Gun Violence: What Causes it & How Do We Stop it?

Gun violence is an important issue to us at the Gini Foundation because it's a symptom of deeper socioeconomic problems, which we have been predicting for years in our nonpartisan books and articles. The decentralized monetary and community governance systems that we build at Gini are explicitly designed to solve many of the problems that are causing gun violence in the U.S. and around the world today.

Establishing Common Ground. The article you're reading now is the first part of Gini's four-part Gun Violence series. Parts 1–3 ask and answer a few basic questions to establish a common foundation of knowledge for people from all walks of life and ideological perspectives. Part 4 builds on the first three parts and ties everything together. You won't fully understand part 4 if you jump straight to it; so, please read all the parts in numerical order.

As Always, Beware of Special Interest Groups. The gun control debate creates opportunities for powerful special interest groups to conflate their narrow interests with the broader public interest, which is a problem we've discussed extensively in the Gini book. The logic of some special interest groups can seem rational at first, but many people don't realize how easily their perceptions can be hijacked by the interests of profit-seeking corporations. This is a big problem that prevents meaningful progress on many issues today. Whenever we see socioeconomic problems with these characteristics, we work to provide our Gini readers with nonpartisan facts, data and analysis to help them extract the truth from all the confusing noise and propaganda in our world today.

For our readers' convenience, each article starts with the links to all four parts of the series and ends with a link to the next part. You can continue reading part 1 after the links below.

• Part 1: Do Guns Enable Us to Defend Our Physical Bodies?
• Part 2: Can We Prevent Evil Human Animals from Killing Innocent Humans?
• Part 3: Do Guns Enable Us to Defend Our Democratic Freedom from Tyrannical Governments?
• Part 4: Sociopathic Behavior is at the Heart of All Threats to Democracy.

Do Guns Enable Us to Defend Our Physical Bodies?

There are hundreds of videos that illustrate how random psychotic humans can kill you if you don't have a way to defend yourself. Those are only the events captured on video. We can reasonably assume they represent a tiny fraction of all the violent events that occur in every country every day, which are not always reported in the media. It's difficult to watch those videos and not come to the conclusion that guns are necessary to protect ourselves in many situations. This is especially true in business establishments where valuable assets attract robbers, but it's also true in our homes and schools ("soft targets") where valuable assets and precious family must be protected.

Violence Will Get Worse. For all the socioeconomic reasons predicted in our Gini books and articles, there's little doubt that violence in the U.S. and around the world is going to get much worse unless fundamental economic and political system changes are implemented. Additionally, state and municipal budgets throughout the U.S. have been severely impaired since the 2008 financial crisis. Their economic conditions will continue to deteriorate with the deteriorating national economy, but cities and states don't have currency printing presses. That means local, state and federal social programs will be slashed, which will amplify the socioeconomic problems even more. At the same time, shrinking police department budgets will be under pressure from all sides as disintegrating socioeconomic conditions spawn more violence.

Deprivation Causes Humans to Become Inhumane Animals. Many Americans (including me) own guns to protect the humans they love from mentally ill animals. The quasi-scientific and deeply flawed studies performed by well-intending humans are naive and arguably immoral if they are used to prevent law-abiding citizens from defending themselves. As the population of economic refugees continues to expand, many of them will turn to lives of crime and violence out of desperation to feed themselves and their families. Despair and desperation can quickly turn relatively good humans into vicious, inhumane animals. This is one of the most significant reasons why it's so important to design economic, labor, trade . . . and gun control policies around equitable and sustainable principles that reflect the realities of the real-world, not ideological fantasies.

Read Part 2: Can We Prevent Evil Animals from Killing Innocent Humans?