back of the envelope: handguns and the marginal homicide

[Ed: I actually started writing this a couple of weeks ago, and had to set it aside to work on other things. In light of the president's policy proposals today, which seem to consist of mostly toothless executive orders and lobbying for congress to reign in assault weapons and large magazines, I think it's worth putting out there even though it's not as fully formed as I would like. Especially since I find myself in the--admittedly familiar, at this point--position of both being revolted at the reactionary pro-gun rhetoric and of the opinion that what the president is proposing is likely a waste of time and resources.]

Let's dispense with the rhetoric for a moment, and look at some numbers.

I came across the following on Wikipedia while looking for something else. It's from a data set produced by the Bureau of Justice Statistics breaking down homicides in the US by the weapon of choice. Here's the graph that appears on Wikipedia:

 

The obvious point here is that handguns account for the majority of homicides in the US. But what I find interesting is that homicides involving other weapons have remained very nearly constant (knifings having experienced a small, but steady drop) over the the 30-year time period measured, while handguns appear to account for the relatively huge fluctuations in year-over-year homicide rates. Just to be sure, I plugged the numbers (which you can get in table form here) into my own spreadsheet, and added a column for total homicides. What you get is this:

In other words, handgun homicides drive the overall rate. Just to drive the point home a little more formally:

Now. None of this tells us anything about why homicide rates are higher or lower in any given year. Nor do they (necessarily) explain why the rate in the US is so much higher than other western countries.

However, I do think it is fair to argue that the marginal homicide in the US is--statistically speaking--committed with a handgun, because again: note that the rates of homicides by other means are really, really stable year over year. Put another way, the difference between a homicide and a non-homicide may very well be in many cases, having a handgun with which to commit it, or not.

Whatever your predisposition is regarding guns, public funding for mental health services, criminal justice policy, or any of the other arenas of debate that impinge on the question of gun violence in America, I should hope it is safe to assume that everyone is interested in having fewer people die violent deaths. The points of contention, really, aren't about the ultimate goal, but rather 1) how best to achieve that goal, and perhaps 2) how one weighs the trade-offs involved in policies pursuant to achieving that goal.

Too often--and especially after high-profile mass shootings--the argument is made that "nothing could have prevented this." This is problematic, not because it is untrue in many of those particular cases, but because it tends to lead to the--perhaps unconscious--conclusion that all homicides are therefore not preventable. Clearly, no one seriously believes this; if every homicide (or indeed any crime) is an utter inevitability, why bother having a criminal justice system at all? And yet it seems an article of faith among many in this country that all efforts to reign in our culture of gun violence via tighter regulation of guns are ultimately futile.

That said...it is entirely fair for gun rights advocates (or anyone) to demand a measurable positive return on a change in policy, particularly a policy that abridges (or that they consider to abridge) their own personal freedom (see point #2 about trade-offs above). And if the metric we are using to evaluate that positive return (or lack thereof) is the total homicide rate, I'm not sure that it makes sense to fret too much about assault weapons or large magazines.

If we're serious about reducing total homicides via reducing the number and/or types of weapons in general circulation, it makes a great deal more sense to go after handguns. Given the number of people that own handguns in this country, that is naturally a much more difficult proposition.