Why I’m For and Against Gun Control
The difference between fixing problems and political posturing
[TW: Serious discussion of suicide, murder, and domestic violence.]
Leah Libresco wrote a good editorial about gun control— and it captures well the main reasons you don’t see me advocating strong gun control policies. These policies are, by and large, aimed at being political candy by upsetting people some groups of voters imagine as their enemies. But like any policies crafted for reasons other than solving a real problem, their effects are completely haphazard, and almost never have anything to do with the real problems facing our country: in this case, 33,000 gun deaths per year.
Unfortunately, we do very little about this — and in many cases legally can’t, because the NRA (which is also, as far as I can tell, entirely interested in political candy for its supporters and profit for its funders) has gotten Congress to effectively ban research on anything which may be related to gun deaths.
But her article does a good job of highlighting what we do know. Gun deaths fall overwhelmingly into three categories: suicides (the majority, not just the plurality!), domestic violence, and gang violence. Mass shootings dominate news cycles, but very few people die in them compared to these.
Each of these requires a very different kind of solution. Gun-related suicide attempts are different from other suicide attempts in that they are far more likely to be successful: this is the main reason why in the US, women are three times more likely than men to attempt suicide, but men are 3.5 times more likely than women to die from suicide. Guns in the home pose a particular risk, because most suicide attempts are best understood as acute symptoms of a chronic underlying problem: intense suicidal ideation comes and goes, and if a person is stopped from committing suicide during that attack (typically lasting minutes to hours), the attack passes and the desire to die stops. This is why suicide fences on bridges make a difference: not because you can’t climb over them, but because that point of resistance is enough to make many people turn back. Having a gun in the home sharply reduces the time required between initial ideation and irreversible action. It’s a good guess that this lack of time delay is a major contributor to the death rate — but we don’t know, because research on this has been (legally) limited.
(NB: Not all suicides fall into this category. People who have made systematic plans to end their lives due to deteriorating chronic illness, for example, are experiencing something completely different. For that matter, people who rush into near-certain death to save others are also committing suicide — again, of a profoundly different sort. Suicide is not a disorder; a suicide attempt is an event, which can (among other things) be a symptom of another disorder.)
Domestic violence suffers from a different problem, although ultimately a related one to suicide: murder happens at the endpoint of an escalation chain, and the symptoms can often be detected much earlier on. In the case of suicide, the failure to detect is often cultural, tied to a need to “be strong” and otherwise conceal symptoms; in the case of domestic violence, a victim’s need to conceal symptoms is not merely cultural but a survival requirement, and an abuser’s need to conceal them is part of a broader system of abuse. Interventions here need to take a completely different form, not only in recognizing patterns of abuse, but in giving people tools to escape it. (It’s never as simple as “just leaving;” if it were, abuse would be a really minor problem. One important note: the period immediately after leaving an abuser is the time of highest risk of murder.)
Gang violence is much more different, and I suspect is more amenable to economic and societal solutions. Underground economies, after all, emerge when “above-ground” economies are for one reason or another unavailable. The resolution of disputes with violence, the requirement of a certain level of violence to protect oneself, and the emergence of local warlords as the closest thing to an arbiter of law are all things that happen when other forms of law and justice are not available. And indeed, the people caught up in gang violence have good reason to believe that going to the police or the courts would be the worst thing they could do in nearly any circumstances: they are as likely as not to be targeted themselves.
This brings up a fourth category which Libresco didn’t mention: police violence. 963 people were killed by police in the US in 2016; no other first-world country comes close. This includes an unknown number (research made difficult by deliberate concealment of information) of people who were unarmed or lightly armed, who could have been captured without violence, and likely would have been using the police methods common in other first-world countries. (NB that police training time on firearms averages at least 3x the amount of training time they receive on de-escalation; this isn’t just a matter of difference of circumstances, there’s a very explicit focus on certain tactics here.) In fact, one critical argument for having heavily armed police, and for the need for routine use of lethal force, is how heavily-armed criminals are in the US, which (it is argued) makes the US case fundamentally incomparable to other first-world cases.
It makes perfect sense to regulate guns, but those regulations should be tailored to attain some specific objective, not attempts to score political points while doing nothing useful.
My net conclusion is this: It makes perfect sense to regulate guns, but those regulations should be tailored to attain some specific objective, not attempts to score political points while doing nothing useful. For example, I would be quite happy to see licensing, training, and insurance requirements similar to those for driving — which killed 35,000 people in the US last year, on a par with guns. I’d be fine with a central database of rifling patterns. I’d be actively happy to see research on things that could reduce the risk of gun suicides and accidental deaths, and regulations tied to those. But on the other hand, I find regulations around nonsensical categories like “assault weapons” (a term made up for political press, not actually a kind of gun), or the “we demand more paperwork for the sake of making this harder!” approach that California takes, to be a poor use of all our time and energy — and, like the NRA’s flagrant disregard for the reality that guns are dangerous to the public, actively counter to the real public need of reducing the number of dead and injured.
