Guns And States

[Epistemic status: I think I probably wrung the right conclusions out of this evidence, but this isn’t the only line of evidence bearing on the broader gun control issue and all I can say is what it’s consistent with. Content warning for discussion of suicide, murder, and race]

I.

From a Vox article on America’s Gun Problem, Explained: “On Wednesday, it happened again: There was a mass shooting — this time, in San Bernardino, California. And once again on Sunday, President Barack Obama called for measures that make it harder for would-be shooters to buy deadly firearms.”

Then it goes on to say that “more guns mean more gun deaths, period. The research on this is overwhelmingly clear. No matter how you look at the data, more guns mean more gun deaths.” It cites the following chart:

…then uses the graph as a lead in to talk about active shooter situations, gun-homicide relationships, and outrage over gun massacres.

Did you notice that the axis of this graph says “gun deaths”, and that this is a totally different thing from gun murders?

(this isn’t an isolated incident: Vox does the same thing here and here)

Gun deaths are a combined measure of gun homicides and gun suicides. Here is a graph of guns vs. gun homicides:

And here is a graph of guns vs. gun suicides:

The relationship between gun ownership and homicide is weak (and appears negative), the relationship between gun ownership and suicide is strong and positive. The entire effect Vox highlights in their graph is due to gun suicides, but they are using it to imply conclusions about gun homicides. This is why you shouldn’t make a category combining two unlike things.

II.

I am not the first person to notice this. The Washington Examiner makes the same criticism of Vox’s statistics that I do. And Robert VerBruggen of National Review does the same analysis decomposing gun deaths into suicides and homicides, and like me finds no correlation with homicides.

German Lopez of Vox responds here. He argues that VerBruggen can’t just do a raw uncontrolled correlation of state gun ownership with state murder rates without adjusting for confounders. This is true, although given that Vox has done this time and time again for months on end and all VerBruggen is doing is correctly pointing out a flaw in their methods, it feels kind of like an isolated demand for rigor.

So let’s look at the more-carefully-controlled studies. Lopez suggests the ones at the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, which has done several statistical analyses of gun violence. They list two such analyses comparing gun ownership versus homicide rates across US states: Miller Azrael & Hemenway (2002), and Miller Azrael & Hemenway (2007).

(does it count as nominative determinism when someone named Azrael goes into homicide research?)

We start with MA&H 2002. This study does indeed conclude that higher gun ownership rates are correlated with higher murder rates after adjusting for confounders. But suspiciously, it in fact finds that higher gun ownership rates are correlated with higher murder rates even before adjusting for confounders, something that we already found wasn’t true! Furthermore, even after adjusting for confounders it finds in several age categories that higher gun ownership rates are correlated with higher non-gun homicide rates (eg the rates at which people are murdered by knives or crowbars or whatever) at p less than 0.001. This is really suspicious! Unless guns are exerting some kind of malign pro-murder influence that makes people commit more knife murders, some sort of confounding influence has remained. Let’s look closer.

The study gets its murder rate numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics, which seems like a trustworthy source. It gets its gun ownership numbers from…oh, that’s interesting, it doesn’t actually have any gun ownership numbers. It says that there is no way to figure out what percent of people in a given state own guns, so as a proxy for gun ownership numbers, it will use a measure called FS/S, ie the number of firearm suicides in a state divided by the total number of suicides.

This makes some intuitive sense. Among people who want to commit suicide, suppose a fixed percent prefer to use guns compared to other methods. In that case, the determining factor for whether or not they use a gun will be whether or not they have a gun. Hospitals diligently record statistics about suicide victims including method of suicide, so if our assumption holds this should be a decent proxy for gun ownership within a state.

There’s only one problem – I checked this against an actual measure of gun ownership per state that came out after this study was published – the CDC asking 200,000 people how many guns they had as part of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey – and the FS/S measure fails. When I repeat all of their analyses with their own FS/S measure, I get all of their same positive correlations, including the ones with non-gun homicides. When I repeat it with the real gun ownership data, all of these positive correlations disappear. When I look at exactly why this happens, it’s because FS/S is much more biased towards Southern states than actual gun ownership is. Real gun ownership correlates very modestly – 0.25 – with 538’s ranking of the Southern-ness of states. FS/S correlates at a fantastically high 0.62. For some reason, suicidal Southerners are much more likely to kill themselves with guns than suicidal people from the rest of the States, even when you control for whether they have a gun or not. That means that MA&H 2002 thought it was measuring gun ownership, but was actually measuring Southern-ness. This is why they found higher homicide rates, including higher rates of non-gun homicide.

So we move on to MA&H 2007. This study was published after the CDC’s risk survey, so they have access to the same superior gun ownership numbers I used to pick apart their last study. They also have wised up to the fact that Southern-ness is important, and they include a dummy variable for it in their calculations. They also control for non-gun crime rate, Gini coefficient, income, and alcohol use. They do not control for urbanization level or race, but when I re-analyze their data including these factors doesn’t change anything, likely because they are already baked in to the crime rate.

They find that even after controlling for all of this stuff, there is still a significant correlation between gun ownership level and gun homicide rate. Further, this time they are using good statistics, and there is not a significant correlation between gun ownership and non-gun-homicide rate. Further, there is a correlation between gun ownership and total homicide rate, suggesting that the gun-gun-homicide correlation was not just an artifact of people switching from inferior weapons to guns while still committing the same number of murders. Further, this is robust to a lot of different decisions about what to control or not to control, and what to include or not to include.

I repeated all of their analyses using two different sources of gun ownership data, a couple different sources of homicide and crime rate data, and a bunch of different plausible and implausible confounders – thanks a lot to Tumblr user su3su2u1 for walking me through some of the harder analyses. I was able to replicate their results. Pro-gun researcher John Lott had many complaints about this study, including that it was insensitive to including DC and that it was based entirely on the questionable choice of controlling for robbery rate – but I was unable to replicate his concerns and found that the guns-homicide correlation remained even after DC was included and even when I chose a group of confounders not including robbery rate. I was unable to use their methodology to replicate the effect in places where it shouldn’t replicate (I tried to convince it to tell me tractors caused homicide, since I was suspicious that it was just picking up an urban/rural thing, but it very appropriately refused to fall for it). Overall I am about as sure of this study as I have ever been of any social science study, ie somewhat.

This study doesn’t prove causation; while one interpretation is that guns cause homicide, another is that homicide causes guns – for example, by making people feel unsafe so they buy guns to protect themselves. However, I doubt the reverse causation aspect in this case. The study controlled for robbery rate; ie it was looking at whether guns predicted homicides above and beyond those that could be expected given the level of non-homicide crime. My guess is that people feeling unsafe is based more on the general crime rate than on the homicide rate per se, which would make it hard for the homicide rate to cause increased gun ownership independently of the crime rate.

If guns are in fact correlated with more homicide, how come me and VerBruggen found the opposite in our simpler scatterplot analysis? This is complicated, but I think the biggest part of the answer is the urban/rural divide. Rural people have more guns. Murder rates are higher in urban areas. Race also plays a part: whites have more guns, but black areas have higher murder rates. Finally, the North and West seem to have more guns, but murder rates are highest in the South (which is what produced the bogus effect on the last study). All of these differences are large enough to cancel out the gun/no-gun difference and make the raw scatterplot look like nothing. This study didn’t address all those things directly, but its decision to control for non-gun crime rate and poverty took care of them nevertheless. As the old saying goes, guns don’t kill people; guns controlled for robbery rate, alcoholism, income, a dummy variable for Southernness, and a combined measure of social deprivation kill people.

If this is all true, how come I spent so much time yelling at that first study with worse data? Because I worry that if people only see the good studies, they’ll get complacent. Vox posted these two studies as proof that there was a state-level gun-murder correlation. The first one was deeply flawed, but the second one turned out to be okay. Do you think Vox realized this? Do you think they would have written that article any differently in a world where both studies were flawed? As long as you trust every scientific paper you see – let alone every scientific paper you see on your side in a highly politicized field – even when you’re right it will often just be by luck.

III.

Vox also voxsplains to us about America’s unusually high gun homicide rate.

Having presented this graph, they say that “To understand why that is, there’s another important statistic: The US has by far the highest number of privately owned guns in the world.”

Even granting, as we saw above, that gun ownership does indeed increase homicide rates, this is not the most important factor in explaining America’s higher homicide rate, or even close to the most important factor. Let me give a few arguments for why this must be the case:

1. The United States’ homicide rate of 3.8 is clearly higher than that of eg France (1.0), Germany (0.8), Australia (1.1), or Canada (1.4). However, as per the FBI, only 11,208 of our 16,121 murders were committed with firearms, eg 69%. By my calculations, that means our nonfirearm murder rate is 1.2. In other words, our non-firearm homicide rate alone is higher than France, Germany, and Australia’s total homicide rate. Nor does this mean that if we banned all guns we would go down to 1.2 – there is likely a substitution effect where some murderers are intent on murdering and would prefer to use convenient firearms but will switch to other methods if they have to. 1.2 should be considered an absolute lower bound. And it is still higher than the countries we want to compare ourselves to.

2. There are many US states that combine very high firearm ownership with very low murder rates. The highest gun-ownership state in the nation is Wyoming, where 59.7% of households have a gun (really!). But Wyoming has a murder rate of only 1.4 – the same as right across the border in more gun-controlled Canada, and only about a third of that of the nation as a whole. It seems likely that the same factors giving Canada a low murder rate give Wyoming a low murder rate, and that the factors differentiating the rest of America from Wyoming are the same factors that differentiate the rest of America from Canada (and Germany, and France…). But this does not include lower gun ownership.

3. There are many US states that combine very low firearm ownership with very high murder rates. The highest murder rate in the country is that of Washington, DC, which has a murder rate of 21.8, more than twenty times that of most European countries. But DC also has the strictest gun bans and the lowest gun ownership rate in the country, with gun ownership numbers less than in many European states! It seems likely that the factors making DC so deadly are part of the story of why America as a whole is so deadly, but these cannot include high gun ownership.

If not gun ownership, what is the factor making America so much more deadly than Europe and other First World countries? The traditional answer I always heard to this question was that America had a “culture of violence”. I always hated this answer, because it seemed so vague and meaningless as to be untestable by design. If the NRA waves their hands and says “eh, culture of violence”, how are you going to tell them they’re wrong?

But we can work with this if we assume the culture of violence (or, if you want to be official about it, “honor culture”) is more common in some populations and areas than others. Some of the groups most frequently talked about during these lines are Southerners and various nonwhite minorities. This provides a testable theory: if we compare American non-Southern whites to European countries mostly made up of non-Southern whites, we’ll find similar murder rates. But first, some scatter plots:

This is murder rate by state, correlated with perceived Southernness of that state as per 538’s poll. I’ve removed DC as an outlier on all of the following.

And this is murder rate by state correlated with percent black population:

This would seem to support the “culture of violence” theory.

Can we adjust for this and see what the murder rate is for non-Southern whites? Sort of. The Economist gives a white-only murder rate of 2.5 (this is based on white victims, whereas we probably want white perpetrators, but the vast majority of murders are within-race so it doesn’t make much difference). And Audacious Epigone has put together a collection of white murder rates by state. I can’t find anything on non-Southern white murder rates per se, but one hack would be to take the white murder rate in non-Southern states and assume there aren’t any Southerners there.

Our main confounder will be urbanization. Western Europe is about 80% urban, so let’s look at states at a similar level. The four northern states that are closest to 80% urban are Colorado, Oregon, Washington, and Connecticut. I’m throwing out Colorado because it has a large Latino population who can’t be statistically differentiated from whites. That leaves, Washington (2.4), Connecticut (2.0), and Oregon (2.0). So possibly adjusting out Southerners brings us down from 2.5 (all whites) to 2.1 or so (non-Southern whites)? Again, compare to Germany at 0.8, Canada at 1.4, and America at 3.8.

There’s one more factor that needs to be considered:

This is a plot of the gun death rate vs. the robbery rate. There’s a strong correlation (r = 0.78). Robbery is heavily correlated with percent black, percent Southern, and urbanization, so it’s probably coming from the same place. Nevertheless, it seems to correlate with murder better than any of them alone, maybe because it’s combining all three measures together. I was able to make a linear model using those three measures that correlated at r = 0.79 with murder, about the same amount that robbery does. I should also mention that robbery correlates negatively with gun ownership at r = – 0.52, but this disappeared when controlled for urbanization.

So my very tentative conclusion is that although the US murder rate is much higher than that of other First World countries, this is partly due to the existence of various cultural factors not present in those other nations. When we adjust those away, America’s murder rate falls from 3.8 to 2.1. Which is still higher than Germany’s 0.8 or Canada’s 1.4.

Is that extra due to guns?

IV.

According to MA&H 2007, each absolute percentage point in gun ownership was related to a 2.2 relative percentage point difference in homicide. This part of the study was beyond my ability to check, and I’m not sure why they switched from absolute to relative percents there, but suppose we take it seriously.

America has a gun ownership rate of 32%, so if we somehow decreased that to zero, we would naively expect about a 70% decrease in homicides. Unfortunately, only 67% of American homicides involve guns, so we’re back to pretending that eliminating guns will not only have zero substitution effect but also magically prevent non-gun homicides. This shows the dangers of extrapolating a figure determined by small local differences all the way to the edge of the graph (I’M TALKING TO YOU, RAY KURZWEIL).

Maybe we can be more modest? Canada has a gun ownership rate of aboot 26%, so…

…wait a second. I thought we’ve been told that the US has a gun ownership rate seven zillion times that of any other country in the world, and that is why we are so completely unique in our level of gun crime? And now they’re telling us that Canada has 26% compared to our 32%? What?

Don’t trust me too much here, because I’ve never seen anyone else analyze this and it seems like the sort of thing there should be loads of analyses of if it’s true, but I think the difference is between percent of households with guns vs. guns per capita. US and Canada don’t differ very much in percent of households with guns, but America has about four times as many guns per capita. Why? I have no idea, but the obvious implication is that Canadians mostly stop at one gun, whereas Americans with guns buy lots and lots of them. In retrospect this makes sense; I am looking at gun enthusiast bulletin boards, and they’re advising other gun enthusiasts that six guns is really the bare minimum it’s possible to get by with (see also “How many guns can you have before it’s okay to call your collection an ‘arsenal’?”, which I have to admit is not a question that I as a boring coastal liberal have ever considered). So if the guy asking that question decides he needs 100 guns before he gets his arsenal merit badge, that’s a lot more guns per capita without increasing percent household gun ownership. This should actually be another argument that guns are not a major factor in differentiating US vs. Canadian murder rates, since unless you’re going on a mass shooting (WHICH IS REALLY RARE) you wouldn’t expect more murders from any gun in a household beyond the first. That means that the small difference between US and Canadian household percent gun ownership rates (32% vs. 26%) would have to drive the large difference between US and Canadian murder rates (1.4 vs. 3.8), which just isn’t believable.

…okay, sorry, where were we? Canada has a gun ownership rate of about 26%, so if America were to get its gun ownership as low as Canada, that would be -6 absolute percentage points = a 13% relative decrease in murder rate = the murder rate going from 3.8 to 3.3 = a 0.5 point decrease in the murder rate. That’s pretty close to the difference between our 2.1 US-sans-culture-of-violence estimate and the 1.4 Canadian rate – so maybe beyond the cultures of violence, the rest of the US/Canada difference really is due to guns?

(I’m not sure whether I should be subtracting 13% from 2.1 rather than 3.8 here)

In Germany, 9% of households own firearms (wait, really? European gun control is less strict than I thought!) Using MA&H’s equation, we predict that if the US had the same gun ownership rate as Germany, its murder rate would drop 50%, eg from 3.8 to 1.9. Adjust out the culture of violence, and we’re actually pretty close to real Germany’s murder rate of 0.8.

How much would gun control actually cut US gun ownership? That obviously depends on the gun control, but a lot of people talk about Australia’s gun buyback program as a model to be emulated. These people say it decreased gun ownership from 7% of people to 5% of people (why is this number so much lower than Canada and Germany? I think because it’s people rather than households – if a gun owner is married to a non-gun-owner, they count as one gun-owner and one non-owner, as opposed to a single gun-owning household. The Australian household number seems to be 19% or so). So the gun buyback program in Australia decreased gun ownership by (relative) 30% or so. If a similar program decreased gun ownership in America by (relative) 30%, it would decrease it by (absolute) 10% and decrease the homicide rate by (absolute) 22%. Since there are about 13000 homicides in the US per year, that would save about 3000 lives – or avert about one 9/11 worth of deaths per year.

(note that our murder rate would still be 3.0, compared to Germany’s 0.8 and Canada’s 1.4. Seriously, I’m telling you, the murder rate difference is not primarily driven by guns!)

Is that worth it? That obviously depends on how much you like being able to have guns. But let me try to put this number into perspective in a couple of different ways:

Last time anyone checked, which was 1995, about 618,000 people died young (ie before age 65) in the US per year. Suppose that the vast majority of homicides are of people below 65. That means that instituting gun control would decrease the number of premature deaths to about 615,000 – in other words, by about half a percentage point. I’m having to borrow this data from the UK, but if it carries over, the average person my age (early 30s) has a 1/1850 chance of death each year. Gun control would decrease that to about 1/1860. I’m very very unsure about the exact numbers, but it seems like the magnitude is very low.

On the other hand, lives are very valuable. In fact, the statistical value of a human life in the First World – ie the value that groups use to decide whether various life-saving interventions are worth it or not – is $7.4 million. That means that gun control would “save” $22 billion dollars a year. Americans buy about 20 million guns per year (really)! If we were to tax guns to cover the “externality” of gun homicides preventable by Australia-level gun control, we would have to slap a $1000 tax on each gun sold. While I have no doubt that some people, probably including our arsenal collector above, would be willing to pay that, my guess is that most people would not. This suggests that most people probably do not enjoy guns enough to justify keeping them around despite their costs.

Or if all gun enthusiasts wanted to band together for some grand Coasian bargain to buy off the potential victims of gun violence, each would have to contribute $220/year to the group effort – not totally impossible, but also not something I can really see happening.

This is very, very, very, very very tentative, but based on this line of reasoning alone, without looking into the experimental studies or anything else, it appears that Australia-style gun control would probably be worth it, if it were possible.

(I didn’t price in the advantages of guns in terms of preventing state tyranny and protecing freedom, which might be worth subsidizing, but my guess is that if 32% gun ownership is enough to maintain freedom, 22% gun ownership is as well)

V.

In summary, with my personal confidence levels:

1. Scatterplots showing raw correlations between gun ownership and “gun deaths” are entirely driven by suicide, and therefore dishonest to use to prove that guns cause murder (~100% confidence)

2. But if you adjust for all relevant confounders, there is a positive correlation between gun ownership and homicide rates (~90% confidence). This relationship is likely causal (~66% confidence).

3. The majority of the difference between America’s murder rate and that of other First World countries is not because of easier access to guns in America (~90% confidence).

4. But some of it is due to easier access to guns. This is probably about 0.5 murders/100K/year.

5. An Australian-style gun control program that worked and had no side effects would probably prevent about 2,000 murders in the US. It would also prevent a much larger number of suicides. I am otherwise ignoring suicides in this piece because discussing them would make me too angry.

6. Probably the amount of lost gun-related enjoyment an Australian-style gun control program would cause do not outweigh the benefits.

7. This is not really enough analysis to make me have a strong opinion about gun control, since this just looks at the correlational evidence and doesn’t really investigate the experimental evidence. Contrary to what everyone always tells you, experimental evidence doesn’t always trump correlational – there are cases where each has its strengths – but it wouldn’t be responsible to have a real opinion on this until I look into that too. Nevertheless, these data are at least highly consistent with Australia-style gun control being a good idea for the US.

If you want to look into this more, here is a CSV version of all the relevant data.

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1,489 Responses to Guns And States

  1. entobat says:

    However, as per the FBI, only 11,208 of our 16,121 murders were committed with firearms, eg 31%.

    You’ve switched something with its complement here – 11,208 / 16,121 is 69%. (And yes to be a nitpick, but i.e. is proper here, unless 31% is only one of many possible percentages that could describe your fraction.)

    (Really, it’s 69.5 + epsilon. I’m shocked, *shocked*, I say, at your lack of journalistic integrity by rounding up 30.47% to 31%.)

    Edit: Also,

    There are many US states that combine very low firearm ownership with very high murder rates

    is probably not the best way to begin a paragraph that discusses only DC.

    • hawkice says:

      This raises a curious observation: it should really only be kosher to round off >1 digit at a time. If you only know something to the accuracy of 44.5, you can’t round to 45, only to 40, because the 0.5 is already “rounded” within your understanding of its accuracy — it could be a 44.48, and therefore the rounding to 45 isn’t appropriate.

      And yet modern math education recommends “rounding the trailing 5 and above up and everything lower down” — can we get some education professionals on board to change it to “rounding the trailing 50 and above up and everything lower down”? I’m sure there are textbooks or (state-level?) standards for this. Otherwise we could successively round 44.44444444445 to 50 (I wasn’t sure at first that multiple roundings are useful, but I believe the SEC’s rule that stocks can trade for fractions of a penny interacts with my penny-rounded brokerage account in such a way that this happens constantly — wait a second, is my brokerage firm obligated to steal fractions of a penny this way a la the plot to office space?).

      • Anonymous says:

        IIRC in physics class they told us to round .5 up or down with 50% probability (or something, it’s been a while).

        • Spandrel says:

          In physics they taught us to round exactly 5 to the nearest even number. This effectively produced a 50% probability of rounding up vs down.

          • James James says:

            It’s called bankers’ rounding. It doesn’t bias the average value, but can introduce a towards-zero or a towards-infinity bias.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        Otherwise we could successively round 44.44444444445 to 50

        FWIW, I used that example on my third grade teacher, and was told to stop making trouble.

      • Vox Imperatoris says:

        In high school physics, I was just taught to keep track of significant figures and always round (in the normal way, up from 5) to the level of significance. For instance, if you measure 3.27 cm and multiply it by 50 (163.5), you should round it to 164 cm, with no decimals.

        If a 0 is significant it should be indicated in decimals by leaving it trailing at the end, e.g. 0.03270. Or in non-decimals with an overline (which I can’t seem to type) like 327overlined00

        • Michael Watts says:

          Surely 32,700, significant to four places, is represented as 3.270 x 10^4 and not 32700 with a macron over the left 0? (“327ŌO”?) That’s most of the purpose of scientific notation.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            Of course you can do it that way, too. I didn’t even think to say that.

            The overline thing is an actual usage, but you’re right that in practice it’s rare compared to scientific notation.

            On the other hand, when you’re writing numbers on paper in a physics class, it’s sort of annoying to have to break out the scientific notation for a five-digit number. Especially when you’re adding and multiplying by hand.

          • RCF says:

            My understanding is that the main purpose of scientific notation is to present numbers in a more compact form that is more amenable to certain types of calculations (for instance, if you’re multiplying two numbers in scientific notation, you don’t have to count the zeros, you can just add the exponents).

      • RCF says:

        You’ve cherry-picked the 44.5 example. If it were 44.8, you could round it it 45. And your complaint makes sense only if one views rounding as some sort of hash function or something. The whole point of a rounding is to get an approximate value. If a number is rounded, then the last digit isn’t know for certain. So it’s perfectly fine to round 44.5 to 45. If the exact number is 44.45, then 45 is within the margin of error. Rounding doesn’t follow the same rules as many other mathematical operations. It’s not deterministic, it’s not associative, it’s not distributive, etc.

    • codetaku says:

      The eg still hasn’t been corrected to ie and it’s driving me craaaaazy

    • entobat says:

      This is just about the best bit of discussion I could have hoped arose out of my post.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          No, “to have arisen”.

          Besides, “arose” is closer / not that bad. “Arise” is just totally wrong.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            “would arise”

            In the past he hoped it would arise in the future.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ HeelBearCub:

            No, that just sounds wrong. I’m trying to think of why, but you can’t say “could have hoped would arise”.

            Ah, I’ve got it. This construction requires either that a) “hoped” take a noun as its object, or that b) “hoped” introduce a subordinate noun clause, with “hoped that” (the “that” is optional).

            “To have arisen” is an infinitive. Infinitives can act as nouns, so it can fit under option a).

            On the other hand, suppose you want to say “This is just about the best bit of discussion [optional “that”] I could have hoped [that] would arise out of my post.” That what would arise? There is no subject of this subordinate clause. Option b) doesn’t work because there is no subject of the subordinate noun clause.

            Contrast this with “I could have hoped this discussion would arise out of my post.” See? You can say that.

            Now, it’s also true that “to have arisen” is not the only option in regard to tense. You could also say “to arise”. But “to arise” is a present infinitive, while “to have arisen” is a present perfect infinitive.

            I say that “to have arisen” is more appropriate for the situation. What does it mean to combine a present perfect verb (such as “have hoped”) with a present infinitive? Well, take “I have waited so long to see you.” This implies that I waited before but am seeing you right now. So we have one action in the past and one in the present. (“Have waited” is nevertheless present in form because it describes one’s present state.)

            On the other hand, what does it mean to combine a present perfect verb with a present perfect infinitive? “I have waited so long to have climbed this mountain.” This implies that I have finished climbing it; perhaps I am standing at the summit. We have two actions, both in the past. (Again, though, “have waited” and “have climbed” describe my present states.)

            If I said, “I have waited so long to climb this mountain,” that would imply that I am climbing it or am about to climb it. There is a big difference in meaning!

            In my opinion, the sense of entobat‘s situation is best conveyed by “to have arisen”. entobat could (in the past) have hoped (also in the past) for this discussion to have arisen (again in the past). At the time of entobat‘s observation, the discussion had already arisen.

            “To arise” implies the discussion was still arising at the time. Perhaps, but it seems to me that once a discussion is taking place, it is not still arising.

            ***

            This was seriously fun.

            I had to go check Wikipedia for several terms, though, to help me get things straight. It’s not every day that you get to really analyze grammar this way. 😉

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Vox:
            My wife, who is generally very good at editing, if not analysis of grammar, said it should “expected” which sort of short circuits the whole problem.

            Damn editors, ruining all of our fun. 😉

    • RCF says:

      Also, in “If guns are in fact correlated with more homicide, how come me and VerBruggen found the opposite in our simpler scatterplot analysis?” it should be “VerBruggen and I”.

  2. Tom Bri says:

    How confident are you in the 32% of US households owning guns? I seem to recall wildly varying numbers for this, and it’s the kind of question that many people would either not answer or might fib on in a survey. This number, if higher, would skew a lot of your latter conclusions.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      It would be hard for me to believe it’s much higher. And if it gets much lower, it bumps up against Canada’s rate, which is also hard to believe. Unless Canada’s rate is flawed too, in which case whatever, they’re probably both flawed the same way.

      • Jardine says:

        I’m not sure if it’s possible to find the actual numbers, but I suspect there’s a huge difference in the types of guns owned by Americans and Canadians. The gun enthusiasts I know (in Canada) mostly own long guns. Handguns are rare and you pretty much can’t transport them anyway.

        I believe there’s still a handgun registry and there was a long gun registry from 1995-2012. That data was supposed to be destroyed, but there might be reports about ownership statistics based on it.

        • Iain says:

          Legally speaking, handguns in Canada must be registered. As of 2014, the RCMP had 911,789 registered weapons (http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/cfp-pcaf/facts-faits/index-eng.htm); in addition to handguns, this also includes automatic weapons, and semi-automatic weapons below a certain barrel length. (I’m simplifying a bit. See here for the gory details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Canada#Classification_of_firearms).

          According to the Canadian Department of Justice (http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-sjc/jsp-sjp/wd98_4-dt98_4/p2.html#a22), fewer than 12% of gun-owning Canadian households own handguns, which, using the 26% number, works out to 3% of Canadian households owning a handgun. My cursory Googling couldn’t find an equivalent statistic for US households owning handguns, but I did find an estimate that 114 million of the 310 million guns owned by civilians in the United States were handguns (http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-states).

          Even if we generously assume that all of the remaining 196 million non-handguns in the US would be non-restricted in Canada, that still works out to 12.5 times more restricted-in-Canada guns per capita in the US than in Canada.

          This seems relevant. Handguns are disproportionately involved in homicide: the FBI says that nearly 90% of gun homicides in the US are attributed to handguns (leaving out gun homicides with “unspecified” firearms) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States#Homicides).

          I would be very curious to see what the numbers would look like if they were limited to handgun ownership, rather than gun ownership in general.

          • I completely agree with this; handguns and rifles are different and comparing them as though they were the same is a serious error that most academic studies on the link between guns and crime seem to make. I don’t know why they make that error, since the ratio of handgun-crimes to gun-crimes is pretty clear, but we just get studies on “guns” in general as though a rifle is a handgun.

            (I suspect the reason that they’re lumped together is that it’s easier to collect data that way, but this is one of those cases where easy of collection makes the data far less useful.)

        • Sevesteen says:

          My feeling (mostly based on FBI data on gun crime) is that handguns and long guns are too different in their relationship to crime and murder to group them together, and that difference is likely bigger than most of the other confounders mentioned here.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            I have seen more than one LEO make the observation, in a debate on this topic, that if handguns were banned criminals would start using sawed-off shotguns and the average lethality of an armed encounter would probably increase quite a bit. You might survive a hit or two from a nine milimeter pistol if you’re lucky or close to a trauma center. A few hits from a sawed-off 12-gauge is much less survivable.

            Or we might start seeing the ascent of the sawed-off rifle, which is the worst of all possible worlds, since you can make a (somewhat) concealable weapon which can defeat most police armor that way. Obviously the accuracy would suck, but most criminals can’t shoot anyway.

            I have no idea if it’s true but it certainly demonstrates the sort of unintended consequences that flailing around with halfass measures and feelz-based-solutions might have.

          • Echo says:

            It’s not “might”. Even 20 years ago the survival rate for handgun shootings was over 80%. I’ll try to find the new stats, but they’ve almost certainly gotten even better with the vastly improved trauma care we’ve seen lately.

            Shotguns though… if it can put down a 300lb animal quickly and humanely, a human doesn’t stand much of a chance.

          • Adam says:

            My dad got shot in the chest at a range of 15 feet with a shotgun when he was 18 and lived.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @Adam:

            A .410 loaded with rock salt or a 10 gauge loaded with double-ought buck?

          • Adam says:

            I don’t know. I know it was a hunting trip and they were hunting deer, so I suppose you can guess from what is most common, but obviously this was before my time.

            I mean, definitely not rock salt because I believe that would be absurd to hunt with, but correct me if I’m wrong. Presumably thanks to this experience, he was spooked off of it and never taught me to hunt. My weapons experience is solely from military service.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @Adam:

            I do not mean to impugn the honor of either you or your father, but if he survived a direct hit in the chest from a gun meant to and loaded for killing deer at point-blank range, he was either one of the luckiest so-and-so’s to ever come down the pike, or the ammunition malfunctioned. How long did it take to get him to the hospital?

          • Adam says:

            Beats the hell out of me. I’ve always assumed he just got absurdly lucky like 50 Cent or something. I give him the benefit of the doubt that he wasn’t just lying to me, being an otherwise honest person.

          • Echo says:

            That’s incredible. You lucky bastard! Supposedly there’s only about a 20-30% survival rate for that.

          • Tom West says:

            Not that incredible. There’s a 100% survival rate for people shot at close range by a shotgun who years later became fathers.

          • RCF says:

            Isn’t the choke also an important variable? (Although presumably a sawed off shotgun wouldn’t have a choke?)

          • Marc Whipple says:

            The choke on the shotgun could be very relevant, but not in the situation described. It’s entirely possible the weapon was loaded with a slug, in which case there’d be no choke. If not, it would still have been loaded with relatively large shot, which wouldn’t have much of a spread at the distance implied no matter the choke installed.

        • I’m with Iain and Sevnsteen.

          There’s an important difference between urban/handgun and rural/longgun styles of usage. They shouldn’t be lumped together.

      • The Anonymouse says:

        It would be hard for me to believe it’s much higher.

        I wouldn’t be so sure about that. If someone called you up on the phone (or came to the door, or whatever) and asked if you had a gun or several in your home, and you did, how likely would you be to say yes?

        If you are worried that there’s an incremental movement to take away the guns you do have, you are strongly incentivized to say “nope, no guns here!”

        If you are worried that there’s a random person who has demonstrated the ability to find you and is asking if you have a very expensive,* easily portable, easily resellable item in your home, you are strongly incentivized to say “nope! no guns here!”

        I suspect that 32% household gun ownership gives little information as to the true rate other than as a strong lower bound.

        * Expensive in both purchase price and potential liability risk.

        • Wency says:

          I am fairly certain that a (casual) friend of mine owns guns, but he has refused to confirm or deny when I have asked. He is an upper middle class financial executive and does not by any means come across as a paranoid, tinfoil hat type.

          I suspect that the number of people who would not answer the question accurately to a pollster is somewhat higher than those who won’t share it with friends or acquaintances.

          Still, I agree with Scott that the number doesn’t seem like it can be dramatically higher than 32% of households. It may be that the inaccurate reporting is higher in the US than Canada though, for cultural reasons.

          • The Anonymouse says:

            Ah yes, thank you. The third prong. If you own a gun or several, and you live in a place where that is not the bien pensant sort of thing to do, are you going to answer ‘yes’ when asked?

            See also, why so many of us “don’t know any creationists” despite creationists being a large portion of the US population. Admitting to owning a gun in a culturally-blue area of the country is outing yourself as being waaaaay deep in the wrong tribe.

          • Jiro says:

            It may be that the inaccurate reporting is higher in the US than Canada though, for cultural reasons.

            If Canada has to register all guns I would expect underreporting to be a lot smaller in Canada.

          • JayT says:

            For what it’s worth, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and
            A) I would guess that 50% of the people I know own guns, and
            B) I would never admit to owning a gun, whether it was true or not.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            It’s none of anyone’s business if I have a gun.

            Since I’m kinda of anonymous here, I’ll say I don’t own a gun and don’t want to own a gun, and I’m slightly suspicious of people who do own guns, but I’m much more suspicious of people who want to know my gun-owning status. MYOB.

          • Is it anyone’s business whether you own a car, explosives, or a nuke? Let me explain: the bright line here is “thing that can readily be used to kill”, or not.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I want to keep my lack of gun-ownership private, pithy slogans notwithstanding.

          • Mary says:

            “If Canada has to register all guns I would expect underreporting to be a lot smaller in Canada.”

            Those who don’t register would be confessing to a crime, so why smaller?

          • RCF says:

            I would also expect there to be large overlap between people who use their guns to commit crimes and people who deny having a gun. Are the studies showing that more guns means more death, or that more people admitting means more death?

            “Those who don’t register would be confessing to a crime, so why smaller?”

            It would be smaller among people who haven’t registered, but presumably the percentage among people who have registered would be higher, since they’ve already admitted to having a gun.

          • William O. B'Livion says:

            @TheAncientGeek:
            > > Is it anyone’s business whether you own a car, explosives, or a nuke?
            > Let me explain: the bright line here is “thing that can
            > readily be used to kill”, or not.

            Do you have any idea how many things have been used as murder weapons over the years?

          • @EdwardScissorhands

            Everyone, individually, has reason to keep gun ownership private, and if everyone does, that leads to a worse situation overall. Usual problem.

          • “Do you have any idea how many things have been used as murder weapons over the years”

            Yes, thankyou. I don’t think that is the difference between us. I think the difference is that I am assuming that a life saved is a life saved, whereas you seem to be assuming that only perfection is acceptable. Or are you? After all, if you were, you would have to regard pretty well every piece of legislation ever passed as useless.

        • Anon says:

          Not only that, I would expect a difference in reporting accuracy in areas with different gun cultures. Where I live I don’t think many would see reason to deny gun ownership as it’s so mundane. I’d expect more “gun-friendly” areas to be less likely to under-report, but I’m far from certain especially since I’m not from the U.S.

        • Licinius says:

          Re: people underreporting gun ownership to pollsters – I’ve heard gun owners argue the opposite – that the number is overstated because nobody wants to admit to a “pollster” – who may not actually be a pollster – that they don’t have a gun in their house. To hear some people tell it, “if somebody calls you and asks if you own a gun, you better say yes in case they’re a robber trying to case the place.” My gut sense is that the type of person who would think this way is the type of person who would already own a gun, but you never know.

        • Mary says:

          Hmm. Recently read an article where it observed that gun sales have been through the roof — and fewer households have guns. According to surveys.

          The article thought it meant more concentration. Apparently the inspiration for buying more guns can’t also inspire lying about them.

          • Harold says:

            Indeed. I did a very rough back of the envelope calculation combining such claims by an anti-gun group and figures generated from Federal Pittman-Robertson Act tax collections and the result, if the former was correct that all these new gun purchases were by existing gun owners would have us owning, on average, an inventory of guns costing $100,000. It would still be an ludicrous figure if you allowed for all the new gun owners due to the tail end of the sweep of shall issue concealed carry in the nation.

      • Echo says:

        Don’t have the data on this comp, but there was a sharp (~7%-ish?) drop in self-reported gun ownership in the US right after Clinton’s “assault weapons ban”.
        It’s also about the time people started joking about “what a shame I lost all my guns in a tragic boating accident”.

        • Donny Anonny says:

          Setting aside for the moment that people may lie to random pollsters, it’s unsurprising to see the number of gun owning households shrink as they’re a subset of ALL households.

          So long as the growth of American households outpaces the growth of those households that choose to own guns, the long-term effect will be a gradual downward trend of gun owning households as a percentage of all households, even if the number of gun owning households is growing.

          You’d have to see market penetration similar to smart phones or internet service in order to see the subset of gun-owning households go up.

        • keranih says:

          Canoeing accident. A v. tragic canoeing accident.

      • Jiro says:

        I find it extremely easy to believe that it is much higher.

      • Robert VerBruggen says:

        That’s on the low end. My best guess is somewhere 35-40. Went through some data here: http://www.realclearpolicy.com/blog/2014/02/24/the_vanishing_spike_in_gun_ownership_850.html

      • John Schilling says:

        I think what we really need for this kind of analysis is the actual rate of handgun ownership, rather than the legal or reported rate of total gun ownership. Or maybe “handgun + 18-21″ barrel shotgun + black carbine”, to better distinguish guns purchased with an eye towards shooting people as opposed to pure sporting goods / pest-control implements.

        We could probably get the legal rate of handgun ownership without too much trouble, but it’s the handguns where I would most expect to find underreporting.

        • RCF says:

          I don’t think you properly escaped those interior double quotes.

          • Echo says:

            ?
            Handgun. 18-12″ barrel shotgun. Evil Babyseeking Black Carbine. Think he did it right, no?

          • RCF says:

            The natural parsing is that the quote ends with 18-21, and everything after that isn’t included in the quote.

          • My Alt says:

            @RCF,
            In US customary units we generally abbreviate n feet as n’ and n inches as n”. Those weren’t quotation marks but rather part of the barrel length.

      • Ano says:

        I think your bubble bias is affecting your estimate on that one. I live in a very red state (Utah) and I would guess the number of gun owning households in my town is somewhere between 70 and 90%. Seriously. It would be weird to NOT have a gun. I don’t hunt or even shoot much, but I have several guns.

        The government will never be able to get an accurate number on gun ownership. Coastal blue tribers don’t realize how much conservatives fear you and by extension the government. There is a lot of macho bluster from conservatives, but that is because they are terrified.

        Blue tribe runs the government, runs the media, runs the internet. The cultural feeling in the red tribe is that blue increasingly wants to run their lives and thoughts too. The red tribe will never willingly admit to owning guns when blue has stated so vocally that they are coming to take all the guns away.

        My personal politics run pretty mixed color for my area, but culturally I am deeply, deeply red tribe. I know my community. On the record, nobody owns guns. But whenever our church men’s or youth group plans a shooting activity, nobody complains that they don’t have a gun. The question is “which guns should I bring?”

        As nice as Scott’s workup is, I don’t have much confidence in the numbers because it runs so very contrary to my personal observation.

  3. JRM says:

    I remember an older post you did coming to somewhat different conclusions. I think they are the two best things I’ve ever read on guns, though I need some time and energy to look at this one harder.

    I must, however, take exception to quoting John Lott for anything. He’s a bad actor; he made up his data for More Guns, Less Crime (Google it; he says, basically, the dog ate my data) and he sockpuppeted John Lott cheerleaders (Google “John Lott Mary Rosh.”) The research and position papers on both sides of this have been incredibly bad; even the abortion debate is fundamentally more honest.

    There’s still a problem if we conclude guns cause lots of deaths (and I have a family member who died in a gun-related suicide, and I came rather closer to being on the ventilated end of a gun-related homicide than the actuarial tables recommend). Taking the guns from people is going to be… interesting. We’re not starting from square zero.

    But the first step is making sense of the mess of data, much of it bad. This is great.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Yeah, I remember that.

      IIRC that was working off of mostly experimental studies; this is working off of mostly correlational ones. Unclear which is better – usually experimental ones are, but they can be limited – for example, most of the experimental ones looked at gun control within a US state, but that isn’t that useful because you can just take a gun over state lines.

      Overall I am still confused, as I mentioned in 7. I’ve edited the post a bit to make that more obvious.

      • Professor Frink says:

        Even worse for the natural-experiment papers is that none of the gun control laws passed in the states do much- i.e. if you can’t conceal and carry but you can still buy a gun without any sort of licensing or waiting, then you can just buy a gun and stick it in your purse.

        • RCF says:

          By “can”, do you mean “are physically able to”, or “can legally do so”?

          • John Schilling says:

            Are physically able to and almost certainly will not be punished for doing so.

          • Professor Frink says:

            “Physically able and unlikely to be punished.” It makes carrying a concealed firearm a lot like speeding in a car.

          • John Schilling says:

            Correct, including the part where (at least in the United States, and barring occasional ticket quotas) the police don’t want to cite or arrest you for either one unless you’re being blatantly obvious about it or are on their shit list for some other reason.

            The one difference is that speeding is always visible; even in places or circumstances where police would want to arrest you for illegally carrying a concealed weapon if they knew about it, they probably won’t know or have cause to look.

          • William O. B'Livion says:

            California is what is called a “may” issue state, which means that you may beg your local “Chief Law Enforcement Officer” for permission to carry a firearm for self defense.

            This ranges from places like Northern CA where most sheriffs (so I’m told) will issue a CCW to anyone who lives there and isn’t a known dirtbag to San Francisco County which has (at least up to the time I lived there) only issued 3 permits, one of which was to Diane Feinstein, who is more equal than you and I.

            And to places like Santa Clara County were a 5000 donation to the local Sheriff’s re-election campaign would get you a permit. Of course, if you donated to her opponent, even if you were a bail-bondsman, you did not have good reason.

            Which is to set up the comment that I carried in San Francisco and Santa Clara county *every day* for about 7 years without a permit.

          • Anonymous says:

            “Law abiding”

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Anonymous – yup, he’s a criminal. Just like Martin Luther King.

          • Anonymous says:

            Sure, invoke MLK when convenient but “law abiding” isn’t a phase coined or widely deployed by gun control advocates–rather it’s the gun advocates that loves to throw it around, claiming that this or that restriction will inconvenience law abiding folks. So which is it, law abiding or proudly law disregarding?

            Perhaps law abiding means something else, not what it says on the tin. Maybe I’m missing the true meaning because it’s just at too high a pitch for me to hear.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Anonymous:

            This is just like when conservatives play their little rhetorical game about illegal immigrants not being “law abiding”.

            Yes, by definition, they are breaking a law by entering the country. But are they breaking laws in a way that actually hurts anybody?

            Moreover, as I understand it, the argument by gun rights advocates is that people who did follow these laws would be victimized. Not necessarily that people have an obligation thus to victimize themselves.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Anonymous – “Perhaps law abiding means something else, not what it says on the tin. Maybe I’m missing the true meaning because it’s just at too high a pitch for me to hear.”

            True, necessary, kind?

            You are already perfectly aware of this, but I’ll spell it out explicitly for the cheap seats: William, as he describes himself, is a “law abiding citizen” in that he does not engage in wanton criminal behavior. He does not rob, burgle, rape or assault his fellow citizens. He does not randomly engage in destruction of property. He does not involve himself in gang activity or the drug trade. That is the common definition of a law abiding citizen, and no part of it involves race.

            No part of the above definition precludes carefully considered civil disobedience, which concealed carry *by the law abiding* amounts to when it is outlawed. The comparison to MLK is a valid one. Please stop being maximally uncharitable.

