America is a Violent Country

One immediate thought – is the decline in deaths related partly to improved trauma care? Isn’t it the case that more US troops survive wounds now that would have killed them previous wars? Is the same effect causing some of the change here?

Meanwhile the UK have just announced the lowest murder rates for 30 years.

Demographics plays a role, as does immigration. I notice self-assualts are not included, which would double Japan and Korea’s listed rates …

If anyone knows of a similar time series for homicides specifically, let me know.

You might try the Bureau of Justice Statistics here.

There are also extraordinary regional trends in US violence. There is a factor of 6 difference between the highest and lowest rates for states in the US:

http://www.census.gov/statab/ranks/rank21.html

Note that this isn’t just urban vs. rural; South Carolina is the highest and Vermont is the lowest. SC doesn’t have a major metropolitan area, nor is there an unusual rate of recent immigrants. The South has always had a high violent crime rate, and this factors into things like US politics in a major way. The incarceration rate is also offscale and has enormous regional differences.

There has also been a huge overall drop in the US crime rate, with major cities now pushing 50 or more year lows. There are a lot of factors driving this.

@Magistra: Aggravated assault is also down sharply over the same time period, so it’s not just that assaults are less often fatal

A few things:
* I’d like to see a comparison of non-lethal crime rates. Does the US have more crime, or just more homicides, than other industrialized nations, and if so how big are the differences?
* I would also like to look at other areas with high crime and homicide rates: Brazil, Russia, South Africa, and elsewhere. What traits do they share with the US but not East Asia and the EU?

@6 and @7 just made my point with higher crime rates in those NRA strongholds… Thanks!

Bruce @6: Actually the data Marc links to at @7 indicate that the more urban Northeastern states are right on the national average. So, while far below places like Tennessee, they’d still be way above the OECD norm.

ChadW: Listen to yourself. “Owning a gun is premeditated murder toward as of yet unnamed victim.” And you blame others for hysteria?
I own more than one gun. I have no intent of murdering anyone, for any cause. I do have intent of killing some tasty deer this fall, and some tasty partridge and rabbit too. I am not afraid of my neighbors, unnamed prowlers or gangs.
The only prowler I might shoot is a cougar or a bear if they decide to threaten my animals. Then again, if they don’t, I’ll let them be.
I leave my doors unlocked (although not my gun cabinet ;) and if my neighbor needs something, he knows he’s welcome to take it. I think this debate becomes very different in a rural setting. But, that’s the problem; you can’t lump all gun owners together and expect to make a coherent argument.

@17, Yes, I know about hunting and I agree with that means of gun ownership. I was just referring to gun ownership for any other means that generally shows up in more violent ways. I don’t see too many people owning a semi-automatic glock or an AK47 for the purpose of hunting…

This article should have been titled:

America is violent; water is wet.

Bad link corrected, I hope.

Gun ownership is also all over the map (and at about 30% nationwide):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/health/interactives/guns/ownership.html

The distinction is both regional and rural vs. urban – states like Vermont are high and states like Rhode Island are very low. Gun ownership also has significant class divisions; it’s far less common among college educated professionals than it is among rural blue collar workers. Smoking is a good example: it’s become almost a social class marker in the US at this point. Guns are similar.

I would love to know the story of why the Korea graph looks the way it does. I guess drugs/drug policy is always a decent bet.

@20: Not to be overly pedantic, but as that table wasn’t what I was expecting: that’s a table of the average number of guns owned per 100 people, not a ratio describing the number of gun owners. (That is, I had misinterpreted “gun ownership” to be a binary variable.) It would be interesting to see how the distributions of gun ownership compare across nations–you could imagine some places that have a small number of collectors each with large numbers of guns, and other places where many people have only a single gun for a single purpose (for hunting, home protection, shooting pests on the farm, etc.).

Re demographics: is it possible to overlay these graphs on ones of the percentage of the population in, say, the 18-28 age group, assuming that’s the primary one for violent crime? Different countries had different size baby booms, didn’t they? I see the peak in US deaths from assault is around 1978, when babies born in 1957, which I think was the peak baby boom year, were 21.

@26: The gun / no gun information is in the link at post 23. You’re correct: there is a small group of people who collect lots and lots of guns. The median number of guns in a household with them is probably close to 1, and the average is about 3.

@17 Janie, thanks for giving me some matter for thought. In my country, Portugal, it is extremely difficult to purchase any kind of gun and very few people own them. Also, violent crime statistics are very low compared to other countries, so I have always assumed both facts to be correlated, just as I assumed a correlation between gun ownership and violent crime in the U.S.A.

Having lived for some time in Switzerland, where nearly every male up to age 45 keeps a government issue assault rifle at home, and in Sweden, where elk hunting is a national sport, I came to realize the correlation is not so direct as I had thought. Maybe the fact that every round of ammunition must be strictly accounted for in both countries makes a big difference.

Nevertheless, it is possible that your State, Maine, has more in common with elk-hunting Sweden than with some American States. And there certainly is a big difference between a hunting gun and an AK47, which as far as I can see can have no other purpose but to take another life.

I think you hit the core of the matter with your question “Why are Americans so angry?” But their anger may be precisely what leads many of them to buying assault rifles rather than hunting weapons. If so, I should worry about my country and the rest of Europe, where anger has been mounting steadily in the past four years.

