“People need a narrative, and if there isn’t one, they make one up.” ― Jean Hanff Korelitz
The United States has the highest gun homicide and suicide rates of any modern country in the world. The National Rifle Association (NRA) would like you to ignore this fact, but the data do not lie. Yes, the data presented in the chart below are old, eight years old now. But the numbers, researched, compiled and published by Erin Grinshteyn and David Hemenway in the American Journal of Medicine, are still relevant and comparable by nation. I do not believe that we have improved our relative standing in the world. If anything, our standing in terms of gun violence has probably grown even worse.
I am sharing the data in this table because more current publications like this are now difficult to find. The NRA and its minion, The Republican-controlled Congress of the United States, have made sure of it.
Because it is so rampant, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used to study gun violence in America. With so many killed annually, obviously, gun death factors, including the numbers and availability of guns, are health hazards. But in 1996, the Republican-majority Congress threatened to strip funding from the CDC unless it stopped funding research into firearm injuries and deaths. The NRA accused the CDC of promoting gun control. As a result, the CDC stopped funding gun-control research and that had a chilling effect far beyond the agency, drying up money for almost all public health studies of the gun violence issue nationwide. This is how the NRA has, and continues to, control the gun control debate narrative. People who love their guns and fear the government taking them away at some point, don’t want to hear the facts. They are content to believe talking points like:
- When guns are illegal only criminals will have guns.
- It takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun.
- Shooters target gun-free zones.
- No laws could have prevented this tragedy.
- Terrorists and criminals are not deterred by gun laws.
- Guns are just a tool like hammers and knives.
None of these talking points can be proved. But they do resonate with gun lovers who want to believe that they are true. So long as they do believe, and so long as the NRA can continue to funnel large sums of money from political donors to Republicans with impunity, we will continue to have the highest gun-related crime numbers in the modern world.
“When guns are Illegal, only criminals will have guns.” This is my favorite NRA talking point. If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it every damn time that I’ve had a conversation with 2d Amendment, gun rights apologists about gun control. What makes it a talking point? The fact that it cannot be proved makes it a talking point; it cannot be proved because crime data simply do not support it. However, in an effort to do so, these people will invariably bring up the amount of gun violence in Chicago. They do so because Chicago has some of the strongest gun control laws in the nation. They claim that it’s the murder capital of America with the most gun violence despite its laws. But this is not true. What is true is that there are more murders in Chicago annually than in any other U.S. city. According to the FBI statistical database on crime, there were 650 in 2017. Applying the national average of 74.5 percent of murders being gun-related, this means there were approximately 484 gun-related murders in Chicago. Compared to Baltimore, Maryland, which had 343 murders in the same time period, 256 gun-related, this sounds terrible – Chicago had twice as many! But what these people choose to overlook in their argument is that Chicago is a city of 2.7 million people and is a little more than four times larger than Baltimore’s population of roughly 670,000. Doing this same math for other large U.S. cities, Chicago does rank as fourth highest in gun-related murders per-capita. Yes, tragically bad. But even so, its numbers prove nothing about gun control laws being ineffective.
So, why aren’t the gun control laws in Chicago more effective in preventing gun violence? Two things: First, gangs – Chicago has a lot of organized crime owing to many factors, poverty and drug trafficking being among them; Second, demand – there is a robust black market among gang members for the “illegal” resale of guns purchased in smaller cities and towns surrounding Chicago and in nearby states. Many of these cities and towns have lax gun control laws. So, a person can drive 20 miles from Chicago and be back in one day to make a huge profit on the resale of guns from pawn shops and gun shows.