    • Troy says:

      I must, however, take exception to quoting John Lott for anything. He’s a bad actor; he made up his data for More Guns, Less Crime (Google it; he says, basically, the dog ate my data)

      I first saw this accusation from Andrew Gelman, and it seemed damning to me at the time, but a recent post from Gelman containing a reply by Lott made me much more skeptical of it: http://andrewgelman.com/2015/06/29/a-note-from-john-lott/

      • I stopped following the Lott controversy years ago, but as best I recall that accusation was made not about “his data” but about the data for one claim in the book. It had nothing to do with the original Lott/Mustard paper showing a positive effect from shall issue laws, over which there has also been controversy.

        • John Schilling says:

          That, and using sock puppets to defend himself in online debate. There’s reason to doubt his intellectual integrity, and I don’t trust his numbers unless I or someone I do trust has double-checked them. But he does go through a good deal of effort to collect data, and when it can be double-checked it’s probably OK to use his work as a starting point.

          • I’m not inclined to entirely trust anyone in a politically controversial debate such as gun control–you have to look at what the critics say and then how those criticized reply. I tried to do that on my web page for a while with respect to the Lott/Mustard controversy, but gave up when the statistical arguments got beyond my statistical competence.

            I think John is too willing to believe things that support his views–I had a discussion on my blog some years back of one such case. But, as best I could tell, John was believing (and repeating) a story invented by someone else on his side of the argument.

            http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2007/07/lott-lambert-guns-and-merced-killings.html

            So far as the sock puppet episode, I think John’s claim was that that was the work of his children posting in his defense. He and his wife home schooled, which has some tendency, for good or ill, to produce a family that views itself as an in-group, much of the rest of the world as an out-group.

  4. Josh Sacks says:

    One note:
    The Australian buyback did not noticeably reduce the Australian murder rate- at least not beyond the background rate of improvement.

    Vox covered this with the same murder+suicide trick you noted. They also add the “firearm homicide” rate trick- fewer gun murders but little change in overall murder rate. Here’s the Vox article: http://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9212725/australia-buyback

    I happen to know this because I read the Vox article and was surprised since it seemed to contradict most of the literature I was aware of, so I looked up the Ozzie stats.

    Here are some relevant Australian murder statistics: http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/homicide.html
    The relevant buyback is 1996-1997.

    The Australian buyback was effective at lowering suicide rate, as the existing literature would indicate.

  5. John Schilling says:

    This study doesn’t prove causation; while one interpretation is that guns cause homicide, another is that homicide causes guns – for example, by making people feel unsafe so they buy guns to protect themselves.

    Yet another interpretation would be that a third factor causes both homicide and gun ownership. And if we’re having a long discussion where “culture of violence” is being presented as a real and important characteristic of American states, I can think of an obvious suspect for something that would cause both homicide and gun ownership. A member of a violent culture is more likely to anticipate wanting or needing to get violent some time in the future – for reasons including but not limited to self-defense – and prepare for such. And, more likely to actually get violent and kill someone.

    Really, to tease truth out of this messy data with any confidence, I think we need a better way to quantify “culture” of violence. Because this sort of thing:

    And this is murder rate by state correlated with percent black population … This would seem to support the “culture of violence” theory

    is going to get you in trouble, I think beyond its actual utility in predicting cultural inclinations to violence. Unfortunately I can’t think of any better readily measurable proxy than “Southern and/or Black”.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      This is what we’re trying to eliminate by adjusting for lots of confounders including the ones we think are correlated with culture of violence. It’s possible we missed a confounder or adjusted incorrectly, but I was pretty impressed with the study.

      • John Schilling says:

        The obvious missing element to my eye would be Hispanics on the culture-of-violence side; Hispanic culture (in the US) seems coarsely to be less violent than US “black culture” but comparable to Southerners and much higher than non-Southern whites.

        But more than that, when you try to isolate a small correlation by factoring out order-of-magnitude-larger cofounders, with only a single study and limited dataset, you’re on shaky ground to begin with. When you can’t even measure the cofounder you’re trying to isolate but have to use various correlated proxies for that and hope you’ve got them all, that may be a step too far. And when you then try to assert not just the existence of a correlation but the direction of causality from such a foundation, I think that’s three-strikes-and-you’re-out territory for statistics.

        You’re basically saying “It must be X that’s causing Y because I can’t think of anything else that could cause Y”. You can prove UFOs are flying saucers that way, or mental illnesses the result of demonic possession.

  6. Geoff Greer says:

    Have you considered doing an analysis of the kinds of guns used in crime? According to FBI stats (https://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/data/table_20.html), handguns are responsible for almost half of all homicides. Long guns such as rifles and shotguns are responsible for ≈6% of killings. For comparison, approximately the same number of homicides are committed with bare hands as are committed with long guns. I don’t have figures on handgun ownership in countries like Canada and Germany, but I bet handguns are much more common in the US. This may help explain some of the difference in homicide rates.

    Lastly: I’m a gun owner, yet I wouldn’t immediately reject a $1,000 tax on firearms. Quality firearms are already expensive. A nice handgun such as a Sig P226 can easily cost $800. Depending on components, an AR-15 can cost anywhere from $700-$2,000. A $1k tax would kill the market for cheap guns (nobody’s going to buy a Hi-Point for $1200), but for many gun enthusiasts, it’d just cut their arsenal in half. In my case, I’d own four guns instead of six.

    To make it politically feasible, the BATFE could tax the manufacture and importation of firearms, not their purchase. Start small, ramp it up faster than inflation… and maybe they could get away with it.

    • John Schilling says:

      That;s how gun control got its start in the United States, various laws intended to make sure that middle-class white males could readily own the sorts of guns that middle-class white males like to own but Those Other People, You Know Who, The Ones Who Cause Problems, couldn’t afford to own any sort of gun at all.

      I would be very surprised and disappointed if you could actually pull anything like that off today.

      • Geoff Greer says:

        Even if your statement is true –and I’m not sure it is–, that doesn’t refute the idea that guns should have their negative externalities priced-in. You might as well be against taxes on alcohol because the Anti-Saloon League supported them.

        • Andrew says:

          There are serious social ills to disarming poor communities that don’t currently have effective policing.

          • Troy says:

            The morality of pricing guns out of the range of poor people may then turn on whether the only “legitimate” use of guns is hunting (or collecting), or whether it includes self-defense. If the benefits of making guns more expensive are substantial, I don’t think it’s that problematic to make hunting unaffordable less affordable for poor people. On the other hand, it does seem problematic to allow rich people to defend themselves against murderers but disallow poor people this same right. (Not really disallow, of course, but make much more difficult.)

          • Troy: ” I don’t think it’s that problematic to make hunting unaffordable less affordable for poor people.”

            Part of the urban/rural divide about guns is that for some rural people, hunting makes a significant contribution to their food budget. Perhaps you were thinking of hunting as a hobby.

          • JBeshir says:

            I’m genuinely curious how this works budget-wise; do they have a lot of free time, or is it much more time efficient in terms of meat caught and made edible than one might think, are transport costs not a problem, etc.

            More than any other artisanal good, I’d expect having a hunter go out and kill you something to be way more expensive in time and transport and supporting supplies than buying some burgers from Walmart or a small food store if much nearer.

          • The Anonymouse says:

            @ JBeshir

            An elk (a large game animal commonly hunted in my part of the country) might provide between 150-250lbs of boneless, edible meat. Here, also, the cheapest beef currently goes for about $2.98/lb. Even counting in the ancillary costs of hunting (time spent, an elk tag, transport, a freezer in the garage), such an animal can make a substantial benefit to a family’s food budget.

            There are many smaller game animals in the US (as well as some larger), but the smaller take-home in meat is offset by lessened transport/storage/processing costs. Moreover, the time-cost of hunting is generally offset by the fact that hunters tend to see the time spent hunting as not a cost, but a benefit; most hunters find hunting an enjoyable activity.

          • JBeshir says:

            That makes sense. At $450-$750 in meat it would allow pretty large costs.

          • The Anonymouse says:

            Happy to help.

            As a side note, when coming up with dollar values, it is worthwhile to consider that the beef comparison-cost is for the cheapest (last Sunday when I was shopping for beef) cuts available; a hunter gets all the good cuts as well as the so-so ones (usually ground up for sausage or burger). My 10s Google search for commercial elk tenderloin prices shows a result of about $30-35/lb.

          • Troy says:

            Part of the urban/rural divide about guns is that for some rural people, hunting makes a significant contribution to their food budget. Perhaps you were thinking of hunting as a hobby.

            A fair point. I was thinking of hunting as a luxury good, but as you observe it’s more than that for many people.

            On the other hand, hunting can arguably be replaced with other sources of food more easily than guns for self-defense can be replaced with other sources of self-defense.

          • CatCube says:

            When my father was young, the only meat they might have was whatever he, his father, and his brothers would shoot. Being in a rural, forested area, it was trivial to go back into the treeline and set up a blind, but it also meant that they hunted constantly, in season or not.

            This also means that the only costs were their time and the bullet; they weren’t purchasing licenses or anything.

          • Is improving policing to the standards enjoyed by other, poorer, countries out of the question?

          • I’m urban/suburban myself, but i believe an important part of the economics of rural hunting is that a lot of it is done by people who aren’t making much money. It’s much easier for them to hunt than for them to get better-paying work.

          • Richard says:

            @Troy:
            Hunting is also a necessity as it is the only feasible way of controlling wildlife populations. I happen to actively dislike the actual hunting and yet I shoot dozens of animals every year.

          • “There are serious social ills to disarming poor communities that don’t currently have effective policing.”

            OTOH, there is no reason why improvements ot policing can’t be part of the picture. In some countries it is taken for granted that poor areas have poor policing because they are poor, in other countries it is take for granted that everyone deserves the same standard of policing because everyone is a citizen.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @TheAncientGeek:

            Logically, this is quite true, but there are two problems with your assertion.

            1) This is what as known as “linkage.” In modern politics it is usually the sign of someone really, really desperate. Once upon a time, politicians were honest – i.e. they stayed bought – and could be trusted to keep deals, most of the time, more or less. That day is done.

            “Maybe you’re right and poor people do need guns to protect themselves. We’ll improve policing and then they won’t need so many guns… but let’s get rid of the guns first. Because reasons.”

            No. Let’s improve policing first. I mean, turn it around. There’s no reason stricter gun control can’t be part of the package once the improved policing is in effect, right? You trust the gun owners to follow up once you do what you said, right? You really want to actually deal with the problem your opponents have raised, right? You’re sure improved policing will have the effect you claim it will, right?

            2) If we really wanted to have better policing, we’d have it already. I am unaware of anyone, with the partial exception of stop-and-frisk opponents, who opposes “better policing.” I am aware of lots of people who don’t want to pay for it. I don’t see why this would change just because stricter gun control measures were imposed.

            Although if you really want to kill two birds with one stone… How about we take all those BATFE agents who are hassling people about pieces of metal lying in toolboxes and send them to patrol the neighborhoods in need of better policing? Scarce resources and all that.

          • bluto says:

            @JBeshir

            When I was a kid in the west I recall eating game almost everynight and beef even McDonalds was a rare treat. My family would shoot several antelope deer and perhaps an elk or moose annually (the latter required winning a lottery). We never had a guide. The only ongoing costs was time (my father reloaded bullets and reloading componets come in high quantities). One could do similarly with deer in much of the eastern US today. I recall eating essentially only game meat for 5 years for a family of 4.

        • Echo says:

          There was actually a lot of discussion about that in the Heller and McDonald cases. One of the first examples was Tennessee’s “Army Navy law” of 1870-something, which banned all handguns types except the very expensive ones fit for army or navy service.
          Interestingly, it was passed only a few years after the law banning black freedmen from owning guns was overturned by the ’75 civil rights act…

        • Leonard says:

          that doesn’t refute the idea that guns should have their negative externalities priced-in.

          True. Even though gun control is racist as a historical matter, a utilitarian should still do it if the hedons and utils dictate.

          I would note, however, that Scott has not made any attempt to compute the positive externalities of guns. I, for one, am happy that home invasion crimes are very rare in the USA, and I thank all the gun owners around me for that.

          • This is a very general issue. People who want to make an economic argument against X can do it by listing the negative externalities, making generous estimates of uncertain numbers, adding them up, while ignoring the positive externalities. To take a simple example from the climate controversy, we often see estimates of increased mortality from hotter summers, rarely of decreased mortality from milder winters—although the effect of AGW on winters is stronger than on summers and mortality from cold more common than from heat.

            I first encountered that problem about forty years ago in the context of population. I wrote a piece for the Population Council in which I tried to calculate the net externality from one more child. I concluded that the size of positive and negative effects was too uncertain to know whether the sum was positive or negative.

            http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Laissez-Faire_In_Popn/L_F_in_Population.html

            One of the talks I give is based on that and the current climate controversy, where I believe the same thing is true.

            http://oxlib.org.uk/2013/01/video-of-david-friedmans-lecture/

          • How much stolen property equates to a life?

          • John Schilling says:

            How much stolen property equates to a life?

            It is usually considered polite to conceal that value and piously pretend it to be infinite. If you really care, there are places you can look to find it at least implicitly presented. Including elsewhere in this discussion, I believe.

          • Dan says:

            If I shoot somebody for attempting to steal my wallet/car etc, it isn’t because I am equating the value of the property with their life.

            I don’t give a damn about the property. It can be replaced.

            I give a damn about the explicit/implicit threat to my life to seize that property. THAT is why they get shot.

            If a person is stupid enough to place trust for their future existence in the hands of someone that is demonstrating contempt for same…I guess they must learn to accept the roll of the cosmic dice.

            I prefer to load those dice.

          • roystgnr says:

            Even with no threat to life you can’t talk about property loss without talking about the changed incentives which accompany it. If Altruist Alice steals $0 from her neighbors under all conditions, and Burglar Bob steals everything his neighbors don’t carry on their person or nail down, then Burglar Bob will end up stealing approximately $0 too, but the cost to his neighbors (who will no longer bother to own anything that can’t be carried or nailed down) will be enormous.

            IIRC this is still a major hypothesized contributor to third world poverty – if failures of property protection and even of property records don’t allow you to accumulate wealth, then you’re better off not even trying.

          • Mark Atwood says:

            hypothesized contributor to third world poverty

            I am firmly convinced that it’s a major cause of developed world poverty as well.

            Poor people living around lots of poor people spend more resources, relatively speaking, in guarding what they do have from being stolen by their neighbor’s idiot meth-head sons. When the meth-head idiot sons do break the windows, steal the tv, wreck the car, the poor victims are more injured, just due to being on the wrong side of the “declining marginal value of each additional dollar” reality.

            The other thing I have noticed, and it’s been mentioned in the past in SSC, is that poor people with families of poor people surrounded by poor people, are not allowed to save money by their own family and their own neighbors. As soon as it is known they have even a few hundred bucks in their savings, everyone shows up needing help, $20 at a time, and how dare they not help out their sister, brother in law, grand-aunt, their nextdoor neighbor, the neighbor’s sister in law, etc with gas money, grocery money, car repairs, new pair of shoes, etc..

            As I write this I am thinking of a specific close friend of mine, who explained this dynamic to me, and that they escaped that world by being ludicrously secretive about their income and their savings, by absolutely refusing to ever spend a cent on the drugs that were readily available and commonly used in those spheres (booze, tobacco, weed, meth), by generally refusing to spend money on unnecessary unproductive crap junkfood or toys, and even to this day maintaining a near sociopathic attitude towards bailing out their family and people from their old neighborhoods.

          • TrivialGravitas says:

            “although the effect of AGW on winters is stronger than on summers and mortality from cold more common than from heat.”

            Nope. If you only look at straight up direct cause of death numbers cold kills more people but temperature related fatalities com in the form of things like a higher than background rate death by other causes, similar to famine deaths. Cold is still riskier but far more people have inadequate cooling vs heating and there’s rough parity (though I expect the rough parity would persevere even if climate shifted radically globally, people would be less interested in their heat and more interested in their cooling)

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ trivial gravitas
            “Cold is still riskier but far more people have inadequate cooling vs heating and there’s rough parity (though I expect the rough parity would persevere even if climate shifted radically globally, people would be less interested in their heat and more interested in their cooling).”

            Absent recent high-tech, adequate heating is much easier than adequate cooling. It’s only since Mid-20th Century that ‘refrigerated air conditioning’ became a practical alternative to ‘swamp coolers’, and even swamp coolers came not so long previous.

          • @TrivialGravitas:

            You deny my claim that more people die from cold than from heat. For the U.S., checking it is easy–just look at mortality rates over the year. For example:

            http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/provisional_tables/Provisional_Table01_2014Dec.pdf

            For the world it’s a little harder, but there was a publication in a British journal a couple of years back that estimated mortality from heat and cold. My memory is that the figure from cold was about ten times that for heat, but it would take some effort to go back and find the article.

            But since you are making a positive claim, why don’t you do it?

          • TrivialGravitas says:

            @houseboatonstx

            I’m not sure what you’re point is given that we’re talking about the 21st century?

            Though pre 20th century heating was neither entirely adequate nor was pre 20th century cooling actually absent, though it was dependent on construction techniques rather than heat pumps.

          • ADifferentAnonymous says:

            Looking at the US and Britain doesn’t prove much

            I’d suspect that places where people can’t acquire climate control to literally save their life tend to be places where heat is a larger threat than cold.

            Though this is just argument for fun, the point about cherry-picking externalities stands.

          • @ADifferentAnonymous:

            The British source I referred to was an article in a British journal which attempted to estimate global mortality from heat and cold. The journal was the Lancet, and here’s a link I found to a summary of its results:

            http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150520193831.htm

            Twenty times as many deaths due to cold as due to heat by their calculations.

          • Vorkon says:

            The home invasion issue is just as much about personal safety as it is about property, if not more.

            I forgot the exact statistics and would have to look them up again, but in the US, the vast majority (I want to say around 90%) of the home invasions that do occur take place while the owner is not at home, or at least when the invader believes the owner is not home, while in the UK, the majority (I believe it was around 60%, but like I said, all I remember for sure is that it was definitely over 50%) take place while the owner is at home. Further, surveys of prisoners indicate that in both cases this is on purpose; in the US, they do it that way because they fear for their safety, and in the UK they do it that way because they think they are more likely to find items that they don’t need to fence, such as cash in a wallet, when there is someone at home.

            So not only does the prevalence of guns in America reduce the total number of home invasions, but it also makes it much less likely that you will be home for them, and thus reduces the potential for a home invasion to turn violent. I’m not sure how this would effect the total homicide numbers (as such confrontations would be less likely to be lethal, I’m assuming) but it’s still something to consider.

            Again, I apologize for not including my source. I’ll try to look it up again when I have some more time.

          • Cadie says:

            On cold/heat: I suspect that cold is a much bigger danger in relatively wealthy nations/areas than heat would be; in areas where extreme poverty is widespread, that may not hold up. This is partly based on my own experiences, but I’ve lived without air conditioning, in the US, in the heat of summer in a Southern state. Very unpleasant. I got sick from mild dehydration a couple of times from it but nothing life-threatening, just feeling lousy. The big trick was getting enough fluids/electrolytes to handle the heat especially through sleeping when I wouldn’t be able to replenish them right away because I was asleep. Where clean water is basically free (in a pinch you can usually find a public water fountain or sink to refill containers) and adding a pinch of salt is free or less than a penny’s worth from a canister, this can be done easily with a bit of planning. Not so much where water is hard to get and may not be safe to drink as-is.

            I’m not at all sure that a night of freezing temperatures with no access to heating or even a fire would be survivable without serious health consequences.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ cadie

            As someone mentioned above, we should not count just literally freezing to death, but also deaths by ailments worsened by cold. This should apply to heat also; eg associated air problems (and as long as all this Southern and crime data is handy, doesn’t assault rate go up during hot spells?)

            Heating is low tech if you can find enough firewood and have enough coats. Effective cooling requires pretty high tech. In the US South before common refrigerated a/c, there was no good way to keep cool in summer. Even rich people had little recourse except big power fans, and even those weren’t very helpful.

            The areas in line to get too warm by AGW, are also the ones too poor to rely on air conditioning. So ‘cold causes more deaths than heat’ isn’t a very strong point.

          • Two points:

            As someone else pointed out, one way of dealing with high temperatures is architecture–buildings designed in one way or another to stay cool. And, of course, another is by behavior–taking a siesta at midday instead of working.

            According to the summary of the Lancet article I mentioned, most of the excess mortality in both directions isn’t from the extremes, it’s from weather moderately hot or moderately cool.

          • Shouldn’t tropical diseases be figured into the health effects of heat?

          • William O. B'Livion says:

            TheAncientGeek says:
            > How much stolen property equates to a life?

            We got our house broken into while living in a country that does not allow the use of a weapon for self defense (which is to say if they could prove you had that cricket bat for self defense and you used it on a burglar you’d be in more trouble than them).

            My wife thought the noise was our toddler up in the middle of the night.

            She got a black eye and a broken jaw. If I hadn’t been on my way out of the bed room screaming (there was stuff strewn all down the driveway and out in to the street, they were running scared) who knows if they’d have stuck around to make things worse.

            She will *still* get out of bed sometimes to check the doors (the same ones she always checks right before bed).

            So you break in to my house and that value is less than a stick of gum.

            Tell me about “negative externalities” when YOUR loved one can’t sleep well.

          • William O. B'Livion says:

            ADifferentAnonymous says:
            > I’d suspect that places where people can’t acquire climate
            > control to literally save their life tend to be places where
            > heat is a larger threat than cold.

            WHAT?

            We’re not talking about being comfortable, we’re talking about *survival*. Do you know what it takes to survive in 130 degree heat?

            Water and shade. You do your work (hunting, food gathering etc.) in the morning or evening when it’s cooler, and you lounge around during the heat.

            You know what it takes to survive in 20 degree temperatures? Water, LOTS of food (because it’s going to be too cold ALL STINKING DAY), clothing, shelter and fire.

            There’s a reason there’s lots of people at the tropics and damn few at the poles.

            In first world nations people die from “the heat” because they live in crap neighborhoods and are afraid to open their windows during the heat of the day for fear that they’ll get burglarized.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ama/?n=heatindex

            At a heat index of 125 or higher, a human will get heat stroke even in the shade while avoiding activity. One way to reach such a heat index is to have 45% relative humidity at a temperature of 105F (in the shade). Another is to have 12% relative humidity at a temperature of 125F (in the shade).

            The way to survive 130F is to have air conditioning. Or move.

          • “It is usually considered polite to conceal that value and piously pretend it to be infinite. If you really care, there are places you can look to find it at least implicitly presented. Including elsewhere in this discussion, I believe.”

            I’m aware of that. Try plugging it into the wider argument: it’s very hard to justify trading off more shootings against fewer burglaries, using either the infinite or the very high value of a life.

          • “Tell me about “negative externalities” when YOUR loved one can’t sleep well.”

            Remember that the worst case of the negative
            externality is schoolchldren killing other schoolchidren.

        • Anthony says:

          Gun control has been all about keeping guns away from blacks, until it became all about keeping guns away from conservative whites.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            I think liberal whites still, deep down, want to take guns away from blacks so they can gentrify inner cities, but they don’t have a vocabulary for expressing that not unreasonable desire. So they end up talking all the time as if the Real Menace is rural whites. What urban liberal whites really want is some racial solidarity so that other whites would help them politically disarm urban blacks, but they can’t begin to express such a verboten concept, so they just sputter demonization of other whites.

      • > That;s how gun control got its start in the United States,

        I’m glad to hear *that* it did.

    • Echo says:

      Re-open the MG registry and increase the tax stamp to $1000. Nobody on our side would complain.
      Now THAT’S how you make a good “compromise” that isn’t a euphemism for “taking everything from you one slice at a time”.

      • LtWigglesworth says:

        I’d also suggest removing the restriction on suppressors. I’ve always found that ridiculous (I do live in NZ, where we have a licensing system similar to Canada, but absolutely no restrictions on suppressors.)

        • Dan says:

          Right. In Europe/UK you can pick up suppressors for around $200. They’re considered a health & safety device. Heck, the UK even has suppressors for air rifles! To acquire a similarly affordable suppressor in the US, you would have to make it yourself (and just pay the $200 tax).

          Here in the US, you can pay almost as much as the cost of the weapon it attaches to, PLUS the $200 tax stamp.

          Hearing loss due to shooting is a serious thing. Suppressors are a very sensible option in addition to ear defenders/plugs.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            First you would have to get PERMISSION to pay the tax. This is not easy to do.

          • Dan says:

            True. Depending on your location, the signoff may be a problem.

            I am fortunate to live where the senior LEO uses a rubber stamp 😉

      • hlynkacg says:

        Make Suppressors Title III and I’d vote for it.

        Heck I’d even accept some pretty serious handgun restrictions if it meant significant deregulation of long-arms and AOW items.

        Edit: Ninja’d by the Lt.

      • Garrett says:

        I have a local standing order with my favorite gun store: as soon as he can order me a real FN-P90, he’s to do so and I’ll buy it. I think $1000 is a bit too much for the tax stamp, but as a white male professional, I can afford it, and would do so.

      • Vorkon says:

        This is a very important point, which I don’t see brought up often enough.

        Why does nobody try to come up with legislation which includes an ACTUAL compromise? I know I would go in for all the background checks you can think of, a complete elimination of gun sales by anyone other than an FFL dealer, all kinds of mandatory training requirements, and a requirement to register every weapon in a federal registry, in exchange for eliminating may-issue states, mandating reciprocity with other states CCW permits, and eliminating federally mandated gun-free zones. (not including specifically designated locations, like the White House, of course, but certainly not the ridiculous “all federal property, parks, schools, etc.” that we have now.)

        The biggest problem with this debate is a lack of trust. When anti-gun people say “we’re not trying to take your guns, we just want some common-sense regulation,” pro-gun people say, “yeah right,” and with good reason. Although there are certainly a few honest people who simply don’t realize that the “common sense” gun laws they are proposing won’t do any actual good, there are also a significant number of people who are simply flat-out lying when they say this, and most of the people actually writing the policies are among them. Some kind of quid-pro-quo, tit for tat bargaining would go a LONG way toward proving their sincerity. That’s what a real compromise would look like.

        You would still need some sort of guarantee that the requirements for getting on the registry/getting your FFL/getting the mandatory training wouldn’t be so restrictive as to become a de facto ban, but unless you throw in some kind of bonuses like the expansion of CCW permits I’m talking about, nobody would have any reason to believe you are being sincere about those guarantees.

        (I wouldn’t complain about removing the restriction on suppressors either, of course. It’s just stupid. They don’t work like the movies make people think!)

        • William O. B'Livion says:

          The reason we shouldn’t compromise any *more* is that those pushing for gun control are lying when they say they don’t want to ban them all.

          We know this because they keep *saying* it, and because every time “we” compromise they come back asking for more. We “compromised” in 1934 by making it hard to get fully automatic weapons, explosives, silencers and all the other cool toys. That didn’t change much of anything (at the federal level) so they went after mail order sales, required filling out of forms and other restrictions. Then in 1986 they outlawed the sales or purchase of any “new” fully automatic weapons, and in 1994 went after the scary black ones.

          Not one of those had *any* measurable impact on crime.

          Look, I’m ok with banning guns by mail-order to the doorstep (e.g. interstate transfers going through FFLs.) And yeah, making reasonable efforts to keep felons from buying them (but if they’re so dangerous, why are they back out on the street?), and yeah, I get that it’s probably a bad idea to let people with Schizophrenia and other severe mental problems have unrestricted access to firearms[1].

          So I’m willing to “compromise” by demonstrating that I’m not currently in one of those categories. Which means all non-local sales go over the internet, and yes there SHOULD be a way that I can verify you’re not a prohibited person over the internet.

          But this is America, not some country full of knee bending euroweenies. If I want a Browning .30 (or .50 for the insecure among us) machine gun in the garage (Wife disallowed such things in the living room), and I can afford it, then WHY NOT?

          Because some douche-bag criminal would use one for a drive-by?

          Because some-one ELSE wets the bed over it?

          Don Kates asserts:
          “Felons commit over 90 percent of murders, with the remainder carried out primarily by juveniles and the mentally unbalanced.”
          http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2472

          There are anywhere north of 80 MILLION gun owners in the US. That’s the LOW number.

          There are 11k (roughly, to make my math easier) firearm murders per year. If EVERY SINGLE firearm murder was done by a legal gun owner (they aren’t) then there would be about .000137 percent of gun owners committing murder. If I put the decimal point in the right place.

          But we know from lots of sources that somewhere around 90% of murders are committed by “prohibited persons”, people who *aren’t* allowed to own firearms anyway.

          Which means that less than 1100 murders per year (roughly) are committed by otherwise law abiding gun owners.

          [1] don’t think these folks should be banned from ownership, but the mechanics of only allowing them access when “sane” is problematic.

          • Harold says:

            We “compromised” in 1934 by making it hard to get fully automatic weapons, explosives, silencers and all the other cool toys.

            And the “compromise” was that the Feds didn’t put handguns under the same strictures, including an inflation adjusted and during the Great Depression “tax” of $3,500. That’s why so many of the categories are strange, they tried to sweep up everything that was somewhat handgun like, including sawed off shotguns and “short barreled rifles”.

            And William O. B’Livion only hit most of the highlights, or rather lowlights of Federal gun control (didn’t include the Brady Act), there were plenty of other “smaller” measures, he didn’t mention the ATF atrocities that were extinguishing American gun culture that resulted in the 1986 Gun Owners Protection Act and the poison pill we were forced to swallow.

            Note that in all those “compromises” we’ve never been offered, let alone obtained anything in return, it’s always been of the “well, we won’t throw this kid off the sleigh to the wolves today” nature. We’re really not inclined to make any more, especially with our betters, including Hillary and Obama, praising or calling for outright confiscation (for those two, Australia’s gun “buyback”).

    • ShemTealeaf says:

      I agree that it’s very important to differentiate between different types of guns. I’m generally opposed to gun control, but I think the best argument from gun control advocates will center specifically around handguns.

  7. walpolo says:

    How do non-homicide crimes prevented by self-defense with a gun factor into the costs and benefits of Aussie-style gun control for the US, in your opinion?

    • hlynkacg says:

      Sadly, good statistics on this topic are seriously hard to come by.

    • Echo says:

      Burglary vs Robbery might make a good proxy for this. The latter is proportionally much higher in the UK, for example.

      • Pete says:

        This website attempts to do just that. It claims that robbery rates are 1.1 times higher in the UK, as an example.

        Do you have a source for saying it’s much higher? The site I linked is clearly advocating a position so may be biased, and I haven’t tried to find any flaws in his methodology so they may exist.

  8. Douglas Knight says:

    Norway’s 2.2

    That’s only because you’re using the 2011 figures. If you take a 10 year average, Norway is just like Sweden.

  9. Bryan Willman says:

    There’s another fallacy in all of this – which is the presumption that the revealed desire of the body politic is the reduction of all causes of death.
    Yet it is totally clear that this is NOT the revealed desire of the US public in action over time. Otherwise prohibition would have stuck, smoking would have disappeared long ago, there would not be moves to legalize intoxicating substances such as marijuana, the culture around cars would be very different, and so on.
    And in any case, DC and Chicago are stunning examples of places where there has been elaborate gun control and there are still very high rates of violence.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I think people think differently about causes of death that kill the user (eg smoking) and causes of death that might kill other people (eg guns). This is why people talk less about gun suicide than gun homicide.

      • Bryan Willman says:

        Cars? All manner of accidents associated with alcohol? All manner of accidents associated with other intoxicants? Whatever the real effects of second hand smoke are?

        Alcohol, not tobacco, is the most relevent example.

        I assert again, “minimal premature deaths across all all classes of citizens in all places” is NOT the revealed preference of the US polity.

      • rossry says:

        > This is why people talk less about gun suicide than gun homicide.

        …uh? There are no other reasons worth discussing?

      • The CDC claims that between 2005 and 2009, about 41,300 adult nonsmokers died in the US each year due to lung cancer or heart disease resulting from lifetime exposure to secondhand smoke (http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/secondhand_smoke/general_facts/). By comparison, they say that a little over ten times that many people (~440,000) die in the US each year from their own smoking (http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_facts/).

        In 2005, there were 10,100 firearm homicides in the US (http://web.archive.org/web/20100412084914/http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/05cius/offenses/expanded_information/data/shrtable_07.html), vs. 17,002 firearm suicides (http://www.suicide.org/suicide-statistics.html#2005). So cigarettes kill more innocent third parties than firearms kill total, though there are more homicides relative to suicides than there are second-hand smoke deaths relative to first-hand smoke deaths.

        Of course, death from second-hand smoke isn’t very similar to firearm homicide. It’s more like if 40,000+ people died every year from living near shooting ranges, or from going on hunting trips with friends (while abstaining from hunting themselves).

        • I tried to trace the claim on mortality due to second-hand smoke to source a few years ago, and was unable to find any support for it–do you know how it was calculated? There was some work that was pretty clearly bogus, in which the researchers compared two cities of their selection, one of which had imposed a restriction on smoking and one of which had not. Someone at the National Bureau estimated the result of applying their method across all cities instead of ones selected to produce the desired result and found that the effect vanished.

          I traced another estimate to a claim by the California EPA, picked up by the Surgeon General’s report, but couldn’t determine where it came from. I reported my attempts in a blog post:

          http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2013/02/blowing-second-hand-smoke.html

          I can’t say with confidence that there is no good basis for the claims of mortality due to second-hand smoke—I’m not as careful as Scott is in researching such questions—but I couldn’t find any. Can anyone here point at reliable research that supports the claim?

          Also, in the case of second-hand smoke, you need to distinguish between the effect on people exposed involuntarily and those exposed voluntarily, by choosing to live with a smoker or spend time in places where others smoke. For the economic analysis of externalities, only the latter counts. I got into the issue because my university was in the process of banning all smoking on campus, including outside. My guess is that the effect on me of someone else smoking fifty feet away is tiny compared to the effect of living with a smoker, and estimates for the latter were being used as an argument to prevent the former.

    • David Wong says:

      But the DC and Chicago examples are meaningless because they’re not walled cities or islands — guns just flow in from the places where they are legal, which is usually right outside city limits. Everyone in Chicago knows where to get a gun, and it’s not a long trip. It’s not like having to cross an international border or an ocean to buy one over the counter, as is the case when other countries enact gun control measures.

      • Has anyone compiled data on black market price of firearms in different countries? Might be hard to get, but it would be interesting to see to what degree legal restrictions actually make it harder for criminals to obtain firearms.

      • Publius Varinius says:

        The U.S. is not a walled city either. Borders cannot stop adult humans (~80 kg per average instance), much less handguns (~0.8 kg per average instance) or drugs (<0.8 kg per average instance).

        Besides, Wong's example, if true, would prove way too much. Even though both Austria and Slovakia have very lax gun control (e.g. you have 6 weeks to register a rifle after purchase) compared to Hungary; major cities such as Bratislava, Gyor and Vienna are less than an hour’s drive from each other; and there are no borders to cross; guns simply don’t flow in.

        • LtWigglesworth says:

          One of the things that the recent events in Paris has shown is that it is very hard to control firearms in a continent with porous or non-existent borders, especially when there are a lot of ex-military firearms floating around after the Balkan Wars .

          • naath says:

            This is certainly true; it is demonstrated that really determined terrorists can get guns into Paris, I doubt there’s a city in the world that a really determined terrorist organization with money and people willing to risk their lives couldn’t get a gun into if they really really wanted to.

            But attacks by determined terrorists are a tiny minority of gun-homicides.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Granted, attacks by determined terrorists are in fact a tiny portion of gun-homicides.

            However, warfare between rival criminal organizations is a much larger portion and if Terrorists can get guns I think it’s fair to assume that Drug Dealers and Mafiosi can too.

          • Anthony says:

            However, warfare between rival criminal organizations is a much larger portion and if Terrorists can get guns I think it’s fair to assume that Drug Dealers and Mafiosi can too.

            This probably ties in to the “revealed preferences” discussion above. Lots of people probably don’t care much if one scumbag drug dealer kills another one, and don’t want to inconvenience themselves to keep drug dealers and other mafiosi alive.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Anthony:

            Yes, this “all harm to every person counts the same” idea of utilitarianism is very silly.

            You don’t have to believe that people are inherently morally unequal at birth, in order to believe that some people are capable of making better choices and “counting” more, while others “count” less.

            (I was initially prompted of this when I read the suggestion by JBeshir that we should ban large bottles of Tylenol for everyone, so that people won’t commit suicide with them.)

            Utilitarianism admits that we sometimes need to lock up criminals. But it still says they count the same as everyone else, only that total happiness can only be maximized by lowering their individual happiness. Yet why should the happiness of immoral people count the same at all?

          • @vox Imp:

            I have a published article that looks at the question of whether all lives should be considered equally important in the context of murder victims—whether the punishment of a murderer should depend on, among other things, the characteristics of his victim. You might find it of interest:

            http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Payne/Payne.html

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ David Friedman:

            Interesting article. I’ve only read section III so far, and I’m still looking through it. (I have a lot of other thoughts about “moral luck” and whether acts or intentions should be punished.)

            However, your paper seems to be totally compatible with utilitarianism. Everyone’s “utilons” count the same; it’s only that vicious murderers are going to cause so many more nega-utilons to exist, and thus the expected value of their lives (in terms of future utilons produced) is far less than the expected value of an innocent mother of two children.

            On the other hand, suppose that there are “high-quality” people who have high-quality utilons and “low-quality” people who have low-quality utilons (I don’t actually think it’s binary, but this is a simplification). And suppose a low-quality utilon is worth half that of a high-quality utilon, and that a vicious murderer is an example of a low-quality person. Our math then changes from the paragraph above, since murderers not only cause high-quality nega-utilons to exist; but their own utilons are merely low quality. So the degree of punishment it is efficient to inflict goes up.

            I don’t think this kind of view is so crazy. Take Hitler. In many people’s minds, he was such a low-quality person that his positive utilons count negative. We don’t say that, yes, it’s very bad he killed six million Jews but at least it’s mitigated a tiny bit by the fact that he got to enjoy the loot he stole from them. The pleasure he got from that loot “counts negative”; it’s worse that he enjoyed it than if he didn’t.

            And this is distinct from saying that other people’s knowledge that Hitler enjoyed that loot caused them grief, which is negative. That’s what utilitarianism would say. Maybe that is an additional negative, but the point is that Hitler’s pleasure was not a positive.

          • Anthony says:

            @Vox Imp – I’m not sure I would want to justify lives being unequal in a utilitarian framework, but I’m not a utilitarian*, and I suspect most voters aren’t either.

            *Not quite true, but my personal system of morals allows lots of things to trump utilitarian calculations. Only if you’ve managed to avoid all those would I accept a purely utilitarian calculation.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Anthony:

            I’m not a utilitarian either. Utilitarianism at one point was often used to refer to any moral system that involves calculating utility in any way. But it’s overwhelmingly used in the 20th and 21st centuries to mean a specifically impartial system that counts each person’s utility as equal.

            As for what I am, I am a consequentialist. “Utility” is a vague term, which is why it is useful. I accept in as a sort of stand-in for “whatever is conducive to that person’s ultimate happiness”. When I say I don’t think all utility ought to be treated the same, I mean I don’t think people ought to value everyone’s ultimate happiness equally. This is to reject utilitarianism’s impartialism.

            The ultimate in “partialism” is egoism, which is the view that each person’s own utility is the only thing that counts to each person. And that other people’s utility is valuable instrumentally in promoting it. That would be the Fitzjames Stephen kind of egoistic “utilitarianism” (as he called it, in the 19th century).

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ David Friedman:

            So I finished reading your essay, and I wanted to talk a little more about the basis of punishment. Should it be acts or intentions? But first of all a quote from Aristotle relevant to my previous comments:

            Now the man is thought to be proud who thinks himself worthy of great things, being worthy of them; for he who does so beyond his deserts is a fool, but no virtuous man is foolish or silly. […] Now the proud man, since he deserves most, must be good in the highest degree; for the better man always deserves more, and the best man most.

            What is the purpose of judgments of offenders in law? It’s not to weigh people in the cosmic scales and find them wanting. There isn’t (and shouldn’t be) some kind of governmental office which searches every man’s soul and gives him the kind of treatment he has earned by his overall character throughout his life. If it did, it would have to give out rewards as well as punishments (see: “the best man deserves the most”). I think it would be nice, but obviously that’s impossible among human beings.

            In the real world, we know that life is not fair and that people do not always get what they deserve, i.e. the rewards they ought to expect from the character of their free choices. In general, capitalism is not a fair system in this respect (neither is actually existing socialism). As you and Nozick say, it is not based on desert but on entitlement. And that’s better for everyone because the government simply can’t tell what people deserve and allocate things accordingly.

            Now, court cases are properly brought by injured parties on the basis of acts that injured them. So the basis of every case is an act. If there is no act (or negligent failure to perform a required act), there is no crime.

            So it is not the immorality of the person as a whole that the court seeks to determine, but whether he was guilty—acting immorally violation of the rights of another—in committing the act. Therefore, it is a defense to the accusation of guilt to say that one acted morally.

            That’s why even if you kill someone in an accident, you don’t have to pay the “weregild”, so long as you weren’t negligent. You acted morally and therefore within your rights. It was his responsibility to avoid you and preserve his own life, and if he couldn’t, that’s just bad luck.

            Properly, the courts never or should never punish someone for a guiltless act committed solely because of bad luck. We leave “acts of God”—bad luck in reality—to fall on the heads of those whom they naturally fall upon, to be dealt with by market systems like insurance.

            But it is, in a sense, bad luck that some people drive drunk and hit a tree and others drive drunk and hit a pedestrian. Or that some people are born rich and never feel tempted to steal, while others are born poor and feel a greater temptation. These people are properly punished because the purpose of court cases is to address the concerns of parties who were actually injured by acts, not to judge one’s whole character. And it is not a defense to the charge of guilt to say that another person is just as immoral but got luckier—since that is no concern of the injured party. To be guilty is to act immorally in violation of the rights of another.

            Those who drive drunk and don’t hurt anyone can be stopped as public nuisances because to threaten the imminent violation of a right is also to cause an injury because it makes people afraid. (Indeed, in a case the Institute for Justice is prosecuting, Albuquerque is using civil asset forfeiture to sue their cars as nuisances. Which would be fine if there were a higher burden of proof, and that’s the part IJ is challenging.) Yet it is a properly a lesser crime than actually killing someone while driving drunk.

            In the case of temptation, the degree of temptation and the poor quality of one’s upbringing are mitigating factors. A poor man who steals a loaf of bread to eat is less guilty than a rich man who steals it for kicks; the latter should be punished more. Cases of extreme temptation (e.g. you walk in on your wife sleeping with another man and kill him), extremely bad upbringing (e.g. locked in a basement), and so on are not justifications but are excuses. If you’re tempted but it’s your fault (e.g. you steal a loaf of bread to eat, but you have no money because you gambled it all away), it doesn’t count.

            That’s my opinion on the subject.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ David Friedman:

            Actually, a few final thoughts.

            While I don’t endorse the whole civil/criminal-private/public distinction, I there is is a real distinction for what we may call “crimes of moral turpitude” and acts which infringe upon the rights of another non-maliciously.

            It is possible to a) harm another accidentally in a way that doesn’t violate his rights, b) violate his rights intentionally, and c) violate his rights unintentionally or justifiably in the situation.

            In the first case, there is no wrong act at all. For instance, running over a pedestrian who darts out in front of you. Avoiding you was his responsibility, if he wasn’t in a crosswalk and you weren’t a reasonable stopping distance away.

            In the second case, there is a “crime” (for lack of a better word; it is not necessarily an infringement upon the sovereign) which is immoral and more or less hateful. The purpose of punishment is not only to give compensation to the victim but also (as Fitzjames Stephen says) to express the moral disapprobation of society.

            In the third case, there is a “tort” (for lack of a better word; in real life, torts can certainly be malicious). The purpose here is only to make sure the cost of the act is borne by the right person, so only compensatory damages are awarded. No one is to blame.

            This applies to temptation as a mitigating factor. It only mitigates against the hatefulness of a “crime” to society and can only reduce the punishment inflicted for that purpose. It doesn’t mitigate against the harm to the victim.

            In the case of a perfect excuse (and just assume that killing a man whom you see sleeping with your wife is one for the sake of argument), a “crime” is converted into a “tort”. You didn’t act immorally, but you did violate his rights, and you do have to pay his family for the damages caused by his death.

