I've been pondering trends in gun violence the past week, wondering
where we really are on the slippery slope. Are we just making too many
excuses for the luxury of guns - too many to be justified against the
backdrop of killings?
It's easy to see that mass killings are up. Since the tower in Austin in the mid-60s, we've gone from something shocking every few years to every few months, and overall the pace keeps quickening. (As has happened perhaps in lesser degree in numerous other countries, to be fair. America doesn't have a corner on the mass murderer market).
But checking trends out at the National Institute of Justice site, I was surprised. Gun violence peaked in 1993, fell to below 1975 levels, then started inching up slowly again after 2002. But that really just puts the homicide rate at what it was forty years ago, around 11,000 a year. That doesn't sound like much progress but it really is kind of significant, given the fact that the US population is over 50% larger than it was 40 years ago. That means the real per capita homicide rate is less than 2/3 what it was in the early 70s. Honestly, I'll take that. Granted, guns are used in a preponderance of homicides, but there are a surprising number of offsetting weapons. Taken altogether, knives, other weapons and blunt objects seem to be about a third of the total.
That doesn't help against the mass murders. Obviously, if someone's going to do that - and clearly they are, more and more often - they're not going to try to kill 200 people at a time with a knife, lead pipe, or candlestick. I'm entirely in favor of resuming the ban on assault weapons and extended magazines - weaponry that, in a civilian population, primarily seems to serve to facilitate mass human slaughter. The only other use is sport, and and constraining someone's sporting options is a small price to pay for reduced danger in the public square.
Between the frothing and the foaming on both the liberal and conservative ends, I think I find myself in a rational middle ground on this issue. No sweeping abrogation of gun rights, but a rational constraint on something that had only been allowed as recently as the late 1980s - ownership of automatic weapons by civilians, and which has no authentic use in normal personal defense.
It's easy to see that mass killings are up. Since the tower in Austin in the mid-60s, we've gone from something shocking every few years to every few months, and overall the pace keeps quickening. (As has happened perhaps in lesser degree in numerous other countries, to be fair. America doesn't have a corner on the mass murderer market).
But checking trends out at the National Institute of Justice site, I was surprised. Gun violence peaked in 1993, fell to below 1975 levels, then started inching up slowly again after 2002. But that really just puts the homicide rate at what it was forty years ago, around 11,000 a year. That doesn't sound like much progress but it really is kind of significant, given the fact that the US population is over 50% larger than it was 40 years ago. That means the real per capita homicide rate is less than 2/3 what it was in the early 70s. Honestly, I'll take that. Granted, guns are used in a preponderance of homicides, but there are a surprising number of offsetting weapons. Taken altogether, knives, other weapons and blunt objects seem to be about a third of the total.
That doesn't help against the mass murders. Obviously, if someone's going to do that - and clearly they are, more and more often - they're not going to try to kill 200 people at a time with a knife, lead pipe, or candlestick. I'm entirely in favor of resuming the ban on assault weapons and extended magazines - weaponry that, in a civilian population, primarily seems to serve to facilitate mass human slaughter. The only other use is sport, and and constraining someone's sporting options is a small price to pay for reduced danger in the public square.
Between the frothing and the foaming on both the liberal and conservative ends, I think I find myself in a rational middle ground on this issue. No sweeping abrogation of gun rights, but a rational constraint on something that had only been allowed as recently as the late 1980s - ownership of automatic weapons by civilians, and which has no authentic use in normal personal defense.
