"John: I have obtained Gary's permission for you to use this summary of his book. It should indicate the information noted at the bottom as to where it was presented and should indicate that it is a summary of his book POINT BLANK: GUNS AND VIOLENCE IN AMERICA(Aldine de Gruyter, 1991)"
This book can be ordered directly from Aldine de Gruyter at 200 Saw Mill River Road, Hawthorne, NY 10532.
John Grossbohlin JOHN.GROSSBOHLIN@HVBBS.COM or DIRPP@HVBBS.COM
This paper of a summary of my book, Point Blank: Guns and
Violence in America, which in turn summarizes the literature on
guns, violence and gun control, as well as reporting new research. The purpose of the paper is to outline the main findings and conclusions, without systematically establishing the empirical basis for each conclusion. These can be found in the book itself. And since the book has about 570 references, it is not practical to cite supporting materials for each assertion. Only studies summarized in the tables are contained in the References. Instead, I have simply indicated the chapter of the book where interested readers may find the full set of supporting citations, empirical evidence, and detailed argumentation.
Why the Issue Matters (Chapter 2)
In 1985, about 31,600 persons were killed with guns, and
perhaps another 130,000 people suffered nonfatal gunshot wounds.
The majority of the deaths, 55%, were suicides, rather than
criminal homicides. Only 37% were homicides, 5% were fatal gun
accidents, and 1.5% each were due to legal intervention (police
officers killing suspects in the line of duty) and to death where
it was undetermined whether injury was intentionally or
accidentally inflicted. Among all deaths due to "external cause," i.e. accident, suicide or homicide, guns were involved in 22% of them, handguns in about 13% of them. The majority of all gun deaths involve handguns, mainly because 79% of the gun homicide deaths involved handguns. Guns were involved in 1.5% of all deaths, from all causes, in 1985. They were involved in 59% of suicides, 60% of homicides, and 1.8% of accidental deaths in 1985.
There were also over 650,000 violent crimes involving guns in some way in 1985, over 540,000 of them (82%) involving handguns. Guns were involved in about 12% of all violent crime, and handguns in about 10%. The majority of the gun crimes were assaults, mostly threats without any injury or any element of theft or rape.
Gun Ownership (Chapter 2)
The prospects for reducing violence by restricting guns
depends to a great extent on how many guns there are, how people
get them, why they own them, and how strongly they would resist or
evade gun controls in order to hold onto them. Also, one's
interpretation of a positive relationship between violence rates
and gun ownership rates depends on the degree to which one believes
that violence can drive up gun ownership, by motivating people to
get guns for protection, as well as gun ownership increasing
violence.
There were probably over 200 million guns in private hands in
the U.S. by 1990, about a third of them handguns. One
straightforward policy implication is that policies which seek to
reduce gun violence by reducing the overall supply of guns, as
distinct from reducing the number possessed just by high-risk
subsets of the population, face an enormous obstacle in this huge
existing stock. Even if further additions to the stock could
somehow be totally and immediately stopped, the size of the stock
and durability of guns imply that, in the absence of mass
confiscations or unlikely voluntary surrenders of guns, it might be
decades before any perceptible impact of a supply-reduction
strategy became apparent.
Gun ownership increased from the 1960's through the 1980's,
especially handgun ownership. Some of the increase was due to the
formation of new households and to growing affluence enabling gun
owners to acquire still more guns; however, a substantial share of
the increase was also a response to rising crime rates among people
who previously did not own guns. Most handguns are owned for
defensive reasons, and many people get guns in response to high or
rising crime rates. Therefore, part of the positive association
sometimes observed between gun ownership levels and crime rates is
due to the effect of the latter on the former, rather than the
reverse. Nevertheless, most guns, especially long guns, are owned
primarily for recreational reasons unconnected with crime.
From the mid-1960's to the mid-1980's, scattered evidence
strongly suggests that, while gun ownership increased in general,
it did so even more among criminals and violence-prone people than
it did among the nonviolent majority of the population. Because
these "high-risk" groups are largely unrepresented in national
surveys, this would partially account for the fact that household
gun prevalence in national surveys remained fairly constant during
this period, despite huge additions to the total stock of privately
owned guns.
