Federal agents on Wednesday morning hauled more than 120 firearms, including “machine guns,” out of the Ahwatukee Foothills home of a man suspected of shooting at a campaign office for the Democratic Party three times and posting bags of white powder labeled as poison near political signs.
Jeffrey Michael Kelly, 60, was arrested on Tuesday night near his Ahwatukee Foothills home by Tempe police who, according to court documents, used surveillance footage to find the suspect.
The overwhelming majority of gun crimes are committed in relation to the drug trade, and otherwise ordinary crime. This isn’t a demographic that’s collecting guns; they’re using what they have access to. Meanwhile, I know tons of people that have multiple AR-15s, all configured differently, for different purposes. One for a basic two gun competition, one for home defense, one for a night match (usually with a suppressor; they’re great for minimizing smoke), and so on.
I’m personally likely in the top 1% or so of gun owners, because I have >10 firearms, plus a progressive reloading press. There are three that I use regularly, and some that I never use because they’re antiques.
My question is more on a per capita basis for those groups. Do people who own 1 or 2 guns commit crimes at a rate higher or lower than people who own 5+ guns?
Yes there are fewer people who own the 5+ guns, but is there a correlation between owning more firearms and committing crimes?
My gut feeling is that, the more guns you own, the less likely it is that you’re going to commit violent violent crimes. I don’t know if anyone tracks any kind of data on that though. People that collect firearms and/or are seriously involved in competition are not typically the people that will be involved in other illegal activities. But, again, I don’t think that there’s data to back this up.
My caveat on that is that there are non-insignificant number of high-volume gun owners that are committing gun crimes, that is, they’re violating the National Firearms Act by owning illegal/unregistered machine guns, unregistered silencers, Other Destructive Devices, etc., or are violating local laws regarding storage, etc. (There’s no storage laws where I live, and, uh, I def. have guns out pretty much all the time. But I have no kids, there’s always someone at home, and I’m in a very rural area where breaks ins are very rare.So I think that there probably should be a distinction between commission of violent crimes using firearms, or crimes related solely to ownership/possession.
I concur with your gut.
Hunter and have a small farm. My wife actually has more handguns than me. My primary use case for firearms is as tooling, but I totally understand the enjoyment from shooting sports and collecting.
I don’t see why your gut feeling matters at all. Lots of gut feelings are wrong. That’s why we have statistics to prove things.
I agree that it should be related to violent crimes, maybe with some semi-violent crimes like human trafficking, etc.
Sure, we should have the data, because more data is usually useful, but I’m not certain that it’s actually material.
Let’s say that, statistically, the people that owned >20 firearms were 100% more likely to commit a violent crime with a firearm than the general population. First, that’s still a very, very low percentage of people that own >20 firearms, second, any way you cut that, gun ownership is still a civil liberty in the US, and third, you’re still looking at correlation rather than causation, and I don’t know if a correlation–and remember, this is just a mental exercise, rather than any real statistics–gets you any closer to finding the real cause.
This is the same problem that you run into when you start talking about factors that make someone into a person that commits a mass casualty event; you can find a lot of factors, but simply having one or more of those factors doesn’t mean that you will commit a mass-casualty event, and not having any of those factors also doesn’t mean you won’t commit a mass casualty event.