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The Single Best Anti-Gun-Death Policy? Ending the Drug War
By Noah Smith

Dec 21 2012, 11:03 AM ET

Universal gun confiscation is impossible, and even aggressive gun control might not dramatically reduce gun-related deaths. But ending our ridiculous and expensive war on drugs could.

This is not a column against gun control. Gun control is a good idea. The assault-weapons ban is a good idea. So are background checks, stricter licensing agreements, and greater efforts to keep guns out of the hands of minors. A prohibitive tax on ammunition? There's another good idea finally getting attention it deserves, after being suggested by comedian Chris Rock a decade ago.

But much of the gun-policy commentary that has come in the wake of the tragic Newtown massacre is misdirected. Stringent gun-control measures are unlikely to turn the United States into a peaceful gun-free society like Japan. In addition, much of the hysteria over "rising gun deaths" is badly misplaced, since the violent-crime rate and the murder rate have both been declining since the early 1990s. If we really, truly want to reduce gun deaths, there is a much better way to do it than the gun-control measures.

THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM: ZERO-GUN AMERICA

Having lived in Japan, I've known for many years how peaceful it is. Women can (and often do) walk down the street at night alone in a big city without fear of attack. Fights are rare, and murders rarer. And much, though not all, of this is due to the fact that Japan doesn't allow people to own guns. If you think Japan is a special case, check out Germany, France, and other gun-free countries.

But to become like Japan, banning gun sales wouldn't be enough. We'd have to actually confiscate all the guns that Americans now have. This is because guns are very durable; they last many, many years. The United States has far more guns per 100 people than any other country (88.8 in 2007, compared to 58.2 for second-place Serbia). It would take many decades for a gun sale ban to reduce that number to rich-country averages.

Nor is there any certainty that marginal reductions in gun ownership would bring matching reductions in the murder rate. Brazil, for example, has a murder rate more than four times as high as the U.S., with less than 10% of the gun ownership that we have. In other words, it's possible that appreciably reducing gun murders might require a truly huge (and unrealistic) reduction in gun ownership.

Now, if the U.S. banned gun ownership, and confiscated all the guns that people currently own, it would probably be very effective. But this is almost certainly politically infeasible, and if somehow the 14th Amendment were repealed and this law were passed, it would cause violent civil unrest. Additionally, lots of people could hide their guns. The effort required to confiscate them would be likely to turn our country into a police state.

So universal gun confiscation is out.

THE GUN NUMBERS TO FOCUS ON

Any gun control we enact will have a limited effect. But this should not be cause for despair. Much of the recent hysteria over gun deaths is misplaced.

A lot of people have been citing a recent report, "American Gun Deaths to Exceed Traffic Fatalities by 2015." The article shows that gun deaths in America are slowly rising, and now stand at 32,000 per year -- a staggering toll. Now, 32,000 deaths per year is a lot of death, and I'd never minimize that. But what the article's authors fail to mention is that gun murders comprise less than a third of that total -- about 9,000 per year in recent years. With accidental gun deaths steady at around 500-600 per year, the bulk of those 32,000 "gun deaths" are suicides.

In fact, murder by gun has been falling steadily since the early 1990s. Some of that is due to improvements in emergency medicine, but most is a result of the overall decline in violent crime that America has enjoyed over the last two decades. The fact that overall gun deaths has risen since 2000, despite the fall in murders, suggests that increased gun suicide has accounted for more than 100% of the increase in gun deaths. Obviously, suicide is a tragedy, and I don't want to minimize it. But people aren't panicking over suicide, they're panicking over murder, and gun-related murder is on the way down.

Of course, 9,000 gun deaths a year is still a lot. Still more than other rich countries, still a disgrace, still far too many! But people who have been watching the round-the-clock coverage of the Newtown massacre need to understand that "mass killings" of the Newtown type account for a very small percent of that 9,000. Most of those 9,000 gun murders are of the more mundane, but no less deadly variety -- drive-by shootings, gang wars, personal quarrels, and other easily comprehensible crimes.

And if we really care about those 9,000 souls who are shot to death each year, there is an extremely effective policy that we could enact right now that would probably save many of them.

I'm talking about ending the drug war.

A DRUG-WAR POLICY, NOT A GUN POLICY

Reliable statistics on the number of drug-related murders in the United States are hard to come by. A 1994 Department of Justice report suggested that between a third and a half of U.S. homicides were drug-related, while a recent Center for Disease Control study found that the rate varied between 5% and 25% (a 2002 Bureau of Justice report splits the difference). Part of this variance is that "drug-related" murders are hard to define. There are murders committed by people on drugs, murders committed by addicts to get money for drugs, turf-war murders by drug suppliers, and murders committed by gangs whose principal source of income is drug sales.

