Firearm Availability and Homicide a Review of the Literature
By Jon Miltimore
A couple of months ago, The Atlantic published an article written by staff writer David A. Graham that explores the surge of violence the U.s.a. experienced in 2020.
Overall the commodity, which analyzes findings from the FBI'due south "Compatible Crime Written report," is quite skilful. It effectively breaks down what we know and—more importantly—what nosotros don't know about the latest crime trends in America, which in 2020 saw a record surge in the murder rate amid a broader rise of violence.
On i detail point, however, Graham is simply wrong.
Fact Check: 'More People Conveying Guns Tends to Result in More than Shootings'
Graham notes that sales of firearms jumped in 2020, as did police confiscation of illegal guns, and he attempts to tie this to the surge in violence.
"You can ask police force-abiding people or you can ask people who do not abide by the law, 'Why are y'all armed with a firearm?' 'I need to protect myself,'" Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the Academy of Missouri at St. Louis, tells Graham.
Precisely what Rosenfeld meant by this statement is unclear, but Graham's next sentence is articulate.
That creates a vicious cycle: More people carrying guns tends to result in more shootings, which in plow heightens the want to conduct a weapon for protection," Graham writes. "When offense is decreasing, this dynamic helps it continue to fall, but in one case it begins to rising, the feedback loop turns ugly.
Whether this claim is Graham's or Rosenfield's is unclear. No link or citation is offered to support the assertion. What we do know is the claim that "more people conveying guns tends to result in more shootings" is only untrue.
Every bit economist Mark Perry pointed out several years ago, the US saw gun violence steadily decrease over multiple decades every bit gun ownership surged.
"According to data retrieved from the Centers for Disease Control, there were 7 firearm-related homicides for every 100,000 Americans in 1993 (run into lite blue line in chart)," Perry wrote. "Past 2013…the gun homicide rate had fallen by well-nigh 50% to only 3.vi homicides per 100,000 population. "
This refuse, Perry points out, occurred every bit the number of privately owned firearms in America surged from almost 185 million in 1993 to 357 one thousand thousand in 2013.
And in case you lot're wondering, non-fatal shootings followed a similar refuse as fatal shootings, as Vox reported at the time. This is role of a larger decline in gun violence that saw "a 39 percent decline in gun homicides between 1993 and 2011 and a staggering 69 percent decline in non-fatal firearms crimes."
Why Did Violence Fall?
Mr. Graham, who has also reported for Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal, is no doubt a fine writer and reporter. (Many of his points in the article on the FBI's recent criminal offence report are insightful.) But he's simply incorrect that more people possessing guns "tends to result in more shootings." The data simply do non support this claim. During this "staggering" decades-long trend of falling firearms crimes, gun ownership steadily increased the entire time.
None of this is to say that gun ownership caused the decline in gun violence. It very well may have, but that's a more hard question to answer. For instance, Max Ehrenfreund, a Harvard scientist, has posited that the decline in gun violence may have stemmed from a decline in alcoholism, more police working the streets, the bullish economy of the Reagan years, and even less lead exposure.
Ehrenfreund says researchers don't really know for certain why the decline in violence happened, just he said one thing is clear: "America has get a much less violent place."
The decline in gun violence was no incertitude linked to many factors, only it's certainly possible the rise of gun ownership was one of them.
Every bit Lawrence Reed has pointed out, compelling research shows guns prevent some ii.5 million crimes a yr in America—6,849 every day—nearly a half million of which are of a life-threatening nature. And it's not exactly hard to see why. After all, lx percent of convicted felons told researchers that they avoided committing such crimes when they suspected the target was armed.
If yous're suspicious of these statistics, it's worth noting that the Centers for Disease Control, in a study commissioned by President Obama following the 2012 Sandy Hook Massacre, estimated that crimes prevented by guns may be even higher: upward to three million annually (8,200 per twenty-four hour period).
Again, we don't know for certain. These are estimates. What we practice know is that guns aren't simply used to commit crimes; they are besides used to cease and deter crimes.
Seen and Unseen
In his famous essay That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen, the groovy economist Frédéric Bastiat noted at that place is a pervasive tendency for people to focus on the visible effects of a given policy or action and miss the unseen consequences.
Gun control proponents often brand this mistake. They focus on crimes committed with guns (the seen)—some of which are truly the things of nightmares—but ignore all the unseen, all of the crimes prevented by firearms.
Some may not be prepared to take the idea that guns prevent thousands of crimes in America every single mean solar day. That'south ok.
But The Atlantic should right its claim that "more people conveying guns tends to result in more than shootings." Information technology's pure fiction.
Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the field of study of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Periodical, CNN, Forbes, Pull a fast one on News, and the Star Tribune.
Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
Source: https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/fact-check-no-shootings-dont-increase-when-more-people-carry-firearms/
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