I am personally in to.
However, I am a stickler for informed debates, and few things annoy me more than to see people spreading false information or playing loose with the facts. For the most part, I don’t think it’s intentional and I think it comes from a good place. Whenever we hear about another tragic mass shooting, it’s natural to grasp for ways to help, and things like “common sense gun laws” and “assault weapon bans” sound so appealing and like, well, common sense. However, I believe that in order to have a productive debate about the issue of gun violence, it’s essential that we have a shared lexicon so that everybody involves knows exactly and specifically what everybody else is talking about.
I believe that gun violence and gun control are some of the issues that have the biggest problem with misinformation, vague and ill-defined concepts, or just flat out incorrectly used terminology. It’s frustrating to see, because it causes people to argue past each other instead of directly addressing the other side and it causes us to endlessly rehash the same talking points over and over again. This is harming our ability as a nation to make progress in our debate over gun violence. This is my attempt, in some small way, to help remedy the problem.
Note: This post might get a little long, and I might get a little into the weeds at times. I think it’s all helpful information, and I’ve tried to keep things as lean and relevant as possible, so I encourage you to read it all. However, if you find yourself getting bored and/or just want the Cliff’s Notes version, then feel free to scroll down to the end (look for the TLDR) for my main points distilled down as simply as I can.
Why Now?
I believe that laws and regulations are best crafted after extended, sober discussion of the pros and cons on both sides, not as a knee jerk reaction to a single news-worthy event.
At the same time, however, I do acknowledge the power of timing when articles are published, and so I didn’t want to just pick a random date. Ultimately, I went with a date not for its shock value, but because I thought it might help get people to think differently about gun violence in general, which is my main point of this article.
The 2017 Las Vegas shooting is the deadliest mass shooting committed by an individual in the United States. 59 people were killed, including the shooter. This past July 14 was the two year anniversary of an incident many Americans might not even remember: the Nice attack. On Bastille Day in France in 2016 a truck was deliberately driven into crowds of people in what was later called an act of Islamic terrorism by French President Hollande. 87 people would ultimately be killed, including the driver.
I point this out not to try to minimize America’s problem with gun violence. I think even the most ardent gun rights supporter would admit we have a problem. I point this out to try to help put things into context. Yes, guns are dangerous, but so are other things, like cars. In fact, most years more Americans die in automobile accidents (and recently even drug overdoses) than by firearms. Secondly, lack of access to a gun isn’t going to stop people intent on doing harm. The victims of 9-11 and the Oklahoma City bombing weren’t harmed by the abundance of guns in America. Less guns being available in London hasn’t stopped murders from occurring there, and now London is considering stricter knife control. Again, I don’t intend at all to try to minimize or excuse America’s gun violence, only to try to focus on areas where I believe we can meaningfully make a difference. We’ll never be able to end all murders and stopping somebody intent on doing harm will always be a daunting challenge, but maybe there are less obvious changes we can make that can make a big difference. I hope my arguments below can convince you of that.
Fully Automatic? Semi-automatic? Assault Weapon?
As I mentioned before, I’m not overly knowledgeable about guns and would struggle comparing calibers and describing things like pistol grips or carbines. However, if we’re going to be having a debate over what types of guns should be banned and what accessories should be prohibited, I think a baseline of knowledge is essential.
For starters, do you know the difference between a semi-automatic weapon and a fully automatic weapon? They may sound like interchangeable terms, but they mean very different things and can be loaded words that carry very strong biases when used incorrectly. Semi-automatic describes the vast majority of modern guns sold in the US today where the gun shoots one shot with every pull of the trigger. An example of this type of gun can be seen in this scene from John Wick (note, I’ll be using movie examples because I figure it’s the closest “experience” many people have with guns). The gun cannot be shot any faster than somebody can pull the trigger. Semi-automatic weapons are not machine guns. It’s also worth noting that this scene is from a Hollywood movie, so it’s virtually impossible for anybody in real life to be as lethally accurate as Keanu Reeves is.
