Washington Post (6/27/21): “One centrist…said fellow Democrats must not shy away from talking about rising crime and the challenges facing police.”
Media musings on a spike in homicides and shootings over the past year focus on how “defund the police” and other civil rights movement calls to action are affecting public safety—while largely ignoring any policy proposals that could keep guns off the street.
The headlines blare from every corner of the news media: “Defund the Police Encounters Resistance as Violent Crime Spikes” (CNN, 5/25/21). “Cities Reverse Defunding the Police Amid Rising Crime” (Wall Street Journal, 5/26/21).”Democrats Pushed Hard Last Year to Rein in Police. A Rise in Homicides Is Prompting a Shift” (Washington Post, 6/27/21).
Crime is up, especially homicides and shootings, and the most-cited culprits are civil rights demonstrators calling for defunding the police. Far less often mentioned in these articles and reports is the role of the massive increase in gun sales in 2020–21.
Gun sales exploded
Reasons for the increase in gun sales are manifold: political instability during a close and contested election, fears of societal collapse during a global pandemic, and the rise of political extremism, to name just a few.
CNN (3/14/21): “In January, as rioters stormed the US Capitol and a new administration took office, the FBI was swamped with 4.3 million requests for background checks.”
As CNN (3/14/21) reported, citing an arms industry consulting firm, gun sales in 2020 exploded: 23 million weapons were sold, outpacing 2019’s nearly 14 million by around 65%. USA Today (2/10/21), using records of FBI background checks, had a different, higher number: “Gun sales in the United States rose 40% last year to 39,695,315.”
2021 is poised to smash these records. As MSN (7/5/21) reported this month, gun sales for the first half of this year totaled more than 22 million, an increase of 15% from last year’s already unprecedented total. As the New York Times (5/29/21) reported in May:
“There was a surge in purchasing unlike anything we’ve ever seen,” said Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, a gun researcher at the University of California, Davis. “Usually it slows down. But this just kept going.”
In this context, the relentless, narrow focus on “defund the police” and the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers in May 2020 is misplaced. There are, of course, any number of reasons that may lead to increased crime, and it’s impossible to identify precisely what is driving the rise in violent crime. But a relative lack of interest in guns as a driver of shootings and homicides in the reports is noticeable.
The flow of guns used in crime across state borders (Vox, 10/26/16) makes state-level gun sales an unhelpful predictor of state gun violence.
Axios (7/12/21) and the Guardian (7/9/21) have touted results from a new study (Injury Epidemiology, 7/5/21) by researchers at the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis that purports to show the rise in gun sales did not have a major effect on gun violence in 2020. The researchers lined up gun sales and gun violence on a state by state basis, and found “no relationship between state-level excess purchasing and non-domestic firearm violence.”
But the state-level approach taken by the study elides a rather important point: Many guns used in violent crimes cross state lines—60% in Illinois, 74% in New York, 83% in New Jersey—rendering the expectation that there should be a 1:1 relationship between state-level gun sales and state gun violence rather fanciful. And the data itself may be incomplete, as Axios noted:
National data on homicides is spotty and laggy—authorities won’t know the full number of murders last year for months—and there is no conclusive database on gun purchases or who owns firearms in the US, all of which complicates connecting the dots.
Murders and shootings up
According to FBI crime data, murders rose by 25% around the country in 2020. Of that 4,100 increase in murders, 75% are likely to be gun murders, as crime data analyst Jeff Asher told the Guardian (3/24/21) in March.
And the numbers this year might even be higher:
The FBI’s preliminary 2020 data does not yet include some of the cities that saw the worst increases in murder last year, including Chicago, New Orleans and New York, Asher said, which might mean that total murders could rise more than 25%.
“If there’s a 30% increase, which I think is very plausible, that would be 5,000 additional people murdered,” he said.
That’s not the whole story—the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report system shows that while violent crime has spiked slightly, the general shift is downward. And property crime has continued to go down every year over the past decade.
“2020 marked the best year for gun sales—ever,” NPR (3/3/21) reported, and “there’s an increase in the ratio of violent crimes that involved guns to those that didn’t”—but it’s “a leap” to see a connection between the two phenomena.
Yet when corporate news media address the connection in the rise in violent crime and gun sales, it’s often with a hesitant, careful approach. NPR (3/3/21) in March devoted an entire report to downplaying any such connection—”Experts Who Study This Say Not So Fast”—and then in June (6/19/21) turned to Miami Police Chief Art Acevedo for a segment headlined “Understanding 2021’s Rise in Gun Violence.” Acevedo used the opportunity as a platform to use the rise in crime in his city as a reason to continue to invest resources in policing, egged on by host Scott Simon.
