Study: Despite drop in gun crime, 56% think it's worse

Violent gun crime has dropped dramatically in the past two decades, but the majority of Americans think it's more of a problem now than ever, according to a Pew Research Center study released Tuesday.

According to the survey, done in March, 56% of Americans believe gun crime is worse today than it was 20 years ago. And 84% believe in recent years, gun crime has either gone up or stayed the same — when the reality is that it has dropped significantly.

The rate of non-fatal violent gun crime victimization dropped 75% in the past 20 years; The gun homicide rate dropped 49% in the same period, according to numbers Pew researchers obtained from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"The public doesn't get its feelings out of crime statistics," said Alfred Blumstein, an urban systems professor at Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University. "The public gets its feelings from particularly notorious events, and what the press talks about."

The recent attention on the massacre in Newtown, Conn., other mass shootings and even the spate of shootings in Chicago have fueled a perception that crime is up, even though in most cities it has dropped overall, he said.

"It's not just gun crime — it's all crime has gone down," said David Hemenway, a professor at Harvard's School of Public Health. "But from the news, it sounds like school shootings are way up. Certainly since Newtown, these things are huge news. So people believe things must be worse."

Hemenway called Pew's findings "not surprising at all."

He said a recent case that attracted national news, where a 5-year-old boy in Kentucky accidentally shot and killed his 2-year-old sister, was an example of a relatively commonplace event that, in light of the national focus on guns at the moment, became national news.

"Every week or so, something like that happens," he said. "But that's the focus now, so people are not surprisingly misled. People worry about the wrong things. What people worry about are things that are salient in the news — things that happened recently, things that they have no control over."

Pew researchers began their work before the elementary school shooting in Newtown in December 2012, said D'Vera Cohn, a co-author of the study. Pew plans a larger study of crime trends and public awareness later this year, she said.

The survey found that women and the elderly were less likely to be victims of crime, but were more likely to believe gun crime had increased in recent years. Men, who were more likely to be victims, were more likely to know that the gun crime rate had dropped.

Starting in 1993, homicides and robberies began to drop. Blumstein said that was in part due to the decline of the crack cocaine trade, which from 1985 to 1993 fueled a 25% increase in those crimes.

Violent crime rates remained relatively flat through much of the 2000s, but then dropped by about 8% in 2009 and again in 2010, Blumstein said.

Hemenway said researchers can't point to a singular reason why gun crime has dropped so significantly. The report points to the aging population, high incarceration rates and a drop in crime internationally since the mid-1990s as contributing reasons.

"I think the big reason gun crime has gone down is because crime has been down," Hemenway said. "There's no huge thing — there's been no major changes in gun policy,"

There is a fear of a knee-jerk response based on the public's erroneous perceptions of crime, Blumstein said.

For example, in the late 1980s, politicians instituted increasingly tough mandatory sentencing laws to lock up what some had deemed a new type of "super predator" involved in the street drug trade. The result has been overcrowded prisons and a number of first-time offenders serving overly long sentences, Blumstein said.

As politicians weigh in on gun control, he said, they're very aware that many citizens believe that gun crime has gotten worse.

"The public says 'I'm concerned, do something,' and the political system has to respond to that," he said.