Crime

Crime is Slate’s new crime blog. Like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter @slatecrime.

In November, I wrote about Joseph June, a Florida man sentenced to five years in prison for cocaine possession. The cocaine was found in a search that stemmed from a “consensual encounter,” one into which both parties entered voluntarily; the officer had no reason to suspect that June was engaged in illegal activity, and just stopped him in order to chat. In the initial piece, I suggested that consensual police encounters are often anything but. Cops have guns, and handcuffs, and cars with back doors that don’t open from the inside. Even if a police officer is polite as pie, he or she will have the upper hand in most conversational situations. As a consequence, most ordinary citizens will feel compelled to talk with a police officer even when, legally, they don’t have to.

Since then, I’ve received a lot of emails from readers asking what, exactly, you should do if you find yourself in a supposedly consensual conversation with an officer of the law. Apparently a lot of innocent, non-suspicious-looking people have been or expect to be pressured into gratuitous interactions with the police. And, from the emails I’ve received, a lot of people have no interest in talking to the law in these situations. Which, to be sure, is their right. You’re under no obligation to talk with a police officer in non-investigatory situations, and you shouldn’t be intimidated into feeling otherwise. (And to be clear, I’m not talking about those times when a cop stops you for speeding, or jaywalking, or stealing an old woman’s purse. In scenarios like these, when there’s reasonable suspicion that you’ve done something wrong, you’re obliged to cooperate, and refusal to comply may lead to your arrest.

The simplest answer is that you need to be explicit. It’s up to you to assert your rights. If an officer of the law stops you for a conversation, make it clear that you are uninterested in participating. Ideally, the officer will move on, and the encounter will end. Sometimes, the cop might become offended or truculent and use force or other means to compel you to stay. In this scenario, you might eventually end up in court, which is why you want to make sure that your actions are as clear as possible.

In an excellent, thorough 2001 article for the San Diego Law Review, Daniel J. Steinbock proposed a three-step approach for avoiding unwanted consensual police encounters, informed by the relevant case law. Making the good point that not all police-citizen interactions are adversarial—sometimes, a cop just wants to buy you some boots—Steinbock suggests that citizens answer an officer’s request for conversation with “Why?” or “What is the reason, officer?” If the reason is anything other than overtly benign, or if the police officer gives a non-answer (something like “This’ll just take a minute”), Steinbock suggests you proceed to the second step: “Just Say No.”

He writes:

The crux of avoiding a consensual encounter is noncooperation—refusal to answer questions and to consent to police requests. As noted above, this requires a fair degree of self-confidence and a willingness to flout the conventions of common discourse (which, of course, this is not). Nevertheless, it is the sine qua non of consensual encounter avoidance. "Can we see your driver's license?" "No!" "What are you doing here?" "I am not answering," or less politely, "None of your business."

Saying "no" once may not be enough. Some courts have held that continued badgering after a first refusal causes the encounter to cross the line to a seizure, but others have permitted repeated questioning and requests for consent to search without concluding that a seizure had taken place. A reasonable person would thus be well-advised to say "no" repeatedly, and to reject any attempt by the officer to accompany her if she tries to leave. Some courts have found it significant that the refusals were delivered in a shout or scream, or that the individual ran from police in an attempt to get away. The cases thus not only encourage flatly rebuffing the officer's inquiries, but also encourage doing so in the rudest, most confrontational, and most obnoxious manner.

Take note: Being obnoxious is not a crime. (If it were, we would’ve executed Urkel 20 years ago.) Steinbock goes on to note that saying “no” also means never saying “yes,” because “refusal looks more suspicious if it comes after the individual has already cooperated.” Next, Steinbock encourages you to “announce one’s intent to depart and then do so at a measured pace.”

“A measured pace?” you ask. “But didn’t Steinbock just pretty much say (in the above blockquote) that it’s sometimes OK to run from the police?” Good catch, hypothetical back-talking reader. Steinbock was referring to the 1991 Fourth Circuit opinion on US v. Wilson, in which the court found it significant that Albert Wilson had to run from police in order to terminate an extended and involuntary encounter. But the courts aren’t entirely consistent on this point. In other cases, like Illinois v. Wardlow, flight has been interpreted as providing reasonable grounds for a search and seizure. It’s all very ambiguous.

There are certainly times when running away is justified. (In US v. Wilson, for example, cops followed Albert Wilson through an airport and refused to stop badgering him, despite Wilson’s numerous loud attempts to end the encounter.) But, in general, you don’t want it to appear like you're trying to flee from the police. No matter how the courts might eventually interpret your actions, to a police officer, running away generally looks suspicious; a cop might reasonably argue that your sudden flight transformed the encounter from a consensual one to an investigatory one.

In a recent email exchange, Steinbock told me that he still stands behind this three-step approach. Other people have different strategies. Emailer K.K. from Arizona, a frequent videotaper of police encounters, writes that he carries orange business cards that he hands out to police in these situations. They read like this: “This interaction is NOT consensual, and is being audio and video recorded for my safety as well as yours. I am invoking my Fifth Amendment rights and refusing to answer ANY questions. Please do not ask me any questions without my attorney present. I furthermore invoke my Fourth Amendment rights and do NOT consent to ANY searches of my persons and or property.” If you’ve got a functional printer and a line on some high-quality card stock, you can make this technique work for you. The point is to be explicit, such that both the cop and any potential judge down the line would have no way of mistaking your intentions.

