Challenging America's Gun Culture

Public safety requires that we set limits on guns

The enormous power of the gun lobby in the United States, and the pervasiveness of its gun culture, makes it almost impossible to put a dent in the number of guns out there. Even if bans were enacted, hundreds of millions of guns would remain in the country. It would not be enough merely to prohibit new sales. We would have to take and destroy the guns already out there, an implausible move for the reasons already stated. Because a ban would leave so many weapons still in existence, it would take a long time before such a law would significantly reduce gun violence. A ban would still be worthwhile, though, even if we had to wait years to see a major decline in gun deaths. Because so many Americans prioritize individual liberty over public safety (about which more later), even modest gun control measures remain difficult to implement.

Yet there is a more serious problem: the focus of gun-ban discussion is on assault weapons, which account for only a small fraction of gun deaths. Most gun deaths involve handguns. If we were serious about greatly reducing gun violence, we would have to eliminate handguns. That’s not even on the table. It would be hard enough getting the assault weapons ban through. Too many people are convinced they need military-grade weapons in order to be safe and free. Handguns, by contrast, have at least a plausible claim for self-defense. The most we could conceivably do, therefore, is reduce the availability of weapons like the AR-15, perhaps forcing the next Adam Lanza to resort to a less powerful gun. We would save some lives, but we would leave most gun violence untouched.

Of course, there is more to gun control than bans. We could finally require criminal background checks for all gun purchases, closing the gun-show loophole. We could strengthen reporting requirements for mentally ill people who present a threat. We could enact waiting periods and limit the number of guns purchased at a time. But as long as our laws still make it relatively easy for almost anyone to get their hands on a weapon of mass destruction, we won’t even prevent massacres like Sandy Hook, let alone reduce the daily handgun killings in American cities.

So does that mean it’s pointless to go after assault weapons? Surely not – a ban would, over many years, make it harder for killers to get the weapons most convenient for mass murder. Shootings might not become less common, but they would cause fewer deaths. Maybe a killer brandishing a less powerful weapon would take longer to shoot through a locked school door, giving people more time to call the police and hide. Or maybe the need to stop and reload more often would slow down the killing, reducing the body count.

In any case, the anti-gun-control argument claiming that laws are useless for keeping guns away from criminals is false. In countries with restrictive gun laws, such as the U.K., criminals normally do not have guns at all, let alone high-powered ones. The laws make it hard to get them, so fewer people (including dangerous people) have them. Which explains why the U.K. has a lower murder rate despite having a higher overall violent crime rate: the weapons available to criminals are less deadly.

The moral of the story is that moderate gun control most definitely would reduce gun deaths, though not nearly as much as in countries with more comprehensive gun control. Note (from the last post) that the U.S. has a far higher murder rate – especially gun murder rate – than countries with stricter gun laws. If the gun-rights absolutists were right, the opposite would be true: we should have less homicide because we have more guns for self-defense. All those guns should be making us safer. Instead, they make us more likely to be killed.

Lest you object that this is not an apples-to-apples comparison, remember: those countries do not necessarily have less violent crime in general – it’s just that their crime kills fewer people because high-powered guns are generally unavailable. Moreover, the countries to which I compare the U.S. are much like ours in terms of political and economic systems. The biggest difference between us and them is that we have a lot more guns in circulation – and not coincidentally, a much higher murder rate.

This exposes another flawed argument for guns: the argument from self-defense. If guns were so useful for self-defense, we would have a much lower gun murder rate. Instead, a person is statistically much more likely to be killed with a gun than saved by one. But even if you don’t concede this point, you can still support moderate gun control measures. The implausibility of banning handguns means that Americans will always be able to keep a handgun in the unlikely event that they need one for self-defense. Of course, with more comprehensive gun control, most predators wouldn’t have guns to threaten people with, so people would have less need to have a gun for protection.

Even if gun-rights advocates could be persuaded of this point, though, they would still reject gun control. For Americans of a libertarian mindset, security is more an individual responsibility than a collective one. Instead of people surrendering some of their individual liberty for the greater security of all, they would prefer to retain maximum individual liberty even at the expense of public safety. Besides which, having a weapon can make a person feel more secure, even if the overall effect of permissive gun laws is to make him more likely to be killed.

