GUN CONTROL
Response to mass shootings must target evil people, not their weapons.
Immediately after the mass murder at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., voices including that of the U.S. president called for stricter gun control, dispensing with the customary pause for decency. And our cherished “evidencebased decision making.”
If guns killed people, there would be a solid statistical correlation between widespread gun ownership and high murder rates. And there just isn’t.
You cannot look at gun ownership in a society and predict the approximate murder rate. You cannot look at the murder rate and deduce the approximate level of gun ownership. You can’t even look at the gun murder rate and predict the overall murder rate.
The evidence is not exactly hard to find. Just Google “International murder rates” then click on Wikipedia’s “List of countries by intentional homicide rate” and you’ ll find the United States 111th out of 218, more than halfway down, with an intentional murder rate of 4.7 per 100,000 people per year.
Of course, we could all wish it was zero. Indeed, it’s startling that people deliberately murder one another everywhere in such numbers (and this is only homicide; war is excluded) that the American rate is unremarkable, just above Latvia, not exactly renowned as a slaughterhouse.
Some journalists and politicians may depict those guntotin’ Americans as exceptionally prone to murdering one another. But they’re not.
Russia, for instance, sits at 66th internationally, between Gabon and Seychelles, with 9.2 murders per year per 100,000 people, nearly twice the U.S. rate, despite decades of very strict gun control. At the top are seven South and Central American countries, led by Honduras at 90.4, very nearly 20 times the U.S. rate.
These statistics underline pervasive cultural patterns. And by the same token, they underline that the presence of guns, legal or illegal, doesn’t correlate with murder rates among countries or regionally within them.
Famously, murder rates in our prairie provinces are considerably higher than the bordering American states where gun ownership is far higher. OK, it’s not famous. It takes a bit more research. But it’s worth looking into, given its relevance. If guns kill people, why was Idaho’s murder rate lower than Nova Scotia’s in 2011, North Dakota’s lower than in neighbouring Manitoba and Saskatchewan and Minnesota’s lower than Canada’s?
It is true that a larger share of American murders are committed with guns than in most countries. Wikipedia’s less complete list of total firearm-related homicides per 100,000 people in 75 “Countries and Depend- encies” ranks the U.S. much higher: 15 th. And curiously, all but two above it are in the Western Hemisphere (the exceptions are South Africa, 9th, and Swaziland, 5th). But unless there’s some important advantage to being killed with, say, a meat hammer, it’s no argument for cracking down on firearms. After all, nearly eight times as many people per capita are killed without guns in Honduras as are killed at all in the U.S.
Now it has been claimed, including by U.S. President Barack Obama, that widespread U.S. gun ownership facilitates mass murder. And it is clearly easier to commit a horrific slaughter with an automatic weapon than a frying pan.
So here you do have to dig deeper. But if we love evidence, we shouldn’t mind. The economist and gun-rights advocate John Lott has lately adduced statistics showing that eight European countries have had more mass shootings per capita than the U.S. since 2009. And as I was writing this column, news came in of one claiming over two-dozen victims in Tunisia, which has strict gun control.
Incidentally, statistics on suicide are less complete. But again there is no visible correlation between gun ownership and suicide, gun suicide rates and overall suicide rates or even gun suicide rates and gun murder rates. Here, too, human choices, not inanimate objects, determine behaviour.
Am I saying we should just shrug fatalistically at mass shootings? Of course not. But our response must target evil in the human heart, not tools in human hands. And here I’m very encouraged that, in response to the Charleston massacre, so many white Americans have turned dramatically against the Confederate battle flag, especially in the South.
I realize many who flew it, or bought Dukes of Hazzard toys, were not racist. They were expressing a disdain for prissy modernity I entirely share. But there’s no getting around the fact that the central cause of the Confederacy was racial slavery and no scrubbing that stain off that flag. The very public recognition of this truth goes to the heart of the matter in a way disarming law-abiding citizens can’t.
Now you may or may not share my belief in our traditional Canadian right to bear arms. But it’s beside the point here.
The evidence says guns do not facilitate murder.
If guns killed people, there would be a solid statistical correlation
between widespread gun ownership and high murder rates. And there just isn’t