Gun owners are not, as a group, psychologically abnormal, nor
are they more racist, sexist, or pro-violent than nonowners. Most
gun ownership is culturally patterned and linked with a rural
hunting subculture. The culture is transmitted across generations,
with recreation-related gun owners being socialized by their
parents into gun ownership and use from childhood. Defensive
handgun owners, on the other hand, are more likely to be discon-
nected from any gun subcultural roots, and their gun ownership is
usually not accompanied by association with other gun owners or by
training in the safe handling of guns. Defensive ownership is more
likely to be an individualistic response to life circumstances
perceived as dangerous. Defensive ownership is also a response to
the perception that the police cannot provide adequate protection.
This response to dangers, however, is not necessarily mediated by
the emotion of fear, but rather may be part of a less emotional
preparation for the possibility of future victimization.
The strongest and most consistent predictors of gun ownership
are hunting, being male, being older, higher income, residence in
rural areas or small towns, having been reared in such small
places, having been reared in the South, and being Protestant. The
social origins of Rs consistently predict having firearms,
supporting the view that early socialization into gun owning
subcultures is important in explaining gun ownership. However,
traits like racial prejudice and punitiveness towards criminals are
not important. Most gun ownership in the general public is related
to outdoor recreation like hunting and its correlates, rather than
crime. On the other hand, ownership of handguns may well be linked
with fear of crime and prior burglary victimization, though find-
ings are necessarily ambiguous due to questions of causal order -
fear could motivate gun acquisition, but having a gun could also
reduce the owner's fear.
The pattern of results as a whole is compatible with the
thesis that gun ownership is a product of socialization into a
rural hunting culture. The findings support a simple explanation
of the high level of gun ownership in the United States, an
explanation which rejects the notion that weak gun laws are somehow
responsible. Unlike European nations with a feudal past, the U.S.
has had both widespread ownership of farmland and millions of acres
of public lands available for hunting. Rather than hunting being
limited to a small land-owning aristocracy, it has been accessible
to the majority of ordinary Americans. Having the income and
leisure to take advantage of these resources, millions of Americans
have hunted for recreation, long after it was no longer essential
to survival for any but an impoverished few. Hunting in turn
encouraged other recreational uses of guns, including target and
other sport shooting, and collecting, of both handgun and long
guns. Rather than high gun ownership being the result of a lack of
strict gun control laws, it is more likely that causation ran in
the other direction, i.e. that high gun ownership discouraged the
enactment of restrictive gun laws, and that the prevalence of guns
was mostly a product of the prevalence of recreational hunting.
Only since the mid-1960s has a large share of gun ownership been
attributable to concerns about crime.
Probably fewer than 2% of handguns and well under 1% of all
guns will ever be involved in a violent crime. Thus, the problem
of criminal gun violence is concentrated within a very small subset
of gun owners, indicating that gun control aimed at the general
population faces a serious needle-in-the-haystack problem.
Criminal gun users most commonly get their guns by buying them
from friends and other nonretail sources, or by theft. Therefore,
gun regulation would be more likely to succeed in controlling gun
violence if it could effectively restrict nondealer acquisitions
and possession of guns by this small high-risk subset of gun
owners.
Since about half of U.S. households have a gun, broadly
directed restrictions on the acquisition, possession, and use of
guns impinge on the lives of millions of Americans, not just a
small, politically powerless subset of them. This is the essential
political obstacle which faces advocates of stricter gun control -
legislators who vote for strong gun laws must face the prospect of
offending large numbers of gun-owning voters. Perhaps in response
to this simple fact, many advocates of more restrictive controls
have directed their focus away from measures which regulate all
types of guns and toward those which regulate special subtypes of
firearms, i.e. types of guns which are owned by smaller numbers of
voters and which are consequently more vulnerable to regulation.
Pro-control groups have increasingly stressed the need to
control various special weapon categories such as machineguns,
"assault rifles," plastic guns, "Saturday Night Special" handguns,
and "cop-killer" bullets, or sometimes all handguns. For each
weapon or ammunition type, it is argued that the object is espe-
cially dangerous or particularly useful for criminal purposes,
while having little or no counterbalancing utility for lawful
purposes. A common slogan is "This type of gun is good for only
one purpose - killing people."
The specific weapon type so described shifts from one year to
the next, in response to shifts in the political winds rather than
actual criminologically significant shifts in criminal use of guns.
