18 | http://www.nationalreview.com OCTOBER 30 , 2017employ different mechanisms to achieve
a higher fire rate. This is clearly a loop -
hole in the law and should be closed.
These devices can dramatically increase
the body count of a mass shooting but do
not make a gun more useful for legitimate
purposes such as self-defense or hunting.
Our second question is the more im -
portant one. Mass shootings grab our
attention, but they are outliers as far as
American homicide is concerned. The
Las Vegas shooting may have had a
double-digit body count, but 15,000 or so
people are murdered each year in this
country. Where mass shootings are un -
predictable, other murders tend to occur
in specific geographic areas and social
networks. And quietly over the past two
decades, criminologists, community
groups, and technology companies have
hit upon strategies that can reduce the
bloodshed without infringing on anyone’s
right to bear arms.
The fundamental insight here is that
violence is incredibly concentrated. The
broad demographic disparities are fairly
well known: Young men, with a peak
around age 20, commit murder at highly
disproportionate rates, and there’s a
severe racial gap, with the homicide
rate for blacks about eight times what it
is for non-Hispanic whites. The poor
are overrepresented as well, among
perpetrators and victims alike, as are
people with criminal records. But the
patterns get a lot more specific than that.
“Hot spots” are one important concept.
These are the particular neighborhoods,
blocks, and intersections where crime
most often occurs. Nationwide, aboutone-quarter of gun homicides take place
in just 1,200 census tracts, which
contain just 1.5 percent of the population,
according to an analysis by theGuardian.
Zooming in even closer, one study of
Boston showed that over a nearly three-
decade period, 74 percent of the city’s
shootings occurred on less than 5 percent
of its street corners and block faces.
Gun violence is concentrated in specific
social networks as well, and “cascades”
through them like a virus, a phenomenon
thoroughly studied by the sociologist
Andrew V. Papachristos. In one paper, he
and his co-authors looked at individuals
who had been arrested together in Chicago
to map out criminals’ social ties and found
that 70 percent of the city’s nonfatal
gunshot victims “can be located in co-
offending networks comprised of less
than 6 percent of the city’s population.”
Jeff Asher, a New Orleans–based crime
analyst, reached a similar result in work
he did for his city’s police department,
constructing a social network that
amounted to just 0.75 percent of the
population but included 26 percent of the
people fatally shot in 2014. Someone
from the network was confirmed present
at 37 percent of all shooting incidents that
year—whether as a victim, a perpetrator,
or a witness—a figure that would likely
rise to about half if police were able to
identify all shooters. Most strikingly, one
out of every 15 people in the network was
present at a shooting over the course of
that single year.
Essentially, data can tell us with a
reasonable degree of precision not only
where crime is likelier to happen butT
HEviolence that besieged a Las
Vegas concert earlier this month
is almost incomprehensible.
Almost 60 died, and hundreds
more were injured, as a deranged gun -
man rained bullets down on them from
32 stories up and 400yards away.
Following an incident such as this,
there are always two questions we must
ask. First, how could we have stopped this
specific tragedy from happening? And
second, how can we address the broader
problem of American gun violence in a
way that will be both effective and
consistent with the Second Amendment?
The first question is a difficult one
this time. As of this writing, there is
little evidence that the shooter showed
signs of serious mental illness, criminal
tendencies, or ties to international terrorist
organizations. He passed background
checks in buying at least some of his
guns. If a 64-year-old multimillionaire
exhibiting no warning signs is bent on
mass homicide, we are unlikely to stop
him before he’s achieved just that. If his
weapon of choice hadn’t been a gun, it
could just as easily have been a bomb
(materials for which were found in his
car) or a vehicle. Just last year, a vehicle
attack in Nice, France, claimed even more
lives than this rampage did.
There’s one gun-control measure the
shooting does push into the limelight,
however: The shooter possessed twelve
“bump stocks,” accessories that allow
semiautomatic guns to fire almost as
rapidly as a fully automatic weapon. Fully
automatic guns, which spray bullets
continuously when the trigger is held
down, are tightly regulated under federal
law—indeed, it’s been illegal to sell a new
one to a civilian since May of 1986,
limiting the supply to the guns available
before that month—but bump stocks
escape these regulations because theyLess Gun
Violence
Without New
Gun Laws
It’s possible
BY ROBERT VERBRUGGENDAVIDBECKER/GETTYIMAGESAttendees flee the Route 91 Harvest country-music festival in Las Vegas, Nev., October 21, 2017.Text