<![CDATA[Armes à feu: Attention, un massacre peut en cacher un autre ! (As guns could soon overtake cars as America’s number one killer, Harvard econonomist confirms that in developed countries it’s the number of handguns and not assault rifles that kill the most people and children)]]>
Il faut toujours dire ce que l’on voit. Surtout, il faut toujours, ce qui est plus difficile, voir ce que l’on voit. Charles Péguy
Nous retrouvons une fois de plus ce que nous avons appelé plus haut la “loi fondamentale sociogénétique”. L’histoire d’une société se reflète dans l’histoire interne de chaque individu : chaque individu doit parcourir pour son propre compte en abrégé le processus de civilisation que la société a parcouru dans son ensemble ; car l’enfant ne naît pas “civilisé”. Norbert Elias (la Civilisation des moeurs)
Nous ne pouvons accepter ni un monde politiquement unipolaire, ni un monde culturellement uniforme, ni l’unilatéralisme de la seule hyperpuissance.Hubert Védrine (1999)
La situation est riche en ironies. Le rejet par l’Europe de la Machtpolitik, son hostilité à l’usage des armes en politique internationale, dépendent de la présence de troupes américaines sur son sol. Le nouvel ordre kantien dont elle jouit ne pouvait fleurir que sous le parapluie protecteur de la puissance américaine exercée selon les règles du vieil ordre hobbésien. (…) Les dirigeants américains sont convaincus que la sécurité mondiale et l’ordre libéral, tout comme le paradis « postmoderne » qu’est l’Europe, ne sauraient survivre longtemps si l’Amérique n’utilisait pas sa puissance dans ce monde dangereux, hobbésien, qui est toujours la règle hors d’Europe. (…) Ainsi, bien que les Etats-Unis aient eu naguère le rôle décisif dans l’accès de l’Europe au paradis kantien, et le jouent toujours pour en assurer la survie, ils ne sauraient eux-mêmes entrer dans cet éden. Ils en gardent la muraille, mais ne peuvent en franchir la porte. Les Etats-Unis, en dépit de leur puissance considérable, demeurent englués dans l’histoire, contraints d’affronter les Saddam Hussein, les ayatollahs, les Kim Jong-iI et les Jiang Zemin, laissant à d’autres la chance d’en toucher les dividendes.Robert Kagan (2002)
N’importe qui peut jouer les gentils quand les mauvais garçons ont été abattus et le train a sifflé trois fois. Alors les habitants de la ville qui jusque là tremblaient comme une feuille peuvent ressortir dans la grand’ rue et féliciter le shérif à coups de grandes claques dans le dos, se réjouissant que son pistolet soit à nouveau tranquillement rangé dans son étui – et que tous ces cadavres de méchants hors-la-loi soient commodément hors de vue chez le croque-morts.Victor Davis Hanson
Les Européens disent maintenant au revoir à M. Bush, et espèrent l’élection d’un président américain qui partage, le croient-ils, leurs attitudes sophistiquées de postnationalisme, post-modernisme et multiculturalisme. Mais ne soyez pas étonné si, afin de protéger la liberté et la démocratie chez eux dans les années à venir, les dirigeants européens commencent à ressembler de plus en plus au cowboy à la gâchette facile de l’étranger qu’ils se délectent aujourd’hui à fustiger.Natan Sharansky
Si vous pouvez tuer un incroyant américain ou européen – en particulier les méchants et sales Français – ou un Australien ou un Canadien, ou tout […] citoyen des pays qui sont entrés dans une coalition contre l’État islamique, alors comptez sur Allah et tuez-le de n’importe quelle manière. (…) Tuez le mécréant qu’il soit civil ou militaire. (…) Frappez sa tête avec une pierre, égorgez-le avec un couteau, écrasez-le avec votre voiture, jetez-le d’un lieu en hauteur, étranglez-le ou empoisonnez-le. Abou Mohammed al-Adnani (porte-parole de l’EI)
Nous vous bénissons, nous bénissons les Mourabitoun (hommes) et les Mourabitat (femmes). Nous saluons toutes gouttes de sang versées à Jérusalem. C’est du sang pur, du sang propre, du sang qui mène à Dieu. Avec l’aide de Dieu, chaque djihadiste (shaheed) sera au paradis, et chaque blessé sera récompensé. Nous ne leur permettrons aucune avancée. Dans toutes ses divisions, Al-Aqsa est à nous et l’église du Saint Sépulcre est notre, tout est à nous. Ils n’ont pas le droit de les profaner avec leurs pieds sales, et on ne leur permettra pas non plus.Mahmoud Abbas
Je ne peux qu’imaginer ce qu’endurent ses parents. Et quand je pense à ce garçon, je pense à mes propres enfants. Si j’avais un fils, il ressemblerait à Trayvon. Obama
Et, bien sûr, ce qui est également la routine est que quelqu’un, quelque part, va commenter et dire, Obama a politisé cette question. Eh bien, cela est quelque chose que nous devrions politiser. Il est pertinent de notre vie commune ensemble, le corps politique. Obama
There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved. . . . After all we have been through. Just to think we can’t walk down our own streets, how humiliating.Jesse Jackson
How do we turn pain into power? How do we go from a moment to a movement that curries favor? (…) The blood of the innocent has power.Jesse Jackson
Ce que je voulais dire, c’est que lorsque des tyrannies s’instaurent, elles essaient de désarmer le peuple d’abord, et c’est exactement ce qui s’est passé en Allemagne dans les années 1930. C’est pourquoi cela n’arrivera jamais aux Etats-Unis : parce que les (Américains) sont armés. Ben Carson
Savez-vous que les Noirs sont 10 pour cent de la population de Saint-Louis et sont responsables de 58% de ses crimes? Nous avons à faire face à cela. Et nous devons faire quelque chose au sujet de nos normes morales. Nous savons qu’il y a beaucoup de mauvaises choses dans le monde blanc, mais il y a aussi beaucoup de mauvaises choses dans le monde noir. Nous ne pouvons pas continuer à blâmer l’homme blanc. Il y a des choses que nous devons faire pour nous-mêmes. Martin Luther King (St Louis, 1961)
According to the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, there are about 89 civilian-owned guns for every 100 people who live in the United States. Switzerland ranks third in terms of gun ownership, the Survey estimates, with 3.4 million guns among its population of nearly eight million. The Swiss Sports Shooting Association has 175,000 active members All healthy Swiss men aged between 18 and 34 are obliged to do military service and all are issued with assault rifles or pistols which they are supposed to keep at home. Twenty years ago the Swiss militia was a sizeable force of around 600,000 soldiers. Today it is only a third of that size but until recently most former soldiers used to keep their guns after they had completed their military duties, leading to lots of weapons being stored in the attics or cupboards of private Swiss households. In 2006, the champion Swiss skier Corrinne Rey-Bellet and her brother were murdered by Corinne’s estranged husband, who shot them with his old militia rifle before killing himself. Since that incident, gun laws concerning army weapons have tightened. Although it is still possible for a former soldier to buy his firearm after he finishes military service, he must provide a justification for keeping the weapon and apply for a permit. (…) In America then, gun ownership is about self-defence whereas in Switzerland it is seen more in terms of national security. To many traditionalists, a gun in the home has become a metaphor for an independent, well-fortified Switzerland which has helped to keep the country out of two world wars. Hermann Suter, vice-president of the Swiss lobbying group Pro Tell, is infuriated by calls that the Swiss military should give up their guns and store them in a central arsenal. « It is a question of trust between the state and the citizen. The citizen is not just a citizen, he is also a soldier, » he reminds me. « The gun at home is the best way to avoid dictatorships – only dictators take arms away from the citizens. » (…) Yet despite the prevalence of firearms, violent gun-related street crime is extremely rare in Switzerland. In an average year here, there is one gun murder for every 200,000 of the population – in the US that figure is several times higher. But there are more domestic homicides and suicides with a firearm in Switzerland than pretty much anywhere else in Europe except Finland. In his office at Zurich University, Professor Martin Killias, director of criminology at Zurich University is flicking through research papers about gun-related homicides. »It’s like smoking. Less is more. I don’t support outlawing guns, I recognise people have their hobbies, just as I have mine, » he tells me. « But the fewer guns there are in cellars, attics and armoires, then that would be helpful, because there is a strong correlation between guns kept in private homes and incidences occurring at home – like private disputes involving the husband shooting the wife and maybe the children, and then committing suicide. » Prof Killias was a supporter of the 2011 referendum initiative to keep all militia firearms in a central arsenal – because, he says, of the evidence provided by recent statistics. « Forty-three per cent of homicides are domestic related and 90% of those homicides are carried out with guns, » he says. « But over the last 20 years, now that the majority of soldiers don’t have ammunition at home, we have seen a decrease in gun violence and a dramatic decrease in gun-related suicides. Today we see maybe 200 gun suicides per year and it used to be 400, 20 years ago. » The army is not the only entity to have a tradition with guns however. About 600,000 Swiss – many of them children – belong to shooting clubs. On the second weekend in September each year, about 4,000 Zurich girls and boys, aged 12 to 16, take part in Knabenschiessen, a rifle marksmanship contest. The winner is honoured with the title King of the Marksmen. (…) « It teaches people to respect guns, » Michael tells me. « A lot of hyperactive children come to rifle club. They learn to stand still, to concentrate for much longer, and it helps them get better results in school, and in life. » Swiss citizens – for example hunters, or those who shoot as a sport – can get a permit to buy guns and ammunition, unless they have a criminal record, or police deem them unsuitable on psychiatric or security grounds. But hunters and sportsmen are greatly outnumbered by those keeping army guns – which again illustrates the difference between Switzerland and the US. (…) Street violence has gone up in recent years in Switzerland but there hasn’t been an increase in gun-related incidents. BBC
Martin Killias, a criminologist at the University of Zurich, has conducted extensive studies on gun ownership in his home country. He estimates that about 28 percent of all Swiss households today have at least one gun, a very high number compared to surrounding countries. That’s because of Switzerland’s unique defense system. The country does not have a standing army; instead, all males are conscripted into a national militia of sorts. Females can join voluntarily. Training for these recruits continues intermittently through the years, and each conscript is given a firearm that he or she may take home to keep. As a result, Switzerland could very well have the highest gun ownership rate in Europe. Switzerland also has a very low crime rate. That’s why the perennial American debate about the best way to go about gun control often looks to this western European country, with gun owners and their advocates using it as an example of a place where the easy availability to firearms has helped to curb violence. But the counterpoint to this argument is right there on American soil. The number of guns per capita is high here, too — one Small Arms Survey found that there are 88 civilian-owned guns for every 100 people who live in the United States. But unlike Switzerland, the United States has relatively high levels of violence. The difference shows that the connection between gun ownership and crime deterrence is tenuous at best. Homicides — the crime most commonly associated with gun control issues — occur very rarely in Switzerland, where the murder rate per 100,000 people averages at less than one, according to a 2011 report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. But in the United States, the average is five per 100,000. This means that despite the country’s great wealth and prominence in the global sphere, its homicide rates are worse than several less-developed countries including Cuba and Suriname. (At least the U.S. is doing better than the global average of about seven homicides per 100,000 people.) In short, the United States and Switzerland have similarly high levels of gun ownership but very different crime rates, and this variance does not support a positive correlation between gun prevalence and the prevention of violence. In fact, easy access to guns can have a detrimental effect. In a recent study, Killias found that gun ownership in Switzerland may have actually increased instances of violence — and not in terms of street crime. Instead, the presence of guns has a significant impact on domestic crime. Women, in particular, can be endangered by firearms in the home. In Switzerland, about 43 percent of all murders committed in recent years were domestic homicides, with many acts of violence being committed against wives and girlfriends. Alcohol is often a factor. With guns at easy access, Killias explains, emotional familial disputes can more easily turn ugly. « Thus, guns kept at home are dangerous — at home, » he said. (…) There are many factors that can contribute to more frequent instances of violent crime. A major one is the presence of a drug trade, which tends to induce the intense but small-scale rivalries that are prone to homicidal violence. Then there’s urban deprivation, which involves significant inequities between people living in close quarters. Other dangerous factors include internal conflicts — ethnic or religious rivalries, for instance — and government instability, which can lead to a deregulation of the weapons trade. But none of those problems is common to Switzerland, which has an excellent record for social equality and a well-functioning government. And although Switzerland and the United States have similarly high levels of gun ownership, their attitudes toward personal defense are very different. This is true on the personal as well as the national level; the people of Switzerland have little to fear in terms of internal and external threats. « Switzerland has gotten its gun control legislation more in line with European standards, » explained Killias, in order to meet regulatory pre-requisites for joining the Schengen Zone, which allows for easier trade and travel between member countries. « As a result, the number of Swiss households with guns has gone down substantially in recent years. » Today, many soldiers elect not to keep the guns they are issued during their military service. More background checks have been put into place, and it has been made illegal to carry guns in public. Furthermore, it was decided in 2007 that government-issued guns would not come with ammunition; that is now stored in centralized arsenals, outside the home, for emergency use. International Business times
But what about all the other young black murder victims? Nationally, nearly half of all murder victims are black. And the overwhelming majority of those black people are killed by other black people. Where is the march for them? Where is the march against the drug dealers who prey on young black people? Where is the march against bad schools, with their 50% dropout rate for black teenaged boys? Those failed schools are certainly guilty of creating the shameful 40% unemployment rate for black teens? How about marching against the cable television shows constantly offering minstrel-show images of black youth as rappers and comedians who don’t value education, dismiss the importance of marriage, and celebrate killing people, drug money and jailhouse fashion—the pants falling down because the jail guard has taken away the belt, the shoes untied because the warden removed the shoe laces, and accessories such as the drug dealer’s pit bull. (…) There is no fashion, no thug attitude that should be an invitation to murder. But these are the real murderous forces surrounding the Martin death—and yet they never stir protests. The race-baiters argue this case deserves special attention because it fits the mold of white-on-black violence that fills the history books. Some have drawn a comparison to the murder of Emmett Till, a black boy who was killed in 1955 by white racists for whistling at a white woman. (…) While civil rights leaders have raised their voices to speak out against this one tragedy, few if any will do the same about the larger tragedy of daily carnage that is black-on-black crime in America. (…) Almost one half of the nation’s murder victims that year were black and a majority of them were between the ages of 17 and 29. Black people accounted for 13% of the total U.S. population in 2005. Yet they were the victims of 49% of all the nation’s murders. And 93% of black murder victims were killed by other black people, according to the same report. (…) The killing of any child is a tragedy. But where are the protests regarding the larger problems facing black America?Juan Williams
« More whites are killed by the police than blacks primarily because whites outnumber blacks in the general population by more than five to one, » Forst said. The country is about 63 percent white and 12 percent black. (…) A 2002 study in the American Journal of Public Health found that the death rate due to legal intervention was more than three times higher for blacks than for whites in the period from 1988 to 1997. (…) Candace McCoy is a criminologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. McCoy said blacks might be more likely to have a violent encounter with police because they are convicted of felonies at a higher rate than whites. Felonies include everything from violent crimes like murder and rape, to property crimes like burglary and embezzlement, to drug trafficking and gun offenses. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that in 2004, state courts had over 1 million felony convictions. Of those, 59 percent were committed by whites and 38 percent by blacks. But when you factor in the population of whites and blacks, the felony rates stand at 330 per 100,000 for whites and 1,178 per 100,000 for blacks. That’s more than a three-fold difference. McCoy noted that this has more to do with income than race. The felony rates for poor whites are similar to those of poor blacks. « Felony crime is highly correlated with poverty, and race continues to be highly correlated with poverty in the USA, » McCoy said. « It is the most difficult and searing problem in this whole mess. » PunditFact
The absurdity of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton is that they want to make a movement out of an anomaly. Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites. … Trayvon’s sad fate clearly sent a quiver of perverse happiness all across America’s civil rights establishment, and throughout the mainstream media as well. His death was vindication of the ‘poetic truth’ that these establishments live by.Shelby Steele
Before the 1960s the black American identity (though no one ever used the word) was based on our common humanity, on the idea that race was always an artificial and exploitive division between people. After the ’60s—in a society guilty for its long abuse of us—we took our historical victimization as the central theme of our group identity. We could not have made a worse mistake. It has given us a generation of ambulance-chasing leaders, and the illusion that our greatest power lies in the manipulation of white guilt. Shelby Steele
Ms. Harper, who divorced her husband a decade ago, appears to have been by far the most significant figure in her son’s troubled life; neighbors say he rarely left their apartment. Unlike his father, who said on television that he had no idea Mr. Harper-Mercer cared so deeply about guns, his mother was well aware of his fascination. In fact, she shared it: In a series of online postings over a decade, Ms. Harper, a nurse, said she kept numerous firearms in her home and expressed pride in her knowledge about them, as well as in her son’s expertise on the subject. She also opened up about her difficulties raising a son who used to bang his head against the wall, and said that both she and her son struggled with Asperger’s syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder. (…) In an online forum, answering a question about state gun laws several years ago, Ms. Harper took a jab at “lame states” that impose limits on keeping loaded firearms in the home, and noted that she had AR-15 and AK-47 semiautomatic rifles, along with a Glock handgun. She also indicated that her son, who lived with her, was well versed in guns, citing him as her source of information on gun laws, saying he “has much knowledge in this field.” “I keep two full mags in my Glock case. And the ARs & AKs all have loaded mags,” Ms. Harper wrote. “No one will be ‘dropping’ by my house uninvited without acknowledgement.” Law enforcement officials have said they recovered 14 firearms and spare ammunition magazines that were purchased legally either by Mr. Harper-Mercer, 26, or an unnamed relative. Mr. Harper-Mercer had six guns with him when he entered a classroom building on Thursday and started firing on a writing class in which he was enrolled; the rest were found in the second-floor apartment he shared with his mother. (…) Neighbors in Southern California have said that Ms. Harper and her son would go to shooting ranges together, something Ms. Harper seemed to confirm in one of her online posts. She talked about the importance of firearms safety and said she learned a lot through target shooting, expressing little patience with unprepared gun owners: “When I’m at the range, I cringe every time the ‘wannabes’ show up.”NYT
According to data gathered by the Centres for Disease Control (CDC), deaths caused by cars in America are in long-term decline. Improved technology, tougher laws and less driving by young people have all led to safer streets and highways. Deaths by guns, though—the great majority suicides, accidents or domestic violence—have been trending slightly upwards. This year, if the trend continues, they will overtake deaths on the roads. The Centre for American Progress first spotted last February that the lines would intersect. Now, on its reading, new data to the end of 2012 support the view that guns will surpass cars this year as the leading killer of under 25s. Bloomberg Government has gone further. Its compilation of the CDC data in December concluded that guns would be deadlier for all age groups. (…) There are about 320m people in the United States, and nearly as many civilian firearms. And although the actual rate of gun ownership is declining, enthusiasts are keeping up the number in circulation. Black Friday on November 28th kicked off such a shopping spree that the FBI had to carry out 175,000 instant background checks (three checks a second), a record for that day, just for sales covered by the extended Brady Act of 1998, the only serious bit of gun-curbing legislation passed in recent history. Many sales escape that oversight, however. Everytown for Gun Safety, a movement backed by Mike Bloomberg, a former mayor of New York, has investigated loopholes in online gun sales and found that one in 30 users of Armslist classifieds has a criminal record that forbids them to own firearms. Private reselling of guns draws no attention, unless it crosses state lines. William Vizzard, a professor of criminal justice at California State University at Sacramento, points out that guns also don’t wear out as fast as cars. “I compare a gun to a hammer or a crowbar,” he says. “Even if you stopped making guns today, you might not see a real change in the number of guns for decades.”Motor vehicles, because they are operated on government-built roads, have been subject to licensing and registration, in the interests of public safety, for more than a century. But guns are typically kept at home. That private space is shielded by the Fourth Amendment just as “the right to bear arms” is protected by the Second, making government control difficult. Car technologies and road laws are ever-evolving: in 2014, for example, the National Highways Traffic Safety Administration announced its plan to phase in mandatory rear-view cameras on new light vehicles, while New York City lowered its speed limit for local roads. By contrast, safety features on firearms—such as smartguns unlocked by an owner’s thumbprint or a radio-frequency encryption—are opposed by the National Rifle Association, whose allies in Congress also block funding for the sort of public-health research that might show, in even clearer detail, the cost of America’s love affair with guns.The Economist
For the better part of a century, the machine most likely to kill an American has been the automobile. Car crashes killed 33,561 people in 2012, the most recent year for which data is available, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Firearms killed 32,251 people in the United States in 2011, the most recent year for which the Centers for Disease Control has data. But this year gun deaths are expected to surpass car deaths. That’s according to a Center for American Progress report, which cites CDC data that shows guns will kill more Americans under 25 than cars in 2015. Already more than a quarter of the teenagers—15 years old and up—who die of injuries in the United States are killed in gun-related incidents, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. A similar analysis by Bloomberg three years ago found shooting deaths in 2015 « will probably rise to almost 33,000, and those related to autos will decline to about 32,000, based on the 10-year average trend. » The Atlantic
