Western Europe, Canada and Australia have far fewer guns and, compared with the United States, far fewer crimes committed with firearms. From 2000 to 2012 there were an estimated 1,500 gun homicides per year in all of Europe, around 20 percent of total homicides. For a comparable period there were nearly 12,000 annual gun homicides in the United States, eight times as many as Europe, and guns were responsible for 67 percent of all killings. In 1990, a peak year for murder here, the Western European firearm homicide rate was a mere 0.53 per 100,000. The United States rate was 5.57 per 100,000—ten and one-half times higher.
He cites these statistics as part of a claim that incarceration rates in America, while high relative to that in other countries, is not high relative to the dangers that the criminal population presents.
Note that this observation will trouble just about every political view. Conservatives and libertarians will not like to see guns treated as a causal factor in high crime severity. Progressives will not like to see high crime severity as a cause of “mass incarceration.”
Clark Neily attempts to counter Latzer’s overall claim that the U.S. does not over-incarcerate, but I find Latzer’s analysis more persuasive. Let me state my views, which are tentative and impressionistic, rather than well-formed.
1. There may be some margins along which more lenient policies on imprisonment would have little adverse effect on the prevalence of crime, but I am dubious of the view that we would be better off with a much smaller prison population.
2. It is conceivable to me that at some point in the future, prison will be seen as an inhumane solution to crime. Other solutions that protect the public while giving convicted criminals better treatment will have been shown to be superior. But those “other solutions” do not yet exist, or are not widely understood of they do exist.
3. I am convinced by those who say that prosecutors play a game of threatening accused criminals with very severe sentences in order to get them to plead to lesser offenses. You should want the crime with which a prosecutor charges the defendant to be the charge with which the prosecutor expects to convict the defendant, not the charge that can scare the defendant into a plea bargain. Even if the outcomes of the current game are reasonable (i.e., the defendants who plea bargain actually deserve their sentences), the process is rotten. We should figure out what got us into this equilibrium and how to get out of it. Note that what got us into this equilibrium might include characteristics of the judicial process that make it difficult for prosecutors to succeed without playing the plea-bargaining game.
4. We have too many statutory crimes. It would be better to aim for a system with a few statutes, well and uniformly enforced. If you want to see a more tolerant criminal justice system, I would propose that you put more of your energy into the front end of the process (pruning the criminal statutes) than the back end of the process (reducing incarceration of those who are charged). For example, if you think that too many prisoners are serving over-long sentences for drug offenses, then try to change the relevant statutes.
Most gun deaths come from handguns used by urban youth, but that isn’t necessarily what gun control advocates typically focus on (though it is what Mike Bloomberg focused on in NYC). I don’t particularly understand handgun ownership and would be fine with a ban. Instead we constantly hear stuff about assault rifles.
Let’s say the prison population contains the following:
1) The Mentally Ill
2) Chronic Repeat Offenders with basically no hope
3) People who could maybe reform
4) Nonviolent drug offenders (who are not just violent criminals that got nailed on a drug charge because its easier to get a conviction that way)
#1 We could certainly put in mental hospitals (and we used to), but either way they are going to end up institutionalized.
#2 Similarly that is what prison exists for
#3 Personally, I think what might help these people is to have the option for corporal punishment if they desire (five years or 10 lashes). Cheaper, more effective, better for reintegrating into society. Also a total non-starter.
#4 This category is wildly overestimated in all debates on this issue. It just isn’t that large, nor do I think it would go down much if many drugs were legalized.
My own experiences with the Baltimore criminal justice system (admittedly not typical) is that its really hard to convict even violent criminals and I just find it hard to believe we are too tough on crime.
Re: handgun ownership. The idea, for non-criminals, is a self-defense equalizer. If you get into a situation where you or other innocent are illegally endangered by one or several people who are younger, bigger, stronger, faster, then, if you are unarmed, your natural right of self-defense is inoperative because you cannot exercise it to any meaningful degree. But if you are carrying a handgun, you can, either by use of force, or defusing the situation and encouraging unarmed aggressors to disperse. The extreme hypothetical is the 95 pound older woman against a 6’4″, 300 pound, aggressive 18 year old. The woman can’t defend herself unless armed, but all she needs to equalize the situation is a light handgun in her purse, and not the claymores or 50 caliber machine guns that often get into these discussions when people are being silly.
The trouble of course is that the same features that make the handgun the ideal equalizer for personal self-defense in these public situations are the same as the ones that appeal to the criminal element for most common criminal purposes. Which is why most bad firearm murders are committed with handguns. It’s an unfortunate trade-off.
One common-sense way to address that trade-off is to make it illegal for those with criminal records to have handguns, and then push the limits of the Fourth Amendment in terms of enforcing the rule, by aggressively checking the class of individuals who fit the statistical profile of people most likely to commit handgun crimes.
Which is kind of how Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg saved New York City.
Self defense via personal handgun seems more fantasy than reality. If there is a positive aspect to the gun control crowd, its realism about just how practically useless that idea is. Ditto on the idea that militia with hunting rifles could ever act as a check on the state, they would get droned to death.
