A Modest Proposal For Curbing Homicides: Socialism
By John Horgan
Cross-check - Scientific American
Critical views of science in the news
January 24, 2011
https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=cross-check-blog-2011-01-24


If responses to my last post are any guide-including a
diss from one of my own students!-many readers reject
gun controls as a way to reduce shootings like the
recent massacre in Arizona and other gun-related
homicides.

Common sense tells me that unbalanced people like Jared
Loughner, the Arizona shooter, should have a harder time
getting a semiautomatic weapon and high-capacity clips.
Moreover, some researchers have found a correlation
between levels of household gun ownership and homicide.
But I realize that the causal link between shootings and
gun controls-and gun ownership-is complex, more so than
my previous post implied.

Restrictions on gun ownership in New Jersey, Washington,
D.C., and other regions were followed by a surge in
firearm-related crimes, as this 2008 article in The New
York Times noted. Moreover, a comparison of Wikipedia
rankings of nations by gun ownership and by firearm-
related deaths shows that these variables are not
closely correlated. Yes, the U.S. homicide rate is much
higher than in England, Japan and other nations that
severely restrict civilian ownership of firearms. But
Colombia, with a gun ownership rate less than one tenth
that of the U.S., has a firearm-related homicide rate
seven times higher. Brazil, which also has less than one
tenth as many guns per capita than the U.S., has 50
percent more firearm-linked homicides.

As much as I hate to admit it, these statistics support
the slogan that guns don't kill; people do. The link
between homicides and easy access to guns-like the link
between real violence and media violence-is tenuous. You
can make the cause for or against a causal relation,
depending on what society or time period you examine.
Complexities like these lead to complaints that "social
science" is an oxymoron.

But even gun-lovers want fewer homicides, right? So let
me suggest another possible way to achieve that goal.
The idea was inspired by the evolutionary psychologists
Margo Wilson (who died in 2009) and her husband Martin
Daly, both of McMaster University in Ontario. In their
1988 book Homicide, often upheld as the gold standard in
applying Darwinian theory to social problems, Daly and
Wilson pointed out that males have always committed the
vast majority of homicides. The reason, the
psychologists contended, is that our male ancestors
fought fiercely for "control over the reproductive
capacities of women," which resulted in an innate male
tendency toward violent aggression.

Although today lethal aggression can (often) lead to
imprisonment or execution-both of which hamper
reproduction-it would have promoted genetic fitness in
societies predating the rule of law, according to Daly
and Wilson. As evidence of their evolutionary thesis,
Daly and Wilson noted that modern men kill blood
relatives much less often than they kill unrelated
females out of sexual jealousy as well as male rivals
and even the children of other men. (One of Daly and
Wilson's best-known findings is that stepfathers are
many times more likely than biological fathers to kill
their children.)

Males, and especially young males with few prospects,
also kill nonrelatives to achieve status and
"resources"-by committing armed robbery, for example, or
shooting a rival drug dealer. Like other evolutionary
psychologists, Daly and Wilson struggled to explain
variations in behavior among individuals and societies.
For example, the homicide rate of their homeland,
Canada, is only about a third that of its neighbor, the
U.S. Rates of homicide also vary widely from region to
region within each country. Why?

I heard Daly and Wilson propose an answer to this puzzle
at a 2009 meeting on aggression that I reported on for
Scientific American; they also presented the hypothesis
in this 2001 paper (pdf). The best predictor of high
homicide rates in a region, they asserted, is income
inequality. As a measure of such inequality, Daly and
Wilson employed the so-called Gini index (named after
its originator, the Italian statistician Corrado Gini),
which ranks inequality on a scale ranging from 0.0 to
1.0. A region in which everyone has exactly the same
income would have a Gini score of 0.0, whereas a region
in which one person makes all the money has a score of
1.0.

Daly and Wilson found a strong correlation between high
Gini scores and high homicide rates in Canadian
provinces and U.S. counties. High Gini scores predicted
homicides better than low average income, high
unemployment and simpler measures. Basically, Daly and
Wilson were blaming homicides not on poverty per se but
on the collision of poverty and affluence, the ancient
tug-of-war between haves and have-nots. The income-
inequality hypothesis, Daly and Wilson asserted, can
account for the "radically different national homicide
rates" of the U.S. and Canada, the latter of which has
more generous social-welfare programs (including
universal health care) and hence fewer economic
disparities.

Naturally, some researchers have reported data that fail
to support the income-inequality theory of homicide. But
I find it persuasive, especially because it points
toward an attractive solution to high homicide rates: a
more equitable economic system, perhaps with higher
taxes for the wealthy and more generous welfare programs
for the poor. In short, socialism. I hope that opponents
of gun control will consider this modest, alternative
proposal for reducing lethal shootings.

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