"Guns Kill People"
- By Ben Merriman
On my computer is a dataset, ICPSR 6399, cataloging every homicide committed in Chicago over a thirty year period, along with all the particulars the police could gather by investigation. The dataset includes nearly 24,000 killings, with murder weapons ranging from ash trays to padlocks to pantyhose. One weapon is preeminent: between 1965 and 1994, 9,001 Chicagoans were killed with handguns, and the proportion of killings involving a handgun has climbed substantially in the following 20 years. I have this dataset because I am a sociologist. I don't study crime, but I have a sociological faith that these numbers would yield some meaning if I analyzed them properly. This is less a belief in numbers than a will to believe; I want the data to make sense of something that has resisted my efforts at understanding.
I live in Chicago. I have wanted to write an essay like this one since the beginning of 2012, the year that renewed Chicago's infamy for violence. At the end of 2012, the Chicago Sun-Times, putting a rather fine point on the matter, named the handgun “Newsmaker of the Year.” In the time that I have fussed about what I might write, at least 6,000 Chicagoans have been shot, perhaps 50 of them within a mile of my apartment.
Guns are never far from mind, but I am particularly mindful of them now because they are represented everywhere. Illinois has bowed to the Supreme Court's ruling that it must permit the concealed carry of handguns. However, the state has prohibited them in many settings (universities, liquor stores, etc.), and this prohibition is advertised by a picture of a handgun. They are seen most where they are not allowed, and I am fortunate to spend most of my day in places where concealed weapons are forbidden. In the first month that the law was in effect, nearly 9,000 people in Cook County sought permission to carry a concealed weapon. The faith such people have in their own goodness terrifies me. I am more afraid of a lawfully armed citizenry than I ever have been of robbery or crossfire.
The concealed carry measure provoked a great deal of debate to very little effect: constitutional law provides few ways to limit access to guns in the United States. In any case, the public debate about guns is not really about law in a narrow sense. The debate is philosophical, a mix of arguments about causation and meaning.
Opponents of gun control, it appears to me, take a proximate view of cause: responsibility rests with the person wielding the gun, and the sins of one are not a reason to restrict the liberties of others. Beneath this attitude is a view of society as a mere aggregation of its individual members. The famous NRA motto, “guns don't kill people; people kill people,” gets at half a truth. It articulates a particularly Hobbesian idea of social cause (“man is a wolf to man”), but mischaracterizes the most common alternative view: proponents of gun control do not generally think that guns themselves are the problem.
Instead, proponents of gun control view gun violence as an effect of structural causes—behind particular incidents of violence lurk things like inequality, poverty, and institutionalized racism. It has never appeared to me that this view intends to apologize for people who use guns to shoot others. Rather, it is a belief that society is something larger than and, to some extent, distinct from the people who live within it. Yet guns do, in many senses, kill people.
Most narrowly, they are one link in the long causal chain connecting violent human intention to death: handguns fire bullets, bullets pierce flesh, flesh loses blood, bleeding starves the body of oxygen, ad infinitum.
Handguns also possess a certain initiative that exceeds human intention. They often shoot people when no person intended that they should do so, as well as people other than those targeted. A loaded handgun is always ready to realize its telos, even when humans do not have this telos in mind. Many thousands of Chicagoans have died in incidents (scuffles, robberies, traffic disputes) that began with unfriendly intentions but no wish to do deadly harm.
Most broadly, the purpose of a handgun is to work highly efficient violence at close range; widespread possession of handguns is a sign of a community where many people believe that they may, for various reasons, need to kill other people. In this respect, handguns are a kind of contagion. When there are enough handguns in a community, the threat posed by their presence creates a demand for more of them. They are not quite alive, but they reproduce themselves by the fear they stir in their human hosts.
In Chicago, this fear has a racial dimension. The city is segregated, unequal, and haunted by old animus and mistrust. When thousands of people carry handguns with a permit and a clean conscience, I fear that some episode of racially charged vigilantism is not far off. If this were to happen, some might view it as a tragic misunderstanding. Many more would not: a shop on my street sells a t-shirt that features a portrait of Trayvon Martin alongside one of Emmett Till. For my neighbors, such a death is no accident.
Not long after I began this essay, which intended to achieve a state of thoughtful detachment, I heard that there had been a quadruple shooting next to the McDonald's near my old apartment. I had often stood by that McDonald's while waiting for the bus. I had bought a regrettable milkshake there. I knew nothing about the people who were shot or the person who did the shooting; no details were available. But for the first time during my life in Chicago my sociological protections melted entirely away. I cried.
However much I have tried to tell myself otherwise, I am not writing about a social problem. I am writing about a place that has become my home and people who are my neighbors. I am afraid about where we are going. Illinois has issued some 50,000 concealed carry permits since the new law went into effect. There have been more than 120 homicides in Chicago during the coldest—and least violent—months of the year. Soon school will end, warm weather will entice people outside, and the city will fill with visitors. I hope for a peaceable summer, but I don't expect it.
