I mentioned in a previous post that The Economist appears to lose all rationality when one specific topic is broached. The writer of the magazine’s April 20 newsletter “The World in Brief” gave another illustration in the section “The Day Ahead”: he could not mention the 25th anniversary of the horrible Columbine school massacre without doing the rhetorical equivalent of a child hiding behind the couch to stop watching a horror movie—which is the horror of guns in the hands of peaceful citizens:
Gun-rights supporters often say, nonsensically, that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
It is not the only way, but often the most efficient. This is why cops are armed (more and more apparently even in the UK) and why mass murderers never attack shooting ranges or gun club meetings. It is a simple matter of incentives. Even if you want to die while killing people, you still want to do the killing. The efficiency of guns against violent criminals comes not only from their deterrent effects but also from their usefulness in self-defense when deterrence has not worked perfectly.
“Nonsensically”? We know of many documented cases where an armed ordinary citizen saved his own life and the lives of others. The FBI publishes an annual report on events where “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” Many of these cases fit the federal definition of mass shootings. The latest of those reports covers 2022 and the 50 cases that occurred during that year, with 313 injured or killed victims. (People who count hundreds of mass shootings per year in the United States include many other sorts of gun incidents.) Three or 6% of the 50 cases documented by the FBI were stopped by an armed ordinary citizen. In two of those cases (4% of the total), a mass murderer was fatally shot by an ordinary citizen, compared with seven cases (14%) by law enforcement. The two cases are summarized as follows in the FBI report (p. 11):
In one incident [Charleston, West Virginia], an armed bystander engaged the shooter, killing him, after the shooter fired into a crowd attending a party outside an apartment complex.
In one incident [Greenwood, Indiana], an armed citizen killed the shooter as he began firing in a mall food court.
In this last incident, 22-year-old Elisjsha Dicken had just come to the mall with his girlfriend when a mass shooting started. Three people had already been killed and two wounded. Dicken drew his pistol and exchanged fire with the mass murderer, whom he fatally shot. Greenwood’s police chief declared that “many more people would have died if not for a responsible armed citizen that took action very quickly” (“Elisjsha Dicken Stops a Mass Shooting,” Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2022).
Reported cases of armed self-defense in individual aggressions are more numerous. Note that all school shootings have occurred in places where teachers or staff were banned from having a gun under penalty of felony.
We also know, by following murder cases and their investigations in the press, that in at least some of them, peaceful individuals who were murdered could conceivably have stopped their murderers if they had been armed. We can suspect that in many cases, the victim’s last thought must have been “If only I had a gun.” There are real, identifiable individuals who lose their lives or are severely injured and who were forbidden by their own benevolent governments to carry means of protection.
One intuitive objection claims that, even if armed self-defense works, the greater availability of guns on which it is predicated will lead to more murders or aggressions with firearms. Historical and other empirical evidence exists against this objection, but assume for a moment that the latter is valid. Consider what it amounts to claiming: that it is morally acceptable to forbid a peaceful and innocent person to defend himself or herself against a violent aggressor in order to reduce the probability that some unknown person in the future will be the victim of a criminal armed with a gun. It is analogous to a policy that would jail all young men between the age of 17 and 24 in order to prevent 39% of murders (see my post “A Simplistic Model of Public Policy”; see also “The Purpose of a Gun is Not to Kill.”)
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Hiding behind the couch not to see the non-horror movie
READER COMMENTS
Jon Murphy
Apr 28 2024 at 8:58am
It’s interesting to me how many on the American Right see the argument you present here against gun control as rightfully nonsensical, but will then make the exact same argument against immigration and international trade.
Jon Murphy
Apr 28 2024 at 11:32am
I wrote my comment poorly. What I meant to say:
The American Right agree that the argument against restricting/forbidding guns based on statistical discrimination is nonsensical. Yet they will use the same argument to limit trade and immigration.
David Henderson
Apr 28 2024 at 9:14am
Nicely done, Pierre.
Great line: “Even if you want to die while killing people, you still want to do the killing.”
Question: Because I couldn’t find the line you’re referring to in the link, I’m wondering: Did the writer even try to justify that his (her) view that that idea is nonsensical?
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 28 2024 at 10:28am
Thanks, David–including for pointing out that my link to the Economist‘s newsletter was not correct. I kept a copy of the newsletter and the quote is there, but in the bottom section “The Day Ahead.” (I just emailed the newsletter to you.) The problem, it seems, is that this bottom section changes in the online link (the newsletter, or at least that part, is only available to subscribers). I now understand why you could not find the quote. I have deleted the hyperlink in my post and mentioned the bottom section.
Now, to your substantive question: the author of the newsletter did not explain why the self-defense argument is “nonsensical.” Here was his whole blurb on Columbine:
David Henderson
Apr 28 2024 at 11:04am
Thanks, Pierre.
Yes, it appears the writer for The Economist forgot to make an argument.
By the way, it’s refreshing to see a fellow Canadian argue against gun control. I grew up in a Canadian family for whom it was axiomatic (to use Robert MacNeil’s language) that more guns would lead to more crimes and more homicides. When I moved to “the States” in 1972, I was a libertarian and so intellectually favored the Second Amendment but emotionally was against it. What really turned me around on the evidence (and since then I’ve read much more) was reading Don Kates’s book Handgun Control: The Liberal Skeptics Speak Out. Although I never did get to meet Kates, I did meet, and have a pleasant conversation with, one of the authors, SF Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver.
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 28 2024 at 11:25am
David: Nobody in my family in Canada had guns either, but there was a big difference between the urban elite and the countryside. The history of gun control in that country is complex: for a long time, it was freer than many parts of the US. (See my “Disarming Canadians.”) Don Kates’s book was very interesting and had a large influence. He was also a nice guy. The last time I met him was when he and his wife invited me and a girlfriend for breakfast in SF circa 1999.
Andrea Mays
Apr 30 2024 at 1:53pm
David, did you cross paths with John Lott while you were at UCLA? He and David Mustard wrote “More Guns, Less Crime.” John was on the US Sentencing commission when I was in DC and continues his work de-bunking myths about gun control. Pierre, you will find his organization, Crime Prevention Research Center, is a good source of data.