If anyone is interested, Nisbett and Cohen have a wonderful book (Culture of Honor: the psychology of violence in the South) about violence in the southern part of the USA.

there were graphics comparing USA, Canada and UK for homicides for a given population and age. The maximum in the three cases was about 24 years-old for the three countries,

I’m willing to bet the correlation with “male” was pretty high as well. Which I say not particularly to suggest that younger men are inherently violent (there are vastly more 24 year old men who are not violent after all) but merely to point out that “24 year-olds” misses out probably several other relevant demographic details.

«there were graphics comparing USA, Canada and UK for homicides for a given population and age. The maximum in the three cases was about 24 years-old for the three countries,

I’m willing to bet the correlation with “male” was pretty high as well. »

Well, I thought it would be evident from « but in 2000 Scientific american published a special edition on ‘Man’»

So yes, those are the value for male individuals, to be sure I believe I remember that there was too a line for women, but it was much lower in the three cases

I wrote the following earlier on my FB page and thus was glad to see Kieran posted this again.

I think my country, the United States, is a rather militaristic and violent society generally, from the military industrial complex and the national security state, through popular films, video games, television shows, etc. Now of course not all people exposed to such things are affected in the same way, and there’s the rub. The wide variety of personalities or temperaments and character types, combined with genetic inheritance and socialization processes, leaves some individuals more prone to being affected by such things than others: they’re intrinsically vulnerable we might say (and that vulnerability is likely expressed in symptoms of mental illness). Of course it is hard to identify just who are such individuals, but often, especially in intimate social interactions, people have hunches, suspicions, concerns, and so forth, which they may or may not act upon owing to, among other things, not wanting to get involved, uncertainty, or fear, for example. To make matters worse, our mental health system in this country is a mess, in part as a result of “de-institutionalization,” which has had some perverse effects probably not anticipated by those who advocated earlier and in some measure necessary changes in mental health care and treatment. I’m not sure who the government official was speaking at one of the press conferences this morning, but he referred to the suspect as something on the order of a “freak of nature,” while yet another public official spoke of this as an “isolated incident” (which, literally, it appears to be). Both of these descriptions are not at all helpful in our attempts to explain or make some sense of this act of violence. Nor are accounts which speak of this as simply an inexplicable act of evil. Such characterizations permit us to avoid looking at how our society and culture bear some measure of responsibility for the kinds of individuals (and communities) that compose it, and I say that without in any way wanting to diminish the notion of individual moral responsibility. Individual lives are not lived in vacuums, and there are myriad effects on them, some of them identifiable, others hidden or mysterious. I prefer, however painful or inchoate, to see all of us as sharing in the complicity of such acts in a general sense insofar as we’ve done nothing to change a society which is clearly violent and in which an incredibly large number of people display symptoms of mental illness. Erich Fromm got close to the problem in speaking of a “pathology of normalcy” (the particular locution was his but the idea has ancient pedigree). As far back as the 1950s, Fromm wrote that much of our cultural and political life evidence expressions of low-grade, chronic schizoid tendencies. In short, our society is in many respects “sick,” and this latest incident is one of the more visible and terrible symptoms of that sickness.

Great info. Great post. And, for once, an unaggressive, rational comment stream..

America is no country for old men.

In about 6 hours I’ll leave here, Monterrey, to drive through Nuevo Laredo to Laredo Texas. I’ll leave at 4.30 am and hope the bad guys are sleeping. I hope to be crossing the border at 6.30am.
I don’t know anybody who smokes pot or ingests drugs yet here we are in Mexico fighting the USA’s War on drugs. Both sides … no all sides are armed with guns that came from the USA.
60,000 people shot with US sold guns or kidnapped at the point of a gun sold in the USA and then butchered with knives and axes made in China.
Sometimes I feel that there is not enough violence in the USA, then I read about people being shot at the cinema and I regain my rationality.

heckblazer, it’s just a cohort effect combined with the large increase in gun ownership since the war. Most of the other curves in that series show a similar rainbow curve, it’s just flatter because they aren’t so dependent on teh vicissitudes of a) guns and b) drug wars.

Also, someone up above raised the usual canard of immigration. That doesn’t fit the curve at all, with murders falling fast since immigration increased.

“gun control is therefore an issue of low relevance for them. ”

Though I’m for more gun control I realize that won’t be happening any time soon.

So I’d settle for forcing gun stores that sell weapons used to murder people to display a plaque that reads, “We sold Soandso the weapon he used to kill x innocent people.”

The tables in 6 show quite an inverse relationship between suicide and homicide, Rocky Mountain states such as Montana, Idaho topping the scale for suicide and at the bottom for homicide. Widespread hunting gun ownership may be better as explanation for a high suicide rate than for murder.

Matt McIrvin @ 26:
In general I would find exceptionally odd to find a gun laying around in the open when visiting someone’s house. Indeed, I’ve known a number of gun owners and I can’t think of a time when I’ve ever seen one of their guns. However, if I was over at the SF writer Jerry Pournelle’s house and saw a gun laying around I would be both thoroughly unsurprised and unlikely to say anything critical.

