In what is surely one of the most perverse ironies of our current fight with the Covid-19 virus over the last two years there has been a sharp increase in gun violence and indeed violence in general here in the United States. The number of murders committed in the US in 2020 was 21,570, up from 16,669 in 2019, a 29.4% rise, the sharpest one year increase in US history. And that was followed by 24,576 murders in 2021, another 13.9% rise above the 2020 numbers.
Psychologists point to the feelings of depression and confinement brought on by the pandemic to which we can add the political fighting over how to respond to Covid-19. An ever growing number of fights breaking out at school board meetings and aboard airplanes over masks are just the more visible signs of a growing violent trend in our society. It’s as if the virus isn’t just satisfied with killing nearly a million of us directly it has cause us to turn on each other to increase the death toll even further.
And it’s not as if there is anything we can do to reduce the increasing number of gun crimes and violence, we’re all just helpless before the rising tide of murder and mayhem. Oh…wait, there is something we can do, it’s called gun control, laws to prevent people who cannot be trusted to handle guns responsibly from getting their hands on them and in general just decreasing the number of guns in society.
Further evidence of the efficacy of gun control laws in reducing gun violence can be found in a recent report released by the group Everytown for Gun Safety. In this report all 50 states are evaluated for the strength or weakness of their gun control laws. The judgment is made based upon 50 key policies and each state is then given a score between 0 and 100. That score is then compared to that state’s gun violence rate, gun deaths per 100,000 population. Gun deaths include not only murders but suicides and accidental deaths due to firearms.
When you plot the results the issue becomes clear, those states with tough gun laws have significantly lower rates of gun deaths. Also, if you group the states into states designated as ‘National Leaders’, ‘Making Progress’, ‘Missing Key Laws’, ‘Weak Systems’ and ‘National Failures’ the relationship is stark. Those states rated as ‘National Failures’ have a gun violence rate nearly three times that of the ‘National Leaders’. In fact as the strength of gun laws goes down the rate of gun deaths increases almost proportionally.
Now there are a few anomalies in the data, but even they are instructive. For example California has the strongest gun laws of all states, but their gun death rate is more than twice that of #2 Hawaii. The problem for California is guns being brought into the state from other, nearby states with less stringent gun laws. Hawaii, on the other hand is an island where it is very difficult to smuggle in illegal guns.
There are also states with lax guns laws like Vermont and New Hampshire that still have low gun death rates. The key factor here is that Vermont and New Hampshire are actually protected by the strong gun laws of the neighboring states of New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts.
Then there are the states at the bottom including the entire swath of states from Texas to Georgia, all of whom have gun laws in the lower half of all states; Florida isn’t so bad at #17. The worst of all is Mississippi, ranking at very bottom in gun law strength and at the very highest for rate of gun death. In fact a person’s chance of being killed by a gun in Mississippi is fully 8.4 times that of a person in Hawaii.
So its time to really ask ourselves the question, are guns actually making us safer, or are they in fact making us less safe. Thanks to a well financed campaign by the gun lobby our nation as a whole has been unable to pass any kind of gun control legislation in more then 25 years, and with six conservatives on the Supreme Court even state gun laws are being chipped away.
A case in point is the new ordinance being considered by the California city of San Jose, where I lived for a few years back in the 1980s. On the 25th of January the San Jose City Council voted overwhelmingly for a bill that would require all gun owners in the city, an estimated 50,000 people, to pay a annual fee of $25 dollars to pay for suicide prevention, remember twice as many people die by gun suicide as by murder. Now such a fee is quite common but the bill also contains a second requirement for each gum owner to purchase liability insurance for their weapons.
Forcing gun owners to have insurance to cover the cost of any misuse of their firearms is something that has been talked about over the years but never actually enacted before now. And the bill being considered by San Jose has to go through a second reading and another vote before it will become law but nevertheless the gun lobby is already forming ranks to do battle to protect their 2nd amendment rights.
As you might guess the National Rifle Association has already filed a lawsuit in federal count against the San Jose ordinance. So in the end the only people who may benefit from San Jose’s attempts to force some degree of responsibility on gun owners may be the lawyers on both sides of this contentious issue.
A last little Post-Script. Nine of the families from the Sandy Hook elementary school mass killing have settled a lawsuit with Remington, the manufacturer of the AR-15 rifle used to kill twenty grade school children along with six adults. In the settlement the families will receive a total of $73 million dollars but most importantly they will receive access to documents concerning gun company’s advertising strategy along with other documents concerning how Remington conducted it’s sales.
This could be the first crack in the door shining light into the practices of the gun industry. For instance, are the gun manufacturers aware of the dangers of gun ownership and are they simply ignoring the consequences of their product? There’s still a long way to go to defeat the gun lobby, but the documents could be just the ammunition we need.