Debate

Part V: Guns in Cross- National Perspective

EDITOR: What legal, policy, or cultural lessons might we learn from the experiences of other countries in regulating guns and/or reducing crimes committed with firearms?

GREGG CARTER: The April 25, 2002, mass shooting in Erfurt, Germany, in which a former student killed 16 people at school before killing himself, was a lightning rod for the current debate over gun control in the United States. European gun laws are much more stringent than those in the U.S., and there is widespread belief that such gun laws are a deterrent to violence. Tragedies like Erfurt are relatively rare in Europe. But when they occur, gun-rights advocates in the United States are quick to use them as evidence that gun control doesn’t work. Taken as a whole, however, the data speak otherwise.

It is important not to oversimplify when making cross-national comparisons. Pro-gun writers and groups have their favorite examples—Finland and Norway have high numbers of firearms but low rates of violence. On the other hand, Mexico and Russia have low numbers of firearms but high rates of violence. There are forces beyond gun availability that influence the level of violence in any particular country. Most importantly, varying combinations of social heterogeneity and economic development have been linked to violence.

For this reason, when countries are compared, they should be socioeconomically similar, and simplistic pair-wise comparisons (e.g., the U.S. versus Mexico) are rarely useful.

Recent studies (see, e.g., Krug, Powell, and Dahlberg, 1998) reveal that the United States has a murder rate six times higher than the average economically developed, democratic nation (i.e., Western European nations, along with Australia, Canada, Japan, and New Zealand). Comparisons of murder-by-gun rates reveal an even more dramatic ratio: the U.S. rate of 7.07 per 100,000 people is more than twelve times higher than the 0.58 average rate of its peer nations. This huge disparity in the murder rate is accompanied by huge differences in gun prevalence. In the United States the percentage of households with any type of gun (about 36 percent) is two to three times greater than for our peer nations. For handguns, the differences are even more dramatic. In the United States, 22 percent of households have handguns, compared with 0.1 percent in the United Kingdom, 0.2 percent in the Netherlands, 2 percent in Australia, 2.5 percent in Spain, and 7 percent or less in Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, and Norway.

To gun control advocates, these two sets of facts are causally related: the more firearms circulating in a society, the more likely it is to suffer large numbers of violent crimes, suicides, and accidental deaths. Guns are not just another weapon. Assault with a gun is many times more likely to result in death or serious injury than with any other weapon. Because the U.S. has so many more firearms in circulation, gun control advocates argue that we need to have stricter national guns laws than Germany, France, or Great Britain. But we don’t.

Most importantly, Germany and most other European nations require that guns be registered, that gun owners be licensed, and that guns be stored and transported with utmost security. To get a license, a potential gun owner must typically pass an exam on gun safety. Also required are comprehensive background checks of individuals seeking to purchase guns, including any histories of criminality or mental incapacity. Although background checks in the U.S. are required by federally licensed firearms dealers when selling guns to their customers, sales between private individuals (including those at gun shows and flea markets) are not regulated by federal law in the U.S., but they are regulated in our peer nations.

ROBERT SPITZER: I concur with Gregg Carter’s trenchant analysis but would approach the issue in a slightly different way. In other countries, more limited gun availability surely saves lives and reduces the overall degree of injury that accompanies crime, especially in the realm of gun suicides, facts often noted when gun crime rates between the U.S. and other developed nations are compared. Many have pointed to America’s frontier tradition as an important reason for its unique contemporary gun problems among the developed nations of the world. But the cases of Australia and Canada, which have comparable traditions, suggest that the frontier tradition is not decisive in driving contemporary American gun problems.

In legal and policy terms, some conclude that the United States would be better off if it adopted the legal remedies found in other nations. Yet such transplants are unrealistic and surely not viable, because national institutions and practices evolve over many decades and are shaped by distinctive cultures, and these predicates must be taken into account in any effort to apply the lessons of one nation to another. This is why gun control supporters make a mistake when they urge such a transplant, and why gun control foes are similarly mistaken when they warn of imminent gun confiscations such as those that have occurred in other nations. Confiscation would be incompatible with American values, habits, and practices.

