Science Vs - Election Special: Gun Violence

Episode Date: October 30, 2018

After 11 people were shot and killed in a Pittsburgh synagogue over the weekend, mass shootings are back in the news. With the midterm elections happening next week, we've updated our episode on guns and are re-releasing it to give you the facts ahead of polling day. Heads up: this episode contains the sound of guns - and we’ll be discussing homicide, suicide and domestic violence. Please take care when listening to the show. If you or someone you love is struggling, there's always someone you can call at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1 800-273-8255. Check out the transcript, with all the citations, here: http://bit.ly/32qXmZ4 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet Media. With the US midterm elections right around the corner, we at Science Versus are going to spend all of this week looking at the biggest political topics out there and we're seeing exactly what the science has to say about them. We at Science Versus are not activists, we're factivists. Okay, and to start off with, we're looking at guns. And this is obviously because over the weekend there was an awful shooting in a synagogue in Pittsburgh.

11 people were killed. And it seems like every time there's a shooting, the same claims come up. Some people say guns are to blame. Others say guns actually keep us safe. And in this case, a good guy with a gun could have protected these people. So, what does the science say? Now we first ran this episode two years ago, but we've made sure it's all up to date.

And a quick warning before we get started. This episode contains the sounds of guns, and we'll be discussing homicide, suicide and domestic violence. Please take care when listening to this show. Nestled in the heartland of New Jersey amongst a nail salon and car wash sits Gun For Hire, a gun range that bills itself as the only family destination gun range in the world. The heartland of New Jersey, amongst a nail salon and car wash, sits Gun For Hire, a gun range that bills itself as the only family destination gun range in the world. And the guy I'm here to see is Anthony Calandro. Anthony!

He's the owner at this joint, and he's like a celebrity around here. He seems to know who everyone is, and he's shaking hands with all the customers. Anthony tells me I have to wait my turn. How's everything? You doing all right? I'm doing good. You can talk to me later if you want. I figured there was one obvious way to pass the time while I waited for Anthony.

All right, so we're going to put you in the range for an hour. 15 minutes, you're going to be with an instructor. You have an AR-15 McBlock 19, a box of ammo for 9mm, two boxes of.223, four targets. Well, I didn't know how long he was going to be. That closed the gun. It is now loaded. You have three shots. There you go. How did I do? These are your three shots.

Is that good? Yes, very good. You're shaking Is that good? Yes, very good. You're shaking your head. Very good, very good. Shaking your head. When I finished my 70 rounds at Gun For Hire, Anthony Calandro was ready to chat. But before I could start asking questions...

Quick question to you. Your perception of gun ranges before you started visiting them, didn't you think that everybody in there would look like Duck Dynasty characters? I did. This is absolutely true. Because that's 50 years of the media perpetuating us as fat white guys with summer teeth, some over here, some over here, with a beard and suspenders and a baseball cap on

and my Bible in my left hand and clinging to my gun in my right hand. Am I right? Okay, so Anthony, he has teeth, doesn't wear suspenders, and no Bible that I could see. Which isn't to say that you'll mistake this place for the UN. On our way to the interview, we did walk past this room full of dudes. What is that? That's a diversity shoot.

We had a bunch of people come and shoot for the first time. They don't look very diverse, Anthony. They're not very diverse. Today we are putting down the guns and picking up the books to find out what guns do to a community. We will answer the following points. One, how many times a year are guns used for good? Say, in self-defence. Two, how many times a year are guns used for bad, like to murder someone?

And three, what effect, if any, do guns have on the overall crime rate? Now, to be clear, although the Constitution is a lovely document, it's not a peer-reviewed journal. So you will be hearing the words the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms only once in this podcast. And you just heard them. Because today, we're talking science. Let's get into it. Self-defense. Best estimates suggest there are around 300 million guns in the U.S. right now,

a number that has been slowly rising. I say best estimates because no one really knows. Guns aren't traced very effectively around the U.S. Still, a recent Pew survey suggests that 42% of homes in America have guns. And the main reason Americans buy guns is to defend themselves and their property. Surveys find that around two-thirds of Americans who own a gun say they have it for protection. And this idea that you need a gun to protect yourself, it's promoted by the National Rifle Association. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. This is Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the NRA. He's speaking at a press conference. And when you hear your glass breaking at 3am and you call 911,

