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This weekend, I visited my friendly local gun store, idly browsing for shotguns and learning about interstate purchases. Then I drove to my parents and spent the evening playing board games. It was a nice night with good food, drink and company.
Meanwhile, five minutes up the highway, some lunatic was murdering random strangers at a local shopping mall.
No one I know was killed. No one I know personally was present—though a friend of a friend was. I didn’t hear about it until the next morning. Big nothingburger, right? And yet I’ve been to that mall. I’ve been to the bar across the street with my coworkers. If I’d had an errand or three to run, instead of visiting my family, I might have been cowering in a storeroom or staring at a splatter of brains on the sidewalk.
I’m not linking to any articles. Partly for the thinnest veneer of opsec, partly because media coverage is predictably terrible. All sympathetic pictures and, as we’d say here, recruiting for a cause. Nothing good will come of this. Either we’ll force through a knee-jerk bill with symbolic limits on firearms, or we’ll (correctly) dismiss that as posturing and (incorrectly) do abso-fucking-lutely nothing.
It’s not like I can do anything about it. I don’t know what I would actually expect to work, and if I did, how could it be brought about? State, even local politics is as tribal as it gets. Enjoy your a la carte selection of two options, and one of them is out of stock.
Meanwhile, I guess the best I can do is pick up some CCW training and a good holster. Fuck.
Practically speaking, what measures will gun rights advocates actually tolerate? It seems like the only thing they can countenance is more guns.
It seems to me that there are many ways we could 'reformat' our conception of gun ownership in a way that would preserve the ability of 'the people' to bear arms while making them less available for use in crime or mass shootings (or suicide), but I find it incredibly unlikely that the current American gun culture would find it at all tolerable.
The best you can do is probably something like move to New Hampshire. The most reasonable thing you can do is nothing.
The odds of concealed carry protecting you from victimization of any kind, let alone a mass shooting, is incredibly low, if for no other reason than because a middle class defense contractor is already extremely unlikely to be victimized and the efficacy of concealed carry in stopping mass shootings is... mixed. It's a psychological prop more than anything.
Mass shootings are, frankly, more analogous to terrorism than ordinary crime. Terrorism doesn't kill very many people, but it does scare people and make them feel powerless because it is outside the 'normal' sociology of murder. Nevertheless, carrying a gun because you might get jumped by terrorists is hard to justify.
Correct. Since the entire history of gun control regulation has shown that advocates of gun control will never admit to a policy failure. Any violence that occurs is ultimately because there was insufficient gun control in place, thus no failure is actually a failure of gun control policy, it is instead a failure to go far enough.
California has some of the most stringent gun laws in the country and also one of the higher murder rates. To say nothing of fucking CHICAGO. You literally can't get much stricter than Chicago in restricting firearms, and you also can't find many places with a higher murder rate. They've tried heavy gun control and it didn't help. So can they admit that gun control has failed in this instance?
If there are no circumstances under which they'll admit the policy is failing, then in what sense can they be said to be acting in good faith?
Every single compromise gun rights advocates have made previously has been met with demands for further compromise, and nothing is offered in return.
Speaking of, NH has some of the most permissive laws and also a negligible homicide rate. Again kinda makes the point for me.
The odds of a fire extinguisher protecting you from a house fire of any kind, let alone an arsonist, is incredibly low...
You see the subtle error in reasoning here?
And because those instances are given outsized attention by the national media, who has every intention of maximizing the fear felt by their viewership.
But that's a fundamentally different problem. If it weren't terrorism it'd be something else.
This is ridiculous. One cannot prove anything with one or two data points. To take just one example, here is some tentative evidence that permitting decreases homicides, and RTC laws have the opposite effect. I'm obviously not saying that just because there's a study here you have to agree with me, but at least engage with the literature rather than saying 'look at Chicago' and calling it a day.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29785569/
Fire extinguishers do not impose wider social costs.
