No Mistake: Our Nation Owns A Lot of Guns

 previously published in the Terre Haute Tribune-Star, 5/15/2021

These are things I held in my hand within the first two hours of the day: toothbrush, toilet paper, pants, shirt, jacket, dog leash, coffee cup, cell phone, wallet, glasses. Seems pretty boring, normal, nothing really noteworthy. Certainly nothing dangerous, right?

According to some lists of items that police have mistaken for a gun in police-involved shootings, three of the 10 items I held were mistaken by police as a gun, thus justifying the shooting of the actually unarmed person. A person who was no threat to anyone.

I often hold some of the things mistaken by police for a gun: a wrench (last week), water-hose nozzle (Saturday), flashlight (Saturday), cane (most Tuesday evenings), broomstick (Saturday), sunglasses (and glasses, daily), underwear (daily), bottle of beer (almost daily), pill bottle (daily), Wii remote (well, a remote, daily), sandwich (Sunday).

A few things sort of look gun-like … the water nozzle, though hooked to a hose would seem to give it away, a cordless drill, maybe a remote controller. But, the others, sure, it’s dark, shadowy, I guess.

I can understand police officers’ concerns: gun sales are soaring in the United States; 40 million handguns were sold legally in the U.S. in 2020 and 4.1 million in January 2021. Estimates are that there are more guns than people in the US, nearly 400 million firearms. But it's handguns that get mistaken, and estimates are that there are about 100 million handguns in the U.S. Not everyone owns a gun, much less a handgun. Surveys suggest that about 40 percent of households have a gun; about 22 percent of Americans own a gun. Those numbers are down, when in the late 1970s, 51% of households owned a gun.

The Americans who own guns own a lot of guns. We make up about 4 percent of the world’s population but account for about 40% of the worldwide civilian ownership (though I wonder about the accuracy of such international comparisons). Even conservatively, one in five could be expected to own a gun, and probably it’s reasonable to believe even more than that can easily possess a gun.

Couple that with state legislatures making it easier and easier for citizens to carry guns without any restriction (it’s easier in many states to carry a concealed weapon than to get a driver’s license), one can understand that police might fall into the sense that everyone is armed. The International Association of Chiefs of Police position on firearms policy sounds like what polls show Americans to favor, better background checks, an assault weapons ban, some restrictions on concealed carry. That’s quite distinct from what the “gun lobby” wants, which is less restrictions. However, rank and file police officers support more armed citizens, going so far as to claim, in a survey of 15,000 police officers conducted by Police1, that more guns, in the hands of mentally healthy, felony free people, would actually reduce gun violence.

A study compared police officers with civilians in their ability to correctly detect a gun in hand from other objects and the response time to do so. Not surprisingly, police officers' reaction times were better than civilians’. And their error rate was only 5% compared to the 12% for civilians. The report did not, however, indicate whether the 5% error rate was to mistake something else for a gun or not.

According to the Officer Down Memorial Page, in 2020, 45 police officers were shot to death in the line of duty. According to BLUE H.E.L.P, 228 police officers died by suicide in 2020. Civilians killed by police officers totaled 1,021. Since 2015, according to the Washington Post’s database of officer-involved shootings, 6% were unarmed. If that rate holds for 2020, then 61 unarmed people were killed, perhaps holding a cell phone, a remote, a wallet, or maybe nothing at all.

Logically, police officers in a violent nation awash in guns would be “edgy.” Yet, if the Police1 survey is accurate, over 90% of officers think more guns will reduce gun violence.

Even “drop it” is not always good as we saw with Adam Toledo, who threw his gun away and turned with his hands up, only to be shot and killed anyway.

One thing the research literature shows without doubt is that more guns equals more homicides, more guns equal more successful suicide attempts, more guns equals more homicides of police officers, and I’d suggest that more guns also means more police killings of unarmed civilians.