Do Guns Improve Safety?

 

On the face of it, the idea that guns improve safety seems appealing. If you’ve got a gun in your pocket, the reasoning goes, you are less likely to be robbed, beaten or shot yourself and even killed. Is this a legitimate argument? I’d say it is certainly not a legitimate argument. Guns are not safety devices. As a general rule with few exceptions, having one in your pocket does not increase your safety.

 

How can that be so? There is no doubt that producing a gun from your pocket can ward off robbers, rapists and other attackers and potential attackers. Some studies based on self-reports indicate that this or something like it happens hundreds of thousands of times a year in the United States. Critics suggest that many of these cases involve instances of two people arguing and both going to get their guns, or a case of someone hearing a noise and fetching a firearm without ever perceiving an actual imminent threat or hearing additional noises. These are arguably not very convincing instances of guns being used as safety devices, but we’ll leave that alone for the moment.

 

Let’s accept that having a gun can, in certain circumstances, including when you are being attacked, improve your safety. However, what about the rest of the time? Do guns improve safety?

 

To answer this question, I looked first at the number of people killed in justifiable homicides by gun-toting citizens. This means the person killed was in the act of committing a felony, and the person doing the killing used a firearm and was not a law enforcement officer. There were an average of 212 cases of this kind of justifiable homicide in the United States from 2006 through 2010, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I looked at deaths, instead of injuries or instances of a criminal being frightened off by a gun-waving citizen, first because killing someone is a very serious event and also because deaths are closely tracked. As a rule, no one dies without it being noticed and investigated. Homicides are commonly used by criminologists to track overall violent crime rates.

 

Next, I looked at the number of people who are killed in accidental shootings. In 2012 this number, according to the Centers for Disease Control, was 591. You see where I’m heading with this? There are nearly three times as many (2.78 times as many, to be precise) people killed accidentally by guns as there are intentionally killed by citizens in justifiable homicides.

 

We are told that a gun is a device that improves safety by providing people who carry one with the ability to kill anyone they perceive as a threat. However, when we look at the best available data, it turns out that a gun is more likely to accidentally kill someone than to intentionally kill someone in a justifiable homicide. So how can a gun be a safety device?

 

One answer is that in certain circumstances, it is. If you are an illegal drug dealer, mob enforcer, police officer, undercover agent, armored car guard or live or work in an area where violent crime is truly rampant, a gun could conceivably improve your safety. Those are very small populations, however. For the rest of us, a gun is a danger device, not a safety device.

 

I own guns for hunting, but I do not consider them safety devices or have any plan for using them for home defense or some similar use. I keep the guns unloaded at one end of the house and the ammunition at the other. When I have a gun in my hand or in my car, I feel less safe, not more. That’s because I live in the real world, not a world of fantasy.

 

This is not a perfect analysis. The CDC does not track justifiable firearms homicides by civilians. The FBI does not track accidental shootings. So it’s not possible, as far as I can tell, to compare data from the same source or survey in order to find out whether more people die from justifiable homicide or accidental shootings. That would be the best way to do it, because the FBI and CDC are using different methods of data-gathering and analysis, and it’s possible that those different methods explain some or all of the difference in the number of accidental firearm deaths and justifiable firearm homicides. However, we don’t have better data. And this data is not that bad. These are the places you go to get information on these topics. And their message is clear.

 

The evidence pretty clearly shows that guns are not safety devices. Seat belts are safety devices. They save thousands of lives per year and take very few. Guns are devices intended for shooting, wounding and killing. Incidentally, in some instances they may improve safety. However, as a rule, they do not. If you carry a gun and that gun is used to kill someone, all things being equal, the odds that the person killed will be someone you don’t want killed — like yourself, your child, a friend or other innocent person — are about three times higher than the chances you’ll use it to kill someone who you perceive as a threat.

