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Subject: Gun facts--Part I
In the 20th century the US experienced 2 significant violent crime waves; one that began building during the late 1960s and reached its peak in the early 1990s. After hitting an apex in 1992 violent crime rates began a decades-long national decline.
By 2014, homicide rates dropped by 50%, while non-fatal firearm crime dropped to just 16% of the rates 2 decades earlier. In more recent years, there have been occasional (but largely localized) hiccups in this trend. In 2016, for example, Chicago elected a liberal/democrat prosecutor, the first of a movement that continues to this day. Almost immediately, Chicago experienced a stunning increase in crime rates, including violent crime rates, bucking the general national trend and making the city deadly.
It is undeniable, however, that beginning in the summer of 2020, a series of things abruptly destabilized the overall public safety even further in major cities around the nation, even in some cities with traditional “law and order” prosecutors. A broad swath of urban areas around the US were wracked by a rapid, significant, and sustained increase in certain types of violent crime, including homicides, non-fatal shootings, and carjackings. While there is some evidence that these spikes in violent crime may be slowing in some areas, on the whole, the violence has continued largely unabated.
On the contrary, it is far more likely that the same factors driving the surge in violent crime are also driving increased lawful gun sales—and that the increased violence is itself a factor driving more law-abiding Americans to buy firearms for self-defense. It is therefore not only unnecessary to impose stricter gun laws as a means of combating violent crime, but the imposition of such laws would likely prove entirely unhelpful. It may even have the unintended consequence of exacerbating violent crime by lessening the protective impact lawful gun owners have on crime rates.
On the contrary, the best available evidence suggests that a small number of serial offenders commit the majority of violent crimes, and that many of these serial offenders are already legally prohibited from possessing the firearms they use to perpetrate their crimes.
Consider, for example, a report analyzing gun violence in Washington, DC, which concluded that 65% of all gun violence in our capital is tightly concentrated in a group of 500 “very high risk” individuals, almost all of whom have significant prior or ongoing interactions with DC’s criminal justice system. Almost 50% of homicide suspects in DC have been previously incarcerated, while 25% were on active probation or parole supervision. Accord to the report: most victims and suspects with prior criminal offenses had been arrested about 11 times for about 13 different offenses by the time of the homicide” they were involved in—not including juvenile arrests.DC is not an outlier. An analysis of more than 2,200 individuals arrested for shootings in Philadelphia since 2015 had similar results: 40% of suspects had a prior felony conviction, 52% had a prior felony charge, 76% had at least one prior arrest, 20% a pending court case at the time of arrest for a shooting. The same is true of recent analyses of homicide and shooting suspects in Indianapolis, Portland, Knoxville, and San Francisco.
In other words, the trend is across the nation—the bulk of criminal gun violence falls on the shoulders of a small and predictable subset of the population who could not have been in lawful possession of any of the firearms they used to commit their crimes. These analyses of known gun violence perpetrators are consistent with the efforts of law enforcement to trace so-called crime guns. In cases in which the possessor of a crime gun can be successfully identified, that possessor is rarely the original lawful possessor of the firearm, based the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).These findings are also consistent with a 2019 Department of Justice survey of prisoners who possessed guns during their offenses--additional evidence that perpetrators of criminal gun violence are not commonly in lawful possession of legally obtained firearms. It found that 90% of prisoners who possessed a gun during their offenses did not obtain the weapon retail, where they are required to undergo a criminal background check under federal law. A plurality—43%—obtained their guns “off the street” or through an “underground market,” while another 6% obtained them by theft. 25% obtained guns from a friend or family member, good reason to believe that a significant percentage of these would constitute illegal transfers to prohibited persons. Moreover, a small minority of respondents who initially obtained a firearm through a retail source and were presumably in lawful possession at the time of purchase later became prohibited possessors, but evaded efforts to have those firearms removed from their possession by law enforcement. It is little wonder, then, that recent comprehensive analyses have not found any association between increases in lawful gun purchases and increases in violent crime.
