'Behavioural science' and firearms:

Zimring and Hawkins on lethal violence in America

 

Review essay on Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon

Hawkins, Crime is Not the Problem: Lethal Violence

in America. New York and Oxford: Oxford

University Press 1997. xii + 232 pp.

 

IAN TAYLOR

University of Durham, UK

Back to Facts

 

 

 

The interest of the British public in the firearms issue has been on the wane since 1997. If asked, most British citizens would probably offer the observation that the new Government's commitment to extend the ban on private ownership of handguns, as legislated in the Firearms Amendment Act in February 1997, to weapons of .22 calibre and above, puts an end to this issue, at least for the time being. The firearms threat-so tragically highlighted at Dunblane-has now been 'dealt with' and, it is widely assumed, the Home Office and the police forces of Britain are working in partnership to effect the process of surrender of handguns. Officials in the Home Office given formal responsibility for these policy areas point to the overall reduction in the numbers of offences involving firearms reported to the police in England and Wales since 1993: the total number of such offences known to the police has declined from 13,951 in 1993 to 12,304 in 1995. This widespread mood of satisfaction and reassurance on firearms was briefly challenged at the end of September-the deadline for the surrender of handguns under the February legislation-as some sections of the press momentarily reported on the coverage given to the apparent switch by many firearms owners into carbines and other, easily portable and shorter shotguns.1 But, like so many outbursts of anxious news items in the daily press in the late 1990s, the newsworthiness of the item proved short-lived, and did not survive long enough to produce any more extended or 'featured' investigation into the ways in which handgun owners in Britain were reorganizing their personal arsenals (or not) in the light of the Firearms Amendment Act.

One of the most powerful and continuing features of the anxieties which are evoked in Britain over any well-publicized use of firearms in public places is, of course, the anxiety that 'we are becoming like America'. There is an extraordinarily widespread 'commonsense' in Britain-so generally commonsensical, that is, as to be beyond examination-and it works to define the idea itself of Britishness (or; more often, in the dominant framework, 'Englishness') against the idea of America, in large part around the question of firearms. An absolutely defining assumption of this com­monsense is the radical difference in rates of firearm crime in the two societies: in 1995, for example, the rate of 'homicide with firearms' in the United States was officially recorded as 6.4 per 100,000 people as against only 0.14 in Britain (Department of Justice, Canada, 1996). In the popular commonsense, these vast differences in risk and threat in the two societies are generally understood in terms of the specific history of the American settlement (not least, the legacy of the rifle and the pistol deriving, no doubt, from the 'Wild West') but also, in 'little England' of formulations, as an expression of the lack of development of a civilized form of life in the United States. Deeply embedded in these widespread forms of common-sense about Englishness are a number of arguments (some of which would find support among students of Norbert Elias and his analyses of the civilizing process) focusing on the restriction of ownership of lethal weap­ons only to 'responsible' citizens (the police and the army) or; of course, to gentlemen in duels-all this effected during the period of the Restoration in l688-as a measure of the progress of civilization itself.2

The commonsense that defines firearms as being in some sense un­English has clearly been far more important in recent debates over firearms control in this country than any more measured recital of statistics and trends-except insofar as these statistics confirm taken-for-granted under­standings. So we are all reassured, for example, to read the several different research reports which suggest that Britain has one of the lowest rates of private firearms ownership in the world, while the United States has one of the highest.3 We have all also been prey in England, however; throughout the post-war period, to that other defining aspect of the conventional English commonsense about firearms in America, that is, the assumption that the high rate of ownership and use of private firearms in that country is a measure of a generally much higher overall rate of crime. In this well­ established commonsense, America is an 'Other' social and cultural forma­tion against which the defining qualities of 'Englishness' can be understood and valued. We in England may have our problems-in running an efficient and modern, competitive economy, for example-but we have avoided America's problems with crime.

Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins' new book was not written as an examination of any of these questions, though it is one of the curious and unintended consequences of the text-for an English reader-that it can be read as a commentary on the quite marked success that 'America' has had in recent years in combating most forms of non-violent crime, over and above its quite unparalleled problems with firearms and their use in ‘crimes against the person’. Crime is Not the Problem is a measured and careful evaluation, in part, of commonsense that popular in the United States-once again on the ascendant in that country-which conception the firearm not only as a constitutional right but also, quite specifically, as an im­portant instrument in individual and collective avoidance of crime, that is, the widely held American belief that the carrying of a weapon acts as a deterrent to crime. So the book constitutes an important intervention into that commonsense: the latest attempt from a small group of social scientists in the United States (notably also including Arthur Kellerman at Emory University in Atlanta and Philip Cook at Duke University) who are prepared to examine the alternative proposition, namely the extraordinary and lethal consequence that results from the existence of a free market in firearms in civil society. Zimring and Hawkins, however; are decidedly in the camp of the careful evaluators, guided more by the facts which they choose to identify from officially generated sets of data, than by any more personal philosophical commitment. For Franklin Zimring, who has re­searched the issues of firearms crime in the United States for the last 30 years, the motivation in returning to this theme (with his friend and associate, Gordon Hawkins) seems to have been to bring together as many conclusive, international sources of data as possible in order to provide an authoritative summary of a lifetime's endeavour. The outcome is an ex­tensive collection and assessment of a mass of research evidence - an extended and exhaustive comparative study of the levels of 'lethal violence' (homicide) in the United States, linked into an extended examination of the research data on just about every relevant issue (the importance of the drugs trade, the issue of race and violence, etc.) that ever gets raised in the conventional public debate over firearms in the United States.

