- DeusExMachinima
- Sep 2, 2012
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 This poster loves police brutality, but only when its against minorities!
Put this loser on ignore immediately!
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Kellermann’s studies on guns frequently get criticized by people who do not seem to have read them. The latest to do so is Michael Krauss, who writes
Notwithstanding all this data, the press gave extraordinary publicity to a 1993 article by one Arthur Kellerman in the New England Journal of Medicine. Kellerman’s “study” concluded that the presence of a gun in one’s home dramatically increased one’s chances of being killed by gunfire. As has since been widely noted, though, the study had stupendous methodological flaws that would surely have precluded its publication, were the NEJM not blinded by its fear and loathing of guns.
As we shall see below, Krauss doesn’t seem to have actually read Kellermann‘s study.
The study consisted of going to homes where a homicide occurred, and asking whether there was a gun in the house. Such a study by design and definition excluded successful uses of the gun (i.e., where the attacker is scared off and no one is killed).
Not so. Krauss is apparently unaware that the study was a case-control study. That means that as well as visiting the houses where there was a homicide (the cases), they also found similar homes where there wasn’t a homicide (the controls). Successful uses of guns that prevent homicides show up in the controls.
Even if the homicide victim was someone who did not live in the house, and who was stabbed to death, the answer “yes” to the question, “Was there a gun in the house?”, would increase the correlation between guns and homicide.
Krauss does not seem to have even bothered to look at the abstract of the study. It states: “we identified homicides occurring in the homes of victims”.
Moreover, the fear of being killed by a stalker or a gang might well contribute to one’s decision to purchase a firearm. If the fear is well-founded, then we would expect gun purchasers to be more likely victims of murder than others. But that does not establish that the firearm ownership caused the crime. Analogously to Kellerman’s dishonest methodology, I could “prove” that visiting a hospital correlates with dying. This does not show that the hospital visit caused the fatal illness.
Krauss seems to be unaware that Kellermann’s study controlled for many factors such as age, sex, neighbourhood, drug use and criminal history. To take the hospital example, if we compare people with the same disease and the same severity of disease and find that the ones who go to hospital are more likely to die than the ones that don’t then you have evidence that the hospital is making things worse. Furthermore, Kellermann’s study found that gun ownership was not associated with a higher risk of being murdered by other means, just with a higher risk of being murdered with a gun. Are we supposed to believe that people only get a gun to defend against potential killers that are going to use guns and not against people who might attack them with a knife?
I would have hoped that before making serious charges of dishonesty against Kellermann, Krauss would have looked at Kellermann’s study, but he does not seem to have done so. And Krauss is a law professor.
Guns don’t kill people, children do. Cassie Culpepper, age 11, was riding in the back of a pickup when her 12-year-old brother pointed his father’s pistol at her. He believed he had removed the bullets, and so jokingly pulled the trigger. He was wrong.
Since January 1st, 2013 there have been 11 reported gun fatalities involving preschool children as the shooter. Ten more toddlers have accidentally shot themselves or somebody else this year. And this statistic represents only data for which a toddler is the shooter in a death (MotherJones reports that 71 children have been killed by guns since Newtown).
The BBC originally reported on this phenomenon in 2009 when, in the span of 24 hours, two children were shot by their toddler siblings. In both cases, the deaths were a result of improperly secured weapons. A New York Times’ piece added to the controversy showing that, due to idiosyncrasies over what constitutes a ‘homicide’ or an ‘accident’, child firearm accidental killings happen roughly twice as much as they are reported in national databases.
These deaths, quite obviously, could have been avoided had any adult, at any point in time, exercised even a modicum of discretion concerning the availability of their firearm. Our outrage towards these deaths should be proportional to how senseless they are, how utterly avoidable they were. We put child-locks on our medicine cabinets, secure our pools with gates, put on helmets during bike rides, and we give our 12-year-old boys a rifle to play with in the backseat of a truck. Wouldn’t want him to get bored. After all, the only way to stop a bad child with a gun is a good child with a gun.
