Guns in the hands of prospective victims of violence can deter criminal attempts or disrupt crimes once they are attempted, thereby exerting a violence-reducing effect. Oddly enough, guns in the hands of aggressors also have certain violence-reducing effects, along with the more obvious violence-increasing effects. The power which weaponry confers has conventionally been treated as exclusively violence-enhancing - it has commonly been assumed that weapon possession and use serves only to increase the likelihood of the victim's injury and death (e.g. Newton and Zimring 1969). This is an unduly restrictive conceptualization of the significance of weaponry. A broader perspective starts with a recognition of weaponry as a source of power, frequently used instrumentally to achieve goals by inducing compliance with the user's demands. The ultimate goal behind an act of violence is not necessarily the victim's death or injury, but rather may be money, sexual gratification, respect, attention, or the terrorizing, humiliation, or domination of the victim. Power can be, and usually is, wielded so as to obtain these things without inflicting physical injury. Threats, implied or overt, usually suffice and are often preferred to physical attack.
The effects of guns in the hands of aggressors can be better understood if we view violent events as being composed of an ordered series of stages, with the occurrence and outcome of each stage being contingent on previous stages. Figure 1 lists the stages, along with the likely effects which gun possession by aggressor or victim is likely to have on the outcome.
Stage in Guns in the Hands of the:
Hostile Encounters Aggressor Victim
Confrontation (+) (+/-)
Threat, given confrontation (+) (-)
Attack, given threat - -
Injury, given attack - 0
Death, given injury + 0
Notes:
+ means gun possession of use increases the probability that the
encounter will proceed from the previous stage to the current one,
- means a gun decreases this probability, and 0 means no effect.
Parentheses around symbols indicates there is insufficient
information to do more than state a hypothesized direction of
effect.
(1) Confrontation. First, the prospective aggressor and victim coincide in time and space, entering into a potentially conflictual encounter with each other. Possession of a gun can embolden both victims and aggressors to go where they like, including dangerous places where they might adventitiously encounter a stranger who, in the course of the interaction, becomes an adversary, or it may even encourage them to stop avoiding, or even deliberately seek out, contact with persons with whom they already had a hostile relationship. Thus, gun ownership could increase the rate of assaultive violence by giving people freedom of movement without regard to the risks of entering into dangerous circumstances, thereby increasing the rate of hostile encounters. There is, however, no systematic evidence on these possible effects.
(2) Threat. Once aggressor and victim find themselves confronting one another in a hostile encounter, a gun in the possession of the aggressor could encourage him to threaten the victim, with words or a gesture, possibly alluding to the gun. On the other hand, the prospective victim's possession of a gun could, if it was known to the would-be aggressor, discourage the aggressor from expressing a threat. Again, there is no systematic evidence bearing directly on this effect.
(3) Attack. Some hostile encounters go beyond verbal or gestural threats, escalating to an attempt to physically injure the victim, i.e. proceeding to an attack. An aggressor's possession of a gun can either increase or decrease the probability that he will attack his victim. At least four categories of effects on attack can be conceptualized, and they can be labelled facilitation, triggering, inhibition and redundancy.
Facilitation. A gun could make possible or easier an attack which would otherwise be physically or emotionally impossible, dangerous, or difficult to carry out. It has often been remarked that a gun serves as an "equalizer," that it is a way of making power relations more equal than they otherwise would be. Just as a prospective victim's possession of a gun can give him power greater than or equal to his adversary and discourage an attack, the aggressor's possession of a gun could encourage it. The gun might assure the aggressor that his attack will so effectively hurt his victim that counterattack will be impossible, or at least that his victim will be afraid to strike back, even if physically capable of doing so. Guns can thereby encourage weaker adversaries to attack stronger ones. Thus guns are more commonly used when women attack men than when women attack other women, are more common when an individual attacks a group than when the situation is reversed, and so forth. Guns also facilitate attack from a distance. As someone once observed noted, "a gun may not be absolutely necessary to kill, but at fifty yards it's certainly a help." Further, a gun may facilitate an attack by a person who is unwilling to attack in a way which involves physical contact with his victim, or by a person too squeamish to use a messier weapon like a knife or club.
