Do More Guns Mean More Killings?

For many years, the 4th grade class of Mark Horowitz at the Golda Meir School in Milwaukee would travel to Denmark and spend two weeks attending school with Danish students and living with their families. The Milwaukee families hoped to reciprocate, by hosting Danish students in their homes in Wisconsin. The Danish parents never agreed: the United States, they believed, was too dangerous to risk their children.

What does the data show?

It is estimated that the chance of getting shot and killed in Denmark is 0.18 per 100,000 residents. In the United States, the comparable number is 4.46. This suggests that, on average, someone living in America has a probability of getting shot and killed that is 25 times higher than for someone living in Denmark.

In recent years, the United States has increasingly become a global outlier as to two gun-related statistics: the number of guns in the possession of its residents and the rate of gun violence. The Small Arms Survey estimates that Americans possess 393 million guns, 46% of the world’s guns and a bit more than one gun per American. (These figures exclude guns in the hands of military and police forces.)

In fact, the closest competitor for the title of most guns per capita is Yemen, likely reflecting Yemen’s ongoing civil war. Even so, its guns per capita is less than half that of the United States. (One ranking places the Falkland Island ahead of Yemen, but with a population of only 3,000, Falkland’s rank is likely to vary from year to year and estimate to estimate.)

Another number where the United States leads the world is in deaths from shootings. Although some nations exceed the US in gun deaths, those countries are poor.

Is there a relationship between America’s high number of guns and its high gun deaths? The graph below plots the two numbers for 28 advanced nations. The horizontal axis shows the number of guns per 100 residents. The vertical axis shows the number of homicides per 100,000 residents.

The dot in the upper right-hand corner shows the values for the United States; the dots in the lower left-hand corner show the numbers for the other 27 nations (Switzerland, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, Finland, Austria, Italy, Belgium, Croatia, Germany, Portugal, France, Norway, Estonia, Canada, Hungary, Sweden, Greece, Iceland, Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland, Poland, New Zealand, Spain, United Kingdom, Australia and Japan). The trend line (the dotted line) is driven upward mostly because both of the United States` numbers are so much larger than those of the other countries.

To a limited extent the same analysis can be applied to the states. The next graph compares the number of gun deaths and suicides to the percentage of households with at least one gun. The blue dot represents Wisconsin, which as usual falls in the middle.

As with nations, as guns rise in the states so does the number of gun deaths. It appears that this effect is driven by an increase in the suicide rate. As the availability of a gun increases, more people will take advantage of it.

It is axiomatic among statisticians that correlation alone does not prove causality. However, no other credible explanation has been advanced as to why the US gun homicide rate differs so much from those of its peers.

The US has a serious gun problem. As one study comparing death rates across nations concluded:

These results show that the United States suffers excessively from fatal firearm violence compared with other high-income countries—and that the US has become even more of an outlier since 2003. Even residents of the US low-gun states have far higher rates of firearm death than do residents of other high-income countries.

More guns equal more deaths. Why?

Before getting into possible mechanisms, it is useful, I think, to note that shootings seem to fall into two categories:

1. The mass shooting. These are pre-planned to create as much attention—and destruction—as possible. The weapon of choice is often a semiautomatic rifle, and fitted for extra rounds. Body armor seems to be growing in popularity. Sometimes the shooting is tied to a political cause, such as the Buffalo shooter’s obsession with the Great Replacement idea; in other cases, such as the massacre at the Dobbs School, the motivation is unclear.
2. The hand gun shooting. In this case the shooter likely did not plan to shoot anyone. Instead, he (and it is usually he) carried a pistol for self-defense. At some point an argument became a fight and a gun was pulled out of a pocket or retrieved from a car. The recent shootings in Milwaukee’s Deer District have sometimes been counted as a mass shooting based on the number of wounded. I think it would be better classified as three hand gun shootings.

It is clear that the second scenario is by far the most common. The graph below shows the type of gun that was used in Milwaukee shootings this year taken from the Milwaukee Firearm dashboard. Long guns, which would include hunting rifles and assault rifles constitute only about 8% of the known firearms.

Despite this, shootings in the first category attract far more attention than the second. The danger is that the much more common hand gun shooting may escape the attention from those trying to reduce gun violence.

Why is there such a strong connection between the number of guns and shootings?

One possible connection is that the very knowledge that others are carrying guns makes one more anxious to carry one in self-defense.

Another is the copycat syndrome—that one mass shooter acts as a role model to others.

A third is that the presence of a large number of guns is a signal that mechanisms to keep guns away from people who would be a threat to themselves and to others have failed.

Unfortunately, in Wisconsin, as in other states, members of the Legislature seem intent on opposing any gun restrictions. In the most recent session, a number of bills were passed (but vetoed by Governor Tony Evers) that would have allowed more people to carry guns or protected the gun industry from legal liability.

Somehow, the legislators who voted for the defeated bills don’t recognize that they have a responsibility to protect the lives of their constituents.