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AP Photo: James Brady and White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton.
Reading a recent post by our own Austin Gun Rights Examiner, your Texas Statehouse Examiner decided to look at his findings and see what they mean in relation to the 2009 legislative session, and to do a little opining of his own.
Texas is a gun-loving state. You don’t have to look too far for the proof. In 2009, a host of bills concerning gun rights made it to the floor of the Texas Legislature, and while other commentators have covered them thoroughly, it should give us a starting point to consider gun rights as a whole.
Notable among this year’s legislative discussion was the passage of a measure okaying 21 year-old gun owners to carry concealed weapons onto state college campuses. The measure came two years after the Virginia Tech massacre, forty-three years after the infamous Charles Whitman shooting spree at the University of Texas, and a year after a UT student was arrested for carrying a handgun to campus.
I knew the student who was arrested last year. He was in my class at the time. Would I feel any safer now, knowing that my fellow classmates could have shot him first? Of course not. But that's just my opinion, so let’s look at the facts.
Austin’s popular Guns Rights Examiner has a compelling piece about the correlation between Brady scores, gun ownership and violent crime. His piece also delves into some ideas about freedom, governance and a whole host of issues that have plagued American politics since the birth of the Second Amendment.
He is careful to include a number of graphs depicting the correlation between increased gun ownership and decreased violent crime, and between higher Brady scores and higher crime rates. He even explains some of the basics of his Microsoft Excel graphics for those of us without a casual knowledge of statistics.
The linear regressions he uses for Brady grade, violent crime and murder rates, however, are painfully averaged and unrepresentative – the real numbers look more like a wavy scatter plot than any clear correlation. These averages might be useful if there were, say 1,000 states, rather than 50.
But that does not discredit his basic assertion: states with higher gun ownership show fewer murders, for example. This plays into the real basis of the analysis: the political assertion that less regulation of firearms makes us safer by giving us a constitutional right to defend ourselves.
Even if the Brady index is a poor metric, numbers never quite tell the whole story. Who owns guns matters far more than how many of them there are. To make a crude analogy, Norway has a national defense apparatus, but no one’s worried about the Norwegians invading in a mad rush of Viking reassertion. Plenty of Texans have guns; guns for hunting, for keeping in cabinets, for generally admiring and having fun with. Perhaps fewer New Yorkers have guns (hunting options are limited to rats and Williamsburg hipsters), but the ones who do live in socio-economic conditions that induce violent crime, rather than weekend skeet shooting.
In the end, these kinds of statistical analyses, and the band-aid regulation or deregulation that follows, are ignoring the social and cultural problems that catalyze violent crime, murder and the general misuse of our Second Amendment.
This, however, is something most of us, like our Gun Rights Examiner, probably know already. Most of us, of course, except our lawmakers.
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