The law that barred the sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 made little difference. It turns out that big, scary military rifles don’t kill the vast majority of the 11,000 Americans murdered with guns each year. Little handguns do. In 2012, only 322 people were murdered with any kind of rifle, F.B.I. data shows. The continuing focus on assault weapons stems from the media’s obsessive focus on mass shootings, which disproportionately involve weapons like the AR-15, a civilian version of the military M16 rifle. (…) This politically defined category of guns — a selection of rifles, shotguns and handguns with “military-style” features — only figured in about 2 percent of gun crimes nationwide before the ban. Handguns were used in more than 80 percent of gun murders each year, but gun control advocates had failed to interest enough of the public in a handgun ban. Handguns were the weapons most likely to kill you, but they were associated by the public with self-defense. (In 2008, the Supreme Court said there was a constitutional right to keep a loaded handgun at home for self-defense.) (…) Still, the majority of Americans continued to support a ban on assault weapons. One reason: The use of these weapons may be rare over all, but they’re used frequently in the gun violence that gets the most media coverage, mass shootings. The criminologist James Alan Fox at Northeastern University estimates that there have been an average of 100 victims killed each year in mass shootings over the past three decades. That’s less than 1 percent of gun homicide victims. But these acts of violence in schools and movie theaters have come to define the problem of gun violence in America. Most Americans do not know that gun homicides have decreased by 49 percent since 1993 as violent crime also fell, though rates of gun homicide in the United States are still much higher than those in other developed nations. A Pew survey conducted after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., found that 56 percent of Americans believed wrongly that the rate of gun crime was higher than it was 20 years ago.NYT
A 2-year-old Kentucky girl was accidentally killed by her 5-year-old brother who fired a rifle he had been given as a gift, officials said Wednesday. Cumberland County Coroner Gary L. White said (…) “Most everybody in town is pretty devastated by this,” White said. “Nobody wants to take anyone’s guns away, but you’ve got to keep them out of harm’s way for the kids. It’s a safety issue.”(…) The mother had just stepped outside the house for a moment, White said. (…) The rifle used in the accident is a Crickett designed for children and sold under the slogan “My First Rifle,” according to the company’s website. It is a smaller weapon designed for children and comes with a shoulder stock in child-like colors including pink and swirls. “The little Crickett rifle is a single-shot rifle and it has a child safety,” White said. “This was just a tragic accident.” The child safety lock was in place and operational, White said. Officials believe a shell had been left in the weapon from the last use and no one realized it. “In my fifteen years as coroner, this is the first such case,” he said. “It is very, very rare.” It is legal in Kentucky to give a child a rifle as a gift, White said. Nor is it unusual for children to have rifles, often passed down from their parents, he said. Earlier this month, Brandon Holt, 6, was accidentally shot to death by a 4-year-old playmate in New Jersey. LA Times
Un petit Américain de 5 ans qui jouait avec un fusil qu’on lui avait offert a tué mardi sa petite sœur de 2 ans dans leur maison du Kentucky (centre-est). Selon le médecin légiste du comté rural de Cumberland, il s’agit d’un accident. «Ça fait partie de ces accidents insensés», a affirmé Gary White, interrogé par le journal local, The Lexington Herald-Leader. (…) Selon le médecin, la maman des enfants qui faisait le ménage, était momentanément sortie sur le porche de la maison. «Elle a dit que pas plus de 3 minutes s’étaient écoulées puis elle a entendu la détonation. Elle a couru dans la maison et a trouvé la petite fille», a expliqué Gary White à la télévision locale WKYT. Le fusil, un .22 long rifle spécialement conçu pour les enfants, était un cadeau que le petit garçon avait reçu l’année dernière. Il était stocké dans le coin d’une pièce et les parents ne savaient pas qu’il restait une munition à l’intérieur, a affirmé le médecin légiste. «C’est un petit fusil pour enfant, de marque Crickett. Le petit garçon avait l’habitude de tirer avec», a-t-il confié au Lexington Herald-Leader. Libération (01.05.13)
Après la récente fusillade dans une université américaine qui a coûté la vie à 9 étudiants, c’est un nouveau drame qui a endeuillé les Etats-Unis, d’autant plus terrible que l’assassin et sa victime sont des enfants : un jeune garçon âgé de 11 ans, originaire du Tennessee, a été formellement accusé d’avoir tué samedi par balle une fillette de 8 ans avec un fusil de calibre 12 après une dispute au sujet de chiots. Une voisine a dit à la chaine WBIR, affiliée à CBS, que la jeune fille, Makayla Dyer, jouait avec les voisins samedi soir à White Pine, à l’extérieur de Knoxville. Elle a ensuite commencé à discuter avec le garçon, qui n’avait alors pas été identifié, par une fenêtre ouverte de son domicile. « Il a demandé à la petite fille de voir ses chiots », a rapporté la voisine, Chasity Atwood, à WBID. « Elle a dit non et a ri et puis s’est retournée, a regardé son amie et dit ‘Allons chercher les…’. Mais elle n’a pas eu le temps de dire le mot ‘chiots’ ». Le garçon lui avait déjà tiré une balle dans la poitrine.French people daily
Un garçon américain de 11 ans abat une fillette de 8 ans après une dispute. (…) Il s’est servi du fusil calibre 12 de son père. Un garçon de 11 ans a tué par balle sa voisine, une fillette de 8 ans. La ville de White Pine (Tennessee, Etats-Unis), où le drame s’est déroulé, est sous le choc, rapporte la chaîne locale américaine WATE, lundi 5 octobre. Samedi, la petite fille prénommée McKayla jouait dehors. Son jeune voisin lui aurait demandé de voir son chiot. Elle lui aurait répondu « non ». Vers 19h30, il l’a abattue. (…) « Cette arme aurait dû être mise sous clé ou au moins hors de portée », a dénoncé une voisine, interrogée par la chaîne locale WBIR. Le débat sur le contrôle des armes à feu a été relancé aux Etats-Unis après la fusillade du 1er octobre sur un campus universitaire de l’Oregon. Francetvinfo
Un garçon de 11 ans a été inculpé d’assassinat dans l’Etat américain du Tennessee après avoir tué par balle McKayla Dyer, sa voisine, âgée de 8 ans, lors d’une dispute concernant un chiot. (…) Le débat sur le contrôle des armes à feu a été relancé aux Etats-Unis après la fusillade du 2 octobre sur un campus universitaire de l’Oregon, au cours de laquelle un jeune homme de 26 ans a abattu 9 personnes. (…) Selon le site Gun Violence Archive, 559 enfants de moins de 11 ans ont été tués ou blessés depuis le début de l’année aux Etats-Unis. Le Monde
Since 2002, St. Louis Children’s Hospital has cared for 771 children injured or killed by gunfire; 35 percent were younger than 15. These include the recent 12-year-old boy accidentally killed by his friend when playing with his grandfather’s pistol kept under his pillow, the 2-year-old boy paralyzed when his father accidentally discharged his gun during loading, the 5-year-old girl caught in a cross-fire as she sat on her front porch, the 10-year-old boy killed by his mother overwhelmed with mental illness, and the 4-year-old boy who found a handgun in a closet at home, placed the barrel into his mouth and pulled the trigger as he had often done to get a drink from his water-pistol. Many of these children died despite the heroic efforts of our highly trained pre-hospital, emergency, surgical and critical care staff. In 2010, seven American children age 19 and younger were killed every day. This is twice the number of children who die from cancer, five times the number from heart disease, and 15 times the number from infections. This is also the equivalent of 128 Newtown shootings. It has been estimated at least 38 percent of American households have a gun. In homes with children younger than 18, 22 percent store the gun loaded, 32 percent unlocked, and 8 percent unlocked and loaded. The children in these homes know the gun is present, and many handle the gun in the absence of their parents. Children who have received gun safety training are just as likely to play with and fire a real gun as children not trained. In one study, 8-to-12-year-old boys were observed via one-way mirror as they played for 15 minutes in a waiting room with a disabled .38 caliber handgun concealed in a desk drawer. Seventy two percent discovered the gun, and 48 percent pulled the trigger; 90 percent of those who handled the gun and/or pulled the trigger had prior gun safety instruction. Rather than confer protection, careful studies find guns stored in the home are more likely to be involved in an accidental death, homicide by a family member, or suicide than against an intruder. In 2009, suicide was the third leading cause of death for American youth, with firearms the most common method used. The American Academy of Pediatrics has concluded, “The most effective measure to prevent suicide, homicide, and unintentional firearm-related injuries to children and adolescents is the absence of guns from homes and communities.” (…) It has been done in many other economically advanced countries, and we can do it in the United States. St Louis-Post dispatch
Drs. Kennedy, Jaffe & Keller (…) quote statistics that would lead the reader to believe that child gun deaths are a national public health crisis. They suggest that there is an epidemic of gun violence that threatens the safety, health and well-being of our children and devote considerable print to listing the number of children killed or treated for gunshot injuries at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. However, most of the individual cases they report suggest that accidental shootings are the main culprit for these injuries, and that inadequate gun storage at home is to blame. In reality, as is obvious from the daily reporting by the Post-Dispatch of area gun violence, most of the victims of these gun-related deaths and injuries are inner-city residents and their injuries are not accidental. According to reliable statistical data reported in 2009 covering the years 1904-2006, from the National Center for Health Statistics (1981 on) and the National Safety Council (prior to 1981), while the number of privately owned guns in the U.S. is at an all-time high, and rises by about 4.5 million per year, the firearm accident death rate is at an all-time annual low, 0.2 per 100,000 population, down 94 percent since the all-time high in 1904. Since 1930, the annual number of such deaths has decreased 80 percent, to an all-time low, while the U.S. population has more than doubled and the number of firearms has quintupled. Among children, such deaths have decreased 90 percent since 1975. Today, the odds are more than a million to one against a child in the U.S. dying in a firearm accident. According to the 2009 data, in reality among all child accidental deaths nationally, firearms were involved in 1.1 percent, compared to motor vehicles (41 percent), suffocation (21 percent), drowning (15 percent), fires (8 percent), pedal cycles (2 percent), poisoning (2 percent), falls (1.9 percent), environmental factors (1.5 percent), and medical mistakes (1 percent). Since the difference between accidental deaths due to medical mistakes (1 percent) and accidental deaths due to firearms (1.1 percent) is only 0.1 percentage points, perhaps we should consider a ban on pediatricians along with the ban they propose on firearms and large-capacity magazines.F.A. Ruecker
411 children (age 14 and under) died from gunfire in all of 2012 or slightly more than one per day. This includes homicides, accidents, and suicides combined. Gun facts
Il est en effet essentiel de mettre les choses en perspective : les tueries de masse, bien que tragiques, restent statistiquement extrêmement rares. Moins de 0,2% des homicides sont liés à des tueries de masse. De manière plus large et malgré la perception générale du contraire, le taux de crime aux États-Unis est en baisse constante depuis plus de 20 ans. Même le taux d’homicides par armes à feu est en baisse, de 49% depuis 1993. Ainsi, depuis plus de 20 ans aux États-Unis, le taux de crime diminue, et ce malgré un nombre record d’armes à feu détenus par des Américains. Dans le même temps, le nombre de permis de port d’arme en public (« concealed carry permit ») a lui aussi augmenté. « Plus d’armes = plus de crimes », vraiment ? Mais au-delà des crimes demeure un fait peu rappelé dans les débats qui suivent les tueries aux États-Unis : avec plus de 300 millions d’armes à feu en circulation, les citoyens américains utilisent massivement leurs armes pour des motifs légitimes. Parmi ceux-ci, on retrouve la collection, la chasse, le tir sportif ou encore la défense de soi et de son prochain. Ainsi, plus de 99,9% des Américains propriétaires légaux d’armes n’ont jamais utilisé celles-ci pour causer du tort à autrui. De quel droit viendrait-on restreindre leurs libertés parce qu’un dément a utilisé ses propres armes à feu pour nuire à autrui ? Non seulement l’immense majorité de ces détenteurs légaux d’armes à feu ne cause pas de tort à autrui, mais elle empêche des crimes et sauvent des vies. Combien de crimes n’ont jamais eu lieu parce que des criminels violents, de peur de se faire abattre, ont été dissuadés d’agresser autrui ? (…) Par définition, un criminel ne respecte pas la loi. Un fou souhaitant commettre une tuerie trouvera toujours les outils nécessaires. Les seules personnes concernées par les lois sur les armes à feu sont les citoyens honnêtes et pacifiques. Toutefois malgré ces efforts, il paraît vain de souhaiter en finir avec la violence. Certaines personnes seront toujours promptes à agresser autrui. Et face à ces personnes-là, les citoyens honnêtes doivent pouvoir s’armer pour leur défense. Cela n’a pas été le cas sur le campus de l’université dans l’Oregon qui était une « gun free zone », une zone où les citoyens honnêtes en possession de permis de port d’arme ne peuvent la porter. Le tueur avait ainsi le champ libre, sachant que ses victimes seraient incapables de se défendre avant l’arrivée de la police.L’État américain doit en finir avec cette politique de « gun free zones » qui n’empêchent pas les tueurs de commettre leurs crimes, mais empêche une réponse rapide de citoyens qui pourraient stopper l’attaque. Edouard H.
Now, quick: Name the mass shooters at the Chattanooga military recruitment center; the Washington Navy Yard; the high school in Washington state; Fort Hood (the second time) and the Christian college in California. All those shootings also occurred during the last three years. The answers are: Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez, Kuwaiti; Aaron Alexis, black, possibly Barbadian-American; Jaylen Ray Fryberg, Indian; Ivan Antonio Lopez, Hispanic; and One L. Goh, Korean immigrant.Ann Coulter
Our review of the academic literature found that a broad array of evidence indicates that gun availability is a risk factor for homicide, both in the United States and across high-income countries. Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicate that in homes, cities, states and regions in the US, where there are more guns, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide. (…) Using survey data on rates of household gun ownership, we examined the association between gun availability and homicide across states, 2001-2003. We found that states with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide. This relationship held for both genders and all age groups, after accounting for rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and resource deprivation (e.g., poverty). There was no association between gun prevalence and non-firearm homicide. Harvard Injury Control Research Center
We analyzed data for 50 states over 19 years to investigate the relationship between gun prevalence and accidental gun deaths across different age groups. For every age group, where there are more guns there are more accidental deaths. The mortality rate was 7 times higher in the four states with the most guns compared to the four states with the fewest guns. (…) Across states, both firearm prevalence AND questionable storage practices (i.e. storing firearms loaded and unlocked) were associated with higher rates of unintentional firearm deaths. (…) The majority of people killed in firearm accidents are under age 24, and most of these young people are being shot by someone else, usually someone their own age. The shooter is typically a friend or family member, often an older brother. By contrast, older adults are at far lower risk of accidental firearm death, and most often are shooting themselves. (…) Harvard Injury Control Research Center
The central insight of the modern study of criminal violence is that all crime—even the horrific violent crimes of assault and rape—is at some level opportunistic. Building a low annoying wall against them is almost as effective as building a high impenetrable one. This is the key concept of Franklin Zimring’s amazing work on crime in New York; everyone said that, given the social pressures, the slum pathologies, the profits to be made in drug dealing, the ascending levels of despair, that there was no hope of changing the ever-growing cycle of violence. The right wing insisted that this generation of predators would give way to a new generation of super-predators. What the New York Police Department found out, through empirical experience and better organization, was that making crime even a little bit harder made it much, much rarer. This is undeniably true of property crime, and common sense and evidence tells you that this is also true even of crimes committed by crazy people (to use the plain English the subject deserves). Those who hold themselves together enough to be capable of killing anyone are subject to the same rules of opportunity as sane people. Even madmen need opportunities to display their madness, and behave in different ways depending on the possibilities at hand. Demand an extraordinary degree of determination and organization from someone intent on committing a violent act, and the odds that the violent act will take place are radically reduced, in many cases to zero. Look at the Harvard social scientist David Hemenway’s work on gun violence to see how simple it is; the phrase “more guns = more homicide” tolls through it like a grim bell. The more guns there are in a country, the more gun murders and massacres of children there will be. Even within this gun-crazy country, states with strong gun laws have fewer gun murders (and suicides and accidental killings) than states without them. (…) Summoning the political will to make it happen may be hard. But there’s no doubt or ambiguity about what needs to be done, nor that, if it is done, it will work. One would have to believe that Americans are somehow uniquely evil or depraved to think that the same forces that work on the rest of the planet won’t work here. It’s always hard to summon up political will for change, no matter how beneficial the change may obviously be. Summoning the political will to make automobiles safe was difficult; so was summoning the political will to limit and then effectively ban cigarettes from public places. At some point, we will become a gun-safe, and then a gun-sane, and finally a gun-free society. It’s closer than you think. (…) Gun control is not a panacea, any more than penicillin was. Some violence will always go on. What gun control is good at is controlling guns. Gun control will eliminate gun massacres in America as surely as antibiotics eliminate bacterial infections. As I wrote last week, those who oppose it have made a moral choice: that they would rather have gun massacres of children continue rather than surrender whatever idea of freedom or pleasure they find wrapped up in owning guns or seeing guns owned (…) On gun violence and how to end it, the facts are all in, the evidence is clear, the truth there for all who care to know it—indeed, a global consensus is in place, which, in disbelief and now in disgust, the planet waits for us to join. Those who fight against gun control, actively or passively, with a shrug of helplessness, are dooming more kids to horrible deaths and more parents to unspeakable grief just as surely as are those who fight against pediatric medicine or childhood vaccination. It’s really, and inarguably, just as simple as that.Adam Gopnik
Statistically, the United States is not a particularly violent society. Although gun proponents like to compare this country with hot spots like Colombia, Mexico, and Estonia (making America appear a truly peaceable kingdom), a more relevant comparison is against other high-income, industrialized nations. The percentage of the U.S. population victimized in 2000 by crimes like assault, car theft, burglary, robbery, and sexual incidents is about average for 17 industrialized countries, and lower on many indices than Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. « The only thing that jumps out is lethal violence, » Hemenway says. Violence, pace H. Rap Brown, is not « as American as cherry pie, » but American violence does tend to end in death. The reason, plain and simple, is guns. We own more guns per capita than any other high-income country maybe even more than one gun for every man, woman, and child in the country. A 1994 survey numbered the U.S. gun supply at more than 200 million in a population then numbered at 262 million, and currently about 35 percent of American households have guns. (These figures count only civilian guns; Switzerland, for example, has plenty of military weapons per capita.)Craig Lambert
Why manufacture guns that go off when you drop them?. Kids play with guns. We put childproof safety caps on aspirin bottles because if kids take too many aspirin, they get sick. You could blame the parents for gun accidents but, as with aspirin, manufacturers could help. It’s very easy to make childproof guns. »The gun-control debate often makes it look like there are only two options: either take away people’s guns, or not. That’s not it at all. This is more like a harm-reduction strategy. Recognize that there are a lot of guns out there, and that reasonable gun policies can minimize the harm that comes from them. (…) It’s not as if a 19-year-old in the United States is more evil than a 19-year-old in Australia there’s no evidence for that. But a 19-year-old in America can very easily get a pistol. That’s very hard to do in Australia. So when there’s a bar fight in Australia, somebody gets punched out or hit with a beer bottle. Here, they get shot. (…) What guns do is make crimes lethal. They also make suicide attempts lethal: about 60 percent of suicides in America involve guns. If you try to kill yourself with drugs, there’s a 2 to 3 percent chance of dying. With guns, the chance is 90 percent. (…) In Wyoming it’s hard to have big gang fights. Do you call up the other gang and drive 30 miles to meet up? (…) Handguns are the crime guns. They are the ones you can conceal, the guns you take to go rob somebody. You don’t mug people at rifle-point. (…) We have done four surveys on self-defense gun use. And one thing we know for sure is that there’s a lot more criminal gun use than self-defense gun use. And even when people say they pulled their gun in ‘self-defense,’ it usually turns out that there was just an escalating argument at some point, people feel afraid and draw guns. (…) How often might you appropriately use a gun in self-defense?. Answer: zero to once in a lifetime. How about inappropriately because you were tired, afraid, or drunk in a confrontational situation? There are lots and lots of chances. When your anger takes over, it’s nice not to have guns lying around. (…) « A determined criminal will always get a gun » (…) Yes, but a lot of people aren’t that determined. I’m sure there are some determined yacht buyers out there, but when you raise the price high enough, a lot of them stop buying yachts. (…) « You can go to a gun show, flea market, the Internet, or classified ads and buy a gun no questions asked. (…) For decades, there were no plaintiff victories beyond the appellate level » in the tobacco litigation. Reasonable suits might allege things that the manufacturers could do to make guns safer. (…) People say, ‘Teach kids not to pull the trigger,’ but kids will do it. (…) You could make it hard to remove a serial number. You won’t eliminate the problem, but you can decrease it. (…) You can arrest speeders, but you can also put speed bumps or chicanes [curved, alternating-side curb extensions] into residential areas where children play….Just as…you can revoke the license of bad doctors, but also build [a medical] environment in which it’s harder to make an error, and the mistakes made are not serious or fatal. (…) We know what works. We know that speed kills, so if you raise speed limits, expect to see more highway deaths. Motorcycle helmets work; seat belts work. Car inspections and driver education have no effect. Right-on-red laws mean more pedestrians hit by cars. (…) The goal at home and abroad is to make sure the guns we have are safe, and that people use them properly. We’d like to create a world where it’s hard to make mistakes with guns and when you do make a mistake, it’s not a terrible thing. David Hemenway (Harvard)
Qui arrêtera ce nouveau massacre des innocents ?