Richard W. Fulmer
Apr 28 2024 at 9:22am
That horse has already left the barn. There are more privately owned guns in the United States than there are people (390 million guns and 336 million people).
steve
Apr 28 2024 at 11:27am
This is key. The corollary to a good guy shooting a bad guy is that the main reason you need a gun for self defense is that other people have guns. (Many people own them for recreation, competition or hunting as separate reasons, especially shooting the stupid rabbits that keep invading my garden.) Part of the price we pay for having lots of guns is lots of shootings and we have so many they arent going to go away. People get angry, people get drunk and they have guns.
While I have guns and will shoot to protect family I am concerned about this trend of old people shooting unarmed people not doing anything threatening or criminal just because they were scared. Just as there are clearly a lot of people who shouldn’t be driving due to aging related, or other, issues there are also clearly a lot of people where that holds true for guns but its not politically correct to say anything about it.
Steve
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 28 2024 at 12:32pm
Steve: I hoped the last paragraph of my post would preempt your comment! It is also true that if people did not have cars or credit cards to rent them, many mass shootings (but not all) and many other crimes would be prevented. Or, as I think we discussed before, if terrorists did not have credit cards to rent trucks, including to mow people, it would be more difficult for them to commit their crimes. But we probably agree more than we disagree.
Dylan
Apr 28 2024 at 9:36am
I don’t think your objections make a lot of sense. The nonsensical part of that quote, is “the only” part. You admit this is not the only way, and then provide data showing it isn’t a very common way that mass shootings are ended at all. How many of those other incidents had armed people that didn’t act? We know of at least a couple high profile incidents where that was the case.
I also find the line
To not really support much. I’ve never heard of a mass shooting at a yoga retreat, a LARPing weekend, or a renaissance fair either. Should I be drawing conclusions from that?
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 28 2024 at 12:21pm
Dylan: Your last paragraph is interesting because it illustrates the necessity of a theory to indicate which facts to look for in order to understand reality. A good (useful) theory tells you which facts could falsify it (or not), and which facts are irrelevant. I also suggests it rests on a logical error.
(1) There is a near infinity of places where mass shootings do not happen. None that I know of had happened at a bingo game before the recent shooting in Lewinston, Maine. I would guess that none ever happened in places with a Picasso drawing on the wall. To know which facts among the near-infinity that are observable can refute (or tentatively confirm) an hypothesis, your hypothesis must be the conclusion of a theory that tells you which facts to look for. If the hypothesis is that people with mass-murder tendencies see red when they see a Picasso drawing (or, in your example, a yogi), and you have a serious (logical) theory to back that hypothesis, you will spend resources to investigate the proportion of mass shootings where a Picasso drawing or a yogi were present. You’ll probably find zero occurrences, which will refute your theory.
On the other hand, if you have a general economy theory that incentives matter–an individual will do what furthers his goals–a corollary will be that mass murderers will not try mass shootings at places where they will be killed before having a reasonable chance of shooting many people. The favorable places for mass shootings would include gun-free zones (including schools) and exclude places where people usually carry guns (gun club meetings, shooting ranges, hunting camps, police stations, etc.). This tells you which facts to look for in order to refute (or not) your incentive theory. You will not look for facts unrelated to incentives.
(2) At a more basic logical level, A=>B (“if A, then B”) does not imply B=>A. For example, “AI skills => no unemployment” does not imply “no employment => AI skills”. Similarly “armed place => no mass shootings” does not imply “no mass shootings => armed places”–so the former cannot be invalidated by negating the latter.
Dylan
Apr 28 2024 at 1:53pm
Yet, we have other examples where the shooter specifically targeted victims that were armed. I don’t think that discredits the theory that incentives matter, but you assume that every mass shooter has the same utility function focused on killing as many people as possible? I’d say the choice of target is likely a bigger incentive in many of the cases?
Jon Murphy
Apr 28 2024 at 1:15pm
One should also note that participants at LARP weekends and Ren Fairs also tend to be quite heavily armed
Dylan
Apr 28 2024 at 1:57pm
I will admit, I haven’t been to very many LARP events in my life, but the ones I’ve stumbled upon in the parks all seemed to be using foam or plastic weapons? Maybe outside of NYC they use real swords and the like?
Jon Murphy
Apr 28 2024 at 2:00pm
For a lot of the PvP, it’s foam or plastic. But these folks are weapon enthusiasts. Trust me. They are quite armed.
David Seltzer
Apr 29 2024 at 6:38pm
and why mass murderers never attack shooting ranges or gun club meetings. Dylan, the range where I shoot regularly has at least four heavily armed employees during business hours. There are another ten to fifteen in the range firing several different weapons. When a customer enters with their weapon(s) they must be unloaded. Small sample example. In our North Georgia subdivision, many home owners have guns in their residences. We’ve lived here for twenty-seven years. There may have been one home invasion in that time.
Monte
Apr 28 2024 at 11:56am
Show a little compassion! The writer probably suffers from hoplophobia.
Jose Pablo
Apr 28 2024 at 3:14pm
Firearm homicide rate in Europe is o.3 per 100,000 (0.88 in Canada). In the US the firearm homicide rate is 5.4 per 100,00, 1700% higher (514% higher).
From this data it seems that the armed good guys do, in fact, a terrible job stopping the armed bad guys. It seems to work much better when none of the above are armed.
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 28 2024 at 5:17pm
Jose: Universal love might be a good idea, provided everybody is forced to love equally. Please note also that differences between total homicide rates and firearm homicide rates are much smaller: input substitution is a general economic fact.
Jose Pablo
Apr 28 2024 at 8:37pm
You are right, Pierre. The homicide rate in the US (2022) was 6.3 while in the EU it was 0.9. Only 600% higher, not the 1,700% I mentioned. So yes, a significant substitution effect.
Still, the data doesn’t seem to support the idea that having armed vigilante increases the protection of the rest of the population. Quite the opposite.
Also 1980 was the year with the highest gun ownership in the US 53.7% of Americans according to Gallup. This percentage dropped to 37% in 2019. At the same time the homicide rate dropped from 10.3 (1980) to 4.5 (2019). Again, this data doesn’t seem to support, prima facie, the hypothesis that armed vigilantes protect the rest of us.
