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.