Guns, crime, and suicide: a perspective from India

Last edited Fri Oct 25, 2013, 01:25 AM - Edit history (2)

So I went to Delhi this weekend. It sucked (but I did get some pictures of monkeys). But I noticed that just like in Mumbai, there are tons of armed cops, everywhere. Not just sidearms, but semi-automatic rifles. I don't know how old that is (a response to the 2008 Mumbai attacks? Not sure), but it's really still jarring for me to see (there's fewer of them in Kolkata, at least in the parts I've been to).

Delhi is the capital and has all of the government buildings, so just like DC I suppose heavily armed police everywhere shouldn't be that surprising. And Mumbai, obviously, is still deeply affected by the 2008 attacks (and even the ethnic riots of 20 years ago). But I haven't seen a single civilian carrying a gun, and it got me curious about Indian gun laws.

India, like America, has a large population living in vastly different areas, in some of which it makes sense for people to have guns (Wyoming, rural Punjab) and in others of which it makes very little sense for people to have guns (Chicago, downtown Mumbai). Like the US, it has a Federal system of law enforcement but no border controls between states (for the most part), so that Federal laws are difficult to design to meet everyone's needs, while state laws have difficulty dealing with the fact that neighboring states may be more lax.

India does have more Federal involvement than the US in gun control: semi-automatic weapons require a Federal license (but not in all cases a Federal registration of the weapon itself; the operator is licensed). Weapons slower than semi-automatic are regulated by the states, and most require licensing and registration (for that matter most just piggy-back on the Federal license).

(The following numbers are from http://www.gunpolicy.org )

The US has an estimated civilian gun ownership rate of 101 per 100 people; India has an estimated civilian gun ownership rate of 3.3 per 100 people. (EDIT: according to the Gulf News piece I posted downthread, that places India in 2nd place after us for civilian gun ownership, which I find astounding. Caveat: I haven't checked that; I'm just taking their word.)

More than 75% of civilian-owned guns in India are unregistered; the US system is complex enough that it's difficult to come up with a comparable figure.

The homicide rate in the US is 5.1 per 100k; the homicide rate in India is 3.5 per 100k (the US murder rate is roughly one third higher than India's).

Here's one that's really striking: the gun death rate in the US is 10.3 per 100k (more than double the overall homicide rate); the gun death rate in India is 0.55 per 100k (one tenth the overall homicide rate).

The gun homicide rate in the US is 3.6 per 100k (roughly the same as the overall homicide rate in India); the gun homicide rate in India is 0.3 per 100k.

I want to stop there and point something out: nearly three quarters of gun deaths in the US are not homicides; over half of the gun deaths in India are homicides.

India does not track gun homicides by gun type, but the US does: and at the risk of beating this dead horse, handguns are essentially the only type of guns that are used to kill people, accounting for 90% of the total.

The US suicide rate is 12.3, and the Indian suicide rate is 10.8 (I call that roughly comparable). People in the US should not be killing themselves at a higher rate than the country with some of the worst poverty, inequality, and social ills on earth. And wouldn't you know it? our gun suicide rate is 6.3, while India's is 0.14. Over half of our suicides are gun suicides. Despite the fact that all other indicators that correlate with suicide are significantly higher in India (except family formation, IIRC*), our rate is higher because it's easier for people to get guns, which makes it easier for them to kill themselves.

Anyways, what started as me being surprised at all the cops carrying rifles has led me to this thought from those data: we have ridiculously higher gun ownership, higher but comparable overall homicide, and much much higher gun homicide rates than India. But even that much higher gun homicide rate accounts for only one-third of our gun death rate (accidents, it turns out, are not significantly part of those deaths; it really is almost all suicides).

Gun control is contentious and too often used (particularly by the right, but we're guilty too) as a culture war proxy. I personally favor registration, or failing that at least licensure. But the two topics I mentioned here, handguns and suicide, are not really addressed by much of anything. Both Democrats and Republicans have staked their turf over the appearance and behavior of certain classes of rifles and shotguns despite the fact that they aren't really what's killing people. Handguns are killing people, and the person they kill most often (two thirds of the time or so) is the killer himself.

Personally, I think the Constitutional argument for owning a handgun is much weaker than for a long gun, though both the 2nd and 9th amendments have something to say there (it should not literally be impossible for someone with a clean record to legally get one). What I'd love from our party is a gun safety act that puts suicide and handguns front and center.

* From the psych class I took a billion years ago, I remember that religious observance used to be considered a suicide anti-indicator but that that view was being edged out by new (at that time) data. I have no idea to what extent if at all that applies in the subcontinent.