you won't be able to pray hard enough for a gun in the hands of a good guy to get there fast enough to protect you. And Anthony Calandro, owner of Gun For Hire, he agrees with this. There's an old saying, when you need help in seconds, the police arrive in minutes. But if you're home alone, who's going to protect you? If two men were trying to break into your house, a firearm is the ultimate equalizer. Anthony says he's never had to use a gun to protect himself, but he likes the idea that he's ready if something, anything would happen. When I go to a restaurant, I sit with my back to the wall

because I need to see who's coming in and out and watch everything because no one's sneaking up on me. Where did that begin? I have no idea. I think you're just, some people are born that way. And I was born that way. You know, they say, what do they call you, sheepdog? If you're born that way, you have that sheepdog mentality. It's just the way I am. But how many people in America will actually use their guns for self-defense? Well, there is one number that gets cited quite a bit in the media. There are 2.5 million defensive uses of guns every year. It's like 2.5 million. Two and a half million times a year.

2.5 million times. 2.5 million times last year, law-abiding citizens pulled guns in self-defense and saved lives. So let's take a closer look at this number. Where did it come from and can we trust it? Let's start with the man responsible for it, Gary Kleck. He's a professor of criminology at Florida State University and he's been writing about guns for decades. Do you own a gun yourself?

I never answer that question. The reason being that people use it as an excuse for not thinking about the issues but just judging what people have to say, and that's foolish. Gary's study was the first to come up with this number, that there are 2.5 million defensive gun uses. And here's how he got it. Back in the early 1990s, Gary's team surveyed just under 5,000 people to ask them, have you used a gun, even if it wasn't fired,

for self-protection or the protection of property, at home, work or elsewhere? And he found that 1.3%, that is 66 people, said that they had. So then... You take the percent of the sample who said they had that experience and multiply it times the population. So he took those 66 people, that 1.3%, and multiplied it by the adult population of the US,

which equals... Um... OK, so you've got to carry the one and... Two and a half million times a year. You never, ever, ever, ever sort of do that. You never extrapolate like that. This is David Hemenway, a professor of health policy at Harvard University. And he takes issue with Gary's methods.

Nobody who has any training in epidemiology would ever extrapolate the 1% of people. David says multiplying out 1.3%, which in this study, remember, was only 66 people, to the population of America is dangerous. And here's why. Let me give you an example. A recent US survey of more than 5,000 women who had been pregnant found that 45 women, or 0.8% of them, consistently affirmed that they had had a virgin birth.

The survey was published in the British Medical Journal. Now, if you pull a Gary Kleck and multiply that out to the number of women who gave birth in, say, 2013, you'd find that there would be around 31,000 women in America who were virgins when they had their bubs. So in just a decade, there might be 310,000 Jesus babies. Well, hallelujah! Hallelujah!

The point is they were mistaken. They had sex and then they had babies. The other point is that when you're talking about very small percentages being multiplied out to very big populations, a few people being mistaken can lead to a very big wrong number, which is why no scientist would say that there were 31,000 virgin births in the US in 2013. I asked Gary about whether his very big number on defensive gun uses might also have this problem.

The percentage point is very small. So if you're a little bit off, then actually it's orders of magnitude that this figure could be wrong, right? Not if it's a little bit off. It could be orders of magnitude off if it's way off. But if it's, say, one percentage point off, if it's one percentage point off, this could be a problem. If, yeah. I mean, you can speculate anything, if it were, but of course, we don't have the slightest evidence to support that view,

and we have ample evidence to contradict it, which is the results of the other surveys, which always indicate huge numbers of defensive gun uses. Yes, other surveys do exist. And yes, they have gotten similar figures, around 1%. But David Hemenway, who has actually done some of these surveys, says that just because you can replicate a result, it doesn't mean it's true. Why? Because sometimes people lie, leave stuff out, or just misremember, and they do it in the same pattern over and over again.

