Before the Trigger Is Pulled

Gun violence is a uniquely American problem among rich countries of the world. To solve it, we’ve relied mainly on deterrence: Compared to 50 years ago, prison penalties have gotten much harsher for all sorts of crimes, including gun violence.

But have we been trying to deter the wrong thing? In my new book, Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence, I summarize new data suggesting the decision to pull a trigger might not be among the most deterrable moments of someone’s life. The overwhelming cause of gun violence is arguments that end in impulse shootings — meaning, the shooter didn’t set out to fire his weapon and might not even have “meant to” until he was overcome by the urge to do so in the heat of a moment.

This finding leads to an important policy insight. Deterrence might have more of an impact if it is focused on the behavior that is the precursor (and necessary condition) of most shootings in America: illegal gun-carrying itself.

Deterrence and its limitations

Starting in the 1970s, America increased its prison population in a way that had no historical or international precedent. That change was the result of a series of deliberate policy decisions motivated partly by rising violent crime and partly also by a consensus view at the time that not much could be done to prevent crime or rehabilitate criminals.

Prison serves multiple goals at once. There’s plain old punishment: making sure perpetrators experience consequences for their actions. There’s incapacitation: Someone behind bars can’t commit crimes against the public. There’s also deterrence, which rests on the assumption that before someone decides to commit a crime, including a gun crime, they first weigh the benefits and costs of their action.

But most shootings are not premeditated or motivated by economic considerations. They’re instead garden-variety arguments that escalate and end in tragedy because someone has a gun.

Criminologists distinguish between “instrumental” violence, where the violent act is a means toward some other end (taking someone’s wallet and phone in a robbery, capturing some other gang’s drug-selling turf) and “expressive” violence, where the entire goal is to express one’s rage at another person and hurt them. A careful look at 20 years’ worth of murders in the U.S., captured by the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Report system, suggests that 23% of murders are instrumental, and 77% — nearly 4 of 5 — are expressive (Miethe, Rogoeczi and Drass, 2004).

This distinction is important because one of the main findings from behavioral science over the past 50 years is that our minds engage in two different types of thinking that have implications for how deterrable these two types of violence are. As Daniel Kahneman described it in his wonderful book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” there’s the voice in our head that we recognize as thinking — slow, measured and giving us the capacity for careful, rational deliberation (which doesn’t mean the voice in our head is always rational). That’s most relevant for instrumental crime, and is most responsive to changes in incentives (like deterrence).

But there’s another type of thinking, too — fast, automatic, below the level of consciousness. That’s what we rely on when we’re pissed off in a heated argument and experience an adrenaline dump that makes the little voice in our head nowhere to be found. That’s not us at our most deterrable. And that’s the type of thinking behind most expressive violence.

The implication is that deterrence is a tool that’s limited in its ability to prevent most of the gun violence in America.

Some evidence that interpersonal violence is much more of a “fast-thinking” problem than we have appreciated comes from a clever study by Swedish economist Michael Priks. He looked at what happened when the Stockholm subway system installed surveillance cameras in different subway stations at different points in time to determine the contours of crime declines. The answer is yes — overall crime dropped in subway stations that got cameras. But more important for present purposes is the pattern of which crimes were affected. Property crimes declined, but violent crimes didn’t.

As a staff member in the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center here in Chicago put it a few years ago to me, 20% of the residents (in his view) are dangerous and need to be locked up, but the other 80%, he always tells them, “If I could give you back just 10 minutes of your lives, none of you would be here.”

The lesson here is that deterrence works, but mostly when crimes are more premeditated and rational. Deterrence works substantially less well for interpersonal violence because so much of it is driven by momentary passions.

Deterring illegal gun carrying

Even though gun violence itself may not be quite as deterrable as we long assumed, there is perhaps a place where deterrence might do some real good: illegal gun carrying.

The overwhelming majority of murders in big cities like Chicago — something like four of every five — occur in public places, and the overwhelming majority of those murders involve illegal guns. Ergo, most murders are preceded by illegal gun carrying. Without a gun on the scene, there might have been a fistfight or maybe a stabbing, but less likely a murder.

And contrary to the in-the-moment, passion-driven decision to swing a fist or pull a trigger, the decision to take a gun with them on their way to the party or the mall is more likely to be rational and deliberate — and hence deterrable.

There’s a second reason this is so important: This is a collective action problem. In surveys, people say they carry a gun because they’re worried about other people carrying guns. This means that not doing anything about illegal gun carrying can create a vicious cycle: More people carry guns, which gives everyone else an even greater incentive to carry themselves, which begets further carrying, etc. In lots of areas of life we speak metaphorically of “arms races.” In this case, it’s literally an arms race.

So what could be done to deter this behavior?

To say the obvious, using police is fraught. The U.S. Supreme Court says that police can make a “Terry stop” or “stop-and-frisk” when there is reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. That might help get guns off the street — but as we’ve seen, it can also generate lots of collateral harm.

What else might be done beyond policing?

For one, judges and prosecutors could more commonly request pretrial detention for illegal gun carrying cases. People who are arrested for this are, according to the data, at elevated risk for future violence both as victims and, according to publicly available data from the New York City Criminal Justice Agency, as offenders as well. And so, from a public safety perspective, pretrial detention for illegal gun carrying makes the sanction feel more “swift and certain,” thought to help maximize deterrence.

If they want to focus their pretrial detention on a smaller group, prosecutors and judges could aim more narrowly at people caught with guns that have high-capacity magazines or machine gun conversion devices, so-called “Glock switches,” which allow semiautomatics to fire continuously so long as the trigger is depressed. The growing use of both devices in cities like Chicago seems to be an important factor in explaining why shooting fatality rates have increased substantially since 2010. More people are being wounded more times per shooting. The rise from 13% to 19% has meant 1,581 more murder victims in Chicago alone over this period.

Anything we can do to deter illegal gun carrying, or at least deter the carrying of the most lethal types of guns, can help make America at least a little bit less of an outlier compared to the other rich countries of the world. People in London, Paris, Berlin, Istanbul and Tokyo are also prone to acting irrationally and even violently in heated situations. But in all these places, because guns are so less readily available, people settle these conflicts in ways that are much less lethal than we do here in the U.S.

Conclusion

Gun violence seems to be a type of crime where the scope of deterrence is much more limited compared to many other types of crime. But deterrence may do more good focusing on some of the key decisions that sit upstream of gun violence itself.