The Dark Knight Massacre

I write this as details are still emerging of the massacre in Colorado at a showing of The Dark Knight Rises. At least 12 are dead and some three dozen wounded.

This massacre highlights once again the issue of firearms in the United States. Do guns keep us safer, or do they make us less safe? Many studies try to answer this question, and they do not come up with a consistent answer, but they do point to one conclusion overall. Here is my take on what this conclusion is:

Guns do make some people safer, but overall they make people and our society as a whole much less safe than more safe. Households with guns suffer more gun injuries and gun deaths than households without guns, even after controlling for such factors as alcohol use and family conflict. States with more guns have more gun homicides than states with fewer guns. Perhaps people in dangerous states buy guns to protect themselves, thus accounting for this correlation, but it does seem that the presence of handguns is raising the homicide rate.

For me, the most persuasive evidence of the danger of firearms comes from international evidence. Among all industrial democracies, the US ranks above average for aggravated assault and robbery rates, but not at the very top. However, it ranks at the top for homicide rates, and its rate is far higher than whatever nation might be in second place in any given year. Because the major difference between an aggravated assault and a homicide is whether the victim dies, the inescapable conclusion is that the very high homicide rate in the US reflects its very high gun ownership rate. What would have been aggravated assaults in other nations become homicides here because a gun is used rather than a knife, club, or other non-firearm weapon.

As we think about the Dark Knight massacre, one more thing should be kept in mind. The shooter was a man. When it comes to violence in general and massacres like this in particular, gender matters. Most men certainly do not commit violence, let alone massacres, but men commit violence at far higher rates than women, and they also commit almost all massacres, and every massacre that I can think of right now. We must raise our boys differently so that they do not develop the potential to commit violence. And we must do what is possible within the constraints of Supreme Court interpretations of the Second Amendment to limit the lethality of firearms.