En ces temps étranges où, brutalisation djihadiste ou victimisation médiatique oblige, le premier imbécile ou damné de la terre venu peut ou se sent obligé d’entrainer dans sa mort, y compris au couteau de boucher, à la voiture-bélier ou à l’avion-missile, des dizaines voire des centaines ou des milliers d’anonymes dans sa mort …
Et où après l’avoir si longtemps dénoncé, l’on se plaint, aujourd’hui que notre rêve de monde multipolaire est enfin exaucé, de l’absence sur la scène mondiale de plus en plus catastrophique du seul pays capable d’en jouer les gendarmes …
Pendant qu’au nom de normes écologiques toujours plus draconiennes, l’on pousse nos constructeurs automobiles à trafiquer nos moteurs …
Et qu’au lendemain, alors que malgré la baisse des dix dernières années les armes à feu pourraient dès cette année dépasser l’automobile comme première cause de décès, d’un énième massacredans une école américaine (dans une zone interdite aux armes) suivi comme il se doit de deux autres presque simultanés mais heureusement beaucoup moins meurtriers), partisans et opposants se jettent les éternels mêmes arguments à la figure …
Entre un président et ses amis chasseurs d’ambulances incapables de résister à une occasion de récupération politique et un candidat républicain et brillant ex-neurochirurgien qui se sent obligé pour flatter le lobby des armes à feu d’invoquer le génocide juif …
Qu’aussi tragiques et médiatiques qu’elles soient, ces tueries de masse ne constituent en fait qu’une infime partie du total des homicides (moins de 1% ) et que les armes de guerre qui leur sont souvent associées n’entrent en jeu que dans 2% des cas ?
Qui a l’honnêteté de signaler que l’évidence apparemment mathématique (plus d’armes entrainent plus de victimes) ne tient en fait que pour les pays développés (y compris à l’intérieur même des Etats-Unis – Wyoming: 17,5 décès pour 60% de possession vs. Massachussets: 3,18 pour 10,6), le cas des pays en développement démontrant largement qu’on peut faire (beaucoup) plus avec (très) peu (Honduras: about 64,8 décès /100 000 pour seulement 6, 2% de possession, soit presque six fois plus de décès avec 18 fois moins d’armes que les EU), Venezuela: 50,9 pour 10,7%, Jamaïque: 39,74 pour 8,1% contre 10,6 pour 112,6% pour les EU mais 3,1 pour 31,2% pour la France – mais des taux d’homicide volontaire de 13.3, 7.9, 2.7 et 1.8 % pour Guyane, Guadeloupe, Martinique et Réunion vs. 1.2 pour la France) ?
Qui osera alors en tirer l’évidente conclusion – éléphant dans la pièce qu’il devient de plus en plus difficile de voir, Hemenway compris – que l’on a en fait affaire à deux Amérique emboitées l’une dans l’autre, les ghettos noirs, qui pour une population noire totale de 12% de la population totale concentre 41% des auteurs et près de 50% des victimes d’homicides, fonctionnant en fait comme des îlots de sous-développement, et partant de moindre ancienneté et exposition au processus de civilisation décrit par Elias, à l’intérieur d’un pays par ailleurs à la pointe du développement ?
Mais en même temps qui prend la peine d’expliquer que c’est par ailleurs aussi par effet d’opportunité et d’incitation que ce trop-plein d’armes principalement de poing (près de 113 armes à feu pour 100 habitants !) peut rendre catastrophiques et irréversibles, sans parler des rixes ou des simples vols, les moindres accidents, suicides ou disputes au sein même des familles ?
Qui aura enfin le courage d’exiger face au puissant lobby des fabricants mais aussi des fondamentalistes de la liberté à tout prix …
Un minimum, comme cela a été fait pour l’industrie de l’automobile ou du tabac notamment avec les fameuses « class actions », de sécurités et de contrôles pour les produits …
Et à l’instar, sans compter le bébé de 5 mois de Cleveland le même jour que la tuerie de l’Oregon, de ce petit garçon de 11 ans du Tennessee qui a tué sa petite voisine de 8 ans quatre jours après pour avoir refusé de lui montrer son petit chien …
Ce qui ne fait certes, diront les critiques, que 40 fois moins que le bilan des accidents automobiles pour lesdits enfants et qu’à peine 20 fois celui du massacre de Newtown …
Death by the Barrel
David Hemenway applies scientific method to the gun problem
Craig Lambert
Harvard magazine
September-October 2004
This particular gun story took place, ironically enough, at the 1997 convention of the American Public Health Association in Indianapolis. There, among a group of white-collar professionals and academics, a seemingly minor incident quickly led to mayhem. While eating dinner at the Planet Hollywood restaurant, a patron bent to pick something up from the floor. A small pistol fell from his pocket, hit the floor, and went off. The bullet struck and injured two convention delegates waiting to be seated; both women went to the hospital. »Why manufacture guns that go off when you drop them? » asks professor of health policy David Hemenway ’66, Ph.D. ’74. « Kids play with guns. We put childproof safety caps on aspirin bottles because if kids take too many aspirin, they get sick. You could blame the parents for gun accidents but, as with aspirin, manufacturers could help. It’s very easy to make childproof guns. »
Logic like this pervades Hemenway’s new book, Private Guns, Public Health (University of Michigan Press), which takes an original approach to an old problem by applying a scientific perspective to firearms. Hemenway, who directs the Harvard Injury Control Research Center at the School of Public Health (www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc), summarizes and interprets findings from hundreds of surveys and from epidemiological and field studies to deliver on the book’s subtitle: A Dramatic New Plan for Ending America’s Epidemic of Gun Violence. The empirical groundwork enables Hemenway, whose doctorate is in economics, to sidestep decades of political arm-wrestling over gun control. « The gun-control debate often makes it look like there are only two options: either take away people’s guns, or not, » he says. « That’s not it at all. This is more like a harm-reduction strategy. Recognize that there are a lot of guns out there, and that reasonable gun policies can minimize the harm that comes from them. »
Hemenway’s work on guns and violence is a natural evolution of his research on injuries of various kinds, which he has pursued for decades. (In fact, it could be traced as far back as the 1960s, when, working for Ralph Nader, LL.B. ’58, he investigated product safety as one of « Nader’s Raiders. ») Hemenway says he doesn’t have a personal issue with guns; he has shot firearms, but found the experience « loud and dirtyand there’s no exercise »as opposed to the « paintball » survival games he enjoys, which involve not only shooting but « a lot of running. » He also happens to live in a state with strong gun laws. « It’s nice, » he says, « to have raised my son in Massachusetts, where he is so much safer. »
Statistically, the United States is not a particularly violent society. Although gun proponents like to compare this country with hot spots like Colombia, Mexico, and Estonia (making America appear a truly peaceable kingdom), a more relevant comparison is against other high-income, industrialized nations. The percentage of the U.S. population victimized in 2000 by crimes like assault, car theft, burglary, robbery, and sexual incidents is about average for 17 industrialized countries, and lower on many indices than Canada, Australia, or New Zealand.
« The only thing that jumps out is lethal violence, » Hemenway says. Violence, pace H. Rap Brown, is not « as American as cherry pie, » but American violence does tend to end in death. The reason, plain and simple, is guns. We own more guns per capita than any other high-income countrymaybe even more than one gun for every man, woman, and child in the country. A 1994 survey numbered the U.S. gun supply at more than 200 million in a population then numbered at 262 million, and currently about 35 percent of American households have guns. (These figures count only civilian guns; Switzerland, for example, has plenty of military weapons per capita.)
« It’s not as if a 19-year-old in the United States is more evil than a 19-year-old in Australiathere’s no evidence for that, » Hemenway explains. « But a 19-year-old in America can very easily get a pistol. That’s very hard to do in Australia. So when there’s a bar fight in Australia, somebody gets punched out or hit with a beer bottle. Here, they get shot. »
In general, guns don’t induce people to commit crimes. « What guns do is make crimes lethal, » says Hemenway. They also make suicide attempts lethal: about 60 percent of suicides in America involve guns. « If you try to kill yourself with drugs, there’s a 2 to 3 percent chance of dying, » he explains. « With guns, the chance is 90 percent. »
Gun deaths fall into three categories: homicides, suicides, and accidental killings. In 2001, about 30,000 people died from gunfire in the United States. Set this against the 43,000 annual deaths from motor-vehicle accidents to recognize what startling carnage comes out of a barrel. The comparison is especially telling because cars « are a way of life, » as Hemenway explains. « People use cars all day, every dayand ‘motor vehicles’ include trucks. How many of us use guns? »
Suicides accounted for about 58 percent of gun fatalities, or 17,000 to 18,000 deaths, in 2001; another 11,000 deaths, or 37 percent, were homicides, and the remaining 800 to 900 gun deaths were accidental. For rural areas, the big problem is suicide; in cities, it’s homicide. (« In Wyoming it’s hard to have big gang fights, » Hemenway observes dryly. « Do you call up the other gang and drive 30 miles to meet up? ») Homicides follow a curve similar to that of motor-vehicle fatalities: rising steeply between ages 15 and 21, staying fairly level from there until age 65, then rising again with advanced age. Men between 25 and 55 commit the bulk of suicides, and younger males account for an inflated share of both homicides and unintentional shootings. (Males suffer all injuries, including gunshots, at much higher rates than females.)
Though assault weapons have attracted lots of publicity from Hollywood and Washington, and NRA stands for National Rifle Association, these facts mask the reality of the gun problem, which centers on pistols. « Handguns are the crime guns, » Hemenway says. « They are the ones you can conceal, the guns you take to go rob somebody. You don’t mug people at rifle-point. »
And America is awash in handguns. Canada, for example, has almost as many guns per capita as the United States, but Americans own far more pistols. « Where do Canadian criminals, and Mexican criminals, get their handguns? » asks Hemenway. « From the United States. » Gang members in Boston and New York get their handguns from other states with permissive gun laws; the firearms flow freely across state borders. Interstate 95, which runs from Florida to New England, even has a nickname among gun-runners: « the Iron Pipeline. »
The ways in which people die by guns would not make a good television cop show. Rarely does a suburban homeowner beat a burglar to the draw in his living room at 3 a.m. Few urban pedestrians thwart a mugger by brandishing a pistol. « We have done four surveys on self-defense gun use, » Hemenway says. « And one thing we know for sure is that there’s a lot more criminal gun use than self-defense gun use. And even when people say they pulled their gun in ‘self-defense,’ it usually turns out that there was just an escalating argumentat some point, people feel afraid and draw guns. »
Hemenway has collected stories of self-defense gun use by simply asking those who pulled guns what happened. A typical story might be: « We were in the park drinking. Drinking led to arguing. We ran to our cars and got our guns. » Or: « I was sitting on my porch. A neighbor came up and we got into a fight. He threw a beer at me. I went inside and got my gun. » Hemenway has sent verbatim accounts of such incidents to criminal-court judges, asking if the « self-defense » gun use described was legal. « Most of the time, » he says, « the answer was no. »
Ask criminals why they carried a gun while robbing the convenience store and frequently the answer is, « So I could get the money and not have to hurt anyone. » But as Hemenway explains, « Then something happens. Maybe somebody unexpectedly walks in, or the storeowner draws a gun. Your heart is racing. Next thing you know, somebody is dead. »
Researchers have interviewed adolescents in major urban centers, where many inner-city kids carry guns. When asked why, the reason they most often give is « self-defense, » adding that getting a gun is easy, something one can often do in less than an hour. Yet when researchers asked a group of teenagers, more than half of whom had already carried guns, what kind of world they would like to live in, Hemenway says that almost all of them replied, « One where it’s difficult or impossible to get a gun. »
Most murderers are not hired killers. Instead, killings happen during fights between rival gangs or angry spouses, or even from road rage, and leave deep regret in their wake. « How often might you appropriately use a gun in self-defense? » Hemenway asks rhetorically. « Answer: zero to once in a lifetime. How about inappropriatelybecause you were tired, afraid, or drunk in a confrontational situation? There are lots and lots of chances. When your anger takes over, it’s nice not to have guns lying around. »
Many suicides, similarly, are impulsive acts. Follow-up interviews with people who survived jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge reveal that few of them tried suicide again. One survivor volunteered this epiphany after jumping: « I realized that all the problems I had in life were solvableexcept one: I’m in midair. » In the United States, suicide rates are high in states with an abundance of gunssouthern and western mountain states, for exampleand lower in places like New Jersey, New England, or Hawaii, where guns are relatively scarce. Nine case-control studies have shown that guns in the house are a risk factor for suicide. Firearms turn the agonizing into the irreversible.
Virtually all industrialized nations have stronger firearms laws than the United States. We have no national law, for example, requiring a license to own a gun (though some states require one). Almost all other countries have licensure laws, and many demand that gun owners undergo training, also not required here. Hemenway scoffs at the rote objection, « A determined criminal will always get a gun, » responding, « Yes, but a lot of people aren’t that determined. I’m sure there are some determined yacht buyers out there, but when you raise the price high enough, a lot of them stop buying yachts. »
In most of these United States, many types of gun sale trigger neither a background check nor a paper trail. « You can go to a gun show, flea market, the Internet, or classified ads and buy a gunno questions asked, » Hemenway says. It is illegal to sell a firearm to a convicted felon or for criminal purposes, although sting operations have proved that some licensed vendors flout even this proscription. « In 1998, police officers from Chicago (where possessing a new handgun is illegal) posed as local gang members and went firearms shopping in the suburbs, » Hemenway writes. « In store after store, clerks willingly sold powerful handguns to these agents, who made it clear that they intended to use these guns to ‘take care of business’ on the streets of Chicago. »
Some civil lawsuits have targeted gun manufacturers, seeking damages for the death and disability resulting from the use of firearms. In one sense, such plaintiffs are in the bizarre position of suing manufacturers for making products that perform as advertised. Yet there may be parallels to the legal assault on tobacco, another product that can be lethal when used as directed. « For decades, there were no plaintiff victories beyond the appellate level » in the tobacco litigation, Hemenway notes. « Reasonable suits might allege things that the manufacturers could do to make guns safer. »
Many such changes are possible. Fairly small tweaks in design and engineering could save countless human livesin much the same way that the 1985 law requiring a third brake light (the upper back light) on cars reduced rear-end collisions. For starters, making childproof guns is, well, child’s play. Even a century ago, gunsmiths made pistols that would not fire unless the shooter put extra pressure on the handle while pulling the trigger; this required strength beyond that of a child’s hand.
Many times a teenaged boy will find a gun such as a semi-automatic pistol in his home and, after taking out the ammunition clip, assume that the gun is unloaded. He then points the pistol at his best friend and playfully pulls the trigger, killing the other lad with the bullet that was already in the chamber. « People say, ‘Teach kids not to pull the trigger,’ but kids will do it, » Hemenway says. In a 2001 study, for example, small groups of boys from 8 to 12 years old spent 15 minutes in a room where a handgun was hidden in a drawer. More than two-thirds discovered the gun, more than half the groups handled it, and in more than a third of the groups someone pulled the triggerdespite the fact that more than 90 percent of the boys in the latter groups had received gun-safety instruction.
Hence product redesign may do more good than safety education. Hemenway suggests such changes as adding « a magazine safety, so that when you remove the clip, the gun does not work. Or make guns that visually indicate if they are loadedjust like you can tell if there is film in a camera. » A different design solution could help police, who often find that guns recovered from crime scenes are untraceable because it’s « pretty easy to obliterate the serial number, » Hemenway notes. « Often you can just file it off. You could make it hard to remove a serial number. You won’t eliminate the problem, but you can decrease it. »
One of Hemenway’s main goals is to help create a society in which it is harder to make fatal blunders. He compares it to cutting down on speeding autos. « You can arrest speeders, but you can also put speed bumps or chicanes [curved, alternating-side curb extensions] into residential areas where children play….Just as…you can revoke the license of bad doctors, but also build [a medical] environment in which it’s harder to make an error, and the mistakes made are not serious or fatal. »
Yet even if such interventions became public policy, there would be no way to evaluate their impact without meaningful data. Consider the 1994 law that bans assault weapons, which is due to expire this year. « We don’t know if homicides have gone up, down, or stayed the same as a result of this law, » Hemenway says. « Or take unintentional gun deaths, of which there are about two a day. We don’t know if they tend to occur indoors or outdoors, whether the victim is the shooter or another person, whether they involve long guns or handguns, if they occur in the city or country, or if patterns have changed over time. »
This ignorance about gun deaths stands in sharp contrast to the wealth of useful data available on motor-vehicle fatalities, for which more than 100 pieces of information per death are collected consistently in every state. Shortly after its creation in 1966, the predecessor of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began to record information like the make, model, and year of the car, speed limit and speed of car, where people were sitting, use of seatbelts and more recently airbags, weather conditionsthese data and many more are available to researchers on the Web. Consequently, Hemenway says, « We know what works. We know that speed kills, so if you raise speed limits, expect to see more highway deaths. Motorcycle helmets work; seat belts work. Car inspections and driver education have no effect. Right-on-red laws mean more pedestrians hit by cars. »
This kind of detailed information allows researchers to statistically evaluate the effects of laws. Regarding those right-on-red laws, for example, Hemenway explains, « If you only [tracked] traffic deaths, you wouldn’t see this pattern. You need data on pedestrian deaths, and pedestrian deaths at intersections! »
In 1998, Hemenway and the Harvard Injury Control Research Center launched the pilot for what has become the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) in an attempt to assemble a similar database documenting violent deaths, including those by firearms. They funded 10 sites to organize a consistent, comparable set of data, using information that already existed. Vital statistics like age and sex were commonly available. The police have a good system for homicide data. Medical examiners’ (coroners’) reports are a rich source of information but are not part of any system and aren’t linked to anything else; the same is true of crime lab reports. The new system will also provide important suicide data. (Currently, once a death is defined as a suicide, the police investigation ends, so « all we have are death certificates, » says Hemenway. « They tell you nothing about the circumstances. »)
Two years ago, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) took over administration of NVDRS; Hemenway estimates that funding the whole system for all 50 states would cost about $20 million. He will continue this work, but he is also getting involved with international firearms problems. Although high-income countries (other than the United States) generally don’t have severe gun problems, the developing world faces major issues with guns in places like Jamaica, Colombia, and South Africa. The goal at home and abroad, he says, is « to make sure the guns we have are safe, and that people use them properly. We’d like to create a world where it’s hard to make mistakes with gunsand when you do make a mistake, it’s not a terrible thing. »
Craig A. Lambert ’69, Ph.D. ’78, is deputy editor of this magazine.December 19, 2012
We live, let’s imagine, in a city where children are dying of a ravaging infection. The good news is that its cause is well understood and its cure, an antibiotic, easily at hand. The bad news is that our city council has been taken over by a faith-healing cult that will go to any lengths to keep the antibiotic from the kids. Some citizens would doubtless point out meekly that faith healing has an ancient history in our city, and we must regard the faith healers with respect—to do otherwise would show a lack of respect for their freedom to faith-heal. (The faith healers’ proposition is that if there were a faith healer praying in every kindergarten the kids wouldn’t get infections in the first place.) A few Tartuffes would see the children writhe and heave in pain and then wring their hands in self-congratulatory piety and wonder why a good God would send such a terrible affliction on the innocent—surely he must have a plan! Most of us—every sane person in the city, actually—would tell the faith healers to go to hell, put off worrying about the Problem of Evil till Friday or Saturday or Sunday, and do everything we could to get as much penicillin to the kids as quickly we could.
We do live in such a city. Five thousand seven hundred and forty children and teens died from gunfire in the United States, just in 2008 and 2009. Twenty more, including Olivia Engel, who was seven, and Jesse Lewis, who was six, were killed just last week. Some reports say their bodies weren’t shown to their grief-stricken parents to identify them; just their pictures. The overwhelming majority of those children would have been saved with effective gun control. We know that this is so, because, in societies that have effective gun control, children rarely, rarely, rarely die of gunshots. Let’s worry tomorrow about the problem of Evil. Let’s worry more about making sure that when the Problem of Evil appears in a first-grade classroom, it is armed with a penknife.
