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Guns, Drugs, and the Limits of Suppression
Over 100,000 Americans died of drug abuse related causes in 2021. They almost all died using either illegal drugs or using drugs for which they did not have legal prescriptions.
In 2021, 703 Americans were murdered in mass casualty shooting events (counting any incident with greater than four victims, no matter the cause). Many were murdered using guns that the user had no legal right to own. Most had nothing to do with schools/churches/malls or targeting ‘civilians’. A total of 36 have died in school and church shootings this year.
Yes, one is largely self-harm and the other ‘other’ harm, but I’m confident more than 36 ‘innocents’ were taken by malevolent drug crimes.
In both cases, though, the problem isn’t the mechanism being used (drugs or guns). Many societies have wider access to drugs and/or guns but none (or few) of the issues. As we’ve come to realize with the ‘Slow Suicide Problem’ where drugs are the mechanism, the Murder problem is much more complex than the mechanisms used.
The problems are cultural – and dare I say it – spiritual.
Ignoring this – and just going for proximate ’causes’ never works. The War on Drugs hasn’t resulted in ‘no drug deaths.’ Drug deaths have exploded. A similar thing could be seen in the war on bacteria. ‘Total suppression’ in hospitals has resulted in the development of things like MRSA. After Columbine, we were told bullying was the problem – that and the expression of violent fantasies. Zero tolerance for both has not reduced school shootings. You can squeeze things like guns out, but only in a society that will accept it. And it isn’t just rural hicks who won’t accept it. To give a foreign example: Israeli Arab society is awash in illegal guns and the Israeli government is totally unable to stop it – despite what ought to be a willingness to act.
But an inability to remove guns from society isn’t the end of the world. After all, widespread gun ownership is not necessarily related to widespread gun violence (see Switzerland) just as the banning of guns doesn’t result in a lack of murders (110 Israeli Arabs were murdered in 2021, a murder rate halfway between Florida and Colorado).
Guns can certainly be an accelerant, but they are not the cause of the violence. People are.
What do we do? Well, the questions at hand are huge: how do you fix families, enable people to feel a sense of fulfillment, balance civil rights with the dangers of severe mental illness, increase dialog and understanding to stunt extremist ideas, limit zero-sum fame-seeking and alleviate massive nationwide loneliness? I certainly have my ideas and have written extensively about them (I cover some of this in my book A Multi Colored Coat).
But none are turn-key solutions.
So, rather than tilt against the U.S. windmills, my wife and I just picked up our family and left for healthier shores.
A couple of small notes: In some very important situations, guns can serve as a deterrent to much larger-scale violence (the first thing Nazis seized in Eastern Europe was Jewish guns, Uygurs can’t have guns or knives). This last idea is the genesis of guns in the US – free press is the first line of defense of tyranny, guns the last. The difference is, again, cultural. In New England 200 years ago, civic society was pretty strong and widespread guns didn’t result in widespread violence. And the US would never have been born without those guns. Then again, in the South, exclusive gun ownership by white people was a critical part of the system of racial enslavement. Guns in Black hands would have resulted in a very different reality.
For those focusing on ‘high powered weapons’, rifles (including Assault Rifles) are in involved in less than 5% of murders in the U.S. (less than ‘no weapons’ and about half that of knives). This is despite there being more rifles (~76 million) as handguns (~72 million). Just removing ‘assault rifles’ will have very little effect – even if you could do it.
Published in General
Thank you; a thoughtful and well-written piece.
It is a massive problem, and it doesn’t have a single, simple solution, even though half the internet claims that this is “easy”.
We didn’t get here in a day, and we won’t get back in a short time either. The collapse of the culture has been underway since the 60s and, like an avalanche, its momentum continues to build and accelerate. Until we are willing to look at this holistically and culturally, then we don’t have a prayer of resolving it.
I think those on the Left, particularly the leaders, see the gun issue as one that will be resolved in their favor once they achieve global control sought with The Great Reset. That effort is focused on the climate change issue to ban carbon-based energy production and we have recently seen how health related matters enabled the Left to control society through fear. More to come.
I’ve been meaning to ask what the impetus was for the first gun-free towns in the American West, and though this 1976 thesis paper does not answer this directly, it does give a good history (so far — I’m only up to page 40 or so).
Interestingly, the first gun control legislation was New York State’s Sullivan Act which was the brainchild of a NY coroner and was passed in 1911 by the state legislature in response to a shooting attempt upon NYC mayor Wm. Gaynor — and so it was nearly unanimously agreed to by legislators once a politician became the target. And gun control was furthered in 1921 by the sermonizing of a pastor who, obviously wanting to create a better world, argued, following the thinking of prohibition, that “We put the saloon keeper out of business and stopped the brewer and distiller. Why not take away the rights of those men who manufacture arms to shoot and kill?”
Gun control sentiments started around 1900 with the urbanization of America in which within cities the cultural perception of the use of guns (and early childhood training in the them) shifted from a tool for hunting and protecting one’s family toward the use of guns by the criminal class.