To be clear, I think police officers have tremendously stressful jobs, and I think the vast majority of them approach their work with the best intentions. But I also think it’s important for citizens to know their rights, and many of us don’t understand what rights we’re afforded when we’re stopped by the cops. We live in a society of laws, and as long as those laws set limits on police-citizen encounters, those limits should be well understood and respected by all relevant parties.

Crime is Slate’s new crime blog. Like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter @slatecrime.

On Dec. 24, in Webster, New York, an ex-con named William Spengler set fire to his house and then shot and killed two responding firefighters before taking his own life. He shot them with a Bushmaster AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle—the same weapon that Adam Lanza used 10 days earlier when he shot and killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary. James Holmes used an AR-15-style rifle with a detachable 100-round magazine this past summer when he shot up a movie theater in Colorado. (Though the AR-15 is a specific model of rifle made by Colt, the term has come to generically refer to the many other rifles built to similar specifications.)

Three makes a trend, as we all know, and many people have reacted by suggesting that the federal government should ban the AR-15 and other so-called assault weapons. Gun advocates have responded with exasperation, saying that, despite appearances, AR-15-style rifles are no more dangerous than any other gun. In a piece today on humanevents.com titled “The AR-15: The Gun Liberals Love to Hate,” NRA president David Keene blasted those critics who “neither understand the nature of the firearms they would ban, their popularity or legitimate uses.” Keene noted there are several valid, non-murderous uses for rifles like the AR-15—among them recreational target shooting, hunting, and home defense—and argued that law-abiding firearms owners shouldn’t be penalized because of homicidal loners who use semi-automatics like the AR-15 for criminal purposes.

I generally consider myself a Second Amendment supporter, and I haven’t yet decided where I stand on post-Newtown gun control. I would own a gun if New York City laws didn’t make it extremely difficult to do so. But I nevertheless find Keene’s arguments disingenuous. It’s odd to cite hunting and home defense as reasons to keep selling a rifle that’s not particularly well suited, and definitely not necessary, for either. Bolt-action rifles and shotguns can also be used for hunting and home defense. Unfortunately, those guns aren’t particularly lucrative for gunmakers. The lobby’s fervent defense of military-style semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15 seems motivated primarily by a desire to protect the profits in the rapidly growing “modern sporting rifle” segment of the industry.

The AR-15 was designed in 1957 at the behest of the U.S. Army, which asked Armalite to come up with a “high-velocity, full and semi auto fire, 20 shot magazine, 6lbs loaded, able to penetrate both sides of a standard Army helmet at 500 meters rifle,” according to ar15.com. When it entered Army service in the 1960s, it was renamed the M16, in accordance with the Army Nomenclature System. “AR-15” came to refer to the rifle’s semi-automatic civilian equivalent. From 1994 to 2004, AR-15-style rifles were subject to the now-expired Federal Assault Weapons Ban. Since then, the rifle and others like it have become tremendously popular. Last month, I estimated that upward of 3.5 million AR-15-style rifles currently exist in the United States. People like the rifle because it is modular and thus customizable (one article calls the AR-15 “perhaps the most flexible firearm ever developed; in seconds, a carbine can be switched over to a long-range rifle by swapping upper receivers”), because it is easy to shoot, and because carrying it around makes you look like a badass.

But the AR-15 is not ideal for the hunting and home-defense uses that the NRA’s Keene cited today. Though it can be used for hunting, the AR-15 isn’t really a hunting rifle. Its standard .223 caliber ammunition doesn’t offer much stopping power for anything other than small game. Hunters themselves find the rifle controversial, with some arguing AR-15-style rifles empower sloppy, “spray and pray” hunters to waste ammunition. (The official Bushmaster XM15 manual lists the maximum effective rate of fire at 45 rounds per minute.) As one hunter put it in the comments section of an article on americanhunter.org, “I served in the military and the M16A2/M4 was the weapon I used for 20 years. It is first and foremost designed as an assault weapon platform, no matter what the spin. A hunter does not need a semi-automatic rifle to hunt, if he does he sucks, and should go play video games. I see more men running around the bush all cammo'd up with assault vests and face paint with tricked out AR's. These are not hunters but wannabe weekend warriors.”

In terms of repelling a home invasion—which is what most people mean when they talk about home defense—an AR-15-style rifle is probably less useful than a handgun. The AR-15 is a long gun, and can be tough to maneuver in tight quarters. When you shoot it, it’ll overpenetrate—sending bullets through the walls of your house and possibly into the walls of your neighbor’s house—unless you purchase the sort of ammunition that fragments on impact. (This is true for other guns, as well, but, again, the thing with the AR-15 is that it lets you fire more rounds faster.)

AR-15-style rifles are very useful, however, if what you’re trying to do is sell guns. In a recent Forbes article, Abram Brown reported that “gun ownership is at a near 20-year high, generating $4 billion in commercial gun and ammunition sales.” But that money’s not coming from selling shotguns and bolt-action rifles to pheasant hunters. In its 2011 annual report, Smith & Wesson Holding Corporation announced that bolt-action hunting rifles accounted for 6.6 percent of its net sales in 2011 (down from 2010 and 2009), while modern sporting rifles (like AR-15-style weapons) accounted for 18.2 percent of its net sales. The Freedom Group’s 2011 annual report noted that the commercial modern sporting rifle market grew at a 27 percent compound annual rate from 2007 to 2011, whereas the entire domestic long gun market only grew at a 3 percent rate.