But very few would argue that the illegal drug trade is a significant cause of murders. This is a straightforward result of America's three-decade-long "drug war." Legal bans on drug sales lead to a vacuum in legal regulation; instead of going to court, drug suppliers settle their disputes by shooting each other. Meanwhile, interdiction efforts raise the price of drugs by curbing supply, making local drug supply monopolies (i.e., gang turf) a rich prize to be fought over. And stuffing our overcrowded prisons full of harmless, hapless drug addicts forces us to give accelerated parole to hardened killers.

Ending the drug war would involve reducing all of these incentives to murder. Treating addicts in hospitals and rehab centers, instead of sticking them in prisons, would reduce demand for drugs, lowering the price and starving gangs of income while reducing their incentive to wage turf wars. Decriminalization would relieve pressure on our prison system, allowing us to focus on keeping violent people off the streets instead of pointlessly punishing drug users for destroying their own health. And full legalization of recreational marijuana -- which is already proceeding quickly among the states, but is still foolishly opposed by the Obama administration -- is an obvious first step.

In other words, yes, gun control is good. BUT don't expect it to be a panacea for America's gun violence problem. If we really want to save some of those 9,000 people, we need to end the self-destructive, failed drug policies that have turned us into a prison state and turned many of our cities into war zones.

Sticking my umbrella up to try to deflect the tsunami of specious, beside-the-point, hiding-the-cultural-imperialism-ball, insult-to-reason uses of empirical evidence on violence & gun control (emanating from those on both sides of the debate), I offered a couple of feeble blog posts (here and here) urging more thoughtful, grounded arguments that are mindful both of the limits of our knowledge and our duty, as citizens of a liberal democracy, to justify our policy positions on grounds free of the impulse to use law as an expressive weapon for denigrating cultural styles that differ from our own.

I'm not satisfied by my performance.

The problem isn't that what I wrote will make no difference, have no effect, etc. If that were the decisive issue, why would I ever say anything? I'm not trying to change the world; I'm just trying to engage other curious and concerned citizens who also want to think about issues reflectively and form positions that they think are factually supportable and morally defensible. I'm trying to help them so they'll help me back, since I'm by no means certain I'm right either.

No, the problem wasn't the futility of what I said but the incompleteness. "Don't look to statistics" -- could be read as denigrating the utility of empirical inquiry in assessing public policy and as expressing a sort of nihilistic "who cares, nothing we can do!" attitude, both of which would deeply misrepresent how I feel about evidence-based policymaking generally & about using evidence to think about guns.

So to amend I will emend.

I now want to point out that in fact, while the empirical evidence on the relationship between gun control and homicide is (at this time at least) utterly inconclusive, there certainly are policies out there that we have very solid evidence to believe would reduce gun-related homicides very substantially.

The one at the top of the list, in my view, is to legalize recreational drugs such as marijuana and cocaine.

The theory behind this policy prescription is that illegal markets breed competition-driven violence among suppliers by offering the prospect of monopoly profits and by denying them lawful means for enforcing commercial obligations.

The evidence is ample. In addition to empirical studies of drug-law enforcement and crime rates, it includes the marked increase in homicide rates that attended alcohol prohibition and the subsequent, dramatic deline of it after repeal of the 18th Amendment.

from Claude Fischer, Berkeley Blog Actually, it's pretty interesting to look at homicide rates over a broader historical time frame than typically is brought into view by those who opportunistically crop the picture in one way or another to support their position for or against gun control. What you see is that there is a pretty steady historical trend toward decline in the US punctuated by expected noisy interludes but also by what appear to be some genuine, and genuinely dramatic, jumps & declines.

One of the jumps appears to have occurred with the onset of prohibition and one of the declines with repeal of prohibition. Social scientists doing their best to understand the evidence generally have concluded that that those are real shifts, and that they really were caused by prohibition and repeal.

from Claude Fischer, Berkeley Blog

Criminologists looking at the impact of drug prohibition can use the models developed in connection with alcohol prohibition and other modeling strategies to try to assess the impact of drug prohibition on crime. Obviously the evidence needs to be interpreted, supports reasonable competing interpretations, and can never do more than justify provisional conclusions, ones that are necessarily subject to revision in light of new evidence, new analyses, and so forth.

But I'd say the weight of the evidence pretty convincingly shows that drug-related homicides generated as a consequence of drug prohibition are tremendously high and account for much of the difference in the homicide rates in the U.S. and those in comparable liberal market societies (the non-liberal, non-market societies all are burdened with homicide rates orders of magnitude higher; guns don't explain that-- the pacifying influence of doux commerce does). By all means decide for yourself, though; I've cited some reading material at the end of this post & urge others to call our attention to more in the comments section.