Fully automatic weapons, on the other hand, fire bullets continuously with a single pull of the trigger. Machine guns are fully automatic weapons. Think of the machine gun used by Rambo. It should be noted that fully automatic weapons are extremely highly regulated just short of outright prohibition for civilian use and that there have been virtually no mass shootings in America that have involved fully automatic weapons. Fully automatic weapons are nowhere near as common in real life as movies make it seem.
This is a very important distinction and I’ve seen people mix up the terms and confuse them many times. I’ve seen countless instances on social media and had many exchanges where people bemoaned that anybody could get an automatic weapon (not true) and wonder what use anybody could possibly have for a semi-automatic weapon (presumably not realizing that virtually all handguns are semi-automatic). It’s not just random people who mix the terms up, though. The media have occasionally gotten the terms wrong and even President Obama used the wrong term when pushing for new gun control laws. It’s a little worrisome to see such mistakes from a politician who was actively pushing for more regulation over an area he didn’t appear to understand.
Other terms that get tossed around carelessly at times are “assault rifle” and “assault weapon”. Although the terms probably appear interchangeable to those that are not interested in guns, there is a difference. As noted by Wikipedia, “The term assault rifle, when used in its proper context, militarily or by its specific functionality, has a generally accepted definition with the firearm manufacturing community”. On the other hand, the term “assault weapon” was largely an invention of legislative necessity. Gun control advocates needed a term to describe the type of guns that they wanted to ban and thus the term was born. In essence, the term “assault weapon” was used to describe a gun that looked threatening and similar to a more powerful weapon, even if functionally it wasn’t very different from a hunting rifle or hand-gun. Unfortunately, that has caused a lot of confusion about what exactly the terms means and some criticism that the banned gun features are largely cosmetic.
Last week Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced a new, supposedly improved version of the federal “assault weapon” ban that expired in 2004. But like that earlier law, which the California Democrat also sponsored, Feinstein’s bill prohibits the manufacture and sale of guns based on characteristics that have little or nothing to do with the danger they pose.
Although arbitrary distinctions are a defining characteristic of “assault weapon” bans, recent polls indicate that most Americans support them. New survey data suggest one possible explanation: Most Americans don’t know what “assault weapons” are.
Feinstein’s bill would ban “157 dangerous military-style assault weapons” by name, along with other guns that meet certain criteria. A rifle is considered an “assault weapon,” for example, if it has a detachable magazine and one or more of these “military characteristics”: a pistol grip or forward grip, a grenade launcher or rocket launcher, a barrel shroud, a threaded barrel, or a folding, telescoping, or detachable stock.
CNN made an even bigger mistake, claiming the bill is aimed at “rifles capable of firing multiple rounds automatically.” In reality, the bill has nothing to do with machine guns such as those used by the military, which fire continuously (or “automatically”) when you pull the trigger and are already tightly restricted by federal law; it deals only with semiautomatics, which fire once per trigger pull.
–What’s an Assault Weapon? by Jacob Sullum
This website is pretty informative in laying out some of the history behind the term “assault weapon” and explaining how such guns are no more powerful or deadly and simply look more threatening than other guns. The site definitely has a pro-gun agenda, so feel free to stop reading about halfway through the slide show.
To drive home just how little most people understand what “assault weapon” means, there was a poll done which asked, “In just a few words, how would you describe an assault weapon?” The answers varied widely, from “one that has multiple bullets” to “machine gun” to even “a knife”. Many definitions focused on how fast a gun could fire, which typically isn’t a part of most legal definitions of an assault weapon.