 

Loud Pipes Don’t Save Lives

Once a month or so I play a music show at a downtown bar that often keeps its windows open to benefit from the ambience of Austin’s happening Sixth Street scene. Inevitably, during a song or two, somebody drives by on a motorcycle that is so loud it can doubtless be heard several blocks away. When that happens, I keep singing and playing although no one — including me — can hear anything I’m doing, because one of my cardinal rules is not to stop once I’ve started a song. But between lyrics, I also tend to grit my teeth and think angrily about the “Loud pipes save lives” slogan that bikers use to justify riding around on such sonically muscular steeds.

So do loud pipes save lives? A lot of people claim they must, based on common sense: If car drivers can hear you, the reasoning goes, they won’t pull out in front of you. Of course, common sense doesn’t counterbalance actual evidence. And we have some actual evidence from the most comprehensive motorcycle safety report done to date. The Hurt Report, released in 1981, found that “street motorcycles with modified exhaust systems were over-represented in crashes.”

It doesn’t sound to me like loud pipes save lives. If they do, then why are bikes with modified exhaust systems over-represented in crash statistics? I can’t think of an explanation that makes sense, unless possibly drivers of loud bikes are also more likely to drive in dangerous situations, or to drive in dangerous manners. So, bikers, if you would put somewhat quieter exhaust systems on your motorcycles, it would be appreciated. And, no matter what your patch may claim, the evidence is that loud pipes don’t save lives.

In fact, to the extent that loud pipes have a causative effect on motorcycle crashes, whatever that may be, it would appear possible that loud pipes actually *take* lives, given that modified exhaust systems are over-represented in crash stats.

That’s not as crazy as it might sound. It’s a documented fact that ambulances with their lights and sirens on are more likely to be involved in crashes than those running without lights and sirens. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, from 1992 to 2011, of the annual average of 1,500 ambulance crashes involving injury, 59 percent occurred while the meat wagons were running in emergency mode — lights and sirens — nearly twice as many as the 34 percent of crashes that happened in non-emergency mode.

So if an ambulance with lights and sirens is more likely to be in a crash, why would loud pipes save lives? You tell me.

Does Campus Rape Culture Make College Women More Likely to Be Assaulted?

Everybody knows campuses are hotbeds of sexual assault fueled by a rampant rape culture. As is often the case, what everybody knows is wrong, at least as far as can be determined by an objective evaluation of the best available evidence.

 

Before we get into looking at this topic, many readers will want to take a deep breath. This examination is not going to discuss feminism or patriarchy. It is not going to attempt, as some writers have, to draw parallels with historical hysterias, such as the McCarthy daycare child abuse cases of the 1990s. It is not going to attempt to unpack rap lyrics, excuse rapists or condemn victims.

 

It will report on objective measurements of actual events — specifically, sexual assaults — rather than subjective observations of the extent and virulence of rape culture. And it will draw exclusively on authoritative, objective, unbiased sources of information prepared by highly skilled, experienced and reputable professional social scientists with no discernible ax to grind.

 

I hope you will relax now. I’m not going to say there is no rape culture on campus. No doubt, there is a rape culture on campus. However, it is equally clear that there is an anti-rape culture on campus as well as off. And when we look at what is happening in the realm of actual events — I am talking here about the number of sexual assaults that occur everywhere in our society and also the relative likelihood that a woman on a college campus will be sexually assaulted — it seems likely that anti-rape culture is considerably more powerful than rape culture. In short, whatever rape culture is or is responsible for, it doesn’t seem to be producing more rapes. Rape is, rather, declining very significantly.

 

Nor am I going to analyze the widely disseminated statement that 1 in 4 college women is sexually assaulted. If you’re interested in that, you may wish to read what the Washington Post said. I’m taking a different tack, one that I have not seen published anywhere else.

 

Let’s start with the overall incidence of rape. Over the last two decades the likelihood of an American woman being raped has fallen by about two-thirds. Many people find this statement surprising and questionable. However, it is well-supported.