“Doesn’t sound like you think this is a good time to reduce police resources,” Simon said. “I won’t use that red flag of a word, ‘defund.'”
CBS News (5/24/21) framed the parallel rise in gun sales and crime as a problem of insufficient infrastructure for background checks—”Some of those sales are stretching our background check system thin,” its source says—a law enforcement–friendly view of the problem. Last year, the network (7/8/20) implied a correlation between a $1 billion cut to the NYPD’s budget—dropping it from $89.1 billion to $88 billion—and the 130% increase in shootings in New York City through the first six months of 2020:
The increase in violence comes amid widespread calls to defund and reform police departments across the country in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. New York’s decision to defund a small percentage of the NYPD was the first budget cut the department has been given since de Blasio took office.
“People will die if you defund police,” Tucker Carlson (Fox News, 4/1/21) claimed—though as AP (6/10/21) pointed out, “the same big increases in homicides are being seen nationwide—even in cities that increased police spending.”
NBC News (3/14/21) covered the rise in violent crime as evidence that cutting police department budgets was a mistake. Guns were mentioned, but only in the context of police enforcement:
[Lansing, Michigan Police Chief Daryl] Green vowed to lean on the violent crime task force, formed a decade ago in response to an uptick in fatal shootings—including that of Edmond’s daughter—to take illegal guns off the streets and interrupt retaliatory gun attacks.
Fox News (4/1/21), unsurprisingly, took aim at defund measures as the primary driver of a rise in violent crime, arguing that
as police departments were left to make do with shrunken budgets and less support, some big cities have seen sometimes drastic upticks in murders and other violent crimes.
It’s enough to make you wonder if the US media have any interest in uncovering the root causes for societal ills like violent crime—or if pushing civil rights movement demands as divisive culture war issues is the point.
Blue penciling that which fails to fatten “the thin blue line”
The July 2020 CBS story seems to refer only to year-over-year June shootings in NYC — 89 in June 2019 vs 205 in June 2020. I didn’t see any mention of a six-month total, as the FAIR piece says. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-city-shootings-increased-130-in-june
Further, neither CBS nor FAIR appears to mention that starting around Feb-Mar 2020, household members were cooped up together due to the pandemic, an emotional pressure cooker. That could be an even greater factor than gun sales, or at least a major amplifying co-factor. Guns + pressure cooker = shootings.
Even when shootings take place outside the home, Covid stress — including (and especially) loss of income, threat of eviction and the like — could be a major contributing factor alongside guns. Again, neither CBS nor FAIR mentioned this possibility. I wonder if any studies over the past 12-18 months support or disprove the idea.
Further: to the extent there’s any data (likely scant at best), have shootings over the past year involved a disproportionate number of “newer” guns (purchased in the past year or so) vs “older” guns)? Even patchy data might hint at whether or not the huge spike in gun sales affected the rate of shootings and murders.
I’d guess yes, there’s likely a significant impact, but news reports and logic are subject to my own confirmation bias.
What evidence is being offered as to prevention: efficacy of current police methods, priorities or involvement having substantive effect on crime: domestic or on the streets? NYPD is more and more the FIRE Sector’s private army, to terrorize & subjugate indentured “essential workers” into 1099 gig peonage? 34K, mostly poor folks died, millions indentured (many, chronically ill; family homes flipped, W4 jobs, retirement equity & kid’s futures robbed) and nobodys going to JAIL, perpetrators all indemnified, spewing lies on Comcast, AT&T, Fox, Disney & Viacom?
I wonder what life would be like if the police had to first rely on their listening skills —- instead of shooting first and “forgetting” to use on their body cameras. Maybe guns should be issued after 3-5 years of LISTENING on the job first.
Many guns don’t seem that expensive—–maybe bullets should cost a bundle.
So, correlation is no causation? If you don’t like one data point, select another to confirms your biases. Seems like a very lazy basis for an article. I guess this is why people go into journalism and not math. Math is hard.
“…The evidence is now such that these correlations between income inequality and both health and social problems must be regarded as causal, reflecting the ways greater inequality damages societies, harming human health and well-being.
“The step from evidence of correlation to evidence of causality is obviously a crucial one. Why do we think it can be made confidently? Epidemiology has been centrally concerned with statistical evidence identifying the causes of disease and has therefore developed a set of criteria for judging whether relationships are likely to be causal. As well as the obvious point that causes must precede their effects, they also include the strength of the relationship, whether there is a ‘dose-response’ relationship–i.e, higher levels of inequality lead to successively worse outcomes–whether the relationship is biologically plausible, whether or not there are other likely explanations, and whether research results present a consistent picture. Judged on this basis, the evidence from several hundred research studies suggests that the relationship between larger income differences and a worsening of a wide range of health and social problems is indeed causal.” ~from “The Inner Level” by Pickett and Wilkinson
Mostly Peaceful, I think a big problem is what Erich Fromm mentions here, this is from his old book “Escape From Freedom.”