As the NRA’s David Keene notes, a lot of people do use modern sporting rifles for target shooting and in marksmanship competitions. But the guns also appeal to another demographic that doesn’t get nearly as much press—paranoid survivalists who worry about having to fend off thieves and trespassers in the event of disaster. Online shooting message boards are rife with references to potential “SHTF scenarios,” where SHTF stands for “shit hits the fan”—governmental collapse, societal breakdown. (Adam Lanza’s mother, Nancy Lanza, has been described as “a gun-hoarding survivalist who was stockpiling weapons in preparation for an economic collapse.”) An article on ar15.com titled “The Ideal Rifle” notes that “the threats from crime, terrorism, natural disaster, and weapons of mass destruction are real. If something were to happen today, you would need to have made a decision about the rifle you would select and be prepared for such an event. So the need to select a ‘survival’ rifle is real. Selecting a single ‘ideal rifle’ is not easy. The AR-15 series of rifles comes out ahead when compared to everything else.” Depending on where you live, it’s perfectly legal to stockpile weapons to use in the event of Armageddon. But that’s a far different argument than the ones firearms advocates have been using since the Newtown shootings.

As I said, I generally think of myself as a Second Amendment supporter, and a month ago, I would’ve probably agreed with the NRA’s position. But the Newtown shooting caused me to re-examine my stance—as is, I think, fitting—and to question some of the rhetoric advocates use to defend weapons like this. In his piece at Human Events, Keene ridiculed the notion that AR-15-style rifles ought to be banned just because “a half dozen [AR-15s] out of more than three million have been misused after illegally falling into the hands of crazed killers.” But the AR-15 is very good at one thing: engaging the enemy at a rapid rate of fire. When someone like Adam Lanza uses it to take out 26 people in a matter of minutes, he’s committing a crime, but he isn’t misusing the rifle. That’s exactly what it was engineered to do.

Crime is Slate’s new crime blog. Like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter @slatecrime.

Last month, I wrote about the odd preponderance of cannibalism-related news stories in 2012. (From cannibal cops to would-be child-eaters, cannibalism is more popular than it’s been since the days of Alferd Packer.) In the piece, I mentioned the case of Rudy Eugene, a Florida man who was shot to death by police this spring after gnawing on a homeless man’s face for 18 minutes while fully naked. Eugene’s case drew a lot of press—who doesn’t like a “naked man bites face” story?—with many wondering, quite reasonably, what in the world Eugene had been smoking.

According to the head of the Miami police union, the answer was “bath salts,” a drug that most people had never heard of but were happy to become hysterical over. Sold for years in gas stations and convenience stores next to “men’s vitality supplements” and other weird foil packets, bath salts contain synthetic stimulants mixed with caffeine and such. The white, grainy powder derived its name from its resemblance to Epsom salts, which old people use to soothe their aching bones (and which, when snorted, cause the user to complain about that damn rap music and then go to bed early).

After Rudy Eugene’s face-eating exploits, bath salts were dubbed “the new LSD” by law enforcement and medical types. The media jumped on the bath salts angle, credulously reporting that the substance was responsible for any number of heretofore unexplainable incidents. This summer, the federal government responded to the hysteria by classifying bath salts as a controlled substance and criminalizing their sale; vendors now face up to 20 years in prison.

But are they really as dangerous as they sound? In a great piece on Playboy’s website, Frank Owen convincingly argues that, no, they aren’t. Owen finds that toxicology reports showed that marijuana was the only drug in Rudy Eugene’s system at the time of his death, and he debunks other cases where bath salts were linked to inexplicable rage and violence. The Great Bath Salt Scare of 2012, Owen shows, was almost entirely manufactured by fear-mongering drug warriors.

So why did bath salts become the fall guy in the Eugene case? Owen believes that bath salts were a decoy—that the police union chief was looking to divert public attention from the fact that a Hispanic cop had shot and killed an unarmed African-American suspect. I’m not sure that I buy this, in part because I’m not sure why the cops would expect much criticism for shooting Eugene; using a gun to stop a deranged man from eating someone’s face seems like the dictionary definition of “justifiable use of force.” But if that was the plan, then it worked. While “Crazy man eats stranger’s face” is a good headline, nothing’s a bigger distraction than “Crazy man eats stranger’s face WHILE ON A MYSTERIOUS NEW DRUG.”

In his piece, Owen tries to render the drug a bit less mysterious. He took mephedrone—a common ingredient in bath salts—and concluded that it delivered a high similar to ecstasy: “Colors became more vivid and music more distinct. It was as if I could reach out and caress the texture of the sound coming from the speakers. I felt energized yet strangely relaxed.”

What Owen didn’t feel is anything resembling the alleged effects of bath salts: superstrength, a feeling of extreme heat, or the urge to gnaw off someone else’s face. “It’s easy to understand why consumers would think bath salts are a decent enough alternative to ecstasy,” writes Owen. “What’s not easy to understand is why anybody would think that such an uninspiring drug should be the target of a full-fledged moral panic.”

While Owen doesn’t know what exactly caused Rudy Eugene to turn cannibal, he’s sure that bath salts had nothing to do with it. He theorizes that Eugene may have been a paranoid schizophrenic, observes that it was extremely hot that day, and notes that “a growing body of medical evidence says pot can sometimes trigger aggression in the mentally ill.” (He doesn’t cite any of this medical evidence linking marijuana to aggression.) As explanations go, it’s not much more convincing than “bath salts did it,” and it’s sort of funny that Owen finishes debunking the bath salts theory and then offers another weird theory about a different drug. Is it too hard to believe that maybe Eugene was just hungry?

