Guns, Gun Culture, and Homicide: The Relationship between Firearms, the Uses of Firearms, and Interpersonal Violence

Randolph Roth

MICHAEL A. Bellesiles's Arming America, an ambitious and well-written study of the history of gun ownership and gun use in America, has many themes, but none is more important for contemporary public policy than the relationship between guns and interpersonal violence. Bellesiles argues that before the 1850s, relatively few Americans owned guns or knew how to use, repair, or preserve them. As a result, guns contributed little to the homicide rate, which was low everywhere, even in the South and on the frontier, where historians once assumed guns and murder went hand in hand. These patterns changed dramatically, according to Bellesiles, after the Mexican War and especially after the Civil War, when gun ownership became widespread and cultural changes encouraged the use of handguns to command respect and resolve personal and political disputes. The result was an unprecedented wave of gun-related homicides, which has left America to this day with the highest homicide rate of any industrial democracy.	1
Bellesiles's thesis has been widely embraced by proponents of gun control and condemned by opponents of firearms regulation. Widespread gun ownership is not the only cause, in Bellesiles's opinion, of America's high homicide rate, but it is a crucial factor, so his thesis has landed at the center of a vigorous public debate.1	2
My concern with Arming America is not over its political implications. As a student of homicide, I am persuaded that lowering levels of gun ownership and gun use among groups at high risk of committing homicide, and improving gun storage and safety, might well lower America's homicide rate, even if guns did not cause America's homicide problem in the first place. My concern is that the thesis of Arming America is wrong, and wrong in ways that will make it more difficult to persuade the public to back policy measures its author supports.	. . .