Argument against guns
Why do I care about guns?
You once asked me, “Why do you really care about guns? Why are guns such an emotional topic for people who don’t own them and largely won’t be harmed by them?” I don’t know if there’s anything inherently about guns that I find objectionable. Personally, as a kid, I had a huge fascination with them, mostly as a result of watching action movies with my dad. But, mostly due to a lack of evidence, I still continue to believe that there’s a relationship between guns and gun violence. Although I concede that gun violence has myriad causes, until I see strong evidence to the contrary, guns play a big role in my mind.
When considering guns as a political topic, I wondered if my thoughts on guns are what they are because of the signaling I got from the progressive/Democrat movements that I’ve associated with for the last 15 years. Much of my political identity was formed by thinking I’m a progressive, associating with the major political progressive conversation, and adopting the slate of issues of the progressive movement. My guess is that’s pretty common for young people. One of these issues was diminishing gun violence, mostly through increased gun control.
Gun violence affects the constituents Democrats have come to include under their tent (inner-city, urban, minority, poor, so on) at a higher rate than people not in the Democratic tent. So a problem exists (gun violence), with a seemingly simple solution (gun control) that will help these constituents. And the people who are against this solution, don’t matter politically to this party. This is directly related to other points we’ve discussed above, namely, the disconnect between gun owners and the victims of gun violence. This is probably part of the reason it has become part of the slate of issues progressives talk about. Separating responsible gun ownership from guns used as part of gang activity is usually lost in this debate. I get why discussions about gun laws basically stall before they’re even started. I really wish it wasn’t that way. Maybe one starting place would be to include more language (and sincerely mean it) about ensuring gun owners’ rights in conversations about gun regulation.
As you say above about the existence of guns, “guns exist, people want them,” which is a reasonable statement. However, there are plenty of examples of things that exist, that people want, that we as a society have agreed have enough negative externalities that we regulate them (drugs, for instance). I imagine you may disagree with regulating those things, but the reality is that regulations exist. I can’t think of a reason to believe we’re at the optimal amount of regulation for guns with regard to gun violence (perhaps less is better, I don’t know!).
I also have a hard time believing that the only viable kind of gun control we can have is a complete ban. Taking examples like increased car safety in the last 50 years, regulations that led to declines in pollution and acid rain, I think we can find ways to smartly allow people to own guns while decreasing gun violence.
The Constitutional right to own guns
With regard to the constitutional right to own guns, this debate, where the proposition was “The Constitutional Right to Bear Arms has outlived its usefulness”, had a lot of interesting discussion, not directly bound by the traditional conversation about gun control. One particular line of thinking, put forth by Alan Dershowitz, struck me as important. He claims that the right to bear arms is a derivative right of a more important, primary right in a democratic society: the right to self defense. In codifying gun ownership in the constitution, the framers left us with a difficult bargain. We are one of 3 countries in the world with an explicit, constitutionally guaranteed, right to bear arms. Most other constitutions codify the right to self-defense, but not gun ownership. This feels particularly anachronistic in a modern society (much like the 3rd amendment about quartering soldiers). Perhaps it is time for the US to contend with the idea that, as described in the bill of rights, the right to bear arms (not to mention the lack of clarity about militias in a modern society), is no longer fit for use. If the constitution, instead, codified the right to self defense, each city or state could decide for itself whether their particular culture or environment was fit for gun ownership. If hunting, sporting and responsible self defense is part of a state’s culture, gun regulation can be lax. If a city has more urban, densely populated, high-crime areas, then maybe gun regulation needs to be tighter. A patchwork solution like this might not be best, but I think it’s worth considering.
The US stands out among its peer nations for gun deaths
Finally, I care about guns because the US stands out among its peer nations in its rate of gun deaths. Their use in suicides is higher than other industrial nations, but so is their use in homicides. Compared to other dangerous activities with negative externalities for society, like car driving, drugs, and alcohol, guns seem under-studied and under-regulated.
Argument for gun control
As I stated above, I’m less interested in arguing for gun control on its own merit and more interested in the idea that increased gun control (not a total gun ban) might lead to a decrease in gun violence. Separating gun violence between mass shootings and drug-related gang violence makes sense to me, as a starting point.
Causes of gun violence
The causes of gun violence and the role of gun control in curtailing gun violence are complex, and it is not clear (as you say, and I agree) that gun control will directly have an impact on gun violence. Your points about cultural causes and solutions make a lot of sense to me. And I tend to agree that social cohesion, civic trust, and a more tight-knight civil society will likely go a long way to address gun violence. However, short of major cultural change, economic reform, addressing inequality throughout society, major assimilation projects for immigrant communities, and a list of other, probably much more difficult, social projects, shouldn’t we try stricter gun laws as a way to stop violence from escalating and becoming deadly? It seems to me that making gun ownership more onerous and difficult, is a price worth paying if in return we get to save lives. Perhaps your idea about an industry insurance fund is a similar step in that direction.
