Gun Play

What Kids Don't Know About Guns Can Kill Them.

David B. Kopel from the July 1993 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

of fatal gun accidents fell from 1.2 per 100,000 Americans to 0.6.

Thanks to private educational efforts, including programs sponsored by the National Rifle Association, the Boy Scouts, 4-H, and other groups, the firearm accident rate has been cut in half.

Despite this impressive private-sector achievement, Sen. Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) thinks that the government could do better. He proposes giving the Consumer Product Safety Commission authority over firearms, ostensibly to reduce accidents. This move could be an indirect way to achieve gun controls far more sweeping and restrictive than Congress is likely to pass. With jurisdiction over firearms, the CPSC could, by unilateral administrative action, ban the future production and sale of all firearms and ammunition. Congress has forbidden the CPSC to regulate guns precisely because of such fears.

Short of banning firearms, the CPSC might require features intended to prevent accidents, such as child-proof grips or indicators that show when a gun is loaded. But such technological fixes, favorites of the gun-control lobby, do not address the main cause of firearm accidents. A 1991 study by the General Accounting Office found that 84 percent of gun accidents involve deviations from basic safety rules. For example, accidents occur when people carelessly wave a gun around, thinking it's unloaded, or put their fingers on the trigger prematurely. Safety education is therefore the best way to continue reducing gun accidents. Unfortunately, children whose parents have no interest in firearms are unlikely to hear gun lessons. Firearm-safety programs ought to be expanded to reach more children.

One successful effort to teach children about gun safety is the NRA's "Eddie Eagle" Elementary Gun Safety Education Program. The Eddie Eagle program offers curricula for children from kindergarten through sixth grade, using an animated video, cartoon workbooks, and play safety activities. The cartoon hero Eddie Eagle offers a simple safety lesson: "If you see a gun: Stop! Don't Touch. Leave the Area. Tell an Adult." Although Eddie Eagle includes no political content, some anti- gun activists have prevented the program from being used in their schools because they disagree with the NRA's position on policy issues. (Riflery programs in high schools, which also teach safe gun habits, have generated even more resistance.)

While schools and other social institutions have an important role to play in gun safety, the primary responsibility rests with parents. A child who can, under parental supervision, invite a classmate to shoot a .22 rifle at a target range will be less intrigued by the possibility of surreptitiously playing with a pistol found in a closet.

In contrast to gun accidents, gun suicides do account for the deaths of many young people–more than 2,000 in 1990. From the mid-1950s to the late '70s, teenage suicide rose sharply, and most of the increase was due to gun suicides. But since then, the teenage suicide rate has remained stable, and so has the percentage of suicides involving guns. Teenagers are still less likely to commit suicide than any older age group.

Although the teenage suicide rate has been about the same since the late '70s, gun-control advocates insist that immediate action is necessary to address this "crisis" as well. They often cite false statistics to justify their sense of urgency. In 1989, for example, the American Academy of Pediatrics told a congressional committee that "every three hours, a teenager commits suicide with a handgun." But this figure is valid only if one counts all suicides as handgun suicides, or if one calls every person under 25 a teenager.

In addition to exaggerating the extent of the problem, gun-control supporters simply assume that fewer firearms would mean fewer suicides. One might speculate that the presence of a gun can turn a teenager's fleeting impulse into an irrevocable decision. If guns were less readily available, perhaps suicide would decline. This theory is intuitively plausible, but it is not consistent with the evidence.

In his 1991 book Point Blank, Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck analyzes suicide rates and gun laws in every American city with a population over 100,000. He takes into account all the factors that might affect suicide, such as race (whites are more likely to commit suicide), religion (Catholics are less likely), economic circumstances, and 19 gun control laws, ranging from waiting periods to handgun bans. Kleck finds no evidence that any of the gun-control laws had a statistically significant effect on suicide rates. While some gun-control laws did affect the rate of gun suicide, the total suicide rate remained the same. People who had decided to kill themselves simply substituted other, equally lethal methods.

Data from other countries appear to support Kleck's conclusion that gun control is not an effective way to reduce suicide. While teenage suicide has remained stable in the United States in the last 15 years, it has risen sharply in Europe, where gun control is much stricter. In Great Britain, where gun laws are very strict and the gun ownership rate is less than one-tenth that in the United States, adolescent suicide has risen by more than 25 percent in just five years. Similarly, in Japan handguns and rifles are illegal and shotguns very difficult to obtain. Yet teenage suicide is 30-percent more frequent in Japan than in the United States.

Given the lack of evidence that gun control reduces suicide, anti-gun activists have resorted to factoids such as this one, reported by Washington Post columnist Richard Reeves last September: 'Teen-agers in homes with guns are 75 times more likely to kill themselves than teen-agers living in homes without guns." The story behind this factoid illustrates how myths that support gun control are generated.

A 1991 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association discussed a study of several dozen homes in western Pennsylvania where a teenager had committed or attempted suicide or where a non-suicidal teenager who had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital lived. A home with a teenager who had committed suicide was twice as likely as the other homes to contain a gun. In an editorial accompanying article, three employees of the federal Centers for Disease Control incorrectly wrote: "The odds that potential suicidal adolescents will kill themselves go up 75-fold when a gun is kept in the home."

JAMA later published a retraction, noting that was incorrect; the increase was in fact twofold (and the number was merely a correlation, not proof of cause). Sen. Chafee saw the false claim but apparently missed the correction, since he repeated the 75-fold figure in a congressional hearing in October 1992. In his Washington Post column, Reeves took the factoid one step further, telling his readers that it applied to all teenagers, even though all of the subjects in the study had serious psychological problems.

Factoids also play an important role in the debate about guns in school. Chafee and Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) claim that "135,000 children carry a gun to school every day." Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) ups