            Similarly, let’s take the case you give against deontological libertarianism in one part of The Machinery of Freedom. A deranged killer is massacring people, but there is a misanthrope who won’t let you use his gun to stop the killer. You are justified in stealing the gun, even though it violates his legal rights, because it is the morally right thing to do. All you have to do is pay him the (very minor) compensatory damages.

            We could even go so far as to say, what if he resists? If you have to kill him to take the gun and stop the killer—and if you can show this was the only way—you are still justified and still haven’t done anything wrong. Now you have to compensate his family for his death, though. He was entitled to the gun and to his life, even though he didn’t deserve them.

            I think we could extend this even to the draft, if it really were necessary to stop a worse evil.

            Edit: there is no real moral reason why the man should be compensated for the gun, or (in the extreme case) his family compensated for his life. It’s just that those are his entitlements in this system. Things would be exactly as just if the initial legal entitlements had been set up differently.

            However, some systems of entitlements work much better than others. Ultimately, I suppose it is a matter of morality (it would not be just if one man were entitled to everyone else’s life), but there’s a lot of optionality.

            This thought applies to innocent enemy civilians in war, as well. They (sometimes) have to be killed justifiably in self-defense of one’s own freedom from aggression. One system of entitlements would be to say that you are nevertheless responsible for compensatory damages to them after the war. But it is also justifiable and likely simpler to say that this is more like the case of a pedestrian who accidentally walks in front of your car: nobody’s fault, nobody pays. Presumably, the aggressor leaders pay, but you’re very likely to run up against the “blood from a stone” problem.

          • @Vox Imp:

            (Mentioning my essay doesn’t specify which one–I’ve written a lot, and linked to a number from here. This is guessing that it’s Payne vs Tennessee with the discussion of moral luck.)

            This could be a long conversation.

            In my view, we have two sets of moral intuitions: desert and entitlement. I think of desert as the God’s eye view. An omnipotent and omniscient God can look into the soul of an offender, tell if he acted deliberately, negligently, or was just unlucky. And such a God faces no budget constraint, so if he concludes that you deserve a great reward he can provide it.

            Humans, on the other hand, are dealing with each other as equals. What you did is observable, the state of your soul is not. And humans face a budget constraint. Even if neither party to an accident was negligent, the accident happened and someone has to bear the cost. And humans are biased in judging each other, which is a good reason to make outcomes depend on observables. If we judge you not by whether you actually killed someone but by whether the state of your soul is such that you would have killed someone, then, since we know that Catholics would murder the King if the Pope told them to, we are entitled to execute all Catholics for treason even though they haven’t yet done anything. That’s part of Smith’s point.

            The implication is that humans dealing with humans should go mostly by consequences–a response to the problem of moral luck. Smith adds that a benevolent God has hardwired the inclination to do that into us, to avoid the problems that would arise if we felt entitled to punish people for merely being bad rather than doing bad things.

            Economics adds some complications, including Coase’s double causation problem, observable evidence relevant to elasticity, complications of causation, cost of enforcement, and lots of other stuff that I discuss in Law’s Order.

            http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Laws_Order_draft/laws_order_ToC.htm

            So we don’t treat all crimes and torts as strict liability offenses. But we do punish the man who shot at someone and hit him more severely than the man who missed, even though being a bad shot is not a moral virtue, and similarly for the man who actually ran down a child with his car vs the man who managed to swerve just in time.

            I don’t know if that helps.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ David Friedman:

            Yes, that essay. The one you told me to check out in the same sub-thread. 🙂

            There’s not much I disagree with in your response to me. I would be interested to know exactly what you disagree with in my two posts (if you do). I’ll just clarify a few things.

            In my view, we have two sets of moral intuitions: desert and entitlement. I think of desert as the God’s eye view. An omnipotent and omniscient God can look into the soul of an offender, tell if he acted deliberately, negligently, or was just unlucky. And such a God faces no budget constraint, so if he concludes that you deserve a great reward he can provide it.

            Exactly. God (if he existed) giving everybody exactly what he deserves would be superior to the market economy. But such a system is unattainable.

            If it were attainable, life would be like an even more “benevolent universe” version of an Ayn Rand novel (or a socialist realist novel; the two would be the same in such a world): the world as it could (in some sense) and should be. Every heroic producer like Roark would win out, every Toohey would fall into disgrace. No one would exercise Superior Virtue and then get hit by a bus. No one would massacre thousands and die in his bed. (Of course, many elements of Rand’s actual books show that this isn’t the case; most importantly, the death of Kira Argounova at the end of We the Living.)

            Humans, on the other hand, are dealing with each other as equals. What you did is observable, the state of your soul is not. And humans face a budget constraint. Even if neither party to an accident was negligent, the accident happened and someone has to bear the cost. And humans are biased in judging each other, which is a good reason to make outcomes depend on observables. If we judge you not by whether you actually killed someone but by whether the state of your soul is such that you would have killed someone, then, since we know that Catholics would murder the King if the Pope told them to, we are entitled to execute all Catholics for treason even though they haven’t yet done anything. That’s part of Smith’s point.

            Yes, those are major reasons why court cases are properly based on injurious acts, not one’s whole character.

            So we don’t treat all crimes and torts as strict liability offenses. But we do punish the man who shot at someone and hit him more severely than the man who missed, even though being a bad shot is not a moral virtue, and similarly for the man who actually ran down a child with his car vs the man who managed to swerve just in time.

            I mostly agree here.

            As I said, there are two elements of “punishment”. One is the amoral element of damages: if you break something which someone else is entitled to, such as a vase in a china shop, you have to pay for it.

            If you break the vase by accident, you did nothing wrong and aren’t really “punished”. You are just made to bear the burden that “fate” laid upon you—upon you because in this kind of situation, the store owner isn’t responsible for your actions, neither is anyone else, and somebody has to bear it. The law could just as easily be the opposite: that store owners are responsible for any accidental damage customers cause to their goods. It just has to be clear.

            If you break the vase on purpose, you have acted immorally and not only have to pay damages for the entitlement, but you are punished because you deserve it. But unlike the case of determining what level of economic goods everyone deserves and allocating it accordingly, it is actually practical to go by desert in such cases.

            I’m not sure you’ll agree with this, but this is a legitimate reason (besides the obvious reason of indoctrination by the state) why the law is held by people to be, in a sense, grander and more majestic than the market. The law (like personal relationships) is an area of life where people can be treated as they deserve.

            Because of budget constraints, the law can hardly award virtue as it deserves. (“At honours that are great and conferred by good men he will be moderately pleased, thinking that he is coming by his own or even less than his own; for there can be no honour that is worthy of perfect virtue, yet he will at any rate accept it since they have nothing greater to bestow on him.”) Nor is there any compelling reason for it to try. This can be taken care of by private charitable organizations, such as those who give scholarships to poor children, or (in the case of anarcho-capitalism, where law itself is private) private organizations which are not associated with the use of force.

            Nor should the law try to punish vice in general. It doesn’t work, and it’s in no one’s interest to fund the prosecution of “victimless crimes”. And as you say, it would lead to persecution and it’s in everyone’s interest to avoid that.

            But when the law punishes guilty acts, this is the one case where it is both right and practical for the law to take desert into account. It is (as Fitzjames Stephen argues) natural and appropriate for people to hate criminals. When the law punishes a criminal who acted intentionally and immorally, it goes beyond compensating the victim (which is not a punishment, just paying the cost of the crime as one would pay for a good sold voluntarily) and imposes an additional punishment to satisfy the demand on the part of society to see justice done.

            And when the law tempers justice with mitigating or aggravating factors, these are certainly “observable”. Such as “rich man stealing bread” vs. “poor man stealing bread”.

            This sense that justice has been done is an additional “public good” which is produced, beyond simple deterrence. That provides one rationale for state-administered justice. Of course, the major drawback is that actually existing states rarely do actual justice.

            I am undecided on the question of whether anarcho-capitalism can work. If it can, people might and I think should be willing to pay as a charitable expense to ensure that those who immorally harm others are punished not only to compensate the victims and to provide deterrence, but to see retribution brought upon them. (And they will want to do so in the most cost-efficient way, unlike the state.)

            (On the other hand, one of the major dangers of anarcho-capitalism, as Michael Huemer has pointed out, is that private law enforcement will punish people too harshly. If you execute anyone who steals from people protected by your agency, no one messes with you anymore. But if everyone else follows suit, the thieves just start killing their victims and everyone’s worse off.)

            For just the sort of reason that people are willing to give scholarships to the poor out of benevolence and love of virtue—not wanting to see it go unrewarded; they ought to be willing to pay to punish the wicked because of their hatred of crime and offense at seeing it go unpunished.

            Anyway, I take this to be a reasonable expansion upon the type of theory you lay out.

          • Thomas Jørgensen says:

            A lot of european criminals avoid guns and murder like the plague because the police investigate gun crimes and deaths a lot harder than is the norm in the US.

            If you are a dope dealer in Stockholm and you kneecap a rival with a baseball bat, your odds of being imprisoned for that crime aren’t actually that high. If you kill that rival, your odds of going to prison are shockingly close to unity. The murder clearance rate being well north of ninety percent.
            This is mostly down to european police dedicating a lot of effort to solving murders, no matter who the victim is. Dead hooker noone cared about when they were alive? Quite willing to spend north of a million tracking down and nailing the perp to the wall once they’re dead.

          • John Schilling says:

            If you are a dope dealer in Stockholm and you … kill that rival [drug dealer], your odds of going to prison are shockingly close to unity.

            Whereas if you kill the Prime Minister, in front of a couple dozen eyewitnesses, you’ll get away scot free. Apparently killing the PM ranks about even with kneecapping a drug dealer, and well below killing someone really important like a drug dealer.

            Or, possibly, there’s something more going on here than the hyperefficient Swedish police always catching their man if they try and always trying real hard to catch murderers.

          • JBeshir says:

            Clearance rate of 90% sounds broadly plausible, exceptional dramatic political assassination stories notwithstanding.

            Murder clearance rate is discussed in http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/76156310-fcc6-11dc-961e-000077b07658.html and as of 2008 was about 90% in London, so Stockholm being at or north of that would be unsurprising.

            It isn’t that much lower in American cities, either- 70-80% in New York, it would seem, unless you have better data (and the article authors consider this to be poor, under-resourced performance).

            The general point that murder is in fact something to be avoided because police will usually catch you would seem to hold.

          • @Vox Imp:

            I’m not up for as long a discussion as your comment requires. Note the Coasian problem of double causation. From an incentive standpoint we not only want to give the customer an incentive to be careful about knocking over valuable vases, we also want to give the owner an incentive not to put valuable vases in places where they are easily knocked over.

            “If you execute anyone who steals from people protected by your agency, no one messes with you anymore.”

            I never read the final chunk of the political authority book, which is where I’m guessing that is from. The obvious response is that it is going to be very difficult to get other rights enforcement agencies to agree to use a private court that gives execution of their customers as the penalty for theft. Does Michael’s passage ignore the idea of pairwise contracts by agencies to get agreement and so avoid violence?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ David Friedman:

            I’m not up for as long a discussion as your comment requires. Note the Coasian problem of double causation. From an incentive standpoint we not only want to give the customer an incentive to be careful about knocking over valuable vases, we also want to give the owner an incentive not to put valuable vases in places where they are easily knocked over.

            Fair enough. I suspect that the main difference between us is that you are, as far as I can tell from your writings, a determinist and a legal positivist. (I don’t mean that pejoratively.) I gather that you think the law should be “amoral”.

            I can’t even remember who first pointed me to Fitzjames Stephen (it might very well have been you). I find him really interesting. I certainly don’t agree with everything he says, and there’s more than a little positivism in him, but he certainly doesn’t think the law is amoral. Whether he’s a determinist, it’s really hard to say. At times, he seems to endorse psychological egoism, which implies determinism.

            About the vases, I absolutely agree that there is an incentive to avoid both. Nevertheless, there are several setups that can handle this more or less effectively. And the main point is that when someone accidentally breaks a vase, he is not morally to blame unless he was negligent—regardless of whether the law requires him to pay compensation.

            I never read the final chunk of the political authority book, which is where I’m guessing that is from. The obvious response is that it is going to be very difficult to get other rights enforcement agencies to agree to use a private court that gives execution of their customers as the penalty for theft. Does Michael’s passage ignore the idea of pairwise contracts by agencies to get agreement and so avoid violence?

            I don’t think he regards it as a crippling difficulty. I don’t remember exactly what he suggests to deal with it, but your suggestion is not unreasonable, and it’s what I thought of.

            The problem, especially from the utilitarian perspective, is like this. Suppose that there are two types of people: the basically good ones and the basically bad ones (whether this is deterministic is irrelevant here). And suppose people generally have a good idea of which they are.

            The good ones will want very harsh punishments on crime, since they have a moral aversion to crime and hate it and all that. It doesn’t matter to them if the system is unjust because they’ll never be criminals. The bad ones want very moderate punishments on crime. They don’t want a complete free-for-all because they could be victims too, but crime doesn’t bother them that much morally, and after all they expect they might get caught.

            Moreover, in an anarcho-capitalist society, everyone will want to signal that he is good. One way to do this is by agreeing to face really severe punishments for committing crimes. If you know you will never commit them, this is rational. (The probability of false conviction will temper this, but surely you will agree that punishments can be unjustly high without being based on false convictions?) No one is going to want to join the defense agency notorious for harboring criminals and being lax toward them.

            The bad people then have little choice but to go along and agree to face really severe punishments. Then they commit crime anyway (because they are irrational or because they have unusual preferences; it doesn’t matter) but use deadly force because they know they’ll be horribly tortured or executed if they get caught.

            As I said, this is really bad from a utilitarian perspective that believes everyone has equal “inherent moral worth” no matter what he does. But even if you believe that there are good people who count more and bad people who count less, these punishments are going to be too high and also cause unintended consequences.

            Finally and unrelatedly, you might be interested in checking out this really interesting psychology paper “Why Do We Punish?” It finds, among other things that:

            despite strongly stated preferences for deterrence theory, individual sentencing decisions seemed driven exclusively by just deserts concerns.

            Whenever a factor of a crime would increase the severity of the punishment needed to deter but not increase blameworthiness, people don’t support increasing the punishment. For instance, two crimes of equal severity, but one is harder to detect. Deterrence theory clearly calls for punishing the harder-to-detect crime more. But people find that wrong.

            Also, in the Payne v. Tennessee article, you quote (and seem to agree with) claims that the value of the victim ought not to matter from the retributionist’s perspective. I find this odd. Isn’t it more blameworthy to kill a great man than to kill some con man?

            Moreover, the whole idea of retributionism is “an eye for an eye” and “blood calls out for blood”. You have to balance the scales of justice by making the perpetrator suffer as well as his victim. If there’s no victim, there’s no blood to call out for blood. So when someone drunk-drives into a tree, where is the retributionist motive for giving him the same punishment as when he hits a pedestrian?

            Maybe you are taking the “God judging sinners” analogy too far? Certainly what I laid out above seems like Fitzjames Stephen’s perspective on it.

            After all, the reason God supposedly punishes sinners for “victimless crimes” is that they offend him. A sodomite’s pleasure is an offense against God which calls out for the appropriate amount of pain. And the infinite nature of God means this is an infinite offense, and that is supposed to be the reason why hell is eternal.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ David Friedman:

            Sorry to go on and on, but Fitzjames Stephen raises a related problem with deterrence.

            If deterrence were our motive, we ought to punish poor people, those from disadvantaged backgrounds, and those who couldn’t help themselves more severely. After all, they are more strongly tempted or more naturally tended toward crime.

            On the other hand, take a rich politician who murders his wife in cold blood. We can get away with punishing him very lightly, since it’s relatively unusual for rich and powerful people to commit such crimes, since they don’t want to fall from their high position in society and lose their reputations. We can just take away his office (or in an anarchist society, whatever honors he has).

            Poor people don’t have any reputation to lose and therefore have to be punished harder.

            Fitzjames Stephen does not endorse any of this. He regards these notions as evidence for retributivism.

          • @voximp:

            It’s more complicated than that–take a look at the analysis of optimal punishment in _Law’s Order_, webbed and linked to my site. The fact that poor people are harder to deter might mean higher punishment to deter them, it might mean less punishment because deterring them costs more than it is worth. The rich man may suffer non-pecuniary penalties from conviction—but if he did kill his wife in spite of that, he must have very much wanted to, so there is no presumption that a little extra penalty will deter him.

            You might also want to look at my old “Should the Rich Pay Higher Fines” article if you can find it—I’m afraid I haven’t webbed it.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ David Friedman:

            It’s more complicated than that–take a look at the analysis of optimal punishment in _Law’s Order_, webbed and linked to my site. The fact that poor people are harder to deter might mean higher punishment to deter them, it might mean less punishment because deterring them costs more than it is worth.

            Why does a stronger deterrent cost more?

            If corporal punishments are allowed, you can impose an arbitrarily high deterrent, moving from flogging to various kinds of torture. These don’t cost society any more than a trial to recover pecuniary damages. (Loss of potential productive output, maybe, but we’re talking about criminals here.)

            Corporal punishments are perhaps not good at incapacitating people, but that’s not the same issue. And even there, you can cut off hands and feet. It’s hard to mug people with no hands or no feet.

            The problem is not that we can’t punish the poor more than the rich for the same crime, committed with a different level of temptation; it’s that it’s immoral.

            The rich man may suffer non-pecuniary penalties from conviction—but if he did kill his wife in spite of that, he must have very much wanted to, so there is no presumption that a little extra penalty will deter him.

            That’s just the point. The little extra penalty the law imposes isn’t going to deter him more, but he should be punished anyway.

            That’s the whole point of retributivism: it’s “inherently good” to punish criminals, regardless of whether it deters them. The suffering of people who deserve it is good in itself. Or rather, in the egoistic Fitzjames Stephen type way, it naturally and properly makes people happy to punish deserving criminals. You might as well ask why it makes people happy to have sex. (He even has a quote saying marriage is to sex as law is to revenge; the purpose is not to get rid of it but to moderate the excesses of it.)

            Probably because of the influence of Christianity (in my opinion) and the idea that such judgment should be left to God, that sounds bloodthirsty to a lot of people. Yet at the same time, retributivism holds that it’s naturally bad to punish innocent people, or to punish guilty people more than they deserve, even if it is an effective deterrent. So it is also gentler than deterrentism to good people, while possibly being harsher to bad people.

            It’s not that I don’t understand what the theory of deterrence says. I just think it neither is nor should be the basis of punishment, though it is often a good side effect.

            In one of your essays, you mention a parallel between the English and Chinese systems: at certain eras (the Bloody Code and the Legalist Qin), they viewed criminals as rational actors and focused on deterrence, while in other eras (the Victorians and the Han), they saw criminals as irrational and at least ostensibly focused on rehabilitation.

            Well, the retributivist view also sees criminals as irrational. It just thinks that rehabilitation is the responsibility of the criminal himself, not the law. The law is concerned with two things: a) making people pay the pecuniary price for violating the legal rights of others, whether voluntarily or not, and b) punishing people who immorally injure others for the sake the observation of justice being done by the victim and by society.

        • That’s naive. Your luggage gets X-rayed when you cross a national boundary, but not when you cross a state boundary.

          • John Schilling says:

            I was not aware that luggage was X-rayed when crossing the Franco-Belgian border. When did this start?

            And in any event, luggage X-rays aren’t really meant to prevent determined smugglers, e.g. terrorists.

          • Creutzer says:

            Nothings gets x-rayed when you cross an intra-EU Schengen border by car or train.

          • Publius Varinius says:

            Internal border controls have been abolished in most* of the European Union since 1995. Border crossings do not have border control posts or passport checks. Only a state sign displays the name of the country being entered.

            Your luggage is not inspected, nor x-rayed, when you cross an internal EU border.

            * The only exceptions on the continent are Croatia, Bulgaria and Romania. In special circumstances, border controls may temporarily be reinstated for no longer than 30 days.

    • Winter Shaker says:

      Otherwise prohibition would have stuck, smoking would have disappeared long ago, there would not be moves to legalize intoxicating substances such as marijuana

      I thought that a major part of the appeal of ending alcohol prohibition was that the increase in violence from organised crime as a result of handing them the whole alcohol market was perceived to outweigh the decrease in directly alcohol-caused deaths?

      And in our own time, a large part of the cannabis legalisation movement is based on the argument that cannabis has such low toxicity, and such low probability of nudging its users towards violence, that undermining the profits of the violent drug-trafficking organisations will almost certainly save lives on net. In each case, if you can round off the forces in favour of prohibition to a coalition of baptists and bootleggers, you can round off the forces in favour of repeal to a coalition of libertarians and harm reductionists.

      With other intoxicating substances, particularly heroin, it is observed that (on top of the money-fuelling-organised-crime-fuelling-violence arguments) a lot of the risks to users stem from uncalibrated variable dosages leading to overdose, and drugs being cut with even more dangerous toxic contaminants. The idea being that the drugs will be much safer under a legally regulated system that mandates precise doses and purity, and that the increase in users under legalisation will be small enough that the extra lives lost through more people taking the (now safer) drugs will be less than the lives saved as a result of the drugs being less dangerous, at least under a regime that still tries to avoid rampant mass marketing of the drugs. That hypothesis may not be correct for every drug, but it is at least plausible, and consistent with a desire to minimise net premature deaths.

      • Bryan Willman says:

        @Winter Shaker – I think what you say is probably true. I am aruging something different (but not in conflict.)

        If the *true revealed desire* of American society *as a whole* was for maximum life span for all, then society *as a whole* would have and would make different choices than it does.

        Your example about prohibition of alcohol and drugs being net losers is a very sound. But note what it reveals. There is a *meaningful* segment of society that simply will not abide such prohibitions. That is, there are a lot of people (perhaps 30% to 50% in the case of prohibition of alcohol) who do not care that “if nobody drinks we will literally all live longer.” If the number of people who demanded alcohol during prohibition was truly tiny (say 1000 fold smaller than it apparently was) prohibition would have worked, been a net win, rather than a debacle.

        By the way (not particularly directed to Winter Falk) – firearms are one of the oldest technologies, the need to make them was one of the large driving forces in the evolution of machine tools, and improvised arms which are crude but adequate for creating mayhem are not overly difficult. In other words, it’s not just weapons coming across borders, it’s weapons “boiling up out of the ether”

        And as so soundly noted in the original post – the NON firearm homicide rate in the US is higher than various places in Europe…

        • Adam says:

          Frankly, I don’t even care if not drinking will cause only me to live longer. Neither my revealed nor self-expressed preference is to maximize my own life span.

  10. Nicholas Weininger says:

    66% confidence in causality for a relatively weak relationship hardly seems sufficient to rebut the strong presumption, foundational to a free society if not to a utilitarian one, that adults should be able to own whatever gadgets they damn well please.

    Not to mention that any restrictions would be enforced (as indeed current restrictions are enforced, badly) not by some new nice police force, but by the gang of incompetent bigoted thugs we actually have. A USA with less terrible policing would probably be much more likely to make gun restrictions utilitarian-positive– but also would be much safer even without them.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I realize this is going to be controversial, but shouldn’t we treat 66% chance of a 20 billion dollar loss as equivalent to a 13 billion dollar loss with certainty?

      • Bill says:

        My instinct that says yes is the same as my instinct that tells me that agreeing to Pascal’s Mugging is the correct decision.

        Edit – And for a second point on this topic…

        The options when facing a 66% chance of success, aren’t just “implement” and “don’t implement.” We also have the “try to increase certainty” option.

        • Sastan says:

          Let me complete the circle. There is a tiny chance that massive Australian gun control scheme imposed on the US sparks insurrection, civil war and millions die. Tiny probability, but let’s estimate the cost at just enough to get us to 14 billion dollars likely loss.

          Now are we justified in opposing on utilitarian grounds?

          • Nicholas Weininger says:

            Moreover, think rule utilitarian. If most people were as intellectually careful and smart as Scott, they might be worth trusting to impose optimal gun restrictions. As it is, a rule that prevents our idiotic, easily morally-panicked voting majority from making decisions on this issue is a +EV rule.

          • As you say, the chance of a civil war is low– I’d say low enough to be negligible. Also– and this is just a matter of feel– if the country were actually poised for a civil war, it might be hard to tell what could set it off.

            However, I think there are some high-probability harms from a serious effort to reduce gun ownership in the US. One is more Ruby Ridges, and more generally, people being punished for Not Obeying the Somewhat Arbitrary Rules rather than doing actual harm. The punishments will include doing more to keep people poor and to jail them. Welcome to Ferguson!– I am of course assuming that the justice system doesn’t change.

            There will also be a large black market. I suppose that violence over gun-selling territories won’t be worse than violence over drug-selling territories, but who wants to add that in? Or I might be wrong because people don’t buy guns (or even ammunition) as often as they buy drugs.

        • meyerkev says:

          FWIW, the last Civil War America had (which was admittedly weird) killed off 2000/100K people in a 4-year span.

          Which is about 500 years worth of murders.

          So if you think a Civil War is more likely than 1 in 500, you probably shouldn’t do it.

          • The Anonymouse says:

            Not 500 years of murders, but X years of murders-that-would-have-been-committed-IFF-the-murderer-had-the-firearm-you-banned.

          • NN says:

            True, but a Civil War like the last one America had isn’t possible today. For one thing, any rebel army that tried to fight the US military head on in a conventional war would quickly end up like the Iraqi army during Desert Storm. Perhaps more importantly, the majority of American Civil War 1’s deaths were caused by disease, and medicine is much better nowadays.

            The best available model for an insurgency style civil war in a modern first world country is probably the Troubles in Northern Ireland. 3,530 died people over 30 years in a region that had about 1.5 million people during that time period. That works out to about 78.4 deaths per million people per year. In the modern US, a conflict of similar intensity would be expected to cause about 25,260 deaths per year. To put it another way, it would roughly triple the homicide rate.

            Possible ways that a hypothetical American Civil War 2 might differ from the Northern Ireland conflict: The Troubles was a conflict between two ethno-religious groups living in close proximity, whereas the divide in a conflict like this would mainly be urban vs. rural, which might serve to decrease the intensity of the conflict. On the other hand, the people that would likely form the core of any insurgency have shown themselves to be especially violent even in peace time. The IRA phoned in warnings before most of its bombings, but Timothy McVeigh made no attempt to warn anyone in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The only event during the Troubles that even remotely approached the casualty count of OKC was a car bombing by an IRA splinter group that phoned in a warning with an incorrect location, killing 29 people. Most other bombings killed far fewer people due to the aforementioned warnings.

          • Echo says:

            >medicine is much better nowadays

            Until the air force starts bombing doctors within borders as much as the other kind.
            Funny how many of the old horrors come creeping back once that thin veneer of civilization gets stripped away.

          • NN says:

            Another thing that is different between the US and Northern Ireland that I feel incredibly stupid for forgetting about: Northern Ireland (as well as Ireland itself) had very strict gun control laws when the Troubles started, forcing paramilitary groups on both sides to import most of their guns from overseas. Obviously that wouldn’t be the case in American Civil War 2.

          • John Schilling says:

            True, but a Civil War like the last one America had isn’t possible today.

            Right, and that’s unfortunate.

            The sort of civil war where you have uniformed armies under military discipline fighting along clearly-defined front lines on both sides, is the best kind of civil war. The kinds of civil war we can have now are the kinds they had in Russia in 1917 and the kind they are having in Syria now.

          • Leit says:

            @NN –

            Something people tend to forget about when they talk about US rebels fighting the US military over guns is that members of the US military – or at least those parts of it with boots on the ground – are disproportionately more likely to come from a culture that enthusiastically supports private gun ownership.

            Best-case scenario you’d have extensive issues with co-ordination and insubordination. Worst case you’d end up with mass defections, and your rebels end up looking suspiciously like US infantry/cav divisions.

            You’d think this would have occurred to more people when the post talks extensively about culture.

          • NN says:

            @Leit: True, but widespread military disloyalty would end up following one of the following scenarios, depending on how widespread and high-up it was:

            1) A military coup that would either quickly end the war or just inflame things further.

            2) Widespread defections of soldiers and officers to join the guerrillas, bolstering their numbers, expertise, and equipment, as happened in Syria.

            3) Few open defections but instead covert support to pass on intelligence, equipment and the like, as happened with the collusion between Loyalist militias and Loyalist members of security forces during the Troubles.

            You still won’t end up with a conventional war, because even if half of the US military wanted to defect, getting them all to defect simultaneously would be an impossible coordination problem. Considering the forces that the US military would be able to bring to bear in the continental US, there simply would be no way to gather forces out in the open for a conventional assault without them immediately getting smoked by the air force, and no country in the world would be able to enforce a no-fly zone in US territory.

          • Leit says:

            @NN:

            Hmm, you’re absolutely right, of course. I’m actually responding to a different argument entirely; that rebels will have no chance because “lol military”, in which the arguer tends not to realise that the military is unlikely to be on their side.

            That’s not the argument that you made, and I suspect that I went and responded to a different comment than I intended.

          • Gbdub says:

            Actually the last American civil war DID involve a sizable fraction of the regular army defecting more-or-less simultaneously to the Confederate side. Lee, Longstreet, and Jackson (among many other CSA officers) were West Point grads and US army officers prior to joining the rebels.

            Of course the American civil war was distinct from a lot of modern conflicts in that there were two distinct sides with well defined territories from the beginning till the end of the conflict.

          • John Schilling says:

            For the sake of completeness, there are unlikely-but-not-ridiculous scenarios in which a state governor could credibly order that state’s national guard to take the field against the regular army. Almost certainly in hopes that a demonstration of resolve would lead to a peaceful diplomatic resolution, but if SNAFU happens then such a force would then be a nucleus for any individually-defecting regulars (and smaller states’ guard units) to join.

            It still doesn’t lead to a Yankee-v-Confederate or Continental-v-Redcoat style “fair fight” because the state Air National Guards can’t really function without USAF logistical support and that means the Feds get air supremacy fairly early. But closer to a battle of regular armies, and while still a bloody awful mess the presence of military discipline and subordination to civil authority on both sides would make for a slightly less awful conflict than e.g. Syria.

          • Salem says:

            Well, it depends who the rebels are, and how quickly USG cracks down on them.

            If the rebels themselves were large, co-ordinated groups who were open about their desire to resist, this would serve as a co-ordination point for military defectors. And if the USG waited for a considerable period before using military force against the rebels (due to political disagreements as to how to act, a belief that the matter could be settled by negotiation, or an unwillingness to shed the first blood) then the existing military’s first-mover advantage could be negated. During that period of uncertainty, the rebels and defectors could co-ordinate and build up their forces and defences without getting “smoked.” Then, when the actual fighting started, the loyal military would find themselves faced by their former colleagues in their former hardware, and therefore be unable to “smoke” them.

            After all, that’s how it went down in the actual American Civil War.

          • xtmar says:

            The other thing to consider is that modern American warfighting is predicated on a large, unattacked, and extremely productive and generous rear to provide the logistical support for the front. Not only is this obvious things like food and small arms ammo, but all sorts of other things. In the event of a civil war, the rear is no longer capable of functioning unprotected, which means a huge commitment of forces to securing the rear, as well as a rapid degradation of fighting capability. In other words, if we had a civil war, I think that the military would be able to run for a few weeks to a few months** on the basis of existing reserves, but after that it would rapidly lose capability to project force. While these shortages would be most obvious in the more technical branches, like the Air Force,* you would also see a degradation of capability in even relatively less complicated MOSs, like the infantry, who would no longer have the batteries and satellite intel that gives them such an advantage over current enemies.

            *Where are you going to get new turbine blades for your jets, or guidance heads for your smart bombs? All of these components have very small industry bases and huge lead times to replicate.

            Obviously you can find ways to hack around these problems, and there is nothing like a war to stimulate human inventiveness, but it will never be as efficient as using what was properly designed to do the job.

            **I tend to think it would be on the shorter side. The US has ~10x the population of Iraq, so the tempo of operations required against a full scale insurgency would be unlike anything that they’ve dealt with in recent history. While the American population doesn’t have as much experience with insurrection as the Iraqis or especially the Afghans, we also have a much more educated and wealthy population to apply their knowledge and skills towards the insurrection.

          • alexp says:

            @NN

            Also, the modern US military is an incredibly complex and interdependent force and defectors will ave a lot of trouble operating, unless they do so in a very coordinated manner. What use are a bunch of supply clerks or mechanics that defect by themselves. Hell, what are a bunch of infantrymen going to do without artillery and air support. Tanks without infantry and mechanics and refuel and resupply infrastructure? Pilots without everything that planes need? Even if the entire Marine Corps turned traitor at once, it’d still have to rebuild with all the support and infrastructure it just cut itself off from.

          • Linch says:

            “So if you think a Civil War is more likely than 1 in 500, you probably shouldn’t do it.”

            Shit. Do a significant number of people actually believe this? That the probability of Civil War in 2016 is greater than .2%?

          • xtmar says:

            @alexp

            On the other hand, it works both ways. The US military is so tightly interconnected, it would be hard for the USG to operate at high efficiency when some of those mechanics and supply clerks defect, even if they could keep all of the pilots and infantry. Most likely you would get something like Syria, except without significant Russian involvement.*

            *Not because the Russians wouldn’t want to influence it, but because the necessary scale would be about 15-20x larger.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Linch:

            The U.S. has been around for 239 years. 4 of those years consisted of civil war.

            Naively, we should expect a 1.67% chance of civil war every year, or one civil war every 59 years.

            You might say the conditions have changed over time so that that civil war is now less probable than it was. But is it ten times less probable? (In my opinion, yes.)

          • xtmar says:

            @Linch,

            Maybe not Civil War, but certainly the end of the USG as currently constituted. If you look at the world at large, there are perhaps 100 real countries after you throw out the micro-states, and perhaps one or two of them experience a coup or civil war each year. Furthermore, even if you restrict it to “developed” countries, most of them have less than sixty years of governmental continuity due to the Cold War and the Great European Experiment part II. Both Spain and Portugal emerged from military dictatorship comparatively recently, as have the various South American countries like Chile, Argentina, and Brazil.

            The US and the UK are comparatively lucky in that they have had relatively long runs with continuous governance. On the other hand, even the US had a civil war ~150 years ago, and the UK was broken up in 1922 with the secession of Ireland, and may again be broken up in a few years by the Scots.

            While I would have to do a more rigorous look to see how long the average country keeps its government, even in developed countries, I would be surprised if its more than fifty or sixty years. On that basis, I think the background chance of civil war or fall of government in the US is probably on the order of 0.5%-1% per year, even without aggravating factors.

          • The U.K. has had three civil wars in the last four centuries, the most recent in 1745, not to mention at least two coups (Pride’s purge and the Glorious Revolution). That’s without counting any of the Irish troubles.

          • keranih says:

            @ lynch –

            Shit. Do a significant number of people actually believe this? That the probability of Civil War in 2016 is greater than .2%?

            How about this – I don’t know what the probability is of a second American Civil War breaking out in 2016, but I am very comfortable saying that whatever the measurement was in 2015, the Oregon revolt means that probability has increased more than 2% for 2016.

            The sense of a state monopoly on the use of force – and more importantly, the sense that the state does not and will not over use that force on a regular basis – is slipping away. While there has always been a degree of this, the last ten years have, imo, seen more dramatic change than previously.

            The BLM has spread the concept that state actors – even leftist state actors – are systemically unjust in their use of force *and* should rightfully be opposed. This is a populous endorsement, from the left, of a similar feeling (from the right/right-fringe) that the state is acting in a tyrannical manner. Thus far, the most disruptive actions have come from unarmed(*) and largely disorganized revolts from the left. Right wing revolts (Tea Party, Bundy, etc) have either been non-disruptive protests, tightly disciplined, or both.

            If there is a shift from the grumbling stage that is the current situation, my feeling is that it will escalate from a organized disruptive protest with an overzealous but ineffective response from the local authorities. Broad, over-reaching emergency actions could easily elicit support for the local community, particularly if the authorities make ill-advised broad-brush comments about the people in revolt. Two or three such incidents may be needed to prime reactions, until there comes a revolt-and-reaction that spreads beyond the ability of the local authorities to control. When other areas start making unwise preemptive precautionary actions, then large portions of the country could explode.

            Less likely to happen, I think, would be opposing groups facing off against each other, rather than one against the feds.

            I don’t *think* this will happen – I don’t think there are enough truely angry, fearful people in the country. But there are a lot of annoyed and disquieted people.

            Re: military action – Between putting down the revolt and actively supporting it there is a third side – a sudden out break of communication and transportation failures, such as untraceable “viruses” in aircraft computers and even in email and other signaling systems that “prevent” the acting units to receive the orders of their higher commands. Orders from civilian command that give the appearance of not being in accordance with constitutional precedence are the thing most likely to lead to this sort of military non-action, and a scrupulous adherence to constitutional principles would prevent it.

            In any case, I put the odds of a military revolt against the federal government as lower than the odds of a widespread civil revolt, and I don’t think the odds of such a revolt to be higher than 5% over the next 2-3 years.

            (*) unarmed in the sense of conventional arms and the use of military tactics to take and hold ground, not ‘unarmed = no gun or no rock or no firebomb’

          • alexp says:

            The Oregon revolt?

            You mean a bunch of jabronis occupying a cabin in the woods?

          • DoYouEvenChop says:

            @Linch
            > Shit. Do a significant number of people actually believe this? That the probability of Civil War in 2016 is greater than .2%?

            If there was some kind of forced gun buyback, I’d say the probability would be upwards of 5-10%. Otherwise, I agree with the keranih’s figure of ~2%, just based on BLM and the Oregon protests.

          • John Schilling says:

            The BLM and Oregon nonsense has no significant impact on the probability of Civil War in the United States. There is no credible path from that sort of local confrontation to a general civil war; too many rungs are now missing on the ladder of escalation. Some of us may recall seeing far worse in the 1980s and 1990s. And the FBI in particular learned from the lessons of Waco and Ruby Ridge; their playbook now says to resolve that sort of situation with a siege plus public relations and negotiations, not an assault. No assault, no “Alamo”, no revolution.

            If there’s a 2%/yr chance of Civil War 2.0, and that sounds about right, it is associated with, first, economic issues unsettled since the 2008 recession, and second, the potential for broadly stupid government policy interventions that directly threaten some significant number of Americans. Confiscatory gun control would be a perfect example of the latter, for what should be obvious reasons.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Do you really think there’s a 2% chance per year of American Civil War? Because those odds pretty much put it in my “likely to happen in my lifetime” bucket, so I’d best start stockpiling.

            1 – ( ( 1 – .02 ) ^ 50)
            = 63.58% chance of revolution in the next 50 years.

            (Assuming that’s the right formula.)

          • Looks right. Probability that an event with 1/n probability in any given trial actually occurs in n trials is (1 − (1 − 1/n)). In the limit n → ∞, this approaches (1 − 1/ⅇ) ≈ .63.

          • Adam says:

            2% per year is pretty ridiculous. It was more like the chance of a civil war given the division between slave and non-slave states was like 10% per year and now that it already happened, it’s pretty close to 0%.

          • anonymous says:

            The above discussion, along with a couple of other on this post, are a perfect demonstration of why we can’t just adopt a live and let live attitude towards shitty honor cultures. The direct violence is bad enough but the restrictions on perfectly reasonable public policy options because “maybe it’ll cause a civil war” is completely unacceptable.

          • John Schilling says:

            At current levels of economic inequality and political polarization, a 2% chance per year seems about right. Now I want to think about how to more rigorously quantify that, but we’re in unprecedented territory here.

          • Mark Atwood says:

            Do a significant number of people actually believe this? That the probability of Civil War in 2016 is greater than .2%?

            Happening specifically in 2016? No.

            The odds being greater than 0.2% of of it happening sometime between 2016 and 2116? Yes.

            The odds of it being greater than 0.2% if the potus and the congress and the scotus all decided it was time to disarm all those annoying Blues “clinging” (Obama’s word, not mine), hell yeah.

          • xtmar says:

            @Jaskologist

            I think 2% is a bit high in general, but I would ask you what you think a reasonable estimate is, both specifically for a civil war, and also for a broader fall of government/major interruption to the standard of living.

            If you look at the developed world, not just the US, it is only in the past decade that people who hit median life expectancy haven’t seen their government overrun in their lifetime. All of Europe* experienced a change of government during or after WWII, the Iberians lost their military dictatorships in the 1970s, Japan also experienced a change of government after WWII, Korea has the war, as did China (not that China is developed), Mexico had a substantial armed insurrection in the early 1900s and is quasi-failed today.

            Even if you exclude WWII, you still have the collapse of the various Eastern Bloc countries, the Iberians, and the pre-WWII changes in government in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere.

            This is to say nothing of the significantly more fragile governments elsewhere in the world.

            The major exception has been the white Anglophone former British colonies (USA, CAN, AUS, NZ), so we have that in our favor, but the UK lost Ireland in 1922 to an armed rebellion, faced further armed rebellion in Northern Ireland, and stands a middling chance of losing Scotland (peacefully to be sure) in the next decade or two.

            However, the major lesson, in my opinion, is that the US has an historically unique expectation for how rare it is for there to be a major discontinuity in government, be it due to invasion, civil war, or domestic unrest.

            So, what’s your estimate?

            *Except Sweden, Switzerland, and the Iberian peninsula.

          • NN says:

            The above discussion, along with a couple of other on this post, are a perfect demonstration of why we can’t just adopt a live and let live attitude towards shitty honor cultures. The direct violence is bad enough but the restrictions on perfectly reasonable public policy options because “maybe it’ll cause a civil war” is completely unacceptable.

            So what’s your alternative? The US government tried to reform the violent Southern honor culture after the first Civil War, and they failed. In the last 15 years, they have utterly failed to reform the violent honor cultures of Iraq and Afghanistan. They did have far more success with post-WWII Japan, but that was preceded by the USAF burning most of Japan to the ground. Few people would consider using those methods today.

          • Evan Þ says:

            “The above discussion, along with a couple of other on this post, are a perfect demonstration of why we can’t just adopt a live and let live attitude towards shitty honor cultures. The direct violence is bad enough but the restrictions on perfectly reasonable public policy options because “maybe it’ll cause a civil war” is completely unacceptable.”

            Suppose that, through some weird combination of events, the Straw Uberconservative Party got into power and started repealing the First Amendment and mandating that everyone go to {{InsertDenominationHere}} churches every Sunday. Would you say a civil war would be justified then? If so, note that a number of people consider gun rights almost as important as religious freedom. If not, when would you consider a civil war justified?

          • anonymous says:

            If so, note that a number of people consider gun rights almost as important as religious freedom.

            That’s exactly my point. These are the people that I hope don’t exist in 100 years, and that we* should work towards making sure that’s the case.

            *For specific values of we, obviously.

          • John Schilling says:

            These are the people that I hope don’t exist in 100 years.

            Well, I can certainly see why you are posting anonymously.

            Fortunately, while many of “these people” sincerely reciprocate your feelings on the matter, and have more guns than you do, we mostly do understand that genocide is a Really Bad Thing that ought to be held in reserve against the direst of emergencies.

          • Anonymous says:

            There are virtually no anarcho-syndicalists today. Does that mean there was a genocide against them sometime over the last hundred years?

            What terrible reasoning.

          • Evan Þ says:

            @second!Anonymous, well argued. “I wish X-ists would vanish” doesn’t mean “I wish they would be killed.” “I wish they’d change their mind” is a perfectly valid option.

            @first!Anonymous, thanks for clarifying your position! You’re saying the problem isn’t just the threat of a civil war, but the threat of a civil war due to gun control – since, you say, gun rights aren’t important at all. Am I reading you right now? If so, what makes you say that gun rights are so unimportant, given the vast number of well-argued posts in this thread from people defending them?

          • Tibor says:

            @xtmar: We had this neighbour next to my parents’ house who lived all her live in that same house (or at least since she was an adult), she was born something like 1912 and died 2010 or something (I do not remember exactly). She had lived in 7 different states/regimes – Austrian-Hungarian Empire, Czechoslovakia (first republic), Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren, Czechoslovakia again (second republic) communist Czechoslovakia, Federal Czecho-Slovakia and the Czech republic. Austria-Hungary lasted 51 years (or 114 years if you also count the previous Austrian Empire…for Bohemia not much changed in 1867), the first republic lasted 20 years, Protektorat lasted 6 years, the so called second republic (before the communist coup d’etat) lasted 3 years, communist Czechoslovakia lasted 41 years, the federal republic lasted 4 years and the Czech republic has lasted 23 years so far.

            Countries like Switzerland or the US with 100+ years of the same regime are an exception rather than a rule.

          • Mark Atwood says:

            These are the people that I hope don’t exist in 100 years, and that we* should work towards making sure that’s the case.

