The Cincinnati Beacon
Seizing Illegal Guns—Thinking About 2%
Sunday, September 02, 2007
Posted by The Dean of Cincinnati
Despite the fact that Cincinnati Municipal Code 910-23 (the anti-marijuana ordinance) has made possession of small amounts of marijuana an offense that carries a permanent criminal record and possible jail time—and further, despite the fact that this law is being enforced unequally, with over six times as many blacks being arrested in the first year of the law as whites, several incumbent City Council candidates claim the law was effective because it took 62 guns off the streets. However, those 62 guns represent less than 2% of the overall number of people arrested. How does this compare to national studies examining the overall number of people in possession of illegal guns?
In other words, what if we could discover that more than 2% of the general population carries illegal guns? Wouldn’t that indicate that CMC 910-23 is a failure, indicating that marijuana smokers are less likely to carry guns than others?
In the short amount of time I had to explore the topic, I did find a few noteworthy resources, all of which indicate that CMC 910-23 (which was introduced by Cecil Thomas) is completely worthless.
Here is some information from an abstract sponsored by the US Department of Justice. Here are some relevant quotes:
The analysis was based on data for boys only. The RYDS data sample consisted of 1,000 adolescents selected from seventh and eighth grade public school students in Rochester, New York. By age 15, about 6 percent of the boys in the study owned guns for protection. This gun ownership was related to a wide range of undesirable delinquent behaviors, including gun carrying, gang membership, and drug selling. Depending on their age, between 5 and 10 percent of the boys carried hidden guns on the street, and the percentage increased with age and was associated with different types of delinquency at different ages.
If Cincinnati’s population is similar to Rochester’s, then this data is revealing. It means that CMC 910-23 finds guns within 2% of a certain population, while another identified population has three times as many people with illegal firearms. Since more urban adolescent males can be seen frequently wearing baggy pants as opposed to smoking joints in the open, police would be more likely to find illegal guns by making droopy pants illegal and decriminalizing marijuana entirely.
(I am not saying I support the idea of making droopy pants illegal—I do not—but it seems quite persuasive that droopy pants might lead to more gun confiscations than pot smoking!)
From the other side, we might consider the words of John Kaplan on this issue:
As Stanford law professor John Kaplan has observed, “When guns are outlawed, all those who have guns will be outlaws."[12] Kaplan argued that when a law criminalizes behavior that its practitioners do not believe improper, the new outlaws lose respect for society and the law. Kaplan found the problem especially severe in situations where the numbers of outlaws are very high, as in the case of alcohol, marijuana, or gun prohibition.
But back to some number crunching.
According to an article by Beth Bjerregaard and Alan J. Lizotte called “Gun Ownership and Gang Membership” (Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology; Fall95, Vol. 86 Issue 1, p37-58, 22p), a large number of youths involved in gangs have guns:
“...(N)early 50% of the gang members interviewed said they possessed more than one firearm and a large majority claimed to have at least one handgun. Similarly ... over half of the juveniles who reported being in a gang also reported owning guns for “protection.” ...70% of the gang members interviewed reported having a gun in their home, thereby having access to a firearm. (40)
Later in the study, the researchers sought to sample an “at-risk” urban sample of adolescents, tracking them to see what percent were in gangs, and what percent of those in gangs had guns, compared to the number not in gangs who have guns. Some results of that study are below:
The total panel consisted of 987 students who attended the seventh and eighth grades of the Rochester public schools during the 1987-88 school year ... Slightly over 10% of the sample reported being a gang member at sometime over the eighteen month period studied in this analysis and one-fifth of the sample reported owning a gun during this same time period. (43)
Please excuse the extensive citations, but I trust, gentle reader, that you will perceive the importance of understanding these kinds of numbers. Remember, less than 2% of those arrested for possessing small amounts of marijuana had a gun—and both Leslie Ghiz and Cecil Thomas have said that the main reason they support this law is to allow officers the ability to search for guns.
However, it should be obvious that the general population of urban adolescent males are likely to be carrying illegal guns at a rate much higher than 2%.
So, rather than giving 98% of the thousands of disproportionately black males permanent criminal records and jail time for smoking weed—all due to an alleged desire to cut back on illegal gun ownership—why not address what appears to be a real root cause: urban adolescent culture getting involved in negative (and perhaps gang-related) activities which increase the likelihood of illegal gun ownership?
The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) happens to have a study published where they offer some solutions to the adolescent culture of gun ownership—and none of them have to do with arresting people for smoking weed or drooping their pants. (You can find a download of this report here.)
In the seventeenth page of the download, the OJJDP suggests things like preventative services, working with witnesses to violence, public education, reducing fear, making guns safer, reducing availability and stricter regulations, enforcing laws, drug treatment and prevention, and improving opportunities.
You’ll notice that arresting people for weed or baggy trousers did not make the list.
The report does discuss gun buy-back programs. What if one week of gun buy-backs in Cincinnati got more than 62 guns off the street? In the first year of 910-23, the City spent over an additional $41,000 defending City Ordinance cases. It is easy to conclude that this increase is attributable to the one ordinance that changed in that year—the anti-marijuana ordinance.
That would compute to over $600 per gun. Surely a buy-back program would be able to secure illegal guns for significantly less than that.
As we enter a campaign season where politicians say empty phrases about supporting “fiscally responsible budgets” (has any politician ever ran on a platform of a “fiscally irresponsible budget”?), let’s remember where we should put our priorities. We have been told that we don’t have money to secure human service funding, but meanwhile we have tens of thousands of dollars to arrest thousands of primarily black males—all to confiscate 62 guns with a hefty price-tag per gun.
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