So Zimring and Hawkins' text takes the form of a detailed comparative investigation of a wide range of empirical and statistical material on crime from the United States and other comparable 'criminal justice jurisdictions' (for example, of the patterns of victimization by burglaries and homicides in Los Angeles and Sydney, and New York and London; a detailed comparison of reported offence rates in different European member states and much more besides). Underpinning these various detailed empirical discussions is one distinct theoretical and political master argument, in­tended for American consumption, and a series of connected subsidiary arguments. The master argument is that the problems of fear and anxiety that are a given feature of everyday travels through specific areas of particular cities in the United States should be understood not in terms of the abstract and generalized idea of the 'fear of crime' but rather in terms of the calculations in which residents of such cities routinely have to engage over the chances of encountering some kind of lethal violence. By contrast, Zimring and Hawkins provide a close analysis in Chapter Three of patterns of non-violent property crime in the United States which suggests that the rate of property crime in that country (which has generally been in quite steady decline since the early 1980s) is now generally on a par with Canada, Spain, Italy, Australia and New Zealand. (About 28 percent of all Americans surveyed during 1988-91 in the International Victimization Survey reported being the victim during the previous year of some kind of non-violent property crime, i.e. 72 percent did not [Van Dijk and Mayhew, 1992].) The master argument is, of course, that what Americans speak of as their 'fear of crime' is actually an expression of the widespread availability of firearms and the spread in use of firearms as a weapon in crime: about 40 percent of all robberies committed in New York City in the 1 990s are committed with firearms (Zimring and Hawkins, 1997: 44). In 1992, there were 357 'robbery homicides' in New York City, as against only five in London (p.39). There were even 194 'lethal burglaries' in New York City in 1992, as against only two incidents in London which could be so described (p.45). But Zimring and Hawkins also show that the overall volume of robbery and burglary, combined, in New York City in 1992 (at 194 reported victimizations per 100,000 population) was actually lower than that reported for London (215 per 100,000). That is to say that 'robbery and burglary', aggregated together; were just as frequent in London as they were in New York, but, when they did occur in London, they were potentially and actually far less deadly. By implication, this picture is true for the United States in general, in comparison not just with Britain but with other western societies where firearms are not generally available or in widespread use by private citizens.

Zimring and Hawkins' main thesis is supported by several other con­nected arguments-all of vital and pressing importance for the American readership to whom the text is directed. So, for example, the argument is forcefully advanced that this widespread 'fear of lethal violence' is a major contributory factor independently of overall rates of crime (which, as we have said, have been falling in the United States continuously from the early 1980s). That is to say that the explosion of the prison population in the United States over the last two decades (an increase of 400 percent) has occurred in the Californian prison population between 1979 and 1994 (p.11) should be understood as an attempt to contain the play of violence in civil society by identifying any and all individuals suspected of being capable of violent offences and sequestrating them in different kinds of penal institution. In practice, in such a generalized and nervous atmosphere of preventative social defence and of 'exclusion' of potentially troublesome dangerous individuals, the police, courts and the criminal justice system as a whole will exponentially widen their use of surveillance, discipline and penal institutionalization. (In the United States, of course, the most recent expression of this intensified new regime of surveillance and exclusion is the 'Three Strikes and You're Out' legislation, first introduced in California in 1994 and now in effect in over 16 states).4 Zimring and Hawkins make good use of their access to Californian prison data in order to show how the nervy and explosive expansion in the prison population in that state has netted-not only 'the violent offender' but also a much larger number of non-violent offenders (who might previously not have ended up in pen­itentiaries). In 1991 only 35 percent of the 429,618 prisoners in Cali­fornian penitentiaries (four times larger a sample than in 1979) had been convicted of any kind of violent offence. The close empirical analysis that Zimring and Hawkins provide cries out for some theoretical reflection, as also do the larger questions of the trends in firearms use in different developed societies. Zimring and Hawkins are no social theorists, however; and they determinedly limit themselves to working within the paradigms of American behavioural science. We will return to these issues later in this review.

