Firearms and the USA
by Ted Drane
Australian Shooters Journal
March 1997
The United States of America is usually put forward as the extreme case of private possession of firearms causing high crime and murder rates. "We don't want it to get like it is in America" is a predictable cry amongst politicians and the media.
The USA is linked to the gun and portrayed as the murder centre of the world despite the fact that Mexico, its nearest neighbour to the south, has very strict gun laws and also a much higher murder rate. The reality is that many parts of the USA have very low murder rates and many of these have both liberal gun laws and high lawful firearm ownership.
For example, official FBI statistics for 1993 show that the entire state of Vermont had only 12 murders; Wyoming had 16, North Dakota 11, South Dakota 18, and New Hampshire 20.
When expressed in the more usual way, this is 2.1 per 100,000 of population for Vermont, 3.5 for Wyoming, 1.72 for North Dakota, 2.6 for South Dakota, and 1.8 for New Hampshire. These figures are all considerably lower than Australia's Northern Territory, which runs at about 11 per 100,000 with very tight gun laws, and yet all five of these American states have almost no restrictions on gun ownership, including the carrying of concealed handguns.
If gun ownership is responsible for crime, then clearly this could not be so, and people in the Australian media need to have this put before them at every opportunity.
However, the USA figures overall do show that it has a murder rate of roughly 10 per 100,000, which is five times that of Australia's overall. So what is it that puts up the figures, and allows gun prohibitionists to complain that Australia mustn't ever be like it is - or appears to be - in America?
In the latest figures available the state of Washington (not to be confused with Washington DC, the capital) had 264 murders in a population under five million, or 5.2 per 100,000; Florida had 1,223, or 8.9 per 100,000, and New York had 2,415, which is 13.3 per 100,000. Here is where the figures rapidly rise. We see that when the statistics are pulled out for individual cities and centres of urban activity, then the picture changes rapidly.
But let us go on to compare these figures with some European cities which have no popular reputation for violence. For example, Amsterdam has a murder rate of 38 per 100,000, Stockholm has 15.9, Helsinki has 15.3 and even Copenhagen has 10.5.
In other words, the murder rate in Florida, where the traveller risks death, according to the Australian media, is very considerably lower than that of several Scandinavian cities with high levels of gun legislation.
As an aside, the murder rate in Jerusalem, where the people are armed to the teeth, is 3.1.
Looked at another way, some US states have a murder rate one tenth of that of Stockholm and one twentieth that of Amsterdam (remember Holland's tight gun laws) and neither of these cities is usually portrayed as particularly violent. Certainly tourists are not known to avoid them, yet tourists have been avoiding Florida. No doubt the media can take the credit for this distorted view.
Since Florida passed a law that requires the issuing of a concealed handgun carry permit to any resident who is a qualified applicant (that is, without criminal record or mental illness), the violent crime rate throughout the state has decreased at a rate faster than the national average. (This will be covered in a future report.) Florida will also grant a carry permit to any qualified interstate visitor, a policy that may explain the recent increase in attacks on foreign tourists, the only group in Florida known with certainty to be unarmed.
This should not be interpreted as a belief by the Institute of Legislative Action that everybody ought to be armed. However, it is still a fact which the Australian media and high-profile politicians must be confronted with. They claim lawful gun ownership brings crime; they are wrong.
In fact, in the US a person is 34 times more likely to die in a car accident than to be killed in a firearms-related accident. There are approximately 48,000 annual motor vehicle deaths and 1400 annual firearm-related accidental deaths.
The matter of accidents with firearms has also become a big money-spinner for gun prohibitionists in the USA, and some of the figures which are bandied around are remarkable.
One such, a recent report by the Children's Defense Fund, claimed that 50,000 children have been killed by firearms in the last decade.
This is the kind of statement that tugs at the heartstrings, but its reality is different: it is true if and only if persons up to 24 years of age are classed as children. Many "researchers" who ought to be neutral but who are plainly not, and particularly the health advocacy workers dealt with in this column last month, present figures this way because of the massive increase in crime amongst young adults in the inner city areas. This is an effective way of bulking up the figures.
Here is where we come to the significant developments in homicide rates in America.
In the last six years the murder rate for black males, ages 15-24, has increased by a factor of three. Since there has not been any significant increase in firearms during this period, there must be another cause for the increase in violence. Could it conceivably be the rise in the crack cocaine trade combined with lenient sentences for younger offenders which has encouraged an increase in crime amongst the younger age-groups of black males?
Of course, this is a very politically dangerous thing to say. In fact, it may be so much so that it is safer for authorities in many countries to let it keep happening, and not bring out the truth - safer for the authorities, of course, because they do not have to live in those places.
However, outlawing firearms because some children are killed by them is illogical. In the USA in 1990, 890 children (that is to say, a genuine 14 years and under) were killed either by criminals or law enforcement officials. Of these 890 children, 283 were killed with firearms.
Another 236 died as a result of firearm accidents for a total of 519 firearms-related deaths (there were no reported firearms suicides in this age group).
In the same year, a total of 15,367 children died, so the percentage of children who died from firearms is 3.3% of the total. To put this percentage in perspective, of those children who died in 1990, 20.7% (3182 children) died in motor vehicle accidents, 7.5% (1148 children) drowned and 6.3% (972 children) died in fires. It is certainly not our intention to trivialize these deaths, but it is still fair to say that no one would suggest that cars, swimming pools and matches should be banned or registered because they can kill children, yet all these present far bigger dangers than firearms across all the USA.
As in Australia, the rate of firearm-related accidental deaths in the USA has been declining at an average of 2.6% annually averaged over the last fifty years for all age groups, no doubt spurred along by ever-increasing education programs run by the National Rifle Association, the same NRA that is so often villified by the media which in fact has no idea about what it actually says and does, but prefers to run with its own film-induced perception of it instead.
(We can say that in particular, the now-departed Federal Justice Minister Duncan Kerr was quite happy to criticise the policies of the NRA, but to our knowledge no NRA official ever reported him getting in touch to find out what they actually are, despite our offers of assistance if he wanted to do so.)
In the USA, the chances of being murdered vary enormously depending on race, with the murder rate for blacks (usually by other blacks) being higher than that for Hispanics which again is much higher than for whites.
Washington DC has the highest murder rate in the country but has very restrictive gun ownership laws.
Gun control advocates assert that guns are simply bought in neighbouring areas to circumvent the restrictions but are at a loss to explain why crime rates are much lower in some areas than others.
If guns can be transported then why not crime? Why are there widely different crime rates in the USA?
Gun prohibitionists see such truths as we have presented here not as posing questions to be answered, but as offering information that needs to be covered up in order to allow them to keep putting the case which they believe in so passionately - despite the facts.
It remains clear that there are parts of America which are undoubtedly violent, but they are not violent because of legal gun ownership there or anywhere else. There are also parts with similar gun ownership which are very peaceful.
What we have in the United States is a country where multiculturalism is at best only partly successful, and the illicit drug trade is high. The urban centres are the places where these facts are crystallized into murder and other crime rates.
Australian politicians who assert otherwise are either silly, or else pushing their own agendas despite the facts.
Non-US figures taken from the UN publication Human Development Report 1995, page 198, table 23, and also from Criminology Australia, Summer, 1995, page 18; also referred to is Crime in the United States, Uniform Crime Reports, Federal Bureaus of Investigation, US Department of Justice, 1991. Other data are from the preliminary release of Vital Statistics and from Accident Facts 1990.
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