This may all seem like unimportant semantics, but I believe accuracy matters when having a debate over the solution to gun violence. Even the liberal magazine Mother Jones agrees, creating their own “Non-Gun-Owner’s Guide to Guns” in response to a particularly bad display of ignorance by the media. During Mark Zuckerburg’s Senate hearings, the media rightly lampooned many of the Senators whose questions revealed that they didn’t grasp the basics about Facebook’s business model or even sometimes how the internet worked at all. How can we expect intelligent laws and regulations to be crafted if our legislators can’t be bothered to learn the basics about the things they are trying to regulate? When people advocating for gun control claim they don’t want to ban all guns, just the dangerous ones like semi-automatic guns, it sounds ridiculous to anybody listening who is knowledgeable about guns. It’s similar to saying you don’t want to ban all computers, just the dangerous ones, like those than can connect to the internet.
The Most Dangerous Types of Guns
Perhaps the most damning argument against the obsession over “assault weapons”, though, is how they are (relatively speaking) not that big of a problem. Even the liberal New York Times realizes that the focus on “assault weapons” is a red herring:
Over the past two decades, the majority of Americans in a country deeply divided over gun control have coalesced behind a single proposition: The sale of assault weapons should be banned.
That idea was one of the pillars of the Obama administration’s plan to curb gun violence, and it remains popular with the public. In a poll last December, 59 percent of likely voters said they favor a ban.
But in the 10 years since the previous ban lapsed, even gun control advocates acknowledge a larger truth: The law that barred the sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 made little difference.
It turns out that big, scary military rifles don’t kill the vast majority of the 11,000 Americans murdered with guns each year. Little handguns do.
– The Assault Weapon Myth by Lois Beckett
So not only is “assault weapon” a poorly defined term that likely inaccurately gets associated with “assault rifle” by the majority of the public, but it doesn’t even necessarily refer to a deadlier type of weapon and isn’t even the type of gun that kills the most Americans. I believe our debate over gun control would be much more productive if we stopped worrying so much over banning arbitrary categories of guns that are classified as “assault weapons.”
What is a Gun Death?
This might seem like a dumb question. How can there be a question about what counts as a gun death? The answer is simple. A gun death can be one person killing another person with a gun (homicide) or it can be somebody killing himself/herself with a gun (suicide). Unfortunately, those two categories are drastically different in terms of how the media covers them, who it primarily affects, and what measures might work to prevent them. Combining the two of them in a blanket term of “gun death” is generally unhelpful
This is important to understand because most gun deaths are suicides. In fact, almost two thirds of gun deaths are from suicides. This is critical, because so much of the conversation around reducing gun deaths revolves around homicides and how to prevent them while ignoring the more banal reality of suicide. Bans on assault weapons or high capacity magazines are unlikely to do anything to prevent a death that typically involves extreme close range and a single shot. On the flip side, there is evidence suggesting a correlation (not necessarily causation) between the presence of a gun in a home and a greater chance of suicide by gun. Even though suicide is often thought to be an impulsive act, there are still laws that could could drastically affect suicide gun deaths. For instance, Israel found success drastically cutting the suicide rate of its soldiers simply by not letting them take their service weapons home during extended leave.
For those who are interested in looking at the demographic breakdown, the rate of gun deaths and ratios of homicides to suicides is different depending on gender and race.
Gun deaths also vary dramatically by type. The vast majority (77 percent) of white gun deaths are suicides; less than one in five (19 percent) is a homicide. These figures are nearly opposite in the black population, where only 14 percent of gun deaths are suicides but 82 percent are homicides:
The firearm homicide rate among black men aged 20-29 is about 89 per 100,000. To put that fact in some international perspective, in Honduras—the country with the highest recorded homicide rate—there were 90.4 intentional murders per 100,000 people in 2012. That includes all means, not just firearm homicides.
–Guns and race: The different worlds of black and white Americans by Richard V. Reeves and Sarah Holmes
Lastly, while every lost life is sad, there’s an unavoidable difference between a suicide, which is essentially a consensual act, and the tragic and very non-consensual homicide that takes another person’s life.