Something that I personally found a bit odd was when I was visiting a friend’s house and saw a upscale glossy lifestyle magazine called Garden & Gun on the coffee table. His wife is a subscriber, though mainly for the “garden” part.

faustusnotes @49:
If by cohort you mean the baby boom you’re definitely on to something. The baby boom in the US peaked at around 1957, and lo about 18 years later we get the peak in violence. The second peak would likewise correlate well with the height of the crack epidemic. I would be curious if demographic trends in other countries similarly tracked the trends in violence.

As for gun ownership rates, ownership by household has declined from 54% in 1977 to around 35% in 2006. Unfortunately I haven’t turned up ownership statistics from before 1972, so I don’t know if there is a corresponding increase in ownership in the 1960s.

However, gun ownership by itself doesn’t strike me as the likely answer. Switzerland has an estimated 46 civilian firearms per 100 people and Finland 45 per 100, yet Finland has a bit more violence. England and Wales have dramatically fewer guns at 6 civilian firearms per 100, yet the UK doesn’t have much less violence than Switzerland (I assuming that Scotland and N. Ireland are largely similar here; I’m sure I’ll be soundly corrected if I’m wrong).

South Carolina! We’re number one! We’re number one!

Not time series, but this gives some global perspective on homicides:

http://chartsbin.com/view/1454

@heckblazer: Switzerland is a really unusual case, given that its rate of gun ownership derives from universal male military conscription; these aren’t hunting guns, collectors’ guns or pistols bought for self-defense. Still, it is an interesting case for the purpose of teasing out the pure effect of guns from other things.

@Patrick O’Donnell:

There’s no question that we have a major problem with mental health care. Deinstitutionalization was supposed to come with a renewed emphasis on community mental health care for un-institutionalized people, and it hasn’t. I tend to see it as part and parcel of the crisis of American health care in general. And the ready availability of guns means that psychotics have access to means to kill lots of people.

Still, I am always a bit suspicious of claims that the modern world or modern America is unusually prone to psychosis, or is somehow generally schizotypal in ways that other places and times are not. It’s entirely possible, but how would one even begin to measure that, with changes in diagnostic criteria and changes in the way people deal with mental illness?

Aside from the former tendency to lock up anyone remotely “crazy” in an institution, one thing that strikes me is that consumption of alcohol in the US has been gradually declining for a very long time, and people used to drink extraordinarily large amounts of it. I wonder if many people who would now be classified as mentally ill used to just self-medicate and come under the general heading of violent drunks.

It is no way comparable to the situation in the US

Indeed:

Dan Oates, the chief of police in Aurora, Colorado, where Holmes killed 12 people and injured 58 others, said: ’He purchased four guns at local gun shops and through the internet he purchased over 6,000 rounds of ammunition, more than 3,000 rounds of 0.223 ammunition for the assault rifle, 3,000 rounds of 0.40 calibre ammunition for the two Glocks in his possession, and 300 rounds for the 12 gauge shotgun.

“Even if it was semi-automatic I’m told by experts that with that drum magazine he could have got off 50 to 60 rounds within a minute.

This from yesterday’s paper:
bq. London is fairly safe. Like New York, it has about eight million inhabitants, but London had 125 murders in 2010, whereas New York – supposedly the safest big American city – had 536.

I remember gun control came up as a subject on CT last summer, when there were three days of rioting across England. Several Americans turned up in comments to suggest that Britain would benefit from US gun laws. The widespread availability of guns would alter incentives and cause rioters to think twice before they went out looting, they said. What was striking was their utter bafflement when asked to consider whether these guns might be used offensively. It seems to me the best way to explain this bafflement is with a cultural argument.

The other day while waiting for the season opener of Breaking Bad to illegally download, I looked to see what the reaction had been from American viewers. There was a discussion about why the series had failed to find an audience when it aired in the UK, and one commenter suggested that, because it was a story of an individual who had chosen to reject the compromises of his society and take a stand in defiance of restrictive drug laws and the repression of the state, that it was uniquely American in a way that didn’t resonate elsewhere. I thought this was an odd reading, given that the main character had finished the previous season poisoning a child. And watching the episode it was obvious that the issue of whether Walter White is a bad man will be a key theme in the show’s final season. But clearly there’s an archetype of a strongly self-reliant loner applying his own morality, and not afraid to use violence to do it, that this commenter was responding to. The perversion of this archetype into the nutcase mass murderer isn’t exclusively American, of course. Anders Breivik, from euroweenie Scandinavia, would be a perfectly stereotypical example. But it does seem more prevalent in the States.
Someone upthread mentioned Erich Fromm, and the notion that while madness exists, the form in which it expresses itself is culturally determined. That’s something worth remembering the next time you hear someone describe the shooter as a lunatic.

Part of the problem with cultural arguments is that they can easily become an excuse for inaction. Which is exactly the reason why the NRA takes such a stern line on Hollywood violence. Yet it would seem obvious that you’re making progress if you narrow the opportunities available to the deranged individual to act out the full extent of their fantasies. Which brings us back to gun control.

Re: (Matt @ 62) “Still, I am always a bit suspicious of claims that the modern world or modern America is unusually prone to psychosis, or is somehow generally schizotypal in ways that other places and times are not. It’s entirely possible, but how would one even begin to measure that, with changes in diagnostic criteria and changes in the way people deal with mental illness?”

