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Gun Rights are Civilization Rights
I believe, if you don't trust an independent adult to have a firearm you ultimately don't trust them enough to be in the same civilization or society as you.
There are three categories of people that nearly everyone agrees should not be allowed to own a firearm:
And you'll notice we generally don't trust these categories of people with much of anything. The first two categories of people we insist on them having guardians, or being wards of the state. The third category of people we imprison.
There are two major arguments against gun rights that I think hold the most salience for people.
Argument One: Guns are Dangerous and Unnecessary
They are undoubtedly dangerous. Their purpose is to be a weapon. But there are other things that are dangerous that we don't ban. Cars can be used to achieve mass casualty events. Bombs can be made with some commonly available materials. These other things are rarely labelled as "unnecessary" though. There are also plenty of "unnecessary" things that we don't ban. Plenty of purely recreational items and services exist. Jet skis, theme parks, cruises, large houses, etc (some of these things are even dangerous). Only the most hardcore socialists and communists want to take away all the fun toys.
There is an argument that gun advocates make that gun rights are necessary to keep the government in check. I generally like this argument, and think it is demonstrated by the level of free speech rights in places like Great Britain where guns have been successfully banned for most private "citizens".
But I'll grant for the sake of argument that guns are totally "unnecessary". And that it is the special combination of Dangerous+Unnecessary that leads people to want to ban it. Since other categories of things like Safe+Unnecessary or Dangerous+Necessary go largely unbanned and untouched.
I think the widespread existence of many "Dangerous+Necessary" demonstrates that we can trust most adults to handle dangerous things in a responsible way. We can't trust them 100% of the time. And we can't trust that there won't sometimes be negligence.
The "unnecessary" component of the argument is also a scary slippery slope to be on. People have different desires and wants. There are I think two steady states of being in regards to "unnecessary" things. Either you let everyone decide for themselves on every topic. Or you have a central authority that decides on everything for everyone. If you are willing to bite that bullet, keep in mind that it will not necessarily be you deciding what is necessary and what is not. I believe it is fully possible for such a bureaucracy to mercilessly strip every single joy out of life, and they'll fully believe they are making your life better. You'll eventually be sad enough that you'll come to the second main argument against gun rights:
Argument Two: Guns enable easier suicide
I don't have the data on hand, and I don't really want to get into an argument about said data. But it is my understanding that there is a noticeable and undeniable effect of guns on male suicide rates. This makes intuitive sense to me. Many methods of suicide require you to actively torture yourself for a short time period, drowning, hanging, cutting yourself, jumping from a very tall building etc. Or they present a chance of a failed suicide attempt that leaves you heavily injured, like jumping from not high enough, or getting in front of a moving vehicle, or pills. Guns make the attempt a more sure thing, and present an option that does not involve torturing yourself.
Something about this whole approach to suicide prevention feels very wrong. On an individual basis I think you should not commit suicide, and if someone can be talked out of suicide they generally should be talked out of it. But there are also some cases where I believe it is very cruel to prevent suicide. Medical cases for sure. But there are also people who have drawn a shit straw in life in too many ways. A bit too dumb, constant low level bad health, unable to figure out how to love or be loved, etc. A life of quiet misery. They should have an exit option, and they should have one that doesn't require them to torture themselves on the way out.
Civilization is one big nebulous agreement we have that helps us get along. But I think saying "you can't leave this agreement without being tortured", is just evil.
Forbidding gun ownership means forbidding exit, and it means you lack trust in others to such a degree that it breaks down many of the assumptions we already have about the rights and responsibilities of adults in society.
Some of the implications of my argument that I am already aware of and fine with:
Some areas that I left unaddressed to save space:
Edit: lots of good responses. I've read all of them but I'm unlikely to respond. Most of the responses were better thought out than my original post. I sometimes just have ideas or arguments kicking around in my head that need to be spilled onto paper. And I think better in response to what others say so this has helped me refine my thoughts on the subject a great deal. That synthesis of thought might end up in a future thread.
There's a common argument that if you ban guns, people will just find another way to kill themselves, so why bother? And no doubt this is true of the sufficiently determined suicidals. But the convenience factor of firearms (and other methods) does appear to play a big role. The example of gas ovens in the UK is illustrative:
In other words, there was no replacement effect: people didn't immediately switch over from inhaling oven fumes to another method. There's a non-negligible chance that Sylvia Plath would have lived to a ripe old age if the UK had made the switch to natural gas a few years sooner.
