Donald Trump’s appearance before
the NRA last week was a perfectly predictable olio of bloviation, narcissism,
incivility and misrepresentation. It also revealed, although you probably knew
this already, that the guy is a little nuts.
Trump told the NRA faithful
assembled in Louisville exactly what they wanted to hear: that he was in favor
of more guns everywhere. In schools. In high crime neighborhoods. In Paris night clubs. Everywhere. Gun-free zones
would become a thing of the past.
The reason for this frenzy is, of
course, “self defense.” For Trump, and for the NRA, we live in a dangerous
world surrounded by people who are out to get us. And the only way we can stop
them in their tracks is to have guns; either, one hopes, to deter attacks in
the first place or, if worse comes to worst, to shoot back. And for Trump,
Hilary Clinton becomes “Heartless Hilary” because she would take people’s guns
away from them and deprive them of their one opportunity to defend themselves.
This is Trump at his adolescent best, lying and name calling in one fell swoop.
Of course it doesn’t bother
Trump in the slightest that there is no evidence that having lots of guns
around will deter gun violence. On the contrary: anyone paying attention knows
that gun ownership is much higher in the United States than it is in other high
income countries. And so is the probability that somebody will shoot you to
death. The extent to which the United States is an outlier in both these regards is
truly stunning. Take a look at this chart.*
What you’re seeing here is that in
2007, there were about 15 guns present for every 100 members of the population in
21 high income countries other than the United States. For the US, the
comparable number was 113. In 2010 in those same 21 countries, there were a
little more than .1 gun homicides per 100,000 members of the population; in the
US there were 3.6. The probability of being murdered with a gun in the United
States was 25.2 times as high as in
other high income countries. Is it really possible to look at that number and
conclude that having lots and lots of guns around is making us safer?**
Here’s where the question of
Trump’s sanity rears its ugly head. In the face of overwhelming evidence that
the accumulation of guns has not made us a whit safer in the past, Trump believes that
more guns will make us safer in the future. And that, as a wise man once told
us, albeit in more polite terms, is nuts.
* To prepare this chart I used
data from two sources: the Small Arms
Survey 2007 and “Violent Death Rates: The US Compared with Other
High-income OECD Countries, 2010,” in the American
Journal of Medicine, 2015.
** Don't be thinking that "Well sure, as long as we've got these guns around, we''ll use them when we want to kill somebody. Folks in all those other countries are going to use knives, or poison, or cricket bats or something." It doesn't work that way. Regardless of method, people in other countries murder each other at much lower rates. It's harder to get the job done if you don't have a gun to do it with.
** Don't be thinking that "Well sure, as long as we've got these guns around, we''ll use them when we want to kill somebody. Folks in all those other countries are going to use knives, or poison, or cricket bats or something." It doesn't work that way. Regardless of method, people in other countries murder each other at much lower rates. It's harder to get the job done if you don't have a gun to do it with.