“…There are always groups whose interest is furthered by truth, and their representatives have been the pioneers of human thought; there are other groups whose interests are furthered by concealing truth…
“This holds true in the first place with regard to a person’s orientation in the outer world, and it holds especially true for the child. As a child, every human being passes through a state of powerlessness, and truth is one of the strongest weapons of those who have no power…
“…With regard to all basic questions of individual and social life, with regard to psychological, economic, political, and moral problems, a great sector of our culture has just one function–to befog the issues…”
Higgins is responding to some pretty crass befoggment. These are voices that I don’t often hear, but I can recommend the Pickett and Wilkinson books.
Truth:
Not to pick too much, but poverty in Appalachia isn’t run up against the same wealth inequality that NYC has: you don’t have the Have-nots living shoulder-jowl with the Haves.
In addition, cost of living is unbelievably low in comparison, so being in poverty isn’t nearly so destitute in Appalachia as NYC.
Relationships between police and community are totally different, and there isn’t a simmering racial animosity between the two groups.
There are a great many more points that could be made here.
“In the USA, although no data were available for Wyoming, the relationship between inequality and homicides is still significant and the differences between states are almost as great as the differences between countries. Louisiana has the highest murder rate of 107 per million, more than seven times higher than New Hampshire and Iowa, which are bottom of the league table with murder rates of 15 per million. The homicide rate in Alaska is much higher than we would expect, given it relatively low inequality, and rates in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts are lower. In the United States, two out of every three murders are committed with guns, and homicide rates are higher in states where more people own guns. Among the states on our graph, Alaska has the highest rate of gun ownership of all, and New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts are among the lowest. If we allow for gun ownership, we find a slightly stronger relationship between inequality and homicides.” ~from “The Spirit Level” by Wilkinson and Pickett
Hi Mostly Peaceful,
This is a quotation from a book called “The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger.”
“Appalachia” is a region which covers more than 400 counties and parts of 13 states. I’m trying to locate all 13 on a graph, in the book, that tries to represent all US states in terms of inequality and homicides. The states with the lowest levels of inequality seem to be Maryland and Ohio; the earlier is way above the graph line with over 80 per million homicides and the latter below with less than 40. The “Appalachian” states with higher inequality and homicides are NC, SC, GA, TN, Al, and MS. All of these states are clustered below 80 per million. The region’s other states below the graph’s line are PA, WV, KY and NY. The first three are in the middle of the graph, with VA, just below 60 per million. NY has the highest level of inequality of all these states and is around 50 per million.
For this book the presence of guns only strengthens the correlation between inequality and social problems. It seems that many in the US would prefer to live in Singapore, a country with high inequality, severe censorship and few guns.
Again, Mostly Peaceful, Appalachia includes parts of 13 states. Here you mention IL, and MI; both of which compare to the cluster of “Appalachian” states which are between 70 and 80 per million in terms of homicides. They are all below MD which comes in above 80, and includes Baltimore. CA is along the graph’s line and around 60 per million, and NY is perhaps a bit below 50 per million. OH, WV, and NY are the only “Appalachian” states that are noticeably below the graph’s line. If you experience inequality you know it. I watched a documentary on Remote Area Medical some time ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n78uVW7S7As .
The article brings up many good points, and it has always seemed to be true that as a society we have tended to look for an overly simple “analysis” of crime statistics and crime reduction. The drivers of both are obviously more complex than we have been willing to spend the time necessary to figure out. Particularly significant in its absence is
any mention of the fact that while it seems many assume spending money on police will produce a reduction in crime, what evidence have we actually got that this is the case to any significant degree? Everything I’ve seen, read, and experienced over the years in this regard has appeared to indicate that policing has actually been, by and large, astoundingly ineffective.
How little faith you have in people who don’t look exactly like you.
Article was not clear on 2nd amendment guns rights.
We liberals hinder police from doing their job citizens must defend themselves from law breaking scum.
A Fox Butterfield moment if I’ve ever read one. If you don’t think gun sales are up BECAUSE of the 570+ riots in about 3 months last year, cities and states hamstringing their police departments, calls for “defunding,” states deciding that some crimes (like shoplifting) are just fine and dandy, releasing inmates due to the pandemic, and so on, then the best I can do is just say ‘duh!’ This is just another example of blaming an object, instead of the people behind it. Completely lazy.