“It takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun.” This claim has been debunked resoundingly. Researchers have determined that armed citizens fare much worse than their police counterparts. In an independent study commissioned by the National Gun Victims Action Council, researchers put 77 participants with varying levels of firearms training through three realistic self-defense scenarios. In the first, seven of the participants shot an innocent bystander. Almost all of the participants in the first and second scenarios who engaged the “bad guy” were killed. In the final scenario, 23% of the participants fired at a suspect who didn’t actually pose a threat. Furthermore, there is overwhelming empirical evidence which corroborates the simulation. Of the 160 active shooting incidents identified by the FBI from 2000 to 2013, only one was stopped by an armed civilian. In comparison, two were stopped by off-duty police, four by armed guards and 21 by unarmed civilians.
“Shooters target gun-free zones.” This is demonstrably false. In one case, on June 12, 2016 a 29-year-old security guard killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in a terrorist attack inside Pulse, a gay nightclub, in Orlando, Florida. There was an armed police officer at Pulse, and he was very quickly joined by two fellow officers. Yet people consistently mislabel this many other mass shootings as being in gun-free zones like Umpqua Community College in Oregon, Hialeah, Florida, and many others. Further, if we examine the 33 mass public shootings in which four or more people were killed between January 2009 and June 2014, the evidence reveals that 18 occurred in areas where guns were not banned or where an armed security guard was present.
“No laws could have prevented this tragedy.” This is self-evidently wrong. Yet Republican politicians and NRA spokespersons recite it without even thinking about it. They do so after virtually every mass shooting, and gun enthusiasts buy it, also without thinking about it. So, just for a moment, let’s think about it. In the Orlando shooting case, gun control laws could have certainly prevented the killings. If it had taken place in Canada which has common sense gun controls nationally, the gunman could not have obtained a license to purchase a firearm because of his history of domestic violence, signs of mental instability and vocal support for terrorist organizations. If gun-shop owners had to notify the FBI when somebody on or previously on one of the terror watch lists purchased a weapon, agents could have investigated and prevented the attack. And, if there were restrictions on magazine size, the shooter would have had to reload more frequently, which would have given club goers a better opportunity to escape or disarm the assailant, thus mitigating the carnage. This is just one example to refute this talking point. Gun controls everywhere else in the world prevent such senseless violence.
“Terrorists and criminals are not deterred by gun laws.” The latest iteration of this popular talking point is that gun laws cannot work because criminals won’t follow them. As Marco Rubio has so often proclaimed during campaign speeches: “My skepticism about gun laws is that criminals don’t follow the law.”
Applying this logic, why have any laws? If criminals are just going to run red lights, why have traffic penalties? The NRA’s reasoning is a prescription for chaos — and it doesn’t withstand contact with empirical reality.
“Guns are just a tool like hammers and knives.” There’s the rather obvious problem with thinking such as this: Firearms are more lethal than hammers and knives, machetes and just about anything else one can think of with which to kill. Gunshot wounds frequently cause catastrophic damage, and the ability to maintain a quick and steady rate of fire with weapons like assault rifles, allows shooters to maximize casualties. There is a reason that American mass killers choose assault-style rifles to carry out their attacks rather than hammers or knives.
On December 14, 2012, a man wielding a knife assaulted people at a school in Chempeng, China. Twenty-three children and one adult were stabbed. Hours later, a man armed with an AR-15 attacked an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, shooting twenty students and eight adults. At Sandy Hook Elementary in Newton, all twenty children and six of the eight adults died. In China, there wasn’t a single fatality. The gun made all the difference.
If we continue to allow the NRA, Republican politicians and 2d Amendment gun enthusiasts to control the gun debate narrative with talking points like these, then we will continue to lose the debate. So, arm yourself with knowledge to refute their fallacious arguments. Next time you’re talking about gun violence and the need for common sense gun control laws with a 2d Amendment apologist, keep your cool, listen politely as they regurgitate talking points like these, then respond with real facts. It helps to state the facts interrogatively, as questions. For example, “Did you know that _____________ ?” Or, “How does the fact that _________________ jive with what you’ve said? Lastly, don’t let a 2d Amendment apologist anger you, even if they start talking over you or screaming at you and start in with the ad-homonyms. Just smile and shake your head.
Please feel free to comment on this article. This is one of my favorite debate topics.
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