David points to surveys about how many sexual partners straight men and women have had. So you can ask people in the United States over and over and over, and the men will always tell you more than the women. That doesn't mean that's true. And you're just looking at heterosexual couples. It doesn't mean it's true. That is, either there is a small group of horny women out there

and props to them, or men are lying, or women are lying, or both are lying. Given what we know about people, it's likely that someone is lying. And David Hemenway thinks this is what is happening in these gun surveys. Just like when you ask guys, how many people have you slept with? If you ask Americans how many times they've used their gun defensively, they tend to inflate the number. So if Gary's numbers are wrong, do we have any idea how many people use their guns defensively in America each year? Yes, we do. Meet the National Crime Victimisation Survey.

Forget Gary's 5,000 people and extrapolating, this beast interviews around 90,000 people, so it's much more reliable. And it's considered the gold standard amongst researchers in this field. But it's not just the size of this survey that makes it more trustworthy. It's also the way they ask the questions. So rather than straight out asking people, do you use your gun for self-protection,

which can overestimate results because people like to boast, this survey first establishes that someone was the victim of a crime. And then they ask, did you do anything with the idea of protecting yourself or your property while the incident was going on? Freeze, you diseased rhinoceros pizzle. When the researchers crunched the numbers from this survey in the early 90s, they found that only about 100,000 defensive gun uses per year happened in the US. When they crunched the numbers again more recently, they found an even lower figure, around 60,000.

Either way, it's much smaller than Gary Kleck's 2.5 million. And when you look into the details of this survey, you find that a lot of the common images that we have about how guns are used defensively, they just don't hold up. Hold up. Okay, so for example, more than 80% of the time, the people who said they use their gun defensively also said they were the only person with a gun in the altercation. So much for a good guy with a gun facing off against a bad guy with a gun. Another image the gun lobby likes to promote is a woman pulling a gun to protect herself against a

man in an alley or breaking into her home. This is from a 2013 speech by the NRA's Wayne LaPierre. The one thing a violent rapist deserves to face is a good woman with a gun. Firstly, only 13% of rapes in the US are committed by strangers. Most rapists are known to the victim. They're often married or related to her. So the vast majority of sexual assaults aren't happening in dark alleyways. And then when we look at the crime victimisation survey, of the 337 women in the sample who had been sexually assaulted,

none used a gun in self-defence. And just to challenge one more popular image that we have, you brandish your gun... ..and the bad guy flees. Well, sometimes things don't turn out that way. Using data from that big survey, David Hemenway found that when people used a gun to protect their property, it did work...

..two-thirds of the time. Yes, there's a bit of suggestive evidence that having a gun may reduce property loss, but the evidence is equally compelling that having mace or a baseball bat will reduce property loss, but the evidence is equally compelling that having mace or a baseball bat will reduce property loss. Just yelling at the guy, turning on the lights or threatening to call the police were pretty good tactics too. When people did that, it worked about half the time.

Conclusion. While we don't know exactly how many defensive gun uses there are in America each year, best estimates reckon it's no more than 100,000, not 2.5 million. And using guns in self-defence is slightly more effective at scaring bad guys than doing other things, but we've got to weigh this small benefit

against the bad things that guns can do. And that's coming up after the break. Hey, it's me again. We don't have any ads on this episode, but if you want to support Science Versus, you can send this show to one of your mates or your family or your weird uncle. Yes, you can be a factivist too.

And if your uncle is like, yeah, but where did they get those facts from? There's a link to the transcript of this episode in our show notes with all the citations. Yes, this episode has 93 of them. Okay, send it on and back to the show. Welcome back to Science Versus. That was too peppy. We're talking about guns. Welcome back to Science Versus. When we talk about gun deaths in America,

mass shootings get a lot of media attention and they're horrible. Still, though, there are a very small proportion of the number of people who die from guns each year. More than 30,000 people in America die from guns annually. On top of that, there are more than 80,000 non-fatal gun injuries. Compare this to mass shootings. While they're harder to put a figure on because people have different definitions of mass, any way you count them, the maximum number of deaths each year is in the hundreds, not thousands. So they're a very small proportion of overall gun deaths. So who's doing most of the killing?

Well, most of the time, it's people killing themselves. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about two-thirds of America's gun deaths are suicides. But when you talk to people like Anthony Calandro, owner of Gun for Hire, they don't think guns are the problem. Suicides are a tragedy. And if you take away, if you press the button tomorrow and all guns in this country disappeared, the suicide rate's not going to go down.

