For as long as I can remember, I have believed in an almost intuitive way that firearms are extremely dangerous. Perhaps it’s that I’ve always been exceptionally sensitive, and whenever, for example, I saw on the TV that somebody had been shot and killed, it must have affected me more deeply than the average person.
As an American adult and a political progressive, I’ve witnessed many occasions where other self-styled progressives tried to make their anti-gun case by quoting or referencing statistics on murder rates and firearms-related deaths in the United States compared to other First World societies. They’d cite, for example, the fact that private gun ownership is so very legal in the U.S. and so very pervasive, and relate the murder rate and compare this to murder rates in other countries with strong gun control laws. Their argument was basically that in so many other countries where gun control laws are seriously enforced the murder rate and gun-death rates are much, much lower. We have no such laws, and we have a murder rate frequently 100 percent, 200 percent, and even 300 percent or 400 percent greater than many other similar liberal democracies (i.e. Japan, Canada, South Korea, Denmark and the Netherlands) with very different gun laws.
And these progressives sometimes claim, correctly, that this statistical lament continues year after year after year.
I have looked at this matter very differently. In the early years of the twenty-first century, I began to marvel that our murder rates in this country were so inexplicably low. With so many guns in so many American hands, it seemed to me we ought to have a murder rate 800% or 1,000% higher than those of other countries. If guns were really as terribly dangerous as I had conjectured they were, how could such a low murder rate possibly be explained?
Before proceeding further, let us review the important terms. When we discuss “murder rates,” it is necessary that the reader understand precisely what we’re talking about. Murder rates can be calculated pertinent to any discreet polity – a city, a state, or a whole nation. And the universal calculation is admirably simple: murders per 100,000 total persons in the whole population per each full year.
Murder rates vary widely throughout the world. A very modern and respected and peaceful country like Canada may have a murder rate of about 2.4 in a single year in the early twenty-first century, and that would mean, of course, that less than three persons in Canada were killed by criminal homicide per 100,000 in that specific calendar year the data was collected. And during the same calendar year the United States might have a murder rate twice that: 4.8. And at the very same time an afflicted country in Central America might have a murder rate of over 90, or even over 100.
A few more numbers and facts: Learned experts estimate that the total privately owned firearms in the United States may be over 300 million. And how many Americans own such weapons? Maybe 40-44% of all American adults are likely to own at least one gun, and this represents a probable number of households in the United States that have guns of some kind at 120 million at the very least.
In America, we sometimes remark that we live in a “gun culture.” And when we pass any adult stranger on the street, in such a culture it is impossible to guess whether that stranger is in fact a “gun owner.” What is it to be a gun owner?
Think about what it is to be “a voter.” What does that mean, exactly? Does it mean that she is counted among those eligible to vote? When she thus self-describes, does she mean that she intends to vote? Does it only mean that she’s registered to vote and has a voting card? What if she just means that she’s voted recently, and intends nothing regarding the future? And what if she voted in a local election recently, but confesses that she is disdainful of national politics – as it is so very “far away” and the leaders in D.C. are so very “disaffected” – and she literally never votes in national elections? Being a voter can mean a lot of things.
Do you see? So too can owning a gun mean very different things. Appertaining to all practical understandings and outcomes, what does it really mean to be a “gun owner?” In real life, how does gun ownership actually play out?
Let us take a hypothetically typical sampling of gun owners across the United States. Let us discuss only 100 such persons, so that we can think simultaneously in corresponding percentages as we go along. Of a representative 100 gun owners in the United States, how many live 50 percent or more of each waking day with a loaded gun in their possession or a loaded gun within arm’s reach? Remember that we’re talking about gun owners only, and not people who happen to use guns as part of their occupation, so soldiers and police (etc.) would have to be considered separately. Their (the police and National Guardsmen, etc.) gun use is relevant, but must be considered separately in order for us to be exacting in the present analysis. Only police (etc.) who are gun owners in their private lives can be counted here among the 100 in our sample. How many out of 100 representative American gun owners have a loaded gun handy each day?
Any candid, honest answer to this question is both revealing and startling: only perhaps one percent of gun owners actually have a loaded weapon on their person or close at hand (as in a dash compartment in a car) for a significant portion of their waking day and waking week.
Does this suggest that, despite what we often guess and what we see in political punditry and opinion surveys and the like, Americans gun owners are ambivalent about their own guns?
Before we answer that question, it is worthwhile answering another question: Where are the guns? If people don’t carry them around with them every day, where are they? I’ve spoken with innumerable gun owners about their guns and this is what they usually contend: “Oh, my gun is very safe! The kids can never get to it. I put it in a box inside a safe in the attic, and I have the key hidden in a place where only I know where it is.” They are very sure that the gun does not endanger anyone, that it is safe. But it is safe not because of what it intrinsically is, but because of its deliberately conceived and ever-continuing remoteness, its relative inaccessibility. The gun is safe not because of itself, but because of its location, a location unmistakably disdainful of the device’s very essence: the gun is safe, and safe because it is in a safe.
When I think about these things and discuss them, I find myself sometimes beginning to laugh. So many Americans are (obviously) convinced that their guns make them safer, yet they deal with their weapons in a very real-time, practical way as if they were very unsafe! The man’s got five different poisons right under his kitchen sink – and ingested, any one of them will kill him or any other mammal in less than an hour – and all those chemicals remain right there under the sink and available for intentional or accidental ingestion by anyone or anything with a thumb and opposing digits and a mouth. Yet, he places his unloaded gun in a sealed bag, the bag inside a metal lock box, that box inside another larger metal lock box, and that inside a safe in a difficult-to-access corner of an attic so dank and lightless that antipodal winter is shamed by its relative brightness. And all this is performed by someone who himself purports that guns are safe. Indeed, isn’t safety the reason he bought the gun in the first place?
That, and similar dispositions of so many millions of Americans’ firearms, is predictive of a relatively low murder rate. And that practical reality, however recondite, however awkward and problematical in statistical measurement, is more conducive to substantive safety than all the instruction in handling weapons that will ever exist.