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There's a standard argument about gun control in the US that you hear a lot in the liberal bubble. Obviously, this argument does not appear to be very compelling to the anti-gun control side. It's pretty hard to find the counterarguments while embedded in the bubble, so I'm asking here in the hopes someone might explain them.
The argument comes from making a comparison between cars and guns. Both create about the same magnitude of danger when in the wrong hands, but cars are significantly more important for being able to function in modern society. Therefore guns ownership and usage should be regulated at least as strongly as cars are. In particular, car ownership has a strict licensing requirement including a safety/competency test and also requires insurance in case of accidents. We should therefore pass additional gun regulations requiring the same.
I can imagine the counterargument being in almost any step of this chain of logic:
For some reason, cars are actually far more dangerous than guns in the wrong hands, maybe when you appropriately consider the kind of car or kind of gun people most commonly have.
Maybe it seems that cars are more important for modern living, but actually guns are more important, maybe as protection against low-probability really horrible things---tyrannical government, breakdown of society, etc. I guess this would require making some kind of expected value justification, that the horrible thing is likely enough and guns ownership would actually help enough.
I can't really see anyone disagreeing with cars being regulated to the level the argument claims.
We don't need to pass additional gun regulations like those for cars. Because of so and so reason, guns are actually already regulated more strictly than cars. Just look based on this and this example how much easier it is to get a car than a gun (though as long as it's not actually super misleading, the stereotypical Texas Walmart example makes this hard for me to see).
Which of these points can actually be expanded into counterarguments you guys find compelling? How do you do so? Is there something else I'm not considering?
I think the biggest problem with that argument is that cars pretty much entirely kill unintentionally. Only about 535 accidental gun deaths occurred in 2020, according to the CDC. That's 2.2% of all gun deaths in the US that year. That's an order of magnitude less than annual accidental drowning deaths, and fewer deaths than (scarcely regulated) swimming pools or bath tubs alone.
It's not enough to say "here's a problem, here's a regulation that pertains in a very broad sense to that problem, therefore the regulation will help address the problem". If people want to commit murder or suicide with a gun, it's incumbent upon would-be regulators to explain how their proposed regulations would stop those people. "We'll make it illegal" does no good - murder is already illegal, and suicidal people won't care. "We'll require a license" does no good when people can trivially obtain one like they can a driver's license. And if the licensing requirement becomes sufficiently onerous that it's practically a ban, they'll run into the same problem as advocates of banning guns: how exactly is that going to happen in a country with a 2nd Amendment, more guns than people, and criminals who don't care what you say you've banned?
While I'm not completely onboard with anti-car YIMBY urbanists, I think they have a reasonable point that most automobile "accidents" are the result of avoidable negligence, and that our auto safety standards reflect a growing allowance for carelessness on the part of drivers. IMO limiting road-legal cars to 90mph (5 over the highest legal speed limit in the country) with strict liability and enforcement, and limiting power to fairly modest acceleration would anger a lot of gearheads but probably save lives overall. Europe does reasonably well with average velocity enforcement of time between fixed measurement points.
I'm not opposed to people owning performance cars, but I don't think they should be "performing" on public streets. There's probably some reasonable middle ground with separate "road" and "race" modes in car computers that I'd be willing to go along with.
The problem is, at this point, mostly unsolvable in the "it's trivial for a state to co-ordinate this, but it makes life a lot worse if they do" sense.
Sure, you can legislate away the dashboard screens (and every control moved there is a strict malus to safety, but the manufacturers like them because it's cheap for them to install, expensive for you to replace, and bakes in obsolescence thanks to how tech companies work). But if you do that, drivers just fall back on their phones like they were before they bought a car with the screens and that's even worse.
And all the other solutions don't work. You could make phones read GPS constantly and just refuse to work above a certain speed, but that means you can't use your phone on the bus, train, or as a passenger and it also kills the battery. Explicit go/no-go zones don't work because they still don't help passengers and are abusable by governments.
I think the best solution at this point is an extension of industry trend: mandate (directly or indirectly) that new phones must function as physical keys for cars. You surrender your phone to the ignition switch (which captures it until you turn the car off), which has a bit of extra hardware that still functions in this way if its battery has died. There are a bunch of complications that you could use to get around this (mostly to do with the requirement for an extra physical key) but it mostly boils down to the car being completely dependent on the phone being in the ignition to play music, display a map, and the other conveniences (maybe calls and text-by-voice-only; while I get that these also increase reaction time substantially you at least have your head up) because it will only pair with other phones if the driver surrendered theirs to start the car.
