The Instrumentality Effect

The National Rifle Association is perhaps the most powerful lobby in the United States. Gun control? Forgetaboutit.  The NRA sends quivers of fear in any national candidate, from either side of the aisle, and dominates the agenda in most rural and non-coastal Western states. They have managed to convince our legislators that the first part of the Second Amendment (that “well-regulated” part) doesn’t exist, banned the accumulation of gun-homicide statistics by any state or federal agency, even fomented legislation in Iowa that would legalize open to silencers. They spread misleading slogans like, “guns don’t kill people, people do,” but they are even loathe to add the kinds of background checks – particularly as gun shows and non-regulated private transaction where 40% of personal arms are sold by unlicensed dealers – that even the vast majority of NRA membership supports.

Still, the daily reports of gun violence continue. And “big shooters” – in places in the U.S. like Ft Hood (twice), Aurora, Sandy Hook, and now a seemly anti-Semitic multiple killing in Kansas City, etc. – continue to grab the headlines with their mass killings. Bu on April 9^th, a 16-year-old sophomore at Franklin Regional High School in Murrysville, Pennsylvania (near Pittsburgh) went on a rampage and stabbed 21 students and a security guard. A knife? Gun proponents repeated that tired old mantra, and noted that when rage sets in, the decision to hurt is a personal one, not one based on the inanimate choice of the weapon type. Yes, there were serious injuries in Murrysville. But wait, no one was killed either. What do you think the result would have been if the weapon had been an AR-15 assault rifle?

Sorry NRA fans, guns in the hands of an unbalanced or criminal killer have a much greater chance of killing people than a baseball bat, a knife or anything short of a large bomb, poison gas or an artillery shell. Writing for CNN.com (April 11^th), Philip J. Cook, ITT/Terry Sanford Professor of Public Policy, and Kristin A. Goss, associate professor of public policy at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy  (co-authors of The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know, published this month by Oxford University Press) note: “‘It's called "the instrumentality effect,’ and we owe the original scholarly findings (more than four decades old at this point) to the eminent University of California criminologist Franklin Zimring. Others, including one of us (Cook), have validated and built upon his insights.

“The idea that the weapon matters emerges in studies of robberies and assaults. When committed with a gun, these crimes are far more likely to result in the victim's death than are similar violent crimes committed without a gun. For example, the likelihood that a victim will die when robbed by a firearm-wielding attacker is three times as high as when the victim faces an attacker bearing a knife and 10 times as high as when the attacker has another type of weapon. For victims injured in an assault, the likelihood of death is also greater when a gun is involved, especially in cases of domestic violence.

“Of course, the choice of weapon could be simply a product of the perpetrator's focus on killing; perhaps it's this intensity, not the choice of weapon, that is really to blame. In light of [the April 9^th] knife attacks in Pennsylvania, Zimring's findings are particularly telling…

“Adding more evidence to the case that the weapon matters, Zimring and Gordon Hawkins later demonstrated that overall crime rates aren't that much higher in American cities than in comparable cities in other developed countries. We just have higher rates of homicide, and that is because our criminals are more likely to be armed with guns and thus their attacks are more likely to end in the victim's death.

“The most important and interesting implication of the instrumentality effect is that if public policy could reduce gun use in crime, the murder rate would go down -- even if the overall crime rate did not. As it turns out, about half of American states have enacted policies that add prison time to felons who use a gun when committing their crimes.” But the NRA’s effective ban on gun statistics (homicides) hinders research and allows their misguided policies to rely on false slogans rather than the hard numbers that we get everywhere else in the world. Do feel safer and better off under the NRA view of the world… or the view that just about every other developed nation applies in terms of gun control?

I’m Peter Dekom, and we are considered – with justification – a rogue nation with an out-of-control gun culture that has long trumped both common sense and the full meaning of the Second Amendment as it was actually written.