According to this article from the National Library of Medicine (full disclosure: I have no clue how serious or reliable these guys are. They seem to be from the government, so not really people I can trust):
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3828709/
Gun ownership was a significant predictor of firearm homicide rates (incidence rate ratio = 1.009; 95% confidence interval = 1.004, 1.014). This model indicated that for each percentage point increase in gun ownership, the firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9%.
Which doesn’t seem to support, either, the effectiveness of arming the good guys to control the bad ones.
Roger McKinney
Apr 30 2024 at 9:08pm
You don’t see any problems with this study?!!! I saw the biggest one in 15 seconds. Most gun deaths are suicides, so naturally where there are a lot of guns people will use them to commit suicide. Duh!
But the debate is about stopping bad guys, not preventing suicides. Where guns are less common, people will commit suicide by other means.
If the study designers were honest, they would remove the suicides from their data.
A rough study would be to compare bad guys killing good guys between say OK, with a high per capita gun rate, with Chicago or New York with a low rate. Anyone not asleep can answer that quickly.
BS
Apr 29 2024 at 11:30am
Sometimes there are no armed good guys because it’s armed bad guys against other armed bad guys.
Jose Pablo
Apr 30 2024 at 1:06pm
… or armed “good” guys against armed “good” guys.
I wonder how frequent are the 3 possibilities in real life? And these are blurred categories. I very easily transform myself into a nasty guy while driving.
Jose Pablo
Apr 30 2024 at 2:17pm
I very easily transform myself into a nasty guy while driving.
Or while commenting in a blog …
Anonymous
May 1 2024 at 10:18am
It is meaningless to say that the best way to stop an armed bad guy is for the bad guy not to be armed. Your critique is a non-sequitur.
Ahmed Fares
Apr 28 2024 at 5:29pm
Some sobering statistics from PubMed:
Injuries and deaths due to firearms in the home
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 28 2024 at 6:58pm
Ahmed: I think the old Kellermann article would be more sobering for people who have not followed the “public health” movement during the last hundred years or so, and not noticed that this movement is more about social control and the correct political authoritarianism. I just retrieved the article from a physical filing cabinet. I did not reread it carefully, but note the following lines:
If I read Table 4 correctly, factors like “home rented” and “case subject or control lived alone” have more effect on homicides than “gun or guns kept in the home.”
In the penultimate paragraph of the article, Kellermann et al. write:
The authors don’t make the same recommendation for the other statistically significant factors. Wouldn’t the prohibition of rental apartments or living alone have major beneficial effects on public health?
Note also that their data include a certain number of cases of legitimate self-defense as well as, it seems, suicides.
Finally, note that, even if Kellermann et al. were right, the last paragraph of my post questions the ethics of forbidding peaceful individuals to have efficient means of self-defense in order to reduce the probability that other individuals (like those living alone, etc.) be the victims of criminals.
Ahmed Fares
Apr 28 2024 at 8:10pm
It’s an old debate about the rights of the individual versus the rights of the collective. The right of eminent domain, for example, favors the collective over the individual. I found this interesting quote on the subject.
Individual and group rights
David Henderson
Apr 28 2024 at 7:40pm
Pierre Lemieux has a good answer but I also want to point out that the suicides and suicide attempts should be stripped out of the data because those are chosen. They are not homicide.
You could argue that keeping people from having guns will make them less likely to commit suicide and that’s a potentially good argument. But that doesn’t justify preventing people from having guns. Doing so on the basis of suicide prevention would put the government in the position of making decisions about someone’s life for him. (I say “him” because people who commit suicide with a gun are disproportionately male.)
steve
Apr 29 2024 at 11:03am
No, they very much should be kept in. Having a gun in the house has some positive value but it also has negatives. One of the negatives is suicide. So if your reasoning for having a gun in the house is safety, it’s faulty reasoning. If your reasoning is that your desire to avoid being killed by someone else outweighs any other risks, then you should have the gun.
Obviously this is just based on mass numbers and based on personal analysis one might think the negative risks are lower. However, it certainly appears that given the numbers cited above people arent very good at assessing risk.
Steve
Roger McKinney
Apr 30 2024 at 9:11pm
No, having a gun does not make suicide more likely. Suicidal people will find another way. Few women use guns to kill themselves, but they still succeed.
Anonymous
May 1 2024 at 10:23am
But at much lower rates. Most who try suicide and fail, do not try again.
BS
Apr 29 2024 at 11:41am
I can guess that measures of “self-defense use” don’t capture most of the instances in which a defender didn’t have to fire, just as the deterrent effect of knowing defensive firearms might be present is hard to measure. I’ve not yet come across attempts to measure “herd immunity” either – for example, how many teachers in a school might have to be actually (or even merely credibly claimed to be) armed to diminish the risk of a school being a target?
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 29 2024 at 3:22pm
BS: You are right. This why, for example, according to the statistics I saw (but I haven’t checked recent research), hot burglaries (burglaries when the home dwellers are in the home) are rarer in America than in countries like the UK, Canada, and I suspect all European counties with the possible exception of Switzerland. In the UK and, I suspect in many other countries except America, the homeowner who defends himself against a burglar is likely to be arrested.
Roger McKinney
Apr 30 2024 at 9:20pm
Maybe guns in the home are slightly more likely to cause an accidental death in the home, but that doesn’t change the fact that people use guns to prevent crimes. And how crime prevention stats are calculated vary greatly. Some see one million crimes prevented annually
Do one million accidentally shoot someone each year?
Also, it doesn’t address the right to self defense. Because some people have terrible gun safety habits, should I lose my right to self defense?
Look at studies done over the years of states that allowed concealed or open carry and the crime stats before and after. Usually they declined. And homicides in concealed carry or open carry states are much lower than in states prohibiting gun ownership.