On the question of why and how entire societies might be “sick,” I would recommend the chapter, “Consensus, Conformity, and False Consciousness: ‘The Pathology of Normalcy,’” in Daniel Burston, The Legacy of Erich Fromm (1991). As to questions of “measurement,” I’m not confident that such claims are amenable to measurement, at least not in any definitive sense in a way that my satisfy current epidemiological standards (which themselves are contestable), although I do believe we can assemble evidence and reasons of various kinds on behalf of such a claim. At least one reason for epidemiological skepticism is provided by Burston: “When it comes to questions of fundamental sanity, laypeople and clinicians alike are accustomed to gauging the sanity of thought processes in terms of the degree of consensual validation that attaches to their content, and terms of the adequacy or intelligibility of their underlying process (so far as we can apprehend it). Many of the diagnostic instruments and protocols used by mental health professionals are merely refined and systematic extensions of these commonsense assumptions.”

In addition, the very idea of the pathology of normalcy is found in ancient Greece before, with, and after Plato (e.g., Hellenistic ethical philosophies like Epicureanism and Stoicism), as well as among Hindu and Buddhist philosophers, Daoist sages, and rabbinical traditions.

Leaving that aside, and conceding the increasing psychological “medicalization” of certain otherwise normal mental attitudes, moods, dispositions, or emotional states like sadness or shyness (see works by Allan Horowitz and Jermoe Wakefield, and Christopher Lane, respectively),

“It seems that Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers treated for it. The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007—from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling—a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children, well ahead of physical disabilities like cerebral palsy or Down syndrome, for which the federal programs were created.

A large survey of randomly selected adults, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and conducted between 2001 and 2003, found that an astonishing 46 percent met criteria established by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for having had at least one mental illness within four broad categories at some time in their lives. The categories were ‘anxiety disorders,’ including, among other subcategories, phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); ‘mood disorders,’ including major depression and bipolar disorders; ‘impulse-control disorders,’ including various behavioral problems and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); and ‘substance use disorders,’ including alcohol and drug abuse. Most met criteria for more than one diagnosis. Of a subgroup affected within the previous year, a third were under treatment—up from a fifth in a similar survey ten years earlier.” (Marcia Angell in the NYRB)

Of course this raises all sorts of questions, the most important of which Angell asks:

“What is going on here? Is the prevalence of mental illness really that high and still climbing? Particularly if these disorders are biologically determined and not a result of environmental influences, is it plausible to suppose that such an increase is real? Or are we learning to recognize and diagnose mental disorders that were always there? On the other hand, are we simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one? And what about the drugs that are now the mainstay of treatment? Do they work? If they do, shouldn’t we expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising?”

I do think American society is “sick” generally, and I think there are in fact a lot of people who are quite unhappy, miserable, anxious, fearful, and to such an extent that we cannot understand them to be in any way flourishing, mentally speaking. Does this amount to mental illness as defined by psychiatrists and psychologists? Sometimes, and of course the boundaries between unhappiness, everyday depression, and generalized anxiety and the exhibition of pathological symptoms is not always clear. In short, there is precious little evidence of eudemonia among the populace and a sufficient evidence of widespread mental illness of various kinds and degrees of severity. The main problem with the former is that it may be a breeding ground for the latter. People are in fact, at least in the first instance and as a matter of speaking, self-diagnosing (and then they proceed to the clinic, hoping for a prescription for a psychoactive drug), as well as self-medicating (is drug use declining?).

Harold @61:
You are absolutely correct that Switzerland has a radically different regulation regime supported by a radically different gun culture. That difference in culture is precisely why lots of guns don’t necessarily correlate with lots of violence.

As to what the heck is the source of the crazy American gun culture, I have a suspicion that the states with some of the most liberal gun laws also being the ones that spent two centuries or so under constant threat of slave rebellions is not a coincidence.

Novakant @64:
Magazines that big fortunately are not legal in every state. Heck, the magazine size limits were about the only thing in the lapsed federal assault weapons ban that did anything.

Young black males might benefit from the body armor.

Just had a little exchange with Kieran on twitter, that might be worth sharing. The murder rate might have declined in the US since the mid-70s, but spree killing seems to have taken off in the 1980s and not to have happened much before then.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spree_killer

Chris, there is still one spree killing every 2 years or so, at maximum. Even the tight Finnish gun control laws had no impact on their spree killers. Better mental health care resources would probably make things better.

ponce, police love gun control because it makes the citizens dependent on them. Are you going to hear them say “it’s because we don’t devote the time to arrest gang leaders who commit these murders?”

_Chris, there is still one spree killing every 2 years or so_

Yes Watson, and there were 6 in the first 8 decades on the 20th century in the US. So I’d say there’s been something of a change!

