DISCLAIMER: If you can’t be bothered to read the article, then (first) I don’t owe you a response on social media when you call me an NRA shill (nothing could be further from the truth, and I will just block you as lazy/a bad-faith troll). Second, know that the title is clickbait and I am strongly in favour of a variety of “gun control” measures. I agree with Brian on most issues. What I take issue with is the lazy idea that “it’s (just) the guns”, which casually sweeps under the carpet a wide variety of societal failings including (in the US particularly), falling access to healthcare, education and social security. If you could magic all the guns out of the USA tomorrow, it would still have horrendously high rates of violent crime. Further, understand that I have studied this topic long enough that I tend to talk about specific remedies and measures. I am not operating at the level of “we should have more/less gun control”. The conversation is past that. I tend to get into the weeds of what you could actually implement in law - licensing, registration, what prohibitions work and what don’t, etc. I’m not here for vague declarations of “we should have more/less gun control”.

So, on with the show.

A gent named Brian Klaas (recently and hilariously featured on Cunk on Earth) recently shared a piece entitled “It’s the Guns.” over on Mastodon. As an American living and working in Britain, he brings an interesting perspective to the topic. But it’s also clear that living in London, Brian hasn’t got quite such a good grasp on the British relationship with firearms as he thinks. Now this is not to bash him - I agree with much of what he writes. And I undoubtedly have my own blind spots. But there were some bits I squinted at, and this then is not so much a rebuttal as a response, getting into the details. This piece can also be seen as an extension to my previous post There’s No Such Thing as Gun Control.

The main issue I take with Brian’s piece is direct comparisons between the US and UK, and the obsession with firearm-murder statistics to the exclusion of other related metrics. To do so risks painting a distorted picture - the UK firearms licensing regime is far from perfect. Why is our overall murder rate is so much higher than other developed countries with higher rates of firearm ownership? We must understand these nuances in the whole, or risk forming poor public policy. The hand-wringing of “It’s just the guns” is about as useful as “thoughts and prayers”.

0. The idea of kids shooting guns is horrifying to Brits

This isn’t one of Brian’s key points, but he opens with this anecdote.

I first shot a real gun with live ammunition when I was ten years old, at summer camp, in my home state of Minnesota. It was a basic bolt action rifle, but a rifle nonetheless. At the time, nobody thought that was remotely strange. But when I tell people in Britain, they’re beyond horrified. “Who would let a child touch, let alone, shoot a gun?”

Maybe Brian has run into one UCL colleague who was “horrified”. But this is not the normal reaction. Yes, I definitely suffer sample bias as a target shooter. But kids shoot in the UK. All. The. Time. Here are a handful of examples from the world of organised target shooting:

• British Shooting Schools Championship - in which several hundred children qualify for finals, whittled down from thousands entering regional qualifiers.
• Cadets - There are more than 115,000 children in the various British Cadet organisations. Every single one has been trained to handle firearms. The cadet forces are mostly open to 14-18year olds, meaning the membership churns every 4 years or so. That’s somewhere in the region of 250,000 young people per decade being trained to handle firearms - a non-trivial proportion of the UK population. And this isn’t just occasional range days. It’s the Ashburton Shield (first awarded 1861), the Athelings (who compete in Canada) and numerous Skill at Arms Meetings under the auspices of the Council for Cadet Rifle Shooting.
• Scouts - The National Scout Rifle Championships get around 1,000 entries a year.
• Pony Club Tetrathlon (and Triathlon, which skips the equestrian part - running, swimming & shooting).
• UCL Rifle Club. Yes, 19 year old students who can’t legally drink in many US states are not only shooting, but operating rifle clubs in universities up and down the country. There are four separate inter-university championships - the smallbore rifle indoor in Sheffield, the corresponding outdoor championships at Appleton, and then the fullbore match at Bisley. There’s also a clay pigeon championships.

On one international trip with the Welsh Squad, our youngest team member was eleven. She won a medal in the Junior Women’s Air Pistol event.

This is not to mention the tens of thousands of kids growing up on farms and in rural areas who will learn to shoot from their parents - whether that’s hunting, pest control or organised game shoots.

People who find the idea of under-18s participating in shooting sports “controversial” are in the minority. This is a quiet, yet very widespread sport. But it’s understandable why it might miss the attention of someone living and working in central London.

But let’s dive into the meat of Brian’s article, where he addresses a number of claims. To be clear, the section headers are the claims he debunks - not Brian’s assertions!:

1: The US isn’t that bad for gun violence. This is all left-wing hype.

No arguments here. As Brian says, this is nonsense and it really is that bad. I do take issue with the presentation of some statistics though.