The avenue or choice of taking their own lives is going to change. Hanging, drowning, asphyxiation, pills, whatever it may be, that's all that's going to happen. It's just that the firearm is a very easy tool, a very easy vehicle to help with that. But if you're set on killing yourself, you are going to do it. It doesn't matter what you have accessible to you. In suicide research, Anthony's argument is called substitution. This is the idea that if you remove one way for people to kill themselves, they'll just substitute it for another.

Now, this theory of substitution has actually been studied internationally, looking at many ways that people suicide. Professor Helen Christensen is an expert in suicide prevention. She heads up the Black Dog Institute in Sydney, Australia. So if you took away a particular way in which people die, do you get an outbreak and a greater number doing it in a different way? And there's been quite a bit of research, for example, putting barriers on bridges. Do people just move two kilometres further down the river and jump from the next bridge? And the answer is no. And there's no reason to think that guns or firearms would be any different?

In my view, no. Over and over, evidence suggests that if you eliminate a popular way that people suicide, fewer people kill themselves. And this is known as means restriction. Here's an example. In the 1980s, a common method of suicide in Sri Lanka was swallowing certain pesticides. And after the country banned them, the total suicide rate fell by 50%. Now, there was a minor increase in hangings, but this didn't come close to offsetting the total number of lives saved. This has also specifically been seen with guns.

In Australia, after a gunman killed 35 people in Tasmania in 1996, heavy gun restrictions were implemented. And once the bans kicked in, there was a slight increase in hangings, but the total suicide rate dropped. For men, it was by 8%. Every study I've seen and every academic I've spoken to agreed that restricting access to guns would significantly reduce suicides. Every academic except Professor Gary Kleck, because he said there's no real difference between people trying to kill themselves with a gun or with a rope. It's just tying a piece of rope around your neck.

Are you saying that it is just as easy to kill yourself using a gun as it is to hang yourself? No. What I said is that people who are that seriously motivated will take the somewhat longer period of time it takes to prepare a hanging suicide attempt than it does to shoot yourself. The difference is a matter of minutes. You can do it in under a minute with a gun, and, well, maybe it'd take 10 minutes to do it by hanging. And so the question is, are seriously intended suicide attempters willing to take 10 minutes to make the attempt? Yeah, I'd say it's almost certain that

they would be. But suicide researcher Helen Christensen says this idea that time doesn't matter isn't true for the vast majority of people who kill themselves. Time is your friend in suicide prevention. So the argument is within 10 minutes, for example, of making the full intention to take your own life, many people do attempt within that tiny window. The longer you allow the person with these thoughts to be delayed, then the more likely it is that they will in fact survive. Conclusion. The current evidence suggests that for most people, thoughts of suicide come at a time of acute crisis. They're not carefully planning their death, which is why removing deadly means from vulnerable people

is such a powerful way to prevent suicide. You can think about it like this. When your friend or lover or child is feeling very low, you don't want them to have access to a gun. We still need to look at murders and violent crimes. But before we do that, let's take a little break. Getting pretty heavy here. Let's all take a big breath.

While I tell you about some very cool octopuses. Yes! They're called the Southern Sand Octopuses and they're found on the eastern coast of Australia. And it was recently discovered that these octopuses create houses for themselves under the bottom of the sea. Using their ingenuity and bodily fluid, they line the burrow of these little apartments

they create for themselves with mucus so that it gives it more structure. And then they create little chimneys for ventilation. Isn't that amazing? It's remarkable. Oh, and don't send me letters because the plural, the collective noun of octopus, is octopuses.

Sometimes people say octopi because they think that octopus comes from Latin, in which case the plural would be I. But actually, octopus is borrowed from Greek, so you add ES if you want to make it a plural. So that would be octopuses. And you should use that word as often as possible because octopuses are cool.