Craig
Apr 28 2024 at 7:55pm
TN allowing teachers to bring firearms to school after 40 hours of training. Prior to that there was typically one SRO per school. Crossing the cultural divide I must say that with respect to where I live in TN, Pickett County, I support arming teachers and constitutional carry. I am also from NJ and I must also say I don’t think NJ should approach the same way — different culture. Honestly I equivocate about Palm Beach County FL For instance if you were to say that I’d buy an AR and sling it over my shoulder on a NJ Transit bus, get off at the PABT and walk up 8th Avenue, I’d say that’s absurd, but it’d be absurd to ban it in TN.
steve
Apr 29 2024 at 11:12am
This sounds pretty reasonable. Lots of people own guns who dont treat them very well and have little or no training. (Let me make a pitch for the NRA courses. Have found them to be very good if you can ignore the politics.) So I think the training is good. I also think your observation about TN is good. If you have never engaged in carrying a concealed weapon it can be a hassle. It’s extra weight you are carrying all day and can be annoying. There are reports of people taking off their gun and setting it on the bathroom counter to take a dump then walking out and forgetting about it, only to be found by some kid. I would think kids in TN would be less likely to treat it as a toy.
Steve
Monte
Apr 28 2024 at 8:57pm
Gun control continues to be one of the most hotly debated issues of our time. I’m personally opposed to repealing/abolishing the 2nd, as I am any right guaranteed under the constitution. If anything, constitutional rights should be expanded, not contracted.
A more reasonable alternative to ratcheting down gun rights is for manufacturers to pursue smart gun technology that would effectively disable firearms in the hands of unauthorized users:
Jose Pablo
Apr 28 2024 at 10:08pm
I’m personally opposed to repealing/abolishing the 2nd, as I am any right guaranteed under the constitution.
That’s one of the worst possible arguments in this debate. The fact that a right is (debatably) guaranteed under a document worded more than 230 years ago, says very little about how sensible it is to keep this right in place today. The fact that this right is guaranteed under the constitution only establishes what the procedure to amend the 2nd would be.
For instance, the Constitution was definitely pro-slavery: it stipulates that the African slave trade may not be abolished before 1808 and contains the fugitive slave clause. The 13th amendment came to correct this obvious nonsense.
The freedom to carry arms could make or not make sense. But if it makes sense it wouldn’t be because it is “written in the Constitution”. This would amount to look what the Bible says about carrying arms to settle this debate.
Not really an intellectually exciting argument.
Monte
Apr 28 2024 at 10:36pm
Well, you can always just ignore my comments if you don’t find them intellectually exciting. But like they say, insults are the last resort of insecure people with a crumbling position trying to appear confident.
Jose Pablo
Apr 28 2024 at 10:53pm
Monte, I wasn’t by any means insulting you (nothing further from my intentions). And I am really sorry for the misunderstanding. What I didn’t find intellectually exciting was to look at the Bible as a support to defend the right to carry arms. Which has nothing to do with “you”.
On the other hand, if you find my position (in the comment to you comment) “crumbling”, I would be more than happy discussing with you the reason why. I sincerely thought the “right to own slaves” was a good valid counterexample.
Monte
Apr 29 2024 at 12:31am
Jose,
Thanks for the response. I shouldn’t have assumed you meant to insult, as we’ve enjoyed a number of very interesting debates on this blog. My apologies for jumping to that conclusion. That said, looking forward to debating the Constitution and the 2nd amendment with you tomorrow. Have a good night.
Monte
Monte
Apr 29 2024 at 4:24pm
The fact that a right is (debatably) guaranteed under a document worded more than 230 years ago, says very little about how sensible it is to keep this right in place today. The fact that this right is guaranteed under the constitution only establishes what the procedure to amend the 2nd would be.
What makes it sensible is that it was designed to evolve and adapt over time. The amendment process prevents it from eroding and becoming a relic of the past. I’m sure you would agree that safety is a fundamental right, but our government can’t guarantee it. Until it can, the Constitution at least guarantees law-abiding citizens the freedom to protect themselves. Time and technology may eventually enable the government to guarantee our safety and security. Only then should we discuss gun ownership as a privilege instead of a right.
For instance, the Constitution was definitely pro-slavery: it stipulates that the African slave trade may not be abolished before 1808 and contains the fugitive slave clause. The 13th amendment came to correct this obvious nonsense.
Yes, just as the amendment process repealed prohibition and gave every legal citizen the right to vote. As society evolves, so must our system of government. Jefferson said “Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” And that has happened with remarkable success by virtue of our Constitution, not in the absence of it.
The freedom to carry arms could make or not make sense. But if it makes sense it wouldn’t be because it is “written in the Constitution”. This would amount to look what the Bible says about carrying arms to settle this debate.
The Bible represents spiritual authority by choice, while the Constitution represents political authority by necessity. It is how things are written in the Constitution that make sense.
Jose Pablo
Apr 30 2024 at 2:28pm
What makes it sensible is that it was designed to evolve and adapt over time. The amendment process prevents it from eroding and becoming a relic of the past
So, we basically agree. The interesting discussion is whether or not an amendment is required to prevent the constitutional right to carry guns from becoming a senseless relic of the past (as some argue it is).
To discuss this (granted, a fair discussion), whether this right was or wasn’t in the Constitution in the first place becomes irrelevant.
I’m sure you would agree that safety is a fundamental right, but our government can’t guarantee it
I agree with both. And I find it outrageous that the government is only obliged to guarantee our safety on a “best effort basis” (on that see Warren v District of Columbia).
But carrying arms does not by any means improve your safety. Quite the contrary (see my comment to Pierre below). Your chances of getting killed in the US (even carrying a gun) are way higher than they are in Europe where you don’t have that right. Unless you are Billy the Kid reborn and can draw faster than most of the other gun-carrying citizens. But only one guy can be the fastest draw this side of the Mississippi, what are the chances of this being you?
Monte
Apr 30 2024 at 4:16pm
Jose,
Yes, we agree more than we don’t. Our point of departure, then, is whether or not we should retain the right to own/carry a gun for purposes of self-defense. It may be true that, statistically speaking, my chance of getting killed is higher than if I don’t, but that’s a chance I’d like the legal right to take if I’m ever faced with it.
To repeat, smart gun technology strikes me as a practical solution to at least keeping guns out of the hands of kids and criminals.
Jose Pablo
Apr 30 2024 at 9:39pm
It may be true that, statistically speaking, my chance of getting killed is higher than if I don’t
Once everybody has the right to carry guns and this results in a higher crime rate, your chance of getting killed is higher (compared to a country with banned guns) whether you choose to use your right to carry your gun or not. They are just much higher if you don’t.
