Ordinary People Who Just Snap

Ordinary People Who Just Snap

One of the enduring myths that underlies much of the gun control movement is the idea that a lot of murders are committed by ordinary people like you and I who lose their temper one day, grab a gun (because it's readily available), and murder someone. The FBI studied this problem in the 1970s, and found that people arrested for murder generally had long arrest records and a sizable fraction had previous felony convictions. An astonishing number had previous homicide convictions!

Professor Volokh over at Volokh Conspiracy points to some more recent data that suggests that this is even more true now:

I know of no truly comprehensive data on this, but here's what we learn from the intentional homicide line in Justice Department's Felony Defendants in Large Urban Counties, 2004 (a sample that is representative of the large urban counties that account for roughly half of the nation's violent crimes):

• 83% had a prior adult arrest (compared to likely 25% or so of the adult U.S. population).
• 76% had two or more prior adult arrests.
• 55% had five or more prior adult arrests.
• 65% had a prior adult conviction.
• 44% had a prior adult felony conviction (compared to about 7.5% of the adult U.S. population, see Christopher Uggen et al., Citizenship, Democracy, and the Civic Reintegration of Criminal Offenders, 605 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 281, 288 (2006)).

This does not include "arrests or convictions that occurred while the defendant was a juvenile" (I quote here from an e-mail from the author of the report). Since nearly half of all homicide offenders are 24 or under, the exclusion of juvenile arrests and convictions is thus likely to substantially undercount the actual arrest and conviction record. This also doesn't include arrests or convictions that the state effectively expunged or never logged, for instance because someone was allowed a "deferred adjudication," which is essentially probation in lieu of a conviction, so that no conviction would be entered if the probation is finished with no observed violations.

There are people without criminal or mental illness histories who do, indeed, lose their tempers, go get a gun, and murder someone. But they aren't that common. Far more typical is the person who, by the time they reach adulthood, already knows what it is liked to handcuffed by a police officer, has been convicted of at least a misdemeanor--and carries a bail bond company's business card with him.