On the flip side, it would be nice if gun control advocates realized that its really unlikely my skeet shooting gun is going to be used by gangbangers.
Sorry, but I think you’re very much mistaken on this one.
People believe it’s a fantasy because the media wants them to believe it’s a fantasy, and so lies and tells them it’s a fantasy. You know they lie about everything all the time, so instead of just swallowing it, use that insight, and think for yourself.
Before you deem it “fantasy”, I’d invite you to research the data we have on defensive gun use, with estimates usually in the range of a million uses per year, most often with handguns.
Yes, there is a lot of controversy about the number, and it’s unfortunate that a lot of the numbers come from an era with particularly high levels of crime.
There are also much lower estimates, but as those come out of the usual suspect gun control groups, they are as hard to trust as the NSPOF result of five million per year.
But even the tight and conservative reliable estimates are in the six digits, usually meaning something in the range of a few hundred to over one thousand times every day.
There is just no way numbers that high are consistent with phantom-level paranoia. People use handguns in justifiable self-defense all the time, and the danger of maybe having the need for one is non-negligible and worth worrying about.
I don’t have a lot of great numbers on self defense use of guns. I know the oft used phrase “your more likely to hurt yourself with a gun than defend against an intruder.” I’ve never lived in an area where I thought owning a handgun for self defense would be necessary.
When I think of using handguns for self defense I think of George Zimmerman. Even when you succeed, you still lose.
Since the American equilibrium includes a massive number of handguns, the mixed authoritarian/free-market approach is to make it legal for only women to own, handle, or fire a handgun in self-defence.
I figure you’re joking. Still, there’s no good “means-test” rule. For one, even the most robust guy, if unarmed, is going to have trouble with two guys, especially if they have knives. Second, he might be threatened by an armed woman, illegally deploying her legally-authorized weapon, which happens.
I’m not joking. The strategy is clear; implementation would be a nightmare. The law doesn’t change for women, men are banned from contact with handguns without exception. If a man needs to use a handgun for self defence he will need to find a woman with a handgun. You would need some kind of constitutional amendment and hopefully a expiration clause, revisited every 1-2 terms, based on crime/violence reduction goals.
By way of example to support your comment, Handle, I am a 73-yo single female who travels the U.S., alone, in a motor home. I have had a CCW permit for many years, primarily for self-defense, should I find the necessity (or should the necessity find me.)
When traveling in the RV, I have a concealed handgun near-to-hand, but no one I encounter is ever aware of that.
I’d daresay that many handgun-objectors are frequently in the personal ambit of concealed carriers, but never realize that there may be invisible self-defense protection nearby.
I said “primarily for self-defense” because range shooting is a fun fun pastime – much more fun than, say, playing golf or shuffleboard!
Prison is indeed obviously cruel and inhumane and, frankly, the way we often go about it, is kind of dumb, because the dark joke about “criminal university” has some truth to it. We should see it as inhumane right now, not just in the future.
However, just because something is inhumane doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it, unless we are semantically making ‘inhumane’ the same as ‘out of bounds’, which I think is a mistake. The principle is one of “escalation of force”, you should have things be as humane as possible, but the level inhumanity needed to effectively accomplish the compelling interest is justified.
The point is deterrence, and if it wasn’t really bad and terrifying, it wouldn’t be effectively discouraging. As bad as it is, it obviously still wasn’t enough to have discourages those masses who are incarcerated.
However, we have the technology right now to track and monitor everything people say and do 24/7, to allow and deny an individual access and privileges to any goods or services or areas, and that means life is a prison, and so we don’t need actual prison.
Already, we let a lot of people out of prison and have them wear ankle bracelet monitors instead, sometimes to enforce house arrest, or make sure they show up for their court dates or else get rounded up by the cops tracking their ankles. We can go much, much further with this, especially with smartphones. And we probably will.
China was already heading this direction with the Social Credit system, and now lots of countries have implemented it in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. No one is going to demobilize any of that domestic control capability. Obviously every government is going to use those same systems for national security and law enforcement the day after tomorrow.
If we have digital scarlet letters / mark of Cain for enforceable official excommunication or ostracization systems like the one in the Twilight Zone episode, “To See The Invisible Man”, then we don’t need prison. We have the tech now, so, let’s get rid of prison.
Yes, it would be politically difficult in the US to revise the Constitution and criminal justice system processes to move in this direction. But the capability already exists, and at the end of the day, it’s just a questions of the political will to make the choice. Everybody else will be doing it.
I was blissfully ignorant of the gamification of the current criminal justice system. Over the last decade I’ve become horrified, not only of the mockery of the concepts of presumed innocence and guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but the inability of jurists to apply those principles.
The current system is more Social/Economic Trial by Water than objective justice. A jury of my peers would ideally consist of 12 people who are as horrified as I am when shown the same set of cases/evidence/rulings that are clearly the opposite of justice.
