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.