            I so love it whenever the mask slips. What is revealed under is never itself surprising, but sometimes the purity of it is.

            And people always get so upset with me whenever I ask a Blue what their long term (a 100 years, say?) goal or desire for the world actually is.

          • Echo says:

            Ah, the Stewie Griffin approach.
            “it’s not so much that I want to “kill her”, it’s just… I want her not to be alive, anymore.”

            And I do wonder if you’ve heard of all those 20th century massacres of Anarcho-syndicalists, or just selectively remember them when it’s time to insult, say, Franco and fascism.

            But hey, it’s “specific values of ‘we'”, so at least you won’t be getting your own hands dirty getting rid of us “throwbacks”.
            Gosh, the language of natural selection sure sounds sinister coming from people who intend to direct it…

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Mark Atwood:

            As two people have said, this is silly.

            I wish there were no “progressives” and no followers of both Donald Trump and Jeb Bush. Does that mean I want to kill them all?

            To say “I wish there were no X supporters” doesn’t necessarily mean “I wish to kill them” or even “I wish they weren’t alive”. Sure, it’s somewhat ambiguous, but it can simply mean “I wish people didn’t support X” or “I wish people weren’t the way people are when they support X”.

          • xtmar says:

            @Tibor

            That’s an amazing story. Thanks for sharing!

          • Echo says:

            @Tibor
            It’s sad that so many old people with amazing experiences of the 20th century are dying without ever passing on their hard-earned wisdom. Thanks for the intriguing anecdote from a rare and under-appreciated source.

          • anonymous says:

            Ah, the Stewie Griffin approach.
            “it’s not so much that I want to “kill her”, it’s just… I want her not to be alive, anymore.”

            Jesus Christ on a fucking pogo stick, how dense can you be? Why do you think I said in a hundred years rather than next year. Hint: what percentage of the people alive today and old enough to meaningfully have a culture are going to be alive in one hundred years? No where did I suggest anyone be murdered.

            I get that change is hard for you, and if you have to die at least everything should be exactly the same as it was during that glorious period in history when you were alive. Too fucking bad, you still don’t get to throw around genocide just because someone would like to convince the following generations not to adopt your shitty culture.

          • anonymous says:

            @Evan Thorn

            If so, what makes you say that gun rights are so unimportant, given the vast number of well-argued posts in this thread from people defending them?

            We obviously disagree as to the quality of those posts, though not at all as to their quantity.

            BTW just one “anonymous” in this sub-thread — a blue-ish box thing with eight boxes around it.

          • Tibor says:

            @echo: You’re welcome, I guess. But there is nothing all that special about her story. At least anyone born before 1918 and living till at least something like 75 in Bohemia or what is now the eastern part of Germany (in 1918, eastern part of Germany was what is now more or less eastern Poland) would have a similar story (someone born in Thuringia in 1915 and dying in 1995 would experience six different regimes…seven in parts of it since the allies “traded” a bit of a US occupation zone with the Russians for the western half of Berlin, so a US occupation zone turned into a Soviet occupation zone over night for some unlucky Germans). I guess the regime changes in Croatia or Slovenia would be similarly frequent in the 20th century and probably some other countries I am not aware of. In Europe the only two countries I know which had the same regime over the course of the whole 20th century are Switzerland and the United Kingdom (even though it lost almost all of its colonies).

            The moral is just that something that seems as “how things work in general” in your country might not be true everywhere or might even be an exception. One does not need “wisdom of the elders” for that, Wikipedia is usually sufficient.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            @anonymous:

            I think you might not realize that there are more reasons to consider gun ownership a civil right than membership in an “honor culture,” and more people who see it that way than “honor culture” members, too.

            Abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier:

            Song of the Vermonters, 1779

            Ho—all to the borders! Vermonters, come down,
            With your breeches of deerskin and jackets of brown;
            With your red woollen caps, and your moccasins, come,
            To the gathering summons of trumpet and drum.

            Come down with your rifles! Let gray wolf and fox
            Howl on in the shade of their primitive rocks;
            Let the bear feed securely from pig-pen and stall;
            Here’s two-legged game for your powder and ball….

            [W]e owe no allegiance, we bow to no throne,
            Our ruler is law, and the law is our own;
            Our leaders themselves are our own fellow-men,
            Who can handle the sword, or the scythe, or the pen….

            Come York or come Hampshire, come traitors or knaves.
            If ye rule o’er our land, ye shall rule o’er our graves;
            Our vow is recorded—our banner unfurled,
            In the name of Vermont we defy all the world!

            Again, that’s an abolitionist poet who wrote that.

            Historically, it’s not about honor culture. It’s about the idea that a society made up of armed citizens is better at resisting invasion and/or tyranny. The USA’s founders set it up that way because of their experience resisting the British crown.

            I’ll ask you the same question I asked the Californian: How would you propose to address the founders’ concerns in the modern era without gun rights? If we changed the US Constitution, what would you replace the 2nd with such that the USA was still protected from invasion/tyranny to the same degree? Have times changed such that nobody has to worry about that anymore? If so, how do you know/what’s your evidence?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ anonymous:

            I get that change is hard for you, and if you have to die at least everything should be exactly the same as it was during that glorious period in history when you were alive. Too fucking bad, you still don’t get to throw around genocide just because someone would like to convince the following generations not to adopt your shitty culture.

            I get that people accusing you of advocating genocide are being absurd, but all you’re doing is trolling with comments like this and the one that sparked off everything.

          • Mark Atwood says:

            I get that change is hard for you, and if you have to die at least everything should be exactly the same as it was during that glorious period in history when you were alive. Too fucking bad, you still don’t get to throw around genocide just because someone would like to convince the following generations not to adopt your shitty culture.

            You don’t get it. I’m not accusing you of desiring to murder us.

            I’m accusing you deciding that your ilk should be the ones to have a monopoly to successfully educate and enculturate our children, while at the same time enforcing that none of us are able to convince any of the children of your tribe to adopt our values.

            I’m pretty sure that doing that is generally considered Bad. Well, except when you do it to us, apparently.

          • “If we changed the US Constitution, what would you replace the 2nd with such that the USA was still protected from invasion/tyranny to the same degree?”

            I’ve been arguing for a long time that the modern equivalent of the 2d Amendment would be a ban on regulation of encryption.

            I don’t think the 2d Amendment achieves its original purpose very well in the modern world, in part because much of its original purpose, as I read the evidence, was to make a serious professional army unnecessary–and we’ve lost that one. It still serves a different purpose—making ordinary people less dependent on police protection and so more willing to limit the power of the police.

            But I believe the modern equivalent of a civil war is going to be mostly information warfare, and in that context the right to encrypt is the equivalent of the right to bear arms.

            I made that argument long ago in a debate on encryption with Ed Meese. The transcript is webbed at:

            http://web.archive.org/web/20030925021822/http://www.hoover.org/Main/uncommon/winter98/205.html

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Mark Atwood:

            Now you sound like you’re accusing him of so-called “cultural genocide”, which is just as uncalled-for.

            Where do you get the idea that he is advocating anything but peaceful persuasion of the people he doesn’t like—and their children—to change their opinions in the normal way opinions change in a civilized country? Did he propose to drag children away from their families like Indians and teach them to abandon their folkways in government schools?

            Okay, fair cop, it’s called “public school”. 🙂 But in all seriousness, regular public school is bad but nothing as severe as that. And you can hardly act like it’s some shocking act of depravity to advocate public schooling in this country, in this day and age.

            Both of you seem to be overreacting.

          • Mary says:

            “I wish X-ists would vanish” doesn’t mean “I wish they would be killed.” “I wish they’d change their mind” is a perfectly valid option.

            Which is why virtually every totalitarian regime starts out with sincere “re-education” camps.

            Wishing they would all go away by changing their mind is only marginally less alarming.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            @David Friedman:

            I think both of those things were part of its original purpose (see: “didn’t want police because thought of police as a standing army”), so…your proposal would only serve one of them.

            But it’s an interesting point. Will read the transcript.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Mary:

            Do you think non-totalitarian societies are justified in such statements as “I wish Islamic fundamentalists would go away”?

            The moral crime is using force to try to “persuade” people instead of using peaceful methods to persuade them.

            “You think certain beliefs are harmful! You know who else thought certain beliefs were harmful? That’s right: the Inquisition!” That’s not a valid argument.

          • Suppose there’s a second American civil war. What is the rest of the world doing? I”m not sure what, but probably something.

            Also, is it plausible that there are foreign governments who would be secretly promoting an American civil war?

          • Julie K says:

            Unfortunately, “honor culture,” or something similar, seems to be getting more popular. And it’s not exactly limited to the red tribe.

            http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-09-11/how-grown-ups-deal-with-microaggressions-

          • Cord Shirt says:

            @Nancy: Isn’t it a pretty normal part of diplomacy to secretly fund people the success of whose goals would, in your opinion, encourage instability and/or civil war in an enemy country? (So…yes?)

            @David:

            …that made me nostalgic.

            First, boring reaction is just that encryption is currently too inconvenient for widespread use. I used to have PGP…now I have gmail, whose algorithms read my e-mail and use it to figure out what to advertise to me. What was that story the sf club discussed? “Gentle Seduction”? Bleah.

            Second:

            “Meese: Government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master and that, but governments were created for one primary purpose and that was to protect the public. That’s the primary reason and to secure the rights that we have and what you want to do is turn over our rights to criminals”

            Ahahahaha.

            Yeah, I’m real convinced that when he says “government is a dangerous servant,” he really means it. :rolleyes:

            Finally…well… The question I kept expecting to be answered that never really seemed to be: *What* will cause future wars to be primarily with words? Are you sticking with the old standard “fear of a nuclear war”? Or what?

          • “*What* will cause future wars to be primarily with words? ”

            Not future wars in general. Future conflicts between the U.S. government and its populace. You win by persuading almost everyone who matters to your side–no shooting involved. Control over mechanisms for spreading information then becomes the key technology.

            Clearer?

          • John Schilling says:

            You win by persuading almost everyone who matters to your side–no shooting involved.

            Yes, but in some contexts “almost everyone who matters” simplifies to “the ones with the guns”. And sometimes the method of persuasion involves shooting. Iraq is 85% Shiite and Kurd; how many of them did Saddam Hussein persuade to support his rule, except by shooting them when they can’t shoot back?

            Provided the ability to shoot people is reasonably uniform across the population, the path to victory is through non-violent persuasion. Given a highly asymmetric ability to shoot people, I am not as confident as you are that this will remain the case.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @John Schilling
            “I am not as confident as you are that this will remain the case.”
            Then why does everything seem OK in the UK, where there is strict gun control. The few people who have guns mainly use them for sport, not coups.

          • John Schilling says:

            Then why does everything seem OK in the UK, where there is strict gun control?

            If you look back, the standard I gave was “Provided the ability to shoot people is reasonably uniform across the population”

            In the UK, the ability to shoot people is reasonably uniform across the population. The police have a few handguns and submachine guns. The general public has a somewhat larger number of double-barrel shotguns (and presumably hacksaws if needed, and a few scoped rifles for sniping at ~100kg mammals). The army of course has lots of guns, but I believe would be culturally resistant to orders to shoot British subjects except under extraordinary circumstances.

            This particular stable equilibrium is not plausibly achievable in the United States. We have a different stable equilibrium.

          • Echo says:

            >Then why does everything seem OK in the UK

            Hohoho…

          • Cord Shirt says:

            @David:

            Yes, thanks.

            What do you think of the Oregon/Malheur standoff? Is it an outlier? And/or would you call the fact that it’s difficult to find reporting on it an example of your point?

            OTOH there’s this.

          • @cord shirt

            I haven’t been following the recent standoff with any care. But my view is that its eventual outcome will depend more on how it is perceived by the mass of the population—who “wins” the information battle—than by how well armed those involved are. And one can see the opening shots in the attempt of critics to label those involved terrorists, despite the fact that they haven’t killed anyone.

          • “This particular stable equilibrium is not plausibly achievable in the United States. We have a different stable equilibrium.”

            I agree with the first statement, but the second is much to pessimistic Every civilisational advance, everything that makes a country more worth living in, is a shift from a Molocohian to an Eluan equilibrium.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ TheAncientGeek:

            I agree with the first statement, but the second is much to pessimistic Every civilisational advance, everything that makes a country more worth living in, is a shift from a Molocohian to an Eluan equilibrium.

            That is not at all true.

            I mean, it works if you define “Molochian” as “bad” and “Eluan” as “good”. But it does not if you (more usefully) define “Molochian” as “exhibiting a lesser degree of coordination” and “Eluan” as “exhibiting a greater degree of coordination”.

            Many times, a higher degree of coordination, given the assumption that perfect coordination is not possible, results in a worse situation. For instance, one of the things Scott describes in his essay is competition among businesses. This is certainly Molochian. But in the context of a capitalist system where individual rights are protected, it results in their being willing to streamline everything down to what best serves the interest of the consumers.

            The Eluan solution for businesses is for each industry to form a cartel, where they get to make the same amount of money while making no improvements. But if every industry tried to do that, the system would collapse. This would be true both if each industry tried to maximize its own selfish interest, and if they all attempted to “build socialism” together.

            With guns, it’s just the same (or at least, you must recognize the theoretical possibility). The Molochian solution is that everyone
            (who feels it necessary) carries a gun to protect himself. The Eluan solution is that the government bans all guns and promises to protect everyone. But if the government is not able to quantum-tunnel the police to everyone who gets attacked, they are not actually able to fulfill this promise.

            So coordination ends up making the law-abiding people weaker against defectors.

      • John Schilling says:

        Only if you have 100% confidence that there are no other significant consequences on either side of the decision. If you have only 66% confidence on the first-order consequence you are trying to achieve, you probably don’t have a good handle on the unintended consequences, and if your first-order goal is only a small reduction in a much larger problem there’s room for those unintended consequences to be huge.

        • 27chaos says:

          Interesting framing, thanks for it. Glad you haven’t gotten banned permanently so far.

        • JadeNekotenshi says:

          Also, I think related – Australia’s gun buyback program targeted mainly long guns. In the US most gun murders use handguns. Does that do anything to diminish the certainty that the first-order consequence that’s desired will actually occur? (Assuming that the putative US buyback would be modeled along the Australian lines, and likewise target mostly rifles and shotguns.)

      • hlynkacg says:

        In addition to John’s unintended consequences, I think you also need to consider the opportunity costs of gun control.

        How much money are you going to spend on the buy-back? What will it cost to enforce the new restrictions and prosecute those who fail to comply? How much political capital will it take to get a new Amendment passed superseding the 2nd? And how many people currently employed in the firearms industry are going to need new jobs?

        Seems to me that 13 billion dollars might be selling short, and that’s assuming everything works out as planned.

        • Randy M says:

          OT, but interesting to see the use of “motte-and-Bailey” spread beyond SSC. Didn’t Scott originate that?

        • Echo says:

          Lots of people read SSC or the places where SSC-terms are discussed. Not sure how much Scott’s managed to affect the quality of public discourse, but he’s certainly influenced the vocabularies of people who are trying to sound Sensible And Important.

        • You don’t have to repeal the 2nd Amendment. All you have to do is to shift the composition of the Supreme Court by one or two justices, so as to get a weaker interpretation.

          • John Schilling says:

            I think it is exceedingly unlikely that one or two new Justices would cause the Supreme Court to overturn a recent, high profile ruling. That sort of thing weakens the reputation of the Court as a whole, and reputation is really all they’ve got. See, e.g., how many new conservative Justices and even conservative majorities Roe v. Wade has withstood, and that one is on much shakier ground.

            Pre-Heller, a few justices one way or another would have made a difference, but not now.

          • Jordan D. says:

            You don’t really have to get the ruling overturned. Heller isn’t a total bar- all you need are a few Justices willing to chip away at it over a half-decade until it becomes a shadow of itself.

            That’s the usual way of things in the high court. Every ruling has, express or implied, exceptions to the rule which it lays out that go unstated in the opinion. A court which doesn’t like Heller can just say that the Second Amendment doesn’t stop states from enacting broad non-total bans and establish a permissive test. They could even pull a Morse v. Frederick or Korematsu and say ‘We are in the middle of a GUN MURDER CRISIS which justifies the state taking unusual action!’

            It’s no more than has happened a dozen times before.

          • Harold says:

            You don’t have to wait, it’s already happened. After McDonald, the Supremes have denied cert to every appeal of an anti-gun ruling they’ve been presented with, even in the face of a circuit split on concealed carry licencing with the 7th enforcing shall issue on Illinois. Per a couple of their latest, we have a right to keep the few types of guns the government allows and to bear them inside our homes, but even their, not ready to be used in self-defense.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          @ Randy M:

          Scott didn’t originate it, but he popularized it.

          The original was in a book criticizing it as one of the main techniques of postmodernism. Like, bailey: “There is no such thing as objective knowledge; thinking the Earth rests on a turtle is just as good as modern science.” Motte: “Well, I’m just saying you shouldn’t be dogmatically certain that you’re right about everything; look where that got the Inquisition.”

        • Jaskologist says:

          I mean, that sounds nice, but it’s been a long time since we’ve actually needed to pass an amendment to change the constitution. In reality, they just need to flip/replace one Supreme Court justice.

        • “How much money are you going to spend on the buy-back? ”

          How much money are you going to put on life?

          • Dr Dealgood says:

            Apparently somewhere on the order of three thousand dollars according to GiveWell.

            Given that we have more guns than people and about 11 kilomurders, and making the silly but simplifying assumption that every gun is equally likely to cause a murder, we should expect roughly one fewer murder per 30K guns bought. So to be effective it looks like we should pay a maximum of about ten cents a gun.

            Seriously though, posturing about the limitless value of life is annoying enough when the religious right does it. Let’s not drag it in here either.

          • You don’t need to put infinite value on lives to realise that cost-of-buyback is always going to be a weak argument.

          • hlynkacg says:

            @AncientGeek

            In what way is it a weak argument?

            The whole pro-gun-control argument seems to hinge on the thesis that gun-control is “low hanging fruit” in reducing overall violence. Whether or not that fruit is as “low hanging” as people claim is a legitimate question, and critical to evaluating the legitimacy of pro-gun control.

        • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

          >The original was in a book criticizing it as one of the main techniques of postmodernism.

          Of course, it’s much older than that. The technique is described pretty accurately in The Art of Being Right.

      • Echo says:

        I can guarantee it would cost more than 13 billion dollars to do the whole “prying them from our cold dead hands” thing that leftist twitter keeps ranting about. Just on principle.

      • Ilya Shpitser says:

        No. You shouldn’t value variance at 0, see also: investing.

        I don’t find a lot to disagree with in your analysis overall. I hope the other Scott A reads it.

    • Earthly Knight says:

      The bigger problem is that being 66% confident in a causal relationship on the basis of correlational studies + statistical controls in sociology is preposterously optimistic. There are countless variables potentially at work here, more than we could possibly inventory, and controlling for the most relevant-seeming manages the underdetermination only a little.

      • Scott Alexander says:

        I guess that depends what our prior is. If our prior was 50-50, then moving up to 66% sounds fair.

        • John Schilling says:

          Except that the prior for the effect of social interventions should not be “50% positive, 50% negative”, but more like “10% positive, 80% insignificant, 10% negative”.

          • Scott Alexander says:

            I feel like there’s a pretty high prior for “getting rid of things that kill people will cause fewer people to be killed”. I mean, I’ve never checked to see if there are studies showing that making drunk driving illegal helped anything, but I think I’m justified in having a high prior that it did.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            There are two types of causal claims being mixed up here. The first claim was about basic things in the world: do guns cause homicide; do drunks driving cause crashes? Scott started with a prior of 50% on the first and moved it up to 66%. John brought up the completely different class of causal claims of social interventions. This is much less likely, but Scott doubled down. No, simple laws against drunk driving do not do much. Well, I don’t really know, because it has always been illegal. But it certainly left a big room for improvement, as demonstrated by the carefully targeted propaganda pioneered by MADD which drove the divergence between America and Europe for a couple of decades.

          • roystgnr says:

            Remember when humanity didn’t have as many things that kill people? This is something we can examine with history, not just tabula rasa priors or correlations in space alone.

            My posterior is “Pyramids of skulls across Asia. Repeatedly.” I think Pinker is the usual citation if you like your data less vivid.

          • “Remember when humanity didn’t have as many things that kill people?”

            Remember when humanity didn’t have stable, secure societies with police forces?

          • roystgnr says:

            Yes, TautologyMan, unstable and insecure societies are indeed unstable and insecure.

            But isn’t it notable how the lack of guns didn’t fix that, but instead made it grotesquely worse?

        • Daniel Speyer says:

          When we see correlation, there are five possibilities:

          * Guns cause murder
          * Murder causes guns
          * Something else (culture of violence?) causes guns and murder
          * Matching gun and murder rates cause inclusion of data in our study
          * The correlation is an artifact of the confounders we controlled for

          We can probably ignore the one about causing inclusion in the study, but the rest all sound plausible, so a 25% prior.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            Thoughtlessly carving up the space of hypotheses into x parts and slathering 1/x of your credence onto each part is not actually a good way to go about things. I mean, what rationale is there for allotting the hypothesis of a common cause a confidence of only .25? Remember that it’s really the disjunction of indefinitely many sub-hypotheses:

            H1: Factor A causes both guns and murder.
            H2: Factor B causes both guns and murder.
            H3: Factor C causes both guns and murder.
            H4: Factor A causes factor D and factor E, factor D causes guns, and factor E causes murder.

            And so on. If we want to establish that guns cause a socially significant increase in homicide, we really need multiple, independent lines of convincing evidence which all converge on that conclusion, along with no countervailing evidence to speak of. That should be the bare minimum evidentiary requirement for showing causation in sociology. Otherwise we are going to wind up drawing all kinds of spurious causal inferences.

          • There’s another possibility. Guns dont; cause murder, but not-guns cause unmurder. The thing you adjust to reduce something doesn’t have to to be the thing that increases it. Cancer isn’t caused by lack of cancer drugs. Lung cancer isn’t cured by stopping smoking.

          • DES3264 says:

            Actually, I was wondering about a variant of (5). The authors control for burglary, as a proxy for general criminality. If potential victims owning guns is much better at deterring burglars than deterring murderers, that would explain their result.

            I don’t think that’s right, because Scott says that the result is robust against swapping burglary out for a bunch of other proxies, but I at least wanted to note it.

        • Earthly Knight says:

          It’s perilously easy to underestimate the difficulty of drawing conclusions about the hidden causal structure of a complex system from an observed correlation. Here is a fairly precise analogy, which I hope will illustrate this:

          You are given 51 black boxes as a birthday present. Each has two gauges built into it, one which measures the G-quantity, and one which measures the H-quantity. You know the following about the internal mechanism of the boxes:

          1. Each contains at least a thousand moving parts.
          2. Boxes which have a high G-reading tend to have a high H-reading; boxes which have a low G-reading tend to have a low H-reading.
          3. The correlation observed in (2) remains when a dozen of the moving parts in each box are stilled.

          Given this, how confident should you be in the hypothesis that changes in the G-quantity are causing changes in the H-quantity? I am not sure how to answer this question, but I can’t imagine assigning the hypothesis a credence higher than .1. We don’t really have anything to go on– there are just too many different possible mechanisms compatible with the available evidence.

          Now, it may be that the hypothesis of guns causing homicide is different because we find it antecedently quite plausible that guns cause homicide. If this is so, though, it’s our intuitive judgment of plausibility that’s doing almost all of the work, and not the observed correlation.

          • Ilya Shpitser says:

            Yeah, I agree with this. People should be a lot more cautious. I think Scott had a post complaining about people who constantly harp about this as a kind of skepticism strategy.

            But I mean, science is hard. I think people really overestimate what we know outside of domains like physics.

    • Troy says:

      Not to mention that any restrictions would be enforced (as indeed current restrictions are enforced, badly) not by some new nice police force, but by the gang of incompetent bigoted thugs we actually have. A USA with less terrible policing would probably be much more likely to make gun restrictions utilitarian-positive– but also would be much safer even without them.

      A USA with fewer guns might make police more willing to use nonviolent policing.

      • BBA says:

        Getting rid of guns isn’t going to fly. I say we get rid of police instead.

        (Tongue only partially in cheek there. Would it be possible to eliminate the things a “peace officer” or “constable” is allowed to do that an ordinary citizen isn’t? More to the point, would it be desirable?)

        • Troy says:

          “When law enforcement vanishes, all manner of violence breaks out: looting, settling old scores, ethnic cleansing, and petty warfare among gangs, warlords and mafias. This was obvious in the remnants of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and parts of Africa in the 1990s, but can also happen in countries with a long tradition of civility. As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin’s anarchism. I laughed off my parents’ argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 A.M. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 A.M. the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that had competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist).” – Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, p. 331

          • Earthly Knight says:

            This is a bad argument. Pinker’s “empirical test” tells us what happens when people who are accustomed to the presence of law enforcement abruptly find themselves in a situation where all the cops have vanished, when what we want to know is what a modern, western society would look like once people grow accustomed to the absence of police. There is no guarantee that the state of anarchy which sets in when the public first discovers there are no patrolmen on duty will continue indefinitely.

          • Troy says:

            There is no guarantee that the state of anarchy which sets in when the public first discovers there are no patrolmen on duty will continue indefinitely.

            There’s no guarantee, but it’s evidence that people will be more violent later on without police than they were with police. And historical examples where there are no functioning police that I know of either see continual high levels of violence (e.g., Somalia) or the rise of non-state actors playing policing roles, such as the Mafia. But, granting that police brutality is a problem (as I agree it is), the Mafia don’t seem a better option to me.

          • Andrew says:

            Ok, so we only demilitarize the police. Take away every weapon they have bigger than a handgun, and every vehicle they have bigger than a sedan. I’d be ok with that.

          • England didn’t have police in anything close to the modern sense until well into the 19th century. We don’t have good crime statistics that far back, but it isn’t clear that crime rates dropped a lot with their introduction.

          • “And historical examples where there are no functioning police that I know of either see continual high levels of violence (e.g., Somalia) or the rise of non-state actors playing policing roles, such as the Mafia. ”

            19th c. England?

            Somalia’s high rate of violence came about when a modern democratic state was imposed on a traditionally stateless society. After a while it turned into a military dictatorship, got into a losing war with Ethiopia, the traditional enemy, and the government collapsed.

            Since then the U.S. and U.N., with the assistance mostly of Ethiopian troops, have been trying to reimpose government. Somalis, especially near the capital, have figured out that if there is government it is better to be the rulers than the ruled, so have been fighting over who gets to run things. We have refused to recognize the Republic of Somaliland, the polity set up in northern Somalia (what was the British controlled area), because that would be to admit that Somalia is not a country.

            A brief period of peace in the south was created by an alliance of Islamic courts (the ICU, “Islamic Courts Union”) backed by local clan militias. In late 2006 that period was ended when Ethiopian troops, acting with U.S. and U.N. support in alliance with the U.N., created a “Transitional Federal Government,” invaded Somalia and eventually took Mogadishu. (Lewis 2008 pp. 87-91)

            I may be biased and am not an expert, but the leading expert on the subject is I.M. Lewis, a retired LSE anthropologist who has been studying Somalia since the 1950’s. For his views, on which mine are largely based, see:

            Understanding Somalia and Somaliland: Culture, History, Society, Columbia University Press, N.Y., 2008.

            “As The Kenyan Somali ‘Peace’ Conference Falls Apart In Confusion, Recognition Of Somaliland’s Independence Is Overdue,” http://www.mbali.info/doc41.htm

          • Daniel Speyer says:

            ISTR Georgia (the country) fired its entire police force in 2005. They created a new one after that, but there was a period without one. It went mostly all right, by the low standards of former-SSRs.

          • LtWigglesworth says:

            @Daniel Speyer
            Yes, but as a counterpoint, most of Iraq’s security infrastructure was demolished after the 2nd Gulf War, and that hasn’t really gone well.

          • Troy says:

            England didn’t have police in anything close to the modern sense until well into the 19th century. We don’t have good crime statistics that far back, but it isn’t clear that crime rates dropped a lot with their introduction.

            Fair enough; my earlier statement was too sweeping.

            It seems to me that in most contexts, introducing police, or adding to the number of existing police (up to a certain point) will reduce crime. Perhaps some places have cultures of conformity or nonviolence where this is not the case. The United States is not, at least right now, one of those — although I’m all for moving our culture in a direction where police are less necessary.

            It’s also my understanding that most criminologists agree that policing reduces violent crime, although the extent and nature of the relationship is a matter of dispute.

          • Anthony says:

            England didn’t have police in anything close to the modern sense until well into the 19th century. We don’t have good crime statistics that far back, but it isn’t clear that crime rates dropped a lot with their introduction.

            “Modern” policing was introduced into England and Wales (and Scotland) piecemeal, so even if it did have a dramatic effect, we might not see it in the national statistics. Statistics for London – that part under the authority of the Metropolitan Police – would be more useful. But there was policing before Peel, both publicly-financed constables, and private police. Also, the Metropolitan Police Service evolved over time – it’s not reasonable to believe that it was instantly fully as effective as its later record.

          • ” But there was policing before Peel, both publicly-financed constables, and private police. ”

            The rotation offices only got publicly financed constables in 1792. There were a handful of them, in London, and their income was mainly from rewards, not from a salary.

            Your “private police” were thieftakers, private citizens who caught criminals for rewards (public rewards for successful prosecution and private rewards for returning stolen property—then there was Jonathan Wilde, but that’s another story). That was in a system where almost all crimes were privately prosecuted. Thieftakers had no special rights that other citizens didn’t. That’s along the general lines of what I would expect to replace government police in a fully private system.

            I agree that it’s hard to measure the effect of the gradual introduction of professional police—but if it were large, one would expect to see crime falling much faster in the 19th century than in the 18th. As best I can tell, you don’t, although the data aren’t very good.

            For more than you want to know about the subject, see my old article, webbed at:

            http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/England_18thc./England_18thc.html

            I’m currently in the process of revising it for my current book project, but I don’t think it has serious errors, although I probably oversimplified the history.

          • Anthony says:

            David – easier would (hopefully) be to find useful statistics for London proper – the success of the Metropolitan Police model is evidence that it was at least fairly successful even from the beginning, so there should be some noticeable change in crime around the establishment of the force. Using only national statistics it would be hard to separate out the effect of the spread of professional policing outwards from London from other effects during the same time period.

          • “This is a bad argument. Pinker’s “empirical test” tells us what happens when people who are accustomed to the presence of law enforcement abruptly find themselves in a situation where all the cops have vanished, when what we want to know is what a modern, western society would look like once people grow accustomed to the absence of police. ”

            They’d reinvent the police. We known this because the police were invented in the modern (250 years or so) era.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            “historical examples where there are no functioning police that I know of either see continual high levels of violence (e.g., Somalia) or the rise of non-state actors playing policing roles, such as the Mafia.”

            Or “The People,” in the case of the US Constitution.

            Goal: Non-brutal police.
            Framers’ solution: The People.

            Problem: They need training, and the incompetent few need to be identified and excluded.
            Solution: The government trains the militia.

            Problem: If the government is who trains them then they are still vulnerable to being controlled by a tyrannical government like King George’s.
            Solution: Make it a different government. The states rather than the feds.

            “Problem”: But when some of the states were doing evil things, their militias were what let them resist when we told them to stop.
            “Solution”: We caucus with racists to reinterpret the constitution to enable gun control (since overturned by DC v Heller).

            …something might’ve gone wrong somewhere.

            …I’m OK with going back to the people being the police. I don’t think it would lead to another civil war. Anyone have a reason I’m wrong?

          • vV_Vv says:

            England didn’t have police in anything close to the modern sense until well into the 19th century.

            Because the concept of a police force separated from the military is relatively modern (I think that some ancient partial examples exist, but they are uncharacteristic). Nevertheless, sovereign states always used their monopoly on coercion to enforce the law.

          • “Because the concept of a police force separated from the military is relatively modern”

            Contemporary France had police and public prosecution. Through much of the 18th century there were people arguing for (and against) having police in England. Until the early 19th century, the people arguing against were winning.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ David Friedman:

            They did send the hussars out on protesters and that kind of thing, though, in the same way modern police would use riot squads. Except riot squads usually don’t ride people down with swords.

    • sweeneyrod says:

      “Adults should be able to own whatever gadgets they damn well please.”

      That clearly isn’t true (unless you think there should be no restrictions on private ownership of nuclear bombs).

  11. Earthly Knight says:

    Unless guns are exerting some kind of malign pro-murder influence that makes people commit more knife murders, some sort of confounding influence has remained.

    It doesn’t seem completely crazy to me that (1) increased gun possession and (2) increased gun homicides might also contribute to non-gun killings. Fear and revenge are common motivations for murder, and it’s plausible both that people might be more fearful and therefore quicker to strike pre-emptively when everyone and their mother is waving a piece around, and that more gun homicides leads to more grudges which leads in turn to more revenge stabbings.

    [Edited for clarity]

    • meyerkev says:

      Western Europe’s violent crime rate is about double ours.

      OK, technically it’s 5x our rate, but that’s because their definition is weird and most of the “Let’s try to reconcile these 2 numbers” ends up with about double, maybe a little less.

      In other words, a perfectly cost-free policy that managed to transform our crime profile into Western Europe’s would be one in which we traded 3 murders/100K for 3-400 extra violent crimes per/100K.

      On the one hand, murder is bad.
      On the other hand, that’s a lot of muggings.

      So I’m not really sure whether I have an opinion on if that’s a good idea or not.

      • JBeshir says:

        Remember that Western Europe is really, really urbanised, to the point that a lot of things common in US rural living are culturally non-existent, and urban living seems to cause crimes of all types across the board.

        While there’s confounders (cultural stuff, etc) which could well predict a reduced crime rate, there’s also those which would predict a much higher one. This doesn’t materialise for murder (could well just be being overwhelmed) but would definitely make sense as an explanation of mugging.

        • Chris H says:

          I have some doubts about this. If you look at the urban population percentage by country the US actually seems well within Western European norms (a little below the Netherlands, a little above the UK, and significantly above Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country). Yeah America has a lot of open rural country, but hardly anyone lives there compared to the cities. Maybe this has to do with differing definitions of “urban” life? But I think more likely the differences just aren’t as large as people think. In the US, there’s just more room in between cities rather than more people living outside cities.

          • JBeshir says:

            Hmm. This would include suburbs as urban, right?

            By more urban, I mean in the “dense city centre” sense of the word it is often used in in the US. In the UK virtually all construction is of that type- you have dense cities or dense towns with gaps rather than sprawl, and I am not sure but I get the impression Western Europe tends towards that.

            On the other hand you raise a good point; I know urban areas are more violent than rural, but I’m not sure how they directly compare to suburban areas. If suburban areas behave the same as urban areas then it’d not be an explanation.

    • AlexC says:

      I agree. I wouldn’t say it’s “suspicious” that “higher gun ownership rates are correlated with higher non-gun homicide rates (eg the rates at which people are murdered by knives or crowbars or whatever)”.

      It seems fairly natural to me that the US states where citizens are more in favour of owning guns would be the states where the citizens are the most generally aggressive and belligerent, which would also correlate with non-gun homicide.

      Maybe that’s just my naive attitude as a Brit though, where we do have a moderate amount of violence, but thankfully extremely little gun violence.

      • Julie K says:

        > we do have a moderate amount of violence, but thankfully extremely little gun violence.

        Shouldn’t the overall level of violence worry you more than the level of gun violence?

        • Gbdub says:

          I don’t know, don’t guns make you double-secret super dead, as opposed to knives or bludgeoning that only make you regular dead?

          • sweeneyrod says:

            Would you rather be shot or punched?

          • Gbdub says:

            Gunshots are actually remarkably survivable. And a single strong blow to the head can easily render you permanently brain damaged, or at a minimum too incapacitated to resist further beating by someone who really wants you dead.

            In the US, murder by unarmed beating is actually somewhat more common than murder by rifle of any type (including “assault rifles”). And that’s before you start counting knives, clubs, etc.

            So while I’d rather face a knife or fist than a gun, I’m probably equally screwed if unarmed against someone with homicidal intent.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            One important difference is that it is easier to outrun a person than a bullet. Another important difference is that presuming you are of average fighting ability, you have better than even odds of surviving an encounter with an unarmed person who wants to kill you. Your odds against pretty much anyone with a gun are considerably lower.

          • Gbdub says:

            Fine, but if the choice is to go live somewhere with above average gun violence but below average total violence (let’s say “serious violence”), I’d still prefer that to a higher rate of total serious violence with a lower rate of gun violence.

            That is, we aren’t arguing about 1 shooting vs. 1 beating, we’re arguing about 1 shooting vs. multiple beatings.

      • onyomi says:

        I don’t know if it’s accurate, but I’ve read that home invasion robberies which occur while the victims are at home are much more common in the UK, presumably because criminals are less afraid they’ll get shot as they try to make off with your TV.

        I would rather live in a place where criminals are afraid to break into my house at night because they think they’ll get shot, but where there is a slightly higher probability of me being mugged at gun point (rather than knife point), than in a place where the probability of my house being broken into at night while I’m in it is higher.

        Maybe it’s a particular phobia of mine, but the latter to me is scarier.

        • sweeneyrod says:

          Home invasions (as I understand the term) certainly aren’t common – I’ve never known anyone to have a confrontation with a burglar in their house. If they are much more common in than in the US, they must be extremely rare indeed over there.

          On the other hand, burglaries where someone forces a window, sneaks into your house at 3 am and runs off with a TV are quite common – I expect a very high proportion of people have been burgled like that (and not realised till the morning). Most people don’t worry that much about these kinds of burglaries – only property damage occurs, in comparison to a mugging where you might be physically hurt.

          • onyomi says:

            See I wasn’t really distinguishing between “home invasion” and just plain burglary (someone opens your window, comes into your house without your permission and takes your tv–they are “invading” your home), but that is still very frightening to me.

            I don’t think most people in the US have had the experience of having something stolen from their house, and of those people I know who have had the experience, it was, in every case, at a time when they weren’t at home–often on vacation, etc.

            To me, someone forcing open a window at 3 am and stealing my tv is terrifying. Because there’s no guarantee I won’t encounter them in the act just because I’m usually asleep then. And also it feels a very strong invasion on my person for my things not to be safe in my own home.

            I think there may be a difference in cultural attitudes: in the US there is a very strong culture of “a man’s home is his castle” (and therefore any invasions of it are rightly met with a much higher level of force than would be justifiable if encountering hostility on the street). The fact that the burglar is less likely to be armed and only after my TV is not a lot of consolation to me. It’s still disturbing and upsetting enough to me that if the trade off is “slightly higher probability of being mugged at gun point while on the street, but much lower probability of burglar taking your TV at 3 am,” I’d still take the deal.

          • JBeshir says:

            I’m in the UK and I have never been burgled. I’ve heard of some stuff happening to garages and sheds and stuff by friends of family and youths messing around in my grandmother’s garden, etc, but nothing involving entering a house. The usual talk is that people think of it as a crime that happens to people while they’re on holiday or away still, because it’s pointless to try to commit it while someone is in- you won’t get away with anything and they might get pictures of you/forensic evidence/of your vehicle. A burglary while someone is actually there is a fuck up.

            I’d need to see actual effect on frequencies, but I have a really strong preference for “not getting killed”, so I’d generally take “home invasions happen X times more often but the invader runs away” over “home invasions involve them (and potentially me) being armed and them trying to shoot me before I (potentially) shoot them” unless the value of X is truly huge.

            Reduction in rate of breaking and entering while I’m not there and of other crime might still be of value, but if I’m present, substantially reduced lethality of the crime tends to matter more than rate unless the rate gap is enough to compensate or the difference in lost property is really big.

          • Anthony says:

            I was burgled once while still in my “house” (bottom flat of a divided house), about 9am. I was living in Berkeley while attending UC, and I think the burglar thought I’d be in class or working (and I should have been…)

            The burglar had forced the window to my bathroom, noisily. I grabbed a piece of metal which could double as a dull sword, and yelled at him – I heard some rustling of the shower curtain, but by the time I opened the bathroom door, he was gone.

          • “To me, someone forcing open a window at 3 am and stealing my tv is terrifying. ”

            So it’s 3am, you;re groggilly trying to find your gun in your nightstand…does the invader a) run, or b) go on the offensive?

          • onyomi says:

            “So it’s 3am, you;re groggilly trying to find your gun in your nightstand…does the invader a) run, or b) go on the offensive?”

            I’m not sure what you’re getting at, exactly, but first of all, there will be no grogginess. If I think the situation is serious enough that I’m looking for my gun, I’m wide awake right away.

            Secondly, an intruder who thinks I have a gun is much more likely to run away than otherwise. Simply realizing that someone is in the house and awake is enough to send most burglars running. Realizing someone is in the house, awake, and armed with a gun will send all but the most PCP-addled running. And if you are dealing with someone in a violent state of mind due to drugs or homicidal mania or whatever, then it’s hard to imagine you wouldn’t rather have the gun than not.

            Note, I don’t even own a gun. But I’m glad any would-be burglars know there’s a high probability I do.

  12. Jeremy Jaffe says:

    “This relationship is likely causal (~66% confidence).”
    Does that mean %66 that there exists a causal relationship or
    Given that there is a relationship, the chance that it’s causal is .66?

  13. Douglas Knight says:

    Last time anyone checked, which was 1995, about 618,000 people died young

    You can extract statistics like that from wonder.cdc.gov. In 2014, 703,984 people died young (plus 163 people of unknown age). The death rate in the early 30s is 1/852. (Did you really mean 1850?) Such numbers are more often reported as decimals, not fractions: 117 per 100,000.

  14. ilkarnal says:

    To put it in a race-neutral way, the problem isn’t mid to high IQ people with guns, it is low IQ people with guns. IQ and the correlated FTO isn’t the only important factor, but it is the primary one.

    The cheaper guns are, the more low IQ people will have them. This is an absolutely ironclad case for bringing US gun policy within the first world norms. You don’t have to seize all or any of the guns to keep them out of low IQ people’s hands. You just have to make them more expensive. This is trivial. Making things more expensive is what governments are best at.

    Knowledge of HBD often leads inexorably to support for some left-wing positions. It is very annoying that this is seldom recognized by those who are more than willing to trumpet to the skies any way that HBD supports right-wing positions.

    • Troy says:

      Steve Sailer has suggested a minimum credit score rating for purchasing guns. But just making them more expensive is definitely more politically feasible.

      • Donny Anonny says:

        The existence of 3d printers, CNC machines, drill presses and the knowledge to use those tools would likely significantly blunt any attempts to raise the cost of guns, to say nothing of the approximately 330,000,000 firearms already in the wild.

        • LtWigglesworth says:

          Meh, If you have the knowledge to use that equipment and access to it then I’d say that you would be well off enough to afford a more expensive firearm.

          • rossry says:

            You would also probably also be well-off enough to open a black market gun shop, if you felt that that were your true career calling.

          • Donny Anonny says:

            Tax evasion is a time-honored American past time with a history extending back to prior to the Revolutionary War.

            Furthermore, even if the tax is something that isn’t a burden, the accompanying bureaucratic requirements in order to make it function would be considered completely anathema to a large portion of those who consider gun ownership to be a civil right on equal footing with freedom of expression, worship, the need for cops to get a warrant, or to be judged by a jury of one’s peers.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            @Donny Anonny:

            “those who consider gun ownership to be a civil right on equal footing with freedom of expression, worship, the need for cops to get a warrant, or to be judged by a jury of one’s peers.”

            Thank you for pointing this out.

            This was what my previously-mentioned-on-earlier-open-thread discussion with the online “Californian gun-control advocate” (who may have been a troll) could never get past.

            He just…couldn’t grasp the idea of someone sincerely considering gun ownership to be a civil right. So he just…

            …kept “stepping on the kitten.”

            All he wound up convincing *me* of was that he couldn’t be trusted to respect (let alone defend) *any* civil rights.

            Now, he clearly was obsessively terrified of guns. I’m sure there’s something real behind it, real experiences he may have had, some kind of real reason for his terror. Not sure what though–the discussion never got that far. He was very focused on mass shootings, which are very rare.

            Also, one time while high he reached for a cop’s gun. I’m afraid that in my Yankee mind, one doesn’t go about high in public (or at all, see other comment, but if one *were* to get high), one just doesn’t; meaning that if one does, one accepts all possible consequences of such action. Sorry not sorry. (People think Yankees are prim and decorous. Maybe so. People think this makes us meek and harmless…maybe not. ;))

          • Marc Whipple says:

            Americans, particuarly those of the Yankee type, are much more likely, IMO and IM limited E, to practice a philosophy along the lines of, “I will be polite, friendly and respectful right up until the point where I decide you are no longer worthy of such treatment. At that point things will go bad for you very, very quickly.”