ROBERT J. COTTROL: The question of cross-national comparisons is a very tricky one. Gregg Carter is certainly correct when he says cross-national comparisons with obviously different cultures like the United States and Mexico are suspect. I would disagree, however, with easy comparisons between the United States and other western nations that are only superficially similar. In a 1998 University of Colorado Law Review article, I argue that the U.S. is different from most other western nations because of three population groups and their historic experiences. The first is the white Southern population, which has had a long history of extra-legal violence. The second is the African American population, which has also had a long history of violence, a reaction to a history of discrimination and often minimal police protection. The third population is our disproportionately large number of immigrants, which can also increase rates of violence. While the number of people in these communities participating in criminal violence, particularly lethal violence, is miniscule when measured against the total populations in these groups, they play a major role in creating the higher levels of violence in the United States.

The higher rates of homicide in the United States are due to cultural differences rather than the availability of firearms. Even within the United States, we find profound differences in homicide rates, differences that are greater than the differences between the U.S. and other western nations. Contrast the differences in African American and Asian American homicides, for example. Both groups have the same access to firearms. Similarly, Minnesota and Mississippi have significantly different homicide rates, although their firearms laws are not radically different.

Even the question of availability of firearms is in part a cultural question. Let’s take the case of Canada. The argument is made that, because Canadian laws on firearms ownership are stricter than those of the U.S., there is consequently less gun violence in Canada. The enactment of stricter firearms laws in Canada indicates one significant cultural difference between the two nations. The cultural difference doesn’t end there. We are frequently told by gun control advocates that the reason we have high rates of gun violence in places like Washington, D.C., Chicago, and New York City, despite very strict gun laws in those jurisdictions, is that guns are brought from states with lax gun laws into jurisdictions with tight gun laws. Why does that process stop at the Canadian border? Americans and Canadians have long boasted (justifiably) of the world’s longest undefended border. There are myriad opportunities to smuggle from one country to the other. Why aren’t illegal guns from Virginia or South Carolina coming into Montreal and Toronto, as they are into Washington and New York?

The reason is that the demand is not there; there is a cultural difference.
Finally, contrasting gun suicides is highly problematic. What we should be doing is contrasting overall suicide rates and seeing if guns contribute to a higher suicide rate in the United States; my understanding is that they do not. Presumably, our interest is in preventing all suicides, not simply gun suicides.

JAMES JACOBS: I think the main lesson is that there is no obvious connection between a nation’s firearm policies and its patterns of violence. Take Japan, for example. It has very stringent gun controls and very few citizens possess guns. The homicide rate is low, but the suicide rate is very high. Does this mean that the absence of widespread civilian ownership of firearms prevents homicide but not suicide? There are so many cultural variables that distinguish Japan from the U.S. that it would not be fruitful to draw conclusions about the differences between Japanese and U.S. homicide and suicide patterns by looking at one difference between the countries—their legal policies on civilian ownership of firearms.

In Great Britain, the gun control laws are very strict, indeed. Since the late 1990s, that country makes it practically impossible for a private citizen to possess a firearm. Few citizens own firearms. Does that mean that the law prevents people from obtaining firearms? Maybe. Nevertheless, while homicide is very low in Britain, the number of gun crimes has continued to increase, even since the most stringent laws were put in place. Criminals do not seem to have difficulty obtaining firearms.

SAUL CORNELL: In her 2002 book, Guns and Violence: The English Experience, Joyce Malcolm argues that the United Kingdom has higher crime than the United States, which she attributes to the nature of their gun laws. David Hemenway challenges this claim in a review of Joyce’s recent book. He argues that levels of crime in the two countries in the last two decades are comparable, apart from our much higher homicide rate. Who is correct Malcolm or Hemenway?