Different thing, but you seem to be framing this as a fault of the media but surely if there is blame to be assigned here it has to go to the consumer, given that the media is surely just satisfying the demand for such news which we all demonstrate by consuming it as much as we do.
Chicago is such a useful example of the people who claim to want to solve the nations' problems absolutely failing to achieve any of their stated goals, though!
Its like, you can't solve violence in your own city, and attempt to externalize the blame for this fact, and then claim to be in a better position to solve violence on an national level than the people who live in the less violent areas! Chicago is itself a refutation of the efficacy of it's own policies.
I'm not certain what data you would, in particular, find convincing, but consider that the major source of firearms DEATHS in the U.S. is suicide. If you want to save lives, THAT is where you need to start.
And there are multiple countries that have strict gun laws and much higher suicide rates. Japan and South Korea as glaring examples here.
This suggests that, again, guns are not the driving or decisive factor here, and it would probably be better to investigate root causes rather than going after firearms directly.
Would you support a ban on matches, lighter fluid, and fireworks, or other implements that can be used for arson? There's definitely a wider social cost there.
My point is that the extinguisher is there to defend against a low-probability but high impact event. You don't have a fire extinguisher because you genuinely think it's likely that you will have to put out a fire, but if a fire does break out it can burn down your entire house and/or kill people. So the precaution is fully warranted.
Likewise, you don't carry a gun, in most instances, because you think it's likely you'll ever be accosted by a violent criminal or mob... but if violence does break out it can destroy your belongings and/or kill people. So the precaution is fully warranted simply because of the fact that when violence does break out it can have outsized impact.
There's little evidence that a person who is legally carrying a firearm on their person imposes a 'wider social cost' in this respect, incidentally
That wasn't my comment.
No isn't because one data point cannot prove that. For all we know, Chicago may well have even more violence than it does already if gun control was relaxed. It may not of course, but simply pointing to one city proves nothing. Numbers are your friend.
Also, I will reiterate that it's very difficult for cities to control guns on their own, national or at least state level action is much more effective.
I agree that gun suicides are very important to tackle! That why I support ERPOs and waiting periods which have been shown to effectively prevent suicides.
Again, this proves nothing.
Are they mutually exclusive? Governments aren't limited to one policy response per issue.
Probably not because the social cost of the arson facilitated by those items probably doesn't outweigh the value we get from their benign applications.
Well they do, in part a) firearms are not tied to a person and more firearms in general circulation is bad for public safety, and more importantly b) even if they were SDGUs aren't that great compared to the average, and in consequence the expected utility for even a legal owner is negative given the facilitation of an easier suicide, accidents etc.
I'd like to see you apply this calculation to firearms.
Given that the uses for hunting, sport/recreation, and the occasional self-defense are necessarily far greater than the uses for criminal activity.
There are approximately 15 licensed million hunters in the U.S.
10 million who do sport shooting (these numbers probably overlap).
So on the one hand we've got literal millions who use guns for 'benign' applications (assuming you don't have some serious objection to hunting).
On the other other, around 50,000 deaths/year which involve firearms in some way.
So what would you estimate the 'social cost' of those 15 or so million people who use firearms without harming anyone being unable to hunt is?
This is excluding DGUs, now.
Not clear to me why we think it absurd to ban matches (50,000 burns require hospitalization every year, 4,500 burn deaths per year) just because it makes it harder for people to light candles, but civilian-owned guns are somehow inherently dangerous to even own.
This seems obviously confounded by factors that contribute to suicide and accidents independently of gun ownership.
So I find it doubtful that for the median gun owner it turns into a net negative, even if we see on the lower end of the bell curve that accidents and suicide are an actual risk.
In the same way that owning a pool makes it WAY more likely you or a loved one will die of drowning, and yet there are fairly easy precautions one can take to mitigate those chances (learn to swim, learn CPR, fence in the pool, provide life vests) to almost zero.
Dont forget to add in the deaths from pools. Or seed oils.
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