* gun deaths versus auto fatalities, & 3 strikes, you're out
Topics: Crime
28 Jan 1994
From: ervan
From today's Chronicle:
Title: Gun fatalaties may pass traffic deaths by 2003
2nd paragraph:
Donna Shalala, secretary of Health and Human Services, released
statistics Thursday demonstrating what she called the "appalling"
growth of gun-related deaths throughout the country in recent
years.
I suppose that Shalala has done a good job of learning how to lie with
statistics from her boss. She already knows what the conclusion is:
more gun control (now being relabelled a 'health issue'). The next
task is to cook that stats to prove her case.
First, I want to note that even if it were true, it does not prove anything.
If society really has become more violent, perhaps that's because we are
making too difficult for people to protect themselves and we should liberalize
gun control laws instead of tightening them.
As for that stats themselves, the curious thing about the title and the
lead paragraph, which echoes it, is the comparison to traffic fatalaties.
Traffic fatalaties have been falling. All we have to do is wait and
they will be less than gun fatalaties. That does not tell us anything
about gun fatalaties. The Chronicle, at least, admitted the real
numbers toward the end of the article (but not on the front page with
the 'shocking' comparison). Shalala, in what little I heard, did not
mention this.
Second, it mentions gun fatalaties and not gun homicides or even
homicides. This conceals one fact and makes in addition a dubious
assumption. The fact that it conceals is that guns have become more
popular while knives have become less popular (table 291 in the U.S.
Statistical Abstract). Thus, the stat reflects a change in the way
people commit murder and not the actual homicide rate. The dubious
assumption is that all gun fatalaties are of the same sort and each
equally tragic. This is not so. I can see five broad classes:
1) Accidents
2) Self-defense
3) Police shooting suspects
4) Suicide
5) Homicide
To lump all of them together and then reach conclusions about the crime
rate is disingenuous. Just for openers, the suicide rate is higher than
the homicide rate (table 116).
Third, the graph used in the Chronicle was for total gun fatalities
and not per capita. We already know this fallacy from hundreds of
other places. Oh look, it's going up!
Fourth, she carefully cherry-picked the years from which to draw
the trend line in order to make her case. First, here are the
facts (table 183):
year homicide rate (per 100,000 population)
70 8.3
75 9.9
80 10.7
81 10.3
82 9.6
83 8.6
84 8.4
85 8.3
86 9.0
87 8.7
88 9.0
89 9.2
These are the most recent figures I have. Now, what period did Shalala
choose? Why, '85 to '91, of course, from the lowest year to the
highest and then made a linear extrapolation!
So, the next time you hear a call for gun control, at least realize
that the stats being used to justify it are likely to be bogus.
------------
The other crime related story in the news this week is the "3 strikes,
you're out" proposal which Clinton advocated in this state of my-wishful-
thinking address. If you have not heard, it basically says that any
three felonies requires a life sentence.
This is just silly grandstanding with each party trying to prove it's
tougher on crime (and the Republicans are absolutely loathsome for
trying to beat up on Clinton over crime while playing dead on his
horrendous economic ideas). I just want to note in passing that this
includes things like DWI and theft of auto radios. While these are
clearly not good things, life imprisonment for 3 DWI's is draconian.
But that's not my main point. It is this: prison space is finite. No
amount of mandatory sentencing will change that. The current system is
simply that we let some people out earlier to make room for others to
stay longer. The current absurdity is that drug dealing merits a longer
sentenece (in the long run) than rape or murder. Even if you think that
drug dealers should be in jail, this is an absurd state of affairs. "Three
strikes, you're out" only aggravates it by keeping some relatively petty
criminals in longer to let more violent ones out. As to applying this policy
to truly violent people, that's fine. But the question is, why are we
letting murderers out now? If keeping people in jail for life is a good
idea (and I'm not taking a position on this), then why not start with those
most deserving?
I bring this up, because there is an important metaphor here: TANSTAAFL.
Congress passes laws to give more money to honey farmers, or the strategic
helium reserve, or head start, or any of a hundred bogosities on the theory
that it's an infinite well to draw from whatever they want. It's not.
Every good idea either (and I'll try to think like a liberal for a moment,
ouch ;-) starves the poor through new taxes (like gasoline, tobacco,
alcohol, & tariffs, all regressive) or aggravates unemployment by taking
money away from the rich that they would spend on buying things that
produce jobs for the poor. Mandatory sentences and related proposals
make the same mistake of thinking that jail space is infinite. It's
not. There is no attempt made, in either case, to rationally allocate
what amount of the resource is available. Instead, more foolish laws
are passed to spend what's not there.
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