A Way Forward on Guns: A Conversation with Arkadi Gerney on How to Win the Fight for Stricter Gun Laws

Over the past few years, mass shootings have become more frequent, and especially with the December 2015 shooting in San Bernardino, CA, guns seem to have come to the fore. To what do you attribute this uptick in particularly public mass shootings and other types of gun violence over the past few years?

One of the challenging things when you are researching gun violence is trying to understand both the connection and distinctions between mass shootings and overall gun violence. Overall gun violence has been at a steady state for at least a decade, and if you look over two or three decades, there has been some decline in gun murders but a sort of persistent and slightly growing level of gun suicides. Over the last decade, there have consistently been 32,000 or 33,000 Americans dying by gunfire each year. Although there are different categorizations of what constitutes a mass shooting, Mother Jones tracks mass shootings, and if you look at Mother Jones’s and some others’ analyses, it suggests that mass shootings are becoming more frequent in the US; and what is probably driving that is, to a degree, that mass shootings beget more mass shootings. There is a media phenomenon related to mass shootings that seems to be associated with potentially driving more mass shootings, as mass shooters in general are seeking notoriety. But there is also a broader challenge, which is the overall challenge when it comes to access to guns and gun laws, that has to do with the disproportionate level of gun violence we have overall in the US, which is also associated with high levels of mass shootings.

What do you think are the most important policy solutions to the issues surrounding gun violence? What are the overarching priorities that, regardless of political constraints, you would like to see passed by Congress or introduced by the President?

In thinking about gun violence, there is a set of overlapping challenges. Mental health is relevant in some incidents of gun violence, although there is a lot of data that suggests it is not a primary driver of homicide-related gun violence. But, if you took the guns out of the equation, there certainly are challenges with the mental health system in the US, things that we could do to make it better, that are worth doing even if guns did not exist. There are also reasons why violent crime exists, and even if guns did not exist, there would be a variety of policy solutions—many of them driven by the research being done at the University of Chicago Crime Lab—that would be smart things to do, which we should do anyway.

But the biggest way to deal with gun violence—the most important set of policies if you want to reduce gun violence—relates to guns. If you look at the US in the comparative sense, we have middle-range crime and violent crime rates when compared to OECD or other highly industrialized countries. But what is different is that we have a murder rate that is way out of whack, and certainly a gun murder rate that tends to be 10 times higher than that in other industrialized countries. What is driving that is guns. Stronger gun laws won’t have a big impact on the level of crime, but what they will have an impact on is how fatal different types of crime are.

If you look at countries that have bans or near total bans on civilian ownership of guns, countries like Japan or the United Kingdom, you see both much lower homicide and suicide rates, but also incredibly lower gun homicide and gun suicide rates. However, given our constitutional, cultural, and political norms, getting rid of guns is not a realistic—and probably not productive—option for people who are advocating for stronger gun laws. What we want to move towards is essentially a compatibilist framework. How do we find a way to make gun ownership more compatible with other objectives?

With guns, it is a series of laws and interventions that accept that there are going to be hundreds of millions of privately owned guns in the US, but also recognize that there is a slew of things we can do to make the levels of violence associated with them much lower. We see pretty consistently that states with stronger gun laws have lower rates of gun violence. The cornerstone is a set of policies to reduce access to guns by the highest risk people in the population.

As you mentioned, there are already upwards of 300 million guns privately owned in the United States. To what extent do you think that, even if we did pass a series of comprehensive gun laws, they would be able to regulate this market?

I think the comparison countries, because we are not going with the ‘ban all guns’ approach, are more like Germany or Switzerland. Both countries have, for European standards, high rates of gun ownership, with estimates being around one third of the US rate of gun ownership. This may sound like a lot less, but the US estimate is that, for every human being, there is a gun. In Germany, there is a privately owned gun for every three human beings, which is much, much higher than in other European countries. But, while the gun ownership rate is one third of the US overall rate, the gun death rate is significantly lower than in the US; in Germany, it is 1/16^th the rate.

What drives the lower gun death rate? Both countries have much more rigorous laws as relates to gun storage, gun access, gun transfers, and tracking guns, and if you took those laws and implemented them in the US, the research suggests that you would still have a level of gun violence that is way above the highly industrialized countries that ban guns, but it would be much lower than the level that we currently have. If you are talking about 33,000 gun deaths a year, and you reduce that by one third, that is 11,000 lives a year.

Let’s talk more about the policy formation process in general when it comes to gun violence prevention. I know you have worked on the issue for a long time—have you seen any substantial changes in policy since you first started working on the issue, and if so, how were those achieved?

At the federal level, changes in policy in the years I have been working on the issue have been modest and incremental—some of them bad and some of them good. I started working on guns in 2006, which was right after a significant set of changes to federal gun laws. There was the expiration of the assault weapons ban and the adoption of the gun industry immunity bill in 2005. So I came in right after federal laws took a pretty significant step backward. If you look at the executive actions—the NICS Improvement Act that was passed after Virginia Tech, funding levels for implementing that to get more mental health records in the system—all of these things together represent a series of modestly good steps forward.