Name: Marquis Diggs

Crime: Possession of marijuana with intent to distribute.

Fatal mistake: Bringing drugs into a courtroom.

The circumstances: December 14 was a very bad day for 29-year-old Jersey City resident Marquis Diggs. That morning, he woke up, grabbed his coat, and headed off to family court, where his mother was waiting to file a restraining order against him. Upon his arrival, Diggs was promptly arrested on several outstanding warrants. The Jersey Journal reports that a subsequent search revealed “32 bags of suspected marijuana” and $176 in Diggs’ coat pocket. The drugs were seized and Diggs was arrested again.

Unfortunately for Diggs, the Hudson County Administration Building—where he and his mother were facing off—is located within walking distance of four schools. Under New Jersey state law, there are severe penalties for dealers who bring drugs within 1000 feet of school property. Diggs now faces an extra three years without parole tacked onto his sentence, unless he draws a kindly judge (which he probably won’t). He’ll also face the charges on the outstanding warrants. But on the plus side, given that he'll be in jail for a while, his mom’s restraining order is probably a moot point.

How he could’ve been a lot smarter: Diggs could’ve worn a different coat. Seven out of 10 impromptu courthouse arrests come about because the perp accidentally wore his “crime coat” instead of, say, a nice blue blazer.

How he could’ve been a little smarter: He could’ve left some of those baggies at home. Unless we’re talking about Willie Nelson, anyone caught carrying 32 bags of weed is going to be mistaken for a drug dealer. If he’d had, say, one or two baggies it’d be easier to argue that he’s just a laid back dude who likes to keep things mellow.

How he could’ve been a little dumber: “No, no, judge, you don’t understand. I brought these drugs for you, as a bribe.”

How he could’ve been a lot dumber: He could've completed his outfit by matching his "crime coat" with his "murder pants," containing 32 bags of blood matching up with 32 unsolved Jersey City homicides.

Ultimate Dumbness Ranking (UDR): This was pretty damn dumb. Though our national attitudes toward marijuana use are evolving, the winds of change haven’t yet blown through the municipal buildings of Jersey City. Maybe in 10 years or so we’ll see judges toking on the bench and jurors playing hacky sack to the sounds of Government Mule bootlegs. But for now, criminals would be advised to keep their drugs at home on their court dates. Courthouses are overrun with cops trained to notice suspicious bulges, computers that will reveal any outstanding warrants, and X-ray machines that will scan your coat and discover your weed. If you insist on ignoring these points, you deserve whatever fate befalls you. 7 out of 10 for Marquis Diggs.

Previous Dumb Criminals of the Week: The Drug Smuggler Whose Fake Breasts Were Made of Cocaine, The Guy Who Gave the Cops an Absolutely Terrible Fake Name, The Job Candidate Who Told the FBI about His Child Porn Stash

Today, we interrupt our Newtown-and-NRA-related programming to bring you an important holiday message about prison rape. For most of us, our familiarity with prison rape begins and ends with tasteless jokes and half the plotlines from the HBO series Oz. But for actual prisoners, prison rape is a real and persistent problem. A 2012 Bureau of Justice Statistics report found that “9.6 percent of former state prisoners reported one or more incidents of sexual victimization” during their most recent stint behind bars. Its preponderance speaks to a systemic problem with America’s penal system.

It’s important to note that the study centered on former prisoners, because even if a rape victim leaves prison—and according to the BJS, 95 percent of prisoners are eventually released—he or she often finds it hard to forget the trauma. The BJS report found that, after leaving prison, “72 percent of victims of inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization said they felt shame or humiliation, and 56 percent said they felt guilt. Seventy-nine percent of unwilling victims of staff sexual misconduct said they felt shame or humiliation, and 72 percent said they felt guilt.”

As one survivor of prison rape put it:

Getting raped destroys you from the inside out, and it takes a part of you and puts it where you can’t reach it. My momma quit writing me because she found out I was married to another man in here. She told me I was sick and she did not want to write anymore. And she stopped. See, she knows I got raped, but she doesn’t understand how I’m surviving now. I ran to another man and married him so I wouldn’t get raped again. My thoughts are so crazy on this; at times I do not understand them. The fear is so great in my heart.

Prison rape doesn’t just bring on mental health consequences. Prisons are hotbeds of HIV, Hepatitis C, and other STDs, and once a rape victim contracts these diseases, they don’t go away upon release. As a 2009 report from the anti-prison rape organization Just Detention International put it, “men and women who did not receive testing, counseling, and treatment in prison are unlikely to have the knowledge, skills, or access to the resources needed upon release to protect themselves and their loved ones.” In other words, the odds are good that they’ll be passing these diseases on to their free-world sexual partners.

In 2003, Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act, the first major legislative attempt to address this issue. The act provided funding for research, created a National Prison Rape Reduction Commission, and directed all prison officials to take a zero-tolerance approach to rape within their institutions.

There are also various non-profits working to reduce sexual assault in prisons. One such group is Just Detention International, which “seeks to end sexual abuse in all forms of detention.” JDI has launched a project called “Words of Hope” that allows you to send a holiday message of support to prisoners who’ve suffered sexual abuse behind bars.

