Argument for Guns

Gun culture

I don’t have an especially strong argument in favor of guns, but I’ll try. The first point in their favor is that people simply enjoy guns — they use them for hunting, they join gun clubs and associations, they take part in shooting tournaments, they collect guns (like other people collect stamps), and have magazines and shows and exhibitions. Gun enthusiasts have formed a vibrant community in the U.S., the kind that De Tocqueville would have served up as evidence of a healthy republic. These people value gun safety and believe that murder is wrong, and the guns they enjoy rarely hurt anyone. To them, the political campaign to destroy their hobby is arbitrary and sadistic, like if someone tried to ban baseball or dancing.

Guns for self-defense

Guns also have a second, more straightforwardly positive use as a self-defense tool: the most powerful means of self-defense that exists. While it would be nice if people could guarantee their own defense without guns, the existence of guns means that only guns are sure to be effective — the saying “don’t bring a knife to a gunfight” illustrates this dynamic. As the ultimate individual weapon, guns provide an absolute kind of self-determination which explains a large part of their appeal. Individuals will always possess the best possible incentive to maintain their own lives, and can determine their own risk preferences for doing so much more competently than any government. Many people thus trust the government to protect them in some circumstances (with a military, with a police force, by dis-incentivizing criminal activity through the criminal justice system), but not in others (at home, at night). People may have different risk preferences that lead them to carry a concealed pistol at all times, or to not own any guns at all. People who own guns are simply more averse to the risks of delegating their personal safety to the care of their government, and the government should respect the decisions of individuals when it comes to their own safety.

I won’t argue that guns are effective for self-defense, mostly because we don’t know. Like most issues with gun violence, the data is lacking, largely due to a highly polarized political debate that has made objective study apparently impossible. It’s plausible that a higher percentage of guns in homes and on persons would lead to less violence, if “bad people” are discouraged from acting in their nature, but it’s equally plausible that more guns lead to more violence, and that gun violence is not committed so much by “bad people” as it is by ordinary people having a bad moment and a gun. I also won’t try to argue for the popular “arm the good guys” line of thinking. Although good guys with guns do occasionally save lives (as happened at the Texas Muhammed Cartoon festival), this doesn’t happen frequently, and is probably mostly offset by negligent accidents and an increased likelihood of impulsive violence (e.g. the Kansas City guy who killed two Indian men; Plaxico Burress). The popularity of “good guys with guns” as support for gun ownership is largely due to a dearth of positive arguments for gun ownership, but it is also consonant with the feelings of most legal gun owners: they bought the gun for protection or recreation (good things), they themselves are good people, and it couldn’t hurt to have more people like them out in the world. The best I can say to that is… maybe? In any case, I’m neither advocating for “arming the good guys” nor relying on it as a justification for gun ownership.

So that’s the positive case for guns. But almost nothing depends on it. Guns exist, people want them, and taking them away from people will be very difficult and could involve the creation of Orwellian state monitoring and enforcement structures that are worse than any problem they might solve. If there were a way to ban guns that was effective and didn’t destroy the possibility of individual liberty, it would solve the problems of gun violence. But if people want to end gun violence through gun control, they should advocate for the total ban on guns.

Argument Against Gun Control

Short of a total ban on guns, virtually all of the most popular gun control policies that have been tried or suggested have no hope of preventing gun violence. This is because gun control solutions mostly assume that gun violence is attributable to discrete features of the weapons and to a legal regime that fails to restrict who is allowed to legally purchase guns. I don’t, however, believe that these are actually important factors in gun violence. Instead, gun violence is the result of cultural forces requiring cultural solutions — primarily by eliminating black markets that are regulated by gun violence, improving public education, and by ceasing to glorify and sensationalize mass shootings.

Addressing Mass shootings

I believe gun violence is better treated as at least two separate problems — mass shootings and daily gun violence — which each require different solutions. Most of the national political outrage about gun violence follows mass shooting events, and there is a predictable call for increased background checks, waiting periods, mechanical restrictions on types of guns such as magazine or ammunition restrictions or assault weapon bans, storage requirements like trigger locks or safes, legal liability changes, and bans on guns, including partial bans like “No Fly, No Buy.” But it’s striking that, in almost every case, the political solutions that are generated in the wake of the mass shooting would not have prevented that exact shooting.

