It’s not gun control. It’s murder control.
You live in a country where there are a lot of guns, about 89 of them for every 100 people. There also happens to be a lot of shootings. There’s been an average of over one mass shooting every day so far this year, in fact.
This naturally leads to a lot of unproductive debate between pro-gun and anti-gun folk. And this often misses the point: we should be concerned about reducing the number of murders, not about banning guns.
As far as I can tell, there are three ways of reducing the number of murders:
- Make it harder to murder someone.
- Make it easier to prevent yourself being murdered.
- Impose a massive penalty on those who attempt murder.
Let’s look at each of these individually.
Make it harder to murder.
One way of making it harder to physically murder someone is by making it harder to acquire the tools that make it easier to murder someone. An example would be to restrict access to guns.
Unfortunately, the fact that this approach tends to be rather successful is of no use to us, as any attempts to introduce gun control are stymied.
Of course, even if guns were banned altogether, people who still really wanted one would be able to get their hands on one. It should be noted, though, that this isn’t an effective argument against gun control because there are a lot of people who would use one if they had one, but who wouldn’t be bothered enough to get one if it was too difficult to do so.
Another non-argument against gun control is that it would mean that only criminals would have guns. Which is true. But criminals, unlike crazy, deranged people, mostly acquire guns not for the purpose of killing, but for the purpose of giving them the upper hand when negotiating with their victims. It makes being a criminal easier.
Having said all that, I think we can accept that making it harder to murder someone is not a solution to the problem that so many people get killed. Let’s consider the second solution.
Make it easier to stop murder.
Probably the most common approach here is to make it easier for everyone to carry guns with them, all of the time. Of course, it wouldn’t stop a TV cameraman from being shot point-blank in the back while at work (for that you’d need to make everyone wear bullet-proof vests, all of the time), but it would give potential victims an opportunity to defend themselves.
It would also put guns into the hands of all those crazy, deranged people who like to go and shoot guns at others, so it’s a flawed strategy.
Without performing the experiment it’s hard to know for sure, but I’m willing to bet that making it easier to stop murder by requiring everyone in society to carry a loaded firearm with them at all times would actually have the opposite effect.
That leaves one final solution.
Make the penalty for murder really high.
The penalty for murder is already pretty high. You could wind up dead when a gun-toting citizen shoots you first. You could get the death penalty, or life in prison. You might take the coward’s way out by killing yourself before the cops get to you.
Trouble is these penalties just aren’t high enough.
In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the character Raven travels around with a nuclear warhead in his motorbike sidecar, which is triggered by a dead man’s switch hooked up to his heart rate monitor. If he dies, everyone else does too. The idea, I suppose, is that it’s the ultimate deterrent.
It’s the anti-murder equivalent of the ultimate deterrent to vehicle accidents: mount a spike on the steering wheel pointed directly at the driver’s heart. The thinking goes that the road toll would instantly drop to zero, as everyone would start driving very, very carefully.
Would a nuclear deterrent to murder work in the real world? Let’s do the thought experiment. Imagine that everyone in society carries a nuclear warhead around with them at all times, hooked up to a dead man’s switch, just like Raven in Snow Crash. Would the murder rate instantly drop to zero as everyone started behaving very, very politely to each other?
Not on your nelly. It would be instant nuclear annihilation. Because one crazy, deranged guy would shoot someone just to see what happens.
Conclusion
I’ve figured it out! Reducing the murder rate is just a case of stopping all of those crazy, deranged people from committing acts of murder.
But we can’t do it by making it harder for them to have guns. And we can’t do it by making it easier for us to defend ourselves from them. Nor can we do it by imposing a massive penalty for murder.
We can only stop crazy, deranged people from committing acts of murder by reducing the number of crazy, deranged people in the world. And, as far as I can tell, there are three ways of doing that:
- Make it harder to become crazy and deranged.
- Make it easier to… oh bloody hell, never mind.