          • Cord Shirt says:

            @Marc Whipple: Indeed you are correct. 🙂

          • @Donny Anonny

            “Tax evasion is a time-honored American past time with a history extending back to prior to the Revolutionary War.”

            Are you calling for the repeal of all taxes on everything? Do you think “not entirely effective” means “entirely ineffective”.

            “even if the tax is something that isn’t a burden, the accompanying bureaucratic requirements in order to make it function would be considered completely anathema to a large portion of those who consider gun ownership to be a civil right on equal footing with freedom of expression, worship, the need for cops to get a warrant, or to be judged by a jury of one’s peers.”

            What? all of those rights require bureacracy, and some of them just are bureacracy. What???

          • ..does “bureaucracy” stand for “subtle racial discrimination” in some way?

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I assume that part of the reason that background checks and so on work (if they do) is that higher-IQ people are more likely to be able to jump through all the bureaucratic hoops.

      Do you think there’s an important relationship between Southern-ness and IQ, independent of race?

      • Donny Anonny says:

        I doubt there’s much correlation between intelligence and passing a NICS check.

        The way they work is that a prospective buyer picks out the firearm of her choosing. She then fills out an ATF form 4473.

        See here for an example of said form:
        https://www.atf.gov/file/61446/download

        Once the form is filled out, the gun dealer contacts the FBI either via an internet portal or phone, and relays basic information such as name, race, age, Social Security Number, etc. which the FBI uses to conduct the background check. They then give the dealer a Yes/No on whether the buyer is a prohibited person and the sale can be completed.

        It’s worth noting that lying on the Form 4473 is actually a felony, and one that would be a slam-dunk conviction in pretty much any court. Furthermore, it’s also worth noting that for whatever reason the DOJ has habitually declined to prosecute prohibited persons who are caught red-handed lying about their status.

        Here’s a document from 2010 examining what happens when a NICS check comes back negative:

        https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/bjs/grants/239272.pdf

        The TL;DR takeaway is that in 2010, there were 72,659 gun purchases denied via the NICS system, of which DOJ only referred 62 cases for prosecution.

        • Scott Alexander says:

          I’m not saying they can’t pass it, I’m saying they won’t do it.

          • Donny Anonny says:

            I’m not sure why, when the process is pretty easy.

            I suppose you could argue that some people may have some sort of anxiety about the bureaucratic process and therefore avoid going through with it, but that’s different than being too dumb to fill out the form.

            If fear of the hoops is the issue, then, yes, there’s precedent in several states for trying to dissuade people by forcing them to do things like acquire a permit to purchase a gun, acquire and hold a Firearms Owner ID Card, etc. but I doubt you’ll find much political will for making gun laws more byzantine or stupid than they already are.

            On an unrelated note, I stumbled across your website for the first time about three weeks ago, and while I suspect we probably disagree on some things, your posts are some of the most thought-provoking I’ve found in a very long time.

          • Troy says:

            I’m not sure why, when the process is pretty easy.

            I think you may overestimate how easy the process is for lower IQ people. Robin Hanson writes:

            “A common bias among the smart is to overestimate how smart everyone else is. This was certainly my experience in moving from top rank universities as a student to a mid rank university as a teacher. A better intuition for common abilities can be found by browsing the US National Assesment of Adult Literacy sample questions.

            For example, in 1992 out of a random sample of US adults, 7% could not do item SCOR300, which is to find the expiration date on a driver’s license. 26% could not do item AB60303, which is to check the “Please Call” box on a phone message slip when they’ve been told:

            James Davidson phones and asks to speak with Ann Jones, who is at a meeting. He needs to know if the contracts he sent are satisfactory and requests that she call before 2:00 p.m. His number is 259-3860. Fill in the message slip below.”

            http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/07/stupider-than-you-realize.html

        • Furslid says:

          I can’t access that doc. However, your post seems to confound two things. Lying on the form, and having it turned down. It’s a felony to lie on the form, is it a felony to fill it out accurately as a person ineligible to own guns?

          Also, a turned down application doesn’t mean that someone is ineligible. An acquaintance of mine got turned down because of some paperwork mixup.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            No, but it’s a crime to try to buy a gun when you know you’re not eligible, so it is a distinction without a difference since filling out the form correctly would be pretty strong evidence – maybe not a winner, but worth prosecuting – that you were trying to do exactly that.

          • HlynkaCG says:

            >Is it a felony to fill it out accurately as a person ineligible to own guns?

            No, the reason being that it is possible to appeal the decision.

            For instance one of the questions is “have you ever been convicted of a felony?” If you have, you are obligated to answer yes, and failure to do so would be a crime. Ordinarily answering “yes” would be a deal breaker, but a judge may be willing to grant an exemption to the “no felons” rule because your crime was not violent or because your conviction was later commuted or overturned.

            Of course you’d still have to convince a judge and local law enforcement and make the case that you deserve such consideration, but my point is that it does happen.

      • Troy says:

        Do you think there’s an important relationship between Southern-ness and IQ, independent of race?

        Audacious Epigone has a post on white IQ scores by state too. There does seem to be a negative correlation, although I’m not sure how strong: http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2015/02/state-iq-estimates-whites-only-2013.html

        • Wency says:

          Places that tend to attract college graduates will tend to have higher white IQs. Places that people live in because they were born there and don’t care to leave will have a lower average IQ.

          Southern states tend disproportionately to be in the latter category (with the exception of dubiously southern Texas, which attracts many college graduates).

          As Scott seems to have alluded to, I’ve long wondered if there is a Scotch-Irish effect on intelligence and propensity to violence, and whether this is genetic or purely cultural. Notably, from what I have seen, the “anglo” population of Texas is traditionally much less Scotch-Irish in character than the southeast, as you can observe from the local popularity of kolaches, or the distinctly German character of Shiner Beer. Contrast with Tennessee’s Jack Daniels. And Texas scores much higher than the southeast on the test in this link.

          I’d have to think the greater effect is from more recent career-related migration, however.

    • Vox Imperatoris says:

      “HBD” consistently leads to collectivism.

      “Identity politics”, extensive state control, extensive restrictions on liberties, “us vs. them”, autarky, censorship, etc. are associated both with the far left and far right.

      Marxism doesn’t believe in genetic “biodiversity”, but it does believe that everyone’s behavior is determined inexorably by his social class. So it’s just that you’ve got to give all power to the proletariat (or rather, the proletariat ought to give all power to the proletariat under “proletarian logic”, and the bourgeoisie ought to give all power to bourgeoisie under “bourgeois logic”, but the latter is inevitably destined to lose out) instead of the high-IQ people or the Aryans or whatever.

      • Julie K says:

        Is “HBD” identical with “politicized HBD?” Is there no faction of people who believe that human biodiversity exists, but not that we should take collective action based on this? Or do such people reject the HBD label?

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          My statement was a little too broad, I suppose.

          I believe that there are statistical differences among groups. And I don’t believe that the difference in height between pygmies and Norwegians is just a matter of what they eat. Neither do I see why statistical differences in measured intelligence among groups couldn’t be attributable to genetics. So that’s the motte.

          The bailey is complete social determinism, primarily by means of genetics. The reason crime is higher among blacks in the U.S. is that they’re low IQ and can’t help it. Or Western civilization merely reflects the natural temperamental prejudices of European people, which happen to be more adaptive than the natural temperamental prejudices of Native Americans. Etc., etc.

          I associate people talking about “HBD” with the bailey. And it gets “politicized” because, ostensibly, political judgments are supposed to be based on facts.

          If social determinism is a fact, there are many reasons it would tend to lead to a collectivist way of thinking. For one, it undermines the objectivity of knowledge and therefore turns everything into group conflict. If Western civilization is a product of European genetics, it just reflects “European logic” and thus can’t really refute “Chinese logic”. There is no real reason to think that there is one truth which everyone can know and in principle agree upon.

          Westerners just have to hope that “European logic” is compatible enough with “Chinese logic” for their conclusions not to lead to mutually exclusive ways of life. But if they are mutually exclusive, all they can do is fight each other. Might makes right.

    • sabril says:

      “This is an absolutely ironclad case for bringing US gun policy within the first world norms. You don’t have to seize all or any of the guns to keep them out of low IQ people’s hands. You just have to make them more expensive.”

      The problem I see with this is that anti-gun types would likely use such a tax as a tool to push for a back-door gun ban by pushing the tax higher and higher and higher. That said, I would support such a measure if (1) it were deliberately designed to make it difficult to increase the tax, so for example it would require a new act of congress to increase it; and (2) it were combined with measures supported by pro-gun types but unlikely to increase crime rates such as national concealed carry for people with clean criminal records.

      It may seem like this would be a win/win situation but I suspect the anti-gun types would never support it. Most likely because their real goal is not to reduce crime but instead the usual tribal signalling.

  15. Alsadius says:

    I’ve heard a comment made that the US is statistically a mixture of Switzerland and Swaziland, and that the vast majority of the crime comes from the latter. These stats seem to bear that out.

    • sweeneyrod says:

      Do you mean that black people (like those who live in Swaziland) commit lots of crime, but white people (like those who live in Switzerland) don’t?

      • I originated the “Switzerland and Swaziland” analogy on my blog.

        It refers partly to the black-white distinction; the 12.5% of the American population that is black commits over 50% of murders and related index crimes.

        It refers partly to the fact that high-violence areas in the U.S. are tiny islands in a surrounding sea of low violence rates.

        It refers partly to the fact that these high-violence Bantustans are extremely dysfunctional by many other measures as well, including the partial collapse of civil order and economies dominated by welfare and the drug trade.

        Gun-rights people are fond of pointing out that gun-control laws were, historically, a form of of institutional racism primarily aimed at blacks. (This remained true into the 1970s, when they became an instrument of Blue Tribe kulturkampf against the Red Tribe.) What they gloss over, because nobody wants to be tagged as a racist these days, is that if selective enforcement of gun control against blacks were possible it would address most of the actual (as opposed to imagined) negative externalities.

        Note that I am not advocating this – I am a gun rights advocate and those rights pertain to black people too. Blacks who aren’t part of the high-deviant criminal minority have self-defense uses for guns as strong and legitimate as anyone’s. But you asked where “Switzerland and Swaziland” comes from; I’m answering.

        • Anthony says:

          Blacks who aren’t part of the high-deviant criminal minority have self-defense uses for guns as strong and legitimate as anyone’s.

          Or more so, as they’re the primary victims of the high-deviant criminal minority. While the rates of interracial murders are not symmetric, it’s mostly true that black offenders kill black victims and white offenders kill white victims. There are areas with high concentrations of highly criminal whites, but outside those areas (and similar black areas), most white people’s biggest murder risk is domestic violence. This is much less true for black people. So while the relative murder rate is 4x higher for blacks, the odds of needing a gun for self defense is likely even higher than that for black people. (I’m too lazy to look up actual numbers right now.)

  16. hlynkacg says:

    While I am firmly on the “anti” side of the gun control debate and I have to say that this is probably one of the best write-up I’ve seen on the topic that I have read in a very long time.

    Leaving aside the deontological and constitional arguments I think that the next step is to look at the nations/states/cities that have recently instituted or repealed gun control measures and see what the effect on murder rates was.

    Australia was cited as an example did the murder rate go up, down or stay the same after they instituted their buy-back. Did a rising trend reverse itself? I honestly don’t know.
    There is also the question of detterance, which sadly is really hard to get good statistics on. I seem to remember reading in the Guardian that the UK saw a spike in other violent crime such as rapes, assaults, and break-ins (but not murder) after their own gun ban.

    In any case, thank you Scott for doing the leg work. Well done.

    • Echo says:

      Czechoslovakia would make an interesting test for studying liberalization in gun laws after the fall of communism. They have concealed carry and a murder rate of 1/100k, so that’s definitely something to look in to.

      • Tibor says:

        I wrote something about Czech gun laws in detail here in another post , Slovak laws are more restrictive, concealed carry is only allowed in Slovakia if you get a special permit from the police (but their murder rate is 1.4 while the Czech is 0.9…Slovakia is also slightly poorer, although not by much and more rural than the Czech republic).

        The homicide rate in the Czech republic has declined steadily since the Velvet Revolution in 89 and the subsequent separation of Czechoslovakia in 93 while the number of legally owned firearms has increased. However, I would not draw any strong conclusions from this particular fact since the much more important factor was probably the transition from communism followed by a great increase in wealth, so this particular
        graph from Wikipedia is pretty manipulative I think (even though I am generally opposed to restrictive gun laws, this is just a bad argument).

        It is necessary to find a country which liberalized its gun laws significantly without changing anything substantial at the same time. Unfortunately, the Czech republic cannot possibly qualify here even though the gun laws were extremely restrictive under communism (basically, guns were illegal for civilians with no exceptions) and are as liberal as those in more pro-gun US states today…Switching from communism to capitalism while also dividing the country in two separate countries is about as big a change as you can have.

    • Nathan says:

      Australia: murders were trending down anyway, the buyback did not appear to meaningfully affect that trend. I’ve heard conflicting claims about whether it caused a statistically significant reduction in suicides, but would expect that it probably did. We had one mass shooting that prompted the buyback and none since, but we DID have a mass stabbing recently where a woman killed eight children.

      • LtWigglesworth says:

        Then again, in most nations mass shootings are basically an infrequent random event, which makes it difficult to tell if the current mass-killing free period is due to the increased gun control, or simply a reversion to a natural state of affairs.

        Aussie gun control didn’t stop the Sydney hostages however.

        I would expect a drop in suicide rates though. Its fairly well established that people often decide not to commit suicide when faced with a trivial inconvenience. That is what occurred in the 50s and 60s in the UK when they moved away from coal gas stoves.
        Gas stoves accounted for almost 50% of suicides. However, once committing suicide became more difficult than opening the oven door and shoving one’s head inside, the suicide rate dropped by 30%

      • enoriverbend says:

        Just in the interests of completeness, post-NFA Australia had an oddly high number of mass murders by other techniques:

        Childers Palace arson — 15 dead
        Churchill fires — 10 dead
        Quakers Hill arson – 11 dead

        But it’s not all arson, of course. Eight children dead by stabbing in the Cairns case that Nathan mentioned. Five dead by hammer in the Lin family murders. Gonzales killed 3 with a baseball bat.

        And even some shooting, despite the new strict laws. The Hectorville shooting, the Monash shootings, the Strathfield massacre.

        Considering the smaller population of Australia, this is a surprising list.

    • Marc Whipple says:

      The best recent-historical example is Florida, which greatly “liberalized,” so to speak, its firearms carry laws and saw at worst no significant change and at best a significant benefit (depends as always on who measures and how.)

      Illinois was recently forced kicking and screaming to institute statewide concealed carry. It’s too soon for any really reliable data, but I can assure you that the incidence of gunfights at high noon has not noticeably increased around these here parts.

      • Tibor says:

        It is funny that in some US states it is the concealed carry that causes panic, whereas in the Czech republic it is the open carry which is illegal (unless you are a policeman or some such). It also makes me feel a bit uneasy to see someone visibly carrying a gun but I have no problem with concealed carry – it also comes with a benefit for me – a potential mugger or assailant does not know who (of the law abiding citizens) has a gun and who does not that way, so even though I don’t even own a gun, I am a bit protected by those who do…with open carry, it works the other way around – if I don’t visibly have the gun on me the assailant can be sure I don’t have it (unless I don’t care about the law).

      • Echo says:

        Yes, there doesn’t seem to be a rush to study liberalized carry laws, despite A) CCPs providing an exact number of the people newly allowed to carry firearms in public, and B) the perfectly random nature of the policy change.
        It’s an ideal statistical experiment that’s lasted… 30 years or so? And yet…

  17. Nomghost says:

    Re: cultures of violence.

    I’d just like to add some Australian perspective. I’ve grown up in Australia, and I’m too young to remember the time before gun control. I don’t think American readers have any intuitive understanding of how Australians think about guns. I’ve lived in the biggest city in the country, in pretty rough suburbs with a lot of drug trade. I’ve spent time staying in houses with dealers, and in towns with high crime rates. I literally never think or thought about guns in anything but an abstract sense. Cops don’t really think about guns when they pull people over. When you answer your door, you’re not thinking about what to do if the person has a gun. In farming towns it’s different, but in the cities, they’re just not a day-to-day fact of life, even in the poorest suburbs. It’s a far stronger effect than the statistics on ownership alone can convey. There’s almost no semi-automatic rifles. Unless you grew up in an organised crime family, chances are that ‘guns’ are something from the TV.

    It seems the U.S has a ‘culture of guns’. A whole lot of daily situations, like road rage, domestic arguments, burglaries &c. take on this lethal potentiality when it’s actually likely that one or more of the participants is concealing a gun. It’s fiendishly difficult to demonstrate empirically, but I honestly think it’s plausible that when guns reach a certain salience in a country, a whole lot of violent situations escalate far further than they would have otherwise.

    • David Wong says:

      Well and look at the controversial police shootings recently; a big issue is that the police are trained to assume everyone is about to pull a gun, and to shoot first. They have to assume that, because it’s extremely plausible. The mere concept of “everyone may very well have a gun” changes everything, in ways that are difficult to quantify.

    • eccdogg says:

      I think it works both ways though. When there is a potential gun on the other side a whole lot of things DON’T escalate further because there might be real consequences.

      Think about a robber in in Texas, how much does he have to weigh the chances that if he breaks into a house he might be shot dead.

      • That is correct, and criminology backs it up. If you ask actual criminals you quickly find out that they fear armed homeowners more than they feart the police.

        Source: Gary Kleck, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America (1992). Victimization studies back it up.

    • hlynkacg says:

      Easy there mate, lets not race to be uncharitable too quickly.

    • Anonymous` says:

      As Scott’s post touches on, a large fraction of the U.S. is just like this. Except for muggings (but a knife seems pretty equivalent there, and besides, these have become really rare in most parts of the country in the last decade or two), Americans generally don’t live in constant fear or even any conscious awareness of guns, because the only people you deal with who have them will be concealed carry enthusiasts, and these people will never actually draw their gun in your presence so you will never know they have one. Road rage/domestic violence gun incidents are not things that really happen in the real world.

      Please remember that news media’s sensationalism bias is large enough that you should never really update your world-model significantly based on the news.

      • meyerkev says:

        “Please remember that news media’s sensationalism bias is large enough that you should never really update your world-model significantly based on the news.”

        That one.

        I get home for Christmas, turn on the news, and the first story is about a church getting robbed.
        I flip to another station, and it’s a story about a kid who killed a guy to steal his car. They caught him because he parked the stolen car in his driveway. Next door*.
        So I turn off the TV because I’m getting depressed, get a Merry Christmas call from my uncle, and it turns out someone pulled the tires off his car on Christmas Eve.

        But you know what.

        There’s 4 Million people in the Metro Area, and if only one of them got shot and 2 got robbed, we’re doing pretty good.

        * Which OK, gotta be honest, made me laugh.

    • Echo says:

      “When you answer your door, you’re not thinking about what to do if the person has a gun”
      Uhh, neither am I? I don’t think Australians have any intuitive understanding of how we think about guns either…

      • Randy M says:

        Beat me to it. If I turned off the computer (for news and political discussions), I’d probably not think about guns in the average month.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      The problem I have with this is that I think something like 20% of Australian households own guns vs. 32% of US households. I don’t understand how such a small difference in reality creates such a big difference in perception. Unless perhaps Australians all own big rifles that they can’t carry around with them and Americans mostly own little handguns that they can?

      • nimim. k.m. says:

        Small handguns vs rifles might be part of it, but on the other hand, it doesn’t seem very unlikely that the cultural perceptions just maybe don’t reflect reality in a linear fashion. Maybe small initial difference is able to create self-perpetuating loops (news media, word of mouth, etc) of trust (“nobody has a gun here in Australia”) or fear (“this is US, that guy might have a gun!”).

      • Yrro says:

        It’s because guns are highly concentrated in 3 places in the US:

        Gun nuts (myself included)
        Criminals
        Police officers

        Nearly everyone else never thinks about them. Cops are *constantly* thinking about them because some of them deal with armed criminals on a daily or weekly basis, and all cops want to think that they’re like those cops.

        Honestly, even most gun nuts don’t use their Concealed Carry licenses as much as they say they should. Maybe 5% of people in the US have a CCW permit. Offhand estimates I’ve heard from trainers (no one’s ever actually done a survey) is that maybe 10% of those people carry on a regular basis.

        Guns are part of the culture much more than they are part of every day life, in terms of self defense, *unless* you are regularly dealing with the urban criminal element. And even then, the vast, vast majority of police officers never fire their guns.

      • kfix says:

        There are very few handguns, and those that do exist are mostly locked up separate from ammunition or stored at the licenced range which is pretty much the only place you can carry or use them unless in a very small range of professions.

        The vast majority of weapons in circulation are shotguns for killing snakes and maybe rabbits or foxes, and rifles for euthanising livestock and pest control/sport shooting of pigs and kangaroos. There are mostly in small towns and on properties.

        In cities it’s reasonably socially acceptable in most circles to participate in sport shooting of some kind (less so if shooting cute animals and definitely no Cecils), but I don’t know anyone who would even think of owning a gun for “self defense”. No way you’d get it out of the (mandatory) safe and locate the separately stored ammunition in time to do any good anyway.

      • mr roboto says:

        I’d say this is probably one of those social bubble things. He mentions he lived in the biggest city in Australia which is Sydney. Which while no Melbourne isn’t exactly gun owning bogan central. Up in Queensland it’s not that rare for someone to own a gun. However, I will concede that the idea of being shot never really enters anyone’s mind. Though I feel like that’s more because of how peaceful aus is in general. Even if you’re in an area with guns you don’t really fear being shot because that doesn’t really happen.

    • “There’s almost no semi-automatic rifles.”

      What kind of firearms are there? Are there people who hunt? If so, with what sort of weapons?

      • keranih says:

        WP’s article is not bad – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Australia

        It appears that farmers have shotguns and that the rifles are largely rimfire, with limited “self-loading” capability. If the OP’s not at all familiar with guns, they might be thinking that semi-automatics means scary black AR models, and so a scoped rifle without a sling and with a nice walnut stock would not be recognized as a semi-auto.

        I was most impressed with the uncertainty range of illegal weapons in Australia – the illegal weapons number somewhere around 15% of the number of legal weapons, up to, oh, over 100% of the number of legal weapons. So I’m not sure just how well that’s working.

        • Nomghost says:

          I’m not an expert, in fact I know almost nothing about guns, but I was under the impression that a rifle that loads itself automatically using energy from the last round fired, rather than some input from the shooter, was a semi-automatic, but happy to be corrected.

          I know a bunch of farmers, including some in my family, and I’ve been out shooting with them a few times. I’ve never seen a rifle that wasn’t bolt action.

          • Yrro says:

            Yes, a semi-auto is anything that loads itself, but still fires one bullet per trigger press. Can be in any caliber of round, in any form factor (rifle/pistol/shotgun)

            Many hunting rifles are bolt-action because it’s cheaper and easier to make a really accurate bolt action rifle, and most hunting laws only allow you one or two follow up shots anyway (not that you’re likely to get a chance for more).

          • Leit says:

            Other reasons for bolt-action include, but are not limited to:
            – Easier user maintenance and repair
            – Better reliability itv jams etc.
            – A stronger action allowing higher-power rounds
            (although if you want *real* power and reliability you can always go with a break-action, provided yo don’t mind only getting ~2 shots per reload and a slow reload besides)

            My favourite reason, though, is simply that operating a well-tuned bolt-action rifle is mechanically satisfying in the same way that a good manual gearbox is.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            All true, but this discussion always makes me think of the seminar I took on the JFK assassination. One of the primary oppositions to the “main” theory (Oswald, alone, from the TBD fired all shots) was that there was no way he could have fired that many shots that quickly from a bolt-action rifle.

            Well, the year I took the class one of my classmates was a retired Marine sharpshooter. The professor brought the rifle to class (this was in the 80’s when you could do that) and the Marine dry-fired it while the professor timed him. Most of my classmates were astonished to find that he could fire three shots (and say he felt they would have been reasonably well-placed) faster than Oswald would have had to.

          • Psmith says:

            Marc, check out the mad minute: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_minute

            Made the Germans think that the British were fielding individual machine guns. Tommy Atkins was a bad man.

        • Anon.. says:

          The uncertainty rate doesn’t surprise me, for two reasons. One, when I used to go rabbit shooting on friend’s farms as a teen, all of the rifles we used were older than anyone present, and had never been registered. That was not unusual, hence any figures on gun ownership prior to the bans were always going to be missing a lot of old rifles.
          Two, when it was became clear that gun control laws were going to get a lot stricter, some people were convinced all firearms were going to be banned. Which led to Bunnings (the biggest hardware chain store) being unable to keep up with the demand for several inch diameter PVC pipe end caps for months.
          So most of the illegal guns out there will be rifles buried in someones back paddock. As for how many, I doubt anyone has anything more than a wild guess.

    • lunatic says:

      I’m Australian and if I’m riding or driving in the middle of woop woop and I see a fence or private property sign, angry people with guns is definitely a possibility I consider.

    • Nomghost says:

      You might be surprised that I actually don’t think a burglar being shot and killed is a good outcome, nor is a burglar bringing a gun because he’s worried the homeowner might have one.

      • John Schilling says:

        The actual outcome, for which we have empirical evidence, is that in places where guns are common, burglars check carefully to see if anyone is home and break in only when they are confident there will be no potentially violent confrontation with the residents, and where guns are not common burglars break in whenever is most convenient to them and trust that they will come out of any violent confrontation with the residents in good shape.

        In this particular corner of the criminal tradespace, more guns actually does lead to less violence.

        • Slow Learner says:

          Not the experience in the UK, where in most cases burglars who hear/see occupants in a house they’ve broken into run like fuck rather than engage in a violent confrontation.
          Even if they come out of the violent confrontation in good shape, that tends to leave behind one or more witnesses who can describe them, there’s a greater chance of leaving behind usable forensic evidence, and it adds charges to any eventual rap sheet, without adding much if anything to the haul from the job.

          I must admit I can’t really see why the calculus would be very different in the US, unless US police are (compared with UK police) incompetent at follow-up.

        • JBeshir says:

          I’d be interested in seeing this empirical evidence.

          I’d believe some shift due to the reduction in incentive to avoid inhabited houses, increased willingness to risk, etc, but a straight up “almost all avoid inhabited houses” to “almost all don’t care about inhabitants” shift would be remarkable.

          The gap between robbing an empty house, where you have all the time you need to load up all the stuff you like, probably no one sees you, and the police are going to find out way later and have to hope for witness testimony weeks after the fact, vs robbing an inhabited house, where you’re lucky to grab a spoon before getting into a confrontation, people are going to be trying to take photos of you, and the police are going to be called right now with fresh forensic evidence and fresh memories from anyone who might have seen your vehicle, is still pretty huge, even with the gun threat removed.

          Humans respond to incentives and their removal, but if there’s other incentives already around it isn’t essentially going to be much of a response.

        • John Schilling says:

          Running like fuck and getting away, counts as coming out of the confrontation in good shape from the burglar’s perspective.

          Getting shot in the back while running away, is exceedingly rare (and generally illegal) in the US, but the fear of it is not. Burglars getting shot in the face before they have time to turn and run is less rare, as is getting chased down and captured by a homeowner who, having a gun, is confident he can deal with the burglar when he catches him.

          Your burglars break into occupied homes, scare the crap out of the residents, then usually run away but sometimes don’t.

          Our burglars usually don’t break into occupied homes in the first place. Our way is better.

        • JBeshir says:

          Breaking into an occupied home is a failure; it means coming away with nothing. Nowhere will people do that on purpose.

          It’s entirely plausible that people are more willing to risk that failure where they’re more able to at least get away alive. But there’s going to be screwups- events where people break into an inhabited home by accident- in either place.

          I prefer to live where this happens more often, but when I make my presence known they run away, rather than have them (and potentially me) armed and they try to shoot me before I (potentially) shoot them, unless the difference in rate is *really* huge.

        • Marc Whipple says:

          Breaking into an occupied home does not mean getting away with nothing. If the burglar decides that an actual robbery is economically beneficial and of low risk, they may well decide to convert their crime type accordingly. Or even add some bonus levels like assault, battery, rape, or murder.

        • Nate says:

          Breaking into an occupied home is a failure; it means coming away with nothing. Nowhere will people do that on purpose.

          I feel like this is telling. Maybe the U.S. and the UK simply have different types of criminals, because there are absolutely burglars in the USA who would break into an occupied house where they knew the residents were defenseless, and then terrorize and traumatize them, sometimes escalating to committing truly unspeakable acts. It seems like you’re operating from the assumption that this kind of thing will never happen, and if that is true in the UK then I say hats off to you! But unfortunately it is definitely not true in the USA, and female victims of these kinds of crimes tend to come off especially badly. A high-profile example that immediately pops to mind is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia#Background

        • John Schilling says:

          The point is, barring the prospect of effective retaliation(*) from the residents, breaking into an occupied home has a net positive value to a burglar. The worst case is he runs away empty-handed. More likely, he has less time to search for prime loot but gets something. Best case, he can intimidate the residents into offering up some valuables, tangible or otherwise, that wouldn’t have been available or wouldn’t have been found if he had to loot an empty house.

          Cancelling the burglary because there are some lights on and the burglar heard a noise, that has zero expected ROI and he’s already invested the time in casing a target. Sunk cost fallacy, but even so. If you want him to not burgle your house, or even if you’d prefer he go away and come back to burgle your house when you’re not present to be frightened or injured, you need to offer an incentive beyond “maybe you’ll have to run away empty-handed”

          * “Effective retaliation” need not involve a gun, but unless you live in an extremely low-crime area the police are not likely to pursue a burglar who got away and so that isn’t a useful threat.

        • JBeshir says:

          What you’re saying amounts to a claim that the risks and costs involved with burgling a home are negligible if there’s no guns involved (at least when you’re already lower class and don’t have a career to ruin) and thus the loss of disincentive from gun threat would indeed cause an absolutely massive increase in total rate of burglaries, to the point that the decreased risk of death from armed confrontations is offset by the huge increase in property loss/upset caused by home invasions.

          I simply don’t agree that the risks and costs involved in home invasions are that low, and rate at which burglaries occur are that high. An increase, yes, but surely nothing *that* dramatic. The existence of law-enforcement is a threat; they’re unlikely to catch you after a single incident, but reports add up, vehicles get noticed, you only need to get caught once, a 5% risk per crime of being caught (average) would still wind up with you in prison within the year, and getting police called out directly after the burglary is a good way to speed up that process. Do you have any kind of source on it? Low gun ownership countries do not seem to be in the state of collapse that this would predict.

          We already have the rate at which they’re inclined to add murder factored into the reduction in homicide rate stuff, so any extent to which it’s above zero is matched by an extent that reduction effects are larger elsewhere. It’s probably pretty low because it’d be incredibly stupid; you get the same stuff you’d get just burgling somewhere else, but now with a murder investigation attached, which gets serious follow up and forensics effort. Murdering someone is not a cost-free act in any civilised country.

          Assault or similar things leave witnesses able to give way more detailed descriptions than the usual “person running away” descriptions or even “shower rustled, and then no one was there” stuff. And it, again, is a really good way to get the police to move you up a lot in their priority list. You might get away with it a few times, but if you pursue it as a strategy you’ll end up in prison. Benefits don’t justify the risks, compared to the alternative of leaving and then just burgling somewhere else another night. Does it happen, probably. Does it happen enough to offset the conversion of all encounters from mutually armed sudden death events to mutually without firearm events? Probably not.

      • Gbdub says:

        I actually don’t think a burglar being shot and killed is a good outcome

        Well, I don’t think that’s a good outcome either, but I prefer it strongly to “burglar breaks into home with impunity, scares shit out of family and/or kills them to avoid witnesses, and gets away”.

        That does seem to be one place where your Australian culture differs from American red tribe culture. You find it tragic that a poor innocent felon gets shot, while many Americans think that “Don’t break into houses if you don’t want to get shot” is a reasonable limit on human behavior.

    • onyomi says:

      I don’t know how much time you’ve spent in the US, but I think you might have a mistaken impression about how prominently guns feature in US daily life, perhaps because of sensational news, movies, TV, etc.

      I have lived almost all my life in the US, most of it in the South, some of it in the rural south, some of it in the very urban south, some of it in poor neighborhoods, and in no case have I experienced concern that I’ll answer a knock at the door and face a gun or that I’ll get in a car wreck and be faced with a gun… or really that I’ll encounter a gun at all in my daily life except as it sits on the hip of a police officer or security guard. I have not, thus far, been proven wrong.

      Not that guns don’t exist in my world–my father owns a gun, I’m sure many of my neighbors own guns (and it makes me feel safer, not less safe to know that), I heard a gunshot once or twice living in a poorer, urban neighborhood, and I see guns for sale periodically here in the rural south where I live now. But they don’t feature prominently in my daily life or awareness in any significant way. To the extent I feared for my safety living in the neighborhood where I heard the gun shots, it was fear of mugging (which might just as well happen at knife point, or by being surrounded by a group) and robbery more than being caught in a crossfire, and while I know that some people in this area love deer hunting, that also doesn’t really affect me at all, insofar as I have no interest in it.

      Not denying there exists a “gun culture” in the US in which one may participate if one wishes, but I think it features a lot less prominently in the daily life and mind of the average American than TV, movies, news, etc. would lead one to believe.

      • Urstoff says:

        Indeed. I’ve been mugged at gunpoint and I still never think of encountering a non-police officer with a gun.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        As an American, I can’t remember the last time I even saw a real-life gun, besides on a cop’s hip.

        It’s just not a concern. I have a dozen other bigger worries in my life than “guns.”

        • I’ve had a gun pointed at me by a criminal. That was in Philadelphia forty-some years ago. He had just shot someone and was running away. I did not try to stop him.

      • Chalid says:

        Of course, if guns weren’t so ubiquitous in the population, the cops wouldn’t feel that they needed the guns so much themselves.

    • rminnema says:

      I am a gun owner and a former concealed-permit holder living in the United States. I have found the opposite of your experience to be true. (I have let my concealed carry permit lapse because of laziness, and not because of any change in my convictions.)

      I used to carry, and carry often. When I’d head to the local game store to play miniatures games until 3 in the morning in my younger days, I liked to be armed. There’s a certain security that comes from knowing that you can deal with threats.

      One night, I came home and made a mistake parallel parking my car. I bumped one of the neighbor’s cars, and he was sitting on his front porch and saw it. He came running down his porch, screaming at me. He was confrontational and aggressive.

      I knew I was at fault, and I also knew I had a gun strapped under my coat. I was confident that I could deal with the situation. However, I knew that disproportionate response would mean that I was the one at fault. I had a strong incentive to defuse the situation: I have the upper hand (even if the other guy doesn’t know it!), which means that if I don’t do everything in my power to keep it under control then I will get the blame.

      Carrying a gun around doesn’t make you feel all-powerful and omnipotent. It makes you acutely aware of your responsibilities*.

      * This probably doesn’t hold for people carrying guns illegally. However, for people carrying legally, it does. One should note that legal concealed carry permit holders commit crimes at lower rates than police officers do.

      • TrivialGravitas says:

        “One should note that legal concealed carry permit holders commit crimes at lower rates than police officers do.”

        Can you source that? I know a guy who likes to bring it up every single time a legal carrier does something illegal and makes the news and it’d be great to see the look on his face.

    • CatCube says:

      When I was at the National Pistol Matches at Camp Perry about 14 or so years ago, there was a vendor there from Australia. While I was browsing, I heard him talking to a coworker, where he said “My family back in Australia asks if I’m afraid of getting shot in the U.S. I tell them that since I’m not muscling in on a drug dealer’s territory, it’s not a big concern.”

      That always stuck with me as probably the most compact and reasonable answer possible about Americans worrying about violence.

    • I’m American. I don’t worry about being shot. It could be that I’m ignoring real dangers, but it could also be that I’m being reasonable. I live in South Philadelphia– probably neither the safest nor the most dangerous place in America.

      Americans reading this, how personally worried are you about gun violence?

      (I hate the term “gun violence”– it’s as though there’s some huge difference about being attacked with a gun rather than some other way– but I think it’s a handy and appropriate phrase to use in my question.)

      • I have lived for almost 25 years in an affluent Midwestern university town of over 100,000 people, which has very little crime by US standards. My town recently had a five-year period with zero homicides; other years there might be one or two.

        We also have a monthly magazine which publishes a map of the city every month, with different color dots indicating specific crimes, based on police reports. The most common dot is for burglary, but it’s a rare month to see one within a mile of where we live. I should say there are probably about three or four thousand households within that one mile radius.

        So, in my everyday life, I don’t really think much about being the victim of any kind of violence, or worry about guns, or people being armed.

      • Anthony says:

        I’ve lived in middling areas of Oakland (California) – stolen cars would turn up in front of my house occasionally. CatCube’s coworker’s attitude is essentially what I thought of it. I *would* hear gunshots pretty much every weekend, but not that close to me.

        If you look up Oakland’s murder statistics, one of the riskiest things a white person can do in Oakland is to marry a filesystem developer.

      • Adam says:

        I’ve lived in the suburbs of Los Angeles, mostly the crappy suburbs, northern California wine country, north New Jersey, rural North Carolina, rural Kentucky, suburban central Texas, and now in downtown Dallas. About the only cause of death I’ve ever worried about is driving in bad weather, though the closest I ever got was swimming in a rip tide.

        I actually grew up in a bad enough place that they banned us from wearing gang colors and Raiders jerseys and my middle school had multiple drive-bys. I still never actually worried about it. I’ve personally known two murder victims. One was shot and the other smothered in her sleep with a pillow. I don’t particularly worry about either of those things. They’re still rare even though they once happened. I know of an exceeding crap ton of people who died in vehicle crashes.

        • I’ve personally known two murder victims.

          Now that you mention it, I can think of two murder victims I knew. Neither was around here. One of them I knew pretty well in high school. She was murdered by her boyfriend, who went on to kill several other young women. The other was a guy who was trying to protect an abused wife; he was killed by the vengeful husband, who shot him and then burned down his house.

          I’m 60 years old, and I’ve known a lot of people over the years, so there might be others.

          • I knew one murder victim– he was a bus driver in NYC, probably in the 80s. Everything that follows is second-hand. There was a rule that bus drivers could only sell transfers when people were getting on the bus, and this was enforced with people pretending to be passengers. Bus drivers could be fired for breaking the rule.

            So the guy I knew refused to sell a transfer, and was killed by the passenger.

          • Adam says:

            The shooting victim was my girlfriend’s brother-in-law and the police never figured out who did it or why. The smother victim was my sister’s best friend and murdered by her mom’s boyfriend seemingly just because he was insane when we were all in high school.

            Another friend in high school shot himself, so gun death I guess, but not a murder. A soldier in my unit in Iraq shot himself right before coming home, too, but I’m not sure something like that even gets counted in the statistics.

            Come to think of it, I technically know a murderer, too, but that was kind of unfair. A soldier in my ex-wife’s unit shot his neighbor in the face because he was beating his wife. An overblown response, but probably not an evil person.

            If we move to justified legal shootings, then I kind of know a lot from the war, including a guy who had to shoot an 8 year-old kid in the face point blank (trust me, it was justified). Outside of combat zones, just the ex-wife’s uncle who had to shoot a few people working security at the gold refinery.

            Outside of combat zones, I’ve only once had a gun pulled on me, by a rent-a-cop. I laughed at him and drove away. Well, my ex-wife once pulled a gun on me when I came home a day early in the middle of the night and didn’t call her. I laughed even harder at her.

          • Another friend in high school shot himself, so gun death I guess, but not a murder.

            I’m sorry to say that I have lost a number of friends and acquaintances to suicide. At least two of them were definitely by gunshot.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Adam:
            “Well, my ex-wife once pulled a gun on me when I came home a day early in the middle of the night and didn’t call her. I laughed even harder at her.”

            This is the kind of the thing that really mystifies me. I’m assuming she pulled a gun on you because either a) she was worried you were an intruder, or b) she was mad at you.

            If it is (a) then in what way is it laughable? That should be her reaction (if you are the kind of person who believes in owning a gun for self-defense against an unknown assailant).

            If it is (b) it seems even less laughable, even if laughing at her may have been the right response to minimize the chance of the gun being used.

          • Adam says:

            Still the only thing I feel is a personal threat to me is the highway, though. The personal notes there are 1) there was a period of six consecutive years after high school during which I lived away from where I grew up, but came home to visit at least twice a year, and every single time, someone else I had known in school died in a traffic accident, and 2) when I first signed in to Fort Hood, it took nearly two years before the ‘x days since the last fatal traffic accident’ counter hit double digits. When they said driving on Texas highways is deadlier than combat, they weren’t remotely kidding. During the same period in which something like 7 Fort Hood soldiers died in combat (including the one who shot himself), hundreds died on the road.

            Oh yeah, I don’t know how I forgot, but a guy I worked with in college, who was also named Adam, that I mostly just played ping pong with in the lounge because we had no actual work to do once the activities budget dried up, died in basketball practice by tripping and breaking his neck. That may be the single most out-of-the-blue death.

            Apparently my dad’s friend in high school climbed a 200 foot electrical tower on a dare, got electrocuted, and then fell onto the concrete below for good measure, so he probably has better stories than I do.

          • Adam says:

            @HeelBear

            (a) I mentioned this elsewhere in the thread, but she keeps two loaded pistols in the house for close access in vulnerable spots, one under her pillow and one on a shelf next to the toilet. She’s the most paranoid person I’ve ever known. That’s why I laughed at her, in spite of my support of her inherent right to self-defense. If I’d actually been an intruder, the dogs would have torn to me to shreds.

      • keranih says:

        Americans reading this, how personally worried are you about gun violence?

        Not very, and I don’t really separate out “gun violence” from “non-gun violence” – I’m female, and not a spring chicken any more, and while I would hurt the bastard, I’m very unlikely to win a physical altercation.

        The only person I know of personally who died of gunshot wounds (domestically) was shot after (needlessly) threatening another person with a rifle. My across-the-street neighbor had her home invaded and was beaten and tied up last spring. I’ve had my home broken into twice while I was not there.

        (American South, low-rent neighborhood, high degree of larceny and petty theft in my area.)

      • @Nancy:

        South Philadelphia, 48th and Chester if I remember correctly, is the one place I have had a gun pointed at me by a criminal. That would be more than forty years ago.

        But I don’t normally worry about being shot.

      • Marc Whipple says:

        Not even a little, little bit. However, I live in a prosperous suburb and work in a prosperous area of downtown.

      • Nate says:

        American here, living in a U.S. state with a statistically high crime rate. The crime rate in my own neighborhood is near-zero because I don’t live near where all the criminals and drug dealers live. I have a CCW permit and carry every day but realistically I have no fear of attack. I do it because I get a psychological kick out of preparedness and responsibility. Virtually all of my neighbors have guns (we talk about gun stuff from time to time) and several regularly carry firearms. I would estimate that there are at least four dozen loaded firearms–and probably a lot more than that–within a 500-foot radius of my home where I’m sitting right now. I have absolutely no fear of any of these firearms because I know and trust their owners.

      • Troy says:

        I’m American. I don’t worry about being shot. It could be that I’m ignoring real dangers, but it could also be that I’m being reasonable. I live in South Philadelphia– probably neither the safest nor the most dangerous place in America.

        Americans reading this, how personally worried are you about gun violence?

        I live in a 50% black/50% white urban area. I don’t worry about getting shot. People have been murdered (by guns) in our neighborhood, but as far as I know the victims have always been black, and I suspect they are mostly domestic disputes or drug related. I don’t feel in much danger myself, at least if I’m not walking out alone at night far from my house.

        I do worry about getting burgled. I haven’t been, but several friends have.

      • vV_Vv says:

        I’m not American.

        During my first time in the US, I was waiting at a light rail stop to catch the train for the airport at 3 am or something. Next to me, a middle-aged, unkempt drunk guy. In the building on the other side of the road there was some kind of party with college-aged people. The drunk guy was making loud obscene remarks on the girls who went through the door. An angry young man leaned from the terrace and started yelling at the drunk guy and threatening violence. The drunk guy dared him to come and face him. I looked around trying to estimate how fast I could run to the nearest corner. Fortunately, the other guy didn’t come and nothing happened.

