What to Do About Guns

A single death is a tragedy.

A million deaths is a statistic.

--Joseph Stalin

 The Phantom heard an eye opening podcast from the NY Times today, which prompted some Googling and changed his mind about some things related to guns.

Some important things to understand:

1. As horrific as they are, mass school shootings like Sandy Hook, Uvalde, Columbine are very rare events compared to the daily rate of gun deaths in America, and they account for less than 1% of all deaths of children by gunfire--most children who die by guns die on street corners or from stray bullets, or in home accidents, or, in the case of adolescents, by gun suicide. 

Actually, the easiest number with the most agreement is that about 1% of all children killed by guns in this country die in school mass shootings. 

But trying to tease out the other numbers is maddeningly difficult. What you really want to know:

       a/ How many kids were killed by guns altogether, including those who were and were not killed in mass shootings?

       b/ How many kids were killed by guns they were playing with, i.e. not intending to use to harm anyone, but by accident?

       c/ How many kids were killed by gun violence aimed at other people, but were "collateral deaths"? That is, unintentional deaths.

       d/ In which states are most kids killed by guns? 

This last number is easier to come by: Unsurprisingly, the states with the highest number of dead kids from guns are in the South and West: South Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Wyoming and Texas were the leaders while Massachusetts, New Jersey were relatively safe states for kids. States where the 2nd Amendment is considered the 11th Commandment have higher numbers of gun deaths. 

This is actually no surprise. Going back to pre Civil War day, the murder rates, mostly by guns, in the Confederacy and its extensions to the Wild West were far higher than in the more civilized East. The South and its extension into the Mountain West have always been violent places, poorer, relatively uneducated. They really do cling to their guns and religion in these parts. 

2. A "mass shooting" is defined as 4 or more people shot, either fatally or not, occurring as a single incident. This could be somebody is shooting unarmed victims in  a grocery store, but may often be shoot outs between armed gang members on street corners, where some of their targets have guns and some people are just caught in the crossfire. 

So when Uvalde happens and lots of statistics get put out by journalists who are saying Uvalde is just another example of mass shootings gone wild, they are misleading the public.  School shootings are likely an entirely different species. They are sui generis. 

What really horrifies us is the idea of a school shooting, so we want to pass laws to stop that, but hardening school, the major fix has not worked. 

Because it's often males under the age of 21 doing the shootings, limiting their access to AR-15's sounds like a reasonable thing to do, but looking at individual instances, given the small number of cases, it's not clear how many could have been prevented, given a determined adolescent who shoots his mother or grandmother on the way out the door. Exceptional cases make bad law. 

The problem is, when you start talking about solutions, the solution to one sort of horror (school shootings) may do absolutely nothing for another, e.g suicide or street shootings.

Utterly Vile

3. 54% of all American gun deaths are suicides. Lumping single men who blow their own brains out with a 15 year old shooting school kids with an AR-15 makes little sense.  And, while we might want to prevent suicide by gun, a laudable goal, talking about solutions to school shootings and mixing in solutions for gun suicides is ridiculous. 

"Gun deaths" are not the same as "mass shootings" which are not really the same as "school shootings" which are a very small subset of "mass shootings."

4. There are over 300 million guns in America and if we decided to take everyone's gun away, these guns could be simply buried in the back yard. Clamping down on ammunition would make more sense.

So trying to prevent the next Uvalde is difficult. The Phantom has to admit, he has no plan he thinks would work. Reducing the number of AR-15's sold to young homicidal maniacs makes sense. Most of the shooters are young males. 

The Phantom remembers so vividly witnessing a smiling White salesman in a Virginia Walmart, years ago, handing a large hand gun across the counter to a Black kid who looked to be no older than 12 and his younger brother, about 10. The fascination of that kids, as they touched, really fondled that black gun, and the gleam in the eye of the salesman--God only knows what he was thinking--are images indelibly burned into the Phantom's brain.

But, whatever plan we have, we have to know it is likely to fail to prevent all school shootings. We'll never know if any plan, say forbidding AR-15 sales altogether, prevented a mass shooting. You don't know how many school shootings you prevent. You can only measure the ones you did not prevent.