Gun Logic Part 4 - White Men Don't Matter

Gun enthusiasts are happy to say they need guns to defend themselves, but they go out of their way not to acknowledge that more people use their guns to kill themselves than to kill anyone else. More than half of all gun deaths in the U.S. every year are caused by people deliberately killing themselves. Most of the rest are caused by people shooting other people for malicious purposes, and a small number of people are killed each year by accident. Almost no one is actually shot to death by police who are enforcing the law or by people defending themselves.

The curious racial overlay on this data is that almost all of the suicides are committed by white males. White guys shoot themselves to death far out of proportion to their numbers in the population. Neither white, black, or Hispanic women shoot themselves or anyone else in any significant numbers. Black males get shot in greater numbers than their proportion of the population, usually by other black males. Hispanic males do some shooting too – mostly at other Hispanic males.

When the pro-gun lobby tries to frighten people into buying guns, they focus on the homicide statistics, which disproportionately implicates and affects minorities. The pro-gun lobby doesn't even want to acknowledge gun suicides, so they ignore more than half of the gun death problem, and most of the white victims.

Though there are racial overtones in the gun-lobby's rhetoric, hiding the white victims does not seem like classical racism, until you consider that they are also hiding the white perpetrators. By looking only at the homicides and not the suicides, the gun lovers create an impression that gun violence is mostly a problem that is caused by minorities in our urban ghettos. If we look at all the gun deaths, we see that gun violence is mostly a white male phenomenon and is not confined to the urban poor.

The effect of this distortion is that most of the problem of gun violence does not get fixed. When we set out to eradicate polio and other diseases, we didn't just vaccinate minorities and leave the majority white population unprotected, we went after the disease wherever it was. When we endeavor to prevent and treat AIDS, we put our efforts into the population segments which are most at risk. Why are we being encouraged to pay no attention to the white people who are most of the people involved in gun violence both as perpetrators and victims?

Part of the answer is that the pro-gun lobby promotes the idea that people who get shot deserve to get shot because they are criminals. This supports the gun lovers' view that the people who do the shooting are good people, and that shooting bad people is a good thing to do. They don't want to admit that most of the people who get shot, and most of the people who are doing the shooting, are just depressed and could be helped rather than being killed. They don't want anyone to realize that the people who kill themselves are just like the majority of gun lovers – white guys. They certainly don't want to think about the fact that the person who a gun owner is most likely to kill is himself. “Buy a gun, join us, and shoot yourself,” would be a pretty peculiar recruiting slogan for the NRA.

It is pretty easy for the pro-gun lobby to perpetuate its charade. Although white guys have traditionally been the biggest political force in this country, they have usually organized against women and minorities. They haven't been pointing the finger of blame at themselves. But that is what they need to do. White guys need to ask themselves why they are killing themselves, and why the gun lobby is making it so easy for them.

Joy of Killing

A friend of mine who likes guns and thinks everyone should own them delights in posting news stories on his Facebook page about people who shoot and kill people and claim self defense. He recently pointed out a story about an eighteen-year-old woman who shot a man whom she said was breaking into her house.

My friend has also recently posted stories in which gun stores claim to have sold a lot of guns as Christmas presents and a story that said people are arming themselves in anticipation of the upcoming elections.

Other friends of mine point out stories like these, too. One such story said that so many people are applying for permits to carry concealed weapons in Wisconsin that the state can't process the applications as quickly as they come in. But there is a difference in the way people bring these stories to my attention.

The pro-gun people add gleeful comments to the stories. They view the shootings as evidence that people need guns to defend themselves. The anti-violence people, on the other hand, add sad comments to the stories. They view the proliferation of guns and their lethal use as an indication that people are reacting to the challenges of our time in inhumane ways.

In short, the pro-gun people think that guns solve problems. The anti-gun people think that guns create problems. Who is right?

Statistically, the picture is pretty clear. Of the nearly 100,000 people who are shot in the U.S. each year, very few are shot while they are committing a serious crime or any crime at all. Defensive shootings are so rare – from a few hundred to a couple of thousand a year – that the gun industry makes sure that every one of them receives the maximum amount of publicity. These are the shootings that my friend helps the gun sellers publicize. Neither he nor the gun sellers looks very closely at whether the victims could have defended themselves any other way, such as by calling the police. Nor do they care much whether the shooter was defending a person or just preventing the loss of a few dollars worth of property.

What the gun enthusiasts don't talk about is that every day, two to three people are accidentally killed by gunshots and another 30 are sent to the hospital with non-fatal injuries because they were shot accidentally.

The gun lovers also don't mention that every day in the U.S., nearly fifty people commit suicide by shooting themselves to death. That's about forty percent of all the shooting deaths, or about 18,000 gun suicides a year.

So, it looks like both sides are right. Guns are used defensively by a few people, they are used by a massive number of people to kill themselves, and they are the instrumentality of a huge number of accidental shootings and deaths. If you can't do grade-school mathematics, you may agree with my friend and the gun industry that more people should have guns in their homes. If, however, you look at the facts honestly, you will come to a different conclusion.