U.S. Gun-Control Debate: A Critical Look

▪ 2001

by Iain Murray

      In 2000—a year that witnessed the antigun Million Mom March in Washington, D.C., as well as surging membership in the pro-gun National Rifle Association (NRA)—the issue of gun control was at the forefront of American political debate. Two facts define the poles of the controversy. On the one hand is the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states: “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.” The exact meaning of the Second Amendment has been debated, but few people would argue that an outright ban on firearms would be possible as long as this text stands. On the other hand is the indisputably high rate of gun-related homicide in the U.S., both in absolute terms and in comparison with other industrialized countries. Each side of the gun-control debate has busied itself with gathering data to support the pro- or antigun stance. The evidence they have presented, however, is not as clear-cut as each side has suggested.

      Through use of misleading definitions, advocates on both sides of the debate have distorted some data. The organizers of the Million Mom March, for example, made much of the figure of “12 children who die every single day from gunfire.” This figure holds true only if persons aged 15–19 are counted as children. Deaths in this group usually occur because of older teenagers' involvement in distinctly unchildlike activities, such as drug-related crime. Using a more usual definition of children—aged 14 or below—1.7 children die daily from gun violence, and the number drops to 1.3 when suicides are excluded.

      Pro-gun lobbyists, meanwhile, made much of the “defensive use” of guns, but the order-of-magnitude range of scientific findings makes these arguments suspect as well. Advocates argue that if more crimes are foiled by citizens defending themselves with guns than are committed by criminals using guns, then possession of firearms may actually provide a net benefit to society. Statistics from a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) survey, however, suggested that guns are used defensively in this sense only about 100,000 times a year, compared with 400,000-plus criminal gun uses. Other surveys indicated much higher levels of defensive firearm use. The figure of 2.5 million defensive uses a year proposed by Florida State University professor Gary Kleck was seized on by gun rights advocates such as the NRA. A more recent study undertaken by Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig for the National Institute of Justice, a government agency in Washington, D.C., estimated that 1.5 million owners used their guns defensively at least once a year. Kleck and others explained their high figures by pointing out that merely displaying or referring to the weapon can often deter a crime. Cook and Ludwig argued that surveys like this are vulnerable to “false positives”—cases, for example, when the person being interviewed remembers that an incident had taken place in the past but assigns it, erroneously, to the year about which the pollster is asking. Researchers such as Cook and Ludwig suspect that the truth lies somewhere in between the “official” DOJ figures and those of Kleck.

      In addition to the careful research of academics such as Kleck, Cook, and Ludwig, advocacy groups also produced their own data, sometimes lacking in statistical rigour. In the U.S. the Brady Law, a measure implemented in February 1994, enforced a nationwide series of background checks of potential gun buyers. In July 2000 the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence (CPHV) issued a report that claimed the Brady Law had significantly reduced the number of homicides nationwide. About a week later, however, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study (once again by Cook and Ludwig) that found that the introduction of background checks had not reduced homicide rates or overall suicide rates. What happened is that the CPHV researchers constructed a set of figures for what could have been the level of violent crime after 1993 and then attributed the negative difference to the Brady Law. The Cook-Ludwig study, on the other hand, compared the numbers of gun-related deaths in states that previously had background check programs with those in states that introduced the checks after February 1994 and found no significant difference between the two sets of figures. In other words, the Cook-Ludwig study employed a “control” (states where the Brady Law was essentially already in effect), while the CPHV study had no such basis for comparison. Cook and Ludwig admit that their study is not the end of the matter—further work needs to be done, they say, in assessing the Brady Law's impact on interstate gun traffic and other factors. Nevertheless, it is clear that the matter is not as simple as the CPHV study suggests.

      The work of Yale University economist John Lott has also stirred controversy. His 1998 book More Guns, Less Crime summarized extremely detailed research into what happens when states (most famously Florida) liberalize laws to allow citizens to carry concealed weapons. He concluded that states that adopted such laws experienced significant declines in crime that could not be attributed to other factors, such as demographic changes, new policing methods, or tougher sentences. Many researchers, including Ludwig, attacked this work for supposed methodological weaknesses, and Lott's work came under intense scrutiny. Repeatedly he refined his data to control for a very large number of influencing factors. He could therefore counter all of the methodological criticisms, although many researchers remain unconvinced.

      While the academic jury was still out, Lott's work was seen by both sides in the gun-control debate almost as a litmus test—if you were pro-gun, you believed Lott's findings; if you were pro-gun control, you dismissed them. The level of contention is so high that acceptance of a set of data by one side often means a knee-jerk rejection by the other. The research of U.S. government agencies should be objective enough to be acceptable to both sides, yet some data produced by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services have been criticized for being biased in favour of gun control. As Cook said, “Many of the basic statistics about guns are in wide disagreement with each other depending on which source you go to. That's been a real puzzle to people who are trying to understand what's going on.” The result is that the debate over gun control is dominated by interested parties who “cherry pick” data to suit their arguments.

      The media are often not very critical of the statistics they are presented with either. With a vested interest both in reporting crime stories and in recording the views of those proposing solutions, the media often provide a platform for those who link gun ownership causally to gun homicide. The conservative Media Research Center found that from 1997 to 1999 television news stories “advocating more gun control outnumbered stories opposing gun control by 357 to 36. … (Another 260 were neutral.)” Probably understandably, newspapers, especially those based in the large metropolitan areas that suffered the most during the gun-homicide boom of the early 1990s, often adopted an editorial policy in favour of gun control and were more willing to accept numbers proposed by gun-control advocates on trust. Even so, the figures of pro-gun groups were sometimes conveyed uncritically as well. During the Million Mom March, members of the pro-gun group Second Amendment Sisters were quoted in the press as stating that “every day 550 rapes, 1,100 murders, and 5,200 other violent crimes are prevented just by showing a handgun,” but these numbers, which derive from Kleck's work, are themselves disputable.

      The gun-control issue in the United States is extraordinarily complex. Careful, scientific research and truthful, well-founded statistics can be the means to shed light on the root causes of firearm misuse and crime as well as other pressing social problems. Society will best be served when the general population and especially the public's chief source of information, the media, adopt a responsible approach and critical skepticism toward the claims of the parties at interest.

Iain Murray is a senior analyst at the Statistical Assessment Service, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization in Washington, D.C., devoted to the accurate use of scientific and social research in public-policy debate.

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