        Was I overly worried because of stereotypes about Americans? I don’t know, but I can’t help but thinking that if the other guy came it could have ended badly.

        • Tibor says:

          Umm, I would not want to get involved in a “dispute” of two drunks even if all they had on them were their fists. I think what you did would be reasonable in any country.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ Tibor
            “I would not want to get involved in a “dispute” of two drunks even if all they had on them were their fists.”

            In deciding how far away to move, I would find the odds of one or more of the drunks having a gun, somewhat relevant.

        • Echo says:

          I used to see this all the time living in the UK. Thought Americans just didn’t do it, but that was only because I hadn’t visited an American city at the right time of night.
          Cities make people crazy degenerates, apparently.

          • Tibor says:

            From the stories I heard, the British are almost as bad drinkers as the Scandinavians in that the usual course of the night is to drink a lot, get completely smashed and barf in the alley. What makes it less a problem is that the cultural drink is not vodka like in Scandinavia but beer. My former English teacher who comes from London (forgot which part, but I think he was a Westham fan form which football fans could probably tell 🙂 ) told me that this attitude to drinking is caused by that there used to be a mandatory closing hour for pubs in Britain and quite an early one, so people would drink more to have a few drinks before they close down. But then that was abolished, yet the drinking habits stayed the same…I don’t know how true that story is though.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            In Britain, we consider ourselves to have a bad drinking culture in comparison to continental Europe – binge drinking and alcoholism are common. Interesting story, no idea if it is true.

          • Echo says:

            I think I left before the pub hours reforms, but considering how I used to see our lot act on vacations in France and the Netherlands… yeah, I can believe it.
            Used to be embarrassed enough I’d pretend to be American.

          • vV_Vv says:

            I wasn’t particularly surpised to see this kind of behavior, I was worried that they may had had guns, something I wouldn’t have considered as much as likely if I was in an European city, except in a very bad neighborhood.

    • anon says:

      Believe it or not, we don’t think about what to do if the person has a gun every time we open our doors. I suggest you learn about life in America from somewhere other than /int/

    • Ralph says:

      Other people have made this point, but I think you are pretty off base about what the gun culture in America is like.

      I’ve lived in 3 major US cities, including some particularly violent ones (Chicago, Memphis) and I can’t really remember ever seeing a gun in public (other than on a cop’s hip). Granted, I’ve lived in middle class neighborhoods, but still in the city proper.

      Sane Americans (who don’t live in the ghetto) don’t actually think about getting murdered at gun point in their daily interactions. Most gun deaths are suicides, the rest are mostly targeted gang/drug murders and domestic disputes.

      The idea that Americans are all walking around in fear of being caught in some crossfire or murdered for bumping into someone on the sidewalk or getting in a car accident is just plain wrong.

    • AnObfuscator says:

      I’d just like to add some Australian perspective. I’ve grown up in Australia, and I’m too young to remember the time before gun control. I don’t think American readers have any intuitive understanding of how Australians think about guns.

      I’m an American. Thanks for your perspective. To be fair, I don’t think Australians have an intuitive understanding of how guns actually impact American daily life or thinking either.

      Cops never asked me if I had a gun before I got a carry permit. After I got one, I merely showed the permit to the officer and told them if I had a weapon or not. Not one even cared. When people come to my door, I don’t start panicking and thinking about if they have a gun or not. I don’t think about getting shot every time I step foot out of my door.

      I once had an Australian roommate. He mentioned that he found the US very different from what he expected. He actually thought he’d see more violence, or hear gunshots, or see police carting off dead bodies. He then admitted that perhaps his perspective on the US was deeply distorted by the emphasis on violence in the media, both news and movies.

      Being attacked by someone with a gun, while more common than in Australia, is still very rare in the US on an objective scale. While it is something thought about and discussed on an abstract level, most Americans will not actually directly experience gun violence in their lives.

  18. duckofdeath says:

    Canadians also have a boatload of limitations on gun ownership that likely reduce the gun homicide and suicide rates in ways that aren’t apparent solely by comparing the number of guns. Canadians need to complete a very extensive background check taking several weeks followed by a mandatory training course in gun safety before being approved for a firearms license and even once you have gotten the license there are limitations on the types of weapons that can be legally owned that are not present in the states (handguns, which tend to be disproportionately represented in homicides, are strictly controlled for example) and there are rules about how guns and ammunition have to be secured in the home. It’s possible that a good portion of the ~5% difference in household gun ownership rate between the US and Canada represents people who would not be able to get a firearms license in Canada because they have obvious warning signs and commit a disproportionate number of the gun murders that occur in the states. Speaking as someone who knows a good number of Canadian gun lovers I doubt that we are any less likely than Americans to like to purchase multiple weapons.

    • Troy says:

      Speaking as someone who knows a good number of Canadian gun lovers I doubt that we are any less likely than Americans to like to purchase multiple weapons.

      I don’t have any stats, but the American gun lovers I know don’t just have multiple weapons, i.e., more than 1. They have, I would guess, more than 20.

      • duckofdeath says:

        Oh, I may be wrong then, the people I know are more on the order of 5 or 6 guns.

        • Echo says:

          USian–that’s a pretty common number here. You need at least 3 just to obey the various hunting laws about acceptable calibers/shot types, etc. etc. And several more for competition shooting, target practice, plinking, etc.

          • Troy says:

            You need at least 3 just to obey the various hunting laws about acceptable calibers/shot types, etc.

            Yes, I hadn’t been thinking of that but talking to friends I understand that’s a large part of it.

          • Yrro says:

            Exactly. It’s like having a driver, a putter, and a wedge in your golf bag. You need different guns for different parts of the hobby.

        • Troy says:

          I have no idea if my friends are representative. But the red tribe’s gun-obsession does seem to be something most outsiders (including non-red tribe Americans) don’t understand very well.

        • Anon says:

          My cousins’ family has at least six, and they’re not even particularly interested in guns; that’s just day-to-day life in rural Oregon. American gun lovers have many, many more than that.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            Michael Z. Williamson, a prominent (for some definitions of the word) sci-fi author and gun enthusiast, likes to boast that he’s defeated Barbados in an arms race and is now involved in one with Bermuda.

        • Troy says:

          This conversation reminds me of a GOP debate from several years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ_IolVXPbM

      • The Anonymouse says:

        The problem is, if you are a felon, adjudicated mentally incompetent, or otherwise already prohibited from owning a firearm, I really don’t care about your sixth firearm. I worry about your first one.

      • Randy M says:

        If I go by my childhood friend’s facebook page, he owns… let’s see, carry the one… approximately all the guns.

      • Adam says:

        My ex-wife’s uncle had over 200. One of my old gunners from when I was a tank platoon leader ended up with over 6,000 by the time he medically discharged, but he was inheriting a family arsenal that was at least a century old.

        Edit: Also, my ex-wife’s uncle did kill someone with a gun more than once, but legally. He was chief of security at a gold refinery for 20 years.

        • Agronomous says:

          Six thousand guns? There’s no way he’s taking care of all of them properly: even if he cleaned three every weekday, it would take him eight years to work his way back around to the first!

          They should be confiscated, and sent to a no-shoot shelter for guns until they’re adopted by someone more responsible. He should have to attend therapy for gun-hoarding before he gets a reasonable number of them (say, 500) back.

    • Selerax says:

      A related possibility is that the problem with the US is not “more guns”, it’s “more guns in the hands of the Wrong People” (due to lack of regulation).

      Since all the graphs in this post use total gun ownership as variables, they wouldn’t pick up any such effect (especially considering that the Wring People, i.e. those likely to misuse guns, are presumably a small minority).

      SUGGESTION: Compare the ratio of gun homicides to non-gun homicides, across countries with similar gun ownership rate to the US (e.g. Canada). If this ratio is higher in the US, then it would suggest that there really is a specific gun problem, above and beyond the general American violence problem.

  19. Troy says:

    Although I’m personally friendly to the claim that a “culture of violence” is a large part of what explains America’s high murder rate, it seems to me that you’ve ignored several other potential explanations of the higher murder rate among blacks and southerners. IQ and poverty are perhaps the most obvious. Another factor to test for would be single motherhood, which as I recall correlates strongly with crime rates even after race is controlled for. This would correlate highly with any reasonable operationalization of culture of violence, although whether single motherhood causes culture, culture causes single motherhood, or they have a common cause is perhaps unclear.

    Also, it wasn’t clear to me why we were assuming that non-southern American whites don’t have more of a culture of violence than European or Canadian whites. Is this just supposed to be obvious? I suspect, although I don’t know, that the media non-southern American whites consume is more violent than the media Europeans/Canadians consume.

    • duckofdeath says:

      There is very little difference between the media consumed by Americans and Canadians. When it comes to pop culture the border might as well not exist. I grew up in one of the more affluent neighbourhoods of one of the most affluent cities in Canada where the populations was something like 60% white/ 30% East Asian/ 10% other and kids there listened to the same rap music and watched literally the same movies as kids south of the border.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      Scott did not assume that northern whites had a Canadian cultural of violence, he proved it (under extremely dubious assumptions on regressions). He did a regression and found that guns predicted a certain number of homicides. They predicted all the difference between Canada and northern whites, leaving none to be explained by a culture of violence. But there was a residual in southern whites, explained as a culture of violence. (I phrased the two steps in the opposite order in the post.)

      • Troy says:

        He did a regression and found that guns predicted a certain number of homicides. They predicted all the difference between Canada and northern whites, leaving none to be explained by a culture of violence.

        Perhaps culture causes guns — i.e., the more culturally violent non-southerner whites are more likely to buy guns.

        It would be strange, though, if culture only caused more violence through more guns among non-southerner whites, while among southerners and blacks it caused more violence in other ways too.

    • Wrong Species says:

      How does the iq of white southerners compare to the places where their ancestors came from? Because places like England and Scotland have lower crime rates than the southern states so I don’t think you can blame genetics.

      • NN says:

        Apparently, white Southerners are mostly Scotts-Irish. That is, they came from Ulster, which is now called Northern Ireland, which was pretty violent from the late 1960s to the late 1990s.

        • John Schilling says:

          More precisely, they came originally from the Scots/English border region, where being Not Quite Scottish and Not Quite English meant they could rob both countries blind like a bunch of bloody Vikings. Then both Scotland and England got tired of that and kicked them out, so they moved over to Ireland for a while until the Irish got tired of that and they moved on to Appalachia or thereabouts.

          Which has worked out much better than anyone could have expected, but even so.

          • vV_Vv says:

            More precisely, they came originally from the Scots/English border region, where being Not Quite Scottish and Not Quite English meant they could rob both countries blind like a bunch of bloody Vikings.

            But the actual descendants of the bloody Vikings, who, given their average height, are perhaps even biologically adapted to the raider lifestyle, have low violent crime rates.

            I don’t buy these ancestral culture of violence or genetic disposition to violence hypotheses.

        • Wrong Species says:

          But Northern Ireland is not so violent now so we’re back to the original point.

        • houseboatonstyx says:

          As a white Southerner of Scotch*-Irish ancestry, I wish I had a comment.

          * That’s how my mother spelled it.

        • onyomi says:

          What about the general Cavalier culture on which Southern US culture was based? Seems inherently more violent than Puritans and Quakers.

          • The Unloginable says:

            The so-called Cavalier culture never got more than 100 miles or so from the Atlantic coast. It was just much more visible to non-southern elites than the far more dominant Appalachian culture was. Both, to be fair, were from notably violent roots.

      • Troy says:

        How does the iq of white southerners compare to the places where their ancestors came from? Because places like England and Scotland have lower crime rates than the southern states so I don’t think you can blame genetics.

        I wasn’t blaming genetics; I was blaming IQ (well, raising it as a possible thing that should be blamed). Genetics is not the only cause of IQ. I don’t know how close white southerners are genetically to current English and Scottish people, but they could be very close and still be different in IQ for non-genetic reasons, such as nutrition.

    • Randy M says:

      “Another factor to test for would be single motherhood, which as I recall correlates strongly with crime rates even after race is controlled for.”

      Impulsivity seems like the trait to look for to link single motherhood and violence.
      Though this might be another name for, or at least closely correlated with IQ.

      • Anthony says:

        Yup. People whose parents couldn’t stand each other long enough to provide a two-parent family for the kids are more likely to do the same, but that behavior pattern is, like so many others, significantly genetic.

        There are cultural changes – those people’s ancestors didn’t actually get divorced back in the 20s and 30s, but they probably had higher rates of abandonment, domestic violence, rapid job turnover, etc.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      When I use politically correct explanations that exactly coincides with politically incorrect explanations, I usually am aware of the politically incorrect explanation but don’t think that costing myself credibility by bringing it up would be an effective use of limited credibility resources given that the politically correct explanation suffices to do whatever needs doing.

      • Troy says:

        Okay, fair enough, I kind of suspected as much — and I suppose you’re right that it doesn’t affect your broader argument much. Although poverty is not a politically incorrect explanation — indeed, it’s one of the most politically correct explanations for greater black crime — and so I was a bit surprised you jumped straight to “culture of violence.”

      • Ariel Ben-Yehuda says:

        When I read it I assumed that the relevant genetic and socioeconomic factors were a part of what you called “culture of violence”.

        Basically like that when we hate “Muslims”, we don’t hate the religion as much as the associated social-genetic (this needs to be a word) correlates – that at least appears to be the situation in Israel (telling the social and genetic influences apart is not that trivial).

    • Ahilan Nagendram says:

      I imagine that increased gun violence could reinforce the “culture of violence”, among other things. There’s also the factor of IQ, definitely. But I argue that culture of violence and IQ could be separated, considering there are low IQ populations without any real culture of violence. There’s also the fact that most people in general, despite IQ, are not gun criminals.

  20. eccdogg says:

    Scott did you do any comparisons that controlled for both Southernness and Blackness? Because Southern States are also Black states. Is Southerness robust to controlling for Blackness? My guess is it still holds but just curious,

    • Scott Alexander says:

      If you look at Epigone’s white data and mentally factor out the states that are obviously confounded by Latino whites, then it looks like Southernness and murder still have a pretty high correlation.

      • Steve Sailer says:

        A useful resource of detail on homicides is the L.A. Times Homicide Report launched by crime reporter Jill Leovy, author of last year’s book “Ghettoside.”

        It features information on every homicide victim since 2007 in Los Angeles County, which has about 3% of America’s population.

        http://homicide.latimes.com/

      • Tom Scharf says:

        There’s probably a pretty good correlation between pickup truck ownership and the white murder rate. A proxy for culture.

        • The Anonymouse says:

          There’s probably a pretty good correlation between pickup truck ownership and the number of persons performing skilled and unskilled manual labor.

          The highest gun-ownership state in the nation is Wyoming, where 59.7% of households have a gun (really!). But Wyoming has a murder rate of only 1.4 – the same as right across the border in more gun-controlled Canada, and only about a third of that of the nation as a whole.

      • Robert VerBruggen says:

        Btw, you can use the CDC WONDER system to get numbers for non-Hispanic whites. Victims, not perpetrators though. http://wonder.cdc.gov/mcd-icd10.html

        Also a good data source to be aware of — the BRFSS actually asked the gun question three different years. You can crunch it manually if you’re feeling ambitious but I did find all the numbers here: http://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Firearm-Ownership-and-Violent-Crime.pdf

      • onyomi says:

        I wonder if dueling deaths were more frequent in the antebellum south than the antebellum north. My gut tells me they would be. Because Southerners had, and to some extent still have, more of an honor-based culture than Northerners. Though explicit duels are seemingly non-existent nowadays, one imagines the underlying impulse may still be behind the occasional deadly argument.

        • eccdogg says:

          It really amazed me seeing how Northerners talked to each other after having grown up in the South.

          I would sometimes see two Northerners yelling and cursing at each other. In my home town if two people were talking that way to each other you were about to see punches thrown.

      • eccdogg says:

        Ok I am probably misunderstanding the data or missed something but this is what I get when I dump your CSV file into R and regress Murder2002 on Percent of households with guns, Southerness, Percent Black and Percent Urban.

        Coefficients:
        Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
        (Intercept) -5.15042 5.78716 -0.890 0.3781
        PGun 0.05392 0.06038 0.893 0.3765
        Southernness -0.99917 0.54690 -1.827 0.0742 .
        PBlack 0.46855 0.07034 6.661 2.94e-08 ***
        PUrban 0.06654 0.05298 1.256 0.2155

        Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

        Residual standard error: 3.582 on 46 degrees of freedom
        Multiple R-squared: 0.6222, Adjusted R-squared: 0.5894
        F-statistic: 18.94 on 4 and 46 DF, p-value: 2.896e-09

        The only significant factor I get is Blackness and Southerness has a negative sign! What am I missing? If I leave out blackness (like the authors of the study did) and do the estimates, southerness is correlated with murder rate but it disapears when you include blackness and actually becomes negative. And I don’t see PGun as a significant factor.

        I am probably missing a key piece here somewhere.

        Here are the same numbers using the varibale “Murder” instea of “Murder2002”

        Coefficients:
        Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
        (Intercept) -1.324236 3.054312 -0.434 0.667
        PGun 0.008917 0.031865 0.280 0.781
        Southernness -0.378816 0.288639 -1.312 0.196
        PBlack 0.248672 0.037126 6.698 2.59e-08 ***
        PUrban 0.037647 0.027959 1.346 0.185

        Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

        Residual standard error: 1.891 on 46 degrees of freedom
        Multiple R-squared: 0.6642, Adjusted R-squared: 0.6351
        F-statistic: 22.75 on 4 and 46 DF, p-value: 2.042e-10

        • eccdogg says:

          This is what I get when i include Hispanic population as well.

          Call:
          lm(formula = Murder ~ PBlack + Southernness + PUrban + PHispanic,
          data = state_factors)

          Residuals:
          Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
          -3.6396 -0.8610 -0.2888 0.6914 7.2013

          Coefficients:
          Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
          (Intercept) 0.9700814 1.7185329 0.564 0.5752
          PBlack 0.2724402 0.0372702 7.310 3.13e-09 ***
          Southernness -0.5247405 0.2820405 -1.861 0.0692 .
          PUrban 0.0005561 0.0267336 0.021 0.9835
          PHispanic 0.0618112 0.0356929 1.732 0.0900 .

          Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

          Residual standard error: 1.834 on 46 degrees of freedom
          Multiple R-squared: 0.6843, Adjusted R-squared: 0.6568
          F-statistic: 24.92 on 4 and 46 DF, p-value: 5.109e-11

          • Robert VerBruggen says:

            Not sure if you’re still checking this thread, but one issue might be that you’re using linear regression with highly skewed data. I’m not an expert on the technical stuff (journalism major), but I’ve read a lot of gun-control studies, and most either take a logarithm of the murder rate (and sometimes other variables as well) to address the skew, or use a different regression technique. (The study SA likes used negative binomial on the count data.)

            That said, I found a similar thing with the model I was messing with (linear with Murder2002 and Robbery logged). I treated the Southernness variable as a factor (so it looks at each category independently), and oddly enough the highest result is category 1, with progressively lower results as you get to the most Southern states (category 4). So, that’s weird.

            (Here’s my formula. I removed two observations because there’s no test-score data for them and that variable survived when I tried doing a stepwise technique to pair down the model. lm() will do that automatically but I was also looking at some other stuff with the residuals.)

            https://twitter.com/RAVerBruggen/status/685550198425255937

  21. Troy says:

    This study doesn’t prove causation; while one interpretation is that guns cause homicide, another is that homicide causes guns – for example, by making people feel unsafe so they buy guns to protect themselves. However, I doubt the reverse causation aspect in this case. The study controlled for robbery rate; ie it was looking at whether guns predicted homicides above and beyond those that could be expected given the level of non-homicide crime. My guess is that people feeling unsafe is based more on the general crime rate than on the homicide rate per se, which would make it hard for the homicide rate to cause increased gun ownership independently of the crime rate.

    As a homeowner in a roughly 50% black urban area (albeit one with a lower crime rate than is typical for our demographics), I think your guess is probably right. I do not really fear being killed; I am not likely to be a homicide target. I do fear being robbed, however.

  22. Mogden says:

    A decline in the murder rate by 2k is about 1/15 of the number of automobile fatalities in the U.S. in 2013. Wouldn’t it be a better use of political energy to save that many lives by improving automobile safety by 1/15 rather than trying to repeal a hot-button constitutional amendment?

    • duckofdeath says:

      You don’t need to repeal the second amendment to pass gun control. It has long been established constitutional law in the US that gun control is constitutional, that’s why so many states are able to have it.

      • Donny Anonny says:

        The sort of gun control Scott is kicking around as being effective at reducing violent crime, e.g. Australian-style mandatory gun buy-ups on a national level, would likely not pass out of Congress, and even if they did, they would face constitutional challenges that would likely end up in the Supreme Court.

      • Vox Imperatoris says:

        If by “gun control” you mean “ban guns”, no. This was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in McDonald v. Chicago in 2010.

        If by “gun control” you mean “tax or restrict guns”, yes. But in that case, almost (?) every state has “gun control”.

        • duckofdeath says:

          Banning semi-automatics or just hand-guns for private ownership would pass constitutional muster, it’s already illegal to own fully automatics and it has previously been illegal to own semi-automatic rifles under the assault weapons ban so in principle there’s nothing unconstitutional about banning certain kinds of weapons.

          • keranih says:

            If you’re calling “semi-automatics” “a certain kind of weapon” you’re treading very close to expressing your thoughts in terms which match well with ignorant people who don’t understand the basic mechanics of the tools they are trying to restrict. This has, historically, been met with unhelpful mockery by people who do understand firearms.

            You might want to look at revising what you’re trying to say.

          • Echo says:

            >Banning semi-automatics or just hand-guns for private ownership would pass constitutional muster

            That is literally what Heller and McDonald said was not constitutional. Like fifteen seconds of googling would save so many wasted “Here’s My Opinion” comments…
            Not trying to be rude here, but seriously bro.

          • Harold says:

            it’s already illegal to own fully automatics

            Not true, around 200,000 are registered with the BATF are in civilian hands; the general lawfulness of this can be confirmed in 10 with Google.

          • enoriverbend says:

            duck, you may want to learn more before embarrassing yourself further. I am trying to say this in the gentlest possible fashion. Your short post set a record today for the most factual errors per sentence; I count at least three but that’s only because I am in a kind and generous frame of mind.

          • hlynkacg says:

            @Harold

            Pretty much all 200,000 of those are “grandfather” items from before the 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act was passed.

            As a civilian you can not legally buy a machine-gun from the manufacturer or a dealer. You’ have to find another civilian who owned that specific gun prior to 1986 and buy it from them. This is what people are referring to when you hear them talk about “transferable” NFA items.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ Atwood

            Context: Party No-Cats wants to ban all cats from cities. Party All-Cats wants to allow all cats, including tigers, in cities.

            Mr. Middleton says, “I don’t want to penalize cat lovers, but I don’t think anyone should have a 50-pound lynx.” So the All-Cats Party takes him apart about diffferent kinds of lynx, is a bobcat any cat with a bobbed tail, lions vs mountan lions, etc. So he and onlookers decide the All-Cats Party is rude and impossible to deal with, and probably shouldn’t have any cats at all.

            This is not helpful for cats. This was an opening for negotiation about what the factors are and where a reasonable limit might fall … since it would be experts who would work out the details anyway.

          • hlynkacg says:

            @houseboatonstyx

            Context is actually a large part of the problem. To continue your analogy…

            Party-All-Cats had in past supported various restrictions on cat ownership. After all, If you really care about cats you’d agree that those who wish to own a cat should demonstrate that they will be responsible cat-owners, and that they are not animal abusers.

            In 1994 Party-All-Cats agrees to support a bill banning “dangerous cats” on the understanding that “dangerous” refers to big game cats such as lions and tigers. After securing Party-All-Cats support, Party No-Cats manages to get an amendment added to the bill to the bill redefining “dangerous” as any cat who has spots, stripes, or more than three shades of fur. Many cat-lovers are incensed by this and make a commitment to never again make such a comprise without sizeable concessions from the opposing side.

          • The Anonymouse says:

            @houseboatonstyx

            When, say, a Republican state legislator from Alabama wants to “open a negotiation” about the proper limits of a woman’s right to choose an abortion, about “what the factors are and where a reasonable limit might fall, since it would be experts who would work out the details anyway,” do you take him at his word?

            If you can see why such a “negotiation” screams bad faith and creeping incrementalism, you will be able to see why Second Amendment supporters become so very wary upon every new call for “common sense” gun control.

            In other words, just as Republican end-runs around Roe have destroyed the prospect of cross-party trust in the discussion of abortion rights, so have Democratic end-runs around the Second Amendment destroyed the prospect of cross-party trust in the discussion of gun rights. (It’s amazing how analogous, if party-flipped, the debates, tactics, and misinformation on the two issues are.)

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ hlynkacg
            Party-All-Cats had in past supported various restrictions on cat ownership. […] In 1994 Party-All-Cats agrees to support a bill banning “dangerous cats” on the understanding that “dangerous” refers to big game cats such as lions and tigers. After securing Party-All-Cats support, Party No-Cats manages to get an amendment added to the bill to the bill redefining “dangerous” as any cat who has spots, stripes, or more than three shades of fur.

            Thank you. This is where I was hoping to go with the analogy. We should figure out what the important factors are. Rather than color, spots, etc, with cats it should be size, weight, etc; with guns, imo (re NECARs) some important factors would be how many projectiles can go out before reloading (for victim count), how long a constant barrage can be kept up before reloading (to prevent interference), etc.

            The All-Cats’ version of 1994 would have happened in Congress. Middleton is posting on some forum such as ssc, where it’s possible to have a civil, good faith discussion that would sort out where in the general neibhborhood of his opening “50-pound lynx” would be good places to draw the lines, set up objective specs, etc. The more of this agreed out in public, unhurried, the harder it would be for Congress to redefine away from the intent.

          • Lupis42 says:

            Thank you. This is where I was hoping to go with the analogy. We should figure out what the important factors are. Rather than color, spots, etc, with cats it should be size, weight, etc; with guns, imo (re NECARs) some important factors would be how many projectiles can go out before reloading (for victim count), how long a constant barrage can be kept up before reloading (to prevent interference), etc.

            re: NECARs, if we stopped publicizing them, in particular if we stopped publicizing details about the perpetrators, we could probably make a dent.
            Beyond that, the primary determinant of the effectiveness of that type of attack is the willingness of people nearby to resist effectively, not the ability of the attacker to keep firing without reloading per se. If the primary goal is prevent that type of incident, or at least limit the lethality of them, encourage the skills and the mindset needed for effective self defense. Make self defense and firearms part of the common educational pipeline. Eliminate gun-free zones completely.
            In terms of what makes a firearm more effective in that type of incident, it’s basically the same things that make it effective as a tool for self defense. Given the relative frequencies of those events, I don’t see this as practical or useful option.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ lupis42
            “In terms of what makes a firearm more effective in that type of incident, it’s basically the same things that make it effective as a tool for self defense.”

            Thanks for a relevant point. But how so? Against multiple attackers?

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HouseBoatOnStyx – Practical self defense requires a weapon powerful enough to incapacitate (read: kill) a large man with a single good hit, and the ability to fire multiple times without reloading, because shots often miss. A weapon that can reliably protect you from one aggressor is almost by definition capable of killing multiple helpless victims.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ FacelessCraven
            Practical self defense requires a weapon powerful enough to incapacitate (read: kill) a large man with a single good hit, and the ability to fire multiple times without reloading, because shots often miss.

            How many shots before reloading would you consider reasonable for that purpose? Is there a capacity you would consider excessive?

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ The Anonymouse
            When, say, a Republican state legislator from Alabama wants to “open a negotiation” about the proper limits of a woman’s right to choose an abortion, about “what the factors are and where a reasonable limit might fall, since it would be experts who would work out the details anyway,” do you take him at his word?

            You make a very legitimate point. On the full size issues of guns and abortion and national strategy of the proponents on both sides of both, certainly there is a very good and obvious resemblance.

            Sorry my term ‘negotiation’ caused conflation here. My Mr. Middleton, and Atwoods’ Simplicito, are not legislators making a formal ‘call for opening a negotiation [presumably in some official committee of politicians]’. Middleton and Simplicito are somewhat clueless ordinary sincere people commenting on a casual forum, at a sincere common sense level. Using personal ridicule to silence them is counter-productive to the cause of those using it, and to civility in general.

          • hlynkacg says:

            houseboatonstyx says:
            Is there a capacity you would consider excessive?

            This is a tough question, as it is quite situational. Against a single target I’m inclined to say that 5 – 10 shots is reasonable, and if you need more than that you probably need training more than you need the extra bullets. However that’s coming from a guy who did 2 tours in Iraq and shoots competitively so my idea of what constitutes “acceptable” shooting probably differs from the general population’s. Multiple attackers are a different story of course.

            Personally I would be willing to entertain some restrictions on Handguns / magazine capacities in exchange for loosening of restrictions else-where. Tit-for-tat if you will.

            Using personal ridicule to silence them is counter-productive to the cause of those using it, and to civility in general.

            You’re absolutely correct, and I am trying to avoid it even if it does raise my blood pressure a bit. 😉

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @houseboatonstyx – “How many shots before reloading would you consider reasonable for that purpose?”

            For legitimate purposes, more are almost always better. For spree killing, I’m not sure there’s any evidence it actually makes a difference one way or the other.

            “Is there a capacity you would consider excessive?”

            No, I don’t think there is. The idea implicit in your question seems to be that weapons with a lethality score of x are good enough for self-defense, but weapons with a lethality score of 5x or more are excessively lethal, and removing them from circulation would therefore make us safer.

            Near as I can tell, this is a false model. Self defense and spree killing are fundamentally dissimilar tactical objectives, and of the two self-defense is the much harder problem. That means to defend yourself successfully, you need weapons *more* capable than the weapons needed for spree killing, not less. Additional weapon capability benefits the defender more than it does the spree killer, and constraining capability hurts the defender more than the killer. The defender has very limited control over the tactical situation they have to deal with, while the killer has near-complete control.

            If you’re defending yourself, all else being equal, more ammo is almost always better, and more lethality is almost always better. In spree killing, my examination of the evidence leads me to conclude that neither are especially significant factors in the lethality of the attack. Compare Holmes (AR15 w/ 100-round-drum, 12-gauge shotgun, .40 handgun, 12 killed, 70 wounded, 76 rounds fired) and Cho (9mm handgun, .22 target handgun, 30 killed, 17 wounded, 170 shots fired).

            If you could wave a magic wand and force all spree killers from here on out to use .22 revolvers exclusively, I’m not convinced there’d be a detectable change in the casualty rates of spree killings.

          • Echo says:

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbria_shootings

            12 dead, 11 wounded with a 5 rd. bolt action 22LR and a double barrel shotgun.

            The reason we oppose limits is that they’ll just keep getting stricter the less effective they are.
            New York went from any, to 30, to 10, to 7. Why should we ever expect it to stop at the “compromise” we were already forced to accept?

          • Lupis42 says:

            Thanks for a relevant point. But how so? Against multiple attackers?

            Both against multiple attackers, and single attackers not stopped by the first hit(s). While I tend to think the police place a bit too little emphasis on safe, accurate deployment of firearms, the pattern of high round counts in police shootings is worth pointing to. Defensive use of firearms means shooting until the threat ceases, and since the human body can ignore quite astounding amounts of trauma for anywhere from seconds to minutes – more than enough time to do a hell of a lot of damage.
            Police shootings are sometimes called out for >30 rounds fired, and >17 hitting the target, implying that that’s excessive force, but there are plenty of accounts of people with seventeen bullets in them accomplishing quite a lot afterwards – in fact, the list of Medal of Honor awards, and Victoria Cross awards both provide a fascinating list of acounts of human beings, many subject to a multitude of GSWs, ignoring enourmous amounts of physical trauma and going on to kill people, blow up tanks/builings, pilot aircraft in for safe landings, and otherwise accomplish a hell of a lot.

            Self defense and spree killing are fundamentally dissimilar tactical objectives, and of the two self-defense is the much harder problem. That means to defend yourself successfully, you need weapons *more* capable than the weapons needed for spree killing, not less.

            This is the core of it – the spree killer selects the time, place, and manner to maximise the effectiveness of the tools/skills they have. The defender needs to prepare for whatever happens.
            On the subject of magazine capacity in particular, I’ll add three points.
            1) Magazines are staggeringly simple to manufacture. While 3d printing isn’t going to be making the manufacture of gun barrels trivial any time soon, reliable magazines are another matter, as a magazine is slighly less complex than a pez dispenser, and doesn’t need to handle much in the way force.
            2) As long as police are exempt from magazine capacity limits, police capacity magazines are going to be all over the place anyway – hence easier to steal, copy, etc. And to the extent that LEOs are more likely to have reliable body armor, backup on call, and a utility belt full of spare magazines, they will suffer less than the average citizen from a magazine capacity limit.
            3) The one place where magazine limits might help (I do know of one mass shooter who actually was tackled while reloading, in AZ) is with the type of shooter most likely to prepare, and hence most likely to obtain, through theft, black market, or home manufacture, whatever capacity magazine they need.

            There’s one other argument against magazine capacity restrictions, which relates to the structure of the law – the actual capacity of a magazine is not fixed, but depends on the type of cartridge loaded in it, and the type of firearm it feeds. For example, a NATO standard rifle magazine holds 30 rounds of 5.56. In an AR-15 chambered in .458, however (a caliber intended for hunting boar/hogs and growing in popularity) that magazine holds 10 rounds of .458, and works quite well. So is it’s capacity 10, or 30? If the owner has a .458 AR, and is using it as a 10 round magazine, does it become a 30 round magazine when the owner buys a 5.56 rifle?
            It gets worse – some firearms use tube-magazines. Several of those firearms, such as .22s and shotguns, will work with several different cartridge lengths, but cartridge length determines capacity. So a lever action .22 rifle, with a tube magazine holding 10 rounds of .22LR, will also hold (and function reliably) with ~14 rounds of .22Short. I have a 12 gauge, chambered to work with 3.5 inch ‘magnum’ shells. It’s magazine holds 4 rounds, or 5 rounds if I load 2.75 inch ‘standard’ shells. Aguila came out with ‘minishells’ a few years back – 1.75 inches long. That shotgun holds 8 of them, and works with them fine. So is it’s magazine capacity 4 (in the cartridge that it’s chambered for), 5 (in the cartridge that worked in it when it was designed/made/sold) or 8 (in a cartridge that came out after I bought it)? I live in MA, where possession of a shotgun magazine with a capacity of more than 5 rounds is a felony if that magazine was made after 1994. The question of whether or not I am a felon under current MA law is unanswered, but if I am, it’s not because of anything I did, but rather because a product came into existence later that retroactively made my shotgun magazine too large.

          • John Schilling says:

            How many shots before reloading would you consider reasonable for that purpose? Is there a capacity you would consider excessive?

            Whatever the local police issue to their rank-and-file officers, almost by definition cannot be considered (by the state) excessive for defense against common criminals. In the United States, and most of Europe, that’s 15-20 shot pistols often backed by 30-shot carbines in the patrol car.

            Actually, for all the talk of the “militarization” of police in the US, I’ve seen European police carrying 30-shot military carbines on routine duty more often than American – though that may be due to different styles of policing. If it is deemed necessary to have a carbine available on say five minutes’ notice and you are walking a city beat without a patrol car…

          • Tibor says:

            John: Where in Europe have you seen policemen armed with submachine guns? I think this only happens if there is either threat of a terrorist attack or a few days-weeks after a terrorist attack. I would not be surprised if the French police carried automatic weapons around nowadays (at least in bigger cities) but I don’t think it is common in Europe for police to carry such weapons. Maybe in the capitals next to parliaments or something like that.

          • Echo says:

            I saw my first MP5s at a UK airport. The guys were just standing around with really sloppy form.
            Only seen one more of those in all the years I’ve been in the US.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ FacelessCraven
            >> “Is there a capacity you would consider excessive?”

            > No, I don’t think there is.

            I’m thinking in terms of the defender’s encumbrance. How much weight in bullets is it worth carrying around? Hm, and the message of pictures of ‘scary looking ‘military style’ armament may be that anyone who wants to dedicate that much pocket and belt space, or even convenient space in the car, may have some dangerous expectations. (Even if he keeps it at home to guard against invasion, that’s still an abnormal money and opportunity cost, raising doubts about the judgment, and/or motives, of the potential buyers.)

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @houseboatonstyx – “I’m thinking in terms of the defender’s encumbrance. How much weight in bullets is it worth carrying around?”

            My Cz-85b has a fifteen-round magazine, which is fairly typical for self-defense handguns. The Steyr GB, also in 9mm, has a twenty-round magazine, and the Kel-Tec P30, chambered in .22 magnum, is no larger and has a thirty-round capacity. Thirty-round magazines are the standard for all modern carbines, and some go considerably higher. All of these weapons use detachable magazines; I own four for my Cz, and could buy a dozen for the cost of my last ammo purchase. Regardless, the amount of ammo needed for practical defense is more than sufficient for any harm a killer wants to cause.

            There is no such thing as a “dangerously high” magazine capacity. There is no evidence that magazine capacity has any perceptible effect on the lethality of spree killings. Guns and gun tactics simply do not work that way.

            “Hm, and the message of pictures of ‘scary looking ‘military style’ armament may be that anyone who wants to dedicate that much pocket and belt space, or even convenient space in the car, may have some dangerous expectations. (Even if he keeps it at home to guard against invasion, that’s still an abnormal money and opportunity cost, raising doubts about the judgment, and/or motives, of the potential buyers.)”

            Concealed carry permit holders have a better safety record and a lower incidence of crime than the general population. “Scary looking ‘military style'” longarms, meanwhile, kill fewer people per year than hammers. Given these two well-established facts, why exactly do you feel justified in questioning the motives or sanity of those who choose to own or use them? What is your actual argument?

          • John Schilling says:

            @Tibor: Mostly in airports, which I necessarily spend a fair deal of time in when I’m visiting Europe. Occasionally policemen with carbines or submachine guns standing on sidewalks; they may be guarding high-value targets I didn’t recognize.

            But never, ever in the United States. It just isn’t done unless there is a reported crime in progress or other threat that specifically calls for it.

          • Lupis42 says:

            @housboatonstyx

            I’m thinking in terms of the defender’s encumbrance. How much weight in bullets is it worth carrying around?
            Depends how much the defender weighs, how much each bullet weighs, where the defender is and for how long before they could obtain more. Unless it’s interfering with your ability to do the things you would be doing other than defending yourself, it’s definitely not excessive.
            Beyond that, all I can say is that I know it when I see it, and that’s a shitty legal standard.

            Even if he keeps it at home to guard against invasion, that’s still an abnormal money and opportunity cost, raising doubts about the judgment, and/or motives, of the potential buyers.
            Depends on your perspective. Being a collector, I have enough money in firearms I find interesting for historical or mechanical reasons to cover the cost of a couple cars.
            I also have a few thousand rounds of ammo, or as I think of it – enough to give a few classes, and keep myself in practice for a few months, plus whatever I can find of the historical calibers practically nobody sells anymore. It’s certainly way more than I can carry. But any competitive shooter goes through at least a couple cases a month, just staying in practice, and therefore probably has a substantial buffer. I certainly don’t think owning on the order of hundreds of thousands of rounds need be excessive. Hell, as an instructor I run intro rifle classes where people go through a thousand+ rounds in a weekend.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ John Schilling
            Whatever the local police issue to their rank-and-file officers, almost by definition cannot be considered (by the state) excessive for defense against common criminals. In the United States, and most of Europe, that’s 15-20 shot pistols often backed by 30-shot carbines in the patrol car.

            Thank you for a very sensible approach to finding an objective benchmark for an upper limit to what a citizen might reasonably need for self-defense. (Well, plus taser, mace, whatever.)

          • @HouseboatOnStyx, surely John Schilling’s observation is a lower bound on what must be allowed as reasonable for self-defense.

          • Tibor says:

            @John: Oh yeah, I forgot about airports. I don’t fly much and when I do it is usually from Prague to somewhere outside of Europe (I also flew from Nürnberg a few times but I cannot recall what the police had there). The police do carry carbines at the airport in Prague. IIRC that practice started after the September 11 attacks in NYC. I guess this is common in Europe. I am actually surprised that the US police is not armed with them at airports.

            Still, I think the militarization of the police refers more to the excessive equipment of SWAT teams in the US. I don’t think there is anything like that (there are special police strike forces but they are not as heavily armed as the SWAT and they seem to be deployed way less often…no SWAT teams knocking down your door because your neighbour told the police you might be making crack or even just selling marijuana).

          • “Mostly in airports, which I necessarily spend a fair deal of time in when I’m visiting Europe. Occasionally policemen with carbines or submachine guns standing on sidewalks; they may be guarding high-value targets I didn’t recognize.

            But never, ever in the United States. It just isn’t done unless there is a reported crime in progress or other threat that specifically calls for it.”

            Well, gosh, other US conservatives are always telling me that Europe is completely supine to terrorist threat. Maybe they are the ones who don’t go there.

          • Harold says:

            Well, gosh, other US conservatives are always telling me that Europe is completely supine to terrorist threat. Maybe they are the ones who don’t go there.

            As long as they admit to the concept of security theater they’re not being inconsistent. And by American standards they are all but “supine”, even France with its fierce internal security forces was very slow to respond to the latest assault, allowing the jihadists hours to murder their victims in, yes, a theater. Post-Columbine active shooter doctrine has an answer to that, along with the police carbines, one of the few complaints about the militarization of our police that’s off the mark.

            One other note: American English is filled with shooting metaphors like “off (or wide of) the mark”.

        • John Schilling says:

          surely John Schilling’s observation is a lower bound on what must be allowed as reasonable for self-defense.

          If there’s evidence that the police have been asking for more but turned down by e.g. hoplophobic politicians, yes – and I believe that was the case in NYC a generation back, haven’t checked lately.

          Otherwise, I would consider police usage to constitute expert opinion as to both the upper and lower ground as to what is reasonable for self-defense against common criminals. If private citizens can generally carry whatever plainclothes detectives or off-duty officers can carry, and keep readily available whatever patrol officers carry and/or keep in their vehicles, I think there would be relatively few complaints.

      • John Schilling says:

        It has long been established constitutional law in the US that gun control is constitutional

        Have you been living in a cave the past eight years?

        It has long been the case that the courts have danced around the core question of whether or not it is constitutional to pass laws whose intent or effect is to seriously hinder law-abiding citizens in their quest for ordinary rifles, shotguns, and handguns, while upholding marginal restrictions in other areas. In 2008, the Supreme Court finally settled the question by saying that no, that’s actually unconstitutional and you can’t do that, and in 2010 clarified that you can’t do it even if you are a state government.

        You may be able to continue “controlling” extra-super-duper-evil guns like sawed-off shotguns (go figure), or require some modest level of paperwork when an average citizen buys an average pistol, or whatnot, but do you really think that is going to make much difference?

        • Tibor says:

          In what way is a sawed-off shotgun more dangerous than a regular shotgun except that it is easier to hide it under a coat…or is that the point?

          • Echo says:

            When the barrel goes from 18″ to 17.5″, it suddenly becomes an illegal Destructive Device that the ATF needs to murder your pregnant wife to get rid of.
            Something about the weapon’s chi becoming focused in its wicked Shoulder Thing That Goes Up, according to undoubtedly well-informed media sources.

    • The Anonymouse says:

      There are precious few primary votes to be had in advocating for (or against, for that matter) more-stringent automobile safety standards.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Yes. Certainly gun control is not the most effective way to do anything.

      (although other than pushing along self-driving cars faster, what low-hanging fruit do you think there is in accident prevention?)

      • Daniel Speyer says:

        24/7 subways or light rail between dense residential districts and their favorite bars.

        • disciplinaryarbitrage says:

          This may be the first time I’ve encountered “subways” and “low hanging fruit” together.

          Take, for instance, the NY 2nd Avenue subway, which was first proposed in 1919. Various administrations attempted to build in the 1940s and 50s, again in the late 60s and early 70s, and finally got off the ground again in the mid-2000s. It’s been under construction since 2007 and if (!) all goes according to plan will open in December 2016, a few months short of a decade of construction time… for Phase I of the project. Which is only two miles long. Which cost $4.5 billion. The whole thing is projected to cost $18bn (so almost certainly >$20bn) for 8 miles of track.

          (Building in Manhattan is atypically expensive for a bunch of reasons, but still.)

          But to get an apples-to-apples cost comparison, the price tag for building a functional rapid transit system (connecting the biggest residential and commercial centers) in every major US city (let’s define as the biggest 50, which coincidentally contain a little over half the US population) that doesn’t currently have one (there are, depending on how you count, about 15 metros that currently have one) might pencil out to about $0.5bn/mile * 50 miles/system * 35 systems = $875bn.