Also of note, the identical arguments both for and against gun control are unchanged since the original 1910 debate on the Sullivan Act. And likewise, at least as far as I’ve read in this history, gun control has failed to control gun homicides since the introduction of gun control in NY in 1911.
It’s still fearful politicians and well-meaning but ignorant do-gooders (with perhaps a touch of narcissism), against a centuries-old standard of independence and self-reliance. The modern incidence of what is essentially suicidal shooting sprees is more likely the result of the prevalent uncontrolled agitation and meaninglessness within the self-image of the shooter rather than the inherent deadliness of the gun.
Nothing surprising here regarding timing. 1911 to 1921 encompasses the decade when everything destructive to the American republic got started.
There were the Black Codes in the South post Civil War that were specifically designed to prohibit freedmen from owning firearms.
I was thinking more about the general population, instituted for everyone without prejudice.
Added: Yes, disarming a group and not disarming others would certainly seem to allow others to threaten the group. I think that saying that because of the color of your skin you can’t have a gun is not a matter of good-will, and not trying to reduce societal crime as a whole.
What I was wondering was what the origin of the broad supposedly good-will intention to disarm an entire locality or population. It started apparently in some western towns for specific reasons, but this could be just myth or movies.
The first broad application that I’ve seen documented was NY, and then arguments were made in the 20s (exactly the same as today) that guns enter from out of state and therefore the laws should be federal permitting or confiscation.
I understand your thinking in the matter. You wanted to show when removal of firearms from everyone started to become legalized, and by that, the Sullivan Act is likely the right starting point. It’s not like racism driven firearms codes stopped after the general acts became popular. For example, the Black Panthers and their carrying of firearms in Oakland, but specifically having an armed protest on the CA Capital steps, lead then Governor Reagan to sign the Mulford act in 1967 (passed in about three weeks).
Thanks. Regarding the Mulford act, there seems to be a pattern in that once again gun control was legislated to protect politicians.
Could you provide a source for this?
The FBI Expanded Homicide Data for 2019 (here) listed 13,927 homicides, of which 10,258 involved firearms and 364 involved rifles. You might conclude that only 2.6% involved rifles. But . . .
This is data from the Uniform Crime Reports, which is a compilation of crimes reported by various police agencies but which does not include all crimes in the country.
Further, while the data above identifies only 364 homicides involving rifles and 6,368 involving handguns, it also identifies 3,281 homicides involving “Firearms, type not stated.” That’s 23.6% of all homicides reported, using a gun of an unknown type.
Maybe you have better data to support your claim about rifles. The above is from my prior investigation on the issue, which did not support the claim that rifles are used in a very small proportion of homicides. It may be true, but I haven’t seen detailed data to support it.
I’d actually like to see such data, as I suspect that rifles are used quite rarely.
Very insightful post with a slightly different perspective, Richard!
I would like to add that many of the people who discuss the gun debate (though not you) perceive America as one homogeneous gun culture. I don’t know about drug overdoses, but guns, and especially murders, are distributed vastly unequally in our society. Something like over half of all murders take place not just in a handful of big cities, but in just a handful of specific neighborhoods in those cities. On the other hand we have many whole States, especially in the Middle North of the country, whose murder rates are lower than Canada’s. (Curiously, Canada has one of the highest rates of serial killers)
It is much more productive to talk about the specific people that are committing the murders rather than the country as a whole. For instance, the abundant availability of firearms in North Dakota has pretty much zero effect on the murder rate, while places with the strictest gun control laws like Chicago and Washington D.C., have some of the highest murder rates.
At Uvalde, we had a good example of what happens when people are required to rely on the police for personal protection; too uncommitted and too late.
From my point of view most of the drug deaths are on the government heads / hands. Most are opioid related. At one time the medical industry was very liberal in handing out opioids like they were candy. This caused pill mills and many people got hooked on pills. This was not a good thing and many people got hood that should not have and needed to be taken off. But mainly they were taking a good quality product that was being sold by pharmaceutical companies in a safe manner with pill strength and integrity being a known factor. In response to this idiot government decided to slam down on the pill mills. This pushed those addicted to purchase pills from unsafe sources and strengths that change from pill to pill. As the unsafe sources created pills they started adding fentanyl for a variety of cost, transportation and other reasons. This created a large amount of uncertain dosages that people keep overdosing on because the previous pills were weak and these are over the amount or the person creating them is not very good at it.
Frankly people have been getting high as long as there has been people. You are not going to stop it. So you need to provide a legal outlook that you can control the safety of and provide a social network around to get people out of it.
One side effect of this is we have made pain management almost impossible and extremely difficult for people that are legitimately using pain pills to function in their lives for health reasons. They are treated like criminal while trying to navigate an ever changing byzantine legal framework that does seem to stop those trying to follow the rules without really stopping those that are abusing.