Do countries with stricter gun laws really have less crime or fewer homicides?
On Jan. 4, 2013, Gabrielle Giffords visited the families of the victims of the Newtown, Conn., mass shooting that, weeks earlier, had claimed the lives of 20 first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School, along with that of the gunman's mother.
In the two years since Jared Lee Loughner opened fire on the former Arizona representative and her constituents, shooting sprees had killed six at a Wisconsin Sikh temple, 12 at an Aurora, Colo., theater, four at a Carson City, Nev., IHOP Restaurant and seven in Grand Rapids, Mich. The attacks had also wounded many others. (And that's just a partial list of mass shootings in the U.S.)
Giffords, a moderate Democrat and gun rights advocate, and her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, launched the organization Americans for Responsible Solutions to push for "responsible changes" in gun laws, countering the hard-line stance taken by the American gun lobby and the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA attributed the Newtown shooting to violent films and video games, and argued for armed guards in schools [sources: Kucinich; Lichtblau and Rich].
Tragic events spark fear and outrage, drive up gun sales and, conversely, inspire calls for expanded (or better-enforced) gun control [source: Ingram]. Congress passed the Gun Control Act of 1968 following the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The Brady Act, which requires background checks by licensed dealers (but does not apply to gun shows), arose from the 1981 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan [sources: ATF; Hennessey and Mascaro; The New York Times]. The act is named for James Brady, Reagan's press secretary who also was injured in the attempt and went on to become a gun control advocate.
But as of January 2013, the possibility of legal reform following Newtown remains unclear, and the composition and effectiveness of such laws remains hotly debated.
One commonly proposed gun law reform involves banning assault weapons such as the popular AR-15, the semi-automatic rifle used in the Newtown and Aurora killings. The Clinton administration's Federal Assault Weapons Ban lapsed in 2004, and attempts to revive the measure have failed, due to both divergent views and the difficulty in codifying a workable and non-exploitable definition of "assault weapon" [sources: Haas; Kucinich; Lawrence; New York Times].
Public support for such a ban has flip-flopped. According to a post-Newtown USA Today/Gallup survey, while 58 percent of Americans supported tighter gun laws, the majority opposed banning "semi-automatic guns known as assault rifles" [source: Walsh]. Gallup asked again in January 2013 and found that 60 percent would be in favor of such a ban [source: Saad].
In the U.S., the gun control debate comprises strongly held views about constitutional law, the rights of the individual, the role of the state and the best way to keep society safe. But it also encompasses an important practical question: Do countries with stricter gun laws experience less crime or fewer homicides?
The answer is anything but simple.
Violent Crimes: No Guns, No Problem
The fight for more stringent gun control laws derives in part from the idea that more guns mean more violence. As it turns out, though, in the United States and the rest of the developed world, total murder and suicide rates, from all causes, do not increase with rates of gun ownership -- or drop under tougher gun laws [sources: Killias, van Kesteren and Rindlisbacher; Liptak].
The effect of gun laws on gun-related violence is fuzzier and far more controversial but, in general, more guns mean more gun-related violence [sources: Killias, van Kesteren and Rindlisbacher; Liptak; Luo]. We'll examine this further below.
First, let's look at the relationship between gun laws and violence in general.
The former Soviet Union's extremely stringent gun controls, successfully implemented and enforced by a police state, did not keep the nation, and successor states like Russia, from posting murder rates from 1965-1999 that far outstripped the rest of the developed world [sources: Kates and Mauser; Kessler; Pridemore; Pridemore]. The killers in question did not obtain illegal firearms -- they simply employed other weapons [source: Kleck].
In the 1960s and early 1970s, murders committed by Soviet citizens -- again, almost entirely without guns -- equaled or surpassed the lives taken violently in the gun-saturated United States. By the early 1990s, the murder rate in Russia trebled the American rate, which had by then leveled off, then dropped significantly (more on that later) [sources: Kates and Mauser; Pridemore; Pridemore].
On the other hand, Norway, Finland, Germany, France and Denmark, all countries with heavy gun ownership, posted low murder rates in the early 2000s compared to "gun-light" developed nations. In 2002, for example, Germany's murder rate was one-ninth that of Luxembourg, where the law prohibits civilian ownership of handguns and gun ownership is rare [source: Kates and Mauser].
Statistics within countries paint a similar picture: Areas of higher gun ownership rates correlate with areas of lower rates of violent crime, and areas with strict gun laws correlate with areas high in violent crime [source: Malcolm].
Does this mean that guns prevent crime? Not necessarily. After all, the most violent areas are also the most likely to pass stringent gun laws. It's a chicken-and-egg problem: Which came first, the violent crime or the gun laws? There's no simple answer. It does appear that high gun-ownership density does not imply high rates of violent crime, and that stringent gun controls do not reduce murder rates across the board [sources: Kates and Mauser; Liptak; Luo]. However, the data involved in these assessments are often mismatched and tricky to compare.
