GUN-CONTROL legislation fell short last month in a close Senate vote, but some spy flickers of hope in the "world's greatest deliberative body". However, the sense of urgency that followed the Newtown massacre has definitely faded, and new studies from the Department of Justice and the Pew Research Center showing an astonishing drop in gun violence over the past two decades seem to call into question the need for new, stricter regulations. Americans have been improving control over their many, many guns without it. Pew reports:

Compared with 1993, the peak of U.S. gun homicides, the firearm homicide rate was 49% lower in 2010, and there were fewer deaths, even though the nation’s population grew. The victimization rate for other violent crimes with a firearm—assaults, robberies and sex crimes—was 75% lower in 2011 than in 1993. Violent non-fatal crime victimization overall (with or without a firearm) also is down markedly (72%) over two decades.

The Department of Justice recently reported similar stats. Gun-rights advocates are crowing. Charles C.W. Cooke of National Reviewsays that the Pew and DOJ reports make "embarrassing reading for those who spend their time trying to make it appear as if America is in the middle of a gun-crime wave". Mr Cooke adds: "And those screaming '. . .but Sandy Hook!' will no doubt be pleased to know that school shootings, too, are down 33 percent since 1993". This is all most excellent news, though I would resist the impulse to think that these welcome trends will somehow vitiate the felt need for further gun control. The decline in gun violence is consistent with a truly amazing general decline of violence, a subject recently explored in Steven Pinker's fascinating book, "The Better Angels of our Nature". This trend defies easy explanation. Mr Pinker speculates that we have become more pacific through the gradual cultural refinement of rational capacities that have guided us away from ancient strategies of violence. One of my own pet hypotheses is that human life becomes literally more valuable to the living as we become wealthier and longer-lived. Wealthier lives have, other things equal, a better experiential texture. And as life expectancy increases, early death steals more years. So we become less likely to feel that life is disposable or cheap, and more likely to see intolerably profound loss in premature death. Insofar as guns are seen as dangerous tools for killing, it makes sense that they would become increasingly odious to increasingly peaceful sensibilities. (And insofar as guns are seen as necessary tools of public safety and self-defence, gun control itself may seem increasingly dangerous. One's side in this debate perhaps depends more than anything on a judgment about the greater source of peril.) New demand for gun control may reflect the same shift in sensibility that has already made us less likely to use guns for violent ends. When the felt value of life increases, a small death toll can add up to a large sense of loss, and a large death toll can add up to an incomprehensible enormity. How many good hours of life were robbed from the children at Sandy Hook Elementary? Perhaps it's callous to the past to imagine that each individual life seems more valuable to us today than it did to our forebears a century ago. Still, I suspect it does. In which case, an almost-50% decrease in gun homicide may not represent quite as much progress as it at first appears. Would the 1993 rate of gun violence seem twice as intolerable today? Who knows? What I do know is that our sense of peril, our sense of what's at risk, does not track crime statistics in any simple way.

The twist in the Pew study is that Americans appear quite ignorant of these happy developments. Indeed, most Americans believe falsely that gun violence has increased. "Despite the attention to gun violence in recent months", the authors of the Pew study write, "most Americans are unaware that gun crime is markedly lower than it was two decades ago." This has some conservatives complaining of liberal "media bias", and there's probably some of that, though selection bias of the "if it bleeds, it leads" variety, and the centrality of gun violence to pop entertainments, probably has more to do with it. I'd add that the psycho-social dynamic I describe—our growing estimate of life's preciousness—might have something to do with it, too. Perhaps the salience of gun crime has increased for the same reason the danger of allowing children to walk to school alone, or to ride bicycles without shoes or helmets, has also increased in salience. Parents don't love their children any more then they used to, but they feel, probably correctly, that children now have more to lose.

In any case, general ignorance of the fall in gun violence ought to cut both ways. Once we understand how much safer we have really become, the felt need to own a gun in order to defend against guns ought to recede. Right?

(Photo credit: AFP)