Following the church shooting in Charleston, and the killing of five servicemen in Chattanooga, debate over gun ownership and homicide rates in the United States has begun anew. Less than a month has passed between the two attacks that have shocked the nation.
Although details about what happened in Chattanooga are still emerging, media reports indicate the gunman managed to buy the gun online. Dylann Roof, responsible for killing 9 people in South Carolina, was able to buy a gun with an incomplete background check.
Double-edged sword
Guns are both good and bad, depending on how they are being used. By pressing the trigger you can save or end a life.
Yet, with the emergence of online firearm bazaars and the persistence of a lightly regulated gun world, the “More Guns, Less Crimes” assumption is increasingly being challenged.
Defensive gun use: reality or myth?
Millions of Americans use guns for hunting and target-shooting, but at the core of supporters’ argument is self-defense.
Statistics show that Americans increasingly perceive the need of owning firearms to protect themselves. Many are faithful to the creed that “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
Overestimating defensive gun use
So how often do Americans use guns to defend themselves?
According to a recent study published in The Journal of Preventive Medicine, defense gun use occurs in fewer than 1% of contact crimes. Led by David Hemenway, Ph.D., of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the study examined data from the National Crime Victimization Survey — an annual survey of 90,000 households, according to The Trace magazine. What researchers found is that using a gun in self-defense just slightly decreases the likelihood of suffering an injury or losing property.
Time to ask ourselves some questions?
The fact that defensive gun use is an inherently rare phenomenon is also supported by new data from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) – a comprehensive and systematic effort to catalog every publicly available defensive gun use report. The report found that there were fewer than 1,600 verified defensive gun uses in 2014.
Pro-gun advocates, on the other hand, argue that the number is of 2.5 million a year but that virtually nobody reports their defensive gun use to the police. Various studies demonstrate that crime statistics do not support this view.
Overall, experts believe that guns are used to threaten and intimidate far more often than they are used in self-defense. Furthermore, having a handy-gun provides no significant benefit to a would-be victim during a criminal confrontation.
Rise in mass shootings
Despite high rates of gun ownership (the US ranks number one in gun ownership per capita among the world’s most developed nations), statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice show a decrease in firearm-related homicides.
But if overall gun-related homicides are down, why is the frequency of public mass shootings is on the rise? A Harvard research shows that mass shootings in the U.S. have tripled between 2011 and 2014. One public mass shooting occurred on average every 172 days between 1982 and 2014. If in the past, most of the shooters obtained their guns legally, current statistics may change taking latest episodes into account.
The phenomenon of mass shootings definitely deserves more investigation and raises a fundamental question: is the answer arming more or fewer people? Is more regulation needed? What’s your view on gun ownership? Share your opinion in the comments section below.
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