America's culture of fear is big business.Getty
A couple of weeks ago, I was heading home from a coffee in downtown Washington, D.C. when I ran into a metro outage. Because the metro train wasn’t running, the traffic was so bad it took the metro bus more than an hour to go less than five miles.
I jumped off the bus at the first stop, which happened to be Reagan Airport, still known to native Washingtonians as National Airport, figuring I’d wait out the rush hour with a glass of wine.
This was the week in which American had seen, first, the shooting at Tree of Life synagogue, then the shooting at a yoga studio in Tallahassee, and the shooting at the Borderline Bar and Grill, a country music venue in Thousand Oaks, Calif. While I was at the bar, I fell into conversation with a traveler from Atlanta, Ga.
When he heard what I was writing about, he asked, “Why? Do you understand why we can’t solve this problem?” It was the same question the woman I’d had coffee with earlier asked, too.
I’m not an expert, but after a year of writing about the business of guns, of talking to gun owners and the owners of businesses that sell guns, or related businesses, I told them both why I think it is a more complicated issue than it seems.
A lot of people posit that the root of America’s gun violence problem is that the main group representing gun owners, or consumers, the NRA, is aligned with the gun manufacturers. This is an unusual situation: Consumer groups often serve as a check on industry groups.
This might be part of the answer – but it’s certainly not the entire answer, and it’s a convenient answer in that it enables Americans who don’t own guns to step away from responsibility for solving the problem.
Gun stores had revenue of about $11 billion, IBIS World said in its 2018 report. Gun and ammunition manufacturers had revenue of $17 billion, but the majority of that revenue comes from the defense side of the equation: arms sales to the U.S. and foreign governments.
These numbers just aren’t that large. A single company, Amazon, had revenue of $178 billion a year in 2017. The GDP of the United States is more than $19 trillion.
What is larger is the amount of money spent securing ourselves against America’s gun violence problem.
The security alarm business alone, for instance, brings in $25 billion a year. There are 1.1 million security guards employed in the United States, according to the Department of Labor. I’m guessing the business of a company like ALICE Training Institute, which provides civilian training on how to respond to active shooters, is probably booming right now. The Washington Post estimated schools are spending $2.7 billion a year on security measures. Government spending on domestic homeland security averaged $65 billion per year from 2002 to 2017.
You can argue that all the political firms and nonprofits in this space, from the NRA to Everytown, are part of the gun violence “industry.” (That sentence is likely to get me ostracized from the left and the right sides of my family’s Thanksgiving table). You can even argue that the amount spent on health care (estimated at $2.8 billion a year for hospitals alone), though a cost to taxpayers, is also revenue to the health care companies and therefore part of the gun violence business.
People caught up in an emotional dynamic of fear and the need to protect take all kinds of steps, more or less rational, from lobbying to buying pepper spray to buying a gun to installing six-foot-high security fences that block out the sun to telling children to throw their plastic animals at men carrying huge rifles. Fear can be a powerful subconscious addiction for some people; and people who gain a sense of self by protecting others could act to perpetuate fear in those around them. Emotional truths sometimes, or often, find expression in the companies that entrepreneurs create.
In short, one of the reasons that we can’t solve our gun violence problem is that it’s complicated, emotional and deeply enmeshed with Americans’ sense of power and control. (And I haven’t even touched on the way a portion of Americans believe it’s their patriotic duty to own a firearm and encourage others to do so.) Our gun violence problem and the political conflict surrounding it have existed so long that there are now markets that have sprung up and companies making profits off the efforts to solve gun violence.
At any point in an intractable conflict, there are people who figure out how to benefit from it. The profiteers of war come in many guises, even from those who are advocating for peace, to those trading on the conflict, to those obviously engaged in provoking it. Those entrenched economic interests, which can be conscious and unconscious, help perpetuate conflict.
Along with the idea that a money nexus between the NRA and gun manufacturers is at the heart of the gun violence problem, the other big misconception is that gun violence is all of a kind. For purposes of my reporting, I separate it into categories, because the private solutions to the problem often address what look to be discrete markets. It’s also worth noting that there are other kinds of gun violence that we have judged to be (more or less) socially acceptable: violence committed by soldiers and police to defend the country and keep law and order; and hunting.
Here’s a list of the kinds of gun violence, and some of the organizations and companies actively marketing solutions in each market. No doubt there are others; but these are the ones I’ve noticed in a year of reporting, and some of the legal and political context that affects the markets.
Mass and public shootings. These are defined as public attacks in which the shooter and victims were generally unknown to each other and four or more people were killed. There are still only a few a year (though the rate is likely increasing), killing at most a few hundred people, As they increase in number, they are spawning hundreds or thousands of new business that purport to have solutions.
A company I wrote about, Sinterfire, makes frangible bullets that could be safer for police and security guards to use in confined areas.
There are bulletproof backpacks, and here are inserts to make backpacks bulletproof.
There are security and training consultancies, like one called Survival Response LLC, based in Pompano Beach, that reached out to me, and ALICE.
Many shooting ranges offer special courses to teach people how to handle active shooters. One of the surprises to people who don’t own guns, and gun control advocates, is that gun owners and gun rights advocates see guns as part of the solution to gun violence.
There are even gun carry cases shaped like Bibles.
Mass shootings also inspire entrepreneurs like Blake Mycoskie of Tom's to take on the "issue" of gun violence.
Many people in the business of selling or finding solutions to all kinds of gun violence uses mass shootings as a marketing tool. That’s despite the fact there’s little evidence of what works, practically speaking, to prevent mass shootings: There aren’t enough of them to study, for one thing, and for another, there’s a dearth of research on gun violence of all kinds.