Causation, Conflation and Consternation
One of the reasons gun debates are so difficult to settle, aside from the strong feelings involved, is that the data involved in researching connections between gun laws, gun ownership, gun crime and non-gun crime are frequently mixed, murky, misrecorded and difficult to compare [sources: Kates and Mauser; Zimring; Zimring].
Take the United Kingdom, where ever-more stringent gun bans brought gun-related homicides to among the lowest in all of Europe from 2003-2010, but where guns remain widely available and are increasingly used in the commission of violent crimes [sources: Bamber; BBC; Malcolm; UNODC].
How does one interpret the success or failure of gun laws in a nation that a July 2009 issue of The Telegraph dubbed "the violent crime capital of Europe"? The U.K. newspaper based the claim on a 2007 study of per-capita violent offenses, but some people argue that problems of definition render comparisons among the European Union nations invalid [source: Edwards].
Similarly problematic is the claim that dropping crime rates in America throughout the 1990s were attributable to the relaxation of gun control policies [source: Kates and Mauser]. Perhaps this easing was a factor, but no data exists that can draw so clear a line, particularly when other factors were in play. Some analysts, for example, point to the significant uptick in American prison populations and executions during this period, or to the larger police forces and improved crime-fighting tactics, the flagging crack-cocaine trade and/or the booming economy [sources: Donohue and Levitt; Lott and Mustard].
Other analysts take more unusual tacks to explaining the drop-off. Economist Rick Nevin, for example, attributes a substantial portion of crime rate fluctuation to changes in childhood lead exposure [source: Vedantam]. As made famous in the book "Freakonomics," economists Steven Levitt and John Donohue credit legalized abortion in the 1970s for the 1990s fall in violent crime. They argue that abortions prevented the births of children to poor, single, teenaged mothers -- a demographic they say is more likely to produce criminal offspring [sources: Donohue and Levitt; Kates and Mauser; Levitt and Dubner; Vedantam].
The point is, the "more guns = more violence" argument and the "gun ownership = decreased crime" argument both sidestep the complicating socioeconomic, cultural and psychological factors affecting violent crime. Economic disparities within countries, along with periods of economic downturn, drive up crime and homicides, and violent crimes occurs four times more often in countries with wide income gaps. While economic prosperity tends to decrease violent crime, crime itself can depress community development, perpetuating a cycle of poverty and violence [source: UNODC].
Violent crime arises from more complicated causes than guns, yet there is no question that guns are associated with a particularly brutal brand of crime. Removing guns from the equation might not stop violence altogether, but might it prevent another Newtown?
The Unique Problem of Guns
The only clear message in this complex issue is that violent crime overall does not increase with the availability of guns, but gun-related violence does [sources: Kates and Mauser; Liptak; Luo]. In 1996, for example, you were far more likely to be shot to death in America than in any of 35 other wealthy nations, but you were also less likely to be the victim of murder, or of violent crime in general [sources: Killias, van Kesteren and Rindlisbacher].
Some opponents of gun control, including NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre, say, "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" [source: Lichtblau and Rich]. But at least one study has shown that defensive gun use succeeds only rarely, and that gun owners are 4.5 times more likely to be shot during an assault [source: Branas, et al.].
Firearms, it seems, are neither as much the cause of, nor the solution to, violent crime as they are cracked up to be.
Yet it is difficult to consider the victims of the mass shootings described above, or at Columbine High School (April 20, 1999) or the Virginia Tech campus (April 16, 2007), and not wonder if more might have lived if firearms regulations had been tighter -- or more tightly enforced.
Because of the gun show loophole, the woman who bought three of the four guns used by the Columbine killers was never prosecuted, despite making a "straw purchase" for two minors [source: Jefferson County Sherriff]. Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho passed a background check to purchase his weapons after a state judge had declared him mentally ill [source: Schmidt and Savage].
In these cases, it seems likely that better controls could have saved lives. But to really limit mass shootings, societies must also find effective ways to identify and treat the mentally ill, and to limit their access to sensitive areas and weapons.
Although Jared Lee Loughner had no criminal record to prevent him from purchasing a gun, he exhibited numerous signs of being psychologically troubled [source: Anglen]. The same could be said for accused Aurora, Colo., theater gunman James Eagan Holmes, Carson City, Nev., assailant Eduardo Sencion and Norway massacre perpetrator Anders Behring Breivik [sources: BBC; Frosch and Johnson; Lewis and Lyall; Lovett; The New York Times]. Preventing violent acts like theirs will require understanding and defusing the pathology that drives them -- a feat far easier said than done.
Ultimately, like so many aspects of human nature, violence abhors simple truths. As long as mental illness, disparity, fear and hate exist, so too will crime, and until we can better identify and treat psychological disorders, we will likely produce people capable of the most atrocious acts.