No, more guns won't help
by David Atkins
Digby touched on this briefly yesterday, but it bears repeating: more guns won't help, and armed civilians haven't stopped a gun massacre in at least three decades despite an exploding proliferation of guns. Mother Jones makes the obvious point:
we set out to track mass shootings in the United States over the last 30 years. We identified and analyzed 62 of them, and one striking pattern in the data is this: In not a single case was the killing stopped by a civilian using a gun. Moreover, we found that the rate of mass shootings has increased in recent years—at a time when America has been flooded with millions of additional firearms and a barrage of new laws has made it easier than ever to carry them in public. And in recent rampages in which armed civilians attempted to intervene, they not only failed to stop the shooter but also were gravely wounded or killed.
America has long been heavily armed relative to other societies, and our arsenal keeps growing. A precise count isn't possible because most guns in the United States aren't registered and the government has scant ability to track them, thanks to a legislative landscape shaped by powerful pro-gun groups such as the National Rifle Association. But through a combination of national surveys and manufacturing and sales data, we know that the increase in firearms has far outpaced population growth. In 1995 there were an estimated 200 million guns in private hands. Today, there are around 300 million—about a 50 percent jump. The US population, now over 314 million, grew by about 20 percent in that period. At this rate, there will be a gun for every man, woman, and child before the decade ends.
There is no evidence indicating that arming Americans further will help prevent mass shootings or reduce the carnage, says Dr. Stephen Hargarten, a leading expert on emergency medicine and gun violence at the Medical College of Wisconsin. To the contrary, there appears to be a relationship between the proliferation of firearms and a rise in mass shootings: By our count, there have been two per year on average since 1982. Yet 25 of the 62 cases we examined have occurred since 2006. This year alone there have already been seven mass shootings—and a record number of casualties, with more than 140 people injured and killed.
Here's the problem, though: this article was written before the Newtown massacre. It was only updated yesterday with the latest awful statistics.
These self-evident facts didn't alter the stupidity of our gun debates prior to twenty toddlers and six teachers being needlessly gunned down in Connecticut. And they aren't likely to alter the debate now, either.
Anyone with an ounce of sense knows that more guns won't make us safer.
Facts won't matter here. Only anger and action will. Our side has to be more angry and motivated to act than theirs.
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