As Arnold hints, it is very hard to get a conviction if you go through a full blown trial. For one thing, there is almost always a “reasonable doubt”. TV shows are so, so unrealistic. The system of plea bargaining developed because prosecutors were 99.9% sure so many defendants were guilty but much less than 99% sure they could get a conviction if they went to trial. Meanwhile, those defendants were 100% sure they had done the crime (and perhaps others they weren’t arrested for). Plea bargaining was a way of cutting the Gordian knot.
Think of a case Wiki and the Veil of Ignorance. When presented with the key facts/evidence, reasonable is 95% or 99.7% concurrence by a large group of reliably reasonable people. The popularity contests have to stop. Guilty vs Not Guilty is a very simple model.
Most cases, take the O. J. Simpson case are easily summarized in point form, with inline links for detailed information.
+1
As most prosecutors will say, the vast majority of folks who plead guilty may not be guilty beyond reasonable doubt of the particular crime, but ARE guilty of “crime”, meaning other crimes they may not be charged for.
There’s a lot more crime than trials or guilty pleas.
incarceration rates in America, while high relative to that in other countries, is not high relative to the dangers that the criminal population presents. …
many offenders go unpunished. This includes those who commit an estimated 3.3 million unreported offenses a year as well as thousands of reported crimes that the police never solve, including 86 percent of burglaries, 70 percent of robberies, and 67 percent of rapes.
Lots of freedom, lots of crime; lots of punishment for crime, lots of prison time.
Even the freedom of the innocent to own guns gives more freedom to the criminals to use guns in crime.
This is a huge reason house prices, “in good areas” (low crime!), are so high. Among other distortions.
The racial differences seem to be non-discussed, and are probably out of bounds for any discussion because such a discussion would be called racist.
This seems to say, roughly, that US non-gun homicides are almost as high as all EU homicides.
This isn’t a gun issue, it’s a homicide issue. The rest is stamp collecting.
I’m not sure how you think those numbers warrant that conclusion. If the US had, say, 5x as many gun homicides and 5x as many non-gun homicides, you might say it’s clearly not a gun issue; if we had the same number of homicides over all, but a much higher fraction are gun homicides, we might conclude that Americans just used guns instead of other methods, and that it’s therefore not a gun issue.
What these numbers say: the US has almost as many non-gun homicides as Europe, and then has >5x as many gun homicides as Europe, and the magnitude of the latter difference is much higher than the former. That would suggest that most gun homicides in the US are not merely ‘substituting’ guns for other methods. So no, these numbers do not, a priori, suggest that guns aren’t a factor.
Maybe some other factor drives up homicides in the US, and absent guns people would just as easily commit homicides as with guns, but that’s not specifically suggested by the numbers cited.
Do you honestly think that absent guns there would be EU levels of homicide in the US?
The fraction of incarcerated people who are there for homicide is very small, so I’m not sure I buy the idea of a direct relationship between homicide rate and incarceration rate by country. I suspect that in the US, because we have see more homicides, we’re more willing to tolerate harsher criminal justice system in general. But if the US justice system were more lenient in respects unrelated to violent crime, would we really see more violent crime?
The indirect causal link one might make is that drug dealers and burglars are much more likely to commit murder at some point than the average person, and so incarceration for non-homicides still greatly reduces homicide rates. This theory dovetails well with the ‘security hypothesis’ for explaining the 1990s drop in crime rates, but less so with Canada’s similar drop in crime without an increase in incarceration.
Back in the ’80s we had lighter sentencing and also much more crime. Stricter sentencing was a deliberate policy aimed at getting crime under control. It was substantially successful.
The correlation between gun ownership and gun crimes actually poses no trouble for conservatives because the causality is ambiguous. Of course, in places with a lot of armed criminals committing crimes, we might expect law abiding people to find it more necessary to carry guns themselves. One could easily rewrite the first sentence, replacing a single word: “Western Europe, Canada and Australia have far fewer guns [**but**], compared with the United States, far fewer crimes committed with firearms.”
I really hate it when people talk about US crime and gun stats because we don’t have one nation of statistics here. The CDC did extensive work on this and compiled it here: https://wisqars.cdc.gov:8443/nvdrs/nvdrsDisplay.jsp
In 2014 for example (before the BLM-era homicide increase) for the states they studied the total homicide rate (all causes) per 100k
Non-hispanic white americans: 2.03
Hispanic: 2.94
Black: 15.98
2014, gun-homicide only, per 100k
Non-hispanic white: 1.10
Hispanic: 1.92
Black: 12.69
So yes, white america has a higher homicide rate than europe, but the reason the numbers look so high is because “American” includes these different sub-populations that don’t belong together. The same thing comes out in suicide rates.
Non-h white: 16.23
Hispanic: 5.05
Black: 5.22
People who are anti-gun mix-and-match these stats to try and get their way. They do this when they talk about how immigrants have a lower crime rate than native born americans, they do this when they talk about “gun-deaths” pretending that suicide and homicide are all the same thing.
Black america has a homicide problem, white america has a suicide problem.