Legal guns vs murder rates - 4 January 1991

I wonder how long it's been going on, this custom, this feeling of obligation on the part of public men, mostly men, of politicians, journalists, parsons certainly, to look back over the past year, to review the good and the bad and draw a moral from it.

I don't remember it as an 18th-century habit at all. I suspect it came in with Nonconformity and popular preaching, with anyway the 19th-century love of sermonising, of drawing morals from everything that was happening and of believing, as no society before or since, that it knew at once and at all times, the difference between right and wrong. I look back to a few other firsts of January and noticed another habit that always went along with the retrospective survey, which was the wind-up prophecy, not so much a prophecy as an educated guess at the way things were likely to go, which trends in politics and international affairs especially were likely to continue.

Well, the good news about this New Year's surveys is that 1990 was such an explosion of unpredictable forces, such a turnaround of trends and truisms we've been parroting for years and years, that I'm delighted to see even the gravest, the wordiest windbags, and I'm thinking now of academic historians and double-domed university prophets, even they hesitate to predict with any confidence what's going to happen to the town council, let alone to the Lithuanian republic or the future of Israel. The common note that was struck a year ago exactly was, and how sweet it sounds, peace is breaking out all over. It's a phrase that hasn't been heard since 2 August, and when it came this week to tapping the pundits for an educated guess about what's going to happen on 15 January, nobody cared to say. Every Middle Eastern expert, defence expert, political science expert, Arabian or Arab expert, every one of them was ready to say what ought to happen, what would be the best thing to happen, what ought not to happen. But nobody was prepared to say he or she could look into the mind of Saddam Hussein.

The Hitler analogy may be false in all sorts of ways but I can't think of another international character who's had the whole world so dithering on tiptoe since Hitler, in the early summer of 1940, when everybody knew or pretended to know, when he would invade Britain. It was going to happen in September, a month from now, a year from now, two weeks, next Monday.

What most of our pundits and politicians have done for a change is simply, helplessly, to list our woes, most of which, it seems to me, are common to the Western world, although perhaps we suffer more acutely from some. Street crime, drugs, the deficit, the pollution of the environment, the sorry state of public education, America's risky dependence on oil and lack of an alternative energy policy, what to do with the 30-odd millions who have no sickness insurance, the developing recession. Having listed these chronic ailments, most politicians and editorial writers urge us to cure them but very few of them specify a cure and nobody across the political spectrum, from the bluest conservative to the goriest radical … As a matter of fact we don't have very radical leftists in America, we have screwballs of all sorts and colours, a few black anarchists, but since the death of Michael Harrington, I can't think of a single serious, distinguished socialist.

Well, I was saying that while few people can spell out with any conviction of political practical cure for our ills, absolutely nobody will say where the money is coming from to repair the bridges, to rebuild the slums, to pay for more day-care, to build the jails to incarcerate the drug pushers, to back ever more job-training programmes for the ever more and more unemployed and the school dropouts. The mayors of a hundred cities are looking at the books for 1990 and finding them dredged with red ink and warning the townspeople of hard times ahead.

There are some indisputable facts, the most glaring one and the most publicised, it comes from the FBI, is that in 1990 more people were murdered in the United States than at any time, any peace time in the nation's history. Why? The experts, the criminologists, the police chiefs, are not fudging their replies. Probably the frankest and fairest reply came from a judge in the state of Wisconsin, who was once the district attorney of Milwaukee and he said the other day, "There is rage out there, you have the drug epidemic, the proliferation of guns, gangs of course, and the whole sector of the community that lives in utter poverty and hopelessness."

Everything right on down the line is more violent; 19 big cities set murder records. The only point in taking up these statistics, having once deplored them, is to find out who gets killed, who does the killing, why and how. The FBI's annual report has some answers. More than half of all the killed knew their killer and 54% either were related to or acquainted with the murderer. Why do people get killed?

Arguments were responsible for one in three, felonies for one in five, brawls, sparked by drugs or alcohol, one in five. It's noticeable that of all the homicides, only 19% were done to strangers, a slight increase, but they are the ones that grab the publicity – the on-looking children caught in the crossfire, the Central Park jogger, the foreign tourist or student here only a day or a week. How are the killings done? 6% with the legendary blunt instrument, 8% by poison, 18% with knives, 60% with firearms.

One ray of light in this dark catalogue, with the increase in population since the 1980 census, it turns out that the per capita murder rate is down from a high in 1980 of 10.2 per 100,000 to 9.3. And, this is not new, this is a constant fact, there are some states that are very little acquainted with murder. North and South Dakota together, which are not quite twice the area of the United Kingdom, had 13 murders, Vermont,11, Wyoming, 21; 21 – that's a hundred times fewer murders than in New York City alone. No wonder my son, who lives in Wyoming and was back here for Christmas, thinks of New York as a jungle. Much changed from the, as he thought then, exciting and romantic town in which he grew up and went to school. You'll notice apropos of the Dakotas, Vermont, Wyoming, that we're talking about mountain states, that are sparsely populated. Wyoming and Vermont each have only representative in Congress, a congressman at large, so-called. A young woman from the Wyoming Criminal Investigation Department commented, you don't have the population base that you have elsewhere and it's spread and there's no rush hour, no stress, and it's hard to have gangs in Wyoming.

Now, the one figure that everybody will have noticed is the preponderance of murders committed with firearms, over 60%. In spite of the National Rifle Association's contention that guns don't kill people, people kill people – one of the more logically nonsensical maxims of the times – I don't suppose there's another social issue in America over which there is more ferocious and ill-tempered argument, than there is over gun control.

Both Presidents Reagan and Bush were, are, firm against it, saying that the incidence of murder has almost nothing to do with the availability of guns. They and several governors and state legislatures, say their own experience proves that a criminal, however strict the law, will always find place to buy a gun. Mr Reagan used to argue that a drastic national gun control law would spawn a huge black market and have much the same effect of the banning of the manufacture and sale of alcohol, the famous Prohibition experiment in this country, which was legally maintained and flouted throughout the 1920s, one of the most drunken decades in American history. However that may be, Mr Reagan's own state, California, began to enforce on 1 January.

A new law, the most severe gun control law in the country. California now prohibits the sale of 56 types of semi-automatic weapons and puts into effect a two-week waiting period for the purchase of rifles and shotguns. Approved types of semi-automatic weapons had to be registered before midnight, New Year's Eve. About 20,000 owners obeyed, leaving another 280,000 yet to be heard from.

Two other facts ticked off the end of the old year. One, the United States is in a recession. The accepted definition is two or more quarters of consecutive decline in the gross national product; 1990 closed out the third quarter and the third decline. Even a research outfit agrees, whose main task is that of a weather man watching out for oncoming recessions. The National Bureau of Economic Research has just discovered and declared to a waiting world that, yes, there is a recession, it began in the summer of 1990.

The second fact is one that will bring relief and delight to males of the species who've been waiting for about 25 years for women to come back. Well, the New York Times says it has happened, is a fact. They define a woman as one who has freed herself from the anorexic, pencil-thin, anaemic, diet-obsessed X-ray figure, dictated by the fashion tyrants since the early '60s. It is now decreed, and the new fashions exemplify it amply, that a desirable woman is one with breasts, thighs and curves. So, finally, farewell Twiggy, hi there Dolly Parton.

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