So what can the US learn from other developed countries regarding guns and crime

Charles Blow recently claimed in the New York Times: “America has the highest gun homicide rate, the highest number of guns per capita . . . .”  On Sunday, the New York Times quotes researcher David Hemenway as claiming: “Generally, if you live in a civilized society, more guns mean more death.”  CNN’s Piers Morgan believes: “America has the worst incidents of gun murders of any of what they call the civilized world.”

Much is made of comparing some rather arbitrarily defined "civilized" nations, but what can Americans learn from these nations?   If the non-US developed nations show anything, even with the extremely questionable data that Charles Blow at the New York Times apparently trusts regarding gun ownership rates, it shows that higher gun ownership means lower homicide or no change in gun homicide rates.  He just hadn’t even bothered to graph out the numbers.

There is a real problem in using cross-sectional data.  Below is part of a long discussion in The Bias Against Guns, Chp. 5 (More Guns, Less Crime also has a long discussion in Chp. 2).  Take a simple example.  Suppose for the sake of argument that high-crime countries are the ones that most frequently adopt the most stringent gun control laws. What if gun control actually lowered crime, but not by enough to reduce rates to the same low levels prevailing in the majority of countries that did not adopt the laws. Looking across countries, it would then falsely appear that stricter gun control resulted in higher crime. Economists refer to this as an “endogeniety” problem. The adoption of the policy is a reaction to other events (that is, “endogenous”), in this case crime. To resolve this, one must examine how the high-crime areas that chose to adopt the controls changed over time —not only relative to their own past levels but also relative to areas that did not institute such controls. 

Unfortunately, many contemporary discussions rely on misinterpretations of cross-sectional data. The New York Times recently conducted a cross-sectional study of murder rates in states with and without the death penalty, and found that “Indeed, 10 of the 12 states without capital punishment have homicide rates below the national average, Federal Bureau of Investigation data shows, while half the states with the death penalty have homicide rates above the national average” (Raymond Bonner and Ford Fessenden, “States With No Death Penalty Share Lower Homicide Rates,” New York Times, September 22, 2000, p. A1.).  However, they erroneously concluded that the death penalty did not deter murder. The problem is that the states without the death penalty (Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Vermont) have long enjoyed relatively low murder rates, something that might well have more to do with other factors than the death penalty. Instead one must compare, over time, how murder rates change in the two groups – those adopting the death penalty and those that did not.

Of course, I have other problems with the New York Times discussion.  For example, the rates of gun ownership for Switzerland and Israel are ridiculously low.  But my point above was that even if those numbers are taken as given, you still find the opposite relationship from what the New York Times was claiming.

The graph showing all non-US countries is shown here.

So what if we asked a different question?  Including the US in the data shows the absurdity of the Small Arms Survey measure of gun ownership in 2007.  They define it in such a way to exclude the military weapons in Swiss homes and to exclude most Israeli guns because the government technically owns them.  Switching either or both of these countries so that they had a higher gun ownership rate than the US would offset their bias for the US rate. In any case, despite my objections to both cross-sectional data and the obviously bogus Small Arms Survey measure of gun ownership, here are the results with the US included.  Doing this leaves the result for the world essentially unchanged and makes the relationship for OECD countries equal zero.