Triggering. This is the effect which experimental psychologists label the "weapons effect." Since it is but one of many effects of weaponry, this term is unsuitable, so I have relabelled it the triggering effect. Psychologists have argued that a person who is already angered may attack when they see a weapon, due to the learned association between weapons and aggressive behavior. The experimental research literature on this hypothesis is almost exactly divided between studies supporting it and studies failing to support it. Generally, the more realistic the study's conditions and the more relevant to real-world aggression, the less supportive the results were. There may be triggering effects, but they appear to be very contingent effects, which depend on settings and conditions not yet very well- specified.
Inhibition. Some of the "weapons effect" studies found evidence that weapons could inhibit aggression as well as trigger it. While the reasons for these experimental findings are not clear, in real world violence, one reason for such an effect might be that a gun provides an aggressor with a more lethal weapon than he wants. Most aggressors do not want to kill, but this could easily happen if they attacked with a gun. Therefore, an aggressor may refrain from attacking altogether, for fear that he might do end up inflicting more harm than he wanted to.
Redundancy. This inelegant term alludes to the possibility that possession of a gun could make a physical attack unnecessary, by making it possible for an aggressor to get what he wants without attacking.
Weapons are an important source of power frequently wielded to achieve some emotional or material goal - to obtain sexual gratification in a rape or money in a robbery, or, more frequently, to frighten and dominate victims in some other assault. All of these things can be gained without an attack, and indeed the possession of a gun can serve as a substitute for attack, rather than its vehicle. In robberies, offenders without guns often feel they must attack their victim in order to insure that the victim will not resist, while robbers with guns are confident they can gain the victim's compliance merely by pointing their gun at them. In assaults, a gun can enable an aggressor to terrify his victim or emotionally hurt him, making a physical attack unnecessary.
It is not yet possible to separately assess the relative importance of each of these possible causal effects. However, the total effect of all them considered together is fairly clear. The net effect of aggressor gun possession on whether the aggressor attacks is negative. In at least 17 prior studies, mostly of robbery, but also of assault, aggressors with guns were less likely to attack and/or injure their victim.
(4) Injury. Once an aggressor makes an attack, it may or may not result in injury. That is, only some attempts to injure are successful. The rate at which attacks result in physical injury to the victim is lower when the attacker fires a gun than when he throws a punch, attempts to cut or stab his victim, or tries to strike the victim with a blunt instrument of some kind. This presumably is because it is difficult to shoot a gun (usually a handgun) accurately, especially under the emotionally stressful conditions which prevail in most violent encounters. Only about 19% of incidents where an aggressor shot at a victim result in the victim suffering a gunshot wound, while the comparable attack completion rate is about 55% for knife attacks. Since guns facilitate attacks at a distance and attacks against more difficult targets, they may thereby also reduce the attack completion rate. (5) Death. Finally, if the aggressor does inflict a physical injury on the victim, it may or may not result in death. Less than 1% of all criminal assaults result in death, and the measured fatality rate is under 15% even if we limit attention just to gunshot woundings. Further, because nonfatal attacks are substantially undercounted, while fatal attacks are fairly completely counted, the true fatality rate in gunshot woundings is actually still lower, probably under 10%.
Nevertheless, the measured wounding fatality rate for guns is about four times higher than that of woundings with knives, the next most lethal weapon, among those which could be used in the same circumstances as guns. This might seem to indicate that if guns became scarce and attackers used guns rather than knives, only one fourth as many victims would die. This reasoning, however, is invalid because it implicitly attributes all of the difference in fatality rates to the weapon itself, and assumes that all else, including the intentions and motives of the aggressors, is equal in gun and knife attacks. This assumption is unrealistic. Evidence indicates that aggressors who use guns choose them over other available weapons - a gun is not used just because "it was there;" weapon choice is not random. Rather, more serious aggressors use more serious weaponry. For example, aggressors with longer records of violence in their past are more likely to use guns. Thus, some of the 4-to-1 difference in fatality rates between guns and knives is due to differences in the people who used the weapons, rather than just the technical differences between the weapons themselves. Since weapon scarcity would presumably not alter the intentions and aggressive drive of aggressors, this implies that the fatality rate would drop by a factor of less than four if knives were substituted for guns. It is impossible to say how much less, since it is impossible to measure and control for the intentions and intensity of an aggressor's anger and willingness to hurt his victim at the moment of the attack. Nevertheless, studies that have imperfectly controlled for aggressor traits thought to be correlated with these factors indicate that guns still appear to be more lethal than knives.