Another example is here in Ireland, in which, although it's available over the counter, it's illegal to sell more than 24 tablets of paracetamol* in a single transaction. For years I thought this was silly: what's stopping you from driving or walking to three pharmacies or supermarkets to stock up on enough paracetamol (hell, even newsagents and corner shops sell it)? And obviously this is true for the sufficiently determined suicidals, about whom there's little we can do to stop them from killing themselves short of sectioning them. But adding in the trivial inconvenience of forcing people to go to multiple different shops does appear to serve as an obstacle: by the time you've walked into your third newsagent in an hour, you might well be thinking to yourself "Do I really want to do this?"
Decades of psychological evidence strongly suggest that the vast majority of suicides are impulsive, opportunistic ones (perhaps even "cries for help" that were rather more efficacious than their user strictly intended), and that these suicides would not have occurred if not for the convenience and ease of use of the method employed. If someone is so determined to kill themselves that they voluntarily choose an extraordinarily painful method of doing so like hanging, I think it's fair to say there's little we can do about them. But on the margin, there are huge savings to be made among the less-than-maximally determined suicidals. In the counterfactual world where the US had banned guns ten years ago, I don't think that all of the people who killed themselves with firearms in our world would have instead hanged or drowned themselves. In fact, I don't think that even 50 or 25% of them would have done so.
I'm not arguing that this, in itself, is a persuasive argument in favour of banning guns, and can see the merits of both sides of the debate (particularly the "guns as a check against encroaching authoritarianism" argument advanced by many, including Handwaving Freakoutery, formerly of these parts). But the causal role that guns play in suicide owing to their convenience factor is something that opponents must take seriously. "If we're going to ban guns to stop people from killing themselves, why not go the whole hog and ban ropes to stop people from hanging themselves?" is not a serious argument, for the reasons outlined above.
*A.k.a. acetaminophen, sold under the brand name Tylenol among others.
Yep. If everyone carried around a big red button that would kill them painlessly and instantly, even if they were never pressed "accidentally", I think most people wouldn't make it very long.
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It's a bit of a distraction and cjet79's willing to accept the standard story, but I'll caveat that the evidence is a lot weaker than common knowledge suggests. There's been a sizable number of countries that have either brought about new firearms regulation, or clamped down significantly harder, in the post-1980 range where we have pretty good statistics. That's part of why the Australia example always bugs me: the decrease in total suicides didn't actually stay and there were increases in non-firearms suicide.
((Is this in contradiction to the one case of gas ovens? Sure! ... but exactly how sure are we that pre-1970s 'suicides' were all intentional suicide?))
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I agree with your argument overall, but I think hanging is not as painful as you say that it is. It's just some pressure for a few seconds and then lights out for the next 20 minutes while your body kicks around and tries to free itself. The real bother for the suicidal person there is that they need a good rope, they need to find a good spot that will support them and not let them come loose, they need to be able to tie a great knot, and they need to worry not about aesthetics of such a violent death. I imagine that these constraints are themselves large barriers to depressives who have little willpower for planning in the first place.
The thought sometimes strikes me of unique ways to commit suicide. Ones I have wondered about:
You never hear about people doing either one of these. I don't know if that's because it just doesn't work or because nobody goes for them. The apple seed one would be painful, anyway, and there are probably more effective drugs out there...
Without the barrel directing it, bullets don't go anywhere. The case will split open and the bullet will not shoot out. There's no viable path to suicide based on holding a hot frying pan to the backs of rounds held against your head.
The bullet itself might not do anything, but the explosion would be enough to do something. I saw a photo of some guy's finger that got mangled after he struck a .50 cal bullet with a hammer. That should work on any part of body...
... unless it were encased in bone!
That is indeed a constraining factor, but we're talking about a whole pack exploding right next to your skull. I don't have my strength of bones calculator handy, but I mean, maybe our aspiring depressive could throw in a pack or two of tannerite, which is also legal and doesn't require a background check. I understand that does change the hypothetical significantly, and it would also explain why one would never hear of this method (because it's lumped under an Explosives death).