Putting hunting/rural pest control and so on to one side for a moment. Why do people want guns? Or to put it another way: what do guns do for people? I ask because it seems to me that guns can only do three things: they can kill, injure or intimidate. Now, only psychopaths actively want to kill or injure other people, and the 52 million US households with guns aren’t all psychopaths. So those people want guns in order to intimidate other people. They may, for instance, wish to intimidate notional burglars and assailants and the like; or they may wish to intimidate ‘the government’, so that ‘the government’ think twice about oppressing the people. Of course, people may describe this in terms of ‘protection’, but that’s a non-starter — these graphs show pretty comprehensively that if protection is what you want, you’re better off living in a place with lower levels of gun ownership, not higher. More, the problem with an entire culture predicated upon ‘intimidation’ is too manifest to need spelling out, I’d say. You can’t start intimidating other people without becoming intimidated yourself. The more you use threat to define your social relations, the less secure and confident you can be, socially speaking.

The St. Valentine’s Day massacre is missing from the Wikipedia page linked @74, so presumably mass killings that would be grouped under “gangland” or “juvenile gang” are all excluded from the category “spree killings.” (And if a person gets drunk and drives a Humvee down the wrong side of the Interstate and kills eight people, that’s not included either, I guess.) They seem to happen mostly where there is apparently little organized violent crime.

Mass shootings in the United States since 2005 (found this in Roger Ebert’s Journal essay on the Aurora, Colo., massacre):
http://www.bradycampaign.org/studies/view/141/

I don’t think it was mentioned above, but the disappearance of leaded gasoline in the 70s may also play a role in the more recent decrease in violent crimes in the US (http://tinyurl.com/7fbhgo6). However, it’s not clear to me whether environmental lead levels in the US have been consistently higher than in other countries (to help explain the generally high rates).

Matt Stevens @ 11:
I’d like to see a comparison of non-lethal crime rates. Does the US have more crime, or just more homicides, than other industrialized nations, and if so how big are the differences?

This paper [PDF] from 2010 says that overall European crime rates are now higher than US crime rates (where “European” really means Austria, Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and UK):

In 1970 the aggregate crime rate in the seven European countries we consider was 63% the corresponding US figure, but by 2007 it was 85% higher than in the US. This striking reversal results from the steady increase of the total crime rate in Europe during the last 40 years, and the decline of the US rate after 1990. The reversal of misfortunes is also observed for property and violent crimes.

Their plots show that “property crime” has started to decline since the early 1990s, but still remains higher than the US (though there’s a lot of variation by country, so a couple of countries do have lower rates than the US). “Violent crime” rates (“homicide, serious or aggravated assault, robbery and sexual offenses”) have generally crept upwards in the 7 European countries since the 1970s (except for Italy, where it went down until ~ 1990, and then started going up), and have been higher than the US since ~ 2000.

Why do people want guns? Or to put it another way: what do guns do for people?

For one category of American men, it reinforces their authority by providing threat credibility, and reinforces their gender identity by emphasizing their role as protector of the innocent. You’ll pretty much never see a guy who’s a gun rights advocate complain that he feels unsafe–it’s always about them providing for the safety of their family–and such types pretty much never say something like “if someone there had been concealed carrying, he or she could’ve taken out James Eagan Holmes before he got a round off.” They’re the ones who provide some sort of narrative description of how easily they could have disposed of the threat if empowered to do so, pretty clearly with a vivid image in their head of the act of heroism they would commit. (And they’re perfectly okay with a teammate acting in their stead. Heroes are guys on a team. That’s why the protestation “but what if ten people all draw their guns and start firing” doesn’t faze them.) In this conception, men subcategorize into potential villains and potential heroes (or neither), but womenandchildren don’t. A tragedy like this is Villains 1, Heroes 0. Gun control handicaps the would-be heroes who are upstanding lawful citizens, and has less of an effect on the would-be villains, because villains don’t follow laws. The herofolk’s longing feeling, of wanting to have been there so that they could have put down the villain, overtakes their sense of shock and concern; from the start they’ll say it was a “needless tragedy” and emphasize the needless part (after all, villains cause tragedies; it’s what they do; be strong enough to not feel mournful about it; and y’know if you would just let the would-be heroes be heroes, maybe the villains wouldn’t be so damn successful).

Women seem to get folded into the potential heroes category by some kind of ad hoc Madonna of the Trail clause (tough and tireless frontier woman, protecting kids and self and property with a shotgun while the man’s away) that folks like Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin have glommed onto.

It’s only one subsegment though; probably the most vocal after a tragedy, but they’re notably different from the more common hunter mentality and rural life utility mentality (lots of completely sane and reasonable folks around where I used to teach would always carry a pistol and knife in their vehicle’s glove compartment, as tools rather than weapons, because e.g. you literally never know when you’ll need to put a deer down) and extension-of-self mentality (e.g. folks who shoot guns almost exclusively at target ranges, and have the same sort of identity connection to their guns that others might feel with, I dunno, their car or truck or collection of D&D books–these folks used to scare me with their disturbingly expansive and intricate knowledge of weaponry capabilities and usage, ’til someone kindly compared it to having the entire 2E Wizards’ Spell Compendium memorized). The overlap with some kind of military mentality is really fuzzy to me; lots of former soldiers do talk the same way about how they could have neutralized the threat, but tend to have the opposite preconception of ‘heroes and villains’, they’re a soldier acting matter-of-factly out of a sense of social duty, with less of a heroic self-conception as protector of the weak and innocent.