Lawn Darts and Firearms
In April 1987 seven-year-old Michelle Snow was killed in Riverside, California by a stray lawn dart that was thrown by her brother’s playmate. These darts were part of a children’s game in the 70’s and 80’s involving large, weighted darts with sharp metal tips, designed to pierce a horizontal target on the ground.
Michelle’s father immediately began a campaign to ban the darts, arguing that anything less than a full-scale ban would be insufficient—after all, even if you were to ban lawn darts in your own home, nothing can stop a neighbor’s child from throwing one over the fence. The campaign led to an all-out ban in the US and Canada. To this day, it is illegal to assemble a lawn dart in either of the two countries. The problem wasn’t just that lawn darts were dangerous, it was that they were dangerous AND they were being marketed to children as a game, despite being responsible for 6,100 emergency room visits over a span of eight years. So when parents observed that these unnecessarily dangerous toys were injuring and killing their children, they did what any sensible parent would do: they complained until the government listened.
Now examine how differently our society treats guns in a similar context: On April 20th, 2013, a five-year-old Kentucky boy shot and killed his two-year-old sister with a gun that had been specifically manufactured for child use. The gun was called “My First Rifle”, a .22 caliber gun which marketed itself as “especially for youth shooters.” Instead of massive public backlash, the National Rifle Association (NRA) instead, days after the event, held its Annual Meeting where it explicitly marketed firearms and firearm paraphernalia to kids, including NRA bibs for children, ‘Youth Model’ firearms, and NRA publications focused on ‘Youth Shooters.’
Where was the outcry over the blatant militarization of children by one of the most powerful political lobbies in the United States? Where was the parental campaigns demanding that children not be subject to the propagandization of firearms? Where are the restrictions, the regulations, the bans? The NRA’s response, instead, sent a different message: “You’ll have to take my gun from my child’s cold, dead hands.”
Guns may not kill people, but gun culture does.
6 Academic Responses to “Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People”
Lawnmowers don’t mow lawns, people do. But if you want to mow a lot of grass in a very short period of time with very little effort or coordination, you’re going to need a lawnmower. And if you want to be brutally efficient about it, why not get a John Deere semi-automatic riding lawnmower? The X758 is a popular model that can literally mow down entire fields at the push of a button, and can be picked up without any hassle at your local Walmart.
I’m belaboring the analogy, but the point should be clear: Guns may not kill people, but people with guns do, and they do so more often and more efficiently than people without guns. People do not behave in a vacuum. They are influenced by their environment, and when that environment is occupied by guns, people behave aggressively and impulsively. Even the NRA is unable to follow its own strict logic behind “guns don’t kill people.” In searching for a scapegoat, Wayne LaPierre often accuses media, video games, Obama’s budget, and anything else he can find that isn’t a gun. The point being these fruitless attempts to shift blame are an implicit acknowledgement that we are influenced by our surrounding environment, an environment that includes guns.
So here are six reasons, supported in the academic literature, for why guns do, in fact, kill people.
1. Suicides
One area over which there is very little controversy involves the relationship between gun ownership and suicide rates. When firearms are available, people commit suicide more regularly and more successfully than people without access to firearms.
A 2009 meta-analysis on lethal means reduction as a strategy for decreasing suicide rates found that policies that influenced the firearm ownership rate had the most prominent effect on suicide rates.
A 2007 paper investigated suicide rates as it related to the implementation of Austrian firearm regulations. The legislation mandated safe storage practices, a 3-day waiting period for firearms, background and psychological testing prior to purchase, and that all purchasers be at least 21 years of age. The study found a statistically significant decline in suicides for women age 20 to 64, and among men in all age brackets above 20.
A 2006 paper published by Dr. Miller and colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health explored changes in household firearm ownership in the United States over the period 1981-2002 as it related to a decline in the suicide rate, controlling for age, unemployment, per capita alcohol consumption, and socioeconomic status. The study found that, for every 10% decline in the household firearm ownership rate, firearm suicides decreased by 4.2%, and total suicides dropped by 2.5%. The decline in suicide rates was highest among children, and there was no statistically significant increase in the fraction of suicides committed with other weapons.