There was a fair amount of attention after Newtown, counting up the ‘good’ gun laws versus the laws weakening gun regulation in the states. The story has been that there are at least as many laws that have weakened guns laws in the states since Newtown as have strengthened them, depending on how you count them. But it’s sort of fighting to a draw at the state level, or something like it. The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence’s count has it with slightly more strengthening laws than weakening them, but roughly it tells the same story, which is “Woah, Newtown happened,” and there are just as many bad laws passing at the state level as there are good laws. And that sounds like a bad story. But it was a political bloodbath for the decade preceding Newtown, so the notion that red states are generally making their laws weaker, and blue states are making their laws stronger, with purple states splitting, which is what has been happening over the past three years, that’s a real difference from what preceded it. But what’s happening on guns, and on other issues too, is a Tale of Two Cities story, where the laws and cultural norms of one set of states is differentiating more and more from the laws and cultural norms of another set of states. The difference between strong-law and weak-law states is growing.

What are the critical elements that need to change politically before there will be comprehensive legislative action on this issue? The NRA (National Rifle Association) plays a very significant role in countering efforts at reforming current gun laws, but do you see a future where advocates for gun law reform can partner with the NRA?

I think it is unlikely that there is a potential for partnership anytime in the near future, given the behavior and incentives of both sides. The NRA needs to be soundly defeated before it will be incentivized to partner. But the political prospects for advocates of gun safety are much, much better than they were five or 10 years ago. Five to 10 years ago, the issue was a loser in both parties. A small group of Republicans favored stronger laws, but the party was largely in bed with the NRA, and elite Democrats had the working consensus that the issue was a political loser, so the issue had no national leaders who were seriously fighting for it, and they had basically abandoned it. No one wanted to touch it. In that way, it was abnormal relative to other issues that are ideologically charged.

Among Democrats, this has changed tremendously; you see evidence of that in the Democratic primary. Why is Hillary Clinton running on it? Because she thinks it helps her both in the primary and in the general election. That is a huge sea change. Howard Dean ran in 2004 as a progressive favorite with an NRA A-rating, and talked about it on the trail and suffered no significant consequence for it. And the vote that Bernie Sanders took in 2005 for the immunity bill, at that time, did not have a big political price to be paid. If he had to do it over again, as he has basically said, he wouldn’t do it that way. Not just because of the substance, but because of the change in politics around it. So the gun issue, at least among Democrats, has become like any other issue.

Everything in our politics has become more polarized, and if you want to achieve anything, even on items where polls suggest there is a lot of bipartisan support, you have to take control of both houses of Congress and the presidency. When Democrats had control in 2009, the gun issue was in such a weak position that they wouldn’t do it, and instead they passed a few incremental measures—guns on Amtrak, guns in national parks—that expanded gun rights. So the politics of it has changed radically, and it’s no more of a third rail issue than raising the minimum wage. But, if you want to do that, or universal background checks, or any number of things, the ideological differentiation between the parties is much more clear than it was a decade ago.

So the position of gun safety among Democrats is much stronger than it was, but among Republicans it wasn’t good a decade ago, and it’s a little worse now. So if you want to achieve something at the federal level, and basically at the state level, in this environment for the moment, it requires taking control of everything. But that doesn’t make guns different from any other issue.

Leading up to President Obama’s recent announcement of executive actions on guns, what role did the larger policy community play in shaping his recommendations?

There was a lot of back and forth, and sending in ideas, and sharing ideas with the administration over a long period of time, about executive actions and what it means to conduct background checks. I think for any issue, to make something happen, it requires a level of attention and focus from the White House to overcome the institutional inertia in the agencies and in trying to change the way that the agencies do their business.

Another thing that has changed, and the President has said this himself, is that the President’s focus on this issue and the level of importance it has to him has changed over time. It has been changed by the experiences he’s had in his role as President, having to deal with and respond to these shooting incidents. The thing that makes this issue challenging, but also makes it possible, and how it is ultimately going to be won, is the emotional content of it. Gun reform is a high stakes issue, a matter of life and death. The stakes for people on the other side of it are very, very high; they have invested in terms of identity, in terms of their sense of what it means to be an American, what their sense of freedom means. If you look at the NRA’s core message, it is not about guns; it is about freedom.

This has always been an emotional issue for people who are directly affected by gun violence, but what we’ve seen in recent years is that the emotional content has become better organized. It is just not enough on this issue to have good data; you need a compelling case about what is at stake that matches or exceeds the very compelling case that the other side has constructed. Part of the value for more mercenary political operative types is that, if you can corral that emotional power, you can get people to do things, like change who they might vote for, or get them to vote at all. And corralling that emotional power for a relatively small percentage of the population is what the NRA’s methodology has been. They don’t have to get massive portions of the electorate to vote on guns, or come out to vote because of guns, but that they can, and incredibly do, do that for some small parts of the electorate is potent and meaningful in elections.

What we are seeing now, and what the President said in his op-ed, is that there are more people who are putting gun violence at the top of their list. And the more they do that, it creates a virtuous circle where the people running for office and the people who advise them are saying, “Look, there is energy here that you can tap into. You can get people to do things by talking about this issue.” But you can’t get them talking about fiscal policy. There’s an emotional resonance here. You can get them to hold a sign for you, come out to a rally, make a contribution, vote, change their vote, talk to their friends. The value of that is very significant, and it is better organized now than it has ever been.

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