So, back to guns and on to the next argument. The gun lobby says that guns not only help people to defend against crime, as we talked about, but they argue that if law-abiding citizens are armed, then criminals will be deterred. That is, they reckon that the mere presence of a gun not only could be used to stop someone who's in the middle of committing a crime,

but it could be used to stop them before the crime even happens. Burglaries, assaults, murders, all of it. There are AR-15s, shotguns and pistols all around you that deter crime and violence every day. This is NRA News commentator Dom Rasso. The presence of weapons alone can stop crime. And when you take them away, the bad guys have the upper hand. So, do guns reduce crime?

Well, according to Fox News commentators, yes. And they invoke studies to make their claim. Here's commentator John Stossel speaking with Megyn Kelly. The jury is still out on the global warming theory. Whoops, sorry. It's just in my folder of outdated science that gets cited. Here it is, John Stossel and Megyn Kelly. The best example is concealed carry. In the states where they passed the laws,

crime, gun crime, murder went down after states passed concealed carry laws. Why? Why is that? Because the bad guys start thinking, gee, if I rob this guy, he might be packing. OK, this claim has been firmly debunked by the scientific community. And to understand the whole story, we have to go back.

Not that far back. Nice. We are in the 1980s, when a bunch of US states unintentionally set up a nice experiment. These states passed laws making it easier for people to carry concealed weapons, so-called right to carry laws. And by doing that, it allowed scientists to measure the crime rate before and after the laws were passed. To answer the question, do legal guns on the street really mean less crime? Economist John Lott, who at the time worked for the University

of Chicago, was one of the first academics to publish on the case. Using some statistical models, he reported a significant drop in violent crimes in states that had passed the gun laws. This work was published in 1997, and John went on to write a very cryptically titled book called More Guns, Less Crime. These days, John is no longer aligned to a university and is instead a Fox News columnist. Meanwhile, a bunch of other scientists still working for universities have looked into John's work and found serious flaws within it. When one academic tried to replicate the findings, he couldn't. And this led an expert committee of some 20 scientists to reanalyse the data.

And while John still maintains the accuracy of his findings, this committee found, quote, no credible evidence that the passage of right to carry laws decreases or increases violent crime, end quote. OK, so people carrying their guns around doesn't affect the crime rate. But what happens when you take into account the guns in people's homes? Do the number of guns in a state affect the overall crime rate? No.

Here's David Hemingway. Guns don't cause violent crime. Guns also don't seem to protect against violent crime. Guns don't reduce violent crime. Whether it is guns or not, you can have violent crime. There are U.S. states with lots of guns that have a low crime rate, like Montana. And there are U.S. states with lots of guns with a high crime rate, like Montana, and there are US states with lots of guns with a high crime rate, like Alaska. Equally, around the world, while the US has a bucketload more guns than

any other high-income country, the crime rate over here is just average. And for more evidence that the number of guns and the crime rate are unrelated, we need to go back. No! From the mid-1990s, crime rates plummeted around the developed world. Burglaries, thefts, assaults, all dropped. And this trend lasted about a decade. And it was so mysterious that academics have spent the last two decades trying to figure out what happened.

With no concrete answers on the table, the National Academy of Sciences put together a crack team of scientists, which included David, to finally uncover why the crime rate fell. After three years of study, I can confidently say the two dozen of us, mostly criminologists, really don't have any good idea. They looked at data on all the obvious stuff, the economy, unemployment, social trends like immigration, but also other things. Things like better policing

and the notion of more fewer people in prison and the idea about less lead in the water, in the air and abortion. And of course, guns. But nothing could explain what happened. Now, it's true that as the crime rate in America was falling in the 1990s, the number of guns in the country was going up. And the NRA likes to take this as proof that more guns means less crime. But according to David Hemenway and the team, if you keep watching the crime statistics after that initial drop in the mid-90s,

you'll see that that relationship between guns and crime changes. Which is why... Zero of our group thought that the number of guns had anything to do with the reduction in crime and homicide. So even though the number of guns in America continues to slowly rise, the crime rate has bobbed up and down throughout the noughties and even today. The noughties, as in the 2000s. I didn't even mean it like a pun.

Like, they're naughty. They're doing crime. It's just what you call the 2000s. There's no other better. The 2000s sounds weird. It does. It sounds weird. What else?

The zeros? The double zeros? The OOs? No. No. The oohs? The oohs. The turn of the century.

