Tunnel vision prevents people from seeing the big picture, and leads to biased and flawed conclusions. With apologies to Abraham Maslow's hammer, if you're a gun-control fanatic, every shooting crime looks like a gun problem.
Maybe you've seen one of the "gun homicide" charts comparing the U.S. and European countries, in which the U.S. is shown to be a "clear outlier" among "developed nations."
Twisted, single-statistic analyses are rarely useful, and this one is especially deceptive and diversionary.
Several questions arise immediately: Why just compare gun homicides? Those comprise only about 1 percent of all violent crimes, and an almost infinitesimal portion (roughly 0.16 percent) of crime overall. They're also highly concentrated in localized sections of urban areas, which renders national averages and comparisons mostly meaningless.
Why limit the comparison to a single-year snapshot? The percentage of U.S. households owning one or more firearms is about the same as 60 years ago, but crime rates and mass shootings have spiked. If you prefer to compare the per capita gun ownership statistic, which has increased over time, the murder rate as a ratio of firearms per person has plummeted since 1960 because of dramatic population increase.
If the U.S. were a similar outlier in gun ownership and gun homicide back then, how are those measures relevant to the crime-rate increase?
For that matter, why only compare homicide or crime? Since 1900, Europeans in "developed nations" have killed each other by the tens of millions via the legalized homicide of warfare and hostile occupations--a triple-digit multiple of American deaths from those causes.
French military deaths from World War I constituted more than 4 percent of the national population; Germany's military death percentage rose even higher in World War II.
In our most murderous years, U.S. homicides account for less than 1/100 of a percent of our population.
It is true that Americans own many more guns than Europeans. But when adjusted for those different gun-possession rates, U.S. gun crime numbers are in line with our Old World brethren. Comparing gun-homicide rates as a ratio of guns owned, France and the U.S. are almost statistically identical. Indeed, though the French have a lot fewer firearms than we do, they're actually a little more violent with the guns they own.
Germany, on the other hand, has a gun ownership rate equal to France's, but 80 percent fewer gun homicides.
The problem with rushing down the "gun first" rabbit hole of crime analysis is that guns are not the reason for criminal activity; they are merely tools criminals use.
Guns don't cause crime, lawbreakers cause crime. And the primary reason European countries don't have as much gun crime as the U.S. isn't because they don't have as many guns. It's because they don't have as many criminals.
When there are more criminals in a place, there will be more crime--regardless of how many or how few guns there are in that place. And if a place has more criminals and also more guns, there will be more gun crime. Thus, reducing any crime problem anywhere starts first with reducing the size of the criminal population.
Because different countries categorize crimes differently, it's not easy to compare the U.S. criminal census internationally. However, a few examples are revelatory.
The aggravated-assault rate in the U.S. in 2020 was more than twice that of the European Union, which includes 27 countries with twice our national population. That's bad enough, but in our most violent cities, it's much worse. The aggravated-assault rate in Memphis, ranked second nationally based on overall crime rate (violent and property crimes combined), is 10 times the EU average.
The U.S. robbery rate nearly doubles the EU as well, but comparing Memphis (pop. 628,127) with Luxembourg (pop. 640,064), the Bluff City robbery rate is 90 times higher.
Talk about statistical "outlier" implications. Imagine life, work and play in Memphis if it had 9,000 percent fewer robbers and violent assailants. Or Baltimore, or St. Louis, or Detroit, or Washington, D.C. Pick and imagine your own metro.
Reduce the number of criminals by 100, 500 or several thousand percent in any city or state, and gun crime will be drastically reduced as well.
Clearly, we're not doing a good enough job of teaching U.S. children to respect property, life and the law. Those basic foundational principles must take priority over--and must be prerequisites to--introducing more complex (and politically charged) critical-thinking concepts and considerations on issues such as social justice, institutional racism, gender identification and the like.
Students who don't first thoroughly understand simple math (addition/subtraction, multiplication/division) will fail miserably in attempts at algebra, geometry or calculus.
And as long as large portions of our younger generations don't master the simple requirements and discipline of democratic civilization and citizenship, they will be prone to turn to barbarous lawlessness and violence.
The problem isn't guns, and neither is the solution. Not here or in Europe. Until we recognize that, our abominable violent crime is unlikely to subside.
Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.