9. Every new round
of talk about gun control creates a panic among gun owners and enthusiasts,
drives expansions in capital investment in the firearms industry, and vastly
expands the volume of weapons and ammunition in the hands of the general
public, presumably increasing the likelihood of gun violence.
In the aftermath of the
2011 mass shooting incident in Tucson, Arizona that critically wounded
Congressman Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others and resulted in 6 fatalities, a
secular up-trend in the common stock price for the small range of publicly
traded gun manufacturers and retail suppliers began, more noticeably in some
cases than in others. On January 7,
2011, the NYSE stock price for Cabelas Inc. (CAB), a major firearms retailer,
closed at $22.15 per share of common stock.
For the same week, Sturm, Ruger, and Co. (RGR), a large manufacturer of
retail sporting guns, closed on the NYSE at $15.42 per share of common
stock. Finally, Smith and Wesson
Holding Corporation (SWHC), the publicly traded holding corporation for a major
supplier of handguns for police and for the retail firearms market, closed on
the NASDEQ at $3.68 per share of common stock.
Two years later (the second week of January 2013), in the aftermath of
16 mass shooting incidents in 2012 (including Aurora and Newtown) with 94
fatalities (including shooters) and at least 109 wounded (see Zornick (2012)
at: http://www.thenation.com/blog/171774/fifteen-us-mass-shootings-happened-2012-84-dead#), the common share price for CAB had risen to
$44.01 (up 98.7 percent relative to the same week in January 2011), for RGR to
$47.51 (up 208.1 percent), and for SWHC to $8.33 (up 126.4 percent).
Being
an honest interpreter of industrial trends, each of these companies
underwent both positive and negative share price fluctuations over this period
and, more importantly, the substantial gains made by each were not
universally attributable to increases in demand for firearms within retail
markets. For example, Smith and Wesson
remains dependent, to a great extent, on wholesale purchases by the law
enforcement community. In a period when
fiscal austerity places constraints on the ability of law enforcement entities
to invest in firearm upgrades, it is likely that S&W’s share price will
reflect a diminution of demand in one of its primary existing markets. Having issued these precautionary points,
however, a basic conclusion presents itself: when politicians begin to talk gun
control, demand for firearms and ammunition spikes, reflecting the fears of
private gun owners and enthusiasts that they will soon face purchasing
restrictions. Moreover, as a basic
reflection on corporate financing of capital expansions, the substantial
increases in share prices for these publicly traded companies makes it less
costly for each to raise capital through equity markets to finance expansions
by issuing new common equity shares.
The same sort of advantageous financial environment may, likewise,
characterize the engagement of privately held firearms manufacturers with
large-scale investors. Thus, the
revival of gun control as a subject of federal and state legislative discourse
is having the unintended effect of stimulating demand and reducing capital
costs for firearms manufacturers to respond to increased demand by expanding
their scales of operation. I would go
further to argue that, even if there had been no legislative
consideration of gun control in the aftermath of the Newtown mass shooting,
there would still have been a spike in demand for firearms and ammunition,
reflecting a knee-jerk paranoid reaction by gun owners, bolstered by
misinformation on internet sites. Any
gun owner knows perfectly well that it would be next to impossible for a
massacre of kindergarten students by a deranged gunman not to stimulate
legislative discussion over gun laws when such discussions have already
emanated within the media.
