Media Reporting on Gun Violence

The following post is an expanded version of an email I sent to Marketplace Money, a public radio program on personal finance.   I was irked by the reporter's glib observation that mass shootings can occur in countries with very strict gun controls and be absent in countries with high rates of gun ownership.  This observation has been regurgitated repeatedly by the media with the goal of enlightening us about  the relationship between the availability of guns and gun violence.  It is not clear whether the reporter was just mindlessly repeating a piece of conventional wisdom or whether he intended to suggest that there is no relationship between the availability of guns and the frequency of gun violence.  Unfortunately, many listeners would be left with that impression.  The reality is more complicated as I explain below.

The report by Stephen Beard about gun control in Europe that aired on Dec 26, 2012 was misleading and did a disservice to your listeners.  After describing the much tighter controls on guns imposed by European countries, Mr. Beard went on to make the observation, which has been parroted by every media outlet on the planet, that mass shootings can occur in countries with very strict gun controls (such as Norway) and can be rare in countries where gun ownership is very high (such as Switzerland).  While factually accurate, the observation is misleading because it leaves the impression that there is no relationship between homicide rates and the availability of guns.  The reality is much more complicated.

The US, with its easy access to guns and high rates of gun ownership also has one of the highest homicide rates in the world.  Of 145 countries surveyed in 2007 by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), 124 had lower 2010 homicide rates than the US and only 20 had higher rates.  As Table 1 shows, that puts the US in some interesting company

                                                                      Table 1

Twenty Countries with the Highest Homicide Rates

Source: (http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/homicide.html.)

 

Let’s take a closer look at Norway, where the attack on students at a summer camp on July 22, 2011 claimed 77 lives even though, as Mr. Beard was careful to note, Norway has some of the strictest gun controls in the world.  What Mr Beard failed to report was that prior to the 2011 shootings Norway also had one of the lowest homicide rates in the world.

 Table 2

2007 Homicide Rates per 100,000 population

In 2007 (the most recent year for which complete data are available) there were 0.05 gun homicides per 100,000 people in Norway.  That’s one twentieth of a homicide for every 100,000 people.   The corresponding rate in the US was 3.87,  66 times higher than Norway.  To put it another way, had the US experienced the same low rate of gun violence as Norway in 2007, US fatalities would have been 154 rather than the 11,630 that actually occurred. 

While strict gun controls did not prevent the Norway mass murder, there is no denying that the country has had extraordinarily low levels of gun violence for decades.  While Norway is exceptional in this regard,  it is really the US, with its exceptionally high rate of gun homicides, that is the real outlier. US rates of gun related homicides are 6 ½ times higher than in Canada, 12 times higher than in the UK, and 16 times than in Europe as a whole.

Table 2

Ratio of US Homicide Rates to Countries with

Stricter Gun Control Laws 

The reader will note that the US does not differ that much from other countries in terms of non-gun.  Clearly, the big difference between the US and the other countries shown in Table 2 is its sky-high rates of gun homicides.

To be sure, the availability of guns is only one of many factors that contribute to the level of gun violence in a particular society.  The list contributing factors would include the severity of illicit drug trafficking, unemployment rates, poverty, school quality, social cohesiveness, and a host of others.  The magnitude of a any one factor’s contribution will vary as will the difficulty of ameliorating its affects.  All the more reason to go after contributing factors that (1) have a significant impact and, (2) are within our power to change.  Using these criteria, the imposition of reasonable controls on guns and ammunition on a National level is a no-brainer.  It is something that could be done relatively quickly and at relatively low cost if we could just get past the politics and the paranoia driven ideology of gun-rights advocates. 

 

We also need to think of the relative costs and benefits of different policy choices.  What exactly are the benefits to society of allowing access to assault  rifles with 30 or 100 cartridge magazines?  There are much better weapons for hunting and a wide range of perfectly good alternatives for self-defense.