Brian uses the rate of murders committed with firearms. And this is valid, but - in isolation - misses an interesting correlation (or lack thereof). The UK is shown in this chart as having a very low rate of gun deaths - lower than countries like Norway.

The thing is though, that Norway’s overall homicide rate is half that of the United Kingdom’s! Here are the 2021 homicide rates from a selection of comparable developed countries (homicides per 100k people):

• Czechia - 0.4
• Italy, Norway & Switzerland - 0.5
• Australia - 0.7
• Germany - 0.8
• France & Sweden - 1.1
• UK - 1.2
• Finland - 1.6

Gun ownership in all those countries is 3-5x higher than the UK. So yes, countries with more guns perhaps have more gun murders - but also fewer murders overall? Now I’ve never been murdered, but I don’t think it would be a great comfort for my family to know I was beaten to death rather than shot - fewer people dead overall is good right, regardless of the methods? How is it that the Czech Republic is so safe overall when gun ownership is five times higher than the UK and they have concealed carry?

And lest it seem like I’m cherry-picking data here, this is the graph of homicide rates vs. gun ownership for the EU, UK and comparable countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand. There’s no statistically significant correlation - it just highlights how much of an outlier the US is (a point on which I wholeheartedly agree with Brian).

I also have to take some minor issue with the use of UK Government data. This graph is shown to demonstrate how consistently low the rate of firearm homicide is in the UK compared to the US (20,000 per year). Red annotations are mine.

Whilst it succeeds in respect that yes, homicide offences are low. It didn’t include key points - like when major firearms legislation was implemented. If we consider 1987, there is certainly a spike. But if we subtract the 16 killed in the Hungerford Massacre we are still left with more than 60 murders that year - one of the highest on record. The rate does not decline, despite the subsequent prohibition on most semi-automatic rifles. The numbers fluctuate, and we see that 1996 (the year of the Dunblane Massacre) is actually the lowest in the 1990s. Despite banning the private ownership of handguns in 1997, firearm homicides trend upwards, peaking in 2002. What else is going on here? We’re not seeing meaningful drops following the prohibitions and buy-backs. Indeed, there were widely reported rises in overall gun crime (not just homicides). (BBC, Telegraph). And this is happening again - despite ever-ratcheting legislation, gun crime in 2017-18 was at its highest for a decade in several areas.

Is it perhaps the case, that the fluctuation in murder rate (and gun crime more broadly) are better correlated with economic downturns, the efficacy of law enforcement and/or other social factors? It is known that UK gun crime levelled off in the early 2000s after Operation Trident started to have an impact on organised criminal gangs smuggling in ex-Soviet firearms from Eastern Europe.

Is it any surprise that gun crime might have risen again after George Osborne’s austerity measures cut 20,000 frontline police officers? Or maybe the numbers are so low the fluctuations are just noise rather than a meaningful signal - for instance, statistics involving small nations like Iceland (pop. 400,000) are always difficult. If they have 3 murders, they are statistically one of the safest countries in Europe. 5 murders however makes them one of the most dangerous! Maybe fluctuations in the UK murder rate are within the threshold of “noise”.

2/3/4

• 2: The US has a gun problem, but the UK has a knife problem. So, it’s a wash.
• 3: The US may have a gun violence problem, but the UK matches it with terrorism.
• 4: It’s not the guns. Other murder weapons are more common in the US.

I agree with basically everything Brian has to say in these. They’re absolute bunkum.

5: Gun control doesn’t work. Just look at Chicago!

I generally agree with Brian. Basically any argument again “gun control” which predicates itself on failed schemes in the US is fallacious - because any non-federal scheme in the US will always be of limited value - there are no hard borders between Texas and Illinois. Or even Indiana and Illinois. This is why we see a lot of “fiddling round the edges” laws like magazine capacity limits (which ironically, we don’t have in the UK - magazines aren’t even regulated). However strict a state might try to be, it will always be of limited value given that criminals can bring firearms in from elsewhere.

6: It’s mental health, not guns!

I basically agree with Brian. Other than I think the US does have a somewhat unique problem, not simply with mental health but health and society in general - whether it’s the OxyContin/Opioid crisis propagated by Purdue Pharma, Pharma Bro Shkreli hiking the price of Daraprim by 5000%, or general lack of mental healthcare availability, or anything else. It’s not just mental health - it’s American Society. Any society in which you have a lot of disadvantaged people who struggle to access basic education or healthcare is likely to be an unstable one. If you took away the guns, you’d see a lot more knife crime. For sure, the number of fatalities would drop, but not the number of incidents - desperate people do desperate things. Gun crime in America is a symptom of serious societal issues. Yes, guns are an exacerbating factor, but they’ve also become a lightning rod which distracts a great deal of attention from those fundamental issues. Which is why I hate the “just the guns” rhetoric. It is grossly disrespectful to the victims of societal failures, and involves elected representatives choosing to ignore things that they find inconvenient.