To summarize, an aggressor's possession and use of a gun apparently reduces the probability that he will attack, reduces the probability that the attack will result in an injury, and increases the probability that the injury will be fatal. Therefore, it is not at all obvious that threatening situations with a gun-armed aggressor are more likely to result in the victim's death, since it is not obvious what the relative balance of these three countervailing effects is. The best empirical evidence on real- life violent incidents indicates that the net effect is essentially zero. That is, the overall probability of a threatening situation ending in the victim's death is about the same when the aggressor is armed with a gun as it is when the aggressor is unarmed. In short, guns have many strong effects on violent encounters, but they work in both violence-increasing and violence-decreasing directions, and these effects apparently more or less cancel each other out.
Note that this conclusion takes no account of gun effects on confrontations and threats. It is still possible that gun availability in a population could affect the rates of assault and murder, despite the foregoing conclusions, if it significantly encouraged people to more frequently enter into dangerous confrontations and to issue threats or otherwise initiate hostile interactions. Also, an analysis focussing solely on individual violent incidents cannot take account of possible deterrent effects of victims having guns, which would tend to discourage aggressors from seeking contact with victims or threatening them. Consequently, the net impact of widespread gun ownership must be assessed using data on aggregates like cities or states, where the combined impact of all of these separate effects can be estimated. These kinds of studies will be summarized later.
A robber's goal is to get his victim's property. Injury to the victim appears to be more of unintended by-product of the crime than an important goal, in contrast to homicides and assaults. Consequently, guns have some additional effects peculiar to robberies, as well the effects observable in assaultive crimes. They may have a facilitative effect similar to that connected with assaultive crimes, since they may encourage some people to rob who would not be willing to do so without a gun. They also appear to encourage robbers to tackle more difficult, better guarded (and more lucrative) targets, such as stores or groups of people on the street, rather than lone individuals. While this might seem to imply that gun availability should increase the robbery rate, the best available evidence indicates that the former has no apparent net effect on the latter. This may be due partly to deterrent effects of victim gun ownership, especially the impact of defensive gun ownership and use by store owners on commercial robberies. However, gun possession by robbers also may have its own negative effect. Because the average "take" in gun robberies is higher than in nongun robberies, a robber can acquire a given amount of money (e.g. that needed to support a drug habit) with fewer robberies.
The most critical flaw in the aggregate-level studies is the failure to model the two-way relationship between crime rates and gun levels. Higher crime rates can cause more people to acquire guns for self-defense. Consequently, any significant positive associations generated in studies failing to model the possible two-way relationship will at least partially reflect the effect of crime rates on gun rates, rather than the reverse. Whether there is also any effect of guns on violence is impossible to detect from these findings. Of eighteen studies, the problem was statistically addressed in only four of them. These studies generally found no impact of gun ownership levels on violent crime rates.
2-way Measure of Crime
Study Sample Relat.? Gun Level Rates Results
Brearley (1932) 42 states No PGH THR Yes
Krug (1967) 50 states No HLR ICR No
Newton and 4 years, No NPP THR,TRR Yes
Zimring (1969) Detroit AAR,GHR
Seitz (1972) 50 states No GHR,FGA THR Yes
AAR
Murray (1975) 50 states No SGR,SHR GHR,AAR No
TRR
Fisher (1976) 9 years, No NPP,GRR THR Yes
Detroit PGH
Phillips et al. 18 years, No PROD THR Yes
(1976) U.S.
Brill (1977) 11 cities No PGC ICR No
THR Yes
TRR No
Kleck (1979) 27 years, Yes PROD THR Yes
U.S.
