So, back when I was cussing a lot about the premature politicization of the Virginia Tech shootings, I threatened to give my real opinions on the subject of gun control on Monday. It’s Monday, and I try to be good to my word, so, this is that post.
Dipping back into my shady past on Usenet, there’s this old post, which turned up in .sigfiles for a while:
Actually, a smallish number of people with strong opinions and mind control powers would probably be the simplest possible explanation for the gun control debate, which typically involves critical reasoning diluted to near-homeopathic levels…
That’s still pretty much my feeling, as you can also get from Thursday’s post, in which I referred to it as one of the two great brain-sucking quagmire arguments in American politics. I say that not just because people who get sucked into arguing about gun control inevitably seem to find themselves covered in filth and unable to escape, but because something about the topic appears to suck the brains right out of the skulls of partisans on both sides. In fact, I can feel brain cells dying even as I write this, so I’ll try to type fast.
People on the pro-gun-control side creep me out, not because of their expansive view of government power, but because they seem to regard guns as weirdly talismanic objects that inevitably bring death and destruction. This is just ridiculous– a gun is a tool, not a ring of power. There’s nothing inherently corrupting about guns. They don’t whisper ominously to you in the Black Speech of Mordor, tempting you to evil. Giving someone a gun won’t turn an ordinary person into a cold-blooded killer, any more than giving them a claw hammer will turn them into a master carpenter.
“But thousands of people are killed by firearms every year!” Yes, and…? Taking statistics from a pro-gun-control site, the total number of firearm deaths in the US is on the short side of 30,000. The total number of guns in the country is frequently cited as being in the neghborhood of 200 million— that means that there’s something like one chance in 7000 of any particular gun killing anybody, even if you make the highly conservative assumption of one and only one death per gun. That makes guns roughly as dangerous as cars (40,000 deaths in automobile accidents for 250,000,000 cars), and those odds just don’t say to me that guns are so intrinsically scary that they must be banned.
Don’t get me wrong– I’m not trying to trivialize firearm deaths. The death of any person for any reason is a terrible thing, and firearm deaths are no exception. But the fact is, the actual risk of death from guns doesn’t come close to justifying the level of fear gun-control proponents try to generate about them.
But the timorous gun control proponents come off well compared to the pro-gun side, who seem to run on a combination of preposterous machismo and pants-wetting terror. It’s a wonder their heads don’t explode from the cognitive dissonance. The case for having more people carry guns rests on two main assumptions, as far as I can tell. The first is that crime is everywhere, and people have an absolute need to carry guns in order to keep themselves safe. The second is that when confronted with an actual crime, a person carrying a gun will automatically turn into Clint Eastwood, calmly and coolly saving the day with steely resolve.
Both of these are ridiculous. The total crime rate is in the neighborhood of 4,000 per 100,000 people, which sounds like a lot, but that’s everything. If you consider only violent crimes (which are what guns are supposed to prevent), that drops by an order of magnitude, and those aren’t going to be evenly distributed. The fact is, for most people, the danger of being a victim of a crime just aren’t that great, whether you’re carrying a gun or not.
I’m thirty-five years old, and I can think of a total of about five occasions in my life when I honestly thought I was in danger of being the victim of a crime, and I was wrong every time. In four of those five cases, I or somebody with me had actively done something stupid to put me in an unsafe situation (the fifth came about because I lived down the block from a crack house, which you could argue is delayed stupidity). Now, granted, I’m a large white male, and I’ve spent most of my life far from crime-ridden urban areas, but none of those situations would’ve been improved by a gun.
(And similar conditions hold for many gun proponents. One of my favorite news articles ever came from the Washington Post in the wake of a vote on an assault weapons ban. A congressman representing Glens Falls, NY, said on the floor of the House that he was voting against the ban because he was away from home for much of the year, and his wife needed to be able to feel safe in their home when was gone. The Post pulled the police blotter for Glens Falls, which featured no violent crimes to speak of, but did include honest-to-God calls to retrieve cats stuck in trees.)
As for the second key assumption, that armed citizens will automatically be able to stop crimes being committed, don’t make me laugh. We’re a nation of people who freeze up when confronted with the six choices on the value menu at a fat-food restaurant– you think that these people are going to make accurate snap decisions in a life-or-death situation? The vast majority of people, armed or not, will simply freeze up in the sort of stressful situation where a gun would need to be used, and those who don’t freeze up worry me more than the criminals do. If carrying of concelaed weapons were as common as some libertoonians would like, I’d be more afraid of getting shot in the face for asking some jittery commuter the time than I would of actual muggers.
This is dealt with extremely well in the promoted comment from “Old Jarhead” on Making Light, and the article on the Lethal Force Institute, also via Making Light. The idea that a bunch of ordinary citizens with guns are going to be a solution to the crime problem is just not credible. Of course, it looks like a rock-solid certainty compared to the farcical notion that privately owned weapons are the last, best defense against government tyranny. That’s absolutely farcical given the resources of a modern police force, let alone the military.
And don’t even talk to me about the hack-tacular John Lott and his ridiculous studies. Even before he imploded in a cloud of sock puppets and mysteriously absent research data, his book was a case study in how to package dubious results to make them look more impressive. His subsequent antics have completely compromised any credibility he might’ve had.
If you put a gun to my head (heh), and made me pick one group or the other, I’d probably go with the gun control people. My ideal solution, though, would be to ban most concealed-carry proponents from carrying anything more threatening than a butter knife, and require most gun control activists to carry loaded pistols at all times. Assuming we couldn’t just maroon them all on an island somewhere.