I don’t see how smart technologies can help. The accidental killing of kids has a high emotional impact but I don’t think they significantly affect the main figures (basically the crime rate differences due to the universal right itself).
BS
May 2 2024 at 4:26pm
The existence of a “no change before” clause suggests the Constitution was not pro-slavery, but rather was worded to start working toward abolition as much as the conditions at the time allowed.
Jose Pablo
Apr 28 2024 at 9:48pm
Consider what it amounts to claiming: that it is morally acceptable to forbid a peaceful and innocent person to defend himself or herself against a violent aggressor in order to reduce the probability that some unknown person in the future will be the victim of a criminal armed with a gun.
Not really. It amounts to claiming that it is morally acceptable to forbid a peaceful and innocent person (PIP) to defend himself or herself against a violent aggressor in order to reduce the probability of this very SAME peaceful and innocent person being killed by a criminal armed with a gun.
It could still not be morally acceptable to force you to do something that increases your probabilities of surviving. But it makes definitely irrational to prefer arming yourself to the prohibition of self-defense against a violent aggressor, since arming yourself (by increasing the number of guns among the general population) significantly increases your probabilities of getting yourself killed (unless you are Billy the Kid reborn).
If we forbid the PIP to defend himself his probabilities of being killed (in a given year) are 0.9/100,000 (I am assuming European figures). If we allow the PIP to defend himself his probabilities of being killed rise significantly. For instance to 4.2 / 100,000 assuming the hypothesis below*.
In this scenario, arming yourself increases your probabilities of getting yourself killed by an astonishing 367%. While also increasing the probabilities of the people that decides not to arm themselves, despite having the Constitutional right to do so, by an even more astonishing 833%
* I am assuming here that to reach the 6.3/ 100,000 homicide rate of the US: a) 50% of the population is armed. b) Armed individuals have a 50% chance of fending off the aggressor c) unarmed individuals have a 0% chance of doing so d) both, armed and unarmed individuals, have the same yearly odds of facing an armed aggressor.
With this hypothesis the chances of facing a violent aggressor in the US are 8.4 / 100,000 in a given year and, if you are armed, your probabilities of being killed are 4.2 / 100,000
Many other hypotheses can be made but they will lead to very similar conclusions. Unless you believe that your probabilities of fending off the aggressor by being armed are more than 92% (really talking Billy the Kid kind of figures here!)
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 29 2024 at 12:05am
Jose: Lots of people want my own good (and yours too) and to force it on me. I think the issue is, from a liberal/liberal/individualist viewpoint, so simple as to be paradigmatic. (You can apply it to car ownership, vaccines, life insurance, education, etc.) There are some individuals who think that owning or carrying a gun will reduce their risk of being killed or maimed; others think that owning or carrying a gun will increase their risk of being killed or maimed. Let the first ones free to own or carry guns; and let the second ones free to not own or carry guns. Individual choices.
A good book to read is Joyce Malcom, To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right (Harvard University Press, 1996). In the same vein, Colin Greenwood’s Firearms Control: A Study of Armed Crime and Firearms Control in England and Wales (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972) is also worth the detour. The classical liberal historical experience is important to understand.
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 29 2024 at 12:06am
Jose: Oh what is a PIP?
Atanu Dey
Apr 29 2024 at 5:03am
PIP — peaceful and innocent person.
Atanu (not Jose but a PIP all the same.)
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 29 2024 at 3:14pm
Thanks, Atanu. Who is the pipiest?
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 29 2024 at 3:08pm
Jose: A few questions. You write:
You mean that if somebody buys a gun and keeps it in his home safe, he is multiplying his probability of being killed by nearly five times ? And that ipso facto the probability of an individual taken at random in his society (either in America, in Europe, or in Venezuela) is also multiplied by five? Or is it just the carrying of a gun that has this effect? Does it matter is the gun is carryed concealed on his person? Or left in his car? And what if the individual is a poor woman living in a dangerous neighborhood (with many drug gans, people renting apartments, and living alone) and working at night, and she was already facing a probability of being murdered of, say, 25%? And why don’t companies selling life insurance or health insurance multiply by five the premiums of people who have a gun? Why don’t they never even ask the question of whether you own or carry a gun? Why isn’t life insurance unaffordable in Vermont, which always had what we now call “constitutional carry”? And why wasn’t insurance unaffordable for anybody in England where, until 1920, there was no restriction in buying, owning, and carrying guns (for ordinary citizens; policemen were restricted)? What about other civilized European countries where this liberty was not recognized by the law but was impossible to enforce (notably because search powers were limited) until the 20th century?
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 29 2024 at 4:07pm
Jose: My apologies in advance if I look sarcastic and too dismissive. It is not my intention. But I just had a flash of literary imagination which showed me the following scene.
The doctor has just told his patient that he has cancer. “What do you recommend to extend my life as much as possible?” the patient asks.
“With the stage of your cancer, I don’t think you can do anything on that front,” the doctor answers. “But you can get rid of your guns.”
“How’s that?” the patient asks. “For one thing,” the doctor explains, “you will reduce your probability of death from aggression. Aggressors especially like to attack armed people, ceteris paribus. For another thing, you will prevent the murdering of other people by criminals and this good action will earn you indulgences for when you (soon) land in Heaven.”
Incidentally, two other important books to read are: another one from Joyce Malcolm, Guns and Violence: The English Experience (Harvard University Press, 2004); and Don Kates (editor), Restricting Handguns: The Liberal Skeptics Speak Out (North River, 1979). The latter had some influence on the new scholarship that was starting about that time and ultimately led to the Supreme Court’s Heller decision.
Jose Pablo
Apr 30 2024 at 2:15pm
“With the stage of your cancer, I don’t think you can do anything on that front,” the doctor answers. “But you can get rid of your guns.”
Yes, the doctor’s sincere advice could be “With this stage of your cancer, go to Europe, you will have to get rid of your guns but you will be better protected and reduce your probability of getting killed by almost 400% …
… and, on top of that, you will be treated for free from your cancer!
