{"id":75226,"date":"2021-12-11T01:39:50","date_gmt":"2021-12-11T07:39:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=75226"},"modified":"2021-12-11T06:20:47","modified_gmt":"2021-12-11T12:20:47","slug":"75226","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=75226","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Comment O’ The Day
\nIf the environment is more favorable for criminal activity (no cash bail, cheering on property destruction, refusal to prosecute, defunding police, etc.), it should come as no surprise that there will be an increase in demand for guns, both from criminals who seek to exploit the favorable conditions for their endeavors and also from law-abiding citizens who seek to defend themselves from lawlessness.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Only any idiot would think this is a chicken\/egg paradox<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

The Paradox of the 2020 Gun-Sales Spike<\/a><\/p>\n

In a\u00a0<\/span>City Journal<\/span><\/i>\u00a0piece over the summer<\/span><\/a>, I cast some doubt on the idea that 2020\u2019s massive\u00a0homicide spike\u00a0\u2014 a\u00a0<\/span>30 percent increase<\/span><\/a>\u00a0\u2014\u00a0had been driven by strong gun sales. America has so many guns that even a really strong year for sales doesn\u2019t\u00a0boost the supply that much,\u00a0and\u00a0most crime guns tend to be fairly old anyway.<\/span><\/p>\n

Most interestingly,\u00a0places with the biggest gun-sales spikes\u00a0didn\u2019t<\/i>\u00a0also have the biggest\u00a0shooting spikes, according to a then-new study\u00a0in\u00a0Injury Prevention<\/i>. I\u00a0further\u00a0noted, however,\u00a0some NYPD numbers suggesting that while guns purchased less than a year ago\u00a0accounted for\u00a010 percent of crime-gun traces in 2019, they were 18 percent in 2020.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now we have national data to update both\u00a0the geographic and the gun-trace findings.\u00a0Oddly enough, they both hold up.\u00a0Comparing all of 2020 with all of 2019, the states with the biggest gun-sales spikes were not the same as the states with the biggest homicide spikes. But\u00a0nationwide,\u00a0new guns\u00a0did show\u00a0up quite a bit more\u00a0in police departments\u2019 gun traces.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a simple, per capita\u00a0way of comparing changes in homicide rates with changes in gun sales\u00a0(as measured via\u00a0<\/span>background checks\u00a0for gun purchases<\/span><\/a>, with a few states with quirky data excluded). There\u2019s no obvious connection between the two, and the picture is the same when you plot the\u00a0<\/span>percentage<\/span><\/i>\u00a0change in one variable against the percentage change in the other.<\/span><\/p>\n


\n\"\"<\/span>The new\u00a0<\/span>trace data<\/span><\/a>, however, are less kind to the latest additions to America\u2019s gun stock. In 2019, about 20 percent of traced guns had been purchased less than a year prior; in 2020, this rose to about 30 percent.\u00a0(<\/span>The Trace<\/span><\/i>\u00a0has some more ways of cutting these numbers\u00a0<\/span>here<\/span><\/a>, as does my colleague Charles Fain Lehman\u00a0here<\/a>.)<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Both these data sets have their limitations. The background-check data\u00a0don\u2019t\u00a0include\u00a0certain transfers<\/a>, such as\u00a0private\u00a0gun\u00a0sales completed without background checks,\u00a0and obviously they don\u2019t account for the fact that a gun can be purchased in one state and trafficked to a different one. Meanwhile,\u00a0the gun-trace data\u00a0comprise\u00a0a mishmash of different situations\u00a0in which police\u00a0thought it useful to trace guns, from assaults and murders to\u00a0suicides and \u201cfound\u201d guns.\u00a0Ideally, we\u2019d want to look at\u00a0the \u201ctime to crime\u201d of guns used in shootings specifically, but those data are not publicly available, so we\u2019re stuck looking at a broader yet non-random sample of guns that police recovered.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If I had to take a stab at reconciling these two patterns, however, my guess would be this: There were two separate phenomena unfolding in 2020. One was a massive surge in fully legal gun sales owing to the pandemic and the riots; this had little to do with\u00a0driving crime. The other, though, was the increase in\u00a0violence\u00a0itself\u00a0\u2014\u00a0which likely led to a surge of criminals\u2019\u00a0seeking guns in various ways, including\u00a0by\u00a0trafficking new guns bought via \u201cstraw purchasers\u201d and\u00a0so on, and then getting caught carrying them or using them in crimes. This would be\u00a0a\u00a0small\u00a0share of all gun sales and not enough to affect geographic correlations,\u00a0<\/span>especially since trafficked guns often cross state lines\u00a0anyhow,<\/span>\u00a0but an undeniable flow of guns to criminals all the same. It\u2019s an interesting question how that scenario might fit into our partisan mudslinging about guns.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Comment O’ The Day If the environment is more favorable for criminal activity (no cash bail, cheering on property destruction, refusal to prosecute, defunding police, etc.), it should come as no surprise that there will be an increase in demand for guns, both from criminals who seek to exploit the favorable conditions for their endeavors … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,8,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-comment-o-the-day","category-rkba","category-safety","post_format-post-format-quote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=75226"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75242,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75226\/revisions\/75242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=75226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=75226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=75226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}