For example, the so-called "cop killer bullets" which were
restricted in 1986, as far as anyone can tell, have never killed a
cop. Likewise, the all-plastic guns which would have been
undetectable by airport security equipment were never actually
manufactured, and thus had never been involved in a single act of
violence.
"Assault rifles" and "assault weapons" became important
objects of gun control efforts in the 1980s. Contrary to
widespread claims, these semi-automatic "military-style" weapons
are rarely used by criminals in general or by drug dealers or
juvenile gang members in particular, are almost never used to kill
police officers, are generally less lethal than ordinary hunting
rifles, and are not easily converted to fully automatic fire. They
do offer a rate of fire somewhat higher than other gun types and
can be used with magazines holding large numbers of cartridges, but
there is at present little reason to believe either attribute is
relevant to the outcome of any significant number of gun crimes.
While the involvement of commonplace semiautomatic pistols has been
common in U.S. violence since the 1920's, probably fewer than 2% of
gun homicides involve the military-style semiautomatic weapons
which are commonly labelled "assault weapons.".
Saturday Night Specials (SNSs) are small, cheap handguns.
They have been the target of special control efforts in the past
because it was claimed that they were the preferred weapon of
criminals, and were especially useful for criminal purposes, based
on the twin notions that they are especially concealable because of
their small size, and that their low price makes them especially
affordable for predominantly low-income criminals. The best
available information indicates the following about SNSs. Only
about 10-27% of crime handguns (in the 1970's) fit the U.S. Bureau
of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) definition of SNSs (barrel
length under three inches, .32 caliber or less, and price under $50
in mid-1970's dollars). Thus, most crime handguns were not SNSs,
nor did they claim a share even approaching a majority. Because
only about 10% of violent crimes involve a handgun, SNSs are
involved in only about 2-7% of all violent crimes. Further, the
SNS share of crime guns appears to be no larger than the SNS share
of the general civilian handgun stock - at least 20% of all
handguns introduced into the general civilian stock were SNSs.
Thus, there is no strong reason to believe that criminals are any
more likely to use SNSs than noncriminal members of the general
public are. More specifically, criminals are no more likely to use
cheap or small caliber handguns than noncriminal gun owners.
Therefore, there is no meaningful sense in which criminals can be
said to "prefer" SNSs. On the other hand, there is some mixed sup-
port for the idea that some criminals prefer short-barrelled
handguns over longer-barrelled ones, though the weapons tend to be
middle or large caliber and of good quality. At most, perhaps 7%,
and more realistically 1-2%, of SNSs will ever be involved in even
one violent crime. In sum, most handgun criminals do not use SNSs,
and most SNSs are not owned or used for criminal purposes. In-
stead, most are probably owned by poor people for protection.
One policy implication of the last conclusion is that gun
control efforts directed specifically at SNSs, such as the Ken-
nedy-Rodino bill, would have their greatest impact in reducing the
availability of defensive handguns among low income people. The
identical observation was made by liberal critics about the ban on
importation of SNSs contained in the Gun Control Act (GCA) of 1968.
Effective SNS-specific measures would disproportionately affect the
law-abiding poor, since it is they who are most likely to own SNSs
and obey the laws, and who are least likely to have the money to
buy better quality, and therefore higher-priced, weapons.
Considering the obvious flaws of a policy focussing solely on
SNSs, why would anyone advocate it? One answer is that SNSs may
not be the real target of the policies, but rather that all
handguns are. Given the somewhat obscure and technical definitions
that are actually used in legislation and administrative
regulations, it would be easy to manipulate such a definition in a
politically low-profile way such that most handguns fell within the
SNS category. Another possible motivation is that prohibiting
those types of firearms which poor people can best afford is the
next best thing to an overtly discriminatory policy of banning gun
ownership by poor people, a policy which would be politically, and
perhaps constitutionally, impossible to implement in any but a
covert form.
A SNS-specific control policy could be worse than merely
ineffectual. If it actually did deprive any criminals of SNSs,
some would adapt by substituting larger and/or marginally more
expensive guns, which would imply the substitution of larger cali-
ber, longer barrelled handguns. Wounds inflicted with larger
caliber handguns are more like to result in a death; longer
barrelled guns fire bullets with greater accuracy and a higher
muzzle velocity, thereby increasing their deadliness. Conse-
quently, among those persons who previously would have used SNSs
but who, as a result of the control policy, substituted larger
handguns, the attack fatality rate would almost certainly increase.