          On the other hand: if a US gun buyback program aims to collect 50% of the ~357m guns in circulation, pays on average $1000 per gun, and direct costs are a third of the program costs (including getting the damn thing passed through massive grand bargains/wholesale purchase of the levers of US governmental power), we’re looking at 357m * 0.5 * $3333 = $594bn.

          My conclusion from all of this: maybe consider putting the bars closer to where people live.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            My conclusion from all of this: maybe consider putting the bars closer to where people live.

            Why aren’t bars closer to where people live? You think it’s because they don’t want to build them closer?

            No, it’s because of residential-commercial zoning laws. Save lives: abolish zoning laws! That cuts down not only on drunk driving but driving and urban sprawl in general.

          • disciplinaryarbitrage says:

            Vox–agree 100%.

            Of course, the reason for the resilience of exclusionary zoning is that people like them, or rather dislike inconveniences such as ‘no bars I can walk to’ less than they appreciate effects such as ‘reduces the riskiness of my primary financial asset’. On the bright side, zoning can be productively changed one town or neighborhood at a time, as opposed to in billion-dollar chunks.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ disciplinaryarbitrage:

            Of course there are purported benefits of exclusionary zoning. But we know that people aren’t very good at weighing the costs and benefits of things when it comes to an election, since even in an election of 100 people, they are unlikely to affect the outcome.

            If, in the voting booth, it is more salient to them to maintain property values, they may not realize the downsides. Or accurately judge the decline in property values.

            And it’s also commonly argued that even when people are deciding solely for themselves, they often choose irrationally when it comes to making a one-time decision that has ongoing effects. For instance, they choose to spend $50,000 extra to get a house with a pool because it seems nice to have one. Then they never use it and have to spend a lot of time cleaning it.

            A similar dynamic might apply to deciding “do I want some nasty bar or ethnic restaurant to be able to set up right next to my house?” The choice and the negative side is upfront. The benefits may be less obvious.

          • Psmith says:

            There’s a sleepy suburb in Seattle that has a great little neighborhood dive bar more or less right in the middle of it, within walking distance of quite a lot of houses. Can’t remember what it was called, but I left the place thinking every neighborhood should have one.

          • Whether a bar is an asset to a quiet neighborhood has a lot to do with how people behave when they leave it.

      • The Anonymouse says:

        Raising the age requirement to get a license?

        • Mark Atwood says:

          Raising the age requirement to get a license?

          It is effectively ALREADY 18 or 21. There are so many restrictions placed on drivers under those ages, that more and more kids are no longer bothering.

          Besides, they no longer need to drive to hang out together away from their parents gaze, that’s what their smartphones are for.

      • JayT says:

        How about mandatory breathalyzers installed in all cars? What about regulators stopping cars from going over 25 mph? These things wouldn’t have any constitutional issues and would save thousands of lives.

        • Adam says:

          On all cars? That would end interstate trucking, hell even intercity trucking. It would also turn average commutes in certain places into five hour commutes.

          • The Anonymouse says:

            I suspect what JayT is getting at is less a serious policy proposal than an emphasizing that “preventing all forms of premature death” is not the foremost terminal value of most Americans, nor likely even a secondary or tertiary value.

          • JayT says:

            Yeah, that’s basically what I’m getting at. People are very concerned about public safety up to the point that it inconveniences them.

      • Richard says:

        Norway has done some rather extensive experimenting on road safety and has cut road deaths by some 75% over the last 25 years. I remember reading that the single most effective measure was putting in rumble strips on just about every road so that people would wake up when drifting across lanes.

        This is a ridiculously cheap measure

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          Rumble strips are pretty common in America. I know because my wife keeps on driving over them.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            They are rarely in the middle of the road but very common on the side of the road. However, if you drift into the wrong lane, you’ll typically hit those bumpy reflectors. That doesn’t stop you from drifting into the lanes going the same direction, but you can’t very well put rumble strips there.

            And of course on the interstate, there’s always a ditch between the two opposite directions of travel.

          • CatCube says:

            In Michigan, they’re pretty common in the middle of the road. They started showing up about 5 years ago.

          • keranih says:

            Bumpy reflectors are (in my experience) far more common in the South where snow plows are not typically used. I do wonder if the lane separation rumble strips are on municipal roads or just highways.

        • Are the rumble strips between the lanes as well as on the edges of the roads?

        • You can get more or less the same effect on an individual level via modern technology. My current car beeps at me if I start drifting out of the lane.

          • Tatu Ahponen says:

            Which one is more guaranteed to wake one up / get their attention, rumble or beep, though?

          • Leit says:

            Because everyone can afford a new car, and no-one wants to drive classics. David pls.

          • @Leit:

            What claim did you think I was making to which your post was a response?

          • Leit says:

            @David:

            In a subthread about low-hanging fruit, you noted an individual solution that gives more or less the same result as the generally applicable idea proposed by Richard.

            Unfortunately, this solution (as opposed to Richard’s, which is cheap) relies on purchasing a vehicle with this lane assist technology, which is presently not common and not inexpensive, making it – to my mind – a poor fit for ‘low-hanging fruit’. If you didn’t mean to claim that it was such, I completely understand, but as such it reads (to me) as a tiny bit of a non-sequitur.

            I also somewhat doubt that lane assist would have entirely the same effect, as even if you’re in a vehicle so equipped, it does nothing to mitigate the consequences of someone in the opposite lane who doesn’t dozing off and wandering into yours. That wasn’t in my original response.

          • @Leit:

            It isn’t low hanging fruit if the objective is to solve the problem for everyone soon. It is low hanging fruit if the objective is to solve the problem for some people–the people who are buying new cars. From the standpoint of the individual, the cost to him of getting his state to modify every road is prohibitive. He has a straightforward way of getting most of the same benefit for himself.

            As to total cost of doing the whole thing, I don’t know if the cost of putting suitable strips on every highway is less than the long term cost of installing the gadget in all new cars. The latter will, of course, take quite a while for full effect–but the process is already started.

          • Leit says:

            But now we’re back to my original objection, which is that the citizen has a straightforward way of getting the benefit if the cost of a new vehicle is not prohibitive and if the citizen is willing to constrain their choice of vehicle.

            The cost of this relatively new technology will come down, certainly, and the system will become more common. The individual solution does have the benefit that it’s a natural evolution that requires no lobbying, and so is less vulnerable to the inertia issues involved in dealing with the state.

            Meanwhile, though, rumble strips are cheap, easy to install, robust enough to last for many years, and will work for every car regardless of hardware or software.

            Your solution is likely to be the realistic one, but it’d be nice if that was because it was objectively better rather than because it’s a mission convincing public servants to actually do anything in the public interest.

      • xtmar says:

        Tougher inspections of vehicle roadworthiness/crash worthiness features. Stricter enforcement of DUI laws, especially towards repeat offenders.

        • keranih says:

          The several states who had vehicle inspection programs in the 1970’s and 80’s discontinued them because the inspections had no impact on accident rates/fatalities. I believe the primary reason they are done now is for vehicle exhaust, not operational safety.

          The average first time DUI offender admits to driving under the influence some scores (100+?) times prior to being arrested. What sort of state should we live in, that we can cut this number in half or less?

          • xtmar says:

            You could raise the inspection standards so that it essentially outlaws older vehicles without airbags and ABS, though that might be a taking from a legal standpoint. Also, tire tread depth and so on. Somewhat more controversially, they should have more advanced seat belt interlocks that prevent the vehicle from being shifted into drive if the seat belt isn’t strong the occupant(s). I know they tried this in the 80s and it just resulted in people permanently fastening the seat belt behind them, thus defeating the purpose, but current technology should allow this to be done more effectively.

            The other possibility would be to increase the standards for driver licensing/training, so that people had to demonstrate their skills every ten years, or if they’ve been involved in an accident.

            Finally, I think there is more to be done in terms of distracted driving, from the angles of enforcement, culture, and also technology.

            As far as DUIs, I think that we should raise the punishment for being caught. While I generally favor less punishment for many crimes, in the case of a DUI you’re basically driving around in a deadly weapon while not in possession of your senses, so the punishment should match that of somebody who brandishes a weapon or threatens aggravated assault.

          • Adam says:

            Which states? Texas only does safety inspections. When I lived in California, the state inspection was only an emissions inspection. Actually, the Texas one varies by county, but the counties I’ve lived in only do safety.

      • Scott: “Certainly gun control is not the most effective way to do anything.”

        Those of us in the gun culture think it is a disturbingly effective way to do one particular thing – extinguish the spirit of liberty by slow, progressive strangulation. The process was already well understood two hundred years ago by historians with many precedents to examine:

        [The disarming of citizens] has a double effect, it palsies the hand and brutalizes the mind: a habitual disuse of physical forces totally destroys the moral [force]; and men lose at once the power of protecting themselves, and of discerning the cause of their oppression.
        — Joel Barlow, “Advice to the Privileged Orders”, 1792-93

        That is, many of us believe that the actual intent of gun control advocates is to not just the obvious one of reducing individuals to a condition of helplessness against state power, but a more subtle program of psychological warfare against the free mind. They want us to be disarmed in spirit, to internalize helplessness, to become incapable of even imaging autonomy and rebellion.

        If you think this is far-fetched, consider the weird kabuki quality of a lot of gun-control measures, advocated by people who often understand at some level that they cannot achieve their ostensible objectives but insist on the need to “make a statement”, to perform gestures. Consider also the utter irrationality of selective bans on “assault” weapons based on superficial visual features that make them scary-looking. Consider the extent to which the politics of gun control has taken on the aspect of a class war of elites against proles.

        When you are oppressed but armed, freedom is not dead. Even if your weapons are objectively inadequate to the forces you face, you can think like an armed person; you imagine a sequence in which small victories lead to greater ones and eventually the tyrants are unable to impose their will.

        That is what the gun-grabbers seem to really want to abolish – not just the physical instruments of resistance but the resistant mindset. And that is a far greater threat than the physical disarmament.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          @Eric S. Raymond:
          This seems like a very good description of your fears.

          It also seems like a very poor model for those who advocate gun control. My initial impression is that this model is useful for propaganda, and not much else.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            More counter-productive than useful, I’d say. If he seriously thinks that he can read my mind, and that that is what is in it … then perhaps I should feel safer if he didn’t have a gun.

          • Echo says:

            He’s quoting the people whose literature and political theory formed the foundation our constitution, and there’s a lot more where that came from.

            I know they don’t teach that kind of Dead White Guy stuff in the trendy majors these days, but I’m surprised you haven’t come across any of it.
            Although I suspect smelling salts would be required if you read too much of it in one go…

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HeelBearCub – “This seems like a very good description of your fears. It also seems like a very poor model for those who advocate gun control. My initial impression is that this model is useful for propaganda, and not much else.”

            Do you believe that self-defense is a legitimate and valuable human right? Do you believe that the citizen’s ability to resist or deter government force, in the abstract, is a legitimate and valuable thing?

            [EDIT] – it may not be a useful model to stop gun control advocates from advocating gun control, but it seems to me to be a reasonably accurate assessment of the mindset underlying the opposition. Uncharitably phrased, I’ll grant you, but it seems to me that the gun control debate ultimately comes down to fundamentally incompatible values, not questions about fact. There are too many obvious facts pointedly ignored for too long by the anti-gun side for me to conclude otherwise.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Faceless Craven:
            You really think the “actual intent of gun control advocates is to not just the obvious one of reducing individuals to a condition of helplessness against state power, but a more subtle program of psychological warfare against the free mind.”?

            Really?

            That’s not uncharitably put. It’s so far off base that it’s … well, it’s not even playing baseball anymore.

            I really can’t honestly square that in any way with what I know or see out of pro gun control advocates.

          • Adam says:

            I think the reasonable intermediate position here is the modal gun control advocate almost certainly does not want that and it is a poor model of their mentality. Nonetheless, it’s at least a somewhat plausible worst-case scenario of what might actually happen and that makes it a path a minimax player does not want to go down.

            Edit: Yes, preemptively, I know this is a stochastic game and Scott is formulating an expectimax strategy, not a minimax. Maybe that’s actually a meaningful difference in how different people approach certain policy decisions.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HeelBearCub – “You really think the “actual intent of gun control advocates is to not just the obvious one of reducing individuals to a condition of helplessness against state power, but a more subtle program of psychological warfare against the free mind.”?”

            I think that what I consider a “free mind”, the average gun control advocate would consider “dangerously antisocial”. Certainly a very great many gun control advocates have claimed as much, loudly and at length, for the two decades plus that I’ve been following the issue.

            Again I ask, Do you believe that self-defense is a legitimate and valuable human right? Do you believe that the citizen’s ability to resist or deter government force, in the abstract, is a legitimate and valuable thing?

          • Echo says:

            >Certainly a very great many gun control advocates have claimed as much
            in this very comment section.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Faceless Craven:
            The right to self-defense is just and good. The right of a citizen to resist their government is just and good.

            Neither of these rights is an unalloyed good. Neither end necessarily entails engaging in or threatening violence.

            As always, their are trade-offs and tensions.

            I would hope none of the above is controversial to you. Perhaps that is naive, I don’t know.

          • Dr Dealgood says:

            Technically you can resist your government without employing or threatening violence, although you’re relying a lot on the good will of your oppressors (how well did passive resistance work for the protesters in Tiananmen Square?). But I am completely at a loss for how you plan to defend yourself without violence. It sounds good in the abstract bit doesn’t make much sense if you think about it.

            The mindset here reminds me a lot of the “zero tolerance” policies I saw in middle school. If some punk hits you then it’s no big deal, he gets to leave class and maybe talk to the school shrink, but if you hit back then it’s A Fight and both of you get suspended. Bullies are generally not the most forward thinking kids and could care less but their victims have to suck it up because they actually have something to lose. Punnishing violence employed in self defense, even supposedly disproportionate violence, only compounds the injustice.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HeelBearCub – “Neither of these rights is an unalloyed good.”

            I would say the right to self defense is a good deal less alloyed than the right to oppose the government. I see self defense as an extremely fundamental human right.

            “Neither end necessarily entails engaging in or threatening violence.”

            …And that’s where we part ways, I imagine. A right to self defense necessarily implies a right to threaten and commit violence, within a context of legitimately defending oneself from an aggressor. I’m not sure what the right would even mean without violence.

            Likewise, I believe that the threat of violent resistance against government is sometimes both morally and practically a good thing, and that includes the Federal government.
            http://images.flatworldknowledge.com/trowbridge2_1.0/trowbridge2_1.0-fig11_017.jpg

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Faceless Craven:
            Every martial arts studio I have ever taken classes in had roughly the same 5 rules of self-defense:
            1) Be aware.
            2) Avoid the situation.
            3) Remove yourself from the situation.
            4) Submit.
            5) Fight as a last resort.

            I take that you don’t think 1 through 4 are part of self-defense? To me that just means you want to use your preferred definition.

            Edit:
            As to the unalloyed good part, the right of self-defense is only as good as one’s perception of threat is accurate. So, the guy who shot a stranded motorist in cold blood because she was on his front porch at night? That would seem to be a case of mis-perceiving threat.

          • keranih says:

            @ HBC –

            Every martial arts studio I have ever taken classes in had roughly the same 5 rules of self-defense:
            1) Be aware.
            2) Avoid the situation.
            3) Remove yourself from the situation.
            4) Submit.
            5) Fight as a last resort.

            None of the people I ever studied under included #4. None of them.

            And I was taught aikido by a gentleman who put the whole back section of class through a quarter hour of punching drills because a couple of us were stupid enough to snicker loudly at a pair of newbie girls who couldn’t punch. (Literally, they had no concept of how to hold their fist, put their feet, swing their arms, nada.) At the end of it, he told us that there was nothing wrong with not being conversant with how to physically hurt other humans,(*) and if we thought otherwise we were welcome to never darken his doorstep again.

            Having said that, the directions of my firearms instructors in avoiding conflict pretty much matched that of my unarmed combat instructors – don’t go places where there might be a fight, and if you’re in a place like that, leave, and take the rest of your group with you.

            Submit to violence done upon you, or to others – that was taught to me by a different Teacher, and I’m still mightily struggling with that one.

            (*) There are people on the gunrights side of the house who disagree with me on this. I hold that so long as one is willing to deal with the effects of not being an effective fighter – and not just outsourcing violence to someone else – there is nothing wrong with being a pacifist, and it might be the more morally correct life path. (But it’s also generally a shorter path.)

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @kerinah:
            #4 was always taught to me in a similar manner to the following:
            If a mugger asks you for your wallet, give them your wallet, unless you believe that giving them your wallet won’t end the situation peacefully.

            It’s not “submit to being beaten” it’s “submit to the demand so as to avoid the fight. Fight if fighting cannot be avoided”.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HeelBearCub – “I take that you don’t think 1 through 4 are part of self-defense? To me that just means you want to use your preferred definition.”

            My understanding of your position was that you didn’t think #5 was.

            I would prefer Paul’s formulation of #1: “As far as it depends on you, live at peace with all men.”

            As for #4, I see it as falling under tactical rather than moral concerns. If a police officer sees a probable threat incoming, they put their hand on their sidearm in preparation to draw, and begin shouting commands. If they see a definite threat incoming, they draw and aim and begin shouting commands. If they are outright attacked, they draw and begin firing back. If they are threatened without warning, they may comply or fight as they judge the situation dictates. So it is for armed citizens.

            In my experience, the Gun Control movement has historically attacked the right of self-defense along three lines:

            a> Self-defense is ineffective and/or counter-productively dangerous. This claim directly contradicts the available evidence, which shows that self-defense via firearms is safer for the citizen than any other form, and considerably safer than compliance with criminal demands.

            b> Self-defense is unnecessary, because protection is provided by the police. This directly contradicts well-established legal decisions and principles across the entire world, which have consistently held that the police exist to enforce the law, not to provide protection to individual citizens.

            c> self-defense is immoral, because the harm caused by thieves does not justify killing them. This ignores the reality that thieves are more or less indistinguishable from murderers, certianly in the moment and to a lesser extent statistically. It also is wrong in and of itself. If someone chooses to threaten me with harm, their safety is no longer my primary concern. That does not mean that killing them becomes my primary goal, but it is an acceptable outcome.

            The stubborn insistence on these three ideas, in the face of all available evidence showing the contrary, is why I do not believe the average gun control advocate respects the right of self defense, and why I find Eric’s formulation credible.

            “As to the unalloyed good part, the right of self-defense is only as good as one’s perception of threat is accurate.”

            I would say that the right only applies to legitimate threats, so yes. [EDIT] – I would also say that this assumption is baked into the original statement. Self defense from legitimate threats is an unalienable human right, and an unalloyed good.

            “So, the guy who shot a stranded motorist in cold blood because she was on his front porch at night? That would seem to be a case of mis-perceiving threat.”

            That sounds like criminal error on the part of the homeowner.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Faceless Craven:
            I think we can agree that no one is perfect. Given that, it’s tautological to say that you will mis-perceive threat some of the time. Given that, it’s not unwarranted for me to claim that the right is not an unalloyed good.

            That is why I think it is important to formulate self-defense as all five of the elements I named.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HeelBearCub – “I think we can agree that no one is perfect. Given that, it’s tautological to say that you will mis-perceive threat some of the time. Given that, it’s not unwarranted for me to claim that the right is not an unalloyed good.”

            People have the right to speak as they please, and to think as they please, which means sometimes people speak and think in harmful ways. Misuse of a right does not make the right a few degrees more evil. By your definition, there are no unalloyed goods, at which point our disagreement is merely semantic. My point is that the right to self-defense is as precious to me as my right to think and speak as I please. It is a fundamental part of my autonomy as a human being, and neither laws nor popular disapproval may strip me of it. To the extent that they try, they become forces of evil.

            “That is why I think it is important to formulate self-defense as all five of the elements I named.”

            If you stated #4 as “de-escalate if possible”, I would have no argument. But you phrased it as “submit”, when your subsequent statements make it seem like what you actually mean is “submit if you think it will improve the outcome”. Even the latter, I have no real disagreement with, but “if you think it will improve the outcome” is a judgement call. I think a person seeing the attack coming, preparing to draw, and in so doing causing the attacker to walk away is a better outcome than the same person being mugged, but that appears to violate your #4.

            …Its also possible that the difference comes from martial arts self-defense, versus firearms self-defense. The latter gives you a very large advantage for minimal cost if you have the initiative, the former does not. Defending yourself with a gun can end a fight before it starts, without firing a shot. There is no way I know to reliably do that with any martial art.

          • Harold says:

            Defending yourself with a gun can end a fight before it starts, without firing a shot.

            A very good point, and confirmed by the survey data, which says the majority of gun self-defense incidents entail no shots being fired. Shots that miss will also be less harmful that proving kinetically that, yes, indeed, you have the martial arts to back up your carriage.

            Although I’ll note the latter can also prevent specific incidents, as I’m pretty sure happened 3 or so times in the dozen years I was in the Boston area. Weasel word specific used because with essentially nothing happening it’s likely that the likely criminals just found easier marks later, whereas being faced with a gun might put them off their game for a while.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Faceless Craven:
            If you look over my comments, you’ll see I haven’t even called for increased gun control, let alone gun confiscation. I’m not sure how possible effective gun-control is in the US, and I don’t think outright prohibition would be good and probably not effective. I only say this because, the way I am reading your comments, (and the sub-thread we are in) seems to indicate that you are perceiving ill-intent on my part. My goal is to get you to understand my mindset, as someone who generally is in favor of effective gun control. (And you can read effective here as “effective in reducing harm”).

            Now, with that said, which is a worse outcome: giving up your wallet, or shooting and perhaps killing someone?

            I don’t want to assume you answer, so I’ll just wait for a reply.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            HeelBearCub – “I only say this because, the way I am reading your comments, (and the sub-thread we are in) seems to indicate that you are perceiving ill-intent on my part.”

            Not ill-intent, just deep, fundamental disagreement. [EDIT] – I don’t think you want to make things worse for people; I do think your philosophy does make things worse for people.

            “Now, with that said, which is a worse outcome: giving up your wallet, or shooting and perhaps killing someone?”

            phrased that way, shooting someone is absolutely worse.

            Which is worse:

            a> complying with a mugging – 10% chance of you being injured, 1% chance of the mugger getting injured due to you having to fight anyway.

            b> resisting with a firearm – 5% chance of you getting injured, 30% chance of the mugger getting injured.

            …the wallet isn’t the issue. if I understand your position correctly, you hold that a> would be better, because the absolute chance of injury is lower. I think that b> is better, because the chance of the innocent party getting injured is lower.

            I think that making the innocent party significantly safer is worth a disproportionate increase of risk for the attacker. I also believe that the above is a worst-possible-world example; in the real world, I think the decrease of risk for the defender is much larger, and the increase of risk for the attacker is much smaller. In fact, I think it is at least arguable that self-defense with a gun is safer *for the criminal* than compliance, based on the criminology data.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Faceless Craven:
            I’m not willing to guess at statistics. Perhaps that is what it boils down to, but I think there are some logical gates we need to pass through that I think will reveal our real fundamental disagreement, assuming it exists.

            Going back to an earlier statement:
            “I think a person seeing the attack coming, preparing to draw, and in so doing causing the attacker to walk away is a better outcome than the same person being mugged”

            Now, I would put this in category three, not 4 or 5. Taking some action that cause the mugging not to happen at all is avoidance.

            But at what point do you actually draw your weapon? After they have approached you and asked for your wallet? To late for avoidance at that point, you are in “submit or fight” mode. Trying to quick draw on someone who is already in melee range seems like bad situation management as well.

            It seems you have to draw your weapon before they have asked for the wallet. Don’t you? Before they even get inside arms reach.

            Perhaps this isn’t what they teach in weapon defense class. But given that one of the biggest advantages of a gun is range, this would seem odd.

            So that means you are escalating situations and pretty much taking option #4 off the table. Once you have deployed your weapon, you aren’t going to give them the weapon, and they aren’t likely to take only the wallet.

            How many times are you threatening people with a gun (whether demonstrably preparing to deploy or deploying) for each actual mugging deterred? When you threaten to use a gun on someone who actual has no intent of doing you harm, is this corrosive to the peace of society?

            I live in a neighborhood that is fairly well off, in a city that is quite decidedly more mixed in outcome. We go through little spates where some people get broken into. In a community of over 200 houses, we might average 1 or 2 break ins a year. Almost always daytime, usually with no one home.

            Now, if I wanted to protect my home from the chance of said break-ins, how many times would I need to deploy my weapon before I could reasonably expect that the deployment would actually stop someone in the act of breaking-in? What are the odds that if a break-in occurs I will even be there? How many times would I need to prepare myself to unholster my weapon on the chance that it is that one time that I am home during a break-in?

            The fact that I would consistently need to be in a state where I am preparing to kill someone doesn’t sit well with me. Far better in my eyes, and I think proven far more effective, to work for a society where this is not necessary or warranted.

            Does make me someone who hates freedom? Someone who want to strange the spirit of liberty? I hope that you don’t think so.

          • Echo says:

            Not to mention that it makes the attacker’s risk much harder for him to estimate, which is essential to increasing his risk/reward ratio and dissuading criminal activity.

            The attacker gets to choose his target, and will always go for the most vulnerable-looking one at the most convenient time. The one patrolling police officer needs to protect everyone–the mugger just needs to find one easy victim in order to face zero risk.

            Knowing that 7% of vulnerable-looking people are actually as deadly as my old Korean landlady sets a floor on the potential risk of mugging people.

            And yes, any increased risk to the mugger’s life is a positive thing, because it pushes him towards life choices other than “victimize innocent people”.

            edit:
            >How many times would I need to prepare myself to unholster my weapon on the chance that it is that one time that I am home during a break-in?
            What? I don’t see how this makes sense at all. If you’re at home and hear your door get smashed open, I hope you’re mentally prepared to defend yourself…

            I know an old nurse who is always scared about coming home to a break-in, because the local scum all know she has drugs in her isolated house at end of a country lane.
            She would never consider doing anything about her fear (though she’s considering NPR’s advice to ‘get a dog’), so she lives in it constantly.
            If you would rather I be forced to live like that, we have a serious problem on our hands.

          • Dr Dealgood says:

            Someone who has “no intent of doing you harm” wouldn’t be mugging you, almost by definition. Having muggers running around is much more corrosive to society than their potential victims being able to defend themselves.

          • “which is a worse outcome: giving up your wallet, or shooting and perhaps killing someone?”

            That depends in part on the elasticity of supply of muggings.

            Giving up your wallet signals that mugging is profitable and tends to result in more of it. Shooting a mugger has the opposite effect. If, to take an extreme case, the difference between the two effects is a thousand muggings a year, then shooting the mugger is, from a consequentialist point of view, probably better–if nothing else, a thousand muggings will probably result in more than one death, either of victim or mugger.

            If the point isn’t obvious, try applying the same analysis to criminal punishment. Locking up for many years someone who has committed one murder under circumstances that make it unlikely he will commit another looks obviously inferior to turning him loose–until you think about the incentive effects on the next person considering murder.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HeelBearCub – “I’m not willing to guess at statistics.”

            Then don’t guess.
            http://www.constitution.org/2ll/2ndschol/58tenn.pdf
            page 20, and see also the footnotes.

            …gun-armed victims who resist felons are roughly 50% less likely to be
            injured than those who submit and 67% less likely to be injured than those resisting with some other
            kind of weapon.

            …and given that actual defensive shootings are a rounding error compared to even the lowest estimate of yearly defensive gun usage, again, I think it’s safer for the robbers as well. Numbers via Kleck; if anyone has better ones, I’d be happy to see them.

            “Now, I would put this in category three, not 4 or 5. Taking some action that cause the mugging not to happen at all is avoidance.”

            Again, all the evidence I’ve seen indicates that is the vast, vast majority of DGUs.

            “But at what point do you actually draw your weapon? After they have approached you and asked for your wallet? To late for avoidance at that point, you are in “submit or fight” mode. Trying to quick draw on someone who is already in melee range seems like bad situation management as well.”

            Indeed.
            http://monsterhunternation.com/2010/09/23/role-playing-for-ccw-its-not-just-for-geeks-anymore/
            Check out the first scenario in the CCW training examples:

            “If the student acts like a victim, the knife comes out and I rob the hell out of them. If the student isn’t a victim and attempts to just get away, or they’re aggressive back, I let them go. It is amazing how many people are programmed to be super polite, even in the face of a abnormal aggression. Criminals love that.

            Just like real criminals, if they look like food, I eat them. If they’re timid, and they let me get close, it is too late. The knife comes out, I press it against their face and start screaming “Gimme the money! Gimme your wallet!” and I try to be friggin’ scary. At that point, most actually give me the money. Some go for the gun and I stab them. Either way, I’ll stop it there and we’ll discuss. (the wide-eyed stare of HOLY CRAP when that happens is so fun).”

            …Then again, there’s this guy:

            “The single most interesting one I ever had was somebody that screwed up and let me corner him. The knife came out, he said sure, take it, pulled out his wallet and dropped it on the floor. Unconsciously, I bent over to pick up his wallet, and he drew his gun and shot me in the top of the head. That made for some excellent (and lively!) class discussion.”

            …50% safer than compliance, yes?

            “It seems you have to draw your weapon before they have asked for the wallet. Don’t you? Before they even get inside arms reach.”

            As I understand it, you don’t draw unless the threat is obvious. As with the policeman example, though, you still have the option to put your hand on the gun and prepare to draw, and to challenge the potential attacker verbally. To my understanding this is what the police are trained to do with an ambiguous threat; you disambiguate while you still have the range advantage to work with.

            “So that means you are escalating situations and pretty much taking option #4 off the table.”

            Not so. If they manage to sneak up on you, submitting is still an option. If you can keep them from sneaking up on you, do so.

            “How many times are you threatening people with a gun (whether demonstrably preparing to deploy or deploying) for each actual mugging deterred?”

            My guess would be not very many. People are actually very good at picking up on when a situation has gone bad; the problem is most have no theory or practice about how exactly to respond, and ingrained habits from living in an absurdly safe environment all their life work against them.

            “When you threaten to use a gun on someone who actual has no intent of doing you harm, is this corrosive to the peace of society?”

            There’s somewhere around a million DGUs per year in the United States, and we seem to be doing okay.

            “The fact that I would consistently need to be in a state where I am preparing to kill someone doesn’t sit well with me.”

            Then don’t do so. Your choice. I live in that state whenever I’m in public, and have since I was a teen, and do not find it unpleasant or burdensome. To me, it’s simply part of being careful. For the record, I do not carry a gun. The one time I’ve ever really, really wished I was carrying was, of course, when I visited London on a vacation through England.

            “Far better in my eyes, and I think proven far more effective, to work for a society where this is not necessary or warranted.”

            Proven far more effective how? And I think such a society will not and cannot exist. There will always be some level of crime, and armed, law-abiding citizens pose no appreciable danger to the rest of society. Again, not a hypothetical; most states in the country allow CCW, and we have the statistics to prove that CCW-holders are safer and less criminal than the general population. What I’m describing is the status quo.

            “Does make me someone who hates freedom? Someone who want to strangle the spirit of liberty? I hope that you don’t think so.”

            I think the idea that self-defense can be rendered obsolete is dangerous. Attempts to do so will fail, and will put more people in greater danger. And yes, I think a desire to do so is intrinsically opposed to my understanding of both freedom and liberty. I do not think that makes you an evil person. I do think it makes you dangerously wrong.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Faceless Craven:
            Fair enough. You think I’m dangerously wrong. I’m not sure why you think it works in Europe and not here but fair enough.

            But, let me go back to the beginning.

            “That is, many of us believe that the actual intent of gun control advocates is to not just the obvious one of reducing individuals to a condition of helplessness against state power, but a more subtle program of psychological warfare against the free mind.”

            Do you think that is my intent?

            Because that is what you came in here to state. You said that “it seems to me to be a reasonably accurate assessment of the mindset underlying the opposition.” In other words, you thought it that it is my intent to “reduce individuals to a state of helplessness vs. the state”.

            And yet at no point have we talked about the state. Or how helpless people should be before it. We are talking about how effective guns are in self-defense, and how much positive and negative utility they have in that context. We have different views about it, but that is the meat of our disagreement.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ HeelBearCub
            #4 was always taught to me in a similar manner to the following:
            If a mugger asks you for your wallet, give them your wallet, unless you believe that giving them your wallet won’t end the situation peacefully.

            It’s not “submit to being beaten” it’s “submit to the demand so as to avoid the fight. Fight if fighting cannot be avoided”.

            Perhaps unfortunately, my instinctual reaction to this idea is to consider cross-dressing. If I carried a wallet instead of a purse, I’d construct a fake wallet full of mace and dye, and if practical a noise-maker, all triggered when the mugger opens it.

            With of course no real ID to link back to me, and if possible, some stick to his fingers epoxy as well.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ David Friedman
            “which is a worse outcome: giving up your wallet, or shooting and perhaps killing someone?”

            That depends in part on the elasticity of supply of muggings.

            Lol. Welcome back.

          • Echo says:

            The ideal “defensive gun use” is a slight change in posture and a brief moment of eye contact that communicates “I know you know that I know, so let’s not and pretend you never thought about it”.

            It’s more subtle than any stupid “martial arts” style body language used to indicate preparedness, and you don’t even have to be armed or physically intimidating to use it… as long as that 5-7% of concealed carry holders exist as a “threat in being”.

            Much better than the “clutch your car keys in fear and get ready to blow your rape whistle really aggressively” strategy they taught us in California. 🙂

            This outcome is considered worse than ideal, but is still much better than a mugging taking place, no?

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HeelBearCub – “I’m not sure why you think it works in Europe and not here but fair enough.”

            It doesn’t work in Europe. We can get into a long discussion about proving that if you’d like, but there are a number of well-established reasons why Europe is not a good example for why self-defense is unnecessary in America. On a personal note, London, England remains the only major city I’ve visited or lived in where I’ve been casually threatened with violence on the street.

            “Do you think that is my intent?”

            I don’t really know you well enough to answer that. Are you a reasonably average member of the pro-control group? Do you agree with and support the views of its leaders? I do know a very great deal about the views and positions of the Gun Control movement, though, and you seem to be claiming to be a member. Certainly saying things like: “Far better in my eyes, and I think proven far more effective, to work for a society where this is not necessary or warranted.” lead me to conclude your thinking is similar to theirs. To me, that sounds like the positive-spin version of Eric’s max-negative-spin formulation. I know that what the Gun Control movement has typically described as “working for a better, more peaceful society” I have very little trouble with the claim that it is “[not only] reducing individuals to a condition of helplessness against state power, but a more subtle program of psychological warfare against the free mind.”

            “And yet at no point have we talked about the state. Or how helpless people should be before it.”

            The only two possible sources of defensive force are the self or the state. If self-defense is minimized or removed, it will necessarily be replaced by state power. I strongly suspect something along those lines would be involved in creating the society you mentioned, but would be happy to be proven wrong.

            I also raised the point of armed resistance of the state, or the threat of same, being a good thing much as self defense itself is good, a point that is usually scoffed at or used as evidence of irrationality by those on the pro-control side, despite quite a few examples in recent american history on a diverse range of points on the political spectrum.

            For what it’s worth, thank you for the conversation. I get the impression you aren’t enjoying it much, but it is not my intention to be rude or abrasive. Mainly, I am trying to illuminate the deep, fundamental divide in philosophy and accepted fact that separate the pro- and anti-gun positions.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Faceless Craven:
            No, I’m not enjoying it very much.

            You are claiming I want your subjugation. That is a bold claim. If I enjoyed being so accused, then I might be the kind of person who actually did want your subjugation.

            It’s precisely these kinds of claims, and associated counter claims, that make it hard to generally have polite conversation around difficult topics.

            If you and/or Eric were content to talk unintended consequences that would be one thing. But apparently that is not enough. Rather you must accuse those that think “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” of being purposely arrayed against freedom and liberty.

            This is, frankly, mystifying to me. Unless what you mean by “freedom and liberty” is not freedom within the nation, as governed by its constitution and laws, but freedom from the nation and from civil society as a whole. I don’t think that is what you mean. Otherwise, I don’t see why working towards a society where violent self-defense is less and less necessary is anathema to freedom.

            And because I don’t see why, it’s horrible thinking on your point to model “loss of freedom” as my end goal.

          • Echo says:

            >”where violent self-defense is less and less necessary”

            You are perhaps confusing “less necessary” with “less possible”?
            By all means let’s make violent self-defense less necessary, as it is most of the time in many of our counties… but understand the suspicion towards making it less possible when necessary.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @echo:
            Again, my model is that being consistently ready to kill is corrosive. And that guns being loosely available is also corrosive. Think of these as negative externalities to broad ownership, even if you contend your ownership has no negative effect.

            As an aside, note that I haven’t even proposed any specific changes. I think the Czech model would be a huge improvement, provided it could be implemented correctly. But what I’m thinking of as gun control policy doesn’t really speak to what my intent is in supporting it.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Echo:
            Earlier you said:
            “If you’re at home and hear your door get smashed open, I hope you’re mentally prepared to defend yourself…”

            I saw mention of an incident today that brought this to mind.

            I think what we have here is a type-1/type-2 problem. When you get a false positive for threat here is what can happen. Obviously any one event means little from a statistical perspective, and obviously it isn’t as if you didn’t already know these events can and do occur.

            But I think it illustrates well the idea that, when you assess threat, you will make mistakes. This is incontrovertible. No one will correctly assess threat 100% of the time. It strikes me that you were implicitly making the argument that you could completely avoid type-1 errors. I don’t think this is the case, and I think proper firearm defense techniques actually encourages you to err on the side of making them, insofar as when you prepare or deploy your weapon.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HeelBearCub – “You are claiming I want your subjugation. ”

            Grah.

            I understand that Eric is saying that fairly explicitly, and it is very uncharitable to do so. I am trying to point out that there is a fundamental disconnect in values, such that simply saying “that’s a lie, we don’t want that” isn’t actually going to solve anything. Others have pointed out the similarity of the abortion debate, and I think it might be a good example. There is not a lot of room for compromise in that debate, because the disagreement is over values that are more or less fundamental: personal autonomy on one side and preservation of innocent life on the other. From the pro-life frame, the pro-choice people really do support things that result in killing millions of babies. From the pro-choice frame, pro-life people really do want things they see as oppressive and harmful to millions of women. At some point, there’s no more room for object-level compromise, and you have to get down to convincing people to change their values.

            Eric frames his opponents as villains. I am not particularly interested in doing that in this debate, because this is a high-charity place and I’d like it to stay that way. At the same time, while I may disagree with his phrasing, I think the core assessment is accurate: pro-self-defense people hold values that are repugnant to pro-safety people, and vice versa. To the extent that I understand your position, I think I disagree strongly, but I’m trying to talk about it dispassionately rather than just calling you names. To the extent I’m failing at that, I apologize. At the same time, while he may make his point in an unnecessarily offensive way, I believe he does actually have a valid point to make. It is not, as you and HBoS implied, all in his head.

            “If you and/or Eric were content to talk unintended consequences that would be one thing. But apparently that is not enough.”

            I think the problem isn’t just unintended consequences. Pro-safety people are trying to eliminate violence as a whole, and take the wide view of the interests of society at large. Pro-defense people are trying to make sure violence is used justly, and take the narrow view of the interests of the individual. I’m not sure I’m willing to commit to self-defense being a terminal value, but I’m not far off from there myself. I am at least willing to entertain the idea of a MORE violent society being acceptable, as long as self-defense is preserved. Fortunately, I don’t think that’s the world we actually live in.

            “Rather you must accuse those that think “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” of being purposely arrayed against freedom and liberty.”

            ‘An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind’ suggests that self-defense is inherently retributive, a tragedy, a net negative. As I’ve been pointing out, self-defense may actually be less violent, and thus a net benefit under your own values. Even if it is not, I see violence, both legitimate and not, as an inevitable consequence of liberty and freedom, not as a bug that can and should be ironed out. I believe that efforts to directly control or eliminate it will instead damage liberty instead, either intentionally or unintentionally. Prosperity and justice seem to reduce it as a byproduct, and I am all for both, but violence in and of itself seems to me to be a symptom of societal health, not a disease.

            “Unless what you mean by “freedom and liberty” is not freedom within the nation, as governed by its constitution and laws, but freedom from the nation and from civil society as a whole.”

            To some extent, yes. Civil Society and the Nation as a whole have great value, but that value is not unbounded. When grievances against some segment of the population outweigh that value, threatened or actual violent resistance may be a valid option. “No justice, no peace”, right? Note that this is not a “we gotta fight da gubbmint” fantasy; such resistance has happened a number of times in the recent political past, from Waco, Ruby Ridge, and the current Oregon standoff to the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, Leonard Peltier, Wiebo Ludwig, and the sorts of riots of which Ferguson may be a recent example, and on the whole I argue the net effect has been a positive one. Peace and order are not terminal values for me. If people feel the need to fight for what they believe in, I want them to be able to. I do not want to live in Europe, or even Japan. I like our system better.

            If you want to make a world where legitimate violence is less and less necessary, I am happy to support that. But my experience has been that pro-safety efforts are aimed at the the capacity of the individual to be violent, which is vastly easier to eliminate than creating actual justice and prosperity. The result strikes me as similar to Scott’s objection to people arguing about “doing something about suicide”, where he noted that “doing something” frequently seems to amount to taking away the one solution they actually have, without actually helping with the problems that drive them to it. I am not willing to accept that in either case.

            “Again, my model is that being consistently ready to kill is corrosive. And that guns being loosely available is also corrosive.”

            Then you should be able to prove that harm statistically, because both are the reality we’ve been living in for decades, if not centuries. Scott’s essays were the best effort I’ve seen at doing so in two decades of looking, but he appears to have completely overlooked the most significant positive externalities of firearms ownership and use. Defensive gun use is so non-harmful that its very existence is still rejected by some pro-safety hardliners to this day, despite solid evidence of its existence.

            “I don’t think this is the case, and I think proper firearm defense techniques actually encourages you to err on the side of making them, insofar as when you prepare or deploy your weapon.”

            The statistics say otherwise. Can you show that they are wrong?

            Again, my apologies for any offense caused, and thank you for engaging as politely as you have despite significant provocation. For what it’s worth, I’ve found this conversation to be valuable and illuminating.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Faceless Craven:
            I really admire your willingness to engage in actual substantive conversation. I mean that absolutely sincerely.

            One thing I want to point back at is that I did say that I do not think the elimination of guns would be a good thing. I believe this, even though I, personally, don’t choose to own guns.

            I haven’t been offended by what you said, but rather frustrated. I chose to be more blunt in the last post because I wanted it to be clear how the statements read to me. I still don’t think you understand where I am coming from.

            I view an effective government, including an effective police force, as essential to civil society. They are what make it possible for 9 million people to live together on a small island, for 320 million people to live together in one nation. There are no infinite horizons where you get to live without the benefits and obligations of a governed society, no matter how much it might appear that way if you stand in the right place in Wyoming.

            I view this as fact to be reckoned with, the law of limited resources. We have to do our best to live together, for there is no other choice. It’s not that I want people to be subjected to government, but rather I see no alternative to government of the people, by the people and for the people.

            Although I think it is in our nature to do harm to others, I don’t think this is inevitable. Each time we, as a society, produce an individual who purposefully harms others, it is a missed opportunity.

            I think I am obligated to you, because we are in this life together. I want a more perfect union.

            Call me naive, call me a dreamer, if you must. But don’t say my goal is for you to be weaker, when all I want is for all of us to be stronger.

          • “I view an effective government, including an effective police force, as essential to civil society. ”

            So England had no civil society at all until 1829, and then only in London? Iceland certainly not before 1263, and probably not for many centuries thereafter. Athens not in the age of Pericles or for a very long time thereafter.

            There are a lot of different ways in which human beings have organized their societies. Law enforcement via a police force is only one option.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HeelBearCub – Thank you for the kind words. They mean a lot. I know we don’t agree much, but the sort of conversations we tend to have are why I come here.

            “One thing I want to point back at is that I did say that I do not think the elimination of guns would be a good thing.”

            I know, and my apologies if I harped on guns too much. The main reason I came into the discussion was the values question, but I let object-level stuff get mixed in.

            “I still don’t think you understand where I am coming from.”