Consider the Newtown, CT massacre: there the shooter killed his mother and stole her gun, then went to Sandy Hook elementary school and killed twenty-five people, mostly small children, and himself before police ever arrived on the scene. In response, a highly emotional President Obama recommended (1) background checks; (2) an assault weapons ban; (3) restrictions on magazine size; and (4) funding for mental health services. It should be clear that background checks wouldn’t have made a difference — the legal owner of the guns was murdered. And mental health services may be helpful, but I’m skeptical of the nation’s ability to effectively identify, diagnose, and treat potential mass shooters in a way that would solve the problem. Not only are these mentally ill would-be-mass-shooters unlikely to be very enthusiastic about their treatment, but mental illness is not remotely the only reason people commit mass shootings — some do it for political reasons, for notoriety, or out of anger. That leaves the assault rifle ban and magazine restrictions.

Since the assault rifle is common to mass shootings and commonly a subject of proposed bans, it’s helpful to consider the assault rifle and what advantages it provides a mass shooter, and ultimately whether any of those advantages are highly relevant in most shootings. The assault rifle has a few advantages over other types of guns. These are: powerful bullets, an extremely long range of accurate fire, and large magazines that are commercially available. I don’t believe that any of the other features of the gun — pistol grips, collapsable stocks, etc. — are going to be very relevant to how many people can be killed with the gun.

First advantage: the range and accuracy. The U.S. Army gives its infantrymen M-16 and M-4 rifles, which shoot bullets with great force for a long distance, on fully automatic firing (automatic weapons are mostly illegal in the U.S., which means that most guns in the U.S. are semi-automatic, i.e. one bullet is fired each time the trigger is pulled). Since the U.S. Army is frequently shooting at people it can’t see at all because they are hidden and far away, their rifles are good weapons for their purposes. But this distance/accuracy feature is almost never a feature of mass shootings. In one of the most deadly mass shootings in U.S. history, a shooter at Virginia Tech used two small-caliber handguns with conventional magazines to kill 32 people and wound 17 others. If the mass shooting didn’t require the shooter to be accurate at long distances, the assault rifle was likely not more deadly than other guns.

The next advantage: powerful bullets. AR-15s (the civilian version of the M-16, used in the shootings at Sandy Hook and the Pulse nightclub) shoot bullets with more force than some handguns. But it’s not like handguns are ineffective toys. In New York State, there is a hunting season in which permitted residents can hunt bears with .45 caliber handguns. And even the smallest caliber handgun, a .22, was used to assassinate President Lincoln. The bottom line is that all bullets are deadly — an AR-15 might be slightly more deadly, but that really only has the effect of making shooting victims slightly more dead.

Finally, the last advantage of the “assault rifle” is commercially available high-capacity magazines. A magazine is just a box that uses springs to push bullets into the chamber of the gun. They can be 3-D printed, or just hand-crafted; the technology is not complex. The AR-15 has a 30 round magazine that is standard, which is a lot of bullets. But there are lots of pistols with high capacity magazines. The Springfield XDM, for example — a mid-range handgun that is popular for being a highly reliable gun that isn’t too expensive ($600, compared to at least $1000 for an AR-15 type gun) — comes with 19 round magazines for the 9mm and 13 round magazines for the .45. Changing out magazines is very easy and fast, and those are just the standard magazines. Extended magazines are easy to buy or make, so even though the commercial availability of the 30-round magazine is convenient, there’s no reason to think that its irreplaceable, or that equally dangerous alternatives wouldn’t be more commercially successful if the AR-15 were off the shelves.

Ultimately, the advantages of the AR-15 and similar assault rifles are not so great or so unique that they justify a particular ban on those weapons. Basically any rifle can be adapted to take high capacity magazines, any handgun or shotgun can be as deadly, and most mass shootings don’t require the particular advantages of these rifles anyway. If the AR-15 and other assault rifles were banned, people would use other types of guns (including handguns and shotguns) and would be as or almost as effective at killing people. The question, as it pertains to mass shootings, should really be whether the marginal gain in lives saved from forcing shooters to switch from “assault weapons” to other firearms is justified by what it would take to restrict assault weapons. I doubt it, but reasonable people could disagree. But the costs of such a ban shouldn’t be overlooked. We should anticipate that if assault weapons were banned in an effective way, there would be a lot of people punished for either deliberately or unknowingly keeping and owning banned guns.