There are obviously other spikes & dips in the "secular" (as econometricians would say; here that's a very nice adjective to use) downward trend in homicide in the U.S. E.g., the upsurge of homicides in the 1960s and the decline in the 1990s. Most of the gun-control combatants mine this period for support for their claims -- they should, since the data are rich with support for specious inference. Scholarly discussion here recognizes that the evidence on the contribution of guns to these jumps is utterly, hopelessly inconclusive.

There is a very interesting empirical study, though, by economist Jeffrey Miron, who concludes that the available evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that the difference in homicide rates in the US and in other liberal market societies is attributable to our drug prohibition policies. Gun availability in the US, according to this hypothesis, doesn't directly account for the difference in homicide rates between the US and these countries; rather, gun availability mediates the impact between drug prohibition and homicide rates in the US, because the criminogenic properties of drug prohibition create both a demand for murder of one's competitors and a demand for guns to use for that purpose.

One of the very nice things about Miron's analysis, too, is that he is appropriately provisional about his conclusions:

The empirical results presented above provide a possible explanation for the large differences in violence rates across countries, and they suggest that previous analyses might have spuriously attributed these differences to gun control or availability. According to the analysis here, differences in drug prohibition enforcement explain differences in violence, which in turn explain differences in gun ownership that correlate positively with violence but do not cause that violence. Further, the results provide a hint that restrictive gun control regimes can themselves increase violence. As noted above, these results should be considered suggestive rather than conclusive. Future research on these issues will need to exploit time‐series rather than cross‐sectional data.

That's what a real scholar sounds like, you see. In my view, it's what an open-minded citizen sounds like too.

Now one thing to note: Obviously, decriminalizing marijuana and cocaine couldn't be expected to prevent mass shootings like the one in Newtown, or Aurora, or Phoenix, or Columbine, etc. (Maybe there'd be fewer guns around, actually, if we didn't have the demand for them associated with their contribution to the illegal drug trade, but there are already so many around -- there are more guns than people in the US -- that I think disturbed people would still have no trouble getting their hands on them.)

But here's another thing to note: these very sad incidents "represent only a sliver of America's overall gun violence." Those who are appropriately interested in reducing gun homicides generally and who are (also appropriately) making this tragedy the occasion to discuss how we as a society can and must do more to make our citizens safe, and who are, in the course of making their arguments invoking (appropraitely!) the overall gun homicide rate should be focusing on what we can be done most directly and feasibly to save the most lives.

Repealing drug laws would do more -- much, much, much more -- than banning assault rifles (a measure I would agree is quite appropriate); barring carrying of concealed handguns in public (I'd vote for that in my state, if after hearing from people who felt differently from me, I could give an account of my position that fairly meets their points and doesn't trade on tacit hostility toward or mere incomprehension of whatever contribution owning a gun makes to their experience of a meaningful free life); closing the "gun show" loophole; extending waiting periods etc. Or at least there is evidence for believing that, and we are entitled to make policy on the best understanding we can form of how the world works so long as we are open to new evidence and aren't otherwise interfering with liberties that we ought, in a liberal society, to respect.

...Now, what other policies might help? And in particular, if we are concerned about deaths of children? Well, there's swimming pools .... But I've said enough for now.

References

Barnett, R. & Trip, B. Drug Prohibition and the Weakness of Public Policy’(1994). Yale LJ 103, 2593.
Hirschman, A.O. The Passion and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph. (1977).


Husak, D. Legalize This! The Case for Decriminalizing Drugs. (Verso, New York; 2002).

Jensen, G.F. Prohibition, Alcohol, and Murder Untangling Countervailing Mechanisms. Homicide Studies 4, 18-36 (2000).

Kleiman, M. Marijuana : costs of abuse, costs of control. (Greenwood Press, New York; 1989).

Kleiman, M., Caulkins, J.P. & Hawken, A. Drugs and drug policy : what everyone needs to know. (Oxford University Press, Oxford ; New York; 2011).

MacCoun, R.J. & Reuter, P. Drug war heresies : learning from other vices, times, and places. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K. ; New York; 2001).

Miron, J.A. & Zwiebel, J. The Economic Case Against Drug Prohibition. The Journal of Economic Perspectives 9, 175-192 (1995).

Miron, J.A. Violence, Guns, and Drugs: A Cross‐Country Analysis*. Journal of Law and Economics 44, 615-633 (2001).

Pinker, S. The better angels of our nature : why violence has declined. (Viking, New York; 2011).

Public executions for all kinds of violent crimes used to work well too! There wasn't much of a problem with violent crime even when you could buy any kind of gun or even cannon you wanted and carry them concealed (not the cannon, obviously) with no questions asked, because you were going to swing, fry, or get shot where you stood if you used your guns maliciously!

less if possible.

...but then again it goes against everything I stand for...