A 2000 paper by Ludwig and Cook estimated whether declines in suicides over the period 1985-1997 were associated with the passage of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. The study found that the legislation produced a significant reduction in suicide rates among persons aged 55 or older, suggesting that suicidal impulses in older individuals were attenuated by the imposition of the five day waiting period.
Note also that the largest study done to assess mental health trends in the United States found that there was no significant changes in suicidal tendencies between 1990 and 2000. The number of suicides occurring during that period, however, did increase. The only explanation for this incongruity is that suicide attempts became increasingly more ‘successful’ as the years progressed, and the most accepted explanation for why this is the case is due to increase access to firearms.
Furthermore, the best empirical evidence on suicides suggests that most attempts occur during temporary bouts of mental illness. One in four teens who survive a suicide attempt say that they thought of suicide just five minutes before the attempt. The presence of a gun increases the likelihood that a suicide will be ‘successful’, which is why gun regulation consistently decreases suicide rates. The imposition of waiting periods or barriers to the acquisition of a gun allows for the resolution of transient suicidal impulses, decreasing the overall suicide rate. This is further validated by a 2012 study, which shows that the majority of suicide attempts were impulsive and that restricting access to highly lethal methods of suicides (like guns) saves lives.
In the case of suicides, then, the evidence is clear that guns do kill people.
2. Accidental Deaths and Injuries
A key observation noted by Hedeboe and his colleagues is that injuries are inflicted by whatever object is most near. However, when a gun is available, impromptu arguments escalate quickly, leading to a lethal injury. FBI data from 1981, for example, found that 2/3rds of deaths involving arguments were a result of guns. These deaths would have been replaced by non-fatal injuries had the guns not been present.
This is the reason that the United States leads other developed countries when it comes to fatal injury rates:
Image from New Zealand Injury Prevention Strategy Secretariat
In another study, David Hemenway found that unintentional firearm deaths in the U.S. are five times higher than any other high-income country. Among the 23 countries compared, 87% of all firearm deaths of children under the age of 15 occurred in America. In 1995, 5285 U.S. children were killed by a firearm, compared with 57 in Germany and 0 in Japan.
The risk of accidental firearm deaths is also not shared equally among the population: in low-income areas, the likelihood of unintentional injury is 10 times higher than in high-income areas. Rates are particularly high among Native Americans, White teenagers, and African Americans age 15-34.
Remember, these are accidental firearm deaths, and they happen far more often than accidental deaths from any other weapon. According to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in 2010, 606 people were killed by unintentional firearm injuries. By contrast, the next highest category for unintentional deaths by weapon was knives (or other sharp objects) which killed 105 people in 2010. Despite the fact that there are many more knives in the United States than guns, guns are responsible for five times as many accidents. The reason being, of course, that accidents caused by guns are more lethal than accidents by any other weapon.
In the case of unintentional injury, then, the evidence is clear that guns do kill people.
3. Homicide Outside the Home
A number of ecological studies in the United States demonstrate the strong association between gun availability and higher rates of homicide and suicide. A famous study entitled a “Tale of Two Cities” showed that Vancouver and Seattle, two cities with similar demographic characteristics, and near identical rates of robbery and burglary, differed in their approach to handgun restriction. Seattle, which had far less restrictive gun control laws, had a homicide rate that was 60% higher than that of Vancouver, and virtually all of the difference in homicide rates could be explained by differences in the firearm ownership rate. Furthermore, despite the fact that assault rates in both cities was very similar, the lethality of the assaults occurring in Seattle were substantially higher due to the fact that firearms were used seven-times more often.
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4. Homicide in the Home
A 1986 study found that, for every time a gun was used in self-defense in a home, there were 1.3 accidental deaths, 4.6 criminal homicides, and 37 suicides involving a firearm. Therefore, a gun kept in the home is 43 times more likely to kill a member of the household, or a friend, than an actual intruder.