I’m sure some inmates probably just throw the cards away. But for those who don’t, these messages show that there are people who neither judge nor blame them for what happened.

Still skeptical? Ask this guy about the good a holiday card can do:

I like this project a lot, not least because I enjoy holiday cards more than anybody else I know. I got an unexpected one the other week, and it just about made my day. If you want to participate, you can go to the Words of Hope website and send a message up until December 31st. I did.

Crime is Slate’s new crime blog. Like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter @slatecrime.

In a press conference this morning, the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre addressed the Sandy Hook school shootings by suggesting that, rather than ban assault weapons, we put armed guards in every American school. LaPierre also blamed America’s “culture of violence” on violent movies and video games. The armed guards thing is being addressed elsewhere on this site, but suffice it to say it’s a weird and implausibly expensive idea that will never, ever happen. The video game point, however, merits a little more scrutiny.

Much of the research supporting the theory that violent video games prompt real-life violence comes out of a psychology lab at Iowa State University. The lead investigator is a fellow named Craig Anderson who has devoted his professional life to proving a link between video game violence and real-life aggression. In 2010, Iowa State issued a news release claiming that one of Anderson’s studies “proves conclusively that violent video game play makes more aggressive kids.”

The other day, Anderson appeared on CNN to talk about Adam Lanza’s fondness for violent video games. In the course of the interview, he repeated his claim that the link between video game violence and real-life aggression has been definitively proven. Said Anderson:

Every major scientific society that has studied the question has come to the same answer, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, most recently, the International Society for Research and Aggression, have all come to the same conclusion that basically media violence is a risk factor, is a causal risk factor for increased aggressive behavior, including violence.

Wow, that sounds pretty conclusive!

But not so fast. Turns out, Anderson’s work is a bit controversial. In a piece yesterday on pcgamer.com, Phil Savage talked to a researcher named Christopher Ferguson whose work was also cited in the International Society for Research and Aggression report that Anderson mentioned on CNN. According to Ferguson, that particular report is perhaps less trustworthy than it sounds:

Anderson referring to the ISRA’s report is something we call “echo attribution.” He in fact nominated all the individuals to sit on the committee, and simply didn’t include any scholars who had been critical of the “video games = aggression” link. If I put together a committee and stack the deck, I can get it to say almost anything. That statement has no credibility whatsoever.

As for using my study, they absolutely misused and misrepresented my meta-analysis in that report. My data should, in no way, ever be used to support links between video game violence and aggression. We have done a number of studies of video game violence with both children and adults and find no evidence to support links between video game violence and youth violence. Furthermore, youth violence has declined to 40-year lows, not gone up in recent years.

Two years ago, on Techdirt, Mike Masnick also questioned Anderson’s legitimacy, citing another report by two Harvard Medical School professors that came to the exact opposite conclusions about video games and aggression:

In the last 10 years, video games studies have been overwhelmingly popular compared to studies on other media

Less than half of studies (41%) used well-validated aggression measures.

Poorly standardized and unreliable measures of aggression tended to produce the highest effects, possibly because their unstandardized format allows researchers to pick and choose from a range of possible outcomes.

The closer aggression measures got to actual violent behavior, the weaker the effects seen.

Experimental studies produced much higher effects than correlational or longitudinal studies. As experimental studies were most likely to use aggression measures of poor quality, this may be the reason why.

There was no evidence that video games produce higher effects than other media, despite their interactive nature.

Overall, effects were negligible, and we conclude that media violence generally has little demonstrable effect on aggressive behavior.

I read up on Anderson several years ago for a Reason book review and came away very skeptical. Take this study from 2003, “Violent Video Games and Aggressive Behavior in Young Women” as an example of his research. Anderson had young women play two video games, one violent (Street Fighter II), one not (Oh No! More Lemmings). Afterwards, he tested their willingness to administer “aversive stimuli” in the form of “loud noise blasts.” Anderson found that the women who played Street Fighter “deliver[ed] more very loud noise blasts” than the ones who player Lemmings. Thus, the conclusion that violent video games prompt aggressive behavior.

Well, maybe. But perhaps it just indicates that Street Fighter II is more exciting and immersive than Oh No! More Lemmings. The study seems to indicate that video gamers experience a short-term adrenaline rush after playing an exciting game, but it requires a logical leap to connect this with any real-world violence at all, and an even bigger logical leap to then believe that video games are in large measure responsible for real-world violence.

Anderson's work has also been supported by a group called the National Institute on Media and the Family, which, before it closed in 2009, was essentially an anti-gaming lobbying group. I’m no psychologist, and I certainly haven’t read everything Anderson has ever published. I’m confident, though, that there’s good reason to be skeptical of his claims—and of the people who use them as a way to avoid addressing gun control.

Crime is Slate’s new crime blog. Like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter @slatecrime.

Last Friday, 20-year-old Adam Lanza killed 26 students and teachers at Sandy Hook School with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.* Much of the ensuing debate has focused on ways to regulate and potentially ban weapons like these. So, how many auto-loading rifles actually exist in America?

In its 2011 report “The Militarization of the U.S. Civilian Firearms Market,” the non-partisan Violence Policy Center noted that “selling militarized firearms to civilians—i.e., weapons in the military inventory or weapons based on military designs—has been at the point of the industry’s civilian design and marketing strategy since the 1980s.” And in its 2011 annual report to investors, Smith & Wesson Holding Company noted that there was a $489 million domestic, non-military market for “modern sporting rifles,” a euphemism for auto-loading, assault-style rifles. Modern sporting rifles are perhaps the fastest-growing segment of the domestic long gun industry. From 2007 to 2011, according to the Freedom Group’s most recent annual report, domestic consumer long gun sales grew at a compound annual rate of 3 percent; modern sporting rifle sales grew at a 27 percent rate.

