Implicit Racism in America’s Gun Debate?
When the “developed world” is part of the problem
Guess what the map above is showing…
Mark Twain wrote: “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics”.
In the current gun debate, there are plenty of lies, and damned lies, but due to the political nature of the debate, there is very little reliable data, and therefore even fewer statistics. Those that are available are typically thrown around wantonly as if they are biblical chapter and verse, not findings to be questioned.
One of the more prominent “facts” we see is that the US has the highest rate of gun crimes and mass shootings in the developed world.
Let’s briefly note that this claim is really a two-in-one claim: 1) the US has the highest rate of gun crimes in the developed world and 2) the US has the highest rate of mass shootings in the developed world.
What I want to focus on here is 1) the statistical analyses backing these conclusions and 2) how moving away from the sample bias inherent in these statements can help us create better policy solutions for gun violence in America.
First, there is evidence that the US has the highest rate of gun crime in the “developed world” — but only if you remove some OECD countries — namely Chile, Russia, Mexico, and Brazil (for those who don’t know, OECD is the benchmark for the “developed world” by groups such as the UN and World Bank). I explore the causes of this in a bunch of free articles here on Medium and PoliticsMeansPolitics; I also have a few more in the works. Also, if you’d like, I can google that for you. I don’t think it makes much sense to pick apart the claim as is, particularly if we’re including suicide as a crime (debatable, but I’m going to let it go for now). The issue of removing countries, I discuss later in this piece.
The second claim, that the US has the highest rate of mass shooting in the develop world is problematic. This appears to depend on how you define a mass shooting. Typically, sources such as the FBI and early research by Lott and Landes [1] define a mass shooting as one where four or more people are killed. Some groups change this definition. The New York Times, for example, recently reported (falsely) that there have been 1,600 mass shootings in the US. This claim is based on incidents where four people are at least wounded — thus drastically increasing the sample of crimes (and oddly enough suggesting the irrelevance of the assault rifle category for mass shootings). If you use more standard numbers (four or more killed), the results change drastically.
Using the standard metric of four or more killed, the Crime Prevention Research Center found that the annual death rate from mass public shootings in the US doesn’t actually break the Top 10 European and North American countries. We come in just behind the Czech Republic and above Austria.
They also looked at the frequency of mass public shootings, not just death rates. Here, they claim that the US falls down to 12th place.
So, to say that the US is the only country that has mass shootings is not true. To say that the US is the only country that has this many mass shootings is also untrue. Given the analysis above, the US has them at comparable rates to European countries… despite their strict gun laws.
Now, some might wonder, where is the implicit racism in all of this. Well, its because it seems evident that to be included in statistics about the “developed world”, you need to pass the paper bag test, which for those who don’t know is a racist test that ultimately relegated anyone who had skin darker than a paper bag to second classedness. Here we also see similar treatment as Chili, Brazil, and Mexico are removed from the OECD insofar as gun control advocates are concerned.
What we also see here, is by using the OECD as the metric for inclusion in the sample, a systematic neglect of most of South America and Africa, apparently because they are somehow qualitatively “different” from the civilized world. This blatant racism is the sort that hasn’t been seen by academics since the Victorian anthropologists went around the world to study the “savages” of different nations.
However, adding these groups totally changes the picture.
We end up seeing a very different ranking of gun homicides per 100,000. The list goes, Honduras, Venezuela, Swaziland, Jamaica, Guatemala, El Salvidor, Columbia, Brazil, Panama, Philippines, South Africa, Mexico, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Uruguay, Peru, Nicaragua and then the United States (Russia was not included in this particular analysis). Are these numbers too high? Yes. But this “yes” extends just as much to the US as it does all of the countries above.
So why include these nations from our analysis? Because they aren’t as “civilized” as the United States? Because they aren’t rich?
From a scientific perspective, I argue that their exclusion makes no sense. It is fairly well established in the psychological literature that humans from different countries do not have different psychological facilities. That is to say, we all have the same psychological abilities. Due to different cultural or environmental factors, we might have different concerns or practices, but people from one nation are not unable to reason or think in the same way as those from another.
So, if we assume that a gun on the table doesn’t commit mass murder, but a human must pick up the gun and pull a trigger, it means that human psychology and motivation is the mediating causal factor in gun violence. As such, there is no real reason to exclude nations from South America and Africa from our analyses.
In fact, there is good reason to think that only focusing on OECD nations is problematic. The OECD is the “Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development”. It is primarily made up of Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) nations. In the psychological literature, one of the highest cited papers dealing with sampling issues that have affected the entire field is the over-reliance on people WEIRD cultures/nations to make generalizations about all of humanity [2]. The paper goes at great length to show that by concentrating just on WEIRD people, we fail to capture the full range of human actions and often end up treating outliers as if they were the average.
In conclusion, there is no reason (short of intentional sample bias or racism) to exclude African and South American countries, and every reason to include them. If we are serious about finding a viable solution to gun crime (in the US or elsewhere), then we really need to use all of the tools we have at our disposal. One of these is the full range of data on gun violence. Gun violence in the US is a serious problem. It is a problem that needs to be dealt with. But the only way we can deal with these issues is by using the data we have at our disposal. By comparing all of the available data, we may be able to find better data trends that can help us to create more effective policy. Sacrificing this potential in order to score political points or signal your group allegiances in online twitter battles only serves to push us further from a real solution; and it does so at the expense of an empirically based common ground on which to form policy.
If you think the map above is showing gun homicide rates, you’re…
Wrong.
It’s showing incarceration rates.
If you want to see something interesting about murder, here’s your map (working on one that shows gun homicides only, broken down by different measures-the Google failed to find one).
References
[1] J. R. Lott and W. M. Landes, “Multiple Victim Public Shootings,” SSRN Electron. J., 2001.
[2] J. Henrich, S. J. Heine, and A. Norenzayan, “The weirdest people in the world?,” Behav. Brain Sci., vol. 33, no. 2–3, pp. 61–83–135, Jun. 2010.