I agree a whole pack at once might do it, but I don't expect that the whole pack would explode at once.
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No, but coming up with a way to direct a bullet that will work for a shot to the head isn't rocket science.
Actually, come to think of it, it pretty much is rocket science. But very simple rocket science.
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I once had the same thought about eating cherries in bulk.
I vaguely recall some movie where this happens, a guy heats shells on a frying pan.
Won't work, you'd just get peppered with brass shrapnel and suffer horribly, but you won't die because the energy isn't concentrated enough to pierce your skull. The polymer coated buckshot would do even less.
Maybe you'll get lucky and hit an artery and bleed out, but at that point it's a lot cleaner to just use a blade.
You need pressure for a good powder burn. That's why we have the brass in the first place: it seals up the breech and allows the pressure to build up during combustion so the energy has nowhere to go but heat and increasing the velocity of the projectile. Blowing up cartridges without a breech lets the energy tear the cartridge and vent gas in all directions instead of speeding up the brass.
Youtube is full of videos of rednecks blowing up .50 BMG on its own and they're always amazed how underwhelming the performance is.
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I must try so very hard to not get nerd-sniped again into an argument about convenient household or pharmaceutical techniques to kill people quickly and easily.
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Re. hanging, I did a deep dive into the biomechanics of hanging on a morbid curiosity kick a while back. My conclusion was that (to not put too fine a point to it) it's possible to set things up such that only a relatively painless blood choke is applied and conciousness is lost in 8-10 seconds, but the standard method of hanging puts much more pressure on the trachea and inconsistent pressure on the carotid arteries, causing a far more painful and likely drawn-out death.
Damn, how horrifying. I always thought that I would prefer not to be hanged if I had to be executed, glad I was right. Guillotine is far more humane, though my real preference is for the firing squad.
Firing squad is the way to go. That or ground zero of an explosive with enough force to instantly destroy your brain.
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Makes sense. I've done Jiu-Jitsu for a long time and whilst I've never been out-out I've spent a lot of time being choked in various guises and if somebody's got a clean bite and catches a blood choke perfectly it's blackness oncoming almost instantly. But also plenty of chokes where it's see-sawing the line the whole time and can be minutes of awkwardness
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That was what I said above. I never disputed that guns increase suicides.
Right, but I think your post contained something of an elision. If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying that people with terminal illnesses but also people who were dealt a bad hand by life should be afforded the dignity of a quick, painless suicide.
While I can understand the argument that people who will never be able to live a normal life (people with severe developmental disorders such that they will never be able to support themselves, paedophiles, the constitutionally unfuckable etc.) should be afforded the dignity of a quick, painless death if they want it, the point I was making about guns is that they facilitate opportunistic suicides among people who don't meet this description who find themselves in a state of intense but temporary distress. And I don't think there's any effective means of separating wheat from chaff. When guns are widely available, you allow the unemployable and unlovable to undergo a quick, painless death - but you also enable a hard-working, decent man who just lost his job to top himself when he would have thought better of it had the gun not been right there in front of him.
The implication that the only people to kill themselves are people who cannot function in ordinary society and want to exit from an agreement they never personally assented to is, in my view, not supported by the best evidence from the social sciences. Every year, lots of people kill themselves who would not have done otherwise if not for the ease of accessibility. An obvious sign of this is the fact that three professions which consistently rank among the most suicidal in every Western country are doctors, dentists and veterinarians. Is it because these professions are uniquely depressing, or attract a particularly dysfunctional class of person? Or is it because all of the people working in these fields have easy access to morphine and other painkillers?
People are not allowed to express an interest in committing suicide without being subject to a whole of oversight and interruption to their life. This can be a good thing to prevent suicide, but it makes all survey data about suicidal willingness a little suspect.
I'd also say that every suicide that happens via someone torturing themselves to death via one of the harder methods is something that could have been prevented with more painless methods being available. At least they could have had a more peaceful death.
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Imagine you hate your life. Every day you go home from your job, stare off into space, and drink a ton of alcohol. You aren't particularly suicidal, but you have fleeting thoughts at times, you still function...with the drink anyway.