An additional study found that while 28 states saw significantly higher risk of gun violence during the pandemic compared to the same time pre-pandemic, 22 states did not experience a statistically significant higher risk—including states like Florida and South Carolina, which at the same time set record numbers for gun sales and traditionally receive poor gun control law ratings from advocacy groups. In short, are serious logical flaws with the assertion that increased lawful gun sales during COVID-19 were causing the simultaneous surge in criminal gun violence. Those firearms, by definition, were not purchased by the small subset of repeat offenders who are responsible for most gun violence.
It is far more likely that the same factors largely responsible for increased crime also facilitated lawful gun sales by increasing the law-abiding public’s sense that the foundations of civil society were threatened by chaos and disorder. Surveys routinely show that most Americans who choose to own guns do so primarily for out of concern for their personal safety. Increased numbers of Americans chose to purchase firearms in recent years because of spikes in violent crime, which led to increased fears that they would need to defend themselves from criminal activity.
BIG LIE: Lawful Gun Owners Rarely Use Their Firearms in Self-Defense
Advocates of stricter gun control laws overstate the impact of such laws on violent crime and seriously downplay (or completely ignore) the protective impact of lawful gun ownership. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, every major study on defensive gun uses has concluded that Americans use their firearms defensively somewhere between 500,000 and several million times every year.
In 2021, the most comprehensive survey of gun owners and gun use ever conducted vindicated earlier studies, estimating an average of 1.6 million annual defensive gun uses. Importantly, this analysis reveals that, unlike criminal gun uses, defensive gun uses are quite common amongst lawful gun owners, with approximately 33% of all gun owners reporting having used a firearm to defend themselves or their property. Not only are armed civilians better able to resist criminal activity when it occurs, but according to criminals themselves, knowing that potential victims might be armed effectively deters many crimes in the first place. According to a survey of imprisoned felons, roughly 33% reported being “scared off, shot at, wounded or captured by an armed victim,” while 40% admitted that they had refrained from attempting to commit a crime out of fear that the victim was armed. Well over 50% of the felons acknowledged that they would not attack a victim they knew was armed, and almost three-quarters agreed that: “one reason burglars avoid houses where people are at home is that they fear being shot. Importantly, it also found that felons from states with the greatest relative number of privately owned firearms registered the highest levels of concern about confronting an armed victim.
This is consistent with the conclusions of a study that analyzed the effect of a Memphis newspaper listing all Tennessee residents with a handgun carry permit in a publicly accessible database, locating them within their five-digit zip code. The database received more than a million views in 2009. The study’s authors concluded that, in the months following a newspaper article that dramatically increased online traffic to the database, zip codes with higher densities of carry permit holders experienced a 20% relative decrease in burglaries compared to zip codes with lower densities of carry permit holders. International data, too, seems to indicate that criminals generally consider the likelihood of armed resistance and adapt their behavior accordingly. According to one study, only about 13% of burglaries in the US take place when the occupants are home, a rate far lower than in many other developed countries like Canada, Great Britain, and the Netherlands.
Because these “hot burglaries” are far more likely to result in an assault against a victim than are burglaries of unoccupied homes, it is relatively easy to predict—as several researchers have—that the lower percentage of hot burglaries in the US results in over half a million fewer assaults every year than would otherwise occur if the percentage of hot burglaries was on par with these other countries, saving the nation billions of dollars in avoided crime costs. Importantly, these dollar amounts increase significantly when inflation is taken into account.
Finally, armed civilians played a significant but under-acknowledged role in stopping active shooters, including those bent on acts of mass public violence. Between 2014 and 2021, armed citizens successfully stopped 51% of active shooters who carried out attacks in public places that allowed civilians to lawfully carry their own firearms for self-defense. In none of those incidents did the armed citizen injure innocent bystanders.
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