Answering difficult questions about what works
We tried an assault weapons ban, the results were mixed, inconclusive, or perhaps entirely ineffective. So we should try something else. If the question “do more guns cause more violence” is difficult to answer, we shouldn’t stop trying to answer it. We shouldn’t keep the CDC, for example, from conducting research about this question. If all your arguments are right, that gun control as discussed today, would not affect mass shootings or day-to-day violence, the problem of gun violence still exists. Maybe more participation from gun rights advocates on the question of gun violence, where the answer is not simply, arm the good guys with guns to take on bad guys with guns (which comes off tone deaf and unsympathetic to the concerns of victims), could help with this.
Registrations could be a place to start. Gun tracing, as it works today, doesn’t seem fit to solve the problem it’s meant to solve. To use the car analogy, we register cars upon purchase. And require tags and titles be updated upon every subsequent exchange of ownership. I don’t know if it would have a material impact on gun deaths, but I think it’s worth considering the idea that stricter implementation of gun registration will have an impact on gun violence.
The causes of mass shootings are also complex, where the role of the media, copy cats, and mental health are all mashed up together. There are lots of other, non gun-control related, solutions that are worth trying. I agree with you that increased gun control seems like it’ll have little impact on mass shootings, but mass shootings also make up a fraction of all gun deaths in the US. Trying to reduce the lethality of guns may be a difficult goal, but again, worth trying. The positive uses of guns (hunting, self-protection, etc), if I’m thinking of them correctly, don’t require highly lethal guns. I understand that even “simple” guns can be highly deadly in a mass shooting, it seems prudent to limit the spread of highly lethal guns and ammunition.
The two options you propose as positive ways to address gun violence make sense to me. I agree that we should end the war on drugs. I also find the industry insurance fund to compensate gun violence victims, internalizing some of the negative externalities of gun ownership, an interesting idea. Although I worry about the political feasibility of this idea, since legal gun owners are likely to feel unfairly on the hook for the actions of mostly illegal gun owners.
Rhetorical features of the gun debate
Abortion analogy
I find the abortion analogy very helpful. And it helps clarify for me why the conversation around gun control stops before it even begins. Dovetailing from the point I made earlier about political constituencies among progressives and conservatives, it’s interesting to me to hear you outline a rational case for not conceding at all on gun control as a possible solution to gun violence to protect against a total gun ban.
The way you’ve described gun ownership in Albany is awful, and you’re right that it’s no way for a government to treat its citizens. Making a constitutional right, like gun ownership or voting, so onerous that it basically discourages people from participating in it, is a sleazy and unfit way to govern. So I don’t want gun regulation just for the sake of making people’s lives difficult. I want gun regulation that is proven to have an impact on gun violence.
Nothing short of a total gun ban?
It’s disheartening to think that we’ve come to this state of debate about guns in our country that we can’t consider any options between what we have now and a total gun ban. Both sides of the political debate are guilty of politicizing this issue. That doesn’t mean we should stop studying it to understand it. I still, badly, want good data and evidence to answer the question “do more guns cause more gun violence?” In lieu of good data, my intuition still leads me to believe that more guns are correlated with more gun deaths. I want to know, to what degree, does the introduction of guns escalate otherwise non-lethal interactions to ones where a gun death occurs? I don’t think we can un-invent guns. I don’t think we can stop every gun death. But I also have a hard time believing that gun regulation has nothing to do with the rate at which people die from guns. Or that we can do no more than we currently do to decrease gun deaths.
Increasing gun safety
We could invest in increasing gun safety. I don’t know the full history of the car safety revolution, but I doubt car companies did it on their own accord. I think government pressure, reporting on testing, increasing consumer awareness, and so on led to safer cars. Maybe government (although maybe not, since you’ve outlined the dangers of government working on such highly politicized issues) or some other organization could study and report on advances in gun safety. Which would then increase the demand from gun owners for safer guns.
The ultimate tool for self preservation
The idea that guns are the ultimate tool for self preservation, much like nuclear weapons for countries, is interesting to me. However, in effect, nuclear weapons have led to a sustained period of peace between countries. Guns don’t seem to have that effect, at least in the US. Then, is the right way to implement this tool for self preservation to make sure everyone has one? To see similar outcomes as nuclear proliferation? If so, we should probably spent some time studying, in detail, the result of increased gun ownership.
In the same way you say that “by not seriously considering any alternatives to gun control as a solution to gun violence, gun control advocates ensure that gun violence will not be reduced,” I would argue that by not seriously contending with the fact that the US has abnormally high levels of gun violence, gun owners are skirting their responsibility as citizens of this country. A better understanding of gun ownership and a commitment to protecting gun owners’ constitutional rights would go a long way in helping gun control advocates. A less antagonistic, defensive stance from gun owners about their role in addressing gun violence would be helpful also.