Taking the self-evident and highly verifiable conclusion
that discussions of gun control increase demand for weapons and ammunition in
private markets as a point of departure, the further issue remains concerning
the effects of increasing the volume of firearms on the prevalence of gun
violence. In my conclusion above, I presume
that the risk of gun violence increases with increases in the volume of
firearms in the hands of the public. I
am basing my conclusion on a presumed positive correlation between the
quantity of firepower available and the number of casualties from violence
involving firearms. On the other hand,
it is not at all clear that such a presumed correlation actually
exists. One blogger with the
objectivist Randian libertarian slant has gone as far as to test this
hypothesis against available 2010 FBI Uniform Criminal Reporting System homicide
totals per 100,000 residents for individual states and 2007 estimates of the
total percentage of residents owning guns at the state level (see “United
States Homicide Rate vs. Gun Ownership By State,” at: http://www.objectobot.com/?p=476). This
analysis concludes that there is no significant correlation between the volume
of gun ownership per state and homicide rates, even seeming to suggest, in line
with the arguments of the NRA and other gun ownership advocates, that any
existing correlation is negative (i.e. that increased gun ownership
would reduce homicides by making the sorts of criminal activities that result
in gun related fatalities that much more dangerous for armed
perpetrators). Not wanting to let this
analysis go without verification, I was generally able to replicate the results
obtained in this blog using the same data.
But I was not satisfied with this result and, in general, I will remain
unsatisfied with existing statistical treatments on this question – statistics
will always have a role in the construction of persuasive arguments, but no
statistical argument can ever uncover the truth that it is attempting to
diagnose (notwithstanding the best efforts of any objectivist to claim
otherwise).
All that said, I had to go about my own statistical
analysis to test the argument that a positive statistical correlation exists
between gun ownership and gun violence.
I could not find any other verifiable data on gun ownership or purchases
by state, so I used the next best thing that I could find: National Instant
Criminal Background Check System (NICS) data, reporting the number of instances
in which FBI was tasked to undertake background checks in association with a
request to purchase firearms. This
data, obviously, comes with the explicit addendum that it does not provide
a valid direct correlation with the actual number of firearm purchases at the
level of individual states. On the
other hand, it had the advantage of providing some measure approaching the
number of legal gun purchases in the District of Columbia, missing from the
previous dataset. I used NICS totals
for background checks performed per state for 2009. I maintained UCR gun-related homicide totals for 2010 with the
implicit rationale that purchase requests for 2009 would bear some relationship
to incidents occurring in the following year (i.e. a lagged effect of purchases
– implicitly a time series concern). I,
then, transformed these data to reflect homicides and NICS requests per
thousand residents using July 2010 U.S. Census population estimates per state
(the average values for these variables across all states turns out to be
.027791 gun-related homicides per thousand residents and 56.238 background
checks per thousand residents). I could
have stopped there, but I approach statistical analysis with a “let’s throw in
the kitchen sink” mentality. I wanted
to gauge the additional effects on homicide rates attributable to differences
in state-level population density (percentage of state populations living in
urban areas from 2010 Census), differences in median income (Census two-year
moving averages for median income for 2009-2010), and differences in
unemployment rates (averages of annual unemployment rates reported by U.S. Bureau
of Labor Statistics for 2009 and 2010).
Regressing all four variables on my gun-related homicide rate
calculation, correcting for possible heteroskedasticity (i.e. that differences
in the sample variance across different groups of states might vary sufficiently
to bias my regression results), and dropping two sample outliers with extremely
high NICS rates (Kentucky and Montana) suggesting to me calculation errors, I
get:
Gun-related
Homicides/1,000 Coefficient (Robust Standard
Error) t P>|t|
NICS Checks/
1,000 -.0002748 (.0002203) -1.25 .219
Urbanization Rate
2010 Census .0005192 (.0002458) 2.11 .040
Median Income
2009-2010 Average -9.99e-07
(4.05e-07) -2.46 .018
Unemployment
2009-2010 Average
.0004655 (.0015424) .30 .764
Constant .050185 (.0263715) 1.90 .064
Number of Observations: 49
F (4, 44): 4.04
Prob. > F: .0071
R-squared: .2255
Root MSE: .02287
All of this means that I
got no farther than I did when I replicated Objectobot’s results – gun
ownership or the best possible substitute that I could utilize in its place has
a very negligible and, given the size of its error term/sample variance,
statistically insignificant negative correlation to the sample gun-related
homicide rate. It turns out that, on a
