Why Tucson Massacre Is Destined to Happen Again
by Brett Arends
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Guns and joblessness can be a deadly combination
The only surprising thing about Saturday's massacre is that it doesn't happen more often.
America is a tinderbox. We have a growing army of young and middle-aged men who, like Jared Loughner, are only marginally attached to the economy or to society. Many are among the 14 million rushing to buy guns each year.
Throw in the exciting world of the Internet, where they can find validation online for whatever moods, desires or hatreds they may have, and the mixture is deadly.
How dangerous is the situation we're living in?
On Friday, the day before the shooting, the U.S. Labor Department happened to publish its monthly jobs report. Media coverage tends to focus on the percentage of active job seekers still looking for work. But the real story is the number of men dropping out of the system altogether.
The official unemployment figure, now 9.4%, is a fiction and should be ignored. The so-called underemployment rate, which casts a wider net and now stands at 16.7%, is a better measure of the disaster this economy is wreaking on society, but it is still incomplete.
If you really want to see what's going on, you have to delve into the statistical tables published by the government and do some analysis.
According to the Labor Department, there are 10.6 million young men in Loughner's age group, between 20 and 24. (That doesn't count those in the military, in prison or institutionalized.) Officially, 16.9% of them count as "unemployed." That's pretty bad. It's nearly twice the level it was before the financial crisis, and more than twice what it was 10 years ago.
The real picture revealed by the government's data is even worse. The number of men in this age group who lack a full-time job has skyrocketed by 40% in the past four years, and today stands at 6.4 million — nearly two-thirds of the total. Most of them simply aren't counted by the official unemployment numbers.
Some of those, of course, aren't counted because they are studying. That will include those doing a full-time degree program, and those taking just one course a semester. Loughner was a student at a community college until he was suspended four months ago. But many aren't doing anything.
The picture is similar for men aged 25 to 54. According to last Friday's report, 8.9% of them are officially "unemployed." The truth? According to Labor Department data, 25% lack a full-time job and more than 19% lack any job at all. Millions have simply dropped out of the system in the past few years. A decade ago, 89% of this group worked full time; today it's about 80%. These are men of prime working age.
Put it all together, and you have skyrocketing numbers of men with too much time on their hands and too little stake in the world around them. As the chart above shows, the number aged 20 to 54 who lack a full-time job has doubled in the past 10 years and risen by about a half, or 7 million, since the financial crisis hit. It has surged in recent months to more than 22 million.
Obviously, no one is suggesting a simple correlation between unemployment and violence. But unemployment hits many men hard, especially those who were already on the edge. Once upon a time, most men had full-time jobs. That probably helped a lot of them keep it together. But the loss of jobs — especially basic manufacturing jobs — in the past decade has created a very different environment.
Meanwhile, gun purchases are booming. Point-of-sale background checks with the FBI, which were initiated in 1998 as a result of the Brady Act, have doubled in 10 years. These are not a perfect indicator of gun purchases, but they are a widely used proxy. They have rocketed in the past couple of years, and now average about 1.2 million a month. There were 14.4 million checks last year alone — or one for every 14 adults aged 18 to 70. If we figure men are, say, twice as likely to buy a gun as women, that's about 10 million checks for about 100 million men. Just in one year.
The FBI says more than 100 million background checks have been made in the past decade, leading to more than 700,000 denials. In other words, fewer than 1% of those who apply are turned down.
If just 1% of all these underemployed men lose their bearings, that would be 220,000 of them. If 10% of those then try to buy a gun in any given year, and only 1% are turned down, then about 21,800 would succeed each year. That's an average of more than 400 per state. They're sitting at home, brooding, reading extremist websites and polishing their guns.
This will happen again. And again.
Brett Arends is a columnist for MarketWatch and The Wall Street Journal, based in Boston.
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