The rhetoric may not be accurate, but it is definitely useful.<\/b>
\nCriticism of President Donald Trump’s response to the COVID-19 epidemic has figured prominently at the Democratic National Convention this week. But last night the party shifted its focus to a different sort of epidemic. The actress Kerry Washington, the evening’s M. C., introduced the topic at the beginning of the program, saying \u00ab\u00a090 percent of Americans support common-sense gun laws, because we need to do more to address the epidemic of gun violence.\u00a0\u00bb A convention video continued the theme. \u00ab\u00a0Long before this pandemic, our country has been suffering from an epidemic of gun violence,\u00a0\u00bb a Florida gun control supporter identified as \u00ab\u00a0Maria W.\u00a0\u00bb says, describing murder by firearm as a \u00ab\u00a0public health crisis.\u00a0\u00bb Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden uses similar rhetoric. \u00ab\u00a0Joe Biden knows that gun violence is a public health epidemic,\u00a0\u00bb his campaign website says, introducing \u00ab\u00a0The Biden Plan to End Our Gun Violence Epidemic.\u00a0\u00bb This year’s Democratic platform likewise talks about \u00ab\u00a0ending the epidemic of gun violence.\u00a0\u00bb Leaving aside the question of whether the \u00ab\u00a0common-sense gun laws\u00a0\u00bb Biden favors would actually have a meaningful impact, is it accurate to describe gun violence in the United States as an \u00ab\u00a0epidemic\u00a0\u00bb? Obviously not in any literal sense, since gun violence is not caused by an infectious microorganism that spreads from person to person. Figuratively, however, the term epidemic implies a problem that is escalating and out of control, which is true of gun violence only if you focus on a narrow slice of the data. According to the FBI’s numbers, total homicides in the United States fell from 24,700 in 1991 to a low of 14,164 in 2014\u2014a 43 percent drop. The homicide rate fell even more dramatically, from 9.8 per 100,000 in 1991 to 4.4 per 100,000 in 2014\u2014a 55 percent drop. Homicides rose in 2015 and 2016, then fell in 2017 and 2018, when the rate was 5 per 100,000, up 14 percent from 2014. The FBI has not published final data for 2019 yet, but preliminary numbers for the first half of the year indicate that homicides fell by 7.4 percent. The trends for murders committed with firearms are slightly different because the type of weapon used varies over time. Gun homicides fell from a peak of 17,075 in 1993 to a low of 7,803 in 2014\u2014a 54 percent drop. The number rose in 2015,2016, and 2017, then fell in 2018, when it was 32 percent higher than in 2014 but still 40 percent lower than the 1993 total. The gun homicide rate in 2018 was about 3.1 per 100,000, half the 1993 rate. As Philip Bump noted in The Washington Post last year, most Americans are not aware of this dramatic decline in gun homicides. In a 2019 Marist poll,59 percent of respondents believed \u00ab\u00a0the per capita gun murder rate in the U. S.\u00a0\u00bb was higher than it was 25 years earlier, while 23 percent thought it was \u00ab\u00a0about the same.\u00a0\u00bb Just 12 percent knew that the rate had fallen, while 6 percent were not sure. That misperception probably has a lot to do with news coverage of mass public shootings, which account for less than 1 percent of gun homicides. But all the talk about a gun violence \u00ab\u00a0epidemic\u00a0\u00bb reinforces the false impression that we are seeing historically high levels of murders committed with firearms. The Democrats might argue that three consecutive years of rising gun homicides (followed by a drop) constitute an epidemic, even if the rate remains historically low. But they were already talking about an \u00ab\u00a0epidemic\u00a0\u00bb of gun violence in 2016, when the most recent FBI data indicated no trend that could justify that description even by the most generous definition. Exaggerating a problem is a time-honored technique to build support for the policies you favor. It creates a sense of urgency that encourages voters to overlook those policies’ shortcomings, such as the irrelevance of \u00ab\u00a0assault weapon\u00a0\u00bb bans and the inability of \u00ab\u00a0universal background checks\u00a0\u00bb to affect the gun sources that criminals typically use. At the same time, describing gun violence as an epidemic\u2014the same framing that has generated myriad dubious studies of this criminological topic in medical and public health journals\u2014applies a pseudoscientific veneer to proposals whose merits depend on value judgments as well as uncertain predictions about the practical consequences of \u00ab\u00a0common-sense\u00a0\u00bb gun controls. Such rhetoric also slants the debate by suggesting that deadly violence is a disease that can best be controlled by attacking the vectors of transmission\u2014i.e., guns and bullets. It may not be accurate to talk about gun violence this way, but it is definitely useful.<\/p>\n