Most U.S. gun laws are aimed largely or solely at handguns.
This focus has the same flaw as the focus only on SNSs, but on a
larger scale. While some potentially violent people denied
handguns would do without guns of any kind, others would substitute
shotguns and rifles, which are generally more lethal. Under any
but the most optimistic circumstances, this would result in a net
increase in the number of homicide deaths.
One of the political temptations of handgun-only control is
that it appears to be a satisfactory compromise between doing
nothing about gun violence, which would alienate pro-control vot-
ers, and restricting all gun types, which would alienate many long
gun owners. It is tempting to assume that the results of this
apparent compromise policy would correspondingly lie somewhere
between the results of a policy of doing nothing and the results of
one restricting all guns. This assumption is false - the "middle"
course of restricting only handguns is worse than either of the
other two alternatives.
A clear policy recommendation follows from what should be the
first principle of weapons regulations: Never place restrictions on
a subcategory of weapons without also placing restrictions at least
as stringent on more deadly, easily substituted alternative
weapons.
Focusing on specialized weapon categories will be an unpro-
ductive, but unfortunately increasingly popular gun control stra-
tegy in the foreseeable future. The very features that make the
piecemeal approach ineffective also make it politically attractive.
Thus, policies focusing on machine guns, "assault rifles," plastic
guns, and armor-piercing bullets are inoffensive to most voters and
have little cost, but they also address weapons that are only very
rarely used by criminals.
So far, this is merely a special case of a political universal
applying to any policy area - weak approaches carry less risk to
policymakers, while also having less impact on the target problem.
However, many special-weapon gun control measures are worse than
this, since they have serious potential for making the violence
problem worse. Policies targeting only less lethal weaponry, such
as handguns generally or "Saturday Night Specials" specifically,
can increase the gun death total by inadvertently encouraging the
substitution of more lethal types of guns.
Defensive Use of Guns by Crime Victims (Chapter 4) Focussing on Special Gun Types (Chapter 3)
Policy analysts seeking to assess the relative costs and benefits of gun control sometimes simplify their task by assuming that gun ownership has no significant benefits, beyond the relatively minor ones of recreational enjoyment of shooting sports like hunting. Under this assumption, it is unnecessary to show that a given law produces a large reduction in violence, since even one life saved would surely outweigh the supposedly negligible benefits of gun ownership. This simplification, however, is unrealistic, because it erroneously assumes that gun ownership and use has no defensive or deterrent value, and thus no potential for preventing deaths or injuries.
Each year about 1500-2800 criminals are lawfully killed by gun-wielding American civilians in justifiable or excusable homicides, far more than are killed by police officers. There are perhaps 600,000-1 million defensive uses of guns each year, about the same as the number of crimes committed with guns. These astounding totals may be less surprising in light of the following facts. About a third of U.S. households keep a gun at least partially for defensive reasons; at any one time nearly a third of gun owners have a firearm in their home (usually a handgun) which is loaded; about a quarter of retail businesses have a gun on the premises; and perhaps 5% of U.S. adults regularly carry a gun for self-defense.
Keeping a gun for home defense makes most defensive gun owners feel safer, and most also believe they are safer because they have a gun. The belief is not necessarily a delusion. People who use guns for self-protection in robberies and assaults are less likely to have the crime completed against them (in a robbery, this means losing their property), and, contrary to widespread belief, are less likely to be injured, compared to either victims who use other forms of resistance or to victims who do nothing to resist. (Criminals take the gun away from the victim in less than 1% of these incidents.) The evidence does not support the idea that nonresistance is safer than resisting with a gun.
Defensive uses of guns most often occur in circumstances where the victims are likely to have access to their guns, mostly in their homes or places of business. Thus, defensive gun uses are most commonly linked with assaults in the home (presumably mostly domestic violence), commercial robberies, and residential burglaries.
