Day: June 5, 2001

CNN has a transcript of a broadcast by Rhonda Rowland on a study about guns published in a pediatrics journal. In this study — which is similar to the methodology used in similar studies — an unloaded gun is hidden somewhere in a room with children, in this case boys 8 to 12.

In this study, 75 percent of the children found the hidden gun, and half of those pulled the trigger with enough force to discharge the gun had it been loaded. Previous studies have tended to find that the familiarity that children have with guns has some influence on their willingness to pull the trigger, with those having the least experience being the most likely to pull the trigger.

But regardless of what they say about the attitudes of 8 to 12 years olds about guns, I’m always surprised when I see the results of such studies because the entire methodology seems to be completely unethical. I’ve had some limited experience with what’s involved in getting research with human beings approved in a pharmaceutical setting, and have seen what friends have to go through in the social sciences to do even the most basic of studies with human subjects.

An acquaintance who was working on his doctoral thesis on rape, for example, had to include a rather long disclaimer, including numbers and contacts for rape counselors, just to ask women taking a college course to fill out an anonymous survey about sexual violence (the idea being that for a victim of sexual violence, filling out the survey may be a traumatic experience).

Against that backdrop, I can’t imagine why anyone would approve these experiments with 8 to 12 year olds. First, I doubt a child that young can meaningfully consent to such a potentially psychologically serious experiment. Second, there do seem to be some rather obvious potential long term effects of such a study.

On the CNN site, for example, there’s a highly pixelated screen shot from the video showing one child aiming a gun at another child. Some of these children both aim and pull the trigger at another child. It would be interesting to see follow-up psychological exams of the children to see how being on either end of that experience affects the boys.

I can’t imagine, for example, that it’s all that healthy psychologically to learn that the toy gun you pointed at another child and pulled the trigger was in fact a real gun (unless the boys are intentionally deceived about the real intent of the study even after its conclusion which opens up a whole other can of worms).

Finally, the CNN transcript — and the coverage of this study elsewhere — is infuriating precisely because it leaves out (for good reason) one of the most important things people need to know about accidental shootings by younger children. Is this really a serious problem?

You be the judge — in a country where estimates of the total number of privately owned firearms hovers somewhere around 30 million, most years about 150 children under 15 die from gunshot accidents and about another 350 die from homicides involving guns. About 9,000 children die annually in automobile accidents. Sadly, children are far more likely to be murdered intentionally by their parents than die from accidental gunshots — depending on the method used, anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 children are murdered by their parents every year (almost all of those, by the way, under the age of 5).

I’ve always been impressed with RJ Rummel’s books on what he calls democide — the state-sponsored murder of civilians. Rummel has written a number of books about state violence (a good introduction to his work his Death By Government).

One of the interesting things, which Rummel has written about in asides to his more scholarly works, is the difficulty of comprehending the numbers murdered by states in the 20th century. The number is easy enough to repeat. By Rummel’s estimate, about 174 million people were murdered by states in the 20th century. But as Rummel points out, that number is a bit too big for our minds to get wrapped around.

Rummel has posted on his web site some visual attempts to depict just how many people that is in more tangible ways. One non-visual way to illustrate that number is that this would be equivalent to killing 2 out of 3 Americans alive today.

One of the more surprising facts is contained in a chart comparing civilian murders to combat deaths. The comparison isn’t even close, with an estimated 36 million people killed in combat in the 20th century.