… and don’t worry about the higher taxes you will be paying them only for the few years you have left
Anonymous
May 1 2024 at 10:27am
Everyone is basically treated for free for their cancer anyway, with their insurance. And cancer treatment is a bit better in the U.S.
Jose Pablo
Apr 30 2024 at 1:59pm
Sorry, Pierre. I should have made myself more clear. Thought it was an easy-to-follow way of reasoning. I imagined two (hypothetical) scenarios.
Scenario a) guns are banned and individuals have no right to carry them. Pretty much along the lines of gun control in Europe.
Let’s say (hypothetically) that the consequence of this scenario is that your chances of getting killed in a given year are 0.9 / 100,000 (homicide rate)
Scenario b) To protect yourself from that 0.9 / 100,000 chance of being killed you claim your individual right to carry guns. In order to implement your petition the government grants the right to carry guns to all the citizens of the country. Pretty much along the lines of gun control in the US
Let’s say that the homicide ratio in this “imaginary country with a universal right to carry arms ” is 6.3 (that’s the US ratio)
Another consequence is that around 50% of citizens carry guns in scenario b (not far from US real data)
Note: this is a hypothetical case. I am not saying that all the differences between homicide rates in Europe and the US are due to the different approaches to guns. All I am doing is putting some credible figures to your own rationale (you can use other figures if you wish, the rationale doesn’t change as far as the universal right to carry guns actually increases the homicide rate).
Now, imagine that carrying a gun reduces your probability of being killed by 50% (again you can use here the % you want) and that if you don’t carry a gun your probability of being killed is 100%.
Being D the number of “potentially deadly encounters” in a given year and assuming that both gun-carrying and non-carrying citizens have the same D. it has to happen that:
6.3 = 0.5*0.5*D+ 0.5 * D and from here D = 8.4 so the possibilities of being killed by a gun-carrying citizen in scenario b are:
0.5* D = 4.2 (so 4.2/100,000 per year)
And the possibilities of being killed in scenario b if you don’t carry a gun are 1 * D = 8.4 / 100,000
So the practical implementation of YOUR right to carry guns (by allowing everybody in the country to carry a gun) increases YOUR chances of getting killed in scenario b with respect to scenario a by 4.2 / 0.9 – 1 = +367%
And the practical implementation of YOUR right to carry guns (by allowing everybody in the country to carry a gun) increases the chances of a NON-CARRYING GUN CITIZEN of getting killed by 8.4 / 0.9 -1 = +833%
For the gun ownership scheme of scenario b to really “protect” you better than scenario a, you need to get yourself killed only in 7.7% of your deadly encounters (D).
So, you do need to be the best draw this side of the Mississippi. And if you are that good you “cause” the non-arm-bearing guys to be killed at a ratio of 11.7 per year (to compensate for the times that you are not killed and still reaching the 6.3 homicide rate): 1200% times higher than in scenario a)
Even I would have to agree here with Thomas: this does look to me like a (pretty) negative externality of your right to carry arms
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 30 2024 at 3:28pm
Jose: Even if we accept your assumptions (that, for example, the risk to be murdered is the same for a poor woman in a violent neighborhood as for a rich man in a neighborhood well protected by police), I would suggest your model neglect at least three factors: (1) You would get similar results with cars and alcohol, and quite certainly with a stronger argument for a ban than with guns. (I could probably trace the estimate that alcohol is involved in 50% of crimes, at least in the US.) (2) In a free society, it would not be acceptable for some citizens to keep owning and carrying guns while others are banned to. (Malcolm and Greenwood are pretty enlightening on the English history of the right to keep and bear arms.) So cops as well as bodyguards for the rich (as well as the politicians) would have to go unarmed. The resulting rise in violence would have to be added to your estimates. (3) Whatever the results of incorporating these considerations, some individuals are risk seekers, others risk averters. For example, people buy more lottery tickets (and, I assume, less insurance) as you go down the income distribution scale. They have the right to their peaceful preferences as much as other individuals.
Jose Pablo
Apr 30 2024 at 9:19pm
the risk of being murdered is the same for a poor woman in a violent neighborhood as for a rich man in a neighborhood well-protected by police
That’s not an assumption of the (very simple) “model” which only deals with averages. In any case, the results will be similar using the specific homicide rates for the violent neighborhoods or for the well-protected ones. In both cases, you are more likely to be killed in scenario b carrying a gun (violent/rich neighborhoods in the USA as a proxy) than in scenario a (violent /rich neighborhoods in the EU as a proxy).
(1) You would get similar results with cars and alcohol
That’s a very interesting comment. Not necessarily, I think. “Unfortunately”, there are no significant differences between the US and Europe in these topics, so it is difficult to calibrate the effects on deaths of radically different speed limits or of banning alcohol. I doubt that a complete ban on alcohol could have a significant impact on alcohol-related crimes but there is no way of having a baseline case. I doubt the impact will be anywhere near the impact that banning guns seems to have (prima facie 0.9 vs 6.3).
In a free society, it would not be acceptable for some citizens to keep owning and carrying guns while others are banned to. So cops as well as bodyguards for the rich (as well as the politicians) would have to go unarmed. The resulting rise in violence would have to be added to your estimates.
This “resulting rise in violence” is, in fact, included in the model. In the “baseline” used as scenario “a”, cops and bodyguards carry guns (since they do in Europe). So the resulting rise in violence from this fact is included in the 0.9 homicide rate used in the baseline (scenario a).
The only “effective” way of changing the results (apart from assuming very unrealistically high “success ratios” in using your gun as protection) is totally abandoning the idea that universal gun ownership increases the homicide rate. Even if you significantly reduce the impact on crime rates of the right to carry guns (for instance, even if you assume that the universal right to carry guns only doubles the crime rate from 0.9 in the base case to 1.8 in scenario b. Which would leave a 4.5 crime rate difference between Europe and the US unexplained), your probability of being killed in scenario b still increases by 33.3%.
Jose Pablo
Apr 30 2024 at 2:36pm
You mean that if somebody buys a gun and keeps it in his home safe, he is multiplying his probability of being killed by nearly five times
No. If we keep it in his home safe he is multiplying his probability of being killed by something between 5 times and more than 9 times.