JOYCE MALCOLM: Hemenway is wrong when he argues that levels of crime in England and the U.S. in the last two decades are quite close, apart from the homicide rate. Since 1995, the English rate for every type of violent crime, with the exception of murder and rape, has been far higher than in the U.S. For example, based on a U.S. Department of Justice study, in 1995 there were 8.8 assaults per 1,000 persons in the United States, compared with 20 assaults per 1,000 in England and Wales (their statistics are grouped). Robberies in England and Wales were 1.4 times higher, and burglary was nearly double the U.S. rate. Since then, British figures for violent crime have climbed, while ours have dropped. You are now six times more likely to be mugged in London than in New York. A U.N. study of 18 industrialized countries, including the U.S., published in July 2002, found the rate of crime, including the most serious crime, in England and Wales to be the highest. A survey published in July 2003 found an astounding one in five Britons had been a victim of crime in the past year. While for two centuries our homicide rate has been much higher than the English rate, the two are now converging. In 1981 the U.S. rate was 8.7 times the English rate; last year it was only 3.5 times the English rate. Furthermore, the way the police count murder is inflated in the U.S., where the FBI encourages the police to count every suspicious death as murder; by contrast, the English police “massage down” the murder rate by removing cases where there is a final judgment that it was self-defense or accidental.

GREGG CARTER: Much of the rise in U.K. crime was due to the increasing heterogeneity of the nation during the past 25 years. Had the U.K. had the huge number of guns floating around uncontrolled, as we have had in the U.S., deaths from assaults would have been much higher.

JOYCE MALCOLM: It is true that much of the increase in U.K. crime has been due to increasing heterogeneity. Such heterogeneity is one of the reasons the U.S. has had a higher crime rate over the years. Although England was more racially homogeneous before 1920, when there were a large number of guns “floating around uncontrolled,” other causes of crime abounded—extreme social inequities, rapid urbanization, dire poverty, and no social safety net. Nevertheless, England had an enviably low rate of armed and violent crime. Switzerland has a very large number of guns and a heterogeneous population, but a very low level of violent and armed crime. The number of guns available is not directly related to the amount of violent crime. Other factors are key.

GREGG CARTER: Yes, the striking exception in Europe is Switzerland, which
has a laxity in its gun laws comparable to that of the United States and a relatively high percentage of households where guns are present. Switzerland is the NRA’s favorite example of the maxim “guns don’t kill, people do,” because it has low murder rates, both overall and by gun. However, gun control advocates are quick to point out that Switzerland’s population is generally better trained than that of the United States in the safe use of firearms, as most adult Swiss men are members of the national militia.

SAUL CORNELL: According to the British Home Office, the relevant statistics for crime in the U.K. are as follows. Overall, crime has been stable over the last year, consolidating a period of consistent decline, which has seen crime fall by 22 percent since 1997. Between 1999 and 2002, all crime fell by 14 percent, which is a statistically significant reduction. This figure includes statistically significant declines in domestic burglary (down 23 percent), vehicle thefts (down 14 percent), and common assaults (down 28 percent). These figures do not seem to support Joyce’s claims.

JOYCE MALCOLM: I appreciate Saul Cornell’s confusion, particularly since the British government produces two different sets of statistics and regularly changes the way it calculates these. In addition to a 91 percent increase in contact crime in inner cities between 1991 and 1995, Scotland Yard reported that violent crime more than doubled from 1997 to 2001. For the first time, some police are now armed. But the most relevant statistics for this dialogue are gun crimes, and there is no doubt about the great increase in these. In the five years after the 1997 handgun ban, handgun crime in Britain doubled. In 2002 alone, gun crime rose by 35 percent, and handgun crime rose by 46 percent. English efforts to reduce the number of privately owned guns have succeeded only in disarming law-abiding people, but they have failed to disarm those inclined to misuse weapons.

GREGG CARTER: Comparing crime rates of two nations can be misleading for many of the reasons already cited. When we compare a large number of nations having similar political and economic development to the United States, we find a strong correlation between gun possession and violence.

Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Next: Reducing Gun Violence Reprinted from Focus on Law Studies, SPRING 2003, Volume XVIII, Number 2, published by the Division for Public Education of the American Bar Association.

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