95 percent confidence interval, the only statistically significant correlations
that I can find come from the urbanization rate (a positive correlation –
increases in urbanization correlate weakly to a higher incidence of gun-related
homicide) and median income (a negative correlation – increases in median
income correlate very weakly to a lower rate of gun-related
homicides). Summarizing, even if it’s
always worthwhile playing around with numbers just for the pleasure of seeing
what will come out at the end, this analysis proves very little about the
relationship between gun ownership and gun-related violence. Better data sources are needed here
(reliable estimates of legal and illegal firearm volumes per state, better
data on fatal and non-fatal gun-related incidents) and, perhaps,
different estimation techniques better suited to showing the relationship
between the volume of firearms in a state and the incidence of gun-related
violence (maybe a panel data approach, accounting for changes in gun control
policies over time, like the effects of the Heller decision on the
District of Columbia and the McDonald decision on Chicago). Until such analysis can be introduced (and
until the sorts of “natural experiments” on the reduction of gun control
restrictions directed by the federal judiciary bear fruit), I will continue to
assert my presumption on the relationship between firearm volumes and
gun-violence as a presumption, unsupported by statistical manipulations of
data, for whatever statistical analyses are, in fact, worth.
10. It is a
knee-jerk reaction of the left to demand gun control after every atrocious
incidence of gun violence – we need to resist this reaction in the name of broader
revolutionary change.
In, finally, concluding
my rant on guns, I want to tie everything I’ve thrown out here together and, in
doing so, lay out the problem that guns pose for people like me on the
political left. I am trained as an
economist and distinctions across the political left have always been clearer
to me in reference to macroeconomic policy prescriptions. The liberals, especially party line
Democrats, have historically, for at least the last fifty years, bought into
the sort of 1960s sanitized commercial Keynesian thinking that preached more
government spending as the cure for all ills in recessionary periods. If market processes, especially those of
capital markets, posed significant structural defects and long-term constraints
on economic growth, these could be glossed over with the implantation of a
government fiscal stimulus, like the Kennedy tax cuts of 1964 or Obama’s first
term stimulus package. In this manner,
the structural problems go unresolved while government injects fresh capital
into the economy in the hopes that this will make the recession all better –
the macroeconomic equivalent of giving someone with a torn Achilles tendon a
shot of cortisone and telling him that he should be fine to run a marathon in
the morning. Persistently, liberals,
even some very educated ones, do not get that complex social problems, like the
reorganization of capital markets in response to economic globalization, demand
structural solutions that cannot easily be legislated in a couple of hundred
pages of statutory law or realized in a couple of years. Such problems demand broader changes in
society and in the orientation of government toward regional economies. The liberals mean well – they always
mean well, but they always want to put a band-aid on a major social laceration
and hope that it will heal before the patient dies of blood loss.
On the radical economic left of post-Keynesians,
institutionalists, and structurally oriented Marxian thinkers, it is at least
somewhat more evident that macroeconomic problems demand a serious
consideration of infrastructural deficiencies in transportation/logistics,
education/training of manpower, and information transmission mechanisms in
response to changes in supply and demand across globally extensive production
networks. None of these areas,
in my view, necessarily requires government investments, but each
potentially stands to benefit from the initiative of political leaders in
setting the tone for private investors/stakeholders. Political leaders need to point a clear direction and identify
social goals to be pursued in support of equitable and sustainable (and,
perhaps, non-exploitative) economic development. This is not the same thing as throwing cheap
capital across diverse regional economies and expecting/hoping that it will get
things moving.
The liberals are no different when it comes to an issue
like gun violence. For Democratic Party
liberals, gun control is a knee-jerk reaction especially after mass shooting
incidents that never subsides in favor of some more comprehensive, nuanced
solution to the social problems of which gun violence is a symptom. Gun control directly addresses the volume of
firearms entering the general public through legal mechanisms and constitutes a
tangible response on the part of the government. Liberals, in the American/Rooseveltian mold, may not think that
government action is a good in and of itself, but they prize the notion of
direct public action against perceived social ills – when there is a social
problem like gun violence, they want the government to do something to fix
it.
