Amid all the verbal furor over gun rights and crime, at
least one state is having some success by treating gun crime as a disease.
However, most states won’t be able to follow suit.
Writing in the May/June issue of Pacific Standard, senior
editor Vince Beiser discusses the Armed Prohibited Persons System, a program in
which California officials comb through mountains of data to find people who
have lost the right to own guns, then send agents to take those guns away.
According to Beiser, “The agents are looking for people who bought guns legally
but were later convicted of a felony, put under a restraining order or were
deemed seriously mentally ill—any of which bar them from owning a firearm.”
In California, that list includes almost 20,000 people who
hold more than 38,000 handguns and 1,600 assault weapons. Last year, agents
with the California Bureau of Firearms confiscated more than 2,000 illegally owned weapons.
This information exists in part because of the work of Garen
Wintemute, a doctor and researcher at the University of California, Davis
Medical Center. “He is one of a number of academics and activists,” writes
Beiser, “trying to get people to look at gun violence not just as a
criminal-justice issue but as a public-health one.”
“Whether it’s cancer or traffic accidents, you ask the same
questions,” says Wintemute. “You identify the high-risk groups and then look
for interventions.”
One such high-risk group is pistol-owning ex-cons. “People
with serious felony records are barred nationwide from owning guns,” Beiser
writes, “but research shows that such folks are nonetheless relatively likely
to commit new crimes—with a gun.”
Statistics support this. Federal data show that about 40
percent of felons surveyed who were convicted of gun-related offenses were
prohibited from owning firearms when they committed the offense. Researchers
studying people charged with homicides in Illinois found similar results.
This probably doesn’t surprise anyone. What the
prohibited-persons program does is pretty straightforward: It enforces existing
laws by taking the guns away. And apparently, this works.
Wintemute and a team of researchers gathered records on
people who bought handguns before a ban took effect in 1990 and those who tried
to buy handguns after the ban but were turned down. Over the next three years,
the researchers found, “the risk of committing new nonviolent crimes was about
identical [for both groups],” Beiser writes. “But in the group that was banned
from buying handguns, the risk of new gun and/or violent crimes went down by
about 30 percent.”
These kinds of results have a bipartisan appeal. The bill
that created the program was introduced by a Republican and was supported by
the National Rifle Association.
Wintemute estimates that as many as 180,000 people
nationwide should be on a prohibited-persons list, but it’s unlikely other
states will set up similar programs. Why? “California is essentially the only
state that has the data to make the program possible,” Beiser writes.
For example, he writes, “California allows only licensed
retailers to sell handguns—there’s no ‘gun-show loophole’—and has recorded
those sales since 1996.” And don’t expect the federal government to set up a
centralized gun-tracking system. It’s prohibited by law from doing so.
While rhetoric flies around social media about gun rights,
and though gun crime is a complex issue, there are rational approaches that
have proven helpful in reducing it. Unfortunately, rationality rarely prevails
in our polarizing culture.
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