In particular, by 5*x + 9*(1-x) times, where x is the percentage of his “deadly yearly encounters” that happen to happen at this house AND allow him to confront the trespasser after reaching his kept safe arm and making it fully operational.
Jose Pablo
Apr 30 2024 at 2:39pm
The basic assumption behind that, Pierre is that in order for him to have the right to own this gun, a similar right has to be granted to all the citizens of his/her country. And that the price to pay for that is an increase in gun-related incidents.
Both hypotheses were made by you in your post. Both seem very reasonable to me.
john hare
Apr 30 2024 at 7:07pm
Considering the history, culture, and existing supply in America, I would expect criminalizing guns would work about as well as the criminalization of drugs.
Jose Pablo
Apr 30 2024 at 8:44pm
Yes, the results sure are path-dependent.
Many generations should have to pass to get to European crime ratios.
Ahmed Fares
Apr 29 2024 at 2:15pm
We’ve had this debate before. The same argument but this time with vehicles.
The Arms Race on American Roads: The Effect of SUV’s and Pickup Trucks on Traffic Safety
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 29 2024 at 8:11pm
Ahmed: The only solution to this is to have the state decide, directly or indirectly, which cars people must buy. And we know, not only from economic theory but also from history, what will be the approximate results: we’ll all be driving Ladas, after waiting 10 years for delivery. And remember that the danger of pickup trucks on the road is nothing compared with the danger of nationalist confrontations among perfect states.
Ahmed Fares
Apr 29 2024 at 11:51pm
From your article you linked to:
Is public safety not a public good in the sense that the private sector won’t supply it?
In both examples of guns and cars, not only is the private sector not supplying public safety, but by serving private safety, is actually reducing public safety.
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 30 2024 at 11:07am
Ahmed: That’s a good but mistaken point, except if you believe that Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan is desirable. Everything then is “security,” except for security against the state. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? If you wish to adopt a contractarian perspective, Buchanan’s theory is more credible: rational “signatories” of the social contract will want to protect themselves against Leviathan. Otherwise, as I noted above (linking to a post of mine), jailing all males from 17 to 24 would be an essential security measure–among many others of that sort.
Anders
Apr 29 2024 at 4:16pm
Here in Europe, strict gun control is the norm and the US debate a bit bizarre. It seems to stymie even the measures most would agree on, such as selling assault weapons to toddlers or drug dealers with tears tatooed for every kill… spiced it a bit for fun.
But does not liberalism justify constraining personal freedom if that freedom imposes external harm? The rate of gun violence and people feeling compelled to own guns they prefer not to have seem harmful, no? And cross country negative correlation of gun control and gun violence is pretty clear. Empirics should guide us, of course.
The freedom for me to buy a gun matters much less than the freedom from the threat of a society where they are broadly used. No?
Of course on abortion I would make the opposite argument, albeit moderately. And of course politically imposing strict gun control in the US will, as it were, backfire. But at least start with those gun toting toddlers in Arizona and work from there perhaps?
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 29 2024 at 5:03pm
Anders: The “cross-country negative correlation of gun control and gun violence” is not clear at all, especially if you correct for other factors. And there is no such thing as a “threat to society” distinct from a threat to individuals in the society one is speaking of. Threats to individual liberty are a threat to individuals (except to those who prefer tyranny or the Nanny State). If you read, or even just skim through, the books I recommended to Jose above, I think you will discover that what most people believe on guns is 20th-century state propaganda. (Who, in French history, decreed the death penalty for owning firearms?)
If you read French, you could also read my old Le droit de porter des armes (Belles Lettres, 1993); and the most recent (P)rendre les armes by Bertrand Saint-Germain (Le Polémarque, 2023).
Roger McKinney
Apr 30 2024 at 9:33pm
Good points! The last data I saw that could be used for cross country comparisons was the surveys by the University of Leiden in the Netherlands decades ago. They did phone surveys so results across countries could be compared. They said police reporting methods varied too much to be useful.
Several of their surveys showed non-gun violent crime rates were twice as high in Europe than the US. It seemed Europeans are willing to put up with greater violent crime as long as it didn’t involve a gun. Americans have a different attitude.
But I do think Americans are more violent than other cultures. Thomas Sowell explains it as the high levels of immigrants from mountain cultures, like that in the border lands between Engkand, Ireland and Scotland. Highlander Scots were much more violent than lowlands. That was on his book White Liberals and Black Rednecks.
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 30 2024 at 10:41pm
Roger: I just saw your post after posting mine below. Yes, I also remember some study finding that Americans were more violent than many other people, and not only with guns, but for violent crimes in general. Sometimes it’s useful–like a few years ago when three unarmed young Americans fought an armed terrorist on a French train (source: Wikipedia):
They were awarded the Légion d’honneur by the French government.
As for “mountain cultures,” Vermont is close to one! And you go in the White Mountain National Forest, part of which is in New Hampshire and part in Maine, walk off the trail, and shoot your gun. The rules are that you must not damage the vegetation (so bring a target and don’t stick it on a tree), be at least 100 yards from a trail, and don’t shoot across the trail. I did it a couple of times; for proletarians like me, it’s a lot of fun.
Frank Silbermann
Apr 30 2024 at 6:38pm
Much of the statistics offered about the danger of having a gun are poorly compiled, violating rules that would not be tolerated in medical research. For example, comparing your increased danger of being murdered if you buy a gun mixes inequivalent domains of people.
For example, I am more likely, I am more likely than average to privately possess or acquire a gun if I am a street gang affiliate, or a police officer, a person under threat (e.g. from a stalker or vengeful ex-husband). I am also more likely than average to acquire a gun if I have in mind to commit suicide with a gun.
People in all of the above categories are significantly more likely than average to be shot to death. Since people in those categories are included in the diverse domain of gun owners on whom statistics are taken, this raises gun-death percentage in this heterogenous domain.
However, if I am not in any of the above under-danger categories, my decision to arm myself will not put me in any of those categories. But it does put me in the general armed category which does include those (for me) unrepresentative high-danger subcategories.
If you’re doing nutrition research, you are expected to search hard for covariances which could provide alternate explanations for the diet covariances you uncover. A search for alternate explanations is, in contrast, not demanded of people doing research in gun violence.