Whenever I hear somebody talking about “gun deaths”, I always try to have my guard up. Oftentimes the use of such a non-specific term is either the result of lazy reporting or somebody intentionally trying to mislead and conflate suicides with homicides. Either way, it’s a red flag to me about the argument being made and the person making it.
What is a Mass Shooting?
“Mass Shooting” is a pretty nebulous term.
How many victims are required? Three? Four? More? Do the victims need to have died, or should injuries count? Do all the deaths/injuries have to have happened by gun? Oftentimes the shooter ends up killing themselves at the end. Does their death count towards the tally?
Sometimes domestic violence where multiple family members are killed in a home can meet all the criteria for a mass shooting, except that it seems to be in many ways a different beast entirely. Should mass shootings only count in public spaces? Should efforts be made to exclude gang violence, which also seems to have different root causes than what many people consider to be mass shootings?
It doesn’t help that there isn’t an official government source of mass shooting data that everybody agrees upon. Thus, private groups like Mother Jones to compile their own databases of mass shootings. Of course, each group often uses different criteria and therefore has different numbers than every other group’s data. This is why it’s almost pointless to frame our debates about gun violence around mass shootings. How are we supposed to be able to have a rational, informed debate if we can’t even agree on what constitutes a mass shooting?
Mass Shootings are Very Different From Other Forms of Gun Violence
If we’re honestly trying to cut back on all gun violence and not just the tragic incidents that make the news, then mass shootings are a giant red herring. For starters, they’re thankfully pretty rare. There’s a reason why mass shootings make the nightly news but “elderly white male commits suicide” does not. The former is an uncommon event where the latter is, unfortunately, all too common. If the news devoted as much time to suicides or even non-mass shooting homicides as it does to mass shootings, there would never be time to talk about anything else. And it’s not just because gun violence is so common (although that’s certainly part of it). Roughly a hundred Americans die in car accidents each day. Around ten Americans a day drown. By comparison, 17 people died in the Parkland shooting. Focusing on specific incidences and ignoring larger trends is missing the forest for the trees.
Beyond the frequency of occurrence and number of victims, though, is the fact that the demographics of mass shooters and the laws that might help prevent mass shootings are different from those that might help prevent many more non-mass shooting gun deaths. I highly recommend this FiveThirtyEight article and its accompanying interactive graphic as a way to learn more. Here’s a brief snippet from the article:
You could, theoretically, cut down on all these deaths with a blanket removal of guns from the U.S. entirely — something that is as politically unlikely as it is legally untenable. Barring that, though, policies aimed at reducing gun deaths will likely need to be targeted at the specific people who commit or are victimized by those incidents. And mass shootings just aren’t a good proxy for the diversity of gun violence. Policies that reduce the number of homicides among young black men — such as programs that build trust between community members, police and at-risk youth and offer people a way out of crime — probably won’t have the same effect on suicides among elderly white men. Background checks and laws aimed at preventing a young white man with a history of domestic violence from obtaining a gun and using it in a mass shooting might not prevent a similar shooting by an older white male with no criminal record.
–Mass Shootings are a Bad Way to Understand Gun Violence by Maggie Koerth-Baker
This is a problem because so much of our discussion around gun violence happens in the aftermath of mass shootings and the legislation and regulations proposed are almost always overly focused on preventing whatever latest tragedy has made the news instead of looking at the bigger picture. Trying to solve gun violence by looking at mass shootings is like trying to solve traffic deaths by looking at airplane crashes. Statistically, flying is a much safer method of traveling versus driving a car, and yet every time a plane crashes it’s all over the news while we rarely hear about the thousands of Americans that die each year driving. If we’re really serious about addressing all gun violence and not just the newsworthy incidents, we need to stop paying so much attention to mass shootings and focus instead on the larger problems.
School Shootings
School shootings have unfortunately been in the news a fair bit recently, and so it’s worth noting a few things about school shootings specifically. First of all, school shootings are thankfully incredibly rare, and schools have increasingly become a safer place.
