11 Jun 2013
The news is filled with opinions on guns and gun control, and the views range from no guns at all to no restrictions on who might possess them. But on February 6, 2013, the Austin Public Safety Commission sent a memo to the Austin City Council with recommendations to reduce gun violence in the city. One of the five recommendations was to obtain data about the source of guns involved in crimes. As a first step in obtaining that data, of course, we need to gather some statistics on gun involvement in crimes in general, that is, when are guns used in the commission of various criminal acts. The other recommendations by the PSC were as follows:
- No leasing of facilities to gun shows (at least without background checks of gun buyers);
- Prohibit carrying firearms in public parks, at governmental or political functions, and at athletic events;
- Divest any investment in companies that manufacture assault weapons and high capacity magazines for sale to the public; and
- Explore the possibility of a gun buyback program.
On May 30, Chief Art Acevedo of the Austin Police Department detailed the results of an analysis of crimes involving guns. Information about gun violence per se is apparently not easy to come by, at least in part because, the memo says, there is no law enforcement standard defining the term “gun violence.” The memo does reveal, however, the involvement of guns in various crimes, and contains some interesting specifics on the issue based on statistics from 2010 through 2012:
- Guns were involved in more than 2,300 hundred cases of murder, robbery, rape and aggravated assault in Austin. That’s about a quarter of all such cases during that period.
- Almost 40% of murders involved the use of guns.
- The percentage of robbery cases in which guns were involved declined during this period.
- Guns were involved in only about 3% of rapes.
- The most common type of gun used in robberies and aggravated assaults in each of the three years was a handgun.
At this point, we’ll have to wait to see if the analysis leads to any action, but we do agree that getting a handle on the statistics regarding gun violence is helpful in attempting to come up with specifics on how to reduce it.
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