Addressing day-to-day gun violence

Most gun violence, however, does not occur in mass shootings. It takes the form of gang and drug-related violence, in-home accidents, and what I will callously call everyday crimes. These phenomena are less complicated, in my opinion, than mass shootings. It is implausible to think that most people who intend to use guns in criminal activity would ever register those weapons with the government. The more likely anyone is to use a gun for a crime, the less likely they are to comply with background checks, registration, and safety regulations. But, fortunately, gang and drug-related gun violence, like the kind wrecking Chicago, is largely solved by ending the war on drugs and improving public education. By removing the ability of criminal enterprises to make money by selling banned products in a black market, you also remove the occasion to settle commercial disputes in that black market through violence. The advantages of legal markets seems obvious, and it is incomprehensible to me why a wealthy society with strong institutions would choose a legal regime of prohibition that deprives the inevitable market participants of access to those institutions which do a great job of regulating virtually every other commercial interaction in our country. Once illicit drugs are available through normal commercial markets, there won’t be gun violence on anything like the same scale we are seeing now. Anyone who really cares about saving lives that would otherwise be ended by guns should support drug legalization. And obviously, improving public education would help create better opportunities for people who would otherwise turn to violent black markets to make a living. I have ideas for improving education, but will not address them here.

If gun control can’t solve gun violence, can anything? I’m optimistic. The two programs I can support, as actually having some possibility of reducing gun violence without simultaneously ceding an enormous amount of power to the government, have to do with culture and internalizing externalities.

Cultural capital is usually underrated in our political discourse. We tend to assume that our country and government are good because clever people have come up with clever solutions that aren’t apparently available to other people in other countries. That this is not the truth should be apparent from fifty years of trying to help African economies grow, or from the massive failure in self-government following the institution of a parliamentary democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan. What really matters is traditions of mutual respect and trust and a respect for rule of law. By creating better education policies, ending mass incarceration policies like the War on Drugs, and creating stronger social bonds in general, we can address all the gun violence that is caused by a lack of social capital. People who have a stake in the society, and who are taught to live within the bounds of the law, rarely commit crimes with guns. People who have bad prospects for their futures, or who see better options in the black market, do commit a lot of gun crimes. Sexual violence solutions provide a good analogy for alternative, culture-based gun violence solutions. No one thinks current levels of sexual violence are optimal, but since no one is willing to ban sex, the proposed solutions to sexual violence look at educating young people about consent, spreading respect for sexual autonomy, and pursuing legal rather than extralegal remedies. These cultural improvements are the best hope to reduce day-to-day gun violence.

Unfortunately, these types of cultural solutions probably don’t work that well for mass shootings. Mass shootings are also a cultural phenomenon, but the particular cultural problem is not as easily rectified. Data shows that school shootings have increased pretty dramatically since the very popular Columbine High School shootings in 1998. It might be good to consider whether the sensationalized media coverage and semi-glorification of the shooters contributes to the cultural phenomenon and whether a different approach could reduce the power of the mass-shooting cultural idea. But even that doesn’t do much about crazy people, like the schizophrenic man who shot senator Gabrielle Giffords, or terrorists, like Omar Matteen.

A more positive proposal, which I am sure is not popular among most people who don’t support gun control, is an industry insurance fund that compensates victims of gun violence and forces gun owners to pay for the collateral societal damage that is a function of legal gun ownership. Right now, a gun owner can buy a gun, which is made possible by the legal ownership of guns in this country. One aspect of legal gun ownership is that there will be some amount of gun violence. Since gun owners who don’t commit gun violence also don’t currently bear any of the costs of gun violence, the costs of gun violence are an externality imposed on society by gun owners. To internalize this cost, an industry insurance fund could be set up by the federal government, into which every gun and ammunition manufacturer would contribute funds that would cover the societal costs of gun violence. There are a few ways this could be done, in detail: gun manufacturers could be forced to pay for each instance of violence perpetrated by something they manufactured (which gives an incentive to the industry to come up with ways to reduce their liability); or gun manufacturers could have their contribution determined by their proportional share of national gun sales (which is less fair, but probably much easier to administer); or a combination. But however it is done, guns and ammunition would be more expensive in proportion to the amount of gun violence costs the industry is forced to cover. While this scheme would account for some of the costs of gun violence while also respecting individual autonomy, I readily admit that it doesn’t help victims of gun violence in the way I think they would prefer to be helped, and it is also a bit unfair to the gun industry that it is singled out for this kind of treatment when other industries that kill more people (like the automobile industry, or the sugar industry) are untouched.