This is a very important point to make. There have been heartbreaking news stories of kids being scared to go back to school because they feel like they’re going to die. This is no doubt due in part to media coverage of school shootings and parental fears making those events seem more common then they are. Active shooter drills in schools could also be a contributor to such worries. These kind of fears need to be counter-balanced with some reassuring facts.
The Education Department reports that roughly 50 million children attend public schools for roughly 180 days per year. Since Columbine, approximately 200 public school students have been shot to death while school was in session, including the recent slaughter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. (and a shooting in Birmingham, Ala., on Wednesday that police called accidental that left one student dead). That means the statistical likelihood of any given public school student being killed by a gun, in school, on any given day since 1999 was roughly 1 in 614,000,000. And since the 1990s, shootings at schools have been getting less common.
The chance of a child being shot and killed in a public school is extraordinarily low. Not zero — no risk is. But it’s far lower than many people assume, especially in the glare of heart-wrenching news coverage after an event like Parkland. And it’s far lower than almost any other mortality risk a kid faces, including traveling to and from school, catching a potentially deadly disease while in school or suffering a life-threatening injury playing interscholastic sports.
– School shootings are extraordinarily rare. Why is fear of them driving policy? by David Ropeik
School shootings are incredibly rare. It is highly unlikely that a kid will be shot and killed in school. It was mentioned above, but bears repeating: A child is more likely to die traveling to and from school than to be shot and killed in school. We need to stop traumatizing our kids by making them believe that schools are war zones where it’s only a matter of time before they are shot and killed. School-aged kids already have so much stuff to worry about, let’s not unnecessarily add one more.
What are Common Sense Gun Laws?
Regardless of the confusion around what constitutes a gun death or a mass shooting, we can all agree on common sense gun laws, right? After all, they’re common sense! Unfortunately, despite how appealing “common sense gun laws” might sound, there really are no easy answers. As Trevor Burrus notes in this good article: Gun Policy is Hard. Background checks are often pushed in the wake of mass shootings, but the inconvenient truth is that background checks almost never would’ve stopped perpetrators of mass shootings from getting their guns. Even when shooters had previously displayed mental issues, they often had no record which would’ve prevented a gun purchase.
Of course, as noted above, mass shootings are a bad way to think about things. What about for more common homicides and suicides? Again, the most commonly prescribed remedies often wouldn’t seem to make much of a difference and the more narrowly tailored remedies that might make a difference are ones that nobody seems to be talking about.
Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.
Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.
– I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise. by Leah Libresco
In the article referenced above, Leah Libresco does an excellent job discussing why many of the remedies for gun violence that dominate our debate would be ineffective based on some of the things I previously mentioned. Much of it goes back to earlier points about the circumstances around when we have our debates about gun control and gun violence. We don’t talk about what steps we can take to reduce gun violence in the wake of 50 people committing suicide by using a gun because those stories don’t make the news. It’s the rare mass shootings that get the media attention and our recency bias has us unfortunately focused on solving those uncommon events to the exclusion of everything else.
By the time we published our project, I didn’t believe in many of the interventions I’d heard politicians tout. I was still anti-gun, at least from the point of view of most gun owners, and I don’t want a gun in my home, as I think the risk outweighs the benefits. But I can’t endorse policies whose only selling point is that gun owners hate them. Policies that often seem as if they were drafted by people who have encountered guns only as a figure in a briefing book or an image on the news.
Instead, I found the most hope in more narrowly tailored interventions. Potential suicide victims, women menaced by their abusive partners and kids swept up in street vendettas are all in danger from guns, but they each require different protections.
Older men, who make up the largest share of gun suicides, need better access to people who could care for them and get them help. Women endangered by specific men need to be prioritized by police, who can enforce restraining orders prohibiting these men from buying and owning guns. Younger men at risk of violence need to be identified before they take a life or lose theirs and to be connected to mentors who can help them de-escalate conflicts.