Why do people want guns? Or to put it another way: what do guns do for people? I ask because it seems to me that guns can only do three things: they can kill, injure or intimidate.

Well, I haven’t physically possessed a guy for a long time (15 years or so) but I suppose there’s still a sense in which I’m a gun owner (the gun, an ex-police revolver .357, is at my parent’s house) and I was never the least bit interested in any of those things. What I did enjoy, and still enjoy at times, is target shooting, or even shooting at old cans and the like. Shoot clay pigeons is also fun, though I’ve only done it a couple of times and have never owned (or wanted to own) a shotgun. Target shooting is also kind of expensive (you can shoot a lot of rounds pretty quickly) and in many areas not super easy to do, so I haven’t kept up with it. (Plus, I didn’t want to bother with the necessary safety measures for keeping a gun, nor deal with getting it registered and licensed in a state where I would have had to do that.) But, in the right circumstances I’d enjoy having a guy for target shooting, since I enjoy target shooting from time to time. When I visit my family I often enjoy going target shooting, and pretty much none of the guns my family members have are for anything else.

I should add that I wouldn’t feel aggrieved if laws where changed with the side-effect that target shooting was made much harder. That would seem to be a legitimate thing for a democratic government to do. But I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in enjoying shooting and having a gun for reasons other than those listed above.

faustnotes, the Port Arthur Massacare isn’t the question. Home invasions, robberies, murders, and rape are. No gun control measure that would pass constitutional scrutiny would ever prevent a person without prior criminal history or mental disorder from buying a shotgun, and indeed in much of Europe that is quite possible today.

As for dependence on the police, you may want to ask Jessica Gonzales how that worked out for her. The police protect public order: they do not fight crime, or protect people, or punish lawbreakers, except incidentally to preserving the functioning of society. If the Upper West Side hade a crime rate comparable to the Bronx, heads would roll, more police would be hired, etc, etc.

faustnotes, the body armor and tear gas aren’t the weapons that let him kill that many people that quickly: it was the rifle and the shotgun. As for the police actually effectively fighting crime in other countries, the slums of Paris contend with the housing projects of Chicago as areas most neglected by law enforcement. So long as the London riots targeted only immigrant shopkeepers and the homes of the poor, the riot police stood by, guarding the mansions of the rich. Like all rights in a capitalist society, law enforcement is conditioned upon having money.

when it comes to the AK-47 guns or the like. the only purpose is to kill many people quickly. that alone justifies banning it completely from the lock, stock and barrel. piece by piece. the right to own guns has become such a good Madison Avenue Ad and propaganda exercise. solve your problems with guns, defend yourself from the “other” who is coming for your wife, you money, your children. Defend your castle. Sell power in the form of a gun. Don’t get mad, get even! show who’s boss, have the last word. save face!

the idea of caring about minorities/the “Other” is so far fetched. Americans are raised to believe in that American Ideal/struggle. the Rugged Individual.vs. the Wilderness. Lord of the Flies struggle. Each on their own in the Naked Jungle, though nowadays it’s called the Urban Jungle. Society is just an after-thought, created when many of these “Rugged Individuals” wanted to “settle down.” Just look at the type of America in the Westerns and other movies. Holly wood tells our histories, or what they define as American.

Americans are very scared of crime/”other”/terrorists, what with the Global War on Terror indoctrinated since 9-11 upon the American public/baby. of course, we have always had own home grown terrorists, like McVeigh, Kaczynzski, Eric Randolph, Dr. Tiller’s killer, Holocaust Museum shooter, Disgruntled Post Office Workers, Abortion doctors/clinic bombings and many more . the list is long and too many to remember. even before Fox took charge of using fear of the “other” as the focus of communicating, the news has always been a focus on the “spectacle”. Guns are a great “spectacle” creator. News for Days and Days. Blood and Guts sells and keeps our attention. that’s just common interest, human nature, lest it be us lying there in a pool of blood.

giving up the right to buy an AK-47 or the like is not too much to ask. i’m really picky about whether i’d like some lunatic to have access to things like AK-47s. even if i can’t get some “type” of gun because some lunatic wouldn’t either, that’s okay with me. i would gather some types of guns/weapons need not be easily accessible to the general public. unless you want to have someone use these super efficient killing machines anytime they like, cause guns are guns, right? We see these mass killing on a regular basis now. and well, no they are not all guns in the “killing” sense, some guns are just better/super efficient at killing multitudes of people in one setting than others. Those “kind” of guns need to be extremely rare and hard to obtain. Keep the power/killing level down to a basic low number “clip”, so angry young men, mostly, can not do what the Tuscon, Columbine, Virginia Tech, and the Texas Clock Tower shooter did.

America is special, anyway. just like our mass slayings in our high schools, our colleges. and now movie theatres. Coming to a location near you, eventually.

Despite all these senseless deaths, i can’t imagine anything changing about guns in America. there’s a fortune to be made in selling guns and ammunition. and America is all about selling things and making money. with this type of mindset, i would never imagine the “value” of society or of its’ members ever being on a par with making a fortune off of selling guns.