The other two subsidiary arguments in Crime is Not the Problem have to do with the 'African-American' question in the United States and the issue of the relation between firearms and the illicit drug markets. Both of these areas of debate and enquiry have important parallels with recent public debate around firearms, drugs and crime in Britain in the 1990s-one has only to mention the signifying terms 'the Yardie' and 'Moss Side' in order to make the point. On both issues, Zimring and Hawkins want us to stick closely to 'the facts'. In the first area, Zimring and Hawkins rely rather heavily on official American police statistics on homicide which highlight 'the fact' that some 55 percent of all people arrested for homicide (in 1992) were black. (This statistic has been at the centre of a fractious debate in public policy journals and editorials in the American press in recent months, as spokespeople for the radical right intellectuals (like John Deiulio of Princeton University, 1994) have attempted to develop new bio­anthropological theories of the problem of the inner city and the under­class). To their credit, Zimring and Hawkins try to locate their discussion of African-American involvement in lethal violence in the analysis of the manifold structures of disadvantage that define the black experience in American cities, and which on many dimensions appear once again to be accelerating. What they do not do is introduce much of the data that is available on the extent to which African-Americans are also the victims of firearms availability and lethal violence in the United States (and to a quite extraordinary extent). Over 50 percent of all victims of non-fatal gunshot wounds reported to the Center for Disease Control by hospital emergency departments in the US in 1992 were black males (Zawitz, 1996). Other research had suggested that homicide is now the leading cause of death among black American men, and that the life-time risk of being murdered is now six times higher for young black men than it is for young white Americans (Fingerhut and Kleinman, 1989). Some commentators speak of this as a new, very contemporary form of genocidal process, resulting from the long-established impact of institutionalized racism, on the one hand, coupled with the vastly unequal and socially patterned impact of 'the war on welfare' that has been in progress in the United States under the last three administrations, on the other (Raup, 1996). What can surely never be ignored is the question of how the gun is somehow integral culturally to the continuing struggles waged by young black men in America to attain some kind of respect (indeed, of 'rep') in a society in which such respect is hard to find, outside of certain sports (Bourgois, 1995). Nor either; surely, can we ignore the extent to which the use of guns (for example, in neighbour-hoods of high and long-term unemployment which have been colonized by hidden economies of crime) is, indeed, an instrument specifically for the defence of market position-a clear expression of a vigorous competitive­ness thought entirely legitimate and necessary at other levels of the same social formation. The purchase, ownership and the use of the gun is a matter of cultural and social process, rather than simply a matter of either malevolent individuals ('bad guys') or naive, constitutionalist-libertarian law making.

The role of the gun in enforcement of contracts is often thought, by those police officers and researchers in the United States who have come close to these hidden economies of crime, to be linked with the growth of the drug trade, and, in particular; the growth of extraordinary lucrative markets in cocaine in the 1980s. Zimring and Hawkins' own analysis of the existing data on patterns of firearms homicide in the United States, on the one hand, and the data we have on the evolution of the drug trade itself on the other; presents a rather more complicated picture, and a picture on which Zimring and Hawkins, ever faithful to the available data with which they are familiar or on which they are prepared to rely, are reluctant to generalize. In the aftermath of many years of argument about the constitu­tional right of all Americans 'to bear arms', there is no national system of firearms registration,5 but Zimring and Hawkins are able to identify a specific pattern to the evolution of firearms homicide. The long-term data suggest three distinct 'areas of American homicide'-'a long, downward drift to the century's lowest sustained homicide rate in the 1950s and early 1960s, a sharp and sustained increase during the period 1964 to 1974 and variations around the new high levels ever since' (p.58). Zimring and Hawkins are reluctant to theorize around these trends, but they clearly believe that these trend figures would tend to contradict the widely held belief that the incidence of lethal firearms use in America results from the explosion of the drugs trade in the 1980s, when the high levels of firearms use was already quite well established. In their chapter on the relationship between the drug trade and gun use, Zimring and Hawkins point to a number of empirical studies which have produced widely different conclu­sions (that is, as to whether it is possible to identify a 'causal' or 'etiological' link between the growth of the illicit drug trade and patterns of lethal firearms violence) and they have to conclude that future research on this question in the behavioural science tradition (i.e. looking for causal links between different variables) will have to decide on a consistent and specific set of theoretical enquiries, over and above the commonsense positions. They cite some evidence, for example, that suggests that the development of the illicit drug markets in Washington, DC in the mid­1980s could be connected with a reduction in that city in the total number of robbery homicides, consequent on the development for some local miscreants of a viable alternative career to street assault and robbery. In the end, Zimring and Hawkins are altogether agnostic on the relationship between gun violence and the drugs trade, and therefore also agnostic of the question of legalization of drugs.

