What to do?

This was kind of depressing to write, so you might want to have a puppy or something close at hand while you read it. Spoiler alert: a lot of people die.

Everybody has something to say about the Newtown, Connecticut shooting. A lot of it is renewed calls for gun control, defense of gun rights, bemoaning the state of our mental health care system... all so heavily politicized that it's difficult to have a constructive conversation and make headway while each side waves the party flag. I won’t spend much time on mass shootings because, while they’re devastatingly tragic, they represent such a small percentage of the whole that their biggest relevance is to bring broad attention to the violence going on all the time.

You hear a lot of things from either side of the argument, so I looked into it for myself. Yes, all of my information is from Wikipedia. There are some conflicting numbers on there, but overall trends are consistent across articles and reporting groups. I do have a few questions about how some of them are collected, though it's mostly straightforward.

I read up on a few statistics for different countries - mostly gun ownership, firearm death rate, and standard of living. I did not do an exhaustive quantitative analysis. I hope Randall Munroe or some such person puts something together, since he is so good at presenting large amounts of high-dimension information.

This post talks mostly in terms of number of deaths per number of people - so it's all normalized to population, like percentages. I’ll try to hit important points without tiresomely laying out all the nuances and stipulations.

If you can think of a good graphic to illuminate a point, let me know and I’ll see what I can come up with. This could be better organized/summarized, but I wanted to get a few numbers out that give an intuitive comparison between different countries and different phenomena. This is a long post, just to warn you.

A couple preliminary notes

I primarily looked at numbers on gun deaths, not all homicides/suicides. In the US, guns account for about two thirds of all homicides, and 50% of all suicides. Men commit 90% of US homicides, so later in the post I deal specifically with the male demographic because of the majority we represent in this issue. There is also a distinction to pay attention to between overall murder rates (intentional homicide with any kind of weapon), gun murder rates (intentional homicide with a gun), and gun death rates (any death from a gun – homicide or suicide).

Here's what I found.

Gun ownership

The US by far leads the world in personal gun ownership - almost 90 guns in the US for every 100 people (270 million firearms nationwide). About 85% of countries have fewer than 20 guns per 100 people.

The US places at #12 in firearm death rates per year among the countries. Few countries with more firearm deaths are noticeably wealthy, and none nearly so much as us. Some countries with higher rates than us are El Salvador, Colombia, South Africa, and Mexico... countries we don’t normally think of as the safest places to visit (Mexico and South Africa have almost the same rate that we do, though their rates are dominated by murder more strongly than ours is dominated by suicide). These tend to be poor countries with gun ownership rates dwarfed by ours, usually less than 10 weapons per 100 people. Remember, these are only gun-related deaths.

Quick aside: this is one number I'm curious about. It's easy to imagine how they count/estimate gun ownership in the US. But how is it estimated in countries where death rates are dominated by drug cartels, or places with no functional gun control? Also – the reporting agency was explicit that some estimates have a very high margin of error.

Murder rates

Overall (weapon-inspecific) murder rates tend to be worst in countries that are very poor (parts of Africa) and have large drug operations (parts of South America). Most of Asia and Europe are extremely low - the Americas have a greater number of murders per year than all of Asia, though Asia represents well over half of the world's population (high murder rates in a small population – about 1 billion people live in the Americas - versus low murder rates in a large population – over 4 billion people in Asia).

In the States there are about 8.5 firearm deaths per year for every 100,000 people. With a population of 315 million, that means almost 27,000 people are shot to death every year. But that is all gun deaths. About 35% of those are homicides - the rest are suicides. (Accidental gun deaths represent a number that, while small relative to our murders and suicides, is comparable to murder rates in Western Europe.) Don’t forget the additional 5,000 murders and 16,000 suicides per year in the US that don’t use guns. These numbers really add up.

Let’s take a moment to process that. More than 30 people are shot to death every day in the US, and almost 50 overall are murdered daily. Daily. That means we also get nearly 100 daily suicides in the US, half by gun. Every. Day.

It’s important to note that our gun death rate is only comparable to the other trigger-happy countries because of our high suicide rate. Suicides appear to be a wealthy country thing. Colombia has three times the gun death rate compared to the US, but less than one fourth our gun suicide rate (only 3% of their gun deaths are suicides). Presumably our country should start to put all these suicides in the spotlight.

Homicides. No, let's call them murders. Homicide is such a sterile word, like herbicide. More than 10,000 people per year are shot to death in the US - murdered with guns. That's a lot. Individual countries in Western Europe never break 100 per year. Switzerland has a relatively high gun ownership rate due to their mandatory military service (45 guns per 100 people – half of our rate), but only averages 40 gun murders per year.

You may have heard this kind of comparison before, but the absolute numbers are misleading. We have 40 times the population of Switzerland (their 8 million would barely populate New York City), so their per capita murder rate is better characterized as being 17% of ours. Still not great – a population of 8 million Americans murders 240 people each year. That sounds like a small number to us, but Switzerland would flip their shit if they experienced this kind of rate. Interestingly, the Swiss gun suicide rate, relatively speaking, is closer to ours – about 3.15 per year for every 100,000 people compared to our 5.5.

Murder rates relative to gun ownership

Worldwide there is not a strong correlation between gun ownership rate in a country and murder rates. Murder rates appear to correlate with bad economic situations (probably true looking at regional murder rates within the US as well). However, if we look only at wealthy countries, gun murder rates do seem higher in countries with more gun ownership. We actually look pretty good when you consider number of murders per gun in our country, at least compared to war-torn countries overrun by drug cartels.