There are complex, hand-wringing-worthy problems in our social life: deficits and debts and climate change. Gun violence, and the work of eliminating gun massacres in schools and movie houses and the like, is not one of them. Gun control works on gun violence as surely as antibiotics do on bacterial infections. In Scotland, after Dunblane, in Australia, after Tasmania, in Canada, after the Montreal massacre—in each case the necessary laws were passed to make gun-owning hard, and in each case… well, you will note the absence of massacre-condolence speeches made by the Prime Ministers of Canada and Australia, in comparison with our own President.
The laws differ from place to place. In some jurisdictions, like Scotland, it is essentially impossible to own a gun; in others, like Canada, it is merely very, very difficult. The precise legislation that makes gun-owning hard in a certain sense doesn’t really matter—and that should give hope to all of those who feel that, with several hundred million guns in private hands, there’s no point in trying to make America a gun-sane country.
As I wrote last January, the central insight of the modern study of criminal violence is that all crime—even the horrific violent crimes of assault and rape—is at some level opportunistic. Building a low annoying wall against them is almost as effective as building a high impenetrable one. This is the key concept of Franklin Zimring’s amazing work on crime in New York; everyone said that, given the social pressures, the slum pathologies, the profits to be made in drug dealing, the ascending levels of despair, that there was no hope of changing the ever-growing cycle of violence. The right wing insisted that this generation of predators would give way to a new generation of super-predators.
What the New York Police Department found out, through empirical experience and better organization, was that making crime even a little bit harder made it much, much rarer. This is undeniably true of property crime, and common sense and evidence tells you that this is also true even of crimes committed by crazy people (to use the plain English the subject deserves). Those who hold themselves together enough to be capable of killing anyone are subject to the same rules of opportunity as sane people. Even madmen need opportunities to display their madness, and behave in different ways depending on the possibilities at hand. Demand an extraordinary degree of determination and organization from someone intent on committing a violent act, and the odds that the violent act will take place are radically reduced, in many cases to zero.
Look at the Harvard social scientist David Hemenway’s work on gun violence to see how simple it is; the phrase “more guns = more homicide” tolls through it like a grim bell. The more guns there are in a country, the more gun murders and massacres of children there will be. Even within this gun-crazy country, states with strong gun laws have fewer gun murders (and suicides and accidental killings) than states without them. (Hemenway is also the scientist who has shown that the inflated figure of guns used in self-defense every year, running even to a million or two million, is a pure fantasy, even though it’s still cited by pro-gun enthusiasts. Those hundreds of thousands intruders shot by gun owners left no records in emergency wards or morgues; indeed, left no evidentiary trace behind. This is because they did not exist.) Hemenway has discovered, as he explained in this interview with Harvard Magazine, that what is usually presented as a case of self-defense with guns is, in the real world, almost invariably a story about an escalating quarrel. “How often might you appropriately use a gun in self-defense?” Hemenway asks rhetorically. “Answer: zero to once in a lifetime. How about inappropriately—because you were tired, afraid, or drunk in a confrontational situation? There are lots and lots of chances.”
So don’t listen to those who, seeing twenty dead six- and seven-year-olds in ten minutes, their bodies riddled with bullets designed to rip apart bone and organ, say that this is impossibly hard, or even particularly complex, problem. It’s a very easy one. Summoning the political will to make it happen may be hard. But there’s no doubt or ambiguity about what needs to be done, nor that, if it is done, it will work. One would have to believe that Americans are somehow uniquely evil or depraved to think that the same forces that work on the rest of the planet won’t work here. It’s always hard to summon up political will for change, no matter how beneficial the change may obviously be. Summoning the political will to make automobiles safe was difficult; so was summoning the political will to limit and then effectively ban cigarettes from public places. At some point, we will become a gun-safe, and then a gun-sane, and finally a gun-free society. It’s closer than you think. (I’m grateful to my colleague Jeffrey Toobin for showing so well that the idea that the Second Amendment assures individual possession of guns, so far from being deeply rooted in American law, is in truth a new and bizarre reading, one that would have shocked even Warren Burger.)
Gun control is not a panacea, any more than penicillin was. Some violence will always go on. What gun control is good at is controlling guns. Gun control will eliminate gun massacres in America as surely as antibiotics eliminate bacterial infections. As I wrote last week, those who oppose it have made a moral choice: that they would rather have gun massacres of children continue rather than surrender whatever idea of freedom or pleasure they find wrapped up in owning guns or seeing guns owned—just as the faith healers would rather watch the children die than accept the reality of scientific medicine. This is a moral choice; many faith healers make it to this day, and not just in thought experiments. But it is absurd to shake our heads sapiently and say we can’t possibly know what would have saved the lives of Olivia and Jesse.
On gun violence and how to end it, the facts are all in, the evidence is clear, the truth there for all who care to know it—indeed, a global consensus is in place, which, in disbelief and now in disgust, the planet waits for us to join. Those who fight against gun control, actively or passively, with a shrug of helplessness, are dooming more kids to horrible deaths and more parents to unspeakable grief just as surely as are those who fight against pediatric medicine or childhood vaccination. It’s really, and inarguably, just as simple as that.
After the mass gun murders at Virginia Tech, I wrote about the unfathomable image of cell phones ringing in the pockets of the dead kids, and of the parents trying desperately to reach them. And I said (as did many others), This will go on, if no one stops it, in this manner and to this degree in this country alone—alone among all the industrialized, wealthy, and so-called civilized countries in the world. There would be another, for certain.
Then there were—many more, in fact—and when the latest and worst one happened, in Aurora, I (and many others) said, this time in a tone of despair, that nothing had changed. And I (and many others) predicted that it would happen again, soon. And that once again, the same twisted voices would say, Oh, this had nothing to do with gun laws or the misuse of the Second Amendment or anything except some singular madman, of whom America for some reason seems to have a particularly dense sample.
And now it has happened again, bang, like clockwork, one might say: Twenty dead children—babies, really—in a kindergarten in a prosperous town in Connecticut. And a mother screaming. And twenty families told that their grade-schooler had died. After the Aurora killings, I did a few debates with advocates for the child-killing lobby—sorry, the gun lobby—and, without exception and with a mad vehemence, they told the same old lies: it doesn’t happen here more often than elsewhere (yes, it does); more people are protected by guns than killed by them (no, they aren’t—that’s a flat-out fabrication); guns don’t kill people, people do; and all the other perverted lies that people who can only be called knowing accessories to murder continue to repeat, people who are in their own way every bit as twisted and crazy as the killers whom they defend. (That they are often the same people who pretend outrage at the loss of a single embryo only makes the craziness still crazier.)
So let’s state the plain facts one more time, so that they can’t be mistaken: Gun massacres have happened many times in many countries, and in every other country, gun laws have been tightened to reflect the tragedy and the tragic knowledge of its citizens afterward. In every other country, gun massacres have subsequently become rare. In America alone, gun massacres, most often of children, happen with hideous regularity, and they happen with hideous regularity because guns are hideously and regularly available.
The people who fight and lobby and legislate to make guns regularly available are complicit in the murder of those children. They have made a clear moral choice: that the comfort and emotional reassurance they take from the possession of guns, placed in the balance even against the routine murder of innocent children, is of supreme value. Whatever satisfaction gun owners take from their guns—we know for certain that there is no prudential value in them—is more important than children’s lives. Give them credit: life is making moral choices, and that’s a moral choice, clearly made.
All of that is a truth, plain and simple, and recognized throughout the world. At some point, this truth may become so bloody obvious that we will know it, too. Meanwhile, congratulate yourself on living in the child-gun-massacre capital of the known universe.
Dr. Robert M. Kennedy, Dr. David M. Jaffe and Dr. Martin S. Keller
St Louis Post dispatch
February 19, 2013
We are writing today as pediatric emergency and trauma physicians to share our concern about the epidemic of gun violence that threatens the safety, health, and well-being of our children in St. Louis and in the United States.
Since 2002, St. Louis Children’s Hospital has cared for 771 children injured or killed by gunfire; 35 percent were younger than 15. These include the recent 12-year-old boy accidentally killed by his friend when playing with his grandfather’s pistol kept under his pillow, the 2-year-old boy paralyzed when his father accidentally discharged his gun during loading, the 5-year-old girl caught in a cross-fire as she sat on her front porch, the 10-year-old boy killed by his mother overwhelmed with mental illness, and the 4-year-old boy who found a handgun in a closet at home, placed the barrel into his mouth and pulled the trigger as he had often done to get a drink from his water-pistol. Many of these children died despite the heroic efforts of our highly trained pre-hospital, emergency, surgical and critical care staff.
In 2010, seven American children age 19 and younger were killed every day. This is twice the number of children who die from cancer, five times the number from heart disease, and 15 times the number from infections. This is also the equivalent of 128 Newtown shootings.
It has been estimated at least 38 percent of American households have a gun. In homes with children younger than 18, 22 percent store the gun loaded, 32 percent unlocked, and 8 percent unlocked and loaded. The children in these homes know the gun is present, and many handle the gun in the absence of their parents.
Children who have received gun safety training are just as likely to play with and fire a real gun as children not trained. In one study, 8-to-12-year-old boys were observed via one-way mirror as they played for 15 minutes in a waiting room with a disabled .38 caliber handgun concealed in a desk drawer. Seventy two percent discovered the gun, and 48 percent pulled the trigger; 90 percent of those who handled the gun and/or pulled the trigger had prior gun safety instruction.
Rather than confer protection, careful studies find guns stored in the home are more likely to be involved in an accidental death, homicide by a family member, or suicide than against an intruder. In 2009, suicide was the third leading cause of death for American youth, with firearms the most common method used. The American Academy of Pediatrics has concluded, “The most effective measure to prevent suicide, homicide, and unintentional firearm-related injuries to children and adolescents is the absence of guns from homes and communities.”
We concur with recent recommendations from more than a dozen national pediatric professional organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, Academic Pediatric Association, and the American College of Surgeons in response to the Newtown school shooting. We called for action in three areas: reinstating and revising the ban on assault weapons and large ammunition magazines; improving quality and availability of mental health services; and reducing the exposure our children have to media violence. In addition, we called for increasing research on the relationship of these factors on the epidemic of death and injury to children caused by firearm violence and for ending restrictions to this research imposed by Congress.
We are gratified the plan President Obama recently announced addresses all of these issues. The president called for public support of these initiatives, and we strongly agree. As physicians who care for children and families devastated by gun violence, we know first-hand the importance of taking action that will begin to make the environment in St. Louis safer for our children. It has been done in many other economically advanced countries, and we can do it in the United States.
As Gabrielle Giffords said to Congress: “Too many children are dying. Too many children. We must do something. It will be hard, but the time is now. You must act. Be bold, be courageous. Americans are counting on you.” Our children are counting on us!
Regarding Drs. Kennedy, Jaffe & Keller’s editorial on child gun deaths, “Gun violence is a pediatric public health crisis” (Feb. 19):
They quote statistics that would lead the reader to believe that child gun deaths are a national public health crisis. They suggest that there is an epidemic of gun violence that threatens the safety, health and well-being of our children and devote considerable print to listing the number of children killed or treated for gunshot injuries at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. However, most of the individual cases they report suggest that accidental shootings are the main culprit for these injuries, and that inadequate gun storage at home is to blame. In reality, as is obvious from the daily reporting by the Post-Dispatch of area gun violence, most of the victims of these gun-related deaths and injuries are inner-city residents and their injuries are not accidental.
According to reliable statistical data reported in 2009 covering the years 1904-2006, from the National Center for Health Statistics (1981 on) and the National Safety Council (prior to 1981), while the number of privately owned guns in the U.S. is at an all-time high, and rises by about 4.5 million per year, the firearm accident death rate is at an all-time annual low, 0.2 per 100,000 population, down 94 percent since the all-time high in 1904. Since 1930, the annual number of such deaths has decreased 80 percent, to an all-time low, while the U.S. population has more than doubled and the number of firearms has quintupled. Among children, such deaths have decreased 90 percent since 1975.
Today, the odds are more than a million to one against a child in the U.S. dying in a firearm accident. According to the 2009 data, in reality among all child accidental deaths nationally, firearms were involved in 1.1 percent, compared to motor vehicles (41 percent), suffocation (21 percent), drowning (15 percent), fires (8 percent), pedal cycles (2 percent), poisoning (2 percent), falls (1.9 percent), environmental factors (1.5 percent), and medical mistakes (1 percent). Since the difference between accidental deaths due to medical mistakes (1 percent) and accidental deaths due to firearms (1.1 percent) is only 0.1 percentage points, perhaps we should consider a ban on pediatricians along with the ban they propose on firearms and large-capacity magazines.
1. Where there are more guns there is more homicide (literature review).
Our review of the academic literature found that a broad array of evidence indicates that gun availability is a risk factor for homicide, both in the United States and across high-income countries. Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicate that in homes, cities, states and regions in the US, where there are more guns, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide.
Hepburn, Lisa; Hemenway, David. Firearm availability and homicide: A review of the literature. Aggression and Violent Behavior: A Review Journal. 2004; 9:417-40.
2. Across high-income nations, more guns = more homicide.
We analyzed the relationship between homicide and gun availability using data from 26 developed countries from the early 1990s. We found that across developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides. These results often hold even when the United States is excluded.
Hemenway, David; Miller, Matthew. Firearm availability and homicide rates across 26 high income countries. Journal of Trauma. 2000; 49:985-88.
3. Across states, more guns = more homicide
Using a validated proxy for firearm ownership, we analyzed the relationship between firearm availability and homicide across 50 states over a ten year period (1988-1997).
After controlling for poverty and urbanization, for every age group, people in states with many guns have elevated rates of homicide, particularly firearm homicide.
Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. Household firearm ownership levels and homicide rates across U.S. regions and states, 1988-1997. American Journal of Public Health. 2002: 92:1988-1993.
4. Across states, more guns = more homicide (2)
Using survey data on rates of household gun ownership, we examined the association between gun availability and homicide across states, 2001-2003. We found that states with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide. This relationship held for both genders and all age groups, after accounting for rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and resource deprivation (e.g., poverty). There was no association between gun prevalence and non-firearm homicide.
Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. State-level homicide victimization rates in the U.S. in relation to survey measures of household firearm ownership, 2001-2003. Social Science and Medicine. 2007; 64:656-64.
Jeudi 1er octobre a lieu une nouvelle tuerie à l’Université Umpqua dans l’Oregon, faisant 10 morts. Comme à chaque nouvelle tuerie à l’aide d’une arme à feu, de nombreuses voix s’élèvent pour mettre en place des politiques restreignant le droit de détenir et de porter des armes. Portées par l’émotion, elles réclament toujours plus de politiques répressives et liberticides. Bien que compréhensibles, ces demandes n’en sont pas moins illégitimes, et il s’agit de défendre cette liberté fondamentale qu’est le droit de détenir et de porter des armes.
Jeudi dernier, le matin, Chris Harper Mercer amène 6 armes à feu sur le campus de l’Université Umpqua et ouvre le feu sur des étudiants, faisant 9 morts. Il meurt ensuite lors d’un échange de tirs avec la police. Face à cette nouvelle tragédie, nous ne pouvons qu’avoir dans notre cœur les familles des victimes, et leur assurer de nos condoléances les plus sincères.
Mais l’émotion générée par cette tuerie, bien que légitime, doit-elle servir de base à des restrictions sur des libertés fondamentales ? L’État américain devrait-il restreindre encore le droit de détention et de port d’armes des honnêtes citoyens américains, comme Barack Obama l’a suggéré ?
Comme dans tous les débats enflammés qui font suite à des événements tragiques, il s’agit de raison garder. La proposition simple consistant à dire « le tueur était armé, restreignons donc l’accès légal aux armes à feu » peut sembler logique au premier abord, mais en réalité, elle ignore complètement le contexte bien plus complexe de la question du port d’arme aux États-Unis. Car en matière d’armes à feu comme dans d’autres, il y a ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas.
Il est en effet essentiel de mettre les choses en perspective : les tueries de masse, bien que tragiques, restent statistiquement extrêmement rares. Moins de 0,2% des homicides sont liés à des tueries de masse.
De manière plus large et malgré la perception générale du contraire, le taux de crime aux États-Unis est en baisse constante depuis plus de 20 ans.
Même le taux d’homicides par armes à feu est en baisse, de 49% depuis 1993.
Ainsi, depuis plus de 20 ans aux États-Unis, le taux de crime diminue, et ce malgré un nombre record d’armes à feu détenus par des Américains. Dans le même temps, le nombre de permis de port d’arme en public (« concealed carry permit ») a lui aussi augmenté. « Plus d’armes = plus de crimes », vraiment ?
Mais au-delà des crimes demeure un fait peu rappelé dans les débats qui suivent les tueries aux États-Unis : avec plus de 300 millions d’armes à feu en circulation, les citoyens américains utilisent massivement leurs armes pour des motifs légitimes. Parmi ceux-ci, on retrouve la collection, la chasse, le tir sportif ou encore la défense de soi et de son prochain.
Ainsi, plus de 99,9% des Américains propriétaires légaux d’armes n’ont jamais utilisé celles-ci pour causer du tort à autrui. De quel droit viendrait-on restreindre leurs libertés parce qu’un dément a utilisé ses propres armes à feu pour nuire à autrui ?
Non seulement l’immense majorité de ces détenteurs légaux d’armes à feu ne cause pas de tort à autrui, mais elle empêche des crimes et sauvent des vies. Combien de crimes n’ont jamais eu lieu parce que des criminels violents, de peur de se faire abattre, ont été dissuadés d’agresser autrui ? Nous ne connaîtrons malheureusement jamais ce chiffre. À défaut, nous avons cependant des estimations du nombre de citoyens américains ayant en effet utilisé leurs armes pour se défendre d’un crime, et le chiffre est conséquent : d’après un rapport du National Research Council, les armes sont utilisées aux États-Unis pour se protéger d’un crime de 500.000 à 3.000.000 fois chaque année.
Ainsi, ce qu’on voit ce sont les crimes commis avec des armes à feu, qui font toujours grand bruit. Ce qu’on ne voit pas, ce sont les utilisations massivement plus nombreuses de ces mêmes armes pour des motifs légitimes, y compris la protection de la vie humaine. Jamais vous n’entendrez évoquer dans des médias traditionnels ces centaines de milliers de citoyens américains qui empêchent des crimes chaque année.
Mais si des mesures restrictives sur les armes à feu empêchaient effectivement leurs utilisations légitimes, elles permettraient au moins d’empêcher les dérangés de faire des tueries de masse, n’est-ce-pas ? On peut en douter. En France la détention d’armes à feu est strictement limitée, le port d’arme est interdit, et cela n’empêche aucunement les fusillades. Par définition, un criminel ne respecte pas la loi. Un fou souhaitant commettre une tuerie trouvera toujours les outils nécessaires. Les seules personnes concernées par les lois sur les armes à feu sont les citoyens honnêtes et pacifiques.
Le droit de détenir et de porter des armes est une liberté fondamentale. La vive émotion suscitée par une telle tragédie ne doit pas nous faire oublier que l’immense majorité des armes à feu aux États-Unis sont possédées par d’honnêtes citoyens ne voulant causer de tort à personne. De tels événements ne doivent pas être instrumentalisés pour restreindre des libertés, qu’il s’agisse de celle de la détention et du port d’armes ou celle du respect de notre vie privée face à la surveillance étatique.
Que faire alors pour empêcher ces tragédies ? Il paraît essentiel de se pencher sur l’origine réelle de ces tragédies : les tireurs et leurs motivations, et non l’outil qu’ils utilisent. Qu’est-ce qui les amène à commettre de telles atrocités, et que pouvons-nous changer à cela ?
Toutefois malgré ces efforts, il paraît vain de souhaiter en finir avec la violence. Certaines personnes seront toujours promptes à agresser autrui. Et face à ces personnes-là, les citoyens honnêtes doivent pouvoir s’armer pour leur défense. Cela n’a pas été le cas sur le campus de l’université dans l’Oregon qui était une « gun free zone », une zone où les citoyens honnêtes en possession de permis de port d’arme ne peuvent la porter. Le tueur avait ainsi le champ libre, sachant que ses victimes seraient incapables de se défendre avant l’arrivée de la police.
Bangers v bullets
A gun is now more likely to kill you than a car is
The Economist
Jan 10th 2015
New York
ACCORDING to data gathered by the Centres for Disease Control (CDC), deaths caused by cars in America are in long-term decline. Improved technology, tougher laws and less driving by young people have all led to safer streets and highways. Deaths by guns, though—the great majority suicides, accidents or domestic violence—have been trending slightly upwards. This year, if the trend continues, they will overtake deaths on the roads.
The Centre for American Progress first spotted last February that the lines would intersect. Now, on its reading, new data to the end of 2012 support the view that guns will surpass cars this year as the leading killer of under 25s. Bloomberg Government has gone further. Its compilation of the CDC data in December concluded that guns would be deadlier for all age groups.