The agnosticism which Zimring and Hawkins embrace in these critical discussions of data and evidence is a frustration, and is associated with a curious form of 19th century sociological positivism in which only a natural science model 'proof' can be seen as a form of argument. (This is also expressed in a quite extraordinarily eccentric chapter in which the authors try to weigh up the measurable impact of different initiatives that could be taken by the Government in order to help reduce the unnatural premature loss of life of ordinary American citizens-as if it were as a result of such rational calculations that governments work out their policy priorities-and therefore advance an argument for giving a governmental priority to improvements in traffic security.) The authors' strict behaviour­alist epistemology means that what they are unable to allow in is the sweep of their own imagination and/or their making a commitment to the education and activation of public opinion, informed by the overwhelming evidence which this book itself provides. That evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the taken-for-granted right to bear arms itself-the Second Amendment of the American Constitution-is an originating source of the unparalleled levels of lethal violence on which this text reports, and which determines to treat the banning of such weapons as a natural experiment in community safety. In reaching for some kind of conclusion, they observe with resignation that 'the problem with handgun controls is that they depend on radical changes in citizen behaviour' (p. 201)-an observation that could surely be made about any kind of far-reaching social reform or; indeed, any kind of peace-making exercise in a war zone. It is a 'hard choice' from which Zimring and Hawkins, as strict behaviouralist social scientists, want to excuse themselves. It is also, we would ourselves want to argue, an unwarrantably cautious alternative to the swashbuckling research and reportage routinely produced and disseminated by the libertarian right in America, by the National Rifle Association and by the 'Second Amend­ment' apologists who want to extend firearms ownership among free­thinking Americans, as well as, of course, by the firearms manufacturers themselves who can clearly see the potential growth in a market for firearms in a nervous and increasingly 'fortressed' urban America.

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

1. This process of weapon substitution by firearms owners in England and Wales had already been apparent by the summer of 1996 to many firearms registration officers working in English and Welsh police forces in England and Wales. In the event, the overall number of shotguns recorded on firearms certificates in 1996 increased by 1 percent over 1995 (to a total of 1,335,000) (Barber et al., 1997).

2. The long practised restriction of firearms ownership to the aristocracy, the army and to small numbers of sports shooters under specifically regulated conditions-an effect of the lessons of the Civil War-has been subject only to short-term challenge in England (most notably, in the years after the First World War; by soldiers who had brought their weapons home from the front). So in a civil society which has lived without the presence of firearms in private ownership, American debates about the constitutional 'right to bear arms' (the Second Amendment of the US Constitution) have very little purchase. Spokespeople for the National Rifle Association and similar organizations in Britain generally do not attempt to articulate any such argument, though they do on occasion attempt to advance a variant of another discursive strategy-first developed by American firearms manu­facturers in the late 1980s-which locates the carrying of a concealed firearm (like a rape alarm) for self-defence as a kind of modern-day feminist realism.

3. According to an investigation carried our by The Observer newspaper in 1996, for example; some 48 percent of all households in the United States contained guns, as against only 4.7 percent in England and Wales (The Observer 18 August 1996). These figures were generally consistent with official national statistics on firearms ownership by 100,000 population collected by the Canadian Department of Justice, though these figures have been correctly criticized by the British gun lobby as unreliable as the framework for any strictly 'scientific' comparative analysis.

4. For one assessment of the initial effects of the Three Strikes and You're Out regimes in the United Stares, see Schihor and Sechrest (1996).

5. Only Australia and Canada are currently involved in the establishment of any such national system of firearms registration. In England and Wales, the registration of firearms takes place under the aegis of 47 different police forces, with no national database.

 

 

References

 

Barber; Ann, Graham Wilkins and Tim Leech (1997) 'Firearms Certificate Statistics 1996', Home Office Statistical Bulletin 17/97.

Bourgois, Philippe (1995) In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Baveio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Deiulio, John (1994) 'The Question of Black Crime', The Public Interest Fall: 3.

Department of Justice, Canada (1996) A Review of Firearms Statistics and Regulations in Selected Countries. Ottawa: Department of Justice (Firearms Control Task Force), March, Table 1.1.

Fingerhut, L.A. and J.C. Kleinman (1989) Firearms Mortality Among Children and Youth. Advanced Centre for Health and Vital Statistics, National Centre for Health Statistics No.178.

Raup, Ethan (1996) 'Politics, Race and US Penal Strategies', Soundings 2 (Spring): 153-68.

Schihor; David and Dale K. Sechrest (eds) (1996) Three Strikes and You're Out: Vengeance as Public Policy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Van Dijk, Jan and Mayhew, Pat (1992) Criminal Victimisation in the Industrial World. The Hague: Ministry of Justice.

Zawitz, Marianne W. (1996) Firearm Injury From Crime. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Selected Findings, April.