A 1993 study compared various risk factors for homicide in three U.S. counties. They found that the presence of a firearm in the house makes it three times more likely that someone will be murdered by an intimate partner or a family member (usually during arguments). A follow-up study conducted in 2004, came to the same conclusions: if you have a gun in your home, you’re more likely to die from homicide in your home than people without guns. Guns don’t kill people, but it turns out that if you have one near you when an argument escalates, the likelihood that you’ll be killed by that gun is higher than if the weapon had been anything else. Oh, and if you’re wondering why many of these studies occur before 1996, you can thank the NRA.
In the case of homicides, then, the evidence is clear that guns do kill people.
5. The Weapons Effect
‘Priming’ is a well-known, rigorously evaluated concept in cognitive science by which exposure to an unconscious stimulus influences response to a later stimulus. A textbook example by Bargh, Chen, and Burrows (1996) involves an experiment in which subjects were primed with words related to elderly people (slow, forgetful, wrinkle), and found that subjects in the treatment group walked more slowly out of the room than subjects in a control group. These priming effects have been shown to be long-lasting as well. One study found that people primed with certain words are more likely to use those same words to complete a ‘word-fragment completion test’ long after those words had been consciously forgotten.
Why is this relevant to guns? Because a group of social psychologists decided to test whether weapons could function as primes, and the extent to which such primes influenced behavior. They published their findings in a famous paper entitled “Does the Gun Pull the Trigger?” where they found that the mere presence of a weapon primes aggressive behavior. Guns in particular, due to their semantic association with violent behavior, which is reinforced through common experiences in movies, television, and front-page stories, are linked closely with aggression-related concepts. Several studies have confirmed this point. One found people exposed to weapon-related words such as “gun” or “firearm” are more likely to express hostility in subsequent time intervals than those exposed to neutral words.
A great article in the Atlantic brings this conception to bear, arguing that the network of conceptual and symbolic associations triggered when one wields a firearm can, and do, influence behavior. Just as wearing a white lab coat can make an individual behave more intelligently, wielding a gun can make an individual behave more aggressively. The environment we put ourselves in influences our behavior, so we should be cautious about what sort of cultural and social norms we are reinforcing when we advocate for firearms. To modify a Steven Weinberg quote, “With or without guns, you’ll have good people doing good things, and evil people doing evil things, but if you want good people to do evil things, give them a gun.”
In the case of human psychology, then, the evidence is clear that guns do kill people.
6. International Violent Crime Rates
Let’s examine two graphs, adapted from the most recent available survey of international crime statistics. We see here that, compared to other OECD countries, the United States has a fairly modest violent crime rate (ignoring, for a moment, the differences in how countries report crimes).
However, when we compare the same countries on homicide rates, we get a completely different picture:
Why is it that, despite having a relatively modest violent crime rate, the United States has the highest homicide rate, by far, out of OECD countries? Which substantive difference between the United States and other countries explains why the violence our criminals commit is more lethal than the violence of other countries’ criminals? I suspect that the difference might have something to do with this:
Indeed, a study done by David Hemenway and a colleague at Harvard University found that, compared with 23 OECD countries, the United States had a homicide rate that was 6.9 higher than other high-income countries, a difference driven almost exclusively by firearm homicide rates that are 19.5 times higher. A 2013 study also showed that among high income countries “there was a significant positive correlation between guns per capita per country and the rate of firearm-related deaths.”
In the case of violent crime, then, the evidence is clear that guns do kill people.
The Illogic of “Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People”
In the final analysis, I’m reminded of another argument made by gun advocates to succinctly challenge all gun legislation: “Gun control doesn’t work because criminals don’t follow laws.’ I pointed out in an earlier post, that the problem with this argument is that, when iterated out to its logical extreme, it necessitates having no laws at all. We would be forced to live in anarchy if the only laws on the books were ones that everybody always followed.
The same is true for the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument. Yes, the ultimate cause of any crime is the underlying biochemistry that regulates human decision-making. But this says nothing about how proximate causes, such as firearms, influence said decision-making, or whether or not we should regulate such proximate causes.
