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Guns, uninterrupted: beyond Alabama killings, onto Virginia and National Parks
By Kaufmann | February 19, 2010 No Comments »
Predictably, the Alabama faculty killings by Amy Bishop have generated views from all sides, including to my previous post (here, and in Facebook as well). I posted that entry as news about the shootings were emerging. Subsequently I contributed a commentary piece at Brookings (here).
In that commentary I mention that it could be argued that the system did not fail, but that Amy Bishop broke the law by obtaining and carrying a gun illegally in the Alabama campus. The problem with this argument goes beyond the simple fact that the gun that killed her own brother 24 years ago was actually a ’legal’ one (so in one lethal incident it was illegal, in the other one it was legal). The more fundamental challenge touches on the ubiquity of guns and thus on basic supply and demand economics…
The statistics pointing to a mammoth number of firearms among civilians, in the streets, and under them, are inescapable. It is estimated that there are close to 300 million guns in America today. The difference between accessing a gun legally (which is commonplace) or illegally (also commonplace) comes down to the price mark-up difference (and transaction costs at the margin, although it is not impossible to order extralegal guns online).
The rate of gun possession per capita in countries like Canada, Denmark, England, Ireland or Japan are a very tiny fraction of that in the U.S. In England, for instance, there are about 6 guns per 100 residents, in Chile and Denmark about 12, in Canada 31, while in the U.S. there are about 90. And the rate of killings resulting from guns in America (32 per million population per year) is a multiple of that of other countries (1.6 per million in England, 2.6 in Denmark, 4.6 in Canada), as seen in this table (click it to enlarge). Further, there seems to be no compelling evidence that when gun laws are more stringent, there is a substitution to other weapons that kill.
In today’s political system where lobbying and vested interests by powerful minorities play a prominent role, it is unlikely that the anytime soon the U.S. will enact stringent gun laws aligned with those of other modern societies.
In fact, last Friday, the same day of the University of Alabama murders, the Virginia House of Delegates approved a bill that allows people to carry concealed weapons into bars (as long as they do not drink), and a few days later it repealed a 17-year old ban on purchasing more than one handgun a month. This further permissiveness in the purchase and concealed transport of guns is taking place in the very state where less than three years ago the worse peacetime massacre in U.S. history took place, on or off-campus, at the hands of a lone gunman at Virginia Tech.
Finally, the following story in today’s Washington Post tells us what is about to take place in a couple of days: “The federal government will lift long-standing restrictions on guns in national parks Monday, meaning that visitors with proper permits could pack heat along with camping and picnic gear to most of the 392 parks…”
Jim Wesberry, a former USAID official and development expert, pointed out this developing story about carrying guns in national parks (calling it ‘the latest fiasco in point”), in his astute commentary (here), where he explains the “U.S. very difficult historical and constitutional problem with gun control. At the country’s founding privately owned guns were considered indispensable for both personal protection and readiness for militia participation in defense of the nation…”
He then mentions that: “Now we are faced with two great problems: (1) modern rapid fire arms capable of massacring multitudes of persons in minutes, and (2) life’s complexity and pressures causing many persons to lose control of their temperaments and use guns in the process.
Points well taken. I would add that the historical rationale for civilian guns centuries ago obviously needs revisiting, since nowadays there are solid public institutons other than militia and private individuals that provide national defense and personal protection. In 2010, three hundred million civilian guns do not contribute an iota to national security, and on balance they threaten personal safety.
Topics: capture, Regulation & Security, Rule of Law | | Read and Submit Comments