All of the EVs worth buying out-accelerate even the higher end of gas-powered sports cars. It's not the "
gun nutsgearheads" you need to worry about havingspecial guns that hold more than 10 rounds in a magazineamazing acceleration because a significant number of normal people who bought new cars over the last few years have them for reasons mostly unrelated to those performance numbers.Of course, they're also probably the worst cars to have that power because they're way harder to stop- a Tesla weighs an extra ton over a comparable gas car- and because of that mass, they "win" when colliding with a normal car (something that isn't obvious like it is for SUVs).
Sure, you could go tiered licensing to drive them (and most EVs and especially Teslas are built in such a way that crippling their acceleration would be trivial with an OTA update), but now you're directly fighting the EVs-at-any-cost political faction, you damaged the ability of existing owners to quietly enjoy their property, and most people aren't going to bother (the people that would already drive fast gas-powered cars, because they value the ability to turn corners more than raw acceleration).
SUVs aren't going to ever go away mainly because the population is aging and those people find climbing up easier than climbing down (and they're generally above most of the LED high-beams that might as well be military dazzlers, and give the illusion of better visibility because collision standards have made it so you can't see much of anything out of modern cars), so you'll probably have to take that class of vehicle from their cold dead hands.
I think you're making this problem a lot more complicated than it actually is. A lot of deaths could be prevented with a few classes of changes: separate cars from pedestrians and cyclists, and use road design to encourage safety. People gravitate to driving at the speed which feels safe; narrower lanes and roads naturally encourage slower driving, because you're closer to other vehicles, roadside barriers, etc. There's a huge number of other things you could implement as well. And if you assume that people will screw up, it becomes clear that you should design infrastructure to be safe even when someone does make an error.
Over-indexing on phones specifically doesn't do anything about speeding, other forms of distraction, drunk driving, or just regular old human error.
Not just bikes has some videos on traffic calming and related topics:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=bAxRYrpbnuA&ab_channel=NotJustBikes
https://youtube.com/watch?v=bglWCuCMSWc&ab_channel=NotJustBikes
https://youtube.com/watch?v=_ByEBjf9ktY
Car size is also an issue, but this paragraph is pretty baffling to me. Given how high some SUVs and trucks are, I don't believe for a moment that they're easier for anyone with limited mobility than a sedan or smaller SUV or crossover--you have to climb up and down in any case anyway, to get both in and out. Safetywise, SUVs are a defection that only become "necessary" if others already have them; ditto for the issue with elevated lights. If you limit the number of high and heavy vehicles on most roads, and how bright their lights are, then much of the motivation to buy them goes away.
Thinking about this harder, maybe it's all nothingburger.
After all, compared to 10 and 20 years ago, distracted driving rates are way up, vehicle performance is way up (cars have turbochargers they didn't have before, and cars with 400+ horsepower doing 0-60 in 4 seconds didn't exist below 50,000 USD until just a few years ago), blind spots are way bigger, night driving is even more difficult, and the average vehicle is both heavier and taller.
Because of those things we should expect harder and more deadlier crashes.
But that's not what the data shows. Compared to 10 years ago, the rate of traffic fatalities in the US dropped by a quarter (per mile travelled). So if all of those things actually did increase fatalities significantly, and it seems like a reasonable thing to assume would increase, our safety standards are clearly outpacing any and all of the negative effects they have (and to think that the average car on the road today, being made in 2010, doesn't even have the infotainment systems that allow you to send a text without looking down).
So maybe the best solution really is "nothing, just have more and more technology to make distracted and high-speed driving safer and safer available at lower and lower pricepoints". I'm not that happy with that because those safety standards make me feel I'm more likely to cause an accident because of reduced visibility inherent to those safety standards (extra-thick A pillers, huge blindspots) and all that tech getting damaged makes collision repair far more expensive, but clearly they're having a positive effect in aggregate so maybe I'm complaining too much about it.
The US saw over 40,000 traffic fatalities in 2021 and car crashes are one of the leading causes of death for young people. This hardly seems like a nothingburger (do you think crime is a nothingburger? Homicides are something like half that or less).
What data? The table in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year seems to show either flat or slightly increasing deaths per million VMT, depending on whether you're looking before or after the pandemic as your end point. It's even worse if you look at pedestrian deaths, which are way up. And heavy SUVs are contributing to this trend.