To provide an admittedly extreme example, humans are responsible for making the decision about whether or not to use a WMD—this is a situation in which one group of human beings wants to kill another group of human beings, and their WMD has no say in the decision making process. This clearly doesn’t mean, however, that Weapons of Mass Destruction should be unregulated. I can’t imagine anybody sanguinely justifying the sale of nuclear weapons to a terrorist group under the pretense that “Nukes don’t kill people, people do.”
Let us not split hairs: the purpose of a firearm is to kill—to kill at a distance, to kill with speed, to kill with maximum lethality. This is a weapon that has been optimized to extinguish life with the minimum amount of effort possible. And, for whatever reason, America has embraced a social norm that explicitly legitimizes these deaths by providing an unending laundry list of excuses whenever one happens: it was the irresponsible parents, the inadequate firearm training, the bad public policy, and so on. But it’s never the gun. And yet, somehow, the U.S. is responsible for 80% of all firearm deaths, 86% of all female firearm deaths, and 87% of all child firearm deaths in the developed world. It’s just a coincidence that we have the highest per capita gun ownership rate in the world. That’s a lot of irresponsible parents.
The main point of this argument is that criminals do not follow laws; therefore laws restricting gun ownership and types of guns would only hurt those who follow them.
This implies that areas with more restrictive gun laws should have more crime given that an armed populace deters criminals.
This notion is connected with the idea of “gun-free” zones and that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
Reality
What do these two graphs have in common? They both show sharp decreases in the observed rates of firearm deaths immediately following the implementation of gun reform in two countries. There is no way to reconcile this stark empirical reality with the argument that “criminals don’t obey laws.” Clearly, some criminals obey some laws some of the time; this is the nature of incentive explicit in law enforcement. Even at the margins, this is valuable. Indeed, J. Ludwig empirically validated this effect in his scholarly paper about gun control and violence: “even imperfect efforts to restrict gun availability to high-risk people can reduce illegal gun use on the margin, even if these regulatory barriers can be overcome in a number of ways by those who are determined to obtain a gun.”
We have one of two mechanisms to explain the decrease in violent crime following gun control: either potential criminals are deterred from crime, or existing criminals are deterred from crime. Either way, you have gun reform that has produced meaningful, substantive improvements in the metrics society should care about. If it’s not clear that laws have the capacity to induce changes in behavior, I won’t be able to improve upon that position.
The Lawbreaker Paradox
The statement that “criminals do not follow laws” is true for the same reason it’s completely irrelevant to a substantive discussion on gun reform– it’s a tautology. It says exactly nothing about the proper course of action a society should take to improve social outcomes.
Definitionally, criminals don’t follow laws. This is no more a meaningful statement about social realities than the observation that dogs bark or cats meow, so it is baffling that gun proponents view this as an acceptable rejoinder in political debate.
Though it may seem like such an obvious point may not need mentioning, it has become increasingly popular among those who oppose gun reform to argue that such legislation only hurts law-abiding citizens, making it more difficult for innocent civilians to get the guns they need to defend themselves. Criminals, after all, don’t obey the laws that burden law-abiding citizens. I will term this position the lawbreaker paradox—a paradox because it axiomatically reinforces the idea that laws, though created with the intent to improve social outcomes, hurt the people who follow them.
The paradox is as follows:
Law-abiding citizens obey the law
Criminals are lawbreakers, and thus do not obey the law
Laws impose restrictions on the behavior of only those that follow them
Laws, therefore, only hurt law-abiding citizens
Without exception, every law could be refuted with the lawbreaker’s paradox, and societies would swiftly descend into anarchy if it weren’t for reasonable policymakers. Laws against rape, murder, and theft, for example, are rarely followed by rapists, murderers, and thieves, but the fact that such people exist in society is the reason behind such regulations in the first place.
Among gun advocates forwarding this line of argument, there seems to be a serious lapse in moral intuition that privileges expediency over human lives. To think that the minor inconvenience of gun reforms such as background checks, waiting periods, and assault weapon bans is more burdensome than the death of thousands of innocent civilians each year (which such reforms seek to redress) reflects a miscalibrated sense of what matters in the world. After all, when gun advocates say that they are being ‘hurt’ by gun control, let’s be clear what the actual implication of this statement is: my right to not be bothered in the least by regulation outweighs the right to life for thousands of innocents who die in the absence of said regulation. Not only can such gun reforms reduce the number of homicides, but there is very little controversy about the tremendous effect they would have at reducing suicides. So, the belief that laws aimed at saving lives “hurt law-abiding citizens” is completely incompatible with any sane definition of right and wrong.