Get more specific, Peters! Well, it’s hard, imaginary exclamation-making reader, because the data are incomplete. A November 2012 Congressional Research Service report found that, as of 2009, there were approximately 310 million firearms in the United States: “114 million handguns, 110 million rifles, and 86 million shotguns.” However, author William J. Krouse went on to note that “data are not available on the number of ‘assault weapons’ in private possession or available for sale, but one study estimated that 1.5 million assault weapons were privately owned in 1994.”

Good data are hard to come by because firearms manufacturers generally don’t break down their production statistics by model. But that 1994 statistic that Krouse cited isn’t very satisfying, so let’s see if we can go deeper.

Take the AR-15, the auto-loading rifle that Adam Lanza used at Sandy Hook. The AR-15 is the civilian equivalent of the military M-16 assault rifle. It’s one of the most popular assault-style rifles on the market today.

In 2009, in a declaration made as part of the court case Heller v. District of Columbia, which challenged D.C.’s assault weapons ban, NRA research coordinator Mark Overstreet reported that, from 1986 to 2007, at least 1,626,525 AR-15-style semi-automatic rifles were produced and not exported from the United States. Overstreet suggested that you could use trends in NICS background checks to project future sales of AR-15-style rifles. As of Nov. 30, 2012, the total number of NICS background checks increased by 50.4 percent since the end of 2007. If the number of AR-15 rifles increased similarly, then that means there are at least 2,446,294 AR-15 rifles currently available in the United States.

That “at least” is an important caveat. These data only include firearms manufactured in the United States. In his declaration, Overstreet notes that, since 1986, “U.S.-made firearms have accounted for roughly three-fourths of all new firearms available on the commercial market in the United States.” So if you increase the above number to account for foreign-made, AR-15-style rifles, you get 3,261,725 total rifles.

More caveats: Overstreet derived his numbers by examining the sales figures of companies that only produced AR-15-style rifles. He didn’t include sales data from America’s three largest gunmakers—Remington, Smith & Wesson, and Sturm-Ruger—because these three produce multiple lines of rifles, and he couldn’t break down the data. (Remington is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Freedom Group.)

That’s weak stuff, Overstreet! Let’s try estimating those figures ourselves.

According to Sturm-Ruger’s 2011 annual report, sales of rifles accounted for $83.4 million in revenue that year out of $324.2 million in total net firearms sales—about 26 percent of revenue. Sturm-Ruger produced 1,114,700 firearms in 2011. Assuming that every gun cost the same amount—this is certainly incorrect, but we’re just making a back-of-the-envelope calculation here—26 percent of 1,114,700 is roughly 290,000 rifles. According to Overstreet, AR-15s accounted for 14.4 percent of rifles produced in 2007. If that statistic remains true, then Sturm-Ruger produced close to 42,000 AR-15-style rifles in 2011. Walk that number back through the years, and extrapolate it out to the other two manufacturers, and you’re possibly looking at anywhere from 500,000 to 700,000 more AR-15-style rifles. (Again, I must caution that there is a potentially huge margin of error in these calculations.)

Add everything together, make all the necessary caveats, carry the two, and we reach the conclusion that there are somewhere around 3,750,000 AR-15-type rifles in the United States today. If there are around 310 million firearms in the USA today, that means these auto-loading assault-style rifles make up around 1 percent of the total arsenal. And keep in mind, the AR-15 is just one of the many assault weapons on the market. Overstreet estimated that more than 800,000 Ruger Mini-14 rifles—the rifle that Anders Behring Breivik used in the Oslo summer camp shootings last year—had been produced since 1974. There are other types, too. This is only the tip of the gunberg.

No matter the exact figures, there are a whole hell of a lot of assault weapons in America, which complicates any talk of gun control. The most effective way for the government to reduce the existing gun stock would be to buy them back from their owners. When Australia imposed strict gun control measures in 1996 in the aftermath of a mass shooting, the Aussie government bought back 643,726 newly illegal rifles and shotguns at market value. The gun buyback program, which cost an estimated $400 million in U.S. dollars, was funded by a temporary 1 percent income tax levy.

Would such a plan fly in America? Extrapolating from Australia's numbers, a similar buyback in this more gun-laden country would cost billions. While a tax increase isn't the only way to raise that much money—the federal government could have a bake sale, or auction off some of its lesser-known historical treasures—it's certainly the most obvious way to do it. We might soon see what voters and politicians hate more: guns or taxes.

Read more on Slate about gun control.

*Correction, December 20, 2012: This post originally and incorrectly referred to the AR-15 semi-automatic as an "assault rifle." Though the AR-15 could be correctly referred to as an "assault weapon" or an "assault-style rifle," an "assault rifle" specifically refers to a rifle with fully automatic firing capability. The language in the post has been corrected to reflect this distinction.

Crime is Slate’s new crime blog. Like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter @slatecrime.