The deeper philosophical basis for gun rights sees security as an individual prerogative rather than a public good. (This mindset tends to see many other things, such as access to housing, health care, and basic economic security, the same way – hence the link between gun-rights enthusiasm and conservative politics.) A perfectly valid argument, but not one that many gun-rights proponents are prepared to make. Instead they mostly persist in denying, against overwhelming evidence, that more guns means more killing. It would be more convenient for them if widespread gun ownership increased safety as well as liberty. If they cared more about intellectual honesty, though, they would simply argue that liberty trumps public safety.

Until or unless the prevalence of gun fanaticism abates in the U.S., the most we can realistically do is set limits on things like assault weapons, ammunition, number of guns purchased at a time, and the ability of criminals to evade background checks. As I argued in previous posts, our rights have limits. Every reasonable person admits this, even as they disagree on where those limits should be set. Setting limits on guns means overcoming an extreme, zealous, and well-funded gun lobby and its supporters. But it’s a goal worth the effort. 

No, really: Gun control works

9,369

Gun murders in the U.S.

14

Gun murders in the U.K.

Okay, the U.K. has a lot fewer (not less, fewer) people: 60,609,153 to America’s 298,444,215.

(Statistics from http://www.nationmaster.com/compare/United-Kingdom/United-States/People)

That’s four times the U.K.’s population.

Our gun murders are 669 times the U.K.’s.

But guns are supposed to keep us safer. Doesn’t the definition of safer include alive?

What’s wrong?

The Newtown massacre has breathed new life into the gun control debate. Proposed legislation in Congress would ban certain assault weapons as well as require criminal background checks for gun show purchases. Discussion of even the most modest gun control laws, however, infuriates many of America’s gun enthusiasts, who see the freedom to bear arms as an absolute right. They insist that laws can do nothing to prevent gun violence anyway, that taking weapons out of legal circulation serves only to disarm law-abiding people when they need a gun to defend themselves.

Gun control opponents cite evidence purporting to show that gun control leads to more crime victimization, while permissive gun laws prevent crime. While some of the common arguments against gun control are easily exposed for absurdity (see previous post), arguments citing crime statistics require more serious attention. If we really were endangering innocent people by placing restrictions on gun ownership, gun control proponents would have to reconsider their position. I certainly would.

A recently posted Internet video presents the crime-statistic aspect of the case against gun control. I frame my response as a follow-up to my last post. In it, I argued that the easy availability of guns contributes to America having a higher murder rate than countries that are otherwise much like ours. I maintain that position but have to amend the reasoning to account for the good points made in this video.

The speaker observes how strange it is that national leaders largely ignore the 50 percent reduction in violent crime in the U.S. over the past 20 years. Indeed, the statistics suggest we’re considerably safer (at least from violent crime) than we were 20 years ago. He validly questions the notion that Americans are extraordinarily violent, noting that the U.K. actually has a higher rate of violent crime than the U.S. (I assume for the sake of argument that his data is accurate and correctly interpreted.) He suggests that this demonstrates the fallacy of the argument for gun control laws like those in the U.K.

Yet then he makes a critical mistake. He acknowledges that despite its higher crime rate, the U.K. has a lower murder rate. That is not a problem – but he fails to account for the discrepancy. (He rather glibly elides the issue at 4:11.) As I will explain, that’s the flaw in his argument – indeed, a fatal flaw. It is hard to believe he just forgot to explain the discrepancy. More likely he understands the reason for it, but knows that mentioning it would undermine his argument.

But since he rightly cares so much about exposing deceptive interpretations, I will do my part to support his cause here.

How can a country have a higher violent crime rate than another country, but also have a lower murder rate? Because violence doesn’t have to mean death. Why does it just so happen that violence in countries with strict gun control laws produces fewer deaths? Because assailants in such countries usually have less-deadly weapons at their disposal. More people get assaulted, but fewer get killed – because, contrary to the anti-gun-control dogma, gun control does indeed make the deadliest weapons harder for people, including the bad guys, to get.

