GUNS & MONEY
by Jay R. Mandle
When Anthony Fauci was asked whether mass shootings in the United States are a public health issue, his answer was unequivocal. “When you see people getting killed…it’s just horrifying. How can you say it’s not a public health issue?” The scale of mass killings has recently been dwarfed by deaths caused by the Covid 19 virus. Nevertheless, gun massacres in the United States have become an epidemic. While data are not available for mass shooting deaths in the United States before 2014, between that year and 2020, such deaths have more than doubled (269 Americans in the earlier year to 610 last year).
Unlike the case of Covid, where a virus causes death, massacres are caused by guns. The statistical evidence is unambiguous. A recent study of 27 economically developed nations found that “the number of guns per capita per country was a strong and independent predictor of firearms-related death.” Guns play a role in shooting deaths analogous to that of Covid in the pandemic.
Two reasons are often cited for this country’s shooter epidemic. First is that the per capita level of gun ownership in the United States is by far the highest in the world. Firearms per capita in the United States is 120.5, far exceeding that of the second country on the list, Yemen at 52.8. Second, gun availability in this country has grown substantially over time. Taking into account domestic production as well as exports and imports, the sale of new firearms in the United States was more than twice as high in 2018 as it was only fourteen years earlier. 4.9 million guns were sold in 2004 compared to 12.5 million in 2018.
It is tempting to conclude that the increasing availability of firearms reflects a growing gun culture, and that the spread of that culture accounts for the weakness of American gun control measures. But that is not the case. There has been no erosion in popular support for measures of gun control over time. In 2004, 60 percent of those surveyed supported more strict gun control, a percentage that in 2020 was little changed at 59 percent. And despite the fact that many more guns are being sold, the percentage of households that own guns has remained steady over many decades. In 1972, 43 percent of American households possessed a gun, almost identical to the 42 percent recorded in 2020. What has changed with the growing availability of guns is an increase in the number of guns owned by gun-possessing households. Households that have guns have purchased more of them.
Rather than a spreading gun culture among the American people, it is politicians’ refusal to legislate gun control that is the problem. And that refusal has long depended on the power of private money in politics. In the 2020 election cycle according to the Center for Responsive Politics, advocates of “gun rights” spent more money lobbying members of Congress and also contributed more to political campaigns than did advocates of “gun control.” The most dramatic difference was in lobbying. Backers of “gun rights” spent $10,205,036, five times more than the $2,100,000 spent by “gun control” advocates. Less dramatic, but no less important, was the advantage of “gun rights” advocates in campaign contributions. “Gun rights” donations to Senate candidates were 30.9 percent greater than “gun control” contributions ($2,284,030 compared to $1,745,048). And “gun rights” contributions to House candidates exceeded those for “gun control” by 13.0 percent ($2,628,722 compared to $2,325,925).
The situation we face today is analogous to the problem public health reformers faced in the nineteenth century as they sought to reduce death rates. According to Richard A. Easterlin, important innovations such as effective sewage disposal, pure water, paved streets, and safer food contributed to declining mortality. But as he explains, “successful public health measures often required government initiative and public entrepreneurship that overrode personal property rights, such as those of slum landlords in the case of sanitary reform or farmers in the case of tuberculosis infected cows.” In short, the importance of public health was able to override the preferences of wealth.
Something very similar is required today if we are to reduce mass shooting deaths in the United States. The power that wealth provides to gun advocates will have to be curbed. As in so many spheres of American life, reforming the way we pay for our politics is urgently needed. Beginning to solve our public health gun crisis depends on it.
About the Author
Jay Mandle is the W. Bradford Wiley Professor of Economics at Colgate University. His many books include Change Elections to Change America: Democracy Matters Students In Action, and Creating Political Equality: Elections As a Public Good,.
Mandle’s regular monthly editorials, Money On My Mind, explore the role of private money in politics and appear on the Democracy Matters website (www.democracymatters.org).
Other articles on money in politics.
The views expressed in Money On My Mind are those of the author, (not necessarily those of Democracy Matters), and are meant to stimulate discussion. |