NEWTOWN, CONN.—At 6:30 p.m. on a rainy Tuesday night in Newtown, one week before Christmas, hundreds of people stand in the St. Rose of Lima parking lot, lined up to attend a wake for one of the 20 children killed last week in the shooting at Sandy Hook School. The line stretches out from the front door of the church, past an illuminated manger scene, past the two officers monitoring the entrance that has been cordoned off with police tape, winding through rows of cars all the way to the parish school, almost 100 yards away.

The church bell rings at 10-second intervals. A woman exiting the church touches the arm of one of the mourners. “They’re trying to get you in there, into the pews, so that you can be out of the cold,” she says, before giving her umbrella to someone else in the line. “God bless you,” she says.

It is funeral week in Newtown and Sandy Hook, and even though only a small number of families were directly victimized by the shootings, the entire region has resolved to share their pain. If there was ever a question of how Newtown would manifest its grief—if its sorrow would mutate into rage, fear, or withdrawal—it has been answered, as if the only proper response to a sudden subtraction is an influx of new numbers. The people of Newtown are present, and their empathy is palpable.

Outside the church, several hours after the service has officially begun, the line continues to grow despite the lateness and the rain. “It’s hard to believe that one person caused all this,” one man muses, looking behind him at the wet and patient crowd. “To think: this is just one-twenty-seventh of what’s going on.” Inside, hundreds more crowd the pews, aisles, and vestibule: praying, consoling, crying, remembering. The receiving line winds down the center aisle to the altar, where the victim’s family stands next to green and white wreaths, a floral heart that resembles an American flag, a candid photograph of three children on a beach, and a small white coffin.

Elsewhere, the streets are overrun by satellite trucks and stuffed animals. Impromptu memorials abound, in places where you’d expect them and in places where you wouldn’t: on the corner next to the Newtown police station, in a vacant lot across from the Mobil near the highway on-ramp. The line between private and public grief has eroded almost completely, and it disorients and overwhelms.

Downtown Sandy Hook smells like a Yankee Candle outlet. On the corner of Washington Avenue and Church Hill Road, there is a vast and growing shrine containing hundreds and hundreds of lit and extinguished candles, a zoo’s worth of stuffed animals, cards and photographs, the book Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love, and a whole lot more items. The memorial is dotted with signs left by out-of-town visitors: “Trumbull Is With You Heart and Soul,” “The Bronx is here with love.”

Up the road, at the turnoff to Sandy Hook School, the makeshift memorial I first saw on Saturday has sprouted into a grief garden. Twenty-three Christmas trees, each one topped with a decorative angel, line the side of the road, adorned with ornaments and stockings inscribed with the names of the dead. Even at night, people keep coming, climbing the small hill to pay their respects. A middle-aged woman loses her composure and is consoled by a stranger whose cap identifies him as a member of the Billy Graham Prayer Team. “You’re allowed to cry,” he says, pulling her close. “You’re allowed to cry.”

On Saturday, I speculated that the Newtown memorialists are driven by a need to commemorate an event that seemed to come from an entirely different world—that they were reaching out to touch an incomprehensible void. Now, all the candles and tributes seem more like an effort to refute that void, as if solidarity is the only weapon we have against senseless violence like this.

Elsewhere in America, in private and public conversations, the Sandy Hook shooting has become the catalyst for a wider discussion about policy and our national character. Which is fine. It’s natural and healthy that events like this prompt self-examination. The Sandy Hook shooting is the sort of inflection point that, throughout our history, has led us to choose what sort of country we are, want to be, and will become.

The people of Newtown have made their choice. Here, at least, people are still caught in the initial shock wave, a place where emotions are still raw and the solutions being discussed aren’t political ones. All over the city, windows bear a simple sign. “We are Sandy Hook,” it proclaims. “We choose love.”

Crime is Slate’s new crime blog. Like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter @slatecrime.

The recent shootings in Newtown, Conn., have led many people to characterize school violence as a modern affliction, a byproduct of our national obsession with guns and media violence. But the deadliest school-related massacre in American history happened in 1927, at an elementary school in Bath, Mich. A school board member named Andrew Kehoe, upset over a burdensome property tax, wired the building with dynamite and set it off in the morning of May 18. Kehoe’s actions killed 45 people, 38 of whom were children.

At the time, Bath was a small farm community with under 300 residents. The town had “an elevator, a little drugstore, and you knew everybody within 20 miles,” as one survivor of the attack recalled in 2009. Perhaps its most modern feature was the Bath Consolidated School, which opened its doors in 1922 and brought all the region’s students under one roof. In The Bath School Disaster, published in 1927 and available online here, Kehoe’s neighbor, Monty J. Ellsworth, noted that the consolidated school was markedly superior to the “common country school” that preceded it. It was also more expensive, and the township raised property taxes in order to repay the school’s bonds.

This upset Andrew Kehoe. A local farmer with training as an electrical engineer, he was a severe, stubborn man fond of drastic solutions to small problems; Ellsworth writes that Kehoe once shot a noisy dog and killed his own horse because it was lazy. In an article from May 20, 1927, the New York Times noted that Kehoe “was known through the countryside as a ‘dynamite farmer’.  Neighbors detailed how he was continually setting off blasts on his farm, blowing up stumps and rocks.”

Kehoe really hated taxes, and joined the school board to argue against them. The Times reported that, as a board member, he “appeared to have a tax mania and fought the expenditure or money for the most necessary equipment.” In 1926, he ran for town clerk, but his obstructionist reputation preceded him, and he was defeated. His loss in that race, coupled with the news that his farm was facing foreclosure, appears to have triggered his plan.