Comparing the two national icons, cars and guns, yields “a statistic that really resonates with people”, says Chelsea Parsons, co-author of the report for the Centre for American Progress. Resonance is certainly needed. There are about 320m people in the United States, and nearly as many civilian firearms. And although the actual rate of gun ownership is declining, enthusiasts are keeping up the number in circulation. Black Friday on November 28th kicked off such a shopping spree that the FBI had to carry out 175,000 instant background checks (three checks a second), a record for that day, just for sales covered by the extended Brady Act of 1998, the only serious bit of gun-curbing legislation passed in recent history.
Many sales escape that oversight, however. Everytown for Gun Safety, a movement backed by Mike Bloomberg, a former mayor of New York, has investigated loopholes in online gun sales and found that one in 30 users of Armslist classifieds has a criminal record that forbids them to own firearms. Private reselling of guns draws no attention, unless it crosses state lines.
William Vizzard, a professor of criminal justice at California State University at Sacramento, points out that guns also don’t wear out as fast as cars. “I compare a gun to a hammer or a crowbar,” he says. “Even if you stopped making guns today, you might not see a real change in the number of guns for decades.”
Motor vehicles, because they are operated on government-built roads, have been subject to licensing and registration, in the interests of public safety, for more than a century. But guns are typically kept at home. That private space is shielded by the Fourth Amendment just as “the right to bear arms” is protected by the Second, making government control difficult.
Car technologies and road laws are ever-evolving: in 2014, for example, the National Highways Traffic Safety Administration announced its plan to phase in mandatory rear-view cameras on new light vehicles, while New York City lowered its speed limit for local roads. By contrast, safety features on firearms—such as smartguns unlocked by an owner’s thumbprint or a radio-frequency encryption—are opposed by the National Rifle Association, whose allies in Congress also block funding for the sort of public-health research that might show, in even clearer detail, the cost of America’s love affair with guns.
Voir de même:
Technology
America’s Top Killing Machine
Gun deaths are poised to surpass automobile deaths in the United States this year.
Adrienne LaFrance
The Atlantic
Jan 12, 2015
For the better part of a century, the machine most likely to kill an American has been the automobile.
Car crashes killed 33,561 people in 2012, the most recent year for which data is available, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Firearms killed 32,251 people in the United States in 2011, the most recent year for which the Centers for Disease Control has data.
But this year gun deaths are expected to surpass car deaths. That’s according to a Center for American Progress report, which cites CDC data that shows guns will kill more Americans under 25 than cars in 2015. Already more than a quarter of the teenagers—15 years old and up—who die of injuries in the United States are killed in gun-related incidents, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
A similar analysis by Bloomberg three years ago found shooting deaths in 2015 « will probably rise to almost 33,000, and those related to autos will decline to about 32,000, based on the 10-year average trend. » And from The Economist, which wrote about the projection over the weekend:
Comparing the two national icons, cars and guns, yields “a statistic that really resonates with people, » says Chelsea Parsons, co-author of the report for the Centre for American Progress. Resonance is certainly needed. There are about 320 [million] people in the United States, and nearly as many civilian firearms. And although the actual rate of gun ownership is declining, enthusiasts are keeping up the number in circulation.
The figures may say more about a nation’s changing relationship with the automobile than they reveal about America’s ongoing obsession with guns.
The number of fatalities on the roads in the United States has been going down for years as fewer young people drive, car safety technology improves, and even as gas prices climb. (Lower gas prices are correlated with more deaths. A $2 drop in gasoline is linked to some 9,000 additional road fatalities per year in the United States, NPR recently reported.) Though even as fatal transportation incidents dropped in 2013, they accounted for two in five fatalities in the workplace in the United States that year, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
CDC data on firearms offers a more complicated picture, in part because of how the agency categorizes causes of death. Gun deaths can include suicides, homicides, accidental firearms discharges, and even legal killings—but the overall data picture is incomplete. Since 2008, some county-level deaths have been left out to avoid inadvertent privacy breaches. And the number of police shootings—including arrest-related deaths, which are recorded but not made public, according to The Washington Post—are notoriously evasive.
The record of firearm deaths in the United States is murkier still because of how much is at stake politically. Firearm safety remains one of the most divisive issues in the country, with advocates on both sides cherry-picking data to support arguments about the extent to which gun regulation is necessary. It’s not even clear how many guns are out there in the first place, as the Pew Research Center pointed out in a 2013 study: « Respondent error or misstatement in surveys about gun ownership is a widely acknowledged concern of researchers. People may be reluctant to disclose ownership, especially if they are concerned that there may be future restrictions on gun possession or if they acquired their firearms illegally. »
We do know American gun ownership far outstrips gun ownership in other countries. “With less than 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States is home to 35-50 percent of the world’s civilian-owned guns,” according to the Small Arms Survey.
And while the number of firearm homicides dropped dramatically over a 20-year period ending in 2011, the percentage of violent crimes involving firearms has stayed fairly constant, according to the 2013 survey. In other words, even when fewer people die from gun violence, violent crimes involving guns are still happening at the same rate. It’s also true that as the gun homicide rate has declined in the United States, suicides now account for the majority of gun deaths, according to Pew.
Data complexities aside, there is much to learn about a culture from the technologies that kill its people. In the 19th century, before modern labor laws were established, thousands of American workers died in textile mills and other factories. Heavy machinery was hazardous—and violent deaths often made headlines—but chemicals and asbestos killed many workers, too. Workers who made baked enamelware died after inhaling powdered glaze, and textile workers warned of the « kiss of death » from a loom that required its operator to suck a thread through the shuttle’s needle—which meant breathing toxic lint and dust, too.
Americans have been drawing connections between guns and cars for more than a century, since the dawn of the automobile age.
In 1911, The New York Times cited new traffic laws and gun regulations—including imprisonment rather than a monetary fine for people caught carrying pistols—as responsible for driving down the firearm and automobile death rates compared to the year before. But the larger public health risk in those days was infectious disease, which were responsible for almost half of the deaths among Americans in large cities at the turn of the century. It was around that time that officials began collecting reliable annual mortality statistics, according to a 2004 National Bureau of Economic Research paper about public health improvements.
Today, overall accidents are the fifth leading cause of death, according to CDC data. Americans are most likely to die from heart disease—followed by cancer, chronic respiratory disease, and stroke.
The gun debate in the United States has changed a lot over the last 20 years. Support for gun control has declined sharply as support for gun rights has risen, as we noted earlier this week. Those trends are evident in data from a range of sources including Gallup and the Pew Research Center.
A complicated mix of emotions, attitudes and perceptions go into how people feel about guns, but when you look at the data, two points help explain the drop in support for gun control. Over the same period of time the violent crime rate has also dropped sharply. And the partisan divides that have come to define U.S. politics have pushed into the gun control debate.
The decline in violent crime over the past 25 years has been remarkable. In 1990, there were 729 violent crimes reported for every 100,000 people in the United States, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Statistics. The number got as high as 757 in 1992 – and then it began to fall steadily over the next 20 years.
By 2012, the figure was down to 386 violent crimes per 100,000 people.
Chapter 1: Overview
National rates of gun homicide and other violent gun crimes are strikingly lower now than during their peak in the mid-1990s, paralleling a general decline in violent crime, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of government data. Beneath the long-term trend, though, are big differences by decade: Violence plunged through the 1990s, but has declined less dramatically since 2000.Compared with 1993, the peak of U.S. gun homicides, the firearm homicide rate was 49% lower in 2010, and there were fewer deaths, even though the nation’s population grew. The victimization rate for other violent crimes with a firearm—assaults, robberies and sex crimes—was 75% lower in 2011 than in 1993. Violent non-fatal crime victimization overall (with or without a firearm) also is down markedly (72%) over two decades.Nearly all the decline in the firearm homicide rate took place in the 1990s; the downward trend stopped in 2001 and resumed slowly in 2007. The victimization rate for other gun crimes plunged in the 1990s, then declined more slowly from 2000 to 2008. The rate appears to be higher in 2011 compared with 2008, but the increase is not statistically significant. Violent non-fatal crime victimization overall also dropped in the 1990s before declining more slowly from 2000 to 2010, then ticked up in 2011.Despite national attention to the issue of firearm violence, most Americans are unaware that gun crime is lower today than it was two decades ago. According to a new Pew Research Center survey, today 56% of Americans believe gun crime is higher than 20 years ago and only 12% think it is lower.Looking back 50 years, the U.S. gun homicide rate began rising in the 1960s, surged in the 1970s, and hit peaks in 1980 and the early 1990s. (The number of homicides peaked in the early 1990s.) The plunge in homicides after that meant that firearm homicide rates in the late 2000s were equal to those not seen since the early 1960s.1 The sharp decline in the U.S. gun homicide rate, combined with a slower decrease in the gun suicide
rate, means that gun suicides now account for six-in-ten firearms deaths, the highest share since at least 1981.Trends for robberies followed a similar long-term trajectory as homicides (National Research Council, 2004), hitting a peak in the early 1990s before declining.This report examines trends in firearm homicide, non-fatal violent gun crime victimization and non-fatal violent crime victimization overall since 1993. Its findings on firearm crime are based mainly on analysis of data from two federal agencies. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, using information from death certificates, are the source of rates, counts and trends for all firearm deaths, homicide and suicide, unless otherwise specified. The Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey, a household survey conducted by the Census Bureau, supplies annual estimates of non-fatal crime victimization, including those where firearms are used, regardless of whether the crimes were reported to police. Where relevant, this report also quotes from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (see text box at the end of this chapter and the Methodology appendix for more discussion about data sources).Researchers have studied the decline in firearm crime and violent crime for many years, and though there are theories to explain the decline, there is no consensus among those who study the issue as to why it happened.There also is debate about the extent of gun ownership in the U.S., although no disagreement that the U.S. has more civilian firearms, both total and per capita, than other nations. Compared with other developed nations, the U.S. has a higher homicide rate and higher rates of gun ownership, but not higher rates for all other crimes. (See Chapter 5 for more details.)In the months since the mass shooting at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school in December, the public is paying close attention to the topic of firearms; according to a recent Pew Research Center survey (Pew Research Center, April 2013) no story received more public attention from mid-March to early April than the debate over gun control. Reducing crime has moved up as a priority for the public in polling this year.Mass shootings are a matter of great public interest and concern. They also are a relatively small share of shootings overall. According to a Bureau of Justice Statistics review, homicides that claimed at least three lives accounted for less than 1% of all homicide deaths from 1980 to 2008. These homicides, most of which are shootings, increased as a share of all homicides from 0.5% in 1980 to 0.8% in 2008, according to the bureau’s data. A Congressional Research Service report, using a definition of four deaths or more, counted 547 deaths from mass shootings in the U.S. from 1983 to 2012.2Looking at the larger topic of firearm deaths, there were 31,672 deaths from guns in the U.S. in 2010. Most (19,392) were suicides; the gun suicide rate has been higher than the gun homicide rate since at least 1981, and the gap is wider than it was in 1981.Knowledge About Crime
Despite the attention to gun violence in recent months, most Americans are unaware that gun crime is markedly lower than it was two decades ago. A new Pew Research Center survey (March 14-17) found that 56% of Americans believe the number of crimes involving a gun is higher than it was 20 years ago; only 12% say it is lower and 26% say it stayed the same. (An additional 6% did not know or did not answer.)Men (46%) are less likely than women (65%) to say long-term gun crime is up. Young adults, ages 18 to 29, are markedly less likely than other adults to say long-term crime is up—44% do, compared with more than half of other adults. Minority adults are more likely than non-Hispanic whites to say that long-term gun crime is up, 62% compared with 53%.Asked about trends in the number of gun crimes “in recent years,” a plurality of 45% believe the number has gone up, 39% say it is about the same and 10% say it has gone down. (An additional 5% did not know or did not answer.) As with long-term crime, women (57%) are more likely than men (32%) to say that gun crime has increased in recent years. So are non-white adults (54%) compared with whites (41%). Adults ages 50 and older (51%) are more likely than those ages 18-49 (42%) to believe gun crime is up.What is Behind the Crime Decline?
Researchers continue to debate the key factors behind changing crime rates, which is part of a larger discussion about the predictors of crime.3 There is consensus that demographics played some role: The outsized post-World War II baby boom, which produced a large number of people in the high-crime ages of 15 to 20 in the 1960s and 1970s, helped drive crime up in those years.A review by the National Academy of Sciences of factors driving recent crime trends (Blumstein and Rosenfeld, 2008) cited a decline in rates in the early 1980s as the young boomers got older, then a flare-up by mid-decade in conjunction with a rising street market for crack cocaine, especially in big cities. It noted recruitment of a younger cohort of drug seller with greater willingness to use guns. By the early 1990s, crack markets withered in part because of lessened demand, and the vibrant national economy made it easier for even low-skilled young people to find jobs rather than get involved in crime.At the same time, a rising number of people ages 30 and older were incarcerated, due in part to stricter laws, which helped restrain violence among this age group. It is less clear, researchers say, that innovative policing strategies and police crackdowns on use of guns by younger adults played a significant role in reducing crime.Some researchers have proposed additional explanations as to why crime levels plunged so suddenly, including increased access to abortion and lessened exposure to lead. According to one hypothesis, legalization of abortion after the 1973 Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision resulted in fewer unwanted births, and unwanted children have an increased risk of growing up to become criminals. Another theory links reduced crime to 1970s-era reductions in lead in gasoline; children’s exposure to lead causes brain damage that could be associated with violent behavior. The National Academy of Sciences review said it was unlikely that either played a major role, but researchers continue to explore both factors.The plateau in national violent crime rates has raised interest in the topic of how local differences might influence crime levels and trends. Crime reductions took place across the country in the 1990s, but since 2000, patterns have varied more by metropolitan area or city.4One focus of interest is that gun ownership varies widely by region and locality. The National Academy of Sciences review of possible influences on crime trends said there is good evidence of a link between firearm ownership and firearm homicide at the local level; “the causal direction of this relationship remains in dispute, however, with some researchers maintaining that firearm violence elevates rates of gun ownership, but not the reverse.”There is substantial variation within and across regions and localities in a number of other realms, which complicates any attempt to find a single cause for national trends. Among the variations of interest to researchers are policing techniques, punishment policies, culture, economics and residential segregation.Internationally, a decline in crime, especially property crime, has been documented in many countries since the mid-1990s. According to the authors of a 30-country study on criminal victimization (Van Dijk et al., 2007), there is no general agreement on all the reasons for this decline. They say there is a general consensus that demographic change—specifically, the shrinking proportion of adolescents across Europe—is a common factor causing decreases across Western countries. They also cite wider use of security measures in homes and businesses as a factor in reducing property crime.But other potential explanations—such as better policing or increased imprisonment—do not apply in Europe, where policies vary widely, the report noted
Among the major findings of this Pew Research Center report:
U.S. Firearm Deaths
In 2010, there were 3.6 gun homicides per 100,000 people, compared with 7.0 in 1993, according to CDC data.
In 2010, CDC data counted 11,078 gun homicide deaths, compared with 18,253 in 1993.5
Men and boys make up the vast majority (84% in 2010) of gun homicide victims. The firearm homicide rate also is more than five times as high for males of all ages (6.2 deaths per 100,000 people) as it is for females (1.1 deaths per 100,000 people).
By age group, 69% of gun homicide victims in 2010 were ages 18 to 40, an age range that was 31% of the population that year. Gun homicide rates also are highest for adults ages 18 to 24 and 25 to 40.
A disproportionate share of gun homicide victims are black (55% in 2010, compared with the 13% black share of the population). Whites were 25% of victims but 65% of the population in 2010. Hispanics were 17% of victims and 16% of the population in 2010.
The firearm suicide rate (6.3 per 100,000 people) is higher than the firearm homicide rate and has come down less sharply. The number of gun suicide deaths (19,392 in 2010) outnumbered gun homicides, as has been true since at least 1981.
U.S. Firearm Crime Victimization
In 2011, the NCVS estimated there were 181.5 gun crime victimizations for non-fatal violent crime (aggravated assault, robbery and sex crimes) per 100,000 Americans ages 12 and older, compared with 725.3 in 1993.
In terms of numbers, the NCVS estimated there were about 1.5 million non-fatal gun crime victimizations in 1993 among U.S. residents ages 12 and older, compared with 467,000 in 2011.
U.S. Other Non-fatal Crime
The victimization rate for all non-fatal violent crime among those ages 12 and older—simple and aggravated assaults, robberies and sex crimes, with or without firearms—dropped 53% from 1993 to 2000, and 49% from 2000 to 2010. It rose 17% from 2010 to 2011.
Although not the topic of this report, the rate of property crimes—burglary, motor vehicle theft and theft—also declined from 1993 to 2011, by 61%. The rate for these types of crimes was 351.8 per 100,000 people ages 12 and older in 1993, 190.4 in 2000 and 138.7 in 2011.
Context
The number of firearms available for sale to or possessed by U.S. civilians (about 310 million in 2009, according to the Congressional Research Service) has grown in recent years, and the 2009 per capita rate of one person per gun had roughly doubled since 1968. It is not clear, though, how many U.S. households own guns or whether that share has changed over time.
Crime stories accounted for 17% of the total time devoted to news on local television broadcasts in 2012, compared with 29% in 2005, according to Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Crime trails only traffic and weather as the most common type of story on these newscasts.
About the Data
Findings in this report are based on two main data sources:
Data on homicides and other deaths are from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based on information from death certificates filed in state vital statistics offices, which includes causes of death reported by attending physicians, medical examiners and coroners. Data also include demographic information about decedents reported by funeral directors, who obtain that information from family members and other informants. Population data, used in constructing rates, come from the Census Bureau. Most statistics were obtained via the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control’s Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS), available from URL: http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/wisqars. Data are available beginning in 1981; suitable population data do not exist for prior years. For more details, see Appendix 4.
Estimates of crime victimization are from the National Crime Victimization Survey, a sample survey conducted for the Bureau of Justice Statistics by the Census Bureau. Although the survey began in 1973, this report uses data since 1993, the first year employing an intensive methodological redesign. The survey collects information about crimes against people and households, but not businesses. It provides estimates of victimization for the population ages 12 and older living in households and non-institutional group quarters; therefore it does not include populations such as homeless people, visiting foreign tourists and business travelers, or those living in institutions such as military barracks or mental hospitals. The survey collects information about the crimes of rape, sexual assault, personal robbery, aggravated and simple assault, household burglary, theft, and motor vehicle theft. For more details, see Appendix 4.
Roadmap to the Report
The remainder of this report is organized as follows. Chapter 2 explores trends in firearm homicide and all firearm deaths, as well as patterns by gender, race and age. Chapter 3 analyzes trends in non-fatal violent gun crime victimizations, as well as patterns by gender, race and age. Chapter 4 looks at trends and subgroup patterns for non-fatal violent crime victimizations overall. Chapter 5 examines issues related to the topic of firearms: crime news, crime as a public priority, U.S. gun ownership data, and comparison of ownership and crime rates with those in other nations. Appendices 1-3 consist of detailed tables with annual data for firearm deaths, homicides and suicides, as well as non-fatal firearm and overall non-fatal violent crime victimization, for all groups and by subgroup. Appendix 4 explains the report’s methodology.Notes on Terminology
All references to whites, blacks and others are to the non-Hispanic components of those populations. Hispanics can be of any race.“Aggravated assault,” as defined by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, is an attack or attempted attack with a weapon, regardless of whether an injury occurred, and an attack without a weapon when serious injury results.The terms “firearm” and “gun” are used interchangeably.“Homicides,” which come from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, are fatal injuries inflicted by another person with intent to injure or kill. Deaths due to legal intervention or operations of war are excluded. Justifiable homicide is not identified.“Robbery,” as defined by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, is a completed or attempted theft, directly from a person, of property or cash by force or threat of force, with or without a weapon, and with or without injury.“Sex crime,” as defined by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, includes attempted rape, rape and sexual assault.“Simple assault,” as defined by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, is an attack (or attempted assault) without a weapon resulting either in no injury, minor injury (for example, bruises, black eyes, cuts, scratches or swelling) or in undetermined injury requiring less than two days of hospitalization.“Victimization” is based on self-reporting in the National Crime Victimization Survey, which includes Americans ages 12 and older. For personal crimes (which in this report include assault, robbery and sex crime), it is expressed as a rate based on the number of victimizations per 100,000 U.S. residents ages 12 and older. See the Methodology appendix for more details.Acknowledgments
Many researchers and scholars contributed to this report. Senior writer D’Vera Cohn wrote the body of the report. Paul Taylor, senior vice president of the Pew Research Center, provided editorial guidance. Mark Hugo Lopez, senior researcher and associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center, managed the report’s data analysis and wrote the report’s methodology appendix. Catherine A. Gallagher, director of the Cochrane Collaboration of the College for Policy at George Mason University, provided guidance on the report’s data analysis and comments on earlier drafts of the report. Lopez and Kim Parker, associate director of the Center’s Social & Demographic Trends project, managed the report’s development and production. Kevin T. Maass, research associate at the Cochrane Collaboration at George Mason University’s College for Policy, provided analysis of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. Research Assistants Eileen Patten and Anna Brown number-checked the report and prepared charts and tables. Patten also conducted background research on trends in crime internationally. The report was copy-edited by Marcia Kramer of Kramer Editing Services.The report also benefited from a review by Professor Richard Felson of Pennsylvania State University. The authors also thank Andrew Kohut and Scott Keeter for their comments on an earlier draft of the report. In addition, the authors thank Kohut, Michael Dimock, Keeter and Alec Tyson, our colleagues at the Pew Research Center, for guidance on the crime knowledge public opinion survey questionnaire. Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Research Center, provided computational assistance for the report’s analysis of homicide rates by race and ethnicity.Finally, Michael Planty and Jennifer Truman of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice provided data, invaluable guidance and advice on the report’s analysis of the National Crime Victimization Survey.See Cooper and Smith, 2011. The rate declined through at least 2010. ↩
A USA Today analysis in 2013 found that 934 people died since 2006 in mass shootings, defined as claiming at least four victims, and that most were killed by people they knew: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/21/mass-shootings-domestic-violence-nra/1937041/ ↩
Much of this section draws from Blumstein and Rosenfeld, 2008. ↩
The diversity of homicide trend by city was the topic of a recent forum, “Putting Homicide Rates in Their Place,” sponsored by the Urban Institute. ↩
There were 11,101 gun homicide deaths in 2011 and the gun homicide rate remained 3.6 per 100,000 people, according to preliminary CDC data. ↩
The Problem Isn’t Guns or White Men
The ticking time bombs that the Left lets loose among us
Ann Coulter
Front Page magazine
October 8, 2015
The media act as if they’re performing a public service by refusing to release details about the perpetrator of the recent mass shooting at a community college in Oregon. But we were given plenty of information about Dylan Roof, Adam Lanza, James Holmes and Jared Loughner.
