by James A. Bacon
After a spate of mass shootings, gun control has moved to the top of the Democratic Party agenda. Here in Virginia, we got a reminder this morning of the omnipresent threat that gun-wielding thugs pose to public safety. Police arrested two illegal immigrants who were allegedly plotting to shoot up a July 4th celebration in Richmond. The duo was found in possession of two rifles, a handgun, and 223 rounds of ammunition.
Oh, brother. Not only do we have to worry about political radicals, Jihadists, mentally ill teenagers, and suicidal middle-aged men, now we can add homicidal illegal immigrants to our list of worries!
As the rhetoric about guns inevitably heats up, it is worthwhile reviewing the firearms-related data in the 2021 Crime in Virginia report. There were 6,102 firearms among the 17,456 weapons catalogued in crimes last year, or 35% of the total.
The graph above shows that firearms are the weapon used in 446 Virginia homicides last year — about 80% of cases. Knives came in at a very distant second place with 34 homicides.
Of the 13,800 weapons used in aggravated assaults, 5,900 were firearms — or 43%.
Clearly, people don’t need guns to get into serious fights. They will use knives, fists, and teeth. They will hit each other with blunt objects, strangle one another, and run each other down with cars. Remarkably, there were 60 cases of poisoning! But, as implied by the high rate of involvement of guns in homicides, use of a firearm is far more likely than fists or knives to result in a death.
Police record the type of weapon used in kidnapping, sexual assaults, and robberies as well. Firearms are relatively rarely involved with kidnapping and sexual assaults, but are commonly used in robberies. Of the almost 3,000 weapons catalogued in the commission of robberies, guns were used about 47% of the time.
Holding up someone at gunpoint makes it a lot easier to rob someone, but the frequent use of other weapons suggests that if the bad guys didn’t have guns, Virginians would still experience a lot of robberies.
The 2021 Crime in Virginia report also catalogues the type of firearms used to commit crimes. The following chart shows the breakdown of violent crimes by type of firearm. (The state police does not have a separate category for semi-automatic weapons.)
Bacon’s bottom line: Two bottom lines, actually.
First, the prevalence of guns as the weapon used in homicides implies that guns tend to cause more serious injuries than other weapons. This reality lends credence to the idea that if society could find a way to keep guns out of the hands of criminals — a very big if — it could reduce the number and severity of injuries stemming from crime, if not the number of assaults and robberies.
Second, if you want to make a dent in crimes committed with guns, you need to target handguns. The use of shotguns and rifles is almost trivial. I am a know-nothing when it comes to weaponry, but I don’t think there is such as thing as a semi-automatic shotgun. Therefore, semi-automatic rifles are a subset of the rifle category. Of the nearly 6,200 weapons identified in violent crimes in Virginia last year, 209 were rifles — less than one in 30. The number of semi-automatic rifles would have been even more trivial.
One uncertainty here is that police declined or failed to report the type of firearm for a large percentage of violent crimes, so it is possible that the number of rifles (and, by implication, of semi-automatic rifles) is larger than the numbers shown here. However, if a semi-automatic rifle were used in a crime, I expect that police would have been far more likely to have recorded the fact, so I’m not persuaded this is a material consideration.
These graphs provide a one-year snapshot in time of the use of guns in crimes. They do not show trends. The critical question I have been asking on this blog is what caused the increase in the number of murders between 2019 and 2020? Was there a change in the availability of guns that might have contributed? I’ll delve into those questions next.
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