Cook (1979) 50 cities No PGH,PGS TRR No
RMR Yes
Kleck (1984a) 32 years, Yes PROD THR No
U.S. No TRR Yes
Maggadino and 31 years, Nob PROD THR Yes
Medoff (1984) U.S.
Lester (1985) 37 cities No PCS VCR No
Bordua (1986) 102 counties Noc GLR,SIR HAR,THR, No
9 regions GHR No
McDowall (1986) 48 cities, Yes PGH,PGS TRR No
2 yearsd
Lester (1988) 9 regions No SGR THR Yes
McDowall and 36 years, Noe PGR,FGA THR Yes
Loftin (1988) Detroit
Linsky et al. 50 states No GMR GHR Yesf
(1988)
Kleck and 170 cities Yes g g No
Patterson (1991)
Results: Yes=Study found significant positive association between
gun levels and violence; No=Study did not find such a link.
Measures of Gun Level:
FGA = Fatal gun accident rate
GLR = Gun owners license rate
GMR = Gun magazine subscription rates
GRR = Gun registrations rate
HLR = Hunting license rate
NPP = Number of handgun purchase permits
PGA = % aggravated assaults committed with guns
PGC = % homicides, aggravated assaults and robberies (combined
together) committed with guns
PCS = same as PGC, but with suicides lumped in as well
PGH = % homicides committed with guns
PGR = % robberies committed with guns
PGS = % suicides committed with guns
PROD= Guns produced minus exports plus imports, U.S.
SGR = Survey measure, % households with gun(s)
SHR = Survey measure, % households with handgun(s)
SIR = Survey measure, % individuals with gun(s)
Crime Rates:
AAR = Aggravated assault rate
GHR = Gun homicide rate
HAR = Homicide, assault and robbery index (factor score)
ICR = Index crime rate
RMR = Robbery murder rate
THR = Total homicide rate
TRR = Total robbery rate
VCR = Violent crime rate
Notes:
a. Table covers only studies and findings where the dependent
variable was a crime rate, as opposed to the fraction of
crimes committed with guns.
b. Authors modelled two-way relationship, but only report gun
impact results for a model where this was not done.
c. A few gun-violence associations were positive and significant,
but almost all involved female gun ownership or male longgun
ownership. Author interpreted the pattern to indicate the
effect of violence on gun ownership.
d. Panel design, two waves.
e. Attempt to model two-way relationship probably failed due to
an implausible identification restriction. See text.
f. Only established an association with gun homicide rate. No
result for total homicide rate reported.
g. Gun ownership treated as a latent construct, measured with five
indicators: PGH, PGS, PGR, PGA and the % of the value of stolen
property due to stolen guns. Crime rates modelled were total
rate, gun rate, and nongun rates of homicide, rape, aggravated
assault, and robbery (e.g. the rates of total homicides, gun
homicides and nongun homicides).
Effects of Guns on Suicide (Chapter 6)
In a suicide, victim and offender are the same person, so there is no victim resistance to overcome. This radically changes the nature of the technology needed to carry the act out. The gun's capacity to facilitate attacks against strong victims or attacks at a distance is irrelevant. On the other hand, its lethality, and the quickness with which it can be used, may be significant for suicides.
Gun availability might increase suicide rates by giving suicide attempters a more lethal method. It could be argued that, in the absence of a gun, while some attempters would still persist after a nonfatal suicide attempt, others would not and lives would therefore be saved. This argument differs, however, from, the parallel argument made for gun effects in assaultive crimes. Unlike in the latter case, there are many common methods of committing suicide which are nearly as lethal, and in other ways even more satisfactory, than guns. The fatality rate in gun suicide attempts is about 85%, but it is about 80% in hanging attempts, 77% with carbon monoxide, and 75% with drowning. These are only slight differences, and some or all of them could be due to greater seriousness of intent among gun users. There is evidence that suicide attempters who use more lethal methods are more intent on killing themselves, rather than merely making an attempt as a "cry for help" to those around them.