If it weren’t so, we’d see as many or more gun crimes in the U.K. (and other gun-control countries) as we see here. After all, they're just as (or more) prone to violence, right? Indeed, we’d see more gun deaths – according to gun-rights proponents, banning weapons means leaving innocent people in greater danger from armed criminals, meaning that gun-control countries should have higher rates of gun deaths. They don't. Instead, we find that attackers in countries with stricter gun laws often have to resort to weapons such as clubs and knives. You simply can’t kill as many people (at least, not as quickly) with such weapons as you can with a bullet-spraying firearm of the type favored by most of America’s mass killers.

So the fact that strict-gun-control countries may have higher crime rates does not mean gun control is a bad idea. Yet by no means does gun control alone resolve the problem of crime. It merely renders crime less deadly. As I argued in my last post, violent crime doesn’t happen just because of guns, and no serious person says otherwise. The problem is rather that the easy availability of weapons that make killing easier and faster means that when violent crime occurs, it is more likely to be deadly. I noted that the recent knife attack in a Chinese school wounded many but killed none. (Other knife attacks have indeed killed people, but probably not nearly as many as would have been killed had something like an AR-15 been available.)

This message is as important for gun-control supporters as it is for the opponents. When you hear a gun-rights advocate claim that crime increased after gun control, think: He could be right. But not murder. Even if we could convince them, though, the argument would not be over. Who says murder is the most important consideration? Perhaps the weight of all those other violent crimes – occurring because people can’t defend themselves by gunfire – adds up to more suffering than the gun murders our permissive laws encourage?

I suspect that gun-rights advocates understand, at some level, the dangers posed by the saturation of society with guns. I even suspect they know very well that more guns doesn’t mean fewer deaths – perhaps even that it means quite the opposite (as the evidence – fully examined and understood – suggests). I further suspect that they don’t care: that their ideology, not their understanding of murder statistics, drives their defense of gun ownership as an absolute right; that no argument from public safety, even a sound one, can override what they see as the fundamental good of liberty by firearm. This is a perfectly coherent argument. If you believe individual liberty takes priority over all other values, you can validly support a robust conception of the Second Amendment.

But just a second: don’t people who believe in gun control also believe in liberty? Do they not support free speech, freedom of religion, the right to vote? What’s their problem with guns? Their problem with the gun issue (as I explained briefly in the last post) is the same as the problem with any absolute notion of freedom: that it interferes with other people’s rights. That I enjoy freedom of speech does not entitle me to say anything I want, anywhere, anytime. That I enjoy freedom of enterprise does not entitle me to pollute the air that others must breathe. And that I enjoy the right of self-defense embodied in the Second Amendment does not entitle me to own any weapon and carry it anywhere. Our rights carry limits.

Setting those limits is necessarily a difficult task guaranteed to convince people on both sides that their core interests are undermined. But those limits must be set. And, unless we align ourselves with the militia movement, they must be set by and through government – yes, government. That word we hear uttered with the same dread evoked by words like leprosy or Black Death.

That is to say, we must necessarily negotiate our freedoms if we are to have democratic government at all; we cannot have absolute freedom. Those who deny this necessity – the ACLU, the NRA – are demanding something even they would not (I have to believe!) be prepared to follow through with: the abolition of government entirely.

Gun control does not deny the value of liberty. It doesn’t even deny that gun control limits liberty. It merely balances liberty with other values, such as safety from death by gunfire. Gun control does not demean the choice between liberty and death; it merely insists we need not choose death by liberty. 

Finally, a point just to get it off my chest:

That a celebrity acts in a movie in which gun violence takes place does not negate that actor's moral right to be outraged at killings that actually happen. Just like the fact that Al Gore's houses and modes of transportation are carbon bombs does not negate the validity of pollution control. I could cite more examples of this infuriatingly flawed reasoning by otherwise intelligent people, but I think my point is made. Stop, people. Just stop.