Some Random Thoughts on Gun Violence
For the past few days this story has dominated the news here in Tokyo:
Japanese police have nabbed a former gangster, ending a more than 24-hour standoff during which the man shot a policeman dead after wounding his own son, daughter and another police officer and holing up in his suburban house.
This would be a big story anywhere, but is even more so here, where gun-related violence is rare. All day yesterday most of the TV stations here placed a box on the top corner of the screen, showing a live feed of the standoff. Over the past several weeks, sensationalistic gun violence in Japan seems to be up:
The stand-off comes a month after a gangster shot a fellow mobster in a Tokyo suburb and hid in an apartment before shooting himself, and another gangster shot dead the mayor of Nagasaki, shocking a country where gun control is tough and shootings rare.
I think what really matters is the point mentioned in the last paragraph of the article:
Gun-related crimes are rare in Japan and on the decline. The number of shootings fell to a record-low 53 last year, with most involving members of organized crime. Of those, 36 were thought to have involved gangsters. Only two resulted in deaths.
The population of the US is about 2.3 times the population of Japan. As a starting point for comparing the two countries, let’s adjust Japan’s number of shootings by population: 53 times 2.3 is about 122. Take a a guess at the actual annual number of shootings in the US? Don’t Google it - take a guess: 10,000? 30,000? Not even close. I couldn’t find numbers for last year, but looking at 2004 and 2005 numbers, it’s about 83,000 annual shootings (not counting suicides, but including accidental shootings - I couldn’t find a breakdown excluding those), with about 12,000 of those being homicides (compared to 2 in Japan last year).
Looking at this table comparing 25 industrialized countries, Japan is at the lowest end of the spectrum for gun violence, and the US is at the highest. Looking at just gun-related homicides, the country coming closest to the US is Northern Island, but the US rate is almost twice as high. The next closest is Italy, and the US rate is over 5 times higher.
I’m not going to hold forth on some simple (or even complex!) explanation for all this. It’s not something I’ve done a lot of research on. But here’s some food for thought:
- Guns are virtually prohibited in Japan. But, if that table I mentioned is correct, Finland has no restrictions on gun ownership, has an even higher rate of gun ownership than the US, but a homicide rate that’s about one-seventh of the US’. So what’s going on is more complex than just whether or not guns are readily available. (I’m not saying the US’ lax gun laws are ok; I’m saying you would have to look at more than just gun laws to fully understand what drives overall gun-related crime).
- For a shooting to count as a homicide, the victim has to die. I heard an interview a while back with a doctor at the U Penn Hospital who had developed innovative surgical techniques for dealing with gunshot wounds that were eventually adopted by the US military. He said what sent the murder rate off the charts, at least in Philadelphia, was semi-automatic pistols, which hit the streets in the 80s. Instead of people coming into his emergency room with one bullet in them, they started coming in with three or more bullets in them, making it exceedingly difficult to save their lives.
- In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, law professor Jack Balkin wrote a thoughtful post on the Second Amendment. He doesn’t formulate any specific form of regulation, but he does make an even-handed, thought-provoking comparison between the legal limits placed on the First Amendment’s freedom of speech guarantees (restrictions often sought by the Right and disliked by the Left) and restrictions on the Second Amendment (usually advocated by the Left and resisted by the Right).
- In the 1980s and 1990s, I recall the gun control debate was often in the public spotlight. But in the age of terrorism, it’s moved way down on the agenda. Death by firearms, at the hands of fellow Americans, is one of the leading causes of death in the US (the only other major cause that’s not a disease is car accidents). Unfortunately, that simple fact cannot penetrate the political minefield that engulfs the gun control debate in the US. Look at how quickly the public policy debate on gun violence receded after the Virginia Tech shootings. Our political process is utterly paralyzed on an issue that should actually concentrate minds like almost nothing else.