Now, quick: Name the mass shooters at the Chattanooga military recruitment center; the Washington Navy Yard; the high school in Washington state; Fort Hood (the second time) and the Christian college in California. All those shootings also occurred during the last three years.
The answers are: Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez, Kuwaiti; Aaron Alexis, black, possibly Barbadian-American; Jaylen Ray Fryberg, Indian; Ivan Antonio Lopez, Hispanic; and One L. Goh, Korean immigrant. (While I’m here: Why are we bringing in immigrants who are mentally unstable?)
There’s a rigid formula in media accounts of mass shootings: If possible, blame it on angry white men; when that won’t work, blame it on guns.
The perpetrator of the latest massacre, Chris Harper-Mercer, was a half-black immigrant, so the media are refusing to get too specific about him. They don’t want to reward the fiend with publicity!
But as people hear details the media are not anxious to provide, they realize that, once again: It’s a crazy person. How long is this going to go on?
When will the public rise up and demand that the therapeutic community stop loosing these nuts on the public? After the fact, scores of psychiatrists are always lining up to testify that the defendant was legally insane, unable to control his actions. That information would be a lot more helpful before the wanton slaughter.
Product manufacturers are required by law to anticipate that some idiot might try to dry his cat in the microwave. But a person whose job it is to evaluate mental illness can’t be required to ascertain whether the person sitting in his office might be unstable enough to kill?
Maybe at their next convention, psychiatrists could take up a resolution demanding an end to our absurd patient privacy and involuntary commitment laws.
True, America has more privately owned guns than most other countries, and mass shootings are, by definition, committed with guns. But we also make it a lot more difficult than any other country to involuntarily commit crazy people.
Since the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1960s, civil commitment in the United States almost always requires a finding of dangerousness — both imminent and physical — as determined by a judge. Most of the rest of the world has more reasonable standards — you might almost call them « common sense » — allowing family, friends and even acquaintances to petition for involuntarily commitment, with the final decision made by doctors.
The result of our laissez-faire approach to dangerous psychotics is visible in the swarms of homeless people on our streets, crazy people in our prison populations and the prevalence of mass shootings.
According to a 2002 report by Central Institute of Mental Health for the European Union, the number of involuntarily detained mental patients, per 100,000 people, in other countries looks like this:
— Austria, 175
— Finland, 218
— Germany, 175
— Sweden, 114
— England, 93
The absolute maximum number of mental patients per 100,000 people who could possibly be institutionalized by the state in the U.S. — voluntarily or involuntarily — is: 17. Yes, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center, there are a grand total of 17 psychiatric beds even available, not necessarily being used. In 1955, there were 340.
After every mass shooting, the left has a lot of fun forcing Republicans to defend guns. Here’s an idea: Why not force Democrats to defend the right of the dangerous mentally ill not to take their medicine?
Liberals will howl about « stigmatizing » the mentally ill, but they sure don’t mind stigmatizing white men or gun owners. About a third of the population consists of white men. Between a third and half of all Americans have guns in the home. If either white men or guns were the main cause of mass murder, no one would be left in the country.
But I notice that every mass murder is committed by someone who is mentally ill. When the common denominator is a characteristic found in about 0.1 percent of the population — I think we’ve found the crucial ingredient!
Democrats won’t be able to help themselves, but to instantly close ranks and defend dangerous psychotics, hauling out the usual meaningless statistics:
— Most mentally ill are not violent!
Undoubtedly true. BUT WE’RE NOT TALKING ABOUT ANOREXICS, AGORAPHOBICS OR OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVES. We were thinking of paranoid schizophrenics.
— The mentally ill are more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violence!
I’ll wager that the percentage of the nation’s 310 million guns that are ever used in a crime is quite a bit lower than the percentage of mentally ill to ever engage in violence.
As with the « most Muslims are peaceful » canard, while a tiny percentage of mentally ill are violent, a gigantic percentage of mass shooters are mentally ill.
How can these heartless Democrats look the parents of dead children in the eye and defend the right of the mentally deranged to store their feces in a shoebox, menace library patrons — and, every now and then, commit mass murder?
The gun debate in the United States has changed a lot over the last 20 years. Support for gun control has declined sharply as support for gun rights has risen, as we noted earlier this week. Those trends are evident in data from a range of sources including Gallup and the Pew Research Center.
A complicated mix of emotions, attitudes and perceptions go into how people feel about guns, but when you look at the data, two points help explain the drop in support for gun control. Over the same period of time the violent crime rate has also dropped sharply. And the partisan divides that have come to define U.S. politics have pushed into the gun control debate.
The decline in violent crime over the past 25 years has been remarkable. In 1990, there were 729 violent crimes reported for every 100,000 people in the United States, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Statistics. The number got as high as 757 in 1992 – and then it began to fall steadily over the next 20 years.
By 2012, the figure was down to 386 violent crimes per 100,000 people.
Caldwell, Leigh (206448258) / NBC News
(This trend is also true for the U.S. murder rate. In 1990, there were 9.4 murders for every 100,000 people, according to the Uniform Crime Statistics. In 2012, there were only 4.7 for every 100,000.)
These numbers aren’t meant to suggest that people’s attitudes about guns affected the violent crime rate, but it could be the other way around.
Despite the headlines about mass shootings, like last week’s in Oregon, in terms of people’s day-to-day lives and the stories in local media, violent crime is less of an issue today than it was in the United States in 1994. The numbers are still high when compared to other developed countries, but low compared to where the country used to be.
That may have played a role in peoples’ attitudes about gun control. The epidemic of violence that dominated news coverage in the late-1980s and early-1990s gave way to news stories about dropping crime rates and safer cities. That’s become the dominant crime story over the past two decades. It’s one thing see coverage of a senseless horrific shooting somewhere far away from you. It’s another thing to see crime scene tape a few blocks away and personally know victims.
The latest data suggest those declines may be starting to reverse themselves, particularly in big cities and if that rising trend continues, attitudes on gun control may shift.
But there is also a political factor in the gun debate that could be harder to change. As the nation has become more politically polarized and voters have retreated into their red and blue camps, the partisan differences on gun control have become much more pronounced.
Overall, support for gun control has indeed dropped, but Democrats and Republicans have moved in different directions.
In 1993, 47% of Republicans and 65% of Democrats supported gun control, according to Pew Research data. That’s an 18-point gap between members of the two parties, with Republicans sitting near 50%.
In 2015, only 26% of Republicans support gun control, in the Pew Research data. But the Democrats have moved in the other direction – 73% now favor gun control. That’s an enormous 47-point gap with the parties at opposite ends of the spectrum on the question.
In other words, the gun control issue has become deeply intertwined with political identity and as we see on other issues – from abortion to gay marriage – overcoming factors tied to political identity to find consensus can be extremely difficult.
Even if Democratic support for gun control grows and even if independents, who tend to hover around the middle, move back above 50% supporting, it’s unlikely the numbers will show support for it climbing in a significant way.
That idea was one of the pillars of the Obama administration’s plan to curb gun violence, and it remains popular with the public. In a poll last December, 59 percent of likely voters said they favor a ban.
But in the 10 years since the previous ban lapsed, even gun control advocates acknowledge a larger truth: The law that barred the sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 made little difference.
It turns out that big, scary military rifles don’t kill the vast majority of the 11,000 Americans murdered with guns each year. Little handguns do.
In 2012, only 322 people were murdered with any kind of rifle, F.B.I. data shows.
The continuing focus on assault weapons stems from the media’s obsessive focus on mass shootings, which disproportionately involve weapons like the AR-15, a civilian version of the military M16 rifle. This, in turn, obscures some grim truths about who is really dying from gunshots.
Annually, 5,000 to 6,000 black men are murdered with guns. Black men amount to only 6 percent of the population. Yet of the 30 Americans on average shot to death each day, half are black males.
It was much the same in the early 1990s when Democrats created and then banned a category of guns they called “assault weapons.” America was then suffering from a spike in gun crime and it seemed like a problem threatening everyone. Gun murders each year had been climbing: 11,000, then 13,000, then 17,000.
Democrats decided to push for a ban of what seemed like the most dangerous guns in America: assault weapons, which were presented by the media as the gun of choice for drug dealers and criminals, and which many in law enforcement wanted to get off the streets.
This politically defined category of guns — a selection of rifles, shotguns and handguns with “military-style” features — only figured in about 2 percent of gun crimes nationwide before the ban.
Handguns were used in more than 80 percent of gun murders each year, but gun control advocates had failed to interest enough of the public in a handgun ban. Handguns were the weapons most likely to kill you, but they were associated by the public with self-defense. (In 2008, the Supreme Court said there was a constitutional right to keep a loaded handgun at home for self-defense.)
Banning sales of military-style weapons resonated with both legislators and the public: Civilians did not need to own guns designed for use in war zones.
On Sept. 13, 1994, President Bill Clinton signed an assault weapons ban into law. It barred the manufacture and sale of new guns with military features and magazines holding more than 10 rounds. But the law allowed those who already owned these guns — an estimated 1.5 million of them — to keep their weapons.
The policy proved costly. Mr. Clinton blamed the ban for Democratic losses in 1994. Crime fell, but when the ban expired, a detailed study found no proof that it had contributed to the decline.
The ban did reduce the number of assault weapons recovered by local police, to 1 percent from roughly 2 percent.
“Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement,” a Department of Justice-funded evaluation concluded.
Still, the majority of Americans continued to support a ban on assault weapons.
One reason: The use of these weapons may be rare over all, but they’re used frequently in the gun violence that gets the most media coverage, mass shootings.
The criminologist James Alan Fox at Northeastern University estimates that there have been an average of 100 victims killed each year in mass shootings over the past three decades. That’s less than 1 percent of gun homicide victims.
But these acts of violence in schools and movie theaters have come to define the problem of gun violence in America.
Most Americans do not know that gun homicides have decreased by 49 percent since 1993 as violent crime also fell, though rates of gun homicide in the United States are still much higher than those in other developed nations. A Pew survey conducted after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., found that 56 percent of Americans believed wrongly that the rate of gun crime was higher than it was 20 years ago.
Even as homicide rates have held steady or declined for most Americans over the last decade, for black men the rate has sometimes risen. But it took a handful of mass shootings in 2012 to put gun control back on Congress’s agenda.
AFTER Sandy Hook, President Obama introduced an initiative to reduce gun violence. He laid out a litany of tragedies: the children of Newtown, the moviegoers of Aurora, Colo. But he did not mention gun violence among black men.
To be fair, the president’s first legislative priority after Sandy Hook was universal background checks, a measure that might have shrunk the market for illegal guns used in many urban shootings. But Republicans in Congress killed that effort. The next proposal on his list was reinstating and “strengthening” bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. It also went nowhere.
“We spent a whole bunch of time and a whole bunch of political capital yelling and screaming about assault weapons,” Mayor Mitchell J. Landrieu of New Orleans said. He called it a “zero sum political fight about a symbolic weapon.”
Mr. Landrieu and Mayor Michael A. Nutter of Philadelphia are founders of Cities United, a network of mayors trying to prevent the deaths of young black men. “This is not just a gun issue, this is an unemployment issue, it’s a poverty issue, it’s a family issue, it’s a culture of violence issue,” Mr. Landrieu said.
More than 20 years of research funded by the Justice Department has found that programs to target high-risk people or places, rather than targeting certain kinds of guns, can reduce gun violence.
David M. Kennedy, the director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, argues that the issue of gun violence can seem enormous and intractable without first addressing poverty or drugs. A closer look at the social networks of neighborhoods most afflicted, he says, often shows that only a small number of men drive most of the violence. Identify them and change their behavior, and it’s possible to have an immediate impact.
Working with Professor Kennedy, and building on successes in other cities, New Orleans is now identifying the young men most at risk and intervening to help them get jobs. How well this strategy will work in the long term remains to be seen.
But it’s an approach based on an honest assessment of the real numbers.
Voir de plus:
The Caging of America
Why do we lock up so many people?
Adam Gopnik
The New Yorker
January 30, 2012
Six million people are under correctional supervision in the U.S.—more than were in Stalin’s gulags.
A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.
That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.
For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.
The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.
How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two directions. There’s an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation, which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” traces two ancestral lines, “from the North, the birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of subjugationist discipline.” In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.
William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who died shortly before his masterwork, “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice,” was published, last fall, is the most forceful advocate for the view that the scandal of our prisons derives from the Enlightenment-era, “procedural” nature of American justice. He runs through the immediate causes of the incarceration epidemic: the growth of post-Rockefeller drug laws, which punished minor drug offenses with major prison time; “zero tolerance” policing, which added to the group; mandatory-sentencing laws, which prevented judges from exercising judgment. But his search for the ultimate cause leads deeper, all the way to the Bill of Rights. In a society where Constitution worship is still a requisite on right and left alike, Stuntz startlingly suggests that the Bill of Rights is a terrible document with which to start a justice system—much inferior to the exactly contemporary French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which Jefferson, he points out, may have helped shape while his protégé Madison was writing ours.
The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says, Be just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of announcing general principles—no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done—it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong. Even clauses that Americans are taught to revere are, Stuntz maintains, unworthy of reverence: the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” was designed to protect cruel punishments—flogging and branding—that were not at that time unusual.
The obsession with due process and the cult of brutal prisons, the argument goes, share an essential impersonality. The more professionalized and procedural a system is, the more insulated we become from its real effects on real people. That’s why America is famous both for its process-driven judicial system (“The bastard got off on a technicality,” the cop-show detective fumes) and for the harshness and inhumanity of its prisons. Though all industrialized societies started sending more people to prison and fewer to the gallows in the eighteenth century, it was in Enlightenment-inspired America that the taste for long-term, profoundly depersonalized punishment became most aggravated. The inhumanity of American prisons was as much a theme for Dickens, visiting America in 1842, as the cynicism of American lawyers. His shock when he saw the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia—a “model” prison, at the time the most expensive public building ever constructed in the country, where every prisoner was kept in silent, separate confinement—still resonates:
I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.
Not roused up to stay—that was the point. Once the procedure ends, the penalty begins, and, as long as the cruelty is routine, our civil responsibility toward the punished is over. We lock men up and forget about their existence. For Dickens, even the corrupt but communal debtors’ prisons of old London were better than this. “Don’t take it personally!”—that remains the slogan above the gate to the American prison Inferno. Nor is this merely a historian’s vision. Conrad Black, at the high end, has a scary and persuasive picture of how his counsel, the judge, and the prosecutors all merrily congratulated each other on their combined professional excellence just before sending him off to the hoosegow for several years. If a millionaire feels that way, imagine how the ordinary culprit must feel.
In place of abstraction, Stuntz argues for the saving grace of humane discretion. Basically, he thinks, we should go into court with an understanding of what a crime is and what justice is like, and then let common sense and compassion and specific circumstance take over. There’s a lovely scene in “The Castle,” the Australian movie about a family fighting eminent-domain eviction, where its hapless lawyer, asked in court to point to the specific part of the Australian constitution that the eviction violates, says desperately, “It’s . . . just the vibe of the thing.” For Stuntz, justice ought to be just the vibe of the thing—not one procedural error caught or one fact worked around. The criminal law should once again be more like the common law, with judges and juries not merely finding fact but making law on the basis of universal principles of fairness, circumstance, and seriousness, and crafting penalties to the exigencies of the crime.
The other argument—the Southern argument—is that this story puts too bright a face on the truth. The reality of American prisons, this argument runs, has nothing to do with the knots of procedural justice or the perversions of Enlightenment-era ideals. Prisons today operate less in the rehabilitative mode of the Northern reformers “than in a retributive mode that has long been practiced and promoted in the South,” Perkinson, an American-studies professor, writes. “American prisons trace their lineage not only back to Pennsylvania penitentiaries but to Texas slave plantations.” White supremacy is the real principle, this thesis holds, and racial domination the real end. In response to the apparent triumphs of the sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow. Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. “The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage,” the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of “formal control” (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of “invisible control.” Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system. The system, in this view, is not really broken; it is doing what it was designed to do. Alexander’s grim conclusion: “If mass incarceration is considered as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.”
Northern impersonality and Southern revenge converge on a common American theme: a growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:
Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.
Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.
Yet a spectre haunts all these accounts, North and South, whether process gone mad or penal colony writ large. It is that the epidemic of imprisonment seems to track the dramatic decline in crime over the same period. The more bad guys there are in prison, it appears, the less crime there has been in the streets. The real background to the prison boom, which shows up only sporadically in the prison literature, is the crime wave that preceded and overlapped it.
For those too young to recall the big-city crime wave of the sixties and seventies, it may seem like mere bogeyman history. For those whose entire childhood and adolescence were set against it, it is the crucial trauma in recent American life and explains much else that happened in the same period. It was the condition of the Upper West Side of Manhattan under liberal rule, far more than what had happened to Eastern Europe under socialism, that made neo-con polemics look persuasive. There really was, as Stuntz himself says, a liberal consensus on crime (“Wherever the line is between a merciful justice system and one that abandons all serious effort at crime control, the nation had crossed it”), and it really did have bad effects.
Yet if, in 1980, someone had predicted that by 2012 New York City would have a crime rate so low that violent crime would have largely disappeared as a subject of conversation, he would have seemed not so much hopeful as crazy. Thirty years ago, crime was supposed to be a permanent feature of the city, produced by an alienated underclass of super-predators; now it isn’t. Something good happened to change it, and you might have supposed that the change would be an opportunity for celebration and optimism. Instead, we mostly content ourselves with grudging and sardonic references to the silly side of gentrification, along with a few all-purpose explanations, like broken-window policing. This is a general human truth: things that work interest us less than things that don’t.
So what is the relation between mass incarceration and the decrease in crime? Certainly, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, many experts became persuaded that there was no way to make bad people better; all you could do was warehouse them, for longer or shorter periods. The best research seemed to show, depressingly, that nothing works—that rehabilitation was a ruse. Then, in 1983, inmates at the maximum-security federal prison in Marion, Illinois, murdered two guards. Inmates had been (very occasionally) killing guards for a long time, but the timing of the murders, and the fact that they took place in a climate already prepared to believe that even ordinary humanity was wasted on the criminal classes, meant that the entire prison was put on permanent lockdown. A century and a half after absolute solitary first appeared in American prisons, it was reintroduced. Those terrible numbers began to grow.
And then, a decade later, crime started falling: across the country by a standard measure of about forty per cent; in New York City by as much as eighty per cent. By 2010, the crime rate in New York had seen its greatest decline since the Second World War; in 2002, there were fewer murders in Manhattan than there had been in any year since 1900. In social science, a cause sought is usually a muddle found; in life as we experience it, a crisis resolved is causality established. If a pill cures a headache, we do not ask too often if the headache might have gone away by itself.