Other ways of committing suicide are in many ways as satisfactory or even superior to using a gun. For example, using carbon monoxide in the form of exhaust fumes does not disfigure the victim as much as shooting, is not as messy, is less painful, is nearly as lethal, and is quieter and therefore less likely to summon people who might intervene to save the attempter's life. Consequently, there is more reason with suicide than with homicide to expect that nongun methods could be substituted for guns with equally frequent fatal results.
Kleck
Markush and & Pat-
Bartolucci Lester Lester Lester Clarke and Lester terson
Study: (1984) (1987) (1988a) (1988b) Jones (1989) (1989) (1991)
Sample 9 U.S. 50 6 Austl. 9 U.S. 26(13) 50 170
regions states states regions yearsa states cities
# Control
Variables 0 0 0 3 0 0 13
Measure of Gun
Ownershipb S O S S S O Oc
Impact on Gun
Suicide Rate? Yes Yesd Yes Yesd Yes/Noe Yes No
Impact on Total
Suicide Rate? Nof No No No Yes/Noe Yes No
Notes:
a. Time series dataset included 26 years total, but only thirteen had real
data on gun ownership levels; the rest were interpolations.
b. S=survey measure - % of Households with guns; O=other measures
c. See note i, Table 5.
d. Only bivariate association reported.
e. Handgun prevalence related to suicide rates, total gun prevalence unrelated.
f. Significant positive correlation was only obtained if eccentric
weighting scheme was applied. Conventional unweighted results
indicated no significant association.
Consistent with this assessment, previous research has indicated that while gun ownership levels are consistently related to the rate of gun suicides, they are unrelated to total suicide rate (see Table 2). That is, where guns are common, people will more frequently use them to kill themselves, but this does not affect the total number of people who die. Apparently, gun availability affects only method choice, not the frequency of fatal outcomes.
While gun accidents contribute only about 5% of the deaths linked with guns, they play an important rhetorical role in the gun control debate. They are used in attempts to persuade people that keeping guns in their homes for protection is foolish because the risks of a gun accident exceed any defensive benefits. Gun accidents play a different rhetorical role in the debate from homicides or suicides because most people can accurately tell themselves that there is no one is their household like to assault another person or attempt suicide, but it is harder to confidently state that no one will be involved in an accident. Since anybody can have an accident, every household with a gun is at risk of suffering a gun accident.
There are several problems with this argument. First, gun accidents are quite rare relative to the numbers of people exposed to them. The rate of accidental death per 100,000 guns or per 100,000 gun-owning households is less than 4-6% of the corresponding rates for automobiles, and has also been sharply declining for over 20 years, despite rapid increases in the size of the gun stock. Second, the risk of a gun accident is not randomly distributed across the gun-owning population and is not a significant risk for more than a small fraction of owners. Gun accidents are apparently largely confined to an unusually reckless subset of the population, with gun accidents disproportionately occurring to people with long records of motor vehicle accidents, traffic tickets, drunk driving arrests, and arrests for violent offenses. Accidents are most common among alcoholics and people with personality traits related to recklessness, impulsiveness, impatience, and emotional immaturity. The circumstances of gun accidents commonly involve acts of unusual recklessness, such as "playing" with loaded guns, pulling the trigger to see if a gun is loaded, and playing Russian roulette with a revolver. Gun accidents are largely confined to defensive gun owners - less than one sixth of accidental deaths are connected with hunting. Consequently, gun accidents are quite rare for ordinary gun owners, especially when compared with the frequency of defensive uses.
Contrary to impressions left by the news media, gun accidents rarely involve small children. There are probably fewer than 100 fatal handgun accidents involving preadolescent children in the entire nation each year. Instead, gun accidents are largely concentrated in the same age groups where assaultive violence is concentrated, among adolescent and young adult males.
Most gun safety training is aimed at hunters, rather than the defensive gun owners who make up the bulk of people involved in gun accidents. Because of this narrow focus, and because the training does not treat alcoholism or modify the shooter's personality, it probably has little impact outside of the hunting community. On the other hand, it might be possible to reduce gun accidents through gun laws (mainly aimed at reducing crime) which prohibit gun acquisition or possession by high-risk groups like felons or alcoholics.