The fact that armed victims can effectively disrupt crimes suggests that widespread civilian gun ownership might also deter some criminals from attempting crimes in the first place. There probably will never be definitive evidence on this deterrence question, since it revolves around the issue of how many crimes do not occur because of victim gun ownership. However, scattered evidence is consistent with a deterrence hypothesis. In prison surveys criminals report that they have refrained from committing crimes because they thought a victim might have a gun. "Natural experiments" indicate that rates of "gun deterrable" crimes have declined after various highly publicized incidents related to victim gun use, including gun training programs, incidents of defensive gun use, and passage of a law which required household gun ownership. Widespread gun ownership may also deter burglars from entering occupied homes, reducing confrontations with residents, and thereby reducing deaths and injuries. U.S. burglars are far less likely to enter occupied premises than burglars in nations with lower gun ownership.
Gun use by private citizens against violent criminals and burglars is common and about as frequent as legal actions like arrests, is a more prompt negative consequence of crime than legal punishment, and is more severe, at its most serious, than legal system punishments. On the other hand, only a small percentage of criminal victimizations transpire in a way that results in defensive gun use; guns certainly are not usable in all crime situations. Victim gun use is associated with lower rates of assault or robbery victim injury and lower rates of robbery completion than any other defensive action or doing nothing to resist. Serious predatory criminals perceive a risk from victim gun use which is roughly comparable to that of criminal justice system actions, and this perception may influence their criminal behavior in socially desirable ways.
The most parsimonious way of linking these previously uncon- nected and unknown or obscure facts is to tentatively conclude that civilian ownership and defensive use of guns deters violent crime and reduces burglar-linked injuries.
Rates of commercial robbery, residential burglary injury, and rape might be still higher than their already high levels were it not for the dangerousness of the prospective victim population. Gun ownership among prospective victims may well have as large a crime-inhibiting effect as any crime-generating effects of gun possession among prospective criminals. This could account for the failure of researchers to find a significant net relationship between rates of crime like homicide and robbery, and measures of general gun ownership - the two effects may roughly cancel each other out. Guns are potentially lethal weapons whether wielded by criminals or victims. They are frightening and intimidating to those they are pointed at, whether these be predators or the preyed upon. Guns thereby empower both those who would use them to victimize and those who would use them to prevent their victimi- zation. Consequently, they are a source of both social order and disorder, depending on who uses them, just as is true of the use of force in general.
The failure to fully acknowledge this reality can lead to grave errors in devising public policy to minimize violence through gun control. While some gun laws are intended to reduce gun possession only among relatively limited "high-risk" groups such as convicted felons, through such measures as laws licensing gun owners or requiring permits to purchase guns, other laws are aimed at reducing gun possession in all segments of the civilian population, both criminal and noncriminal. Examples would be the Morton Grove, Illinois handgun possession ban, near approximations of such bans (as in New York City and Washington, D.C.), prohibitions of handgun sales (such as those in Chicago), and restrictive variants of laws regulating the carrying of concealed weapons. By definition, laws are most likely to be obeyed by the law-abiding, and gun laws are no different. Therefore, measures applying equally to criminals and noncriminals are almost certain to reduce gun possession more among the latter than the former. Because very little serious violent crime is committed by persons without previous records of serious violence (Chapter 5), there are at best only modest direct crime control benefits to be gained by reductions in gun possession among noncriminals, although even marginal reductions in gun possession among criminals might have crime-inhibiting effects. Consequently, one has to take seriously the possibility that "across-the-board" gun control measures could decrease the crime-control effects of noncriminal gun ownership more than they would decrease the crime-causing effects of criminal gun ownership. For this reason, more narrowly targeted gun control measures like gun owner licensing and permit-topurchase systems seem preferable.
People skeptical about the value of gun control sometimes argue that while a world in which there were no guns would be desirable, it is also unachievable. The evidence summarized here raises a more radical possibility - that a world in which no one had guns might actually be less safe than one in which nonaggressors had guns and aggressors somehow did not. As a practical matter, the latter world is no more achievable than the former, but the point is worth raising as a way of clarifying what the goals of rational gun control policy should be. If gun possession among prospective victims tends to reduce violence, then reducing such gun possession is not, in and of itself, a social good. Instead, the best policy goal to pursue may be to shift the distribution of gun possession as far as practical in the direction of likely aggressors being disarmed and likely nonaggressors being armed. To disarm noncriminals in the hope this might indirectly help reduce access to guns among criminals is not a cost-free policy.