What Actually Works to Suppress "Gun Violence"?
The title of this post is a question much in the news just now. The Left would have you believe that more gun control is what will work to suppress "gun violence." In truth, we already know a good deal about what works. But first, let's get clear about what, exactly, we're talking about.
Liberals and the mainstream media (forgive the redundancy) talk about "gun violence" when they actually mean "murder." Since the huge majority of murder is done with guns, using murder statistics to measure "gun violence" is perfectly sensible, sure. But it's worth noting why the Left uses the phrase "gun violence" instead of "murder." It's to create the impression that the problem is the gun rather than the person using it. This is so much baloney. The gun doesn't fire itself, and 99% of the guns in this country are never used to kill anyone. The ubiquitous use of the phrase "gun violence" is a key component of the Left's hijacking the vocabulary of the debate: Their push for gun control is going to seem a lot more plausible if they can frame the controversy from the get-go in wording that tacitly suggests their conclusion without ever having to advance an argument, or even acknowledging that an argument is needed.
That won't work here. Instead, let's look at the 60 years or so since the end of the Eisenhower administration to see what has gone on with murder in this country and how the the incidence of homicide, which has varied vastly over that time, has been affected by law, policy, and gun ownership.
The statistics for murder (and other crime) are set forth in detail here. In short, they show that the murder rate surged for three decades, 1961-1991; then fell off dramatically -- by more than half -- in the next generation, until about 2014; and has resumed a sharp rise over the last few years, as noted here.
Many on the Left pretend to be mystified about how these trends came about. In fact, almost everyone in the field has a pretty good idea. There were at least five important factors accounting for the decrease in murder. The first two had nothing to do with how the government behaved but the last three assuredly did.
The first factor in the falloff in murder starting in the early Nineties was the aging of the Baby Boom population bulge. People age out of crime, particularly violent crime. Boomer criminals became weaker, slower, and less willing to take risks. So they committed much less violent crime, albeit not necessarily by choice.
The second factor was the dramatic growth of private surveillance and security. You only need to go to the mall to see this. Security guards are omnipresent, and everywhere you go, you're on camera. People behave better when they know they're being watched, and behave better still when someone nearby might intervene in misbehavior.
But three other causes of the decline in murder were directly related to how we changed law and policy in response: We hired many more police; undertook more targeted, computer-assisted, and proactive policing (the most prominent example being New York City's "broken windows policing" under Giuliani/Bloomberg, during which murder fell by an astonishing three-quarters); and we adopted more sober and less scattershot sentencing.
Let's look at the latter in particular, in part because it's such a popular target of "criminal justice reform."
There are four goals of sentencing, all related to crime suppression: just punishment, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation. We have plenty of controversy about what's "just" punishment, largely because it's so subjective. Deterrence is also hotly debated, largely because it's hard to measure or even to agree on how it should be measured. There is likewise no consensus on how to rehabilitate inmates, or even if rehabilitation is possible for most of them. Sky-high recidivism statistics are not encouraging.
But incapacitation is relatively easy to agree upon. When a violent criminal is taken out of civil society, civil society is going to be safer. When the local strong-arm or Crips member is incarcerated, he won't be sticking a revolver in your ear to blow your head off if you don't hand over your wallet fast enough (or maybe to blow it off anyway depending on what drugs he's on at the moment).
As the Left relentlessly complains, more sober sentencing laws, including sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimum statutes, helped produce a significant increase in incarceration from at least the early Nineties through roughly the next 20 years -- exactly the period during which the incidence of murder and other sorts of crime were plummeting.
What a coincidence! Or, as occasionally memorialized in one angst-ridden New York Times headline after another -- a collection of headlines that remain a monument to stupidity -- "Prison Population Swells Even As Crime Shrinks."
Well no kidding.
Bottom line: We know many if not most of the reasons murder declined so much in the generation following Bush 41 after it had surged for three decades before then. But what about gun ownership? Did the number of guns out there affect the murder rate?
This is what Statista.com says, "The share of American households owning at least one firearm has remained relatively steady since 1972, hovering between 37 percent and 47 percent. In 2021, about 42 percent of U.S. households had at least one gun in their possession."
In other words, gun ownership remained roughly where it is now both during periods of massively increasing, and massively decreasing, murder rates.
A graph of 50 years of gun ownership statistics, up through last year, is here. As you can see, the incidence of ownership went up and down and up and down, but always stayed within a very few percentage points of 41 or 42 percent.
And what does this tell us? That the incidence of gun ownership has essentially no relationship to the murder rate.
We have more than a half century of experience telling us what to do. We know what works -- getting tough. We know what fails -- getting soft. We know what has little to no predictable effect -- gun ownership. What we don't know is whether Congress is listening.