Rhetorical Features of the U.S. Gun Control Debate

Why focus on gun deaths?

Every year, gun violence kills approximately ten thousand Americans. For much of the country, this death toll is proof of an epidemic of gun violence for which the solution is to severely limit gun ownership as well as the types of guns which can be legally owned. Gun violence is surely tragic and senseless, but it’s far from clear that the majority of gun violence can be prevented by restrictions on gun ownership. Moreover, the dysfunctional national debate on gun control is, at best, ineffective at curbing gun violence and may possibly extenuate gun violence by crowding out more effective solutions to the problem and by creating a rhetorical environment that enlivens and sustains a “gun culture.”

Because of this dynamic, gun control is highly contentious and gets more attention than it rationally should. After all, there are much more pressing problems in this country. Consider, for example, that there are about thirty thousand traffic accident deaths in the US, which is about three times as many as die from gun violence. So why aren’t we obsessed with car safety like we are with gun safety? While there may not be a gun control solution to gun violence, there are much more likely to be car control solutions to car accident deaths. We could easily ban radios and display screens in cars, mandate breathalyzers in cars so they can’t be started by impaired drivers, stop the distracting use of armed government agents who monitor speed limits, enable remote monitoring of cars for unsafe driving, or force cell phone companies and car companies to work together to end distracted driving. In fact, the car accident problem is so much more severe than the gun violence problem that we would be justified in choosing a car control solution that is projected to be just over one-third as effective as a comparable gun control solution. The difference is that we know for sure that the vast majority of car accidents are due to alcohol and distracted driving, whereas we don’t really have a great idea about what actually causes gun violence.

Given that we understand the causes of deaths attributable to car accidents much better than we do for deaths attributable to gun violence, we should expect our proposed solutions to car accident deaths to be much more effective than our proposed solutions to gun violence. Combine that with the fact that people are three times more likely to die from a car accident and it seems clear that we should be focusing on more heavily regulating cars rather than guns. But the legislative approach does not bear this out: the use of guns, but not cars, during a crime can result in more severe penalties; to own guns, but not cars, requires character references and federal and state background checks in many states; convicted felons are banned from owning guns, but not cars (and there is no penalty for repeat car accident offenders). Companies promoting ride-share and automated driving, both of which would reduce impaired and distracted driving fatalities, are energetically resisted by many of the same political constituencies who clamored for a “No Fly No Buy” law following the Pulse nightclub shooting, which was perpetrated by a man who was not on the No Fly list. This is not about the relative utility of cars versus guns — cars are much more beneficial to society than guns are. But if we want to save lives, cars are obviously a better place to start than guns. In this light, it almost seems irrational to focus on gun control.

Do “reasonable restrictions” exist?

Nevertheless, gun control advocates persist. And their persistence creates in their opponents a logical, predictable reaction. It’s likely that when gun owners hear politicians talk about “reasonable restrictions” or “common sense gun control,” they know that whatever that reasonable restriction is proposed wouldn’t have done anything effectively to prevent whatever tragedy just happened. So advocating for “reasonable restrictions” in response to gun violence just convinces gun owners that gun control advocates intend to continue introducing new restrictions on gun ownership until gun violence diminishes to some acceptable level. But if their gun control solutions aren’t likely to be effective, it means that there will never be an end to gun control until guns are banned. The practical result of advocating for gun control is to advocate for a total gun ban. Which means that gun control is an absolutist position. Accordingly, by suggesting solutions that their adversaries believe are meaningless, gun owners are ideologically prevented from making concessions because they know that they will never gain anything by making concessions.