Furthermore, I am reminded of the research done on the danger of smoking under research grants funded by tobacco companies. Their wrong results (no danger found) was unsurprising considering that the researchers had incentives to get that wrong result. (In their case, the incentive was the availability of future grants.) But nobody seems to care about the incentives affecting people who do research on the consequences of firearms ownership.
People who get grants to do statistical research on firearms ownership work at universities, where the success of their careers is heavily impacted by the political implications of their results and whether those results will be welcomed by the academic community. (There is a reason universities are no longer doing research in, say, the definition of intelligence and its heritability.)
Personal morality also provides a bias-producing incentive. I believe college professors tend to believe that it is immoral, barbaric, or at least uncivilized for the general public to go about prepared and determined to kill any robbers who dare threaten to maim, cripple or murder those who refuse their demands. People who feel that way would no doubt welcome research results that could be used to discourage people from doing this, and would not be happy to hear results that encourage people to own and carry guns.
I certainly have never heard a researcher say: “When I began this research I had hoped that ordinary private citizens carrying guns could help eliminate the muggers and burglars whose numbers seem to have greatly increased since the 1960s. Sadly, I find from my research that owning a gun simply increases danger for the gun owner too much to rely on this solution. Let us hope that perhaps we can get the police to kill these criminals via stake-outs and decoy operations.” No, compared with criminals getting shot, these researchers personally prefer that thieves and robbers complete their crimes successfully with no one hurt.
Therefore, results results on gun ownership danger coming from such people should be viewed with as much skepticism a results funded by tobacco companies saying that smoking is safe.
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 30 2024 at 10:16pm
There is something we have not really discussed because it was not the focus of my post, and because I am not up-to-date on the numbers. Everybody tends to assume that the homicide rate is high in America and that since the rate of private gun ownership is also high, one must cause the other. One big problem with this (besides methodological problems) is that the homicide rate is not high everywhere in America. There are places where it is even lower than probably in any European country. For example, in 2021 (latest year available), it is 0 (zero) in New Hampshire, Wyoming, and Vermont (this last state having had constitutional [concealed] carry during all its history). These three states are among those where individuals are the most armed in America. Maine, at 1.7%, is lower than most European countries. It’s probably the same for Idaho, at 2.2%. (See the CDC’s statistics at https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/homicide_mortality/homicide.htm.)
There is an old article by Brandon Centerwall in the American Journal of Epidemiology (“Homicide and the Prevalence of Handguns: Canada and the United States,” 1991), which compared adjoining Canadian provinces and American states from 1976 to 1980, thereby minimizing confounding factors of cultural differences. (Canadians are just Americans without guns, with free state health insurance, and where everybody loves everybody and his government.) Centerwall concluded that
I don’t know what research has been done since. I just know that when I looked at the raw total rates (without statistical analysis) some years ago, there were only two or three provinces on 10 (from memory) that had a lower rate of total homicide than the adjoining state. Of course, the 0% of New Hampshire, and Vermont are not easy to beat.
On the other hand, there are many countries in the world where guns, and especially handguns, are strictly controlled if not prohibited for ordinary citizens, but where homicide rates go through the roof (I remember that some were in the Carrabeans and South America).
For the history of gun control in Canada, which has worsened since I wrote this article, including with the prohibition of handguns for anybody who does not currently have a (registered) one, see my “Disarming Canadians,” Law & Liberty, September 30, 2013.
Jose Pablo
May 1 2024 at 6:25pm
Of course, the 0% of New Hampshire, and Vermont are not easy to beat.
Iceland has a 0% homicide rate. Being small seems to help.
It would be very interesting to have a good in-depth understanding of what the Europeans are doing to get a 0.9 homicide rate compared with the US’s 6.3.
If the US could manage to get the European rates, around 18,000 lives would be spared every year in the country. This is half the deaths in Gaza in 7 months (as reported by the Palestinian Health Minister). So a full Gaza war takes place in the US every two years! Given that most of the victims are young, black, and poor, I would expect huge demonstrations in the American elite universities about this “civil” war.
As a conclusion of this in-depth analysis, my favorite recommendation would be the imperious necessity of making Southern European food mandatory in the States. The close second would be abandoning baseball in favor of soccer.
But the third one would be gun control.
I will find much more unpalatable the necessity to adopt a single buyer in health care or putting the legislative power in charge of electing the President (Canadians also do that, so, maybe this is key. Although not all hope is lost, the food is also much better in Canada)
Pierre Lemieux
May 2 2024 at 4:20pm
Jose: You write:
If something has to be mandatory, I would agree with that. But, as de Jasay would say, that’s your say-so and my say-so.
Pierre Lemieux
May 2 2024 at 4:29pm
Jose: You write:
And the smaller, the better. At the individual level (the only level that has normative significance), a crushing majority of American individuals also have a 0% homicide rate. The vast majority also have a 0% rate of accidental death. Same for alcoholism and drug addiction.
On the other hand, if you put Americans together with inhabitants of the Carrabeans and South America, the homicide rate goes through the roof (despite strict gun controls in most of these subgroups).
Ryan M
May 2 2024 at 7:19pm
Very likely, the Europeans are not measuring homicides in the same way that is resulting in the 6.9 rate in the US. It would be reasonable to suspect that we are comparing apples and oranges.
Also, per my previous comment – there is the questions of what a person’s objectives really are, or what a society’s objectives ought to be. You might live in a society with 0% gun homicide rate – at least homicides committed by citizens against citizens – say, a place like North Korea, for instance. It does not follow that this is a desirable outcome.
Ryan M
May 2 2024 at 1:53pm
I just finished reading volume 2 of The Gulag Archipelago, and started on volume 3. I took a long break in 2020 because the parallels to what we saw during covid were extremely depressing and I had to put it down.
The reality of soviet Russia is sobering. Thousands of times worse than Nazi Germany (not worse morally but exponential in size); that’s not even to mention communist China.
It is important to remember and to truly understand why the second amendment exists, and it is not to protect against home invasions and mall shootings. I own guns partly due self defense and defense of others. I support universal ownership of guns not because of self defense, but because I know what human beings in power are capable of when populations are powerless.
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