No, it's called the naughties. The point is the crime rate is still going up and down. The number of guns in America are rising. There is no connection. Conclusion. Guns do not affect the crime rate. They don't make it go up or down in any consistent way. Well, there is one exception. Guns do not have an impact on the overall violent crime rate. They don't affect the number of

assaults or rapes or burglaries, but they do have an effect on one particular violent crime, homicide. Here's David. What guns do is they make hostile interactions, robberies, assaults much more deadly. What he means is that if you put a gun in the middle of an altercation, it's more likely that someone will die. In 2015, about 18,000 people were killed in a homicide. The majority, 13,000, were killed by guns. And when we look at the US, states with more guns tend to have more homicides and more firearm-related homicides. Now, there are exceptions. You can find states like Idaho, for example, with lots of guns and not a lot of murders per capita. There is one point, though, where the link between homicides and guns is rock solid.

And that's when women get murdered. A paper tracked firearm ownership and homicides across 50 states over more than three decades. And it found that it was unambiguous. The more guns in a state, the more likely it is that a woman will be murdered. If the gun ownership in a state goes up by 10 percentage points, the number of women who die by guns goes up by 10%. Now, we're not exactly sure why the link between statewide gun ownership and murder is stronger for women than men. But women are more likely to be killed by someone they know than men are. And one

idea is that because males are more likely to be killed by strangers, their murders depend a lot on factors like the overall level of violence in a state, while violence against women depends much less on these outside factors. That is, women are being abused everywhere, but the likelihood that one will die depends on who has access to guns. Conclusion. Guns don't affect the crime rate, but guns make crimes more deadly. Chuck a gun in the middle of an assault, and it's more likely that someone will die. So when it comes to science versus guns, do the claims stack up?

Number one, there are 2.5 million defensive gun uses in America each year. Science says no. According to the best research, the actual number is probably no more than 100,000. And that includes defending property, like stuff in your house. Next, guns reduce crime. Science says... No. Guns do not affect the crime rate.

They don't make it go up and they don't make it go down. But they do make altercations more deadly, which is why more guns, on average, means more murders. So if the data are pretty clear, why is there a big debate? Why all the fuss around guns? According to David Hemenway, this is more about human nature than science. Because the thing is, for people who have a gun, there is a very small chance that something will ever go wrong. You know, serious injuries are fairly rare. So people will say, oh, I had a gun in my house, you know,

when I was growing up and nobody ever died. Great. I mean, you know, but because the gun was in your house, you were sort of, there was three times the likelihood that somebody would die. But they think, you know, their evidence from their own experience is, boy, you know, things are good, things are fine. And for gun owner Anthony Calandro, everything has been fine so far. So he thinks nothing needs to change. And why wouldn't you personally want to give some guns up to make America safer, if that's what the studies showed? Because I am safe and my guns are not hurting anybody. Last time I checked, none of my guns ever left the safe

and went out and committed crimes in the middle of the night while I was sleeping. If this perfect study came up and just found that if you removed the guns in America, you would have a homicide rate that dropped, the perfect study, would you want action to happen? Probably not. Probably not, because we all want to blame everybody else and not ourselves. It's okay to take his guns away, but not my guns. Come on, it's just like when you were a kid, you had a toy, you didn't play with it.

When your mom wanted to give it away, all of a sudden you wanted it again, right? I know that I'm safe and I know I'm diligent with my guns, so nobody's taking my guns. And the thing is, while Anthony is trained and safe with his guns, and maybe you'd rather be in a dark alleyway with him than without him, the science tells us that the more people who think like Anthony, the more guns there are around. Ultimately, the more people die. That's Science vs Guns. Tomorrow, we're continuing our look at the science of issues in American politics. Next up, abortion.

This episode was originally produced by me, Wendy Zuckerman, with help from Heather Rogers and Austin Mitchell. It's been updated by Rose Rimler. Caitlin Sawyer is our senior producer. We're edited by Annie Rose Strasser, Caitlin Kenney, Blythe Shirell and Alex Bloomberg. Fact Checking by Michelle Harris. Sound Design and Music Production by Martin Peralta, Emma Munger, Matthew Boll and Sam Baer. Music written by Bobby Lord and Emma Munger. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you tomorrow.