 Yet, the mass shootings in Columbine, the Aurora movie theater in Colorado, and Newtown Elementary School in Connecticut have one thing in common - the use of semi-automatic guns with high capacity magazines.  At Columbine, one of the shooters wielded a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun and carried one 52-, one 32-, 
                         Intratec TEC-9                                   

The man charged in the Aurora movie shootings, carried an AR 15 with a 100-round barrel magazine.  The Newtown shooter also used an AR15, this one with a 30 round magazine.

Perhaps the NRA would be good enough to describe for us the benefits to our country of making such weapons freely available and how these benefits justify the obvious costs. 

Ron Moon co-owner of CJI Guns in Tucker, Ga., holds 

a pair of 100-bullet-capacity magazines for an AR15 

semi-automatic assault rifle.  The same magazine was used

 in the Aurora shootings.

The Failure of Our Mainstream News Media

 I recently attended rallies in front of the US Supreme Court to show support for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) otherwise known as Health Care Reform or Obamacare.  I had no illusions that demonstrations would affect the outcome of the Supreme Court hearings, but since the event would be heavily covered by the news media I felt it was important for those who support the law to be as visible as possible.

The experience reinforced my already low opinion of the mainstream news media, particularly the TV news outlets.  First of all, I was astounded to find that virtually all of the news outlets I checked gave the impression that supporters and opponents were there in roughly equal numbers.  Even my beloved NPR gave that impression.  The reality was that supporters of the ACA outnumbered opponents by nearly ten to one as the following photographs clearly show.  The two views show demonstrators on the East and West sides of First Street NW immediately opposite the court.  I have outlined the signs of ACA opponents in red.  All other signs are carried by supporters. 

First Street NW looking east

                                                           First Street NW looking west 

Note: The group circled in yellow are school kids touring the Capital, not demonstrators.  There are no anti-ACA demonstrators

 A Missed Opportunity to Provide Real Information to the Public

The organizers of the pro-ACA demonstration held a news conference that featured real people who related personal experiences in which the ACA had rescued them from the kind of abuses that are now prevalent in our employer-based, for-profit, insurance system.   The stories were compelling and would have provided TV viewers with very clear and compelling examples of how responsible people who have played by the rules have been screwed by the present system and helped by the ACA.  None of this made the evening news even though it took place less than 50 feet away from a mob of 40 TV news cameramen and a handful of carefully coiffed TV reporters twiddling their thumbs while waiting to perform their 30-second sound bites.  Not a single one of them bothered to walk over and listen to the stories even though they had been urged to do so by the organizers. Here are just two of them.

(1) Stacie and Her Twin Daughters

Stacies' twin daughters, now 11, were diagnosed with leukemia when they were four. They both needed stem cell transplants and other cancer treatments. Once the cancer was in remission the twins needed hormone injections in order to grow normally.  Stacie’s husband’s company switched to CIGNA health insurance, and CIGNA refused to cover the hormone shots, which cost $440 each.  The high cost of these medications and related treatment costs forced Stacie and her to file for bankruptcy.  Thanks to the ACA, however, the family was  able to obtain coverage for the girls' treatment under a provision that provides $5 billion to insure families that have been denied coverage for a pre-existing condition. The pre-existing condition exclusion will disappear in 2014 when the ACA becomes fully operative.  In the meantime, the act

                                                               The Twins                          Stacie

the ACA is providing  desperately needed coverage for families like Stacie's.


 (2) Christina

While attending a work-related conference, Christina let two men buy her drinks at a bar in Fort Lauderdale. The next thing she knew, she was lying on a roadside with cuts and bruises that indicated she had been raped. Since she did not know anything about the men who raped her, she was advised by her doctor to take anti-AIDS drugs for 30 days as a preventive measure.  She never developed an HIV infection, but months later, when she lost her health insurance and sought new coverage, she ran into a problem.

The insurance companies examined her health records. Even after she explained the assault, the insurers would not sell her a policy because the HIV medication "raised too many health questions". The company told her they might reconsider in three or more years if she could prove that she was still AIDS-free.