The gun violence issue in The USA is complicated and I readily concede that it will not likely be solved anytime soon, if ever. There is no easy way to fix the problem, especially if we can’t agree that there is a problem or what exactly the problem is.
The United States has 5% of the world’s population and between 35 – 50% of all the civilian-owned guns in the world. Reference this article from the Atlantic Magazine:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/americas-top-killing-machine/384440/
There are more guns here than most anywhere else, and that’s important because there is a clear connection with the number of guns and the number of violent crimes, and this is related to legally obtained guns. This relationship is true across affluent nations and also true between states in the United States – where there are more guns there are more murders committed with guns. Reference this research from the Harvard School of Public Health:
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/
Interestingly, the number of gun murders in the USA declined sharply between 1993 and 2001, dropping by 49%. Reference this research by the Pew Research Center :
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2013/05/firearms_final_05-2013.pdf
However, the decline in gun murders stopped in 2001 and has remained around 3 gun murders per 100,000 people in the USA, which is still the highest in the world and more than 3 times higher than the next western country on the list, Switzerland, at just under 1 gun murder per 100,000 people. Great Britain, where there are strong gun control laws and far fewer guns, has something like 0.1 gun murders per 100,000 people. Reference this article in the Washington Post, which has a nice graphic display of the data for gun-related murders in wealthy nations:
Gun murders in the USA in 1993 were around 7 per 100,000 population compared to a steady 3.6 – 3.8 per 100,000 every year since 2001. In 2010 the total number of gun-related deaths in America was 31,672, and most of these were from suicide at 19,392 deaths leaving 12,280 gun-related deaths as murders. Most of the gun murders in our country do not occur in the attention-getting disasters of mass shootings in public places, which account for less than 1% of all homicides. (See the same citation for the Pew Research Center above).
The same PEW research paper mentions a few possible explanations for the substantial, but stalled, decline in gun murders; But the reality is that there are multiple possible factors driving this decline and no single reason will suffice. Some experts have suggested better police efforts, but this has been hard to substantiate. The PEW research paper points out that the biggest group of gun-murder victims, and presumably gun-murder perpetrators, is young men, and over the past several decades the population of young American men has fluctuated up and down, possibly influencing gun violence rates.
There are some unexpected explanations offered for the decline in gun violence, like the impact of abortion. This idea makes the case that there have been fewer young men in the peak age range for gun violence after 1993 because abortion was legalized in 1973 thus fewer unwanted babies were born into the bad socioeconomic conditions that foster criminal behavior. Likewise, another suggestion is that our higher rates of incarceration are keeping more potentially violent young men in jail and thus unable to commit violent crimes. Another intriguing idea is that environmental laws passed in the early 1970’s that reduced the amount of lead in gasoline resulted in lower lead levels in children and consequently lower rates of brain damage that could have led to mental illnesses predisposing these kids to violent behavior later in life. All of this is covered in the PEW research article I referenced above.
The assertion was made to me that the gun violence problem was ultimately related to the fall in religious commitment among Americans, which is a shocking suggestion since we are easily the most religious nation in the western world and, as already confirmed, we have, by far, the highest gun-murder rate of all the wealthy nations in the world. But I felt obliged to look into the claim that if we just started forcing children to pray to a Christian God in public schools without regard for their freedom to believe in a different God, or no God at all, all our problems would be solved. In the United States the most violent region with the highest number of assault-related deaths is the South. The least violent region with the fewest assault-related deaths is the Northeast. See the same Washington Post article as above at this link:
The data for religiosity, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, are exactly the reverse. The Southern United States blows the rest of us away in its religious fervor and the less violent, less deadly Northeast (especially New England) is much less religious and practically crawling with nasty nonbelievers. See this data from Gallup:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/167267/mississippi-religious-vermont-least-religious-state.aspx
Lack of religion is almost certainly not what drives our gun-murder rate. And I’ll resist the temptation to connect these dots and claim that religion is a driver of violent behavior – because that would not be a scientific conclusion with the limited data I have presented. But more research on this relationship would be welcome.
I don’t have the answer to our gun violence problem, and neither does anybody else. Gun laws won’t eliminate gun deaths, but they do help. States with stricter gun laws have fewer gun-related deaths – see the same Washington Post article at this link:
Another less discussed issue that President Obama mentioned in his speech yesterday is that there has been an active suppression of research on gun violence. The kind of research from the CDC that would inform the construction of rational gun control laws is being actively suppressed by, of course, the NRA (and other gun advocacy groups, I’m sure). See these two links:
http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2013/02/gun-violence.aspx
Actively suppressing scientific research that is bad for business is nothing new in the United States. The tobacco industry did it with the link between smoking and cancer. The fossil fuel industry does it with the link between their product and climate change, and the gun industry, via their champion the NRA, does it with gun violence. No matter which side of any issue you are on as a citizen of this great nation you are being wronged when efforts are made to suppress knowledge that you can use to make informed decisions.
Citizens fighting with each other about the most important issues facing our country, and dividing themselves into opposing groups that develop a deeply held hatred for each other, is the consequence of carefully crafted political strategy funded by unscrupulous industries that care about nothing but their profits. The only weapon we have to fight back is untainted information, which we can use to have rational conversations with each other and build working plans to achieve solutions. And this, I fear, is way more difficult than it should be. But let’s try anyway.
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Monte