Why have any laws at all?
Not only is this conservative sound-bite irrelevant to gun reform discussion, it’s also socially untenable and dangerously naïve. If we were to accept that a law is justified only if it has a 100% compliance rate (this is, necessarily, the logical extension of any position that renounces legal reform under the pretense that ‘criminals don’t obey laws’), then we could systematically dismantle every existing law until nothing remains but the state of nature. Laws against murder, rape, and theft would be abandoned out of fear that criminals wouldn’t follow them, and that they would thus hurt law-abiding citizens who ostensibly murder, rape, and thieve out of self-defense. Taking this argument to its logical endpoint, even the most hardened of libertarians would be reticent to accept a world where property crimes can be used to abrogate property rights.
Not to mention that there are already plenty of weapons that have been banned which criminals aren’t using– RPGs, machine guns, anti-tank weapons, surface-to-air missiles, and so on. Just because something is illegal doesn’t mean that criminals automatically have a desire to use said weapons, or have access to a black market that could supply them.
Argumentum ad nauseam on why laws are good
I can think of at least three reasons why law and law enforcement is valuable:
A) It allows people who have been wronged by criminals to seek retribution in the criminal justice system. A lack of coherent laws governing gun control would make all criminal justice disputations arbitrary.
B) The punishment associated with breaking said laws forces criminals to internalize a cost to their actions. This cost will not deter the most hardened of criminals, but it will, unequivocally, deter a reasonable subset of potential criminals who resolve that the costs of jail time are not worth the benefit of their crime-to-be.
C) The existence of laws influence social norms governing appropriate behavior. Evidence from social psychology and evolutionary psychology, show that one’s evaluation of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are significantly determined by the views of authority figures (see Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment). Not only can morality be legislated, but it seems easier to get humans to do immoral behavior given a government imprimatur. Research shows that private racist views intensify or diminish with respect to laws that epitomize those views. In the same sense, then, America’s gun laws contribute to a culture in which guns are valued as power symbols, totems of masculinity that prime aggressive, violent behavior. As Alec Wilkinson writes in The New Yorker, “It’s about having possession of a tool that makes a person feel powerful nearly to the point of exaltation… To people who support owning guns, the issue is treated as a right and a matter of democracy, not a complicated subject also involving elements of personal mental health. I am not saying that people who love guns inordinately are unstable; I am saying that a gun is the most powerful device there is to accessorize the ego.”
Building our better selves into law
But the entire argument misses the point, because the purpose of laws is to describe the most ideal set of rules and conditions that, when followed, produce socially optimal outcomes. Punishment in the form of fines, jail time, and social opprobrium functions as the enforcement mechanism behind these laws. So, it should be clear that the point of law has nothing to do with its adherence; that’s the point of law enforcement.
I’m reminded of a Sam Harris quote in the Moral Landscape:
“Clearly, one of the great tasks of civilization is to create cultural mechanisms that protect us from the moment-to-moment failures of our ethical intuitions. We must build our better selves into our laws, tax codes, and institutions…we must build a structure that reflects and enforces our deeper understanding of human well-being.”
Laws, therefore, are about ‘building our better selves’ into the social institutions that govern behavior. We endorse laws like gun reform because we ought to live in a society where people’s ethical intuitions and norms for communication are informed by diplomacy and compassion, rather than deterrence through mutually assured destruction. We ought not live in a world where benign interactions are securitized through prejudice, stereotype, and threat construction because of constant fear that our concealed carrying neighbor has malignant intentions. We ought not live in a world where deliberation is transformed into Mexican standoffs, and our sense of security is inextricably bound up in how big our guns are and how fast they can shoot.
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Aug 27, 2015 03:39
