Can smart guns, drones, strong laws cut U.S. gun violence?

Could technology combined with a federal law based on the strongest state gun laws dramatically reduce gun violence in the United States, where civilians possess an average of 120 firearms per 100 people, the highest rate in the world?

Based on his recent talk to the League of Women Voters of Oak Ridge, Bill Culbert, a retired family physician, indicated he believes that’s possible. (Culbert is a frequent guest columnist for The Oak Ridger. Like all of the newspaper's guest columnists, he is not paid.)

In 2021, the most recent year for which complete data is available, 48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in the nation, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That figure includes gun suicides, which make up 54% of gun deaths and have increased 7% for Americans 45 and older, and murders, which account for 43% of gun deaths.

The United States has 22 times the gun death rate of the European Union, which has about the same size economy and population, Culbert said.

Each year in the nation about 5,000 guns are stolen from cars, and one-third of those guns are used in suicides and homicides, Culbert said.

He later cited the case of a brilliant high school graduate about to attend college who got drunk at a party after his girlfriend broke up with him. The student became depressed, found the key to the household gun safe and killed himself with his father’s gun.

Are 'smart guns' the answer?

To better deal with these and other preventable situations, Culbert proposed what he called a “pro-gun bill” that he believes could significantly reduce gun deaths in the United States. He would like to see “smart guns” replace the handguns and AR-15 riflesthat 60% of American gun owners buy. A smart gun has facial recognition and fingerprint detection capabilities that ensure the gun is fired only by the owner and other designated persons.

“In his opinion piece for the New York Times, Nicholas Kristoff last year wrote that out of 850,000 crime scenes in the United States where guns were confiscated, only five were rifles that were commonly purchased for hunting,” Culbert said. “The 40% of the gun owners who have hunting rifles are not the problem.”

The gun industry has fought the smart gun proposal by arguing that a smart gun is too expensive for the consumer (up to $1,500 per gun). Culbert proposed that the federal government purchase smart guns for everyone having or wanting a gun, buy back at a fair market price the firearms people now have and subsidize the gun industry to ensure that every gun sold in America in three years is a smart gun. At the same time the gun industry, gun owners and new gun consumers would be relieved from product liability.

Culbert said that of the 300 some gun laws in the United States, several state laws work remarkably well.

“Strong gun laws work,” he said, adding that these laws require safe storage of guns, ongoing gun training, limited access to guns and background checks, “which three-fourths of gun owners want; something most of us agree on.”

He noted that the quartile of states with gun laws that have the strongest legislative strength score had 40% fewer gun deaths than the quartile of states with the weakest gun laws. The problem, he added, is that “if you have a state with great gun laws that is bordering a state with weak gun laws, you have an iron pipeline into the state with good laws.”

Culbert suggested that technology could also be used to identify the perpetrators of almost all homicides in the United States, another possible route to reducing gun violence. About 80% of U.S. murders in 2021 involved a firearm, according to the CDC.

"Only 52% of American homicides are solved,” he said. Using police work backed up by a highly integrated forensic system with extensive databases, he added, Finland has a homicide solve rate of 98%.

Memphis ranks ninth in the country in per capita gun deaths. Culbert proposed that Memphis police deploy ground-level cameras and drones outfitted with cameras to track and record the movements of people with guns and identify them using facial recognition. He added that if a person’s complete set of genes is known, it’s possible to construct what that individual’s face looks like.

Is widescale use of such technologies to reduce U.S. gun violence affordable? Yes, Culbert argued, based on a study by an Iowa State University professor of sociology and other research cited in The Economist magazine. Researchers estimate that the cost of a single U.S. homicide ranges from $15 million to $17 million. The cost includes loss of productivity by the criminal and victim(s), the court and incarceration costs, and people’s tendency to avoid or move from the sites of murders.

Culbert suggested that guns “facilitate” violent deaths because of the combination of impulsive behavior and the easy availability of guns. Brain science studies, he noted, help explain why people take impulsive actions like killing themselves or killing other people.

“Humans have less free will than they think,” he said. “Each of us has competing brain centers.” He explained that one system tends to be impulsive, visceral and emotional while the other responds in a more deliberate, analytical and rational way.

“When one system wins over the other, that’s the decision a person makes. A lot of people look back when they commit a crime and say, ‘I don’t know why I did this thing. I don’t know what made me do this.’ The first system won over the second system.”

Culbert said that almost a quarter of the U.S. population has some mental health issue, predominantly mood disorders, that are very treatable.

“Most mental health conditions are treated not by psychiatrists but by primary care physicians like me,” he said, citing a PBS interview and adding that mood disorders range from short-term depression, generalized anxiety disorder and panic attacks to bipolar depression.

The 60% of Americans who own guns, but are not hunters, have been studied by five sociologists, and their conclusions have been published in The Economist magazine. The study found that many Americans who own guns designed to kill people “have a strong belief in demons,” Culbert said. “They believe evil can break out at any time, so they need to have a gun. It’s their superpower against a supernatural force. They want high-capacity magazines because you don’t know how many bullets it’s going to take to bring down a demon.”

He said men are more likely to buy guns than women, that most gun murderers are men and that a recent Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision struck down as unconstitutional a critical, long-standing federal law on gun safety that had protected domestic violence victims by preventing convicted domestic abusers from possessing guns.

Culbert was asked about the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision on the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution in a case involving a District of Columbia law that restricted residents from owning handguns. The highest court ruled that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual the right to possess firearms independent of service in a state militia and to use firearms for traditionally lawful purposes, including self-defense within the home.

“We should change the Second Amendment interpretation so that almost 50,000 people don’t die violently every year,” Culbert said. “In that 2008 decision, two Supreme Court justices used originalist arguments to come to opposite conclusions. They couldn’t even agree on their interpretation of what the founders thought about the gun issue. This is a semantics issue.”

He also said, “I would argue that deaths from guns violence in the United States is not a public health issue; it is a political issue.” And he noted that a very small fraction of U.S. gun deaths results from highly publicized mass shootings.

Culbert said he “is encouraged that the Biden administration has established the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which has four big initiatives. One is to put together partnerships of people around the country to address the problem.”

This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Can smart guns, drones, strong laws cut U.S. gun violence?