Guns and female homicide
A response to an opinion essay
Our college student newspaper, The Ithacan, is not precisely the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, but a recent faculty opinion editorial, Commentary: Trump exacerbates gun violence in the U.S. (2/8/2024) makes a number of statements that merit investigation. In short, the essay tries to make the case that guns are a public health crisis exacerbated by Trump. The essay makes no public policy recommendations to alleviate this situation, which is most likely due to the difficulties associated with establishing any such policy. However, without a policy suggestion, we cannot discuss whether or not the policy would make a difference. Still, there is a lot to say.
My initial intention was to respond to numerous points in one essay, but there was so much to say about one quote that it will be split into multiple posts. I will argue that gun deaths are not the public health crisis that they are portrayed to be, and that focusing on guns ignores the larger picture of culture and other issues.
From the Ithacan article:
Add to this our near monopoly on female homicide: “of all femicide cases in high-income countries, 70% occur in the U.S.”
First, keep in mind that the comparison is among high-income countries, with 25 selected. It is very easy for our brains to interpret this as a statement about all countries. This is only a minor point; the problems here are considerably deeper.
Two data rules are screaming at us:
Large disparities warrant skepticism
Normalize properly; ask, "Per what?”
Let’s try to find the source of this quote. Clicking the link takes us to the March 10, 2023, article The Silent Epidemic of Femicide in the United States on the website Sanctuary for Families. This isn’t the source, but it does have a link to the July 7, 2022, article, Is the US Still Too Patriarchal to Talk About Women? The Silent Epidemic of Femicide in America in the Chicago Policy Review. Not the source either. Luckily, they do link to the source, which turns out to be the paper Firearm availability and female homicide victimization rates among 25 populous high-income countries in the Journal of the American Medical Women's Association (February 2002)
It appears that the quote being used was taken out of context from this sentence in the abstract of the paper:
The United States accounted for 32% of the female population in these high-income countries, but for 70% of all female homicides and 84% of all female firearm homicides.
Of the 25 countries surveyed, the United States had 32% of the total female population. In other words, population size accounts for almost half of the 70% figure; hence, the data must be normalized accordingly. The 70% figure is a massive exaggeration that is reproduced in these three pieces. Is this intentional, lazy, or ignorant? Who knows. I tend to start with ignorance because there are many writers who have a poor comprehension of statistics, and this applies to writers on both sides of the aisle. Now, the United States is overrepresented in female killings, but to claim a near monopoly is a blatant misinterpretation of the data due to the country's population size.
The questions that come to mind are: How many female murders are the result of firearms? Would our overrepresentation of female killings revert to the mean if gun ownership was eliminated? Does culture play a role?
The firearm availability paper includes normalized data for both gun and non-gun female homicides in each nation investigated. I represent this data in Figure 1. The data for each country is drawn from a year of availability ranging from 1994 to 1999. This is acceptable for a paper produced in 2002, but we shouldn't use data from the late 1990s to blame something on Trump's presidency unless we can show that it has increased. It has, in reality, declined. I will quantify this later.
Not unexpectedly, given the availability of firearms in the United States, the country has the highest gun homicide rate of any of the 25 countries studied. In the United States, weapons are more readily available than in other countries. However, the argument against firearms begins to falter when we consider that the non-gun female homicide rate in the United States is higher than the gun female homicide rate. Are we to think that if firearms disappeared in the United States, all female gun killings would stop? Some would, and some would not. It's difficult to say how many, but given the high non-gun homicide rate, it's likely that a significant number of these would just move into the non-gun category. Any policy short of complete gun elimination would reduce female gun homicides by less.
When I look at the data, what stands out to me is the total female homicide rate, not the number of gun deaths. Sure, more gun restrictions might help, but we'd still be the leaders in female homicides. (Note, who thought Finland was right behind the U.S. in non-gun female homicide rate?) The other point to note is how the overall female homicide rate (just add the two bars for each country) varies by country. Why? If we can answer this, this could be more useful in providing a reduction in the female homicide rate than some form of firearm restriction. The United States is a very diverse country; given the disparities between countries, we should investigate differences within the United States.
Female homicides by race
In my post, Media’s focus of White supremacy harms Black communities I noted that about 50% of all homicides are perpetrated by Black people. Does this hold true for just female homicides? Figure 2 shows the number of female homicides by race as well as the total number. The data comes from the CDC, and to smooth out some yearly variability, I've used the mean yearly homicide from 2016 to 2020. 2020 is the last year in the CDC WISQARS database.
I’ll point out first that the 3,961 total is less than the 4,384 total in the firearms availability paper. This is a reduction before we account for population growth. Does Trump receive credit for this reduction? One thing to note about the data in Figure 2 is that homicide is not among the top 20 causes of death for White females aged 1 and up; the CDC data only includes the top 20. The 1,893 value is calculated by adding the Black, Hispanic, and Asian values and subtracting them from the total. This is why I refer to the category as White-Other, and it should be considered a slight overestimation of the total number of White female homicides. Totals are not appropriate, and we require a rate to compare groups. Still, the Black total is certainly closer to the White total than we would expect if the rates were the same for each group, but when viewed in terms of rate, Figure 3 may surprise.
In Figure 3, note that the overall rate of 2.43 per 100,000 is much lower than the rate of over 3 in Figure 1. This 2.43 rate is also influenced by the Black rate, which is more than three times greater than the White or Hispanic rates. All populations have equal access to firearms; however, the Black female homicide rate is 70% from guns, whereas the Asian homicide rate is 50% from guns. It's easy to blame weapons, but what explains why the Asian female homicide rate is one-sixth of the Black rate? This is a difficult and uncomfortable subject, but perhaps there are cultural influences at work that, if addressed, would be more beneficial than simply ranting against firearms.
Overall female deaths
In an attempt to put female homicides in context, Figure 4 gives the top 20 female causes of death. Again, I’ve averaged the five-year data from the CDC. Note that homicide just makes it into the top 20.
Suicides are more than double the number of homicides, and only a third of them are due to guns. If reducing death is a key goal, as opposed to scoring political points, there are a lot of places to put our efforts that could be more effective than focusing on homicides.
One last quote from the Ithacan essay that I will bring up next week when I address other data issues from the article.
Donald Trump’s Republican Party wants the daily scroll of death by guns to become the background noise to daily life in the country. They want to normalize mass shootings, and everyday gun violence. Why else would they proceed apace after 19 9 and 10-year-olds were slaughtered in their schoolroom in Uvalde, Texas?
I'm a firm believer in freedom of speech, but every Republican wants to normalize gun violence. Really? I don’t think all Trump supporters or gun owners, including Democrats, want to normalize homicides with guns or by any other means. This is a good example of a missed opportunity to find common ground, such as the goal of reducing female homicide. Instead, the author demonized the other side, insuring the status quo. From the perspective of a college professor, this person has all but said that if you are Republican or own a gun, you are evil and should stay out of my class. So much for inclusivity. More next week.
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Disagreeing and using comments
I'd rather know the truth and understand the world than always be right. I'm not writing to upset or antagonize anyone on purpose, though I guess that could happen. I welcome dissent and disagreement in the comments. We all should be forced to articulate our viewpoints and change our minds when we need to, but we should also know that we can respectfully disagree and move on. So, if you think something said is wrong or misrepresented, then please share your viewpoint in the comments.
References
Hemenway, David & Shinoda-Tagawa, Tomoko & Miller, Matthew. (2002). Firearm availability and female homicide victimization rates among 25 populous high-income countries. Journal of the American Medical Women's Association (1972). 57. 100-4.