40 odd comments late – re Peter Erwin at 66, my point is that there are a lot of things going on, in a polity that is markedly different in many ways from most other OECD countries (size, the race factor, political and cultural evolution..). Over the last 30 years the US population has had a lot to get angry about, and one of its traditional ways of expressing social/political anger is to shoot each other. But the elements most likely to shoot each other have been locked up. I don’t know what the trajectory of deadly assault would be in the absence of either guns or mass jailing in the US, but I doubt that simple comparisons with other, very different countries shed much light.

I wonder if the US’s large army and multiple foreign wars have something to do with the increase in mental health issues. I imagine everyone in the US knows at least 1 vet by now. War is hell.

His books are a couple of decades old, but Roger Lane (emeritus history professor at Haverford College) spent much of his career studying the history of violence in America. Several of his books are worth looking at, particularly Murder in America (1997). His Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia won the 1987 Bancroft Prize.

@99: It’s certainly useful to see the gun nut logic in its full flower. A semi-automatic weapon is not the same as a shotgun. There are plenty of ways that you can restrict the availability of weapons that are capable of killing a lot of people quickly – if you actually want to do so, as opposed to wanting to find excuses.

A kid in my neighborhood just died because he and his friends were fooling around with a loaded weapon that they found, presumably to guard against those “home invasions”. Somehow the answer is always more guns; always bigger guns; never any ground given. And I don’t know what will change things – we may well need a new Supreme Court that can return the second amendment to the way it was interpreted for a couple of centuries, and then a reaction against the lunatic fanaticism of the NRA.

@Watson:

I do not know if you are using ‘spree killing’ as it is officialy defined (2 or more sites with little time lapse between) or just as ‘mass killing.’

In July, 2012, alone, there were two other mass killings before the one in Aurora: Tuscaloosa, AL., on July 17 and Dover, DE, on July 9. There have also been ‘multiple death’ homicides that might or might not be categorized along with these three.

Notably almost all the charts illustrate the trend Steven Pinker pointed to in his last book, the decline of violence in general everywhere. The dramatic arc of the US chart not withstanding, they mostly point down at the end.

#62.
“Are there statistics on mass shootings of the sort that happened in Aurora, as opposed to general homicides?

good question. Per Fallows. at the Atlantic:
“The Brady Campaign’s list of mass shootings in America
just since 2005 is 62 pages long..”

My look at this, I would say, a good number of these ‘mass” shootings
are the proverbial ex-boyfriend/ex-husband gone berserk; followed closely
by night-club/late-night bar shoot-em ups, and workplace violence (“gone Postal”)

But yet, there are plenty of horrifying stranger on stranger attacks in the
past years.. What’re the average numbers? I’d like to know too.

decline correlates to the incarceration increase in the US

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/67/US_incarceration_timeline-clean-fixed-timescale.svg/350px-US_incarceration_timeline-clean-fixed-timescale.svg.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States

When Pinker, in a non-peer reviewed book, takes a stance that is at the same time contrarian, Whiggish and unambiguously supportive of cops, courts and state power, the correct response is to make sure no one has nicked your wallet. Even if, against all odds, he should turn out to be right, do not take it to be so until fully digested by at least two generations of anthropologists.

I haven’t read his new book, but I’ve read some of his others. Singer’s review in the NYT makes me strongly cynical since the arguments he picks out in support of Pinker are exactly the kind almost certain to be hopelessly wrong.

And as for the short term trends, a comparison with Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean would show people getting a lot more violent a lot more quickly over the last two decades, at least according the data on Wikipedia.

Yeah, Pinker sounds like he was talking about a global multi-century trend. In the US, IIRC, the trend over the past century was that violent crime declined dramatically around and after World War II, then increased greatly and peaked from the late 1960s through sometime in the mid-90s (and it looks on that chart like a double peak, with the first apex in the 1970s and the second in the early-90s crack epidemic), then decreased after that for reasons that are still not entirely understood.

And a lot of current American folk notions about crime and violence come from people who are still reacting to that peak and aren’t even entirely aware of the subsequent downslope. Ask a random American and you will almost certainly find that they think violence has been monotonically increasing for decades.

Part of it is that Aurora-style mass killings that get a lot of attention may well be increasing in frequency, or at the very least getting individually worse. I’m still thinking it might be illuminating to separate those out from overall trends in US violence.

(Also, serial killers. This is entirely a gut thing, I have no data, but I have a vague impression that real-life serial killers aren’t as common as they used to be in the Seventies and Eighties, though TV shows and movies are still obsessed with them because they’re so well-suited to thriller and horror stories. Maybe it’s just easier to catch them now before the chain drags on for very long. Whereas spree killers can flourish even in an environment where the cops are very good at catching people, because the killing happens so fast without a lot of warning.)

… In the US, IIRC, the trend over the past century was that violent crime declined dramatically around and after World War II…

To be a bit more precise (e.g., using the figure from this blog post, or the figure I linked to in my post @ 66), crime — or at least homicides — started declining in the mid-1930s, before WW2.

Just after WW2 there was a brief increase in the homicide rate, both in the US and in Canada[*]; I’d guess this is an example of the (apparently) quite common phenomenon of increased crime rates immediately after a war.

[*] It’s kind of striking how well the very broad, general trends in homicide rate agree between the US and Canada over the last century.