Over the course of several months, Kehoe gained access to the school and packed it tight with dynamite that was wired together so expertly that, after the explosion, investigators could hardly believe that Kehoe had acted alone. A few days before the attack, Kehoe visited Monty Ellsworth for a round of target shooting; afterwards, Ellsworth looked inside Kehoe’s vehicle and saw “a box in the back about two feet long and 12 or 14 inches wide which was about half full of rifle shells. I believe there must have been a thousand of them.”

The school exploded at 8:45 a.m. on May 18. At that point, after killing his wife and destroying his farm, Kehoe hopped inside an explosive-laden truck and drove to the school. Thirty minutes after the initial attack, while conversing with the superintendent, he detonated the truck bomb, killing himself, the superintendent, and a few others. Later, investigators found that a short circuit in Kehoe’s wiring was the only thing that stopped the attack from claiming more lives, as “more than 500 pounds of dynamite and several sacks of gunpowder were found under a portion of the building that remained standing.” If the explosion had gone as planned, Bath’s entire downtown might have been destroyed.

Like the Newtown school shooting, the Bath bombing was a major news story. Ellsworth writes, “I think we had the greatest demonstration of American sympathy ever awarded a grief stricken community. Thousands and thousands of cars stayed in line for hours. I have a gas station one-half mile west of Bath on the main road to Lansing, where there was a double row of traffic all day. In the afternoon it took about four hours to get three miles, but I don't remember … hearing a single horn sounded. It was like a great funeral procession. Everyone's heart was filled with sympathy.”

But the attention was short-lived. In an interview this summer with the Christian Science Monitor, Arnie Bernstein, author of 2009’s Bath Massacre: America’s First School Bombing, noted that “there wasn't a media frenzy like today. The media came in and left. Three days after it happened, Lindbergh took off and flew to Paris, and that part of it was over.”

It took the people of Bath much longer to recover. In 2009, NPR went back to the town and found several survivors of the attack still living. Now in their 90s, the survivors noted that “we still look at ourselves as survivors. So you look after one another differently, because you know that the absolute unthinkable can happen, even going to school.”

An inquest eventually determined that Kehoe had acted alone. Amid the ruins of Kehoe’s farm, they found a sign attached to a fence. It read: “Criminals are made, not born.”

Read the rest of Slate’s coverage of the Sandy Hook school shooting.

On Friday, not long after the elementary school shootings in Newtown, Conn., an Indiana man announced his plans to “kill as many people as he could” at the local school where his wife worked. When police raided his house, they found almost 50 guns. On Sunday, St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Newtown was evacuated during noon mass after authorities received a bomb threat. Are we facing a potential deluge of copycat crimes?

The idea that crime begets crime is one of those things that feels true. This year, we’ve seen shootings in movie theaters, malls, schools, and other locations; it’s easy to believe that these must all somehow be linked. And research on mass murder has indicated “a probable contagion effect in which the actions of some perpetrators may be triggered by reports of other events.”

But it’d be wrong to assume that we’re going to see a new wave of school shootings. The research on contagion violence and copycat crime isn’t very rigorous, and generally lacks specifics on how, exactly, one incident begets another. As Armando Simon put it in a paper published in the journal Psychological Reports, “a researcher lacks the wherewithal to establish the experimental controls within society whereby a stimulus-response relationship can be experimentally and unquestionably demonstrated.” Often, links are invented ex post facto by observers desperate to see causal connections where they may not actually exist, as in the hysteria after the release of the movie Natural Born Killers. Criminals can also cite these links as a convenient way to explain their actions (“the media made me do it”). You can spin the data however you want.

Though the public uses the term loosely and unscientifically, researchers say a true copycat crime must incorporate a key aspect of the original crime, and must be clearly influenced by media coverage of the first crime. Ray Surette, a criminologist at Central Florida University, has been studying copycat crime for decades. Surette has found that most copycats are career criminals who specialize in nonviolent burglaries and similar malfeasance. These criminals study crimes so as not to get caught—a learning-from-others’-mistakes approach. The last thing they want is to get media attention.

In 2010, after three successive violent attacks on children in China, Surette told the website LiveScience that media coverage of crimes like these can serve as a “rudder” for existing criminal energies. “You have a disturbed or already-established offender who most likely was going to do something anyway,” he said. “What the media attention does is it shapes what sort of incident it is. Someone who's going to take a knife into an elementary school is probably disturbed enough that if he hadn't done that, he would have done something else.” In other words, the media doesn’t cause crime so much as direct it.

In 1984, scholars S.E. Pease and C.T. Love identified four different types of copycat criminals: mode copiers, who hone their actions based on media reports; group copiers, who act in concert with each other; mentally ill or deficient copiers; and terrorists or threateners, who want to stoke fear.

Incidents like the Newtown shooting seem to bring out the threateners. After the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., Armando Simon found that while bomb threats against schools increased significantly, the actual number of school homicides did not. Of course, it’s possible that the homicide rate stayed flat because the police arrested the would-be killers before they had a chance to strike. It’s hard to tell—and that’s the problem.

As for the Indiana man who threatened to shoot up his wife’s school, it turns out that he was just mouthing off during a fight with his wife, and that most of the guns in his house were antiques. “If people followed through on all the threats they've ever made—things said in anger that they don't really mean and regret—our population in this country would be half of what it is,” said the town’s interim police chief. “This was something he said in the heat of an argument. He hadn't been plotting this.”