The simple fact is too many criminals carry guns. Some people wishfully believe that more restrictive gun laws will affect lawbreakers' propensity in this regard.
A more realistic approach would be to up the ante on the punishment structure for any criminal caught with a firearm, whether or not it was used in a crime. Many times the presence of a gun results in its unintended use; a lot of shootings didn't start out as shootings.
They wound up happening unexpectedly. Oftentimes nobody expects the shooting to start, but it does.
It couldn't, however, if criminals were more afraid to carry illegal guns than to not carry them.
Since an unarmed criminal is unlikely to commit a gun crime, and since no criminal policy will ever alter human nature or eradicate the emotive states that produce murderous rage or intent, the policy goal should be to make the penalty for gun possession by a criminal far outweigh the benefit.
Quicker and harsher punishment alone may not be enough, though it's a critical piece. Maybe there needs to be a national stigmatization program, much like has been done with drunken driving and hate crimes.
In jurisdictions where it applies, the law deems a hate-crime assault worse than a regular assault; it gives prosecutors more weapons in their arsenal, and courts more punishments at their disposal. Hate crimes also portray the character, motives and actions of perpetrators as more despicable than their non-hate counterparts.
Hate-crime legislation has been proposed, debated, passed and enforced in Congress and nearly every state. Only four states, Arkansas among them, have not enacted hate-crime laws.
Hate crime has gotten and continues to get a disproportionate amount of press and publicity from the media. Google search results for the phrase "hate crime" returns 12.6 million general results, and 2.3 million in the current news category.
But while there is most assuredly a lot of news coverage for the idea of hate crimes, the actual tally of incidents is an altogether different story.
The latest FBI annual report on hate crimes counted a total of 7,175 incidents for 2017. The overwhelming majority of those were nonviolent incidents; violent offenses included 15 murders, 23 rapes and 990 aggravated assaults. The total number of hate-crime victims for the year was 8,828. The total number of offenders was 6,370.
The fact that there are 300 times more Web page results in a Google news search than actual hate crimes points to a glaring disparity.
Hate crimes as a topic generates a lot of discussion. But hate crimes as a real problem affects a tiny fraction (less than a quarter percent) of the population.
Now let's compare gun-crime numbers.
The FBI reported some 400,000 firearm-related violent crimes in 2017, of which more than half were aggravated assaults. The total number of gun murders was 10,970 (more than all hate crimes combined).
Yet a Google search of "gun crimes" returns 1 million results overall, and only 116,000 in the current news category.
Unlike hate crimes, where the ratio of Google news results to actual incidents was 300-to-1, the ratio for gun crimes is just over 1-to-3.
Here's a direct comparison between hate-crime (HC) and gun-crime (GC) metrics:
Incidents--HC 7,175 versus GC 400,000
Murders--HC 15 versus GC 10,970
Aggravated Assaults--HC 990 versus GC 213,247
Google News Results--HC 2,270,000 versus GC 116,000
That is arguably compelling evidence that our nation has its priorities mixed up--big-time--when it comes to the two types of crime.
Localizing the data reveals an even starker contrast in the disparity. The total number of hate crimes reported in 2017 to the FBI by 292 participating Arkansas law enforcement agencies was eight.
That's one hate crime every 45 days in Arkansas. Seven of those eight hate crimes were crimes against property; only one was a crime of violence against a person, and it was an aggravated assault.
That same year, 16,671 Arkansans fell victim to violent-crime incidents overall (including 258 murders and 12,425 aggravated assaults). Gun crimes were estimated to account for roughly one-fourth of the total number.
That's 45 violent crimes every day in Arkansas. And approximately 11 of those 45 are gun crimes.
Last fall, Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker called all hate crimes "despicable violations of our core values as Americans."
Instead of calling gun criminals "despicable," the tendency is to blame the weapon or criticize America's "gun culture." Most of the personal name-calling around gun crime is aimed at law-abiding citizens who responsibly own firearms.
Imagine how different our nation, states, cities and neighborhoods would be if gun crimes happened as infrequently as hate crimes.
Firearm-suppression programs targeting illegal-gun-saturated "hot spot" areas were implemented by several cities during the violent crime peak in the mid-1990s: anonymous cash tip lines, consent-to-search of juveniles' parents, etc.
Violent-crime statistics overall show reductions, but some of the hottest spots today are still as bad as they were 25 years ago.
Disarming risky populations of potential gun offenders--not the public at large--is the key to reducing gun crime.
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Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.
Editorial on 07/26/2019