On the radical left, gun control can, likewise, be a
knee-jerk reaction to gun violence.
Quite simply, when it is so easy to gain access to firearms and firearms
are so useful at inflicting lethal violence, it appears axiomatic that, if you
want to reduce the prevalence of violent acts performed with guns, then you
have to reduce the legal accessibility of firearms. I have tried to make the point in this rant that nothing is ever
this simple. Furthermore, we need to be
a little more cognizant about what it is that we are doing when we advocate gun
control. It is one thing for liberals
to trust the benevolent intentions of the government as the grand arbiter of
social peace. For the tradition of
thought with which I associate myself, the government has historically been
viewed as an instrument of class dictatorship.
Does
it really make sense for Marxists and other radical leftists to support
the monopolization of access to the tools of lethal violence in the
hands of institutions whose business, at least in part, is to enforce the
dominance of capitalism? One would
have to think that this would imply laying every hope for radical political
change on constitutionally sanctioned political processes that have,
historically, failed to deliver on the potential for achieving important social
goals (e.g. more economic democratization, greater gender and racial equality
and sexual liberty, less militarization, greater social investments in
learning/arts, greater concern with ecological sustainability in economic
development, etc.). I have already made
the point in this rant that we cannot take lethal violence off the table as a
means of achieving political change. On
the other hand, we always have to contemplate, as a simultaneously instrumental
and ethical matter, how our methodological choices shape us as human beings
and political agents. The Bolshevik
revolution in Russia slipped into autocracy, at least in part, because the
regime that emerged in the 1920s was founded on the lethal violence of a
conspiratorial coup, a vicious civil war, and the military response to
counterrevolutionary foreign invasions.
Marxism, as a tradition of theory and political activism, is still
recovering from the historical wrong turn manifest in the experience of Soviet
socialism. Lethal violence may be, in
certain respects, a political trap for radicals.
In any case, I have also tried to make the point in this
rant that guns are not the problem that needs to be addressed, per
se. The problem facing American
society, intertwined under the rubric of mental illness, is the
multidimensional and multi-scalar collapse of community and its effects on the
mental health of individuals, particularly young males. In some respects, the interests and goals of
the radical left, Marxist or otherwise, may enjoy here the possibility for
convergence with the needs of the broader American polity. If, contrary to responses on the political
right, what we need is not enhanced criminalization of gun-related criminal
acts but the enhancement of participatory, democratizing institutions as a
counter to social disempowerment and isolation of individuals, then the
economic, political, and cultural prescriptions of the radical left may be more
in line to resolve the problems of gun violence than those that are currently
contemplated on either side in the post-Newtown debate over gun violence in
Washington and among the various state legislatures. The sorts of things that I have in mind here cannot emanate from
higher echelons of government. They
have to be community initiatives. They
must be voluntary – they cannot be solicited at the end of a gun. They require a lot of footwork, organizing,
and faith in the possibility of progress against the steep obstacles
manifest in consumer-driven individualism, the cynicism of corporate media,
and, in some circumstances, the paucity of mainstream financial resources. All of these obstacles need to be approached
concretely in ways that will enhance the capacity of committed political actors
to reconstitute community in ways that conform to an imagery of deepening and
continuously evolving economic, political, and cultural democracy.
In the end, this rant has sought to
outline the reasons why I am not the least bit concerned about the dismal
prospects for expanded gun control in the U.S. in the aftermath of
Newtown. The present context is a call
to arms for the radical left, not in the name of gun control, but in the name
of revolutionary change to build the sorts of institutions that can transform
the grassroots of American community in ways that will advance the larger goals
of an enhanced conception of democracy.
