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https://mises.org/wire/why-gun-ownership-rates-tell-us-little-about-homicide-trends-america

Ryan McMaken

Every time a homicide committed with a firearm makes the national news, it happens like clockwork: a variety of pundits in the corporate media quickly pen columns advocating for ever broader and stricter gun control laws. If only government agents were entrusted with a strict monopoly (or near-monopoly) on firearm ownership — we are told — then the United States would have much lower homicide rates similar to those found in most other so-called “developed” countries like Norway or Canada.

The journalists and pundits who write these articles present their argument as if they were merely repeating a consensus among scholars who all agree that guns are the reason homicide rates are significantly higher in the United States — well, in many parts of it — than in Canada and Europe.

But there’s a problem with this claim: there is not at all a consensus among criminologists, sociologists, and historians that guns are the primary or driving factor behind the United States’ relatively high homicide rates.

Gun-Driven Crime vs. Culture-Driven Crime

Contrary to the simplistic narrative often pushed by columnists at the Washington Post, et al, homicide scholars frequently debate the most important factors behind the US’s homicide numbers.

To be sure, the “more guns, more homicide” position is influential among researchers. Numerous studies have appeared in the past twenty years attempting to draw a causal relationship between total gun-ownership numbers and homicide. Some of the more notable studies include “The Social Costs of Gun Ownership” by Philip J Cook and Jens Ludwig;” More Guns, More Crime” by Mark Duggan; and “Examining the Relationship Between the Prevalence of Guns and Homicide Rates in the USA,” by Michael Siegel, Craig Ross, and Charles King.

Also influential within this line of thinking is the book Crime Is Not the Problem by Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins. Their claim is not that more guns produce more crime, but that American crime is more lethal thanks to the high availability of guns.

There have always been two big problems with these types of studies, and both were covered in a 2018 Rand Corp. analysis. One is that there is no data which directly tells us how many guns are owned by or available to Americans. Researches attempting to show correlations between crime and gun ownership must rely on proxies such as the “FS/S” proxy, which is the proportion of suicides that were firearm suicides. Other proxies include the proportion of residents who are military veterans, and “subscriptions per 100,000 people to Guns & Ammo.”

Writing for Rand, researcher Rouslan Karimov finds this reliance on these proxies problematic, and notes “many such study designs are currently hampered by poor information on the prevalence of gun ownership and the consequent reliance on proxy measures of availability and prevalence.”

A second problem with the more-guns-more-crime hypothesis is the fact that a high crime rate may itself be a driver of high rates of gun ownership. Karimov notes:

In the past 12 years, several new studies found that increases in the prevalence of gun ownership are associated with increases in violent crime. Whether this association is attributable to gun prevalence causing more violent crime is unclear. If people are more likely to acquire guns when crime rates are rising or high, then the same pattern of evidence would be expected.

Efforts to overcome this problem in establishing gun ownership as the driver of high crime rates remains a serious problem for researchers attempting to establish causation.

Homicide Driven by Perceptions of Government Legitimacy

In contrast to this view, we find crime scholars who instead suggest that “a lack of legitimacy of the state and its institutions predicts variation in levels of crime.” The idea’s origins are summarized by Manuel Eisner and Amy Nivette:

But amongst empirical criminologists the idea that legitimacy could explain macro-level variation in crime only gained some prominence in the late 1990s. In ‘Losing Legitimacy’ [Gary] LaFree (1998) argued that three key social institutions – family, economic, and political –motivate citizens to abide by the rules, participate in social control, and obey the law. When these social institutions are seen as unfair, useless, or corrupt, they lose legitimacy and subsequently the ability to maintain social control.

Since then, other authors have explored how a lack of confidence in government’s ability to deliver on its promises leads to greater lawlessness. Examples include ” Beyond Procedural Justice: A Dialogic Approach toLegitimacy in Criminal Just ice” by Anthony Bottoms and Justice Tankebe and “Procedural Justice, Legitimacy, and the Effective Rule of Law” by Tom R. Tyler.

Perhaps the largest study within this theoretical framework is Randolph Roth’s American Homicide. Roth is doubtful of the pat answers given by both pundits and academics “who claim that they can measure the impact of gun laws or unemployment or the death panlty on homicide rates by controlling statistically for the impact of other variables.” According to Roth, “Those claims are false.” Read the rest of this entry »