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The Production of Criminal Violence in America: Is Strict Gun Control the Solution?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Lance K. Stell
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“Strict gun control”(SCG) has no clear meaning,so it is necessary to clarify it.I define SGC as an array of legally sanctioned restrictions designed to impose firearm scarcity on the general population. SGC’s public policy goal, gun scarcity, commonly rests on the predicates that “dangerous criminal control” is not the central problem for reducing the problem of criminal gun violence but rather that it is the social prevalence of the distinctively-lethal instruments (guns) by which both supposedly “good citizens” as well as violent criminals inflict a staggeringly high percentage of injury and death.

Professor Zimring (who also has an essay published in this issue) is one SGC’s most distinguished, prolific and comprehensive theorists. He has advocated for handgun scarcity among the general population since at least 1969.

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Article
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , Spring 2004 , pp. 38 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2004

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References

See Zimring, F.E., “Is Gun Control Likely to Reduce Violent Killings?” University of Chicago Law Review 35 (1968):721–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
See Zimring, R.E. Hawlins, G., Crime Is Not The Problem: Lethal Violence in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). “Putting social stigma on the instruments of lethal violence [irrespective who uses them, is key because] The rhetorical high ground in violence prevention may leave little room for distinguishing between types of violence” p.208. By “distinguishing between types of violence,” Zimring means the currently-made distinction between unlawful offensive violence and lawful defensive violence.Google Scholar
See Zimring, F.E. Hawkins, G. G., The Citizen’s Guide to Gun Control (New York: Macmillan Press, 1989): 205.Google Scholar
Urging “thoughtful consideration” of gun policy changes may be as oxymoronic politically as commending “thoughtful consideration” of changes in abortion policy.Google Scholar
A “back of the envelope,” county-based calculation indicates that, in the 2000 Presidential Election, counties going for Al Gore had a homicide rate of 13.2, while counties going for Bush had a homicide rate of 1.2. Our current fascination with red v. blue states and or counties underwrites effective political strategy but is potentially very harmful to the country as a whole.Google Scholar
In Crime Is Not The Problem, he additionally supports it by noting that the homicide rates in the G7 countries are markedly lower than that in the United States despite their having assault rates similar to the United States’. See especially Chapter 7, 106–110.Google Scholar
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The graph of the nation’s homicide rate is available at the Bureau of Justice Statistics Website. It should be noted that at the beginning of the 20th Century, several states known or suspected of having comparatively high homicide rates did not report their homicide data to the federal government. This suggests that the nation’s homicide rate must have been higher than the reported national estimate during those years. Professor Kleck has pointed out to me in a personal communication that “The data for 1903–1932 are not actually national data, but rather merely cover the changing subsets of the U.S. that were included in the ‘Death Registration Area’ (DRA), which consisted of those states that have achieved relatively complete coverage of deaths in their vital statistics systems. Most the apparently enormous increase in homicide rates from 1903–1920, and part of the 1921–1933 increase, is a statistical mirage, attributable to new, mostly high homicide, states being added to the DRA. Only a minority of the U.S. was covered by the 1903 DRA, predominantly low-homicide Northeast states, while all of it was covered by 1933. Unfortunately, there was a systematic pattern to which states got added to the DRA latest — generally the states that were the last to get their statistical systems up to speed and join the DRA also tended to be the homicide states, mostly from the South and Southwest. E.g., the very last state to join was Texas, a huge contributor to the national homicide rate both because of its high rate and its large population. In reality, the increase in the U.S. homicide rate was much milder than your chart indicates, up until Prohibition went into effect in 1920, at which point homicide really did jump up, though not as much as the DRA-based data seems to indicate.”.Google Scholar
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By federal law, every firearm produced by American gun manufacturers must bear a serial number. Each firearm imported must also bear a serial number. Domestic production totals, imports and exports must be reported annually to the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco. The trade publication Shooting Industry also publishes annually, based on BATF-provided data, the number of firearms produced over a running 20 year period. These data include BATF totals by handgun type (revolvers and pistols) and by caliber. They enable an objective basis for evaluating market trends and for estimating and updating the number of civilian-owned guns. Using BATF figures to establish a 1945 baseline, Gary Kleck has developed a production-based model that cumulates annual domestic production, adds imports and subtracts exports. From 1945–1994, the American civilian gun total rose from an estimated 46,909,183 guns to an estimated 235,604,001 guns, an increase of 502.25%. Over that period, the number of privately-owned handguns increased from an estimated 12,657,618 to an estimated 84,665,690, a gain of 668.9%. From 1945–1994, Americans bought handguns at a higher rate than they bought long guns. The whole-period handgun growth rate was 151% of the whole period long gun growth rate (a total handgun increase of 668.9% vs. a total long gun increase of 440.7%).Between 1993–1999 the industry produced approximately 28.6 million firearms, including 12.5 million handguns. Allowing for imports and subtracting for exports, we may reasonably estimate that the current gun total approximates the size of the U.S. population, including approximately 95–100 million handguns. Figured on a per capita basis, American civilians probably own guns at a rate between 969 and 1016 per 1,000 adults, including a rate between 365 and 388 handguns per 1000 adults.Google Scholar
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