 

Skeptics’ first complaint about this statement usually is that rape is highly underreported. That is true. However, the evidence of a decline in incidence of sexual assault is not based on reported rapes. This evidence comes from the National Crime Victimization Survey, which has been done annually by the Bureau of Justice Statistics for many years. It involves surveying a representative sample of Americans, then using those results to prepare estimates of crime victimization rates and trends. It does not measure crimes reported to police, but instead counts crimes both reported and unreported by asking people via anonymous surveys about their experiences with crime.

 

Here’s what that survey finds: “From 1995 to 2010, the estimated annual rate of female rape or sexual assault victimizations declined 58%, from 5.0 victimizations per 1,000 females age 12 or older to 2.1 per 1,000.”

 

That is a direct quote from the summary of “Female Victims of Sexual Violence, 1994-2010, “ a 2013 report by a team of Bureau of Justice Statistics researchers based on the National Crime Victimization Survey results. The researchers are all Ph.D.s in criminology and related fields. This is an objective, authoritative, reliable source. It is, in fact, the gold standard of crime data sources. All told, it is reasonable to conclude that the incidence of sexual assault has declined very significantly since 1994, probably about two-thirds unless the trends of recent years have stopped or reversed.

 

Now let’s go to college. Equally authoritative evidence shows that female college students are significantly less likely to experience sexual violence than women of the same age who are not in college. The data here is not as recent as the data on overall incidence of sexual violence, dating from 1995 to 2002. But the findings are clear. Here is a direct quote from the summary of “Violent Victimization of College Students, 1995-2002,” a 2005 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics: “On average, from 1995 to 2002, comparing persons ages 18-24, female nonstudents were over 1.5 times more likely than college students to be a victim of a violent crime (71 versus 43 per 1,000).”

 

The college student violence study also shows that during the study period the rate of violent crime on campus fell. The authors wrote, “Between 1995 and 2002 rates of both overall and serious violence declined for college students and nonstudents. The violent crime rate for college students declined 54% (41 versus 88 per 1,000) and for nonstudents declined 45% (102 versus 56 per 1,000).”

 

Similar declines in violence of many types throughout American society have been observed during the last two decades. What’s causing it is not clear. Many explanations have been advanced, from tougher sentencing for drug crimes to an aging population, but attempts to zero in on the most powerful factors have not been conclusive.

 

Whatever the cause, it seems very likely, if not indisputable, that women are safer on campus than off, and also that sexual assault of women overall is on a long-term steady and significant decline, such that women today are about one-third as likely to experience sexual assault as women of a couple of decades ago. Beyond any doubt, many people are resistant to these findings. However, just as men are told that “no means no,” those who see a rampant rape culture fueling a rising epidemic of on-campus sexual violence targeting women might be well advised to consider that “facts are facts.”

 

It’s also a fact that sexual violence is a serious crime that occurs both on-campus and off far more often than any reasonable person finds acceptable. However, if we are to make responsible choices as a society about what problems to focus our efforts on, does it make sense to focus on problems that are already declining rapidly, and to focus on places where these problems are less likely to occur than elsewhere? Personally, I don’t think it does.

 

And I don’t think college is where sexual assault prevention should focus. The 2013 BJS study on sexual violence against females identified places and situations where women are at higher risk of sexual assault than on college campuses. Specifically, the authors write, “In 2005-10, females who were age 34 or younger, who lived in lower income households, and who lived in rural areas experienced some of the highest rates of sexual violence.”

 

So should we be focusing our sexual violence-prevention attentions on, say, trailer parks instead of dormitories? Again, personally, I tend to lean toward protecting the weak from the strong, not piling up protections for people who are already well-provided for at the expense of those less able to fend for themselves. What do you think? Do you think it’s worthwhile for people to know that sexual assault is a shrinking crime and that campuses are safer than other places? Should we increase protection for relatively more secure college women at the expense of more at-risk lower-income rural women? If so, why?