Another thing to notice is that the recent drop in US violent crime seems to have stopped sometime in the early 2000s, and has been more or less flat since then at a level somewhat higher than the mid-century norm. Whether that’s a harbinger of an impending rise I leave to others to argue about, though many people seem surprised that there hasn’t been a huge jump after the 2008 financial crisis.

I notice the peak in violence in the 70s is right about the same time as Roe v Wade….

Re: Matt McIrvin: in my town (You may have heard about Stockton, CA in the news recently) there has been an uptick in crime and violence since the 2008 crash. I think it’s a matter of demographics and locale as to the jump or lack thereof. To misquote William Gibson, the uptick is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

Oh, and I should add to the comment above that, personally, I am in favor of legal open carry and minimal restrictions on ownership of long guns, including semi-automatic and automatic weapons. These are protected by the Second Amendment, and, unlike in the case of handguns, there’s no evidence that their widespread presence leads to higher homicide rates. A classic example is Switzerland (lots of semi-automatics in private hands, relatively few handguns, low homicide rate).

“If it would have an effect, even a negligible one, why isn’t that a good thing?”

Because there’s a line between doing the right thing and playing the Big Brother.

If Switzerland is any example, in terms of lives saved & homicides prevented per each affected person, a ban on assault rifles would probably be less effective than mandatory installation of breathalyzers in all passenger vehicles.

If Switzerland is any example, in terms of lives saved & homicides prevented

then the US would benefit enormously from tighter controls, and connecting gun ownership to some form of compulsory national service. Thanks for playing – the door is over there.

“So okay, mandatory breathalyzers AND an assault rifle ban. I’m not seeing the downside except “Big Brother” which is handwaving.”

It’s not handwaving, it’s a fundamental principle that we don’t go around banning things without having a very good reason.

But this is an idealistic perspective. To get more pragmatic and back on the ground, the issue with assault rifles is that they are a red herring. We live in a world with limited resources and limited short-term potential for change. Time spent debating assault rifles and machine guns is time not spent on the elephant in the room, viz. handguns. We had a nice example of that in 1994. We are never going to ban all private firearms (Second Amendment!), but we can get a limited form of gun controls and we should try to define them based on real rather than imaginary problems.

“it’s not a gun nut utopia.”

No, it’s not, did anyone say that it is? But it does have lots more assault rifles per capita than the U.S..

“I am in favor of legal open carry and minimal restrictions on ownership of long guns, including semi-automatic and automatic weapons. These are protected by the Second Amendment”

“We are never going to ban all private firearms (Second Amendment!)”

I didn’t think the Second Amendment was so cut and dried, or as Professor James A. Arieti put it:

…. the Second Amendment (“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”) is “maddeningly ambiguous.”
Our Founding Fathers used a common Latin and Greek grammatical structure—the absolute—in writing this amendment, and this construction is responsible for the ambiguities. The first part of the sentence, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,” is the absolute, and hence stands syntactically apart from the main clause.
The difficulty lies in the participle being, whose exact relation to the main clause must grammatically and logically express either (a) cause: because a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state; (b) time: when a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state; (c) condition: if a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state; (d) concession: although a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state; or (e) attendant circumstance: this is not a possibility here, since a militia is not something that might occur as a circumstance of nature (as in “the weather being cold”).
Possibility (d) makes no sense in the sentence; (e) is excluded because an abstract necessity can’t be the kind of contingent circumstance the construction requires. So it appears that interpretations (a), (b), and (c) would grant a right to bear arms only when there is a need connected causally, temporally, or conditionally to a militia. In the absence of actual militias, a strict interpretation of the amendment would favor the right of the state to control arms.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/the-conversation/8703/

“Reason one: dead people.”

Not enough. There are numerous things in the world which can result in dead people, and we don’t and can’t ban them all.

The Swiss situation actually strikes me as a fair definition of a “well-regulated militia”.

American propensity towards violence in general is a topic for sociologists and criminologists. Our nutty gun culture though seems like a more field for psychoanalysis. I understand people who have a firearm for hunting and those who might have a reasonable belief that they need one for self defense in some cases. I classify such folks as gun owners. However, what seems to me peculiar to America that sets us apart from the rest of the world is the vast number of what I would classify as gun nuts. Such folks seem to regard firearms as some sort of religious icon. Your basic Barney Fife personality who thinks possession of a gun makes them a very important person.

I am surprised that Switzerland was included. Every able bodied male 18 and above does military service and maintains a weapon at home. Some homes have 3 generations of weapons at home.

Interesting note from here: Tunisia is literally the least armed population in the world. Further, who knew Saudis were so tooled-up?

I think, the averaging is a bit too strong, giving the impression of still declining rates, whereas the raw data show a steep decline in the 1990s and a stable rate in the 2000’s.

@Kieran:

If anyone knows of a similar time series for homicides specifically, let me know.

Wonder contains that information in it’s database – select the injury intent and mechanism, instead of ICD-10 codes.

People, please. Nameless is concern trolling. Learn to recognize the signs.

It goes both ways. Nameless has done a whole lot of typing – much more than I have – in the service of boneheaded arguments like this:

Once this all is done, we can talk about the relative risk of semi-automatic guns.

Indeed, no city installs a yield sign before they install a crucial stop sign.