All this ought to make the publication of Franklin E. Zimring’s new book, “The City That Became Safe,” a very big event. Zimring, a criminologist at Berkeley Law, has spent years crunching the numbers of what happened in New York in the context of what happened in the rest of America. One thing he teaches us is how little we know. The forty per cent drop across the continent—indeed, there was a decline throughout the Western world— took place for reasons that are as mysterious in suburban Ottawa as they are in the South Bronx. Zimring shows that the usual explanations—including demographic shifts—simply can’t account for what must be accounted for. This makes the international decline look slightly eerie: blackbirds drop from the sky, plagues slacken and end, and there seems no absolute reason that societies leap from one state to another over time. Trends and fashions and fads and pure contingencies happen in other parts of our social existence; it may be that there are fashions and cycles in criminal behavior, too, for reasons that are just as arbitrary.
But the additional forty per cent drop in crime that seems peculiar to New York finally succumbs to Zimring’s analysis. The change didn’t come from resolving the deep pathologies that the right fixated on—from jailing super predators, driving down the number of unwed mothers, altering welfare culture. Nor were there cures for the underlying causes pointed to by the left: injustice, discrimination, poverty. Nor were there any “Presto!” effects arising from secret patterns of increased abortions or the like. The city didn’t get much richer; it didn’t get much poorer. There was no significant change in the ethnic makeup or the average wealth or educational levels of New Yorkers as violent crime more or less vanished. “Broken windows” or “turnstile jumping” policing, that is, cracking down on small visible offenses in order to create an atmosphere that refused to license crime, seems to have had a negligible effect; there was, Zimring writes, a great difference between the slogans and the substance of the time. (Arrests for “visible” nonviolent crime—e.g., street prostitution and public gambling—mostly went down through the period.)
Instead, small acts of social engineering, designed simply to stop crimes from happening, helped stop crime. In the nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots of crimes happened—“hot-spot policing.” The cops also began an aggressive, controversial program of “stop and frisk”—“designed to catch the sharks, not the dolphins,” as Jack Maple, one of its originators, described it—that involved what’s called pejoratively “profiling.” This was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the thousand small clues that policemen recognized already. Minority communities, Zimring emphasizes, paid a disproportionate price in kids stopped and frisked, and detained, but they also earned a disproportionate gain in crime reduced. “The poor pay more and get more” is Zimring’s way of putting it. He believes that a “light” program of stop-and-frisk could be less alienating and just as effective, and that by bringing down urban crime stop-and-frisk had the net effect of greatly reducing the number of poor minority kids in prison for long stretches.
Zimring insists, plausibly, that he is offering a radical and optimistic rewriting of theories of what crime is and where criminals are, not least because it disconnects crime and minorities. “In 1961, twenty six percent of New York City’s population was minority African American or Hispanic. Now, half of New York’s population is—and what that does in an enormously hopeful way is to destroy the rude assumptions of supply side criminology,” he says. By “supply side criminology,” he means the conservative theory of crime that claimed that social circumstances produced a certain net amount of crime waiting to be expressed; if you stopped it here, it broke out there. The only way to stop crime was to lock up all the potential criminals. In truth, criminal activity seems like most other human choices—a question of contingent occasions and opportunity. Crime is not the consequence of a set number of criminals; criminals are the consequence of a set number of opportunities to commit crimes. Close down the open drug market in Washington Square, and it does not automatically migrate to Tompkins Square Park. It just stops, or the dealers go indoors, where dealing goes on but violent crime does not.
And, in a virtuous cycle, the decreased prevalence of crime fuels a decrease in the prevalence of crime. When your friends are no longer doing street robberies, you’re less likely to do them. Zimring said, in a recent interview, “Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. There’s no minimum wage in violent crime.” In a sense, he argues, it’s recreational, part of a life style: “Crime is a routine behavior; it’s a thing people do when they get used to doing it.” And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.
One fact stands out. While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. “New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison. The logic is self-evident if we just transfer it to the realm of white-collar crime: we easily accept that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewar’s-guzzling dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on Third Avenue, another doesn’t naturally start in the next office building. White-collar crime happens through an intersection of pathology and opportunity; getting the S.E.C. busy ending the opportunity is a good way to limit the range of the pathology.
Social trends deeper and less visible to us may appear as future historians analyze what went on. Something other than policing may explain things—just as the coming of cheap credit cards and state lotteries probably did as much to weaken the Mafia’s Five Families in New York, who had depended on loan sharking and numbers running, as the F.B.I. could. It is at least possible, for instance, that the coming of the mobile phone helped drive drug dealing indoors, in ways that helped drive down crime. It may be that the real value of hot spot and stop-and-frisk was that it provided a single game plan that the police believed in; as military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a good plan. But one thing is sure: social epidemics, of crime or of punishment, can be cured more quickly than we might hope with simpler and more superficial mechanisms than we imagine. Throwing a Band-Aid over a bad wound is actually a decent strategy, if the Band-Aid helps the wound to heal itself.
Which leads, further, to one piece of radical common sense: since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime. Neither the streets nor the society is made safer by having marijuana users or peddlers locked up, let alone with the horrific sentences now dispensed so easily. For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two. Would we actually have more fraud and looting of shareholder value if the perpetrators knew that they would lose their bank accounts and their reputation, and have to do community service seven days a week for five years? It seems likely that anyone for whom those sanctions aren’t sufficient is someone for whom no sanctions are ever going to be sufficient. Zimring’s research shows clearly that, if crime drops on the street, criminals coming out of prison stop committing crimes. What matters is the incidence of crime in the world, and the continuity of a culture of crime, not some “lesson learned” in prison.
At the same time, the ugly side of stop-and-frisk can be alleviated. To catch sharks and not dolphins, Zimring’s work suggests, we need to adjust the size of the holes in the nets—to make crimes that are the occasion for stop-and-frisks real crimes, not crimes like marijuana possession. When the New York City police stopped and frisked kids, the main goal was not to jail them for having pot but to get their fingerprints, so that they could be identified if they committed a more serious crime. But all over America the opposite happens: marijuana possession becomes the serious crime. The cost is so enormous, though, in lives ruined and money spent, that the obvious thing to do is not to enforce the law less but to change it now. Dr. Johnson said once that manners make law, and that when manners alter, the law must, too. It’s obvious that marijuana is now an almost universally accepted drug in America: it is not only used casually (which has been true for decades) but also talked about casually on television and in the movies (which has not). One need only watch any stoner movie to see that the perceived risks of smoking dope are not that you’ll get arrested but that you’ll get in trouble with a rival frat or look like an idiot to women. The decriminalization of marijuana would help end the epidemic of imprisonment.
The rate of incarceration in most other rich, free countries, whatever the differences in their histories, is remarkably steady. In countries with Napoleonic justice or common law or some mixture of the two, in countries with adversarial systems and in those with magisterial ones, whether the country once had brutal plantation-style penal colonies, as France did, or was once itself a brutal plantation-style penal colony, like Australia, the natural rate of incarceration seems to hover right around a hundred men per hundred thousand people. (That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get lower in rich, homogeneous countries—just that it never gets much higher in countries otherwise like our own.) It seems that one man in every thousand once in a while does a truly bad thing. All other things being equal, the point of a justice system should be to identify that thousandth guy, find a way to keep him from harming other people, and give everyone else a break.
Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime.
“Oh, I have taken too little care of this!” King Lear cries out on the heath in his moment of vision. “Take physic, pomp; expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” “This” changes; in Shakespeare’s time, it was flat-out peasant poverty that starved some and drove others as mad as poor Tom. In Dickens’s and Hugo’s time, it was the industrial revolution that drove kids to mines. But every society has a poor storm that wretches suffer in, and the attitude is always the same: either that the wretches, already dehumanized by their suffering, deserve no pity or that the oppressed, overwhelmed by injustice, will have to wait for a better world. At every moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the community’s life, and in every case the arguments for keeping the system in place were that you would have to revolutionize the entire social order to change it—which then became the argument for revolutionizing the entire social order. In every case, humanity and common sense made the insoluble problem just get up and go away. Prisons are our this. We need take more care. ♦
ROSEBURG, Ore. — When a downstairs neighbor of Laurel Harper learned there was a gunman on the loose at Umpqua Community College here, he ran up to tell her, knowing that her son, Christopher Harper-Mercer, was a student there. Like other parents, Ms. Harper started to set out in a desperate search, fearing her son could be hurt.
“She was very upset,” said the neighbor, who asked not to be named, citing his family’s privacy.
But as she was leaving, the sheriff and his deputies intercepted her and broke the news that her son was the gunman.
Ms. Harper, who divorced her husband a decade ago, appears to have been by far the most significant figure in her son’s troubled life; neighbors say he rarely left their apartment. Unlike his father, who said on television that he had no idea Mr. Harper-Mercer cared so deeply about guns, his mother was well aware of his fascination. In fact, she shared it: In a series of online postings over a decade, Ms. Harper, a nurse, said she kept numerous firearms in her home and expressed pride in her knowledge about them, as well as in her son’s expertise on the subject.
She also opened up about her difficulties raising a son who used to bang his head against the wall, and said that both she and her son struggled with Asperger’s syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder. She tried to counsel others whose children faced similar problems. All the while, she expressed hope that her son could lead a successful life in finance or as a filmmaker.
Ms. Harper did not respond to messages seeking comment.
In an online forum, answering a question about state gun laws several years ago, Ms. Harper took a jab at “lame states” that impose limits on keeping loaded firearms in the home, and noted that she had AR-15 and AK-47 semiautomatic rifles, along with a Glock handgun. She also indicated that her son, who lived with her, was well versed in guns, citing him as her source of information on gun laws, saying he “has much knowledge in this field.”
“I keep two full mags in my Glock case. And the ARs & AKs all have loaded mags,” Ms. Harper wrote. “No one will be ‘dropping’ by my house uninvited without acknowledgement.”
Law enforcement officials have said they recovered 14 firearms and spare ammunition magazines that were purchased legally either by Mr. Harper-Mercer, 26, or an unnamed relative. Mr. Harper-Mercer had six guns with him when he entered a classroom building on Thursday and started firing on a writing class in which he was enrolled; the rest were found in the second-floor apartment he shared with his mother.
Ms. Harper’s posts were found on Yahoo Answers, a site where she spent hours over the last 10 years, mostly answering medical questions from strangers, occasionally citing her own difficulties raising a troubled child. Her Yahoo profile had a user name of TweetyBird, accompanied by a cartoon image of a nurse. In many of her postings, she included her email address, which public records link to Ms. Harper.
Ms. Harper and Christopher’s father, Ian Mercer of Tarzana, Calif., divorced in 2006 and were separated years earlier. Mr. Mercer told CNN last week that he thought the nation should change its gun laws, saying the massacre “would not have happened” if his son had not been able to buy so many handguns and rifles.
Neighbors in Southern California have said that Ms. Harper and her son would go to shooting ranges together, something Ms. Harper seemed to confirm in one of her online posts. She talked about the importance of firearms safety and said she learned a lot through target shooting, expressing little patience with unprepared gun owners: “When I’m at the range, I cringe every time the ‘wannabes’ show up.”
In addition to talking about guns, Ms. Harper, 64, was a prolific commenter in online forums dealing with medical issues, frequently answering questions from strangers with a tone of empathy and concern. She expressed having expertise in autism, saying that both she and her son — whom she never identified by name — had Asperger’s syndrome.
Consoling another parent seeking help with disruptive behavior by an autistic child, Ms. Harper said that her own son “was, among other things, a head-banger” when he was younger and was initially given a misdiagnosis of attention deficit disorder. But over time, he had learned to cope and was doing better, she wrote: “I was in your shoes and now my son’s in college.”
She expressed frustration with people who questioned how successful a person with autism could be, noting: “I have Asperger’s and I didn’t do so bad. Wasn’t easy (understatement) but it can be done.” She also said she had “dealt with it on a daily basis for years and years” because of her son, who she said was progressing well.
“He’s no babbling idiot nor is his life worthless,” Ms. Harper wrote. “He’s very intelligent and is working on a career in filmmaking. My 18 years worth of experience with and knowledge about Asperger’s syndrome is paying off.”
Alexis Jefferson, who worked with Ms. Harper at a Southern California subacute care center around 2010, said the gunman’s mother sometimes confided the difficulties she had in raising her son, including that she had placed Mr. Harper-Mercer in a psychiatric hospital when he did not take his medication.
“She said that ‘my son is a real big problem of mine,’ ” Ms. Jefferson said in a telephone interview. “She said: ‘He has some psychological problems. Sometimes he takes his medication, sometimes he doesn’t. And that’s where the big problem is, when he doesn’t take his medication.’ ”
Ms. Jefferson said Ms. Harper had described bringing her son to the Del Amo Behavioral Health System in Torrance, Calif., near where they had lived before moving to Oregon.
“He calls and says, ‘Take me out, take me out,’ ” Ms. Jefferson said, recalling her conversations with Ms. Harper. “She didn’t take him out until the doctor said he was ready to get out.”
One piece of advice Ms. Harper dispensed online for a parent with an autistic infant was to start reading to the child as soon as possible and to use expressive gestures. An online posting from six years ago included the unlikely revelation that she used to read to her son a book by Donald J. Trump, the real estate mogul now running for president, who recently suggested that childhood vaccines cause autism — a claim Ms. Harper dismisses in her postings.
“Fact: Before my son was even born, I was reading out loud to him from Donald Trump’s ‘The Art of the Deal,’” she wrote. “And as for the ‘gesture effect,’ I was practically a mime. And now my son invests in the stock market along with me, turns a profit and is working on a degree in finance. His language and reading skills are phenomenal. I tell you this because it’s not too late for you to start helping your daughter.”
It is not clear where — or if — Mr. Harper-Mercer had pursued such a degree. Little has been disclosed about his studies at Umpqua. In California, Mr. Harper-Mercer was enrolled at El Camino College from 2010 to 2012, but officials there would not confirm whether he obtained any degree or certification. Both son and mother moved to Oregon about two years ago; Mr. Mercer said he had not seen either of them since then.
Neighbors in the apartment building here where the mother and son lived said that Mr. Harper-Mercer rarely strayed far. They would see him getting the mail or walking down the road to buy a soda at a market, but said he did not appear to have a job in Roseburg and stayed home most of the day.
At night, when his mother went to her nursing jobs, a neighbor whose bedroom was directly below Mr. Harper-Mercer’s frequently heard him pacing until 3 or 4 in the morning, the neighbor said. She complained to her own family about the noise, but never mentioned it to Mr. Harper-Mercer or his mother.
In an interview in their ground-floor apartment, the neighbor, a young woman, and her mother echoed other people’s memories of Mr. Harper-Mercer as quiet and distant.
They said Ms. Harper had occasionally invited them upstairs for a visit, or when she was writing a complaint letter to the apartment managers about the smell of marijuana smoke or late-night guests at another neighbor’s apartment. She would ask her son to say hello, but he rarely chatted with them.
“Chris would just be in his room,” the young woman said.
The young woman’s mother, who immigrated from the Philippines, said that she had shared Filipino meals with Ms. Harper, and that Ms. Harper had taught her how to drive. She wrote a letter of support when Ms. Harper was applying for a $1,500 scholarship to continue her nursing studies. The family still has Ms. Harper’s thank you card.
“Once again, thank you so very much for helping me with my scholarship application,” the note says. “Now I can attend the nursing program without having to stress out about tuition!”
The day of the shooting, the young woman from downstairs rushed home to check on her toddler, and saw Ms. Harper standing outside talking with the police. It was Ms. Harper’s son who had killed nine people and wounded several others before exchanging fire with the police and then taking his own life.
“She was still in denial of it,” the young woman said. “She just handled it like a nurse would — like it was another person’s life.”
Jack Healy and Julie Turkewitz reported from Roseburg, and Mike McIntire from New York. Ian Lovett contributed reporting from Torrance. Calif.
There have been at least 72 in the last three decades—and most of the killers got their guns legally.
Mark Follman, Gavin Aronsen, and Deanna Pan
Mother Jones
Updated: October 2, 2015
Editor’s note, October 2, 2015:We have updated this database with the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, in which nine were murdered and nine others wounded. The previous update was in July, with the attack at a military center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which came a month after the one at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. The interactive map below and our downloadable database, first published in July 2012, have been expanded with 10 additional cases from 2013-2015.* Other public shooting attacks in that period—such as a rampage at Fort Hood, another in Isla Vista, California, another on a bridge in Wisconsin, and another at a movie theater in Louisiana—have not been added because there were fewer than four victims shot to death in each of those cases. For more about that distinction and its limitations, see this piece and this piece.
We’ve gathered detailed data on more than three decades of cases and mapped them below, including information on the attackers’ profiles, the types of weapons they used, and the number of victims they injured and killed. The following analysis covers our original dataset comprised of 62 cases from 1982-2012.
Weapons: Of the 143 guns possessed by the killers, more than three quarters were obtained legally. The arsenal included dozens of assault weapons and semi-automatic handguns with high-capacity magazines. (See charts below.) Just as a perpetrator used a .40-caliber Glock to slaughter students in Red Lake, Minnesota, in 2005, so too did the one in Aurora, along with an AR-15 assault rifle, when blasting away at his victims in a darkened movie theater. In Newtown, Connecticut, the attacker wielded a .223 Bushmaster semi-automatic assault rifle as he massacred 20 school children and six adults.
The perpetrators: More than half of the cases involved school or workplace shootings (12 and 20, respectively); the other 30 cases took place in locations including shopping malls, restaurants, and religious and government buildings. Forty-four of the killers were white males. Only one was a woman. (See Goleta, Calif., in 2006.) The average age of the killers was 35, though the youngest among them was a mere 11 years old. (See Jonesboro, Ark., in 1998.) A majority were mentally troubled—and many displayed signs of mental health problems before setting out to kill. Explore the map for further details—we do not consider it to be all-inclusive, but based on the criteria we used, we believe that we’ve produced the most comprehensive rundown available on this particular type of violence. (Mass shootings represent only a sliver of America’s overall gun violence.) For the stories of the 151 shooting rampage victims of 2012, click here, and for our groundbreaking investigation into the economic costs of the nation’s gun violence, including mass shootings, click here.
Click on the dots or use the search tool in the top-right corner of the map to go to a specific location. (Zoom in to find cases located geographically close together in Colorado, Texas, Wisconsin, and elsewhere.)
Our focus is on public mass shootings in which the motive appeared to be indiscriminate killing. We used the following criteria to identify cases:
The shooter took the lives of at least four people. An FBI crime classification report identifies an individual as a mass murderer—versus a spree killer or a serial killer—if he kills four or more people in a single incident (not including himself), typically in a single location.
The killings were carried out by a lone shooter. (Except in the case of the Columbine massacre and the Westside Middle School killings, which involved two shooters.)
The shootings occurred in a public place. (Except in the case of a party on private property in Crandon, Wisconsin, and another in Seattle, where crowds of strangers had gathered.) Crimes primarily related to gang activity, armed robbery, or domestic violence in homes are not included.
If the shooter died or was hurt from injuries sustained during the incident, he is included in the total victim count. (But we have excluded many cases in which there were three fatalities and the shooter also died, per the above FBI criterion.)
We included a handful of cases also known as « spree killings« —cases in which the killings occurred in more than one location over a short period of time, that otherwise fit the above criteria.
Here are two charts detailing the killers’ weapons:
This guide was first published on July 20, 2012. Since then, we’ve updated and expanded it multiple times with additional research and reporting. The analysis and charts above cover the data through 2012 (comprising 62 cases); additional data and analysis on the shooters’ weapons are in this story. Information on eight additional mass shootings from 2013 to 2015 is included on the map and in our full data set here. For much more of our reporting on mass shootings, gun violence, and gun laws, see our special investigations: America Under the Gun, Newtown: One Year After, and The True Cost of Gun Violence.(Return to intro.)
Introduction
The debate over gun control in the United States has waxed and waned over the years, stirred by a series of mass killings by gunmen in civilian settings. In particular, the killing of twenty schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012 fueled a national discussion over gun laws and calls by the Obama administration to limit the availability of military-style weapons. However, compromise legislation that would have banned semiautomatic assault weapons and expanded background checks was defeated in the Senate in 2013, despite extensive public support.
Gun control advocates sought to rekindle the debate following the shooting deaths of nine people at a South Carolina church in June 2015. These advocates highlight the stricter gun laws and lower incidents of gun violence in several other democracies, like Japan and Australia, but many others say this correlation proves little and note that rates of gun crime in the United States have plunged over the last two decades.
United States
The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states: « A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. » Supreme Court rulings, citing this amendment, have upheld the right of states to regulate firearms. However, in a 2008 decision (District of Columbia v. Heller [PDF]) confirming an individual right to keep and bear arms, the court struck down Washington, DC, laws that banned handguns and required those in the home to be locked or disassembled.
A number of gun advocates consider ownership a birthright and an essential part of the nation’s heritage. The United States, with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, has about 35–50 percent of the world’s civilian-owned guns, according to a 2007 report by the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey. It ranks number one in firearms per capita. The United States also has the highest homicide-by-firearm rate among the world’s most developed nations.
But many gun rights proponents say these statistics do not indicate a cause-and-effect relationship and note that the rates of gun homicide and other gun crimes in the United States have dropped since highs in the early 1990s.