Certain technological innovations have improved the ability of vehicles to either alert the driver or protect them in case of a crash. Also, as 2020 showed, congestion can reduce automobile fatalities. These developments are offsetting the effects you mention, but that doesn't mean that distracted driving and heavier vehicles aren't a problem.
Based on the data I've seen, the aggregate effect is negative, but also there's no need to couple these things. Repeal CAFE, make narrower lanes and smaller parking spots, add traffic calming, harsher penalties for distracted or reckless driving leading to injury, maybe even tax heavier vehicles.
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I love cars, but I'm pro tiered licensing at this point. Basic license as currently constructed should cover cars up to 180-230 horsepower, anything higher than that should require actual driving training, including track work on vehicle dynamics, and towing/large vehicle handling. I'm tired of people buying gigantic trucks/SUVs that they can't drive or park. Hazard to themselves and others.
Tons of great cars have less than 230 horsepower. You can get a Transit Van that will hit highway speeds with cargo or passengers, you can get a Toyota GR86 and have a ton of fun. But you can't get a car that is both big and fast; driving a Suburban or an F150 with a 220 horsepower engine isn't that enjoyable.
Fine, you want a Hellcat or a Raptor? If you've got $50k+ to spend on a car, pony up $10k and a couple weekends to take classes at the track.
Such restrictions could be imposed through private insurance rather than through government licensing. In some states, private insurance companies already are forced by the govt. to reduce your insurance costs if you take certain safety courses. (See, e. g., New Jersey Statutes § 17:33B-45.1.) Just have the govt. suggest (not mandate) that insurance companies impose actuarially-justified fees on people who drive bigger or more-powerful vehicles without taking corresponding training. (And if in reality no fees are actuarially justified, then none will be imposed.)
Actuarial calculations do not consider eg parking and non accident hazards.
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This is just doing it via direct government requirements, only dishonestly.
If the government "suggests" them they will be justified by the risk of government action if the suggestion is ignored.
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Swimming pool regulation is out of control in Australia. Friends of mine have a huge rural property with a lake (fish and everything, even a small dam). The council wants them to increase the fencing on their swimming pool lest some child walk for about 10 minutes up to the house, get over an insufficiently high fence or through a fairly substantial hedge and drown. So much easier to just drown in the unfenced, easily available lake!
There's a bunch of passive-aggressive and plain aggressive letters going back and forth. It's a complete waste of everyone's time. We would be much better off with fewer regulations on irrelevant stuff like this - focus all that fire and fury on serious matters like gain-of-function.
Is there some irony that we're talking about burdensome Australian swimming pool regulation in a gun-control thread?
Edit: the joke being that (so I hear) Australian gun control regulation is also burdensome
HelmedHorror brought it up. My broader point is that regulations have all kinds of stifling and inhibitory effects that aren't easily noticed, plus they're interpreted by deliberately malicious and unreasonable cretins.
Sorry, to be clear I thought what you had to say was interesting and relevant. It had to be said though, I was hoping it would just be one of many comments and wouldn’t be disruptive
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Such a plot point was an ongoing saga in a season of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
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Mitchell and Webb comedy skit on drowning
Haven't heard this one before. Excellent.
"Everyone has to die, and in a balanced, fair, and democratic society, some of them should drown."
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Regulators should have good laws that work and not have bad laws that don't work, and if that's not happening there should be pushback. But gun regulation isn't the impossible task you make it out to be. The whole "murder is illegal anyway" doesn't track because gun laws can make things more risky by increasing the points of illegality before the murder actually happens. Then you start cracking down on minor crimes, search for guns while you do it, and bam you have a much nicer city Mr. Giuliani. Similarly I easily can imagine effectiveness in inconveniencing and tagging people at high suicide risk (ie people who have attempted before) just because I think many of those happen at intense points, under the influence, etc.
Another thing but the with the whole onerous gun laws thing: Those should just be relaxed if you're a woman, and that'll solve most of those issues. If you're a man, then you should keep a clean slate or get one illegally if you really need to protect yourself and you don't pass the background check, you should probably have connections at that point anyway.
Yeah, I'm not suggesting that nothing can be done to increase enforcement of existing laws. Like you said, the Giuliani/Bratton era in New York City is a good example of that. Nor am I saying that possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony shouldn't be an enhancement to sentencing. I'm just saying that there's not much else in the way of plausible laws or regulations (the OP's topic) that is going to meaningfully reduce gun deaths in a country with 400 million guns and a 2nd Amendment.
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