Philip J. Cook, the ITT/Sanford Professor of Public Policy at Duke University, and co-author of "Gun Violence: The Real Costs," gave two talks Monday at Tech. The first, "The new Second Amendment -- evaluating gun control in the new regime," was an academic lecture for faculty and graduate students. The second, "The real costs of gun violence," was presented for a popular audience and focused on the emotional and social costs of guns in a community. Before his talks, Cook sat down with the Collegiate Times.
Q: What doesn't America understand about gun control today?
A: I think one thing is that people haven't understood the extent to which the regulation of guns helps law enforcement. The two alternative ways of taking on the problem of gun violence actually compliment each other. If you have a police investigation of a shooting, it's very helpful if you have a registration system for guns for tracking down the owner of the gun. If you have some kind of system of ballistics imaging in place you can help to match up different kinds of crime scenes. The registration system that is imposed on manufacturers, distributors, and dealers, all of that turns out to be an important part of police investigations and it could be more so.
California, for example, has just imposed a requirement on pistols that there be a microstamp on the hammer, on the firing plate, that is going to greatly facilitate ballistics investigation. It will also increase the price of a pistol by not much, maybe $15, and there's also going to be a need for more record keeping, but it's going to facilitate investigations and more murderers being brought to justice.
I get tired of hearing the argument that, "we have enough laws in place all we should do is enforce the existing laws." It misses an important piece of the picture: Police need gun regulation.
Q: You put a number on the amount of money that gun violence costs the United States every year -- $1 billion. This number has gotten kicked around a bit. Could you talk about where you could put gun control in terms of national priorities and would you stand by that number in the face of those who say it is inflated?
A: I think that the important thing about the study that we did was to try to change the nature of the conversation about the costs of gun violence which I thought had been going in the wrong direction and missing most of what was important about gun violence. There's one way of thinking about gun violence and that is thinking all about the victims, that its about their medical costs and about their lost earnings and about the disability and death, and of course that is important and gives you a particular image of the problem as being young males who often have criminal records and who are often minorities and that then can lead you to say, "Well this is an issue of social justice" or it can lead you in quite the opposite direction depending on your politics and your conscience.
But I think it really just misses what's really going on. But the most important effects of gun violence are that they become important issues to the community -- these are concerns about safety and whether people feel comfortable living in a particular place. Hearing gunshots every night and there's drive by shootings and they feel they have to bring their children in at 4 o'clock in the afternoon and they have to sleep in the bathroom so the stray bullets won't take them out ... if that happens, you're going to have a community that is never going to thrive. The people living there are going to be traumatized and the folks that can afford to live somewhere else will live somewhere else and relocate their business somewhere else. It becomes an issue of community development and economic development.
The efforts that people put into avoiding becoming victims in areas that have high gun violence rates then damage those communities that have them economically. When you look at that array of costs ... the total that comes out of that is obviously something very substantial. There is a lot of evidence of that, you don't have to trust my survey, and you can just look at what happens in the mayoralty elections in Baltimore or Washington and see what people are concerned about.
There's a big study called Moving to Opportunity right now where they recruited a lot of public housing moms for the experiment and offered them the opportunity to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. They asked them what their motivation was for signing up for the experiment and overwhelmingly it was not greater opportunity and better education but to get away from the crime and get away from the violence ... So we did the survey and found that it's not just people at the greatest likelihood for being shot that are concerned about it but across the board people are willing to pay to reduce gun violence if you can give them a way to do it.
Q: What is your sense of the future of gun control in terms of changes in the public policy surrounding it?
A: I think that gun regulation is a dead letter in Congress and will be even if Congress gets a large Democratic majority. I hope that's not true but I think that's the direction that its going. The more hopeful news is in the area of state legislatures. There will continue to be real interest and action in places like California and New York and Massachusetts. And you know, California has 12 percent of the United States' population so that's not such a bad thing. They have established a number of regulations that you don't find in most other states that we can then assess now that they're in place and see whether they are effective or not.
Q: What would your ideal gun-control regime look like?
A: I think that a lot of the goal here when it comes to violent crime is to make guns a liability to criminals. Any array of policies that push in that direction so that somebody who is deciding to carry a gun with them during the day or whether to use a gun to commit robbery or assault will think twice because using the gun will increase the chance that they will be caught and punished. That leads us to a number of possibilities starting with anything that will improve our crime scene investigation. That would certainly be greatly facilitated by improved registration systems. To go on from that, to have police departments that would give priority to anti-gun policing, that take shootings and illegal concealed carrying cases seriously. There's New York City that runs under cover operations against guns just like they do against drugs.
Regardless of how many guns are in circulation, that strikes me as a very good array of things. On the other side, I think there are some things you can do to reduce access. To some extent we do have that capacity for improved regulation of gun dealers and other point sources. It's just a matter of will, of giving the resources to the agencies that need them, like Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Q: There's a very vocal group of students on Tech's campus that have advocated for the right to carry a concealed weapon on campus for many reasons, usually chief among them a concern for self-defense. How does this strike you?
A: There's been a lot of interest in that and it's been a priority for the national rifle association to increase people's scope for increasing concealed guns. One place that has been especially successful political initiative by the NRA has been this ability to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon regardless of what your sheriff thinks about you. This permissive permitting system is now in place in a lot of places in the U.S. and we've had a chance to look at it to see what effect it's had ... and it's a draw, so to speak. If you look at the statistics, the best guess is that there's very little effect one way or another on that measure.
Now, the argument about bringing guns onto campus strikes me as having extra problems associated with it. As a professor who teaches classes, I would just assume not have an armed student body facing me. They're already angry enough with me as it is. I think a lot of their fellow students would be made anxious by this. Undergraduate students are famous for partying on weekends and being silly and stupid on occasion and if they started carrying guns that would transform the situation and add a big risk factor. And the payoff would be a minute probability that if there's some very unlikely event they would be able to use the weapon in some useful way.
Q: Many advocates of more permissive gun-control legislation cite the number of "defensive gun uses" in the United States every year as reason to maintain or increase the circulation of weapons. What do you think of this argument?
A: I've studied that extensively and its nonsense. Its based on surveys where people are called up and asked, "Did you use a gun to defend yourself or your home?" and maybe 1 percent will say yes I had in the last five years and you multiply up from that and get a big number. It's about the same percentage that say they've been kidnapped by aliens from outer space.
There's a very large percentage of the U.S. population that is under the influence of something or delusional or just having fun with you. So we have to turn to administrative records, like police reports, and though they're always discounted by gun groups, this is the way you find out who is being shot and how many people are actually being shot defensively and the answer is very few.
There are some surveys where you can actually analyze what people are saying when they say they've used a gun in self-defense. When you read those accounts your inclination is to say, "That's not really what I meant" such as: "Oh, I looked over my bedroom window and there were a couple of teenagers around my car that was parked out in front so I got my gun."