7: Gun control won’t work, because criminals, by definition, don’t obey laws.

Hard agree with Brian. And this is where we have to get into the nitty-gritty of what we mean by “gun control”. Robust licensing works. It works across Europe and the developed world. Everywhere except the US in fact (where they haven’t really tried it). But once you’ve made it moderately inconvenient to source firearms legally, there’s no point running down a rabbit hole of prohibitions and diminishing returns. You have to go out and do the hard work of enforcing those laws.

In 1997 the UK prohibited the private ownership of handguns (against the recommendations of the public inquiry) and it did nothing for gun crime. In fact, handguns are still the most common firearm used in crime - despite the Government spending a great deal of taxpayer money buying people’s private property in 1997 (licensing and registration meant that Police knew exactly who owned what. All legal handguns were removed from circulation).

This must be deeply embarrassing to British Police and the Home Office. Those handgun offences are entirely committed with firearms that are smuggled in or manufactured here illicitly. They are entirely and unequivocally a failure of enforcement. We could ban all firearms - entirely. It wouldn’t make a bit of difference to all those illicit handguns floating around.

From a pure public-safety perspective the money would have been better spent banning (and buying back) road-legal cars that could do more than 100mph. The 1997 handgun ban was in response to the UK’s first (and only) school shooting in 120years of widespread private firearm ownership, but even at the time, the Police reckoned that less than 1% of firearms crime overall was committed with firearms that had ever been registered. That is, 99% of firearms crime was committed with smuggled or illegally manufactured firearms. It remains convenient for politicians that Police are not required to record whether a firearms offence was committed with a legally or illegally held firearm. Such statistics would likely raise awkward questions for Police, and discredit any further proposed restrictions.

Once you’re in this position, the only answer is enforcement - we had Operation Trident in the UK. It significantly cut gun crime by interfering with organised criminal operations. Enforcement works. You could blanket-ban all firearms and criminals would still make their own. So licensing works, but once you get past the low-hanging fruit, you unfortunately have to expend some time and resource on actually enforcing the laws. And I appreciate that “enforcing the laws we have” is a dirty phrase in the US because it’s usually uttered by Republican politicians who are hell bent on trying nothing and then complaining it didn’t work. Maybe the US could spend less money on the Walter Mitty lunatics in the DEA, and more money on education, infrastructure and - yes - basic, community law enforcement and Policing.

And I guess this is where my plea for nuance is perhaps naive. Because the US has tried nothing, and it hasn’t worked. The horse has already bolted in the US. Apparently they conversation has not moved past the question of “should we have more gun control?”. But it does nobody any good to point at the UK as a “gold standard of firearms regulation” (we’re not) and say “It’s just the guns”. It’s not “just the guns”. It’s a lack of licensing sure, maybe registration (at least for certain classes of firearm), but more broadly an increasingly broken society - one divided by MAGA-Trumpism, awash in conspiracy theories, and incels who earnestly believe that Bill Gates is trying to inject you with mind-control chips. With or without licensing, homicides - and firearms homicides - will wander up and down based on the economy, efficacy of law enforcement and the general state of society. Finland and Switzerland have lower gun ownership than the US - but not by much. So unless there is some “magic number” or critical mass where violence spontaneously escalates, the US needs to look at itself in the mirror.

In Conclusion

Brian’s not wrong - the US has a problem with guns. But the problem isn’t the guns. They’re just symptomatic. Gun violence is symptomatic of a deeply divided and broken society.

The basic thing the US should probably do is impose a Federal Firearms Licensing programme. Just submit your name for a NICS FFL background check (as done currently) and get your license - like a FOID in Illinois. This doesn’t need to include registration of firearms owned (so doesn’t enable prohibitions or confiscations), but does close any perceived gun-show/private sale loopholes by banning private sales to unlicensed persons. And being able to buy a gun over the counter without running additional NICS checks would be more convenient for license holders. That’s probably all you can do to start with. Get some basic licensing in place and fund some enforcement to whittle out unlawfully held firearms - and give it time to work instead of complaining that everything is hopeless after 12months.

And then have a good old think about “Why is our murder rate so much higher than Switzerland’s?”. And when the thinking’s done, maybe nationalise huge swathes of the healthcare industry, fund the education system and bring public services up to the standards of the Czech Republic.