– I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise. by Leah Libresco
I wish there was an easy, straightforward law that could be passed which would magically cut gun violence in half. Yet all of the evidence indicates that there is no such magic bullet. However, there might be smaller, more targeted actions that we can take to put a meaningful dent into the problem.
More Guns, Less Crime?
To add one further wrinkle to the gun violence/gun control debate, there has been an interesting phenomenon in America over the last few decades. While the number of privately held firearms has nearly doubled, the number of gun murders per capita has been cut in half.
How do we explain that the number of guns owned by Americans keeps increasing at a rather remarkable rate, yet violent gun crimes have been fairly level since 2000 even though gun sales exploded between 2008 and 2016? You would think that, given the ease with which a gun can be used in a violent way (as opposed to a knife or other types of weapons), that the more guns we have floating around, the more violent crime would occur. But that has not been the case. Since 2008, arrests for murder have decreased by nearly 20 percent. Meanwhile, over the same period, more than 75 million guns were added to the civilian arsenal, a doubling of the number added during the administration of George W. Bush. So what gives?
– How Do We Reconcile A Drop In Violent Crime With An Explosion In Gun Sales? by Mike Weisser
I don’t have a good explanation for this, and I’m not implying that more guns means fewer gun deaths. I bring up this point only to say that sometimes there are larger cultural and societal forces at work that can be hard to account for when explaining gun violence and it can be dangerous to over simplify things. Yes, there are plenty of countries outside of the United States with far stricter gun laws and far fewer gun deaths. There are also countries with high rates of gun ownership and yet far fewer gun deaths. Alaska is the state with the highest rate of gun deaths in the US. Does that tell us anything about the efficacy of their gun laws or is it more notable that over 70% of those deaths are suicides? There are a lot of variables in play when it comes to solving the issue of gun violence, so it’s important to not be seduced by easy one-size-fits-all solutions.
Defensive Gun Uses
It’s also worth mentioning that guns can actually have legitimate uses and, dare I say, can even be helpful. A gun can be used as a deterrent or in self defense. A convenience store owner might want protection from armed robbers. A woman might want protection from an angry ex-husband. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr both owned guns for protection.
Counting the number of instances of defensive gun use is an incredibly difficult task for a number of reasons. As a result, estimates range wildly from 100,000 to 2.5 million. However, even if the low-ball estimate is accurate, it’s a significant number that is worth considering as part of any discussion of trade-offs when it comes to gun control laws. There are people who are victims of gun control laws, like Carol Browne, who was killed by an ex-boyfriend while waiting for a permit to obtain a gun.
As with everything else I’ve talked about so far, it’s important not to overstate the occurrence of defensive gun uses and the number of people harmed by gun control laws. However, neither should they be ignored. More research is needed into how often guns are used for protection or to deter a criminal. Every law has a trade-off, and those laws should be judged not solely by their intentions, but also by their unintended side effects.
In Summation, or TLDR
I covered a lot of topics, and it might be hard to remember everything, so here’s a brief recap:
- “Assault weapon” is a fairly meaningless term and the focus on restricting and/or banning them distracts from the fact that most gun deaths are caused by hand-guns.
- The majority of gun deaths are actually suicides, which are unlikely to be affected by the majority of common gun control proposals.
- Mass shooting is a vague term.
- Mass shooting are pretty rare.
- Mass shootings are a terrible way to think about gun violence since they’re so different from other homicides
If you found anything that I wrote above interesting and want to read more, then I highly recommend “You Know Less Than You Think About Guns” by Brian Doherty, which heavily inspired what I wrote and goes into even more detail.
Gun violence in America is a big, complicated problem with no easy answers. I’ve made it clear throughout this post that I don’t have the answers. Instead, I’ve shown that too often our public discourse around the topic is incorrectly obsessed with the wrong questions. I tried to pose some more accurate questions that we should be asking instead. Thanks for reading.