One day the thoughts are a little less fleeting...you think to yourself but shit, I don't live on a busy road and getting hit by a car sounds like a lot. How would I even hang myself? Stabbing myself? Seems hard.
The thoughts pass, as they always do.
But if there was a gun? "Well fuck it." Lights out.
I've seen a shocking number of patients who managed to shoot themselves in the head and think it was an oopsy.
So yes limiting access to lethal means is an important part of standard of care and improves outcomes.
As people have pointed out, the crime rate of people who legally carry is extremely low. Your scary scenarios do not describe reality.
He wasn’t talking about crime- making it a crime to commit suicide would be pointless. He was talking about suicide.
The standard justification for criminalizing suicide is not to punish the survivor, assuming they survive. It is, or at least I've heard it claimed, so that the police have a legal pretext to intervene or break down the door and stop them.
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To be clear I am specifically talking about the evidence based way in which increased access to firearms increases suicides. I do not support restricting gun rights in the general population on this grounds, but it is still a real problem.
You can acknowledge that guns have an impact on suicides and say this is not a reason to restrict rights.
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To be fair, the fact that Costco (et al) sell giant containers of acetaminophen is kinda scary to me. It's substantially more dangerous than naproxen (also available in that size). The 24-count restriction sounds pretty reasonable to me.
It's a piece of legislation I fully support. Some Irish legislation carries a whiff of nanny-stateism, but I really can't imagine why a household would ever need more than 24 paracetamol pills in a week. I think implementing something similar in the US would be a no-brainer, especially when you consider paracetamol poisoning is the leading cause of death by acute liver failure. I assume a significant portion of that is accidental: because it's an OTC drug, a lot of people severely underestimate how toxic it is. My dad (PhD in organic chemistry) says there's no way it would have been made available OTC if it was discovered today. I always urge people to use ibuprofen instead when possible.
Four people with headaches easily covers that. And 24 pills is still enough to kill you, painfully. Making the vast majority of people who just want to keep APAP around the house go more often to the store and pay a higher per-unit price just to slightly inconvenience those who want to die isn't reasonable. Nor is it reasonable to go full retard like with pseudoephederine and have a registry to make sure no one is buying a fatal dose by going to multiple pharmacies.
Tylenol is somewhat uniquely dangerous, it would possibly not have been approved as over the counter in the U.S. in today's regulatory environment.
This is for a couple of reasons.
-The therapeutic and toxic range are way too close (aka it's really easy to overdose accidentally, which does happen).
-It has significant interaction with some medical problems (aka liver metabolism). This is admittedly pretty minor in most situations.
And most importantly:
-Tylenol overdose is one of the worst possible ways to die. It is long, and slow, and for a while you think you are fine. This gives people lots of time to decline in misery knowing they made an irreversable choice. It's awful. Most other forms of overdose kill you quickly or rapidly alter your sensorium.
This creates agony on the part of the victim and their family, and also a significant amount of angst and distress in the healthcare team.
If you like you aren't paying for the minor inconvenience of harder to pull out of the packaging pills vs. fewer suicides, you are doing to reduce clinician burnout and doctors and nurses in the workforce longer.
It's also expensive to manage.
I'm not sure we'd have any OTC drugs in the US starting from zero in today's regulatory environment. Analgesics especially even get banned for prescription use (like the COX-2 inhibitors), because regulators refuse to consider that trading off risk of death against pain is valid in the first place.
That's a failing of today's regulatory environment, and has no bearing on whether I should be able to buy a big bottle of death.
My APAP related disgust is reserved for drug warriors who ensure that oxycodone with APAP is the most available formulation of oxycodone, because they consider people trying to abuse it dying horribly to be a feature and not a bug.
I think these days they would argue that the reason is mostly because of synergistic analgesia (which is not incorrect) but yes I agree it's a questionable cost/benefit.
But ultimately society is organized around tradeoffs in your rights to enable you to have rights and the conveniences of civilization. Having to deal with mildly annoying blister packs or smaller bottles doesn't seem like a high price to pay for the amount of pain you can prevent.
Yes, that's one reason the combinations are popular, but not the reason oxy with APAP (Percocet) is so favored over oxy with ASA (Percodan, no longer available) or oxy with ibuprofen (Combunox, no longer available). That's drug warrior pressure.
No, society is organized around what those with power want.
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