El Salvador has more than 8 homicides per gun each year for every 100,000 people, while we have only 0.034. This is calculated as [gun murders per year per 100,000 people] divided by [guns per 100 people], so it’s not an exact normalization, but it’s a reasonable way to report a relative rate. On this scale, Switzerland weighs in at 0.011, the UK at 0.007, and Germany at 0.002. Oh. So (and these are countries with similar economies to us), each American gun kills 3 times more people than each Swiss gun, 5 times more people than each British gun, and 17 times more people than each German gun. Britain has very restrictive ownership laws (only 6 guns per 100 people), but Germany is not quite so strict with more than 30 guns per 100 people.

Murder in the USA

A quick look at Wikipedia is all it takes to notice a few striking things about murders in the States (this is all murder, not only those by gun). Most obviously: they are overwhelmingly perpetrated by younger men. 18-24 year old men are by far the largest age group among murder perpetrators. That age group only represents 5% of the US population, yet accounts for more than 45% of the murders. If you include 17 year olds, the numbers are even worse (men 16 and under account for only a very small number of murders compared to other age groups). 17-24 year olds (11.4% of the population) commit a full one third of gun murders (gun murders, not all murders).

Broadening the scope by only another ten years, men under 35 account for nearly 90% of all murders in America. 90%. This is a well-delineated, small (15%) subset of our population committing 90% of the murders. Why don’t we hear more about this? Maybe because of the demographics involved. 75% of all murder victims have served jail time. In the mid-90’s, Philadelphia actually reported that 93% of their murder victims had served prison sentences. Chicago reported 88% of perpetrators as having previous arrest records.

I don’t have numbers on the kind of crimes for which they had formerly been indicted, though that might be interesting to see. It could be an interesting result if it went definitively either way – that they are primarily associated with violent crime, or that it makes no difference what kind of crime landed them in prison.

Centralized crime

It’s no surprise that murder is more prevalent in urban areas. Cities larger than 250,000 people represent the vast majority of murders (12 per 100,000 people, versus about 3 per 100,000 people in non-metropolitan areas). In 2009, New York City had 471 murders (6.4 per 100,000 people), compared to Chicago’s 459 in that same year (a whopping 17 per 100,000 people). Over the past 40 years, Chicago has consistently suffered the most murders (total, not relative to population) of any US city, peaking at 943 in 1999 (34 per 100,000). (However, even New York, with a murder rate at one third of that of Chicago, found a murder-free day newsworthy back in November)

What makes this more remarkable is how lopsided the violence is – among Chicago’s black population, there are 34 murders for every 100,000 people, while the “per 100,000” rate is 11 for Hispanics and 3 for whites. In fact, victim/offender percentages among the three primary ethnicities tend to follow each other quite well: about 76% of victims and convicted offenders were black, about 18% were Hispanic, and about 6% were white. Chicago is apparently such a segregated city that even crime is split along ethnic lines.

But what does it mean?

For all of this, a proper quantitative analysis would let us state things more categorically. I’d like to see numbers on correlations between murder rates (with and without guns) and factors like quality of life indicators, drug production/consumption, mental disease occurrence rates, unemployment rates, drug use, and any other interesting dimensions people can think of. So this is where I really start to ramble.

Suicide rate is clearly another topic the media should bring to the nation’s attention. Across the world, suicide rates don’t clearly correlate with any factors I poked into. Obviously the root of both of these problems is not in the existence or ownership of guns, but that doesn’t mean we should toss off gun control as a leftist move towards tyranny.

I’m okay with people owning guns. Nowadays, hunting in the US provides necessary wildlife population control, especially for deer in the Midwest. I’m not as sure about the necessity of handguns, though you have to wonder how many robberies, etc. are averted because the would-be perpetrator knows their target has or might have a gun. A lot of (most?) gun crimes are committed with non-registered or stolen weapons, so the people who use guns in ways they oughtn’t are already circumventing the system. The strongest argument for trying to get rid of all handguns is that 75% of gun murders use handguns (small, easy to carry out of sight, cheap).

Maybe they would have a harder time stealing a gun if there were fewer guns to steal? It’s hard to say. Unfortunately, any time you bring a weapon into a confrontation, the stakes immediately go up. As soon as the gun comes out, everybody starts thinking about death, or at least how much he’d rather it didn’t happen to him.

Regardless, I see no justification for assault weapon legality. Those are for wars, and We The People don’t need to fight wars because we spend $700 billion a year for people to do it for us. (“To fight potential tyranny!” you say? Well remember, that tyrant will be wielding the $700 billion war machine you so patriotically bought. And no, that doesn’t mean you should be allowed to buy even more guns). I have heard that true assault weapons are prohibitively expensive to buy, so I don’t know how many of those are in circulation that a ban would actually change much.

I don’t have personal experience with the US mental health care system. Of course a huge range of pathologies requires a huge range of treatments. Of course a lot of things get shoved under the rug when nobody can figure out how to deal with them. Of course not every pathology can in fact be dealt with. This is a difficult problem, and I’ve already written way too much to try to get into that, too.

I have no strong conclusions, except that a lot of people are killed every day, all over the world. America’s disproportionate number of guns may not have given us a disproportionately high murder rate among first world countries. But maybe it did! The data I looked at doesn’t clearly say.

It is pretty clear, however, that gun restriction alone is not enough, and perhaps not as big of a problem as many of us on the liberal end of things would like to think. So let’s start looking for solutions that are more creative and effective than simply further legislation. Some US cities have had significant success in combating murder rates in the past 15-20 years; hopefully with a little work the rest of the country can, too. To end on a brighter note, apparently violent crimes have been globally decreasing over the past few decades, and nobody is entirely sure why. I can’t find a source for this, but I do remember reading it somewhere in the past few months. So there is hope.