An analogy to the abortion debate

Here an analogy to the abortion debate is helpful — abortion-rights people already know that their ideological opponents cannot accept anything but a complete victory. Anti-abortion people think abortion is murder, so you know from the outset that they aren’t interested in making concessions: they are ideologically prevented from making concessions by the way they’ve defined the debate. So when an anti-abortion legislature makes a law that has anything to do with abortion, you can be pretty sure that it restricts access to abortions (no matter what they say it does). And more than that, you can be pretty sure that they will not stop until they achieve the total ban that is the inevitable goal of their ideological position. It isn’t any different with guns. If I’ve accurately described the feelings of most gun owners, it means that most gun owners perceive most gun control proposals as at best naïve, and at worst as duplicitous. If I am confident that gun control advocates won’t stop trying to restrict gun ownership until gun violence ends, then I already know that they will never stop until they get their complete and total ban, because I know that only a total ban will end gun violence. So why give any ground, on anything? Maybe “they’re coming for my guns” is actually an intelligent and legitimate response to every gun control proposal.

The experience of owning a gun

And it’s not just the theory of gun control that makes this belief a rational one for gun owners. In many jurisdictions with governments that support gun control, policymakers are so convinced that gun control is the only way to reduce gun violence that they have responded to various legal limits on gun control by enacting extralegal programs that seek to reduce the overall number of gun owners. They are sure that fewer registered gun owners will translate to less gun violence. But their policy zeal is not only not likely to be effective in reducing gun violence, it is also unlikely to succeed on its terms — it will not reduce gun ownership, or soften the positions of gun owners. Take Albany County in New York, for example.

To buy a handgun there, you must get fingerprinted ($100), take a four-hour gun safety course ($50), obtain passport-style photos ($12), obtain a driver’s license abstract (about $10), and get four character references who have known you for at least one year, who live in the county, and who aren’t related to you. Then you have to get two distinct copies of the application (filled out in black pen — if you use blue pen, they won’t accept it — seriously), with all the answers perfectly filled out (for example, if you say the purpose of seeking a gun permit is for “home defense,” according to an Albany gun safety course instructor, your application will be rejected), get each copy signed by each character reference, get each copy separately notarized, and then turn in the application (with $3 fee) to the local police department between 1:00pm and 3:30pm on Thursdays only. If there is any problem with the application, no matter how technical, they will hand it back to you without explanation. But if you do it right, typically it takes about six to twelve months to get approved for a permit once you submit the application. There are two important points to make about this process. First, it seems unlikely to prevent people from obtaining handguns if they really want to own one. By adopting this deliberately difficult process, Albany guarantees that it will discourage some law-abiding people from obtaining a handgun. But the people who will use guns for crime are the least likely people to be discouraged from either completing the process or just acquiring a gun illegally in another state, or from a registered owner in the state. And these rules only apply to handguns — even in Albany, you can still buy a shotgun at a Wal-Mart with only a five to ten minute, no-cost, federal background check. Second, this Kafka-esque process for legally obtaining a handgun makes guns more valuable than they otherwise would be. Anyone who makes it through the application process is going to be set on buying a gun, no matter the cost. And someone who doesn’t make it through the process will be convinced that the government is trying to ban guns, which makes getting a gun seem even more urgent. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that gun sales spike after every major proposal for new gun controls.

So Albany County clearly doesn’t want its citizens owning handguns, and they are willing to confuse and humiliate them in order to achieve that goal. Which means that not only do residents know that Albany County is willing to go to unethical lengths to restrict access to guns, they also know, with certainty, that these restrictions aren’t very effective, and will only frustrate the easily frustrated. Because anyone could get a gun easily if they were not concerned with legality. The result is that people have no confidence that the government respects their right to own a gun, and simultaneously no confidence in the government’s ability to prevent the wrong people from getting guns. Gun control measures, in this sense, actually make people want a gun more, since it appears that they will be increasingly less capable of acquiring a gun as time goes by, while the value of a gun in the wrong hands increases proportionally.

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 (unless someone else does something about it), while sustaining a vibrant culture of gun ownership that feeds on the external threat of gun control, all while other pressing issues of national importance are neglected. Unless gun control can be definitively shown to reduce overall violence (and not just gun violence), gun control as a national program will never succeed.