Several articles on guns in America have recently appeared in Varsity. These articles have founded their case for gun control on subtle misunderstandings of American gun law terminology, on misleading statistics, and on distortions of what gun control can and is meant to achieve. It is because I am in favour of gun control that I, an American, write to correct these errors. Misrepresenting or overstating the case for gun control hurts the gun control cause. So does framing the case for gun control in terms of the prevention of mass shootings.

A recent article referred to the AR-15 rifle – a gun used in the Newtown massacre – as an ‘assault rifle’, and another spoke of attempts to ban ‘assault rifles’ in America. This is subtly but crucially misleading. Under one of the recently defeated US gun control bills, the AR-15 would have been banned as an ‘assault weapon’. ‘Assault weapon’ is a legal term for a certain class of semi-automatic firearms. It is not the same as an ‘assault rifle’ – the real fully automatic military deal. Fully automatic firearms are illegal for civilians to own in the United States, as they are in the UK.

Some Americans who favour gun control – I count myself among their number – suspect that a ban on all semi-automatic weapons would be beneficial if it were politically feasible. Since it is not, some American gun control advocates have sought instead to institute an ‘assault weapons ban’. Such a ban would forbid the sale of semi-automatic weapons that share certain cosmetic features with military assault rifles, for instance type of grip or type of stock. Experts agree that such features have little to no effect on a gun’s deadliness. Equally or more dangerous guns that appear less superficially scary would remain on the market under an assault weapons ban. The most recent proposed ban, for instance, would have allowed American civilians to continue to purchase the M-1 Carbine, a semi-automatic firearm designed for the US military and standard issue as recently as the Vietnam War. 

The misleading term ‘assault weapon’ makes it easy to imagine that American civilians can presently purchase fully automatic firearms, and that a highly sensible bill has been proposed to ban those military-grade guns. I once thought this myself. Eventually, a more pro-gun friend contradicted me. Sure that he was distorting the facts, I did some self-righteous Googling. He was completely correct.

I was thus not disappointed when the recent ‘assault weapons ban’ bill failed. Rather, I had feared that, (literally) cosmetic as it was, it would pass but have no discernable effect on violent death rates. This would have given rhetorical ammunition to the gun lobby. ‘See,’ they could then have claimed, ‘gun control doesn't work’.

To argue that gun control does work, the most recent American guns article to appear in Varsity compared US and UK firearm death rates: ‘more people die at the end of a gun every single day in America than in a whole year in the UK’. The quoted statistic clashes with data from the Centers for Disease Control (for the US) and the World Health Organization European Office (for the UK): 10.2 deaths per 100,000 people per year in the US and just under 0.25 per 100,000 people per year in the UK. Moreover, using an absolute death toll to compare two countries whose populations differ by a factor of five is misleading.

There is no need for such misrepresentation. The rates quoted above put the US per capita firearm death rate at 40 times the UK rate. This is not the same as 365 times the number of per capita deaths, or even 365 times the number of absolute deaths, but it’s still a shocking number.

Yet gun control advocates should also recognise that looking at firearm death rates in isolation leads one to overstate the case for gun control as a means of saving lives. While the US’s firearms death rate is 40 times the UK’s, its overall homicide rate – per capita homicides by all means, not those only involving guns – is only 4 times the UK’s, and the two countries’ overall suicide rates are roughly equal. A difference in the number of accidental gun deaths cannot account for these discrepancies; such accidents are rarer in the UK than in the US, but they make up only an insignificant fraction of gun deaths in either country. Rather, there is a higher rate of violent crime in the UK than in the US, and some – though not all – criminals and suicidal people find other lethal instruments when guns are unavailable.

There is still a very strong case to be made for gun control: when guns are more scarce, a lower percentage of violent crimes result in death. The UK’s violent crime rate is higher than the US’s, but UK violent crimes still lead to fewer per capita deaths than US violent crimes, largely because they are less likely to involve guns. A gun rights advocate might contend that the UK’s higher violent crime rate shows that gun ownership deters violent crime. A gun control advocate should rejoin that the net result in the UK has still been markedly fewer deaths, and that gun control is therefore the obvious choice.

If, however, my fellow gun control advocates and I quote obviously misleading statistics to improve our case, gun rights advocates can make their own case seem stronger by pointing out our statistical errors. If we begin with impressive but irrelevant stats and only later present less impressive but more salient ones, our pro-gun opponents will be able to convince themselves and their audiences to disregard even those better, more honest arguments. After all, it was easy for them to poke holes in the initial numbers we presented. Why should they bother doing the same again with the new set of statistics we’ve now brought to the table? 

Most crucially, we must be honest about what we hope to achieve with gun control. In the United States, gun control advocates have lately used the Newtown massacre to build a case for new gun laws. Gun control might make things more difficult for a would-be mass murderer; perhaps there would be fewer mass shootings in a US with stricter gun laws. But gun control cannot stop all mass shootings and all lone-wolf mass murder. If someone is hell-bent on killing and sufficiently resourceful, he or she will find a way.

Mass shootings account for only a tiny fraction of all American homicides. They get the lion’s share of the news coverage, but that is understandable; journalists and their audiences are captivated by spectacle and tragedy. And in the public eye, the ‘acceptable’ number of mass shootings is zero. American politicians accordingly don’t promise to make future Newtowns less frequent. They promise to ‘prevent the next Newtown’. They will not, because they cannot.

If gun control advocates promise that gun control will stop mass shootings, they will be proven wrong by the next tragedy. The pro-gun lobby will then claim that gun control has ‘failed’.

But, emotionally evocative as Newtown may have been, stopping future Newtowns is not the aim of American gun control. The aim is, or at least should be, to reduce the number of violent deaths – any and all violent deaths – in America. This, unlike ‘preventing the next Newtown’, might be possible with intelligent gun laws.

 If my fellow gun control advocates and I wish to succeed, we must abandon disingenuous rhetoric; it plays into the hands of our opponents. Honesty may truly be the best policy.