Federal law sets the minimum standards for firearm regulation in the United States, but individual states have their own laws, some of which provide further restrictions, others which are more lenient. Some states, including Idaho, Alaska, and Kansas, have passed laws designed to circumvent federal policies, but the Constitution (Article VI, Paragraph 2) establishes the supremacy of federal law.
The Gun Control Act of 1968 prohibited the sale of firearms to several categories of individuals, including persons under eighteen years of age, those with criminal records, the mentally disabled, unlawful aliens, dishonorably discharged military personnel, and others. In 1993, the law was amended by the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which mandated background checks for all unlicensed persons purchasing a firearm from a federally licensed dealer.
However, critics maintain that a so-called « gun show loophole, » codified in the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986, effectively allows anyone, including convicted felons, to purchase firearms without a background check.
As of 2015, there were no federal laws banning semiautomatic assault weapons, military-style .50 caliber rifles, handguns, or large-capacity ammunition magazines, which can increase the potential lethality of a given firearm. There was a federal prohibition on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines between 1994 and 2004, but Congress allowed these restrictions to expire.
The United States, with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, has about 35–50 percent of the world’s civilian-owned guns, according to a 2007 report by the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey.
Canada
Many analysts characterize Canada’s gun laws as strict in comparison to the United States, while others say recent developments have eroded safeguards. Ottawa, like Washington, sets federal gun restrictions that the provinces, territories, and municipalities can supplement. Federal regulations require all gun owners, who must be at least eighteen years of age, to obtain a license that includes a background check and a public safety course.
There are three classes of weapons: nonrestricted (e.g., ordinary rifles and shotguns), restricted (e.g., handguns, semiautomatic rifles/shotguns, and sawed-offs), and prohibited (e.g., automatics). A person wishing to acquire a restricted firearm must obtain a federal registration certificate, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Modern Canadian gun laws have been driven by prior gun violence. In December 1989, a disgruntled student walked into a Montreal engineering school with a semiautomatic rifle and killed fourteen students and injured over a dozen others. The incident is widely credited with driving subsequent gun legislation, including the 1995 Firearms Act, which required owner licensing and the registration of all long guns (i.e., rifles and shotguns) while banning more than half of all registered guns. However, in 2012, the government abandoned the long-gun registry, citing cost concerns.
Australia
The inflection point for modern gun control in Australia was the Port Arthur massacre of April 1996, when a young man killed thirty-five people and wounded twenty-three others. The rampage, perpetrated with a semiautomatic rifle, was the worst mass shooting in the nation’s history. Less than two weeks later, the conservative-led national government pushed through fundamental changes to the country’s gun laws in cooperation with the various states, which regulate firearms.
The National Agreement on Firearms all but prohibited automatic and semiautomatic assault rifles, stiffened licensing and ownership rules, and instituted a temporary gun buyback program that took some 650,000 assault weapons (about one-sixth of the national stock) out of public circulation. Among other things, the law also required licensees to demonstrate a « genuine need » for a particular type of gun and take a firearm safety course. After another high-profile shooting in Melbourne in 2002, Australia’s handgun laws were tightened as well.
Many analysts say these measures have been highly effective, citing declining gun-death rates, and the fact that there have been no gun-related mass killings in Australia since 1996. Many also suggest the policy response in the wake of Port Arthur could serve as a model for the United States.
Israel
Military service is compulsory in Israel and guns are very much a part of everyday life. By law, most eighteen-year-olds are drafted, psychologically screened, and receive at least some weapons training after high school. After serving typically two or three years in the armed forces, however, most Israelis are discharged and must abide by civilian gun laws.
The country has relatively strict gun regulations, including an assault-weapons ban and a requirement to register ownership with the government. To become licensed, an applicant must be an Israeli citizen or a permanent resident, be at least twenty-one-years-old, and speak at least some Hebrew, among other qualifications. Notably, a person must also show genuine cause to carry a firearm, such as self-defense or hunting.
However, some critics question the efficacy of these measures. « It doesn’t take much of an expert to realize that these restrictions, in and of themselves, do not constitute much by the way of gun control, » writes Liel Leibovitz for the Jewish magazine Tablet. He notes the relative ease with which someone can justify owning a gun, including residing in an Israeli settlement, employment as a security guard, or working with valuables or large sums of money. Furthermore, he explains that almost the entire population has indirect access to an assault weapon by either being a soldier or a reservist or a relative of one. Israel’s relatively low gun-related homicide rate is a product of the country’s unique « gun culture, » he says.
United Kingdom
Modern gun control efforts in the United Kingdom have been precipitated by extraordinary acts of violence that sparked public outrage and, eventually, political action. In August 1987, a lone gunman armed with two legally owned semiautomatic rifles and a handgun went on a six-hour shooting spree roughly seventy miles west of London, killing sixteen people and then himself. In the wake of the incident, known as the Hungerford massacre, Britain introduced the Firearms (Amendment) Act, which expanded the list of banned weapons, including certain semiautomatic rifles, and increased registration requirements for other weapons.
A gun-related tragedy in the Scottish town of Dunblane, in 1996, prompted Britain’s strictest gun laws yet. In March of that year, a middle-aged man armed with four legally purchased handguns shot and killed sixteen young schoolchildren and one adult before committing suicide in the country’s worst mass shooting to date. The incident sparked a public campaign known as the Snowdrop Petition, which helped drive legislation banning handguns, with few exceptions. The government also instituted a temporary gun buyback program, which many credit with taking tens of thousands of illegal or unwanted guns out of supply.
However, the effectiveness of Britain’s gun laws in gun-crime reduction over the last twenty-five years has stirred ongoing debate. Analysts note that the number of such crimes grew heavily in the late 1990s and peaked in 2004 before falling with each subsequent year. « While tighter gun control removes risk on an incremental basis, » said Peter Squires, a Brighton University criminologist, in an interview with CNN, « significant numbers of weapons remain in Britain. »
Norway
Gun control had rarely been much of a political issue in Norway—where gun laws are viewed as tough, but ownership rates are high—until right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik killed seventy-seven people in an attack on an island summer camp in July 2011. Though Norway ranked tenth worldwide in gun ownership, according to the Small Arms Survey, it placed near the bottom in gun-homicide rates. (The U.S. rate is roughly sixty-four times higher.) Most Norwegian police, much like the British, do not carry firearms.
In the wake of the tragedy, some analysts in the United States cited Breivik’s rampage as proof that strict gun laws—which in Norway include requiring applicants to be at least eighteen years of age, specify a « valid reason » for gun ownership, and obtain a government license—are ineffective. « Those who are willing to break the laws against murder do not care about the regulation of firearms, and will get a hold of weapons whether doing so is legal or not, » wrote Charles C. W. Cooke in National Review. Other gun-control critics have argued that had other Norwegians, including the police, been armed, Breivik might have been stopped earlier and killed fewer victims. An independent commission after the massacre recommended tightening Norway’s gun restrictions in a number of ways, including prohibiting pistols and semiautomatic weapons.
Japan
Gun-control advocates regularly cite Japan’s highly restrictive firearm regulations in tandem with its extraordinarily low gun-homicide rate, which is the lowest in the world at one in ten million, according to the latest data available. Most guns are illegal in the country and ownership rates, which are quite small, reflect this.
Under Japan’s firearm and sword law [PDF], the only guns permitted are shotguns, air guns, guns that have research or industrial purposes, or those used for competitions. However, before access to these specialty weapons is granted, one must obtain formal instruction and pass a battery of written, mental, and drug tests and a rigorous background check. Furthermore, owners must inform the authorities of how the weapon and ammunition is stored and provide the firearm for annual inspection.
Some analysts link Japan’s aversion to firearms with its demilitarization in the aftermath of World War II. Others say that because the overall crime rate in the country is so low, most Japanese see no need for firearms.
C’est à un tsunami de surprise feinte que nous avons eu droit la semaine passée : oh, vertuchou, Volkswagen a bricolé les logiciels embarqués dans ses voitures pour obtenir des résultats brillants aux tests anti-pollution aux États-Unis ! Le constructeur a menti, et il a même reconnu l’avoir fait ! Oh ! La pseudo-consternation a atteint rapidement la bourse, où l’action du constructeur a dévissé, et s’étend maintenant sur le marché européen, en touchant rapidement tous les autres constructeurs. Quel monde, mes amis, quel monde !
Ceci posé, revenons un peu sur Terre. Et si je parle de surprise feinte, c’est bien parce que les petites bidouilles des constructeurs pour faire passer leurs engins pour plus propres qu’ils ne le sont étaient connues de pas mal de monde. L’État, déjà, qui a savamment construit les normes, main dans la main avec les fabricants eux-mêmes, et qui devait bien se douter qu’il y aurait le cas des tests bâtis pour permettre aux modèles de remporter de bonnes notes, et les conditions réelles, franchement éloignées. Les automobilistes ensuite, dont l’écrasante majorité a pu constater l’écart entre la consommation affichée publicitairement, et qu’on ne peut obtenir que dans des conditions de roulage qui frôle la crédibilité par le mauvais côté de la tangente. Les associations écolo enfin, qui, toutes largement subventionnées par l’État, ont su tourner les yeux ailleurs le temps qu’il fallait pour ne pas voir les petits soucis de certaines motorisations.
Avant d’aller plus loin, cela ne retire, évidemment, absolument rien à la faute initiale de Volkswagen dans le cas qui nous occupe. Comme le précise avec raison Vincent Bénard dans son dernier article à ce sujet, le constructeur allemand a bel et bien fraudé, en masquant (de façon logicielle, donc) une production de gaz polluants (des oxydes d’azote, dans ce cas-là) bien au-dessus des normes admises en condition de conduite normale. Il mérite donc ce qui lui arrive actuellement.
Maintenant, ce constat ne permet pas d’éviter de rappeler quelques évidences bien trop vite oubliées tant par la plupart des journalistes que, surtout, par ces politiciens qui commentent l’actualité du haut de leur morale irréprochable et de leur parcours dans leur domaine généralement exempt de toute fraude.
On pourra ainsi pouffer en lisant la demande péremptoire et assez gonflée de « totale transparence » de la part de la ministre de l’Écologie, par exemple. C’est bien joli de réclamer la transparence, mais il faudrait aussi pousser les explications techniques un tantinet pour bien faire comprendre exactement l’enjeu, du côté des constructeurs, de respecter des normes anti-CO2 toujours plus drastiques.
En effet, et n’importe quel chimiste pourra le confirmer, l’apparition des oxydes d’azote (NOx) en combustion signifie que le carburant a été brûlé à des températures et des pressions élevées, qui certes contribuent à une diminution de la production de CO2, mais favorisent aussi l’augmentation de la production des NOx. Pour les constructeurs, chaque effort fait pour baisser la quantité de dioxyde de carbone aura donc tendance à augmenter la production des NOx. Cette augmentation est en partie absorbée par des systèmes de catalyse en sortie (notamment à base d’urée), mais on comprend qu’il est très complexe, chimiquement parlant, d’avoir à la fois une baisse constante des émissions d’un gaz qui, rappelons-le, n’est absolument pas nocif comme le CO2, et dans le même temps, une diminution des NOx (qui eux, sont effectivement nocifs pour la santé).
À ce point, on comprend que la course à l’homologation étatique des moteurs provoque le renchérissement des mécaniques vendues (avec l’introduction de systèmes progressivement de plus en plus complexes), ou, moins honnêtement, l’apparition de trucs et astuces pour réussir les conditions, bien calibrées, de tests connus à l’avance. Si la dernière option est clairement punissable, la première laisse songeur quant au bilan de l’action de l’État dans le domaine automobile.
On pourrait évoquer, par exemple, l’apparition de voitures électriques badigeonnées de massives subventions qui, si elles permettent à certains de frimer dans des Tesla agréables à regarder, n’ont toujours pas permis de régler les problèmes d’autonomie (et loin s’en faut), de recharges (longues et épuisantes pour le réseau électrique) ou de recyclage en fin de vie. D’autant que l’État qui subventionne les lubies électriques, c’est d’autant moins pour d’autres technologies, parfois prometteuses mais enterrées.
On pourrait rappeler que le développement en fanfare du diesel sur le sol européen ne doit à peu près rien au hasard et tout à la patte de l’État qui a sciemment encouragé son ascension par des taxations de plus en plus vexatoires sur l’essence. Ici, l’État stratège a bien frappé, et frappe encore : croyant soutenir une industrie automobile en concurrence avec le reste du monde en tabassant l’essence, l’État a introduit un biais énorme en faveur du diesel qui s’est effectivement révélé lucratif pour les constructeurs français… Jusqu’au moment où l’écart fiscal est devenu palpable (la Cour des Comptes évalue le – fameux – manque à gagner à 8 milliard d’euros) et où l’on s’est rendu compte que le diesel était particulièrement médiocre pour l’atmosphère.
On pourrait se rappeler qu’ensuite, l’écologie entrant dans les mœurs et la politique, les normes antipollution se sont mises à pulluler. L’État, toujours aussi stratège, s’est retrouvé avec d’un côté un diesel favorisé et de l’autre une atmosphère à dépolluer, à coup de normes de plus en plus drastiques, et des tests d’homologation idoines (et négociés avec les constructeurs). Là encore, on a du mal à oublier complètement la part de responsabilité de l’État. On pourrait en effet se rappeler qu’il n’y a pas de lobbying sans des individus, des administrations, des élus à « lobbyiser » surtout lorsqu’ils ont un grand pouvoir sur l’avenir d’une filière.
On pourrait enfin se rappeler que c’est encore l’État, au travers de la loi DMCA (protection des droits d’auteurs) qui a directement empêché que la tricherie soit révélée plus tôt : eh oui, selon cette loi, les constructeurs automobiles affirment qu’il est illégal pour des chercheurs indépendants de vérifier le code du logiciel contrôlant les véhicules, et ceci sans l’autorisation du fabricant, et cette interdiction a permis à Volkswagen de conserver ses manipulations à l’abri pendant des années.
L’État qui édicte des normes, l’État qui édicte des interdits, l’État qui pousse certaines motorisations au détriment d’autres … Volkswagen est évidemment coupable (et il l’a reconnu), mais oublier l’État n’est pas oublier un détail de la pièce qui s’est jouée, c’est oublier le décor, la musique et le metteur en scène.
Alors, quand, sur tout ce bazar déjà bien glauque, on apprend que l’État envisagerait de redresser les torts causés avec … une bonne grosse interdiction des diesels d’ici 2025 (parce que ça marche, ces trucs là, qu’on vous dit : c’est efficace et ça n’apporte jamais d’intéressants effets de bords), on sait que là, on tient la solution, c’est évident ! Bingo !
Toute cette affaire pue. Elle pue le capitalisme de connivence. Elle pue le lobbyisme débridé. Elle pue les petits arrangements, les compromis douteux, les arrangements entre copains et coquins. Elle pue de l’odeur âcre d’un diesel mal brûlé, elle pue d’une écologie politisée à mort et utilisée à des fins protectionnistes (ici, des USA contre l’Europe, jusqu’au prochain retour de bâton), elle pue l’interventionnisme de l’État à tous les niveaux.
Volkswagen paiera, cher, sa fraude, et c’est tant mieux. Mais cette affaire montre de façon éclatante l’incohérence des pouvoirs publics, tiraillés entre leurs lubies, leurs compromissions et les petits intérêts bien compris de ceux qui les dirigent. Tout ceci démontre encore une fois que la régulation étatique ne marche pas. Ceci montre à quel point on est éloigné d’un marché libre où les fraudeurs n’auraient jamais eu la possibilité de faire durer leurs manigances aussi longtemps, où l’État n’aurait jamais pu imposer des normes débiles et des tests ridicules, où le consommateur aurait pu se faire flouer sans rien pouvoir dire.
Some 437,000 people murdered worldwide in 2012, according to new UNODC study.
Men made up almost 8 out of every 10 homicide victims, women accounted for vast majority of domestic violence fatalities
10 April 2014 – (London/Vienna)
– Almost half a million people (437,000) across the world lost their lives in 2012 as a result of intentional homicide, according to a new study by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
Launching the Global Study on Homicide 2013 in London today, Jean-Luc Lemahieu, Director for Policy Analysis and Public Affairs, said: “Too many lives are being tragically cut short, too many families and communities left shattered. There is an urgent need to understand how violent crime is plaguing countries around the world, particularly affecting young men but also taking a heavy toll on women.”
Globally, some 80 per cent of homicide victims and 95 per cent of perpetrators are men. Almost 15 per cent of all homicides stem from domestic violence (63,600). However, the overwhelming majority – almost 70 per cent – of domestic violence fatalities are women (43,600). “Home can be the most dangerous place for a woman,” said Mr. Lemahieu. “It is particularly heart-breaking when those who should be protecting their loved ones are the very people responsible for their murder.”Over half of all homicide victims are under 30 years of age, with children under the age of 15 accounting for just over 8 per cent of all homicides (36,000), the Study highlighted.
The regional picture
Almost 750 million people live in countries with the highest homicide rates in the world – namely the Americas and Africa –
meaning that almost half of a
ll homicide occurs in countries
that are home to just 11
per cent of the earth’s
population. At the opposite end of the spectrum, 3
billion people – mainly in Europe, Asia and Oceania- live in countries where homicide rates are
relatively low.
The global average murder rate stands at
6.2 per 100,000 population, but Southern Africa and
Central America recorded more than four
times that number (30 and 26 victims per 100,000
population respectively), the highest in the world. Meanwhile, with rates some five times lower
than the global average, East Asia, Southern
Europe and Western Europe recorded the lowest
homicide levels in 2012. Worryingl
y, homicide levels in North Af
rica, East Africa and parts of
South Asia are rising amid social
and political instability. In an
encouraging trend,
South Africa,
which has consistently high rates of homicide
, saw the homicide rate
halve from 64.5 per 100,000
in 1995 to 31.0 per 100,000 in 2012.
Homicides linked to gangs and organized crim
inal groups accounted for 30 per cent of all
homicides in the Americas compared to below
1 per cent in Asia, Europe and Oceania. While
surges in homicide are often linked to this type
of violence, the Americas saw homicide levels
five to eight times higher than Eu
rope and Asia since the 1950s.
2
The gender bias
Globally, the male homicide rate
is almost four times higher than for females (9.7 versus 2.7 per
100,000) and is highest in the Americas (29.3 pe
r 100,000 males), where it is almost seven times
higher than in Asia, Europe and Oceania (a
ll under 4.5 per 100,000 males). In particular, the
homicide rate for male victims aged 15-29 in S
outh and Central America is over four times the
global average rate for that age
group. More than 1 in 7 of a
ll homicide victims globally is a
young male aged 15-29 in the Americas.
While men are mostly killed by someone they ma
y not even know, almost half of all female
victims are killed by those closest to them. In As
ia, Europe and Oceania the share of victims from
domestic violence is particularly important. In a
ll these regions, the majority of female homicide
victims are killed at the hands of their intimat
e partners/family members (in Asia and Europe, 55
per cent, and in Oceania, 73 per cent). For example, in Asia, 19,700 women were killed by their
intimate partners or family members in 2012. When
only looking at intimat
e partner violence, the
overwhelming majority of homicide victim
s are women (79 per cent in Europe).
The causes of homicide
The consumption of alcohol and/or
illicit drugs increases the risk
of perpetrating homicide. In
some countries, over half of homicide offenders
acted under the influence of alcohol. Although
the effects of illicit drugs are less well docum
ented, cocaine and amphetamine-type stimulants
have been associated with vi
olent behaviour and homicide.
Firearms are the most widely used murder w
eapons, causing 4 in 10 homicides globally, whereas
about a quarter of victims are ki
lled with blades and sharp object
s and just over a third die though
other means (such as strangulation, poisoning etc.).
The use of firearms is particularly prevalent
in the Americas, where two thirds of homicide
s are committed with guns, while sharp objects are
used more frequently in Oceania and Europe.
Post-conflict societies awash in arms and gra
ppling with weak rule of law and impunity are
conducive to organized crime and interpersonal vi
olence. Haiti, for example, saw homicide rates
double from 5.1 in 2007 to 10.2 per 100,000 in 2012.
In South Sudan, the homicide rate in 2013
was, at over 60 per 100,000 people, among the highest
in the world. In contrast, in Sierra Leone
and Liberia, where reconciliation processes and anti
-crime strategies are taking root, security is
gradually improving.
Conviction rates
The global conviction rate for intentional hom
icide is of 43 convictions per 100 homicides.
However, disparities exist across regions, with a
conviction rate of 24 per cent in the Americas,
48 per cent in Asia and 81 per cent in Europe.
For more information please contact:
In Vienna: Preeta Bannerjee, Public
Information Officer, Phone: +43 699 1459 5764
Email:
preeta.bannerjee [at] unodc.org
For media interviews in London: Karen Davies
, Communications Officer for the UK and Ireland
United Nations Regional Information Centre (UNRIC),
?)