Gun violence committed as part of a crime
Gun homicides increased 31%, from 11,008 shooting deaths in 2014 to 14,415 in 2016. In 2011, there were 467,300 nonfatal victimizations, like rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults, committed with guns.
The companies and organizations working on less sensational but still brutal gun crime are often working in concert with cities and police departments, like Shot Spotter. There are also programs widely seen as effective, like Ceasefire.
Under Ceasefire, police teamed up with community leaders to identify the young men most at risk of shooting someone or being shot, talked to them directly about the risks they faced, offered them support, and promised a tough crackdown on the groups that continued shooting. In Boston, the city that developed Ceasefire, the average monthly number of youth homicides dropped by 63 percent in the two years after it was launched, Pro Publica reported.
Many gun control groups advocate for (and raise funds for) legal solutions to stem gun crime in general. Universal background checks are one of the most prominent ideas today; Dr. Garen
Wintemute argues that they can help reduce both gun violence in general and mass shootings. The Rand Corp. found that background checks might reduce gun suicides. There’s moderate evidence that firearm homicides go down when dealers are required to perform background checks, but the Rand Corp. found inconclusive evidence of the effect of private-seller background checks.
One thing that often surprises Americans who don’t own guns is that gun owners see their guns as part of the solution to gun violence, not the problem. Gun rights advocates often cite studies of self-defense uses of guns as evidence that guns help reduce gun crime, but there’s little consensus on even the number of incidents, much less on whether, taken together, those incidents could result in an overall reduction in gun crime.
The idea of a gun as a tool of self-defense is an idea based on the image of a law-abiding citizen confronting a criminal, when, in reality, most gun uses in the context of a crime are likely the result of an escalating argument between two people who probably are neither upstanding citizens nor evil people.
Of course, law-abiding citizens do use guns to defend themselves and their families against criminals. As a marketing strategy, the idea of a gun in the hand of law-abiding citizen aiming at a criminal or a mass shooter is powerful. Marketing speaks to individuals in anecdotes; it usually doesn’t offer scientific evidence that affects public health, except as part of a narrative.
Domestic violence. Guns were used to kill more than two-thirds of spouse and ex-spouse homicide victims between 1990 and 2005.
I separate this category of gun violence out because I’m hoping to look more at companies active in this space over the next few months. There have been laws passed in the states, often supported by gun control advocates, that tighten the prohibitions on people who have been convicted of a serious domestic violence offense from buying or having guns.
Maybe there’s more out that there that I don’t know about, but it appears to me that the private sector has generated very little way of solutions for women (or men) who want protection against an abusive spouse or partner with a gun.
The one exception are the gun ranges and gun businesses that are marketing guns and gun training as women’s empowerment, like Babes with Bullets. Women’s gun ownership is one of the bright spots of gun sales (sales to women are holding steady, while sales to men decline). One of the reasons is that gun ranges and manufacturers market guns to women as a protection against violence that might visit them personally and individually.
“As a police officer, I know evil exists. I’ve seen violence. And I know how long it takes for a call to get thru 911, to me, and me to get the the scene,” competitive shooter Dianna Muller told me. “I don’t want anyone to feel helpless….and get murdered or get raped or robbed at the hands of an evil person. I want them to have a chance. I want them to have a choice to be able to protect themselves. I believe it to be the most sacred human right, to protect yourself. And I believe gun rights should be EMBRACED by women as a woman’s right.”
Accidents. There were 489 people killed in unintentional shootings in the United States in 2015, the most recent year for which data is available, writes Kurtis Lee. That was down from 824 deaths in 1999, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Taking into account population growth over that time, the rate fell 48%.
A long list of companies market locks for guns, including this Israeli firm, called ZORE. The market for such safety devices has expanded as more states have passed laws that include civil and criminal penalties for leaving guns unlocked or loaded around children, according to Kurtis Lee. Massachusetts requires that guns be stored locked.
Smart gun companies, like Lodestar and iGun, are also marketing to police and to a market concerned about gun safety.
One of the things that drives gun owners and the gun rights organizations crazy is that they get little credit for their work on gun safety. The National Shooting Sports Foundation’s “Project ChildSafe,” for instance, distributed 37 million free safety kits that include a firearm locking device, across the United States.
The GAO identified it and a handful of other nonprofits in the gun safety space, including Bulletproof Kids and the Brady Center’s ASK Campaign.
A group of doctors and medical societies sued the state of Florida over an NRA-supported law that forbade pediatricians from discussing guns in the home with their patients.
Suicides. Suicides account for roughly two out of every three gun deaths. The same number of people die in car crashes and by guns in the United States. That’s mostly driven by the decline in the number of car deaths since 1950, writes Christopher Ingraham. But gun deaths have also risen, especially suicides, which account for two-thirds of all gun deaths. Gun deaths are likely higher now than car deaths, because both the suicide and homicide rates have risen in the past three years, since Ingraham wrote.
Suicide rates are strongly linked with rates of gun ownership; that’s because suicide is best understood as a fleeting mental illness. People succeed if they have easy access to a lethal method, like a gun.
Organizations that work on this kind of gun violence are mostly nonprofits. Some are people working across the gun rights/gun control divide, like the Colorado Firearm Safety Coalition, which includes public health researchers, doctors and gun range owners. It advocates removing guns from the homes when there is a suicide risk.
It’s only in recent years that the rising suicide rate and the connection between suicide and guns has been the subject of research and attention.
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