            I really don’t. I have a model, but I’m aware that it’s mostly based on pattern matching things you say to other things I’ve read or heard from many other people. A lot of my questions have been aimed at trying to map out your specific beliefs and values, but some you didn’t answer and some answers I couldn’t parse. That’s why I fell back on trying to outline my thinking as clearly as possible, so you could get a better model of me and help me out. Has it worked?

            “I view an effective government, including an effective police force, as essential to civil society. ”

            Everything in your most recent post, I read and agree with. Peace, order, and cooperation are precious to me. I think Democracy works well enough on the balance; I’m not an an-cap or an extreme libertarian, I don’t think we need to tip society into the dustbin and start over with some radically different plan. I want to keep what we have now, and improve on it as we go. If that’s as far as it went, we’d be in perfect agreement.

            But I think there’s more to it.

            I don’t think you’re a cackling big-brother advocate, or a throwback dreamer, or some hippy singing kumbiyah. I think you are a moderate, reasonable person who wants to make society safer, and I think your instinct is to do it by making violence less effective and/or harder to use. I very well could be wrong about this, but certainly that seems to be the method preferred by most more-or-less moderate, reasonable people I’ve encountered.

            I think that’s something that those moderate, reasonable people can actually make happen. I also think it is a bad idea, and worry that my objection will probably seem vaguely monstrous or perverse to such people. Perhaps not, but I don’t see a lot of people talking about why the potential for violence is valuable or necessary, and I think a certain level of it is both. Potential violence is like the pain signal in our bodies: it tells us that there’s something wrong. Too much of it and we are crippled; not enough of it, and we can’t tell we’re harming ourselves. I think we have about the right amount of potential violence, if not the right amount of actual violence, and I want to keep it that way. Guns are only a small part of that; attitudes toward violence are much more.

            Anyway, that’s the best I can do for describing my model of you and my model of me, as far as this goes. Does any of that make sense?

            @David Friedman – I think there’s a presumed “at our scale” in there. While there are a lot of other models tried through history, I don’t see a lot of multi-million-plus, super-dense urban populations getting by without effective government and law enforcement of some description in history or the current era. Maybe it’s possible, but it doesn’t seem common.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Faceless Craven:
            “I know we don’t agree much, but the sort of conversations we tend to have are why I come here.”

            I think if we were to do anything social together, we would probably find we agree on a great deal. Disagreement is where the interesting conversation is.

            “That’s why I fell back on trying to outline my thinking as clearly as possible, so you could get a better model of me and help me out. Has it worked?”

            Mmmm, maybe, maybe not. I think I already had a fairly good model of you on this question. But then, I was mostly trying to get to the point of trying to get you to understand why Raymond’s model of me is bad.

            “I think your instinct is to do it by making violence less effective and/or harder to use.”

            I think I would disagree with this, perhaps you would qualify it as a quibble, but I think there is some meat here.

            Russia and the US no longer have their ICBMs targeted at each other. One could say this is a meaningless gesture. I would say it is simply a gesture, but it is hardly meaningless. It’s a statement about how much and what kind of threat they think they pose to each other. By indicating that we perceive Russia as less of a threat, they perceive us as less of a threat. This can be a virtuous cycle.

            Similarly, each time someone employs a firearm in a gesture of self defense, they tell the other person that they perceive them as a threat. To the extent this is done when there is no actual threat, it is a bad thing. It raises the overall threat level of society.

            The reductios on each side of this are fairly obvious. I fully admit that a society with “no guns at all” isn’t even possible but I also don’t think it would be particularly good. We had that world (with much worse government) and it wasn’t better. Similarly, I would hope the idea of a society where everyone had a quick draw holster strapped to their leg at all times and drew their gun each time they felt any threat strikes you as demonstrably worse than the one we live in.

            So, I am approaching your thought, that I want to improve society by making less effective and harder to use from the other end and saying “when we stop treating people as threats, we improve society”.

            Obviously, that depends on the person not being an actual threat, but again this gets back to type-1 vs. type-2 errors. Actual violent threat is rare. In order to be prepared to use a gun, you have to carry the gun. This can be looked at as a consistent type-1 error. You are raising your own actual threat level and telling everyone else that you view them as a threat.

            I have more thoughts and I will come back add them later. I hope it has been helpful.

          • “I don’t see a lot of multi-million-plus, super-dense urban populations getting by without effective government and law enforcement of some description in history or the current era.”

            Neither the original claim nor the sort of argument it’s based on is limited to “super-dense urban populations.” There have been quite a lot of functional stateless societies in conditions very different from ours. There have been functional societies, with populations in the millions, without what we would recognize as a police force and separated from us by less than two centuries.

            It’s a mistake to conflate “government” with “law enforcement.” Government is one way in which rules get enforced, but there are others.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          @HeelBearCub – “Disagreement is where the interesting conversation is.”

          Truth!

          “Russia and the US no longer have their ICBMs targeted at each other. One could say this is a meaningless gesture. I would say it is simply a gesture, but it is hardly meaningless. It’s a statement about how much and what kind of threat they think they pose to each other. By indicating that we perceive Russia as less of a threat, they perceive us as less of a threat. This can be a virtuous cycle.”

          I’d totally agree. I don’t want Russia using the Dead Hand/PERIMETER system, and I don’t want the pentagon actively working to implement a nuclear first-strike. Those are both examples of violence being too easy. But I don’t want either us or Russia to completely dismantle our nuclear arsenal either. Based on your comments about not wanting to ban guns, I suppose you’d agree with that as well. hmm.

          “Similarly, each time someone employs a firearm in a gesture of self defense, they tell the other person that they perceive them as a threat. To the extent this is done when there is no actual threat, it is a bad thing. It raises the overall threat level of society.”

          Agreed.

          “Actual violent threat is rare. In order to be prepared to use a gun, you have to carry the gun. This can be looked at as a consistent type-1 error.”

          Does it have to be? I’d agree that threatening, even just with your hand and eye, is a type-1 error if the person isn’t a threat. The mere presence of a weapon, holstered or slung, doesn’t feel like one, though. Being around open-carry types is fine as long as they’re acting in a civil manner, at least for me. Like, I’m immediately aware that the gun isn’t there for me, because I’m a law-abiding citizen myself, and in fact seeing them openly wearing a gun tells me they’re probably my kind of people. I’m pretty sure that would still be true if they were somehow obviously out-group. Likewise with concealed carry, the weapon is invisible until you use it to make a credible threat, so the question would hinge on whether false alarms are common.

          Stepping away from the self-defense question, what do you think about the usefulness of violence threatened or actual on a civil-disobedience level? Stuff like the current standoff in Oregon, the Ferguson riots, or the Black Panthers?

          @David Friedman – Grah. I haven’t read your book, and so cannot really reply coherently. I need to sometime soon. Apologies for my presumption.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @FacelessCraven:
            Might be too late for you to see this. Not sure.

            “Does it have to be? I’d agree that threatening, even just with your hand and eye, is a type-1 error if the person isn’t a threat. The mere presence of a weapon, holstered or slung, doesn’t feel like one, though.”

            I think we have established in principal that, for a large number of actual threats, you can’t wait until an actual threat manifests. You have to signal to the potential threat that you view them as a potential threat. That seems to be an explicit bias towards type-1 error.

            Now, do you wear your gun while you are in your own house? Do you wear while you are working out? Surely it is not only because it is impractical or the gun is close enough to hand. Some part of it is “I am in a less controlled environment just walking down the street, therefore I will wear a concealed weapon”. That seems like type-1 bias to me, of the form “I’d rather be armed and not need it than unarmed and need it.”

            “Stepping away from the self-defense question, what do you think about the usefulness of violence threatened or actual on a civil-disobedience level? Stuff like the current standoff in Oregon, the Ferguson riots, or the Black Panthers?”

            I think there are some big differences between a) engaging in violence b) threatening violence and c) civil disobedience.

            Civil disobedience seems to me to rise and fall much more on the merits of the cause advocated for. Yes, there are negative externalities, but civil disobedience usually rests on the principle of the actor taking significant negative consequences onto themselves.

            Engaging in or threatening violence will bring more swift and immediate attention to the particular cause being advocated for, but it comes at a much greater cost. As such it seems like it only very rarely is merited.

            I do think there is a big difference between planned violence and spontaneous violence. I also think there is a difference between violence that is the result of long suffered injustice and that which is done only to stop a perceived new injustice. Compare the NYC draft riots in 1863 (ethnic Irish, new draft policy, long standing persecution) with the Wilmington, NC insurrection of 1898 (essentially a coup d’état against the newly elected bi-racial town government).

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HeelBearCub – Ya, still here.

            “You have to signal to the potential threat that you view them as a potential threat. That seems to be an explicit bias towards type-1 error.”

            more or less agreed.

            “Surely it is not only because it is impractical or the gun is close enough to hand.”

            I think it is that, actually.

            “That seems like type-1 bias to me, of the form ‘I’d rather be armed and not need it than unarmed and need it.'”

            well, that’s certainly the mentality… but again, as an unarmed person, I feel *safer* around someone open-carrying, whether cop or civilian, not more threatened. Still, you’ve proposed a mechanism of harm; how would we measure it from the observable data, and is there any way to mitigate it?

            “Engaging in or threatening violence will bring more swift and immediate attention to the particular cause being advocated for, but it comes at a much greater cost. As such it seems like it only very rarely is merited.”

            Yes, exactly. The thing is, I don’t really trust myself or anyone else to decide which cases are merited in advance. Probably a lot of Californians thought the Black Panthers were unreasonable and irresponsible when they started arming up in public. The Oregonians sounded like irresponsible yahoos based on the media reports I heard initially, until I dug enough to get to the actual background of their claims. Threatened or actual violence appears to me to work as an effective appeal to the public as a whole. It won’t stop powerful actors from getting their way, but it has the potential to make the situation unprofitably messy for them.

            It seems to me that this power is neatly balanced by the vastly increased risk of prison and death implicit in using violence as an appeal. I am not really interested in removing or minimizing that risk for the rebels. The Oregonians have done illegal things, as I understand it, and they should go to jail. Then again, quite a few people at the BLM deserve to lose their jobs, along with the prosecutors who assisted them. Remove the ranchers’ ability to take the stand they have, and the BLM goes on quietly ruining peoples’ lives indefinitely until some more violent form of protest is tried.
            [EDIT] – crap. BLM = Bureau of Land Management in this paragraph, not Black Lives Matter. Ironic that the same acronym shows up in both situations.

            “I do think there is a big difference between planned violence and spontaneous violence.”

            Compare Oregon and Ferguson. Ferguson was at least mostly spontaneous. Oregon was pretty clearly planned. Notably, Oregon has caused a whole lot less actual harm, which I think is a good thing and to be encouraged. Likewise, I would imagine that the Oregon protesters are actually going to suffer considerably more consequences than some of the people who provably incited and encouraged the Ferguson riots. Those consequences are necessary if peace and order are to be maintained.

            If the Oregonian/Black Panther strategy of credibly threatening violence without committing it helps prevent the situation from deteriorating into actual riots, I think it’s a pretty unqualified good. If people abuse it, they do so with the knowledge that people will not support them and they will go to jail or possibly be killed. The police, government, and big business, on the other hand, understand that abusing citizens runs the risk creating a very messy, very public confrontation, and so have some incentive to restrain their rapacity.

            In short, given that the choice is more unplanned actual violence vs planned threat of violence, I definately prefer the latter, as it leaves the option for a peaceful solution open, and limits the scope of the immediate damage.

            “Compare the NYC draft riots in 1863 (ethnic Irish, new draft policy, long standing persecution) with the Wilmington, NC insurrection of 1898 (essentially a coup d’état against the newly elected bi-racial town government).”

            …Was it legal for blacks to own firearms in 1890s North Carolina? Would the Wilmington Insurrection have been possible if the blacks were armed?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Faceless Craven:
            You feel safer around an open carry only because you feel confident that you are “in their tribe” and are unlikely to be perceived as a threat.

            If you were in Compton at midnight and someone walked up to you and they were open carrying, I’m betting you would not feel so safe.

            I don’t really grok the Bundy complaints, but I don’t think they are particularly willing to go to jail. Cliven seems to have consistently lost in court, and Ammon does not seem to be wanted by those he is ostensibly rallying for in Oregon. I don’t know what horrible things you think the BLM has done, but the Bundy’s don’t seem to be trying to publicize them? They mostly seem to have convinced themselves that the Feds shouldn’t own “too much” land.

            I wonder if the details of their complaint matter much to this conversation? I don’t think The Black Panthers or The Weather Underground were justified in what they did insofar as they attempted to secure through violence what they could not through the political system.

            Perhaps the distinction I would make would be that if the political system offers you no possibility of redress against injustice done, taking up arms begins to seem justified. But merely being denied redress is not enough, it’s the foreclosing of the possibility that is they key.

            I guess that makes the Black Panther’s more justifiable, and I don’t know their comprehensive history, but they weren’t very effective, and I don’t sense that they had a plan that even could be effective. If you pick up the gun with great pre-meditation, but have no plan for achieving a more just outcome, then that begins to look like a plan merely for vengeance.

            Edit:
            As to the Wilmington takeover, I think that if the Black citizens had managed to successfully fight off the first attacks, they would have quickly been taken down in an even bloodier conflict. It’s only been very recently where the event stopped being referred to as a “race riot”. The coup enactors successfully framed it as somehow the fault of the blacks even though 100s died, compared to only a few whites.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HeelBearCub – “If you were in Compton at midnight and someone walked up to you and they were open carrying, I’m betting you would not feel so safe.”

            I’d take that bet. Specifically, someone with a plainly visible holster would be less scary to me than someone with no visible weapon. If they mean to do me harm, why let me see the weapon until they’re ready to initiate? Visible weapons avoid conflict rather than promoting it. Likewise, I’m going to expect that the armed gentleman I encounter is going to be a lot less worried about me, since we both know he’s armed. At least, that’s how it seems to me.

            “I don’t know what horrible things you think the BLM has done, but the Bundy’s don’t seem to be trying to publicize them?”

            Tribal bubble? Everything I’ve heard about the actual facts of the matter I got from sympathizers on the net, not the networks.

            “They mostly seem to have convinced themselves that the Feds shouldn’t own ‘too much’ land.”

            To my understanding, the BLM has been using its clout and connections to force citizens to sell it their land. Many don’t want to, and the Bureau has a considerable history of using its federal powers to harass and ruin those who resist. Most recently, by classifying a legal prescribed burn and a backburn, neither of which did any appreciable harm by the BLM’s own assessment, as arson of federal property under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, with a mandatory minimum of five years in prison and fines in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

            “Cliven seems to have consistently lost in court…”

            People who get in the Federal Government’s way tend to have that happen a lot, which is why I think this sort of thing is necessary. For what it’s worth, their first court appearance was a “loss” in that they received a slap on the wrist, and the judge ruled the prosecutors’ requested sentence a violation of the Eighth Amendment.

            “…and Ammon does not seem to be wanted by those he is ostensibly rallying for in Oregon.”

            To my understanding, this is because prosecutors have threatened those he’s rallying for with harsher treatment if they don’t distance themselves from him, a move that seems… well, blatantly villainous, given the rest of the history. But again, forcing those in power to act like monsters in public where we can all watch is why I think this sort of thing is valuable.

            “Perhaps the distinction I would make would be that if the political system offers you no possibility of redress against injustice done, taking up arms begins to seem justified. But merely being denied redress is not enough, it’s the foreclosing of the possibility that is they key.”

            The problem is that this seems like a judgement call, and it’s not one I can make for others. Neither of us know what it’s like to live in Ferguson or to deal with the BLM. If we did, armed resistance would be unnecessary. Based on what I’ve read, the BLM is effectively “foreclosing the possibility of redress”, which is why I am sympathetic to the standoff. But if it weren’t for the standoff, I’d never have heard the facts of the case. This leans me toward armed resistance being a meta-good.

            “I guess that makes the Black Panther’s more justifiable, and I don’t know their comprehensive history, but they weren’t very effective…”

            To what extent was MLK the Good Cop to the Bad Cop of Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and the various race riots of the era? Was White America more receptive to his message when the obvious alternative was a massive increase in violence nation-wide? Likewise, Waco and Ruby Ridge exposed longstanding and serious problems with how our government enforces its laws, and the fact that the Oregon protesters have not yet been shot to death or incinerated is proof of the resulting change.

            My argument isn’t that armed resisters tend to be good people, or that they even have a workable plan. My argument is that armed resistance tends to have positive effects in a tolerably-healthy society. At a certain level of difficulty, it serves as a feedback mechanism, an immune system to injustice. Too easy and it turns into cancer, too hard and the immune system is compromised.

            “….and I don’t sense that they had a plan that even could be effective. If you pick up the gun with great premeditation, but have no plan for achieving a more just outcome, then that begins to look like a plan merely for vengeance.”

            Resistance to aggression *is* a more just outcome. The Warsaw Ghetto did better to fight than it would have to surrender quietly. More generally, my thesis is that the fire of armed resistance illuminates more just outcomes that were not previously visible. The question is whether the resisters have a legitimate complaint, not whether they have a workable solution. If their complaint is legitimate, society as a whole can probably provide a better solution than they can plan out individually.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @FacelessCraven:
            Are you saying that a Cliven Bundy once owned the land he is illegally grazing his cattle on? My understanding is that he stopped paying grazing fees which he had been paying, not that he refused to start paying them.

            I have heard nothing about BLM forcing people to sell land, and I will look for that.

            The Oregon brothers were hunting deer out of season and burned to cover it up is how I understand the central complaint. If that is the case, even an otherwise legal burn is arson, I believe.

            I think that MLK was successful because he managed to get people to see how brutally blacks were treated and no one could mistake it for the police responding to a threat. It did not help the peaceful Ferguson protests that violence broke out late at night. It allowed many to dismiss the improprieties in the police response. Had it remained entirely peaceful it would have been far more effective.

            Each time some act of violence is done to a police officer, Black Lives Matter loses a little bit of whatever momentum it has. So, I disagree that Malcom X helped in general, and even he saw that before the end, which ultimately resulted in his assassination at the hands of his own movement.

            I do think that, to the extent that you can use the threat of violence only in self-defense, this can allow the facts of an injustice to be publicized. But if people got it an armed standoff with the DEA to protest the injustice of crack cocaine sentences I would have a very hard time thinking of that as legitimate, even though the drug war in general and crack cocaine sentences in general are unjust.

            Edit:
            Do you think this article is an accurate summary of the Cliven Bundy situation?

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HeelBearCub – “Do you think this article is an accurate summary of the Cliven Bundy situation?”

            Very much no. Apologies for the red-tribe source, but this:

            http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/01/03/full-story-on-whats-going-on-in-oregon-militia-take-over-malheur-national-wildlife-refuge-in-protest-to-hammond-family-persecution/

            …Is most of the story I’m currently seeing from a number of sources; even this version, though, focuses specifically on the Hammond family, and ignores the background of similar BLM and FWS actions in other parts of the country. Likewise, it only briefly touches the instances of BLM and the FWS badly mishandling their land and wildlife populations.

            “Are you saying that a Cliven Bundy once owned the land he is illegally grazing his cattle on? My understanding is that he stopped paying grazing fees which he had been paying, not that he refused to start paying them.”

            …I know very little about Bundy; most of what I’ve heard is about the Hammond family. The bit of his rhetoric I have heard doesn’t impress me. On the other hand, given the above account, I’m extremely skeptical about any claims of trespass made by the BLM. Note in the above where it’s alleged that the BLM unilaterally and repeatedly revoked grazing permits. My understanding is that most all of the ranchers in the area have either experienced or witnessed the above sort of federal strong-arming first-hand, and they are trying to band together to stop it while there are still enough of them left to make resistance possible.

            “The Oregon brothers were hunting deer out of season and burned to cover it up is how I understand the central complaint. If that is the case, even an otherwise legal burn is arson, I believe.”

            …When was the last time you heard of either poaching or setting of grassfires in the wilderness being charged under a terrorism statute that authorizes the death penalty? That alone should have given anyone hearing the story a very great deal of pause. Likewise, to my understanding, the poaching accusation was made entirely without evidence, as a suggested motive for the fire. Could be wrong about that, though.

            “I think that MLK was successful because he managed to get people to see how brutally blacks were treated and no one could mistake it for the police responding to a threat.”

            I wish I could recall the source, but I remember hearing a historian or somesuch talk about the immense relief in Washington DC when King’s march went down entirely peacefully. People were afraid. They were, in fact, terrified, and given the treatment experienced by blacks nationwide, they damn well should have been. It seems clear to me that without that pressure of impending doom, King’s message of reconciliation would have been far easier to downplay and ignore.

            “It did not help the peaceful Ferguson protests that violence broke out late at night.”

            It may not have helped the protests. It has been argued that it definitely helped the national debate. Again, “No Justice, No Peace”. How many marches and protests are ignored every day? How many injustices don’t even make the local news? “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable” is an idea lurking behind every act of civil disobediance, no matter how peaceful or orderly.

            “So, I disagree that Malcom X helped in general, and even he saw that before the end, which ultimately resulted in his assassination at the hands of his own movement.”

            We may have to agree to disagree. I see Malcolm X’s methods as questionable, and his goals as foolish. So too were those of the Black Panthers movement; I’m no particular fan of Maoism, which I think was their prefered political system. So too, I think, are those of the Bundy group. Again, the value is not in these groups winning and carrying out their plan, it is in the illumination they provide.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @FacelessCraven:
            The article I linked had little to do with the Hammond family and was mostly about the Bundy family.

            If the article you linked is true, it seems awful. On the other hand, it has huge red flags in it that indicate it’s not likely to be anything like the full truth. One small for instance is the clear implication that the judge in the case was in the bag for the BLM and somehow uncaring, including the random statement about serving chocolate cake to celebrate his retirement. But that is the judge who sentenced them to only a few months in jail.

            I’ll look for more info, though.

            I think if, say, the 1965 Selma March had involved blacks torching the downtown in Montgomery there is no way we get the federal civil rights act passing.

            I’m curious, do you think there were peaceful protests in Baltimore post Freddie Gray?

  23. Simon says:

    “If guns are in fact correlated with more homicide, how come me and VerBruggen found the opposite in our simpler scatterplot analysis?”

    Just look at the graph. The trend is obviously driven by an extreme outlier (Washington DC, one can assume from the rest of the discussion) and you can see by eyeballing it that there would be a positive correlation with that one point removed.

  24. Echo says:

    No discussion of the homicide rate over time?

    Because this certainly needs explaining
    http://www.lakelandlocal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/USHistoricalViolenceRates.jpg

    • meyerkev says:

      There’s nothing saying that guns can’t be leading to higher homicide rates at any given time while some other Factor N is leading to changing homicide rates over time.

      • Echo says:

        Yes, but that “factor N” appears to outweigh everything else we’re talking about several times over. Which makes talking about “guns” as a variable we can use to control the murder rate pretty weird.

        • Scott Alexander says:

          Not really. The normal secular engines of economic growth (tech, investment, etc) are obviously vastly more important than whatever the Federal Reserve can do, but it’s still nice to have the Federal Reserve do a good job.

          • 27chaos says:

            I feel like there are many economists who would (IMO foolishly) disagree with this and say the Federal Reserve matters more than anything else.

          • Tibor says:

            Are you sure the only thing to change the murder rate in the US (a little) is to have more restrictive gun laws than some EU countries (that is already the case in some US states anyway)?

            It seems better to me to try to figure out what makes the southern US so violent and what makes Canada (or Wyoming or Switzerland) so peaceful despite high gun ownership. Not only are those factors more important, it is also not clear whether one can do something about them when you don’t identify them exactly. Severely restricting guns seems like worrying about an uneven floor in a house which stands on rotting foundations (and when a good deal of the population likes the floor the way it is and might have some good reasons for it as well).

            In a sense, given how little gun control can do, this seems to me like libertarians debating culture subsidies or libertarians in the EU talking about banned light bulbs when there are 100 bigger problems with the EU. Sure, in principle I think culture should not be subsidized at all, but if you look at what proportion of the budget goes into these subsidies and how fiercely some people defend them, it makes more sense to focus on other things. But reality seems different. Many libertarians spend a lot of their time arguing against these subsidies hoping to reduce the state size that way and the anti-gun people spend a lot of their time arguing arguing against liberal gun laws hoping to reduce violence that way and both do it disproportionately to the effect it would actually have. Not only do they not use their time efficiently with respect to their goals, they also make it look like these issues are the important ones and make everyone forget about other problems – ones where maybe a consensus would be easier.

          • Frank McPike says:

            Just because a factor is more important doesn’t mean that it’s what we should be targeting. Most of the factors underlying crime are presently unknown and difficult to discover, despite a fair amount of effort being expended on the task. And even if we do discover the major drivers of crime, that doesn’t guarantee we’ll be able to do something about them.

            I think the culture of violence hypothesis is rather dubious (and I don’t find the evidence here persuasive), but assuming it’s true, I have no idea how that problem could be fixed. I’m not aware of very many ethical interventions capable of quickly changing a longstanding culture. And even if one did present itself, such a proposal would probably also encounter massive political resistance, perhaps enough to make the intervention unfeasible.

            It’s also possible that the true explanation for American crime rates isn’t one big thing, but a bunch of little things, guns being one of them. If that’s the case, then there’s never going to be any single intervention that massively reduces crime, and the best we can ever do is fix all the little things as they come to our attention.

            (The political resistance to gun control is substantial enough that it probably isn’t the most effective area for anyone to focus on right now, but I don’t think our ignorance of other causes of higher crime rates should make us more hesitant to enact solutions to the ones we do know about when those solutions are cost-effective.)

          • Tibor says:

            Frank: Well, I guess that if you basically had “southern culture of honor” plus “too liberal” gun laws and since there is no easy (and much more freedom-restricting) way to change the culture, then this would make some sense. But my impression is that many anti-gun people just make the conclusion that it is either all about guns or that restricting guns is the only thing that can be done. Maybe it would make sense to first take a look at Switzerland or the Czech Republic which both have very low murder rates and very liberal gun laws (and Switzerland even has a high gun ownership rate) and see if there are some things other than culture there that can be emulated. Maybe they make a better job of limiting the number of illegal weapons for example…they also have a lower GINI index and maybe that has something to do with it as well (not my preferred line of argumentation due to my libertarian bias but maybe there is something about that). Essentially it seems to me that some people are too keen to throw freedom of private gun ownership overboard when there may be better ways of solving the problem, ways that possibly do not limit freedom.

          • Frank McPike says:

            In my experience, most American liberals who support restricting gun ownership also support making America’s policies more like those of low-crime European countries in a variety of other ways as well, including policies that would lower the GINI coefficient. For example, most liberals believe that poverty is a cause of crime and the social welfare programs that reduce poverty should be adopted for (in part) that reason. I think it’s also true that most liberals place a low value on the right to personal gun ownership and often fail to appreciate that others value that right highly. Still, I don’t think they’re guilty of supporting only gun control-related methods of reducing crime.

          • Tibor says:

            @Frank: The point is that there are European (even EU) countries which have both low crime rates (even compared to other European countries) and very liberal gun laws. The Czech gun law is comparable to that of Texas and homicide (and other crime) rate is comparable to Germany, albeit for some reason the gun ownership rate is lower than that of Germany. At the same time it is less socialist than Germany (even though the GINI index of Germany is higher, i.e. more income inequality).

            Switzerland has gun laws on par with most US states, gun ownership rate comparable to that of Canada and one of the lowest crime rates anywhere. Switzerland is also probably more capitalist than the US (although for example in labour laws it is more socialist).

            Since there are countries when things can work well with liberal gun laws and without Scandinavian-style socialism (by the way, Norwegian homicide rate is pretty high – 2.2%), or even with arguably more capitalism than in the US, it seems to make more sense to first try to copy those countries in whatever they are doing well (if it is possible and not due to things like culture or other hard to control things).

          • Frank McPike says:

            There are countries with liberal gun laws and lower crime rates than the US, but this does not mean that guns do not contribute to a higher crime rate in those countries than they would have otherwise. The existence of Switzerland shows that there are factors besides gun control that influence crime rates, not that gun control ceases to have an effect once those other factors are dealt with (and even if that were true in Switzerland, that fact might not generalize to the US). If by altering some other factors the US could reduce its homicide rate to Switzerland levels, that does not mean we could not reduce our homicide rate still further by implementing gun control policies.

            It is possible that there are things about Switzerland we could copy. But, as you note, even if we could discover what those things were, implementing them in the US might well be impossible, politically unfeasible, or unethical. I therefore wouldn’t read too much into the fact that liberals don’t pin their crime reduction hopes on Switzerland in particular, even as they typically support a variety of policies that would make the US more like most low-crime European countries. That said, if you have in mind a particular Swiss or Czech policy that would reduce crime, I’d certainly be interested.

            (One side note: The 2.2 figure for Norway is from 2011, in which Norway had an unusually high murder rate as the result of a single terrorist attack. If you take an average over many years, Norway’s homicide rate seems to be closer to 0.6 or 0.7.)

          • Tibor says:

            Frank:

            @Norway: Right, I forgot about that shooting already.

            @therest: It is also not clear that similar drastic measures would have the same effect on the already low homicide rate of Switzerland as they would have in the current US. It is quite possible that all the 46 Swiss homicides of 2011 (or 41 in 2014) were caused by means other than legally owned firearms. Even if not, Scott’s calculations on what the reduction of gun ownership in the US would do are basically Fermi estimates, they are likely to be correct by the order of magnitude but otherwise one cannot rely on such numbers. This is especially a problem when your murder rate is 0.6 (2011) or 0.5 (2014) all that while having 27% of the households armed like in Switzerland, so to have a similar decrease in crime, you’d have to decrease the gun ownership even more, that means even stricter gun laws. In fact you could not even get to the reduction of 0.8 if your murder rate is already at 0.5-0.6…and you could only get 0.6 this way if all murders were caused by legally owned firearms. Maybe a good measure can be Japan with its murder rate of 0.3. Japan is obviously different from Switzerland in many ways but it is more or less the only country with a lower than Swiss homicide rate which is not a city state and has a significant population (Iceland’s homicide rate for 2012 is also 0.3 which is caused by a single murder and so statistically useless). In Japan, firearms (and even some cold weapons) are basically banned. So maybe if you banned guns entirely the murder rate of Switzerland would drop from 0.5-0.6 to 0.3. That does not seem like a good bargain to me. Of course this is also just guesswork. But if it is more or less accurate and if you could emulate the relevant things that make the Swiss murder rate so low then suddenly restrictive gun policy is just not worth it.

            As far as particular policies go, I would be interested in the ratio of legal and illegal guns in the country. If the Swiss or the Czech ratio is significantly higher than the American one, then it looks like the US is doing something wrong in getting rid of illegal guns. In terms of reducing homicide in general (even that which is not caused by firearms) I would say that ending the so called “war on drugs” would help a lot. Czech drug laws are almost as liberal as those of Portugal, the law specifically says that it is illegal to have more than a “small amount” of drugs, where what is small is based on judicial practice but more or less means something like tens of grams of marijuana, more than a gram or two or cocaine, similarly with heroin and other drugs. Selling drugs is still a criminal act, so drugs are not decriminalized entirely but I think that this still should help reduce crime in general…dunno if homicide as well.

            My personal experience is also that the police usually do not care about marijuana much even if you sell it (I was never selling it but I know people who have a few plants at home and a side income) unless you have something like a greenhouse with 100 plants there (which almost nobody does). This means that less marijuana is sold by organized crime and there will definitely be a link between organized crime and homicide rate. Also, medical cannabis is legal. Drugs like cocaine, heroin or LSD still all go through organized crime though (I think, it is not as easy to produce them).

            I would also guess that the US homicide rate has more to do with drugs than the Czech homicide rate, so decriminalizing drugs would help even more there.

            On the other hand, Swiss drug laws are more strict, albeit not as strict is as those in the US, I think.

          • Frank McPike says:

            You’re correct about the cost-benefit analysis working out differently at a lower overall homicide rate. If we did get our crime rate down to Switzerland levels through other means I agree that new firearm restrictions would not be worth it. I suspect our main disagreement here is over the likelihood of finding a set of policies that can bring the US down to that low a rate in the foreseeable future.

            As to the particular solutions, I’m not sure there’s very much low-hanging fruit in terms of getting rid of illegal guns. Law enforcement agencies are already strongly incentivized to do this. I imagine any dramatic expansions of existing programs would probably involve liberty violations of their own. I agree that ending the War on Drugs (along with as much decriminalization is as politically feasible) might have some effect on gang violence and is at least worth trying.

    • Anthony says:

      Now add the percentage of the population which is male between 15 and 30 years of age to that graph.

  25. Jiro says:

    A couple of obvious things it doesn’t sound like you considered:
    — how different does the result get if you assume some of the figures aren;t quite right? Suppose that “urbanization” is measuring slightly different things in the US and Europe (I would expect that rural in the US means far more distant from a city than rural in Europe)? How much would a Latino population of under the Colorado percentage, but nonzero, affect the result? What if your measure of southernness isn’t exactly accurate?
    — Does the percentage of blacks affect the rate of crime committed by whites?
    — Do Europeans have the same types of guns as Americans?
    — As a sanity check, what happens if you look at non-gun murder rates and apply exactly the same corrections for cofounding–is the non-gun homicide rate once you account for race, Southernnness, urbanness, culture of violence, etc. the same as in Europe, or is it higher just like the gun homicide rate, and if it is higher does that mean you left something out? (You really should try this.)
    — Why do you expect that a gun buyback program would decrease gun ownership uniformly from among the population, rather than preferentially decrease gun ownership by the people least likely to commit crimes?
    — Is “gun ownership” in those statistics the same as “legal gun ownership”? Is it the same as “legal, non-police gun ownership”? (I would expect number of guns owned by police to affect crime statistics in ways very different grom gun ownership by average people.)
    — Is “homicide” the same as “non-justifiable homicide”?

    • Vox Imperatoris says:

      — Is “homicide” the same as “non-justifiable homicide”?

      This one seems especially important.

    • Orion says:

      The gun type seems to be the most important missing variable in this analysis. Though data is sparse at best.
      The US gun culture is rather unique in the “First World” not just because of the quantity of guns, but because of the type of guns. In Canada people who own guns nearly exclusively own long guns–if my understanding of their laws is correct. Meanwhile, in the US the people with arsenals are collecting different kinds of handguns, semi-automatics, hunting rifles, etc. I believe, based on no hard data, that the majority of homicides come from these more restricted weapons and that may explain more of the homicide rate. Sadly, there is no federal firearm registry so we’ll likely never have an answer to this question.

      • The Anonymouse says:

        You don’t need a federal firearms registry to remove a bullet from a victim. While there are calibers that cross over platforms, most are fairly indicative of the platform they are shot from; i.e. a 9mm bullet is almost always from a pistol, a .357 is almost always from a revolver, a 5.56 bullet usually from a semi-automatic rifle or carbine, a .30-06 bullet almost always from a hunting rifle.

        In the US, most gun homicides involve handguns.

        • xtmar says:

          You would think, but per the FBI, of the 8583 people murdered in 2011, 6220 were killed by handguns, 323 by rifles, 356 by shotguns, 97 by other guns, and 1587 by unidentified/non-stated guns. My assumption is that most of the other/unidentified guns are simply hundgun crimes where somebody didn’t check the right box, but there is still a fair amount of uncertainty there.

          • HlynkaCG says:

            >My assumption is that most of the other/unidentified guns are simply hundgun crimes where somebody didn’t check the right box

            I am inclined to agree but would point out that there may be some ambiguity introduced by the fact that some of the larger handgun rounds such as .357 and .44 mag may have also been fired from a rifle or carbine.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            There are also types of ammunition which, even if the bullet is recovered, are nearly impossible to identify as to type of firearm or even caliber. (Primarily bullets purposefully designed to be frangible, i.e. to highly deform and break apart after the initial impact.) It is extremely rare for these to be used by ordinary criminals, but I guess it could happen.

            I’d guess that after “checked wrong box,” “lost bullet at coroner’s office,” and other types of human error, “Bullet went through victim and was not recovered” and “bullet was too badly damaged/frangible to identify caliber” were high on the list.

      • Montfort says:

        As someone who has no strong opinion on gun control but has played a few video games, I’m curious – what guns are you referring to when you say “semi-automatics”? Are they distinct, in your usage, from handguns and hunting rifles? Or are you using the literal definition?

        I’ve seen it enough times now I’m convinced I’m missing a regional/subcultural thing.

        • Lysenko says:

          Montfort, I can’t speak for The Anonymouse -specifically-, but in general I believe you are seeing the after-effects of the rhetoric employed before, during, and after the political fight to get the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban passed into law.

          There is now a noticeable segment of Americans (generally those with little to no exposure to actual firearms) who conflate the terms “automatic” and “semi-automatic”. In both cases they mean “guns that are able to shoot lots of bullets fast”, and often are not particularly fussy about quantifying how many bullets constitutes “lots” or what rate of fire constistutes “fast”.

          You will also see the argument advanced that, if magazine capacities are not limited to 5-10 rounds, then it is entirely reasonable to group semi-automatic and automatic weapons together into a single category, and that bringing up the literal definitions is semantic hair-splitting and obfuscation.

          I am…not terribly sympathetic to this argument, to put it mildly, but seems to be here to stay for the forseeable future in gun control debates in the US.

        • Garrett says:

          There’s a confusion in your terminology:
          Semi-automatic refers to the mechanism of how a gun works.
          Handgun or “hunting rifle” is the form-factor, or “shape” of the gun.

          A semi-automatic weapon is defined by two main things:
          1) The automatic part refers to some of the energy released in firing one cartridge is used to work the mechanical bits inside the firearm to load another cartridge such that it is ready to fire. This usually involves releasing the bolt, ejecting the spent casing, extracting a new cartridge from a magazine, placing the new cartridge into the chamber, and closing the bolt.

          2) The “semi” part means that when you pull the trigger only one cartridge should be fired. To fire another bullet/cartridge, you need to pull the trigger again. “Fully automatic” weapons allow the firearm to keep firing as long as the trigger is held down. Interestingly, if you go to make your own firearm (legal), it is much more difficult to manufacture a reliable semi-automatic action than fully-automatic action.

          Semi-automatic firearms are available in many form-factors. For example, common target pistols are semi-automatic and chambered in .22LR. Many rifles are as well. Most States allow the use of semi-automatic rifles for hunting, with magazine capacity limitations. Likewise, semi-automatic shotguns exist, both for use in hunting as well as shooting competitions.

      • Yrro says:

        The fun thing is that the guys with “arsenals” aren’t generally the ones doing the murdering.

        The mechanism is entirely that someone *steals* the handguns from someone with an arsenal (or more often, from someone who has one handgun and left it in his car), and then sells that on the black market until it eventually ends up shooting people.

        Guns used in homicides have on average been on the street, passing from felon to felon, for something like 5 years before they are used to kill someone. They are also almost entirely handguns.

        This mechanism makes any level of gun control that does not involve repealing the 2nd amendment unlikely to have a significant effect.

        • Anonymous says:

          Does the second amendment guarantee the right to leave a handgun unsupervised in a car?

          • John Schilling says:

            No, but the practical effect of the gun control laws people actually pass is to encourage it. And given the realities of enforcing different sorts of gun control laws, even if you add “…and no unsupervised guns in cars!” to the list, people will still find it expedient to minimize their overall risk by leaving guns unsupervised in cars a good deal of the time.

          • Garrett says:

            One of the problems is that many employers prohibit firearms on the premises. This means that to carry for protection or sport, I need to leave my firearm in my car while I’m at work. Removing the ability to leave a firearm in the car while at work would be detrimental to the right to carry.

        • Tibor says:

          If this is true, this might also explain the difference between Europe and the US. As I pointed out in another post, the main difference between weapons in the US and in Europe seems to be not in ownership rates or stricter laws (this is not even true for some EU countries) but in that you are not allowed to leave a gun unsecured, not even at home. If you own a gun, someone robs you and steals it from you and it was not stored in a safe you’ll get in trouble. Leaving a gun in a car unguarded would also be a serious problem. Basically, the gun either has to be safely locked in a safe or you have to have it on your person (in some EU countries concealed carry is legal whereas in others you have to carry the firearm visibly).

          The way I see it this is a kind of gun restriction that makes sense while it does not significantly restrict gun ownership (you have to buy a safe in addition to a gun but that is that, you can get ones that can store several rifles for something like USD 200). A gun left in a car does not help you if you had to defend yourself either, so restricting that does not seem like a big deal either.

    • Some of these are strong enough to turn Scott’s case upside-down:

      • Most gun murders (so I’ve heard, though I don’t have reliable numbers in front of me) are done with illegally-owned weapons. Perhaps total bans on guns could be effective enough to reduce already-illegal gun ownership enough to reduce the number of those murders, but Scott’s proposed $1000 per gun tax on legal guns loses much of its justification. Might as well tax ice-cream cones as legal guns.

      • Most gun murders occur between people involved in other illegal activities; the actuarial and societal value of those lives are probably lower than $7.4 million.

      • Not all gun homicides are murders; many are justified: self-defense and the like. Completely ignoring defensive uses of guns that never result in a shooting, let alone a death (mugger sees gun, goes elsewhere)—mostly because those are not reported and are well-nigh impossible to estimate—justifiable homicides are on the wrong side of the ledger. They’re not costs of common gun ownership (what value an attempted murderer’s or rapist’s life?); on the contrary, they likely represent lives that would have been lost but for the gun.

      This is an interesting issue: small differences in the what-abouts lead to vastly different estimates of what actions are reasonable. Is there some epistemic rule for recognizing such a situation and being extra-cautious about making policy?

      • ADifferentAnonymous says:

        Re: illegal guns, if an “illegal gun” is one purchased over the counter in Virginia and carried illegally into DC, or purchased under the table from a legal gun owner, there’s a pretty good chance national gun control could prevent this.

        Also http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/oct/05/joe-scarborough/msnbcs-joe-scarborough-tiny-fraction-crimes-commit/ concludes gun crime is indeed predominantly committed with illegal guns.

        • Marc Whipple says:

          Those things are already illegal to do. So I take your post as meaning that we really don’t need national gun control, unless you want to make it double-secret illegal to do.

          On the other hand, I’m not sure what you mean by “purchased under the table.” Two non-gun-dealer (basically, and to simplify somewhat, neither has an FFL) private citizens in the same state can sell firearms to each other under whatever laws are in effect in that state. (This is the basis for the wildly misleading “gun show loophole” claims.) Would you consider all such sales “under the table,” or does the receiver have to be a prohibited party (e.g. a felon?)

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Marc Whipple:

            Whether it is actually possible to have effective gun control in the US (for all of the various reasons it might not be), gun control differences across a national border and across a state or municipal border are really quite different in effect.

            The existence or absence of border control measures should be, in a vacuum, expected to have a fairly large effect on the impact of any local prohibition.

          • John Schilling says:

            There are, of course, an awful lot of uncontrolled national borders out there. In particular, the Czech Republic seems to have about the same gun laws as most of the United States and is inside the Schengen Area. If controlled borders are what keep the Evil Guns away, well, that might explain the UK but continental Europe should have the same sort of problems the US does.

            And really, I don’t recall anyone checking either me or my luggage for illicit weaponry on the train from Paris to London – there were signs indicating that they would or could, but it didn’t ever happen in my experience.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @John Schilling:
            It looks to me like in the Czech Republic you have to get a permit from the police for each purchase with a waiting period of up to 30 days before issuance. Assuming there is an actual waiting period, that alone is going to be a deterrent to cross border purchase. You also need to complete written, practical and medical tests to obtain the license.

            In addition, overall the two situations differ in concentration. It seems that ownership in the EU Schengen area is overall comparatively restricted with some notable exceptions. The reverse is the case in the US. It seems reasonable to me to think of a sort of osmotic diffusion model for the effects. The various national/state/city barriers are more and less permeable.

            DC, suspended in a “bath” of readily available guns and a barrier that is almost completely penetrable is much different than the UK whose nearest neighbors have about the same gun availability as they do. Guns will diffuse into DC at about the concentration of the surrounding areas. In the UK, all of the barriers (and volume) between them and the Czech Republic means far less Czech impact on UK gun ownership.

          • John Schilling says:

            It looks to me like in the Czech Republic you have to get a permit from the police for each purchase with a waiting period of up to 30 days before issuance.

            The more important deterrent, I believe, is that you have to be a resident of the Czech Republic to buy a gun there.

            But in the United States, if you want to buy a gun in e.g. Texas or Virginia, you have to be a resident of Texas or Virginia. So I’m still not seeing the substantive difference. If there are people here who believe that the crime problem in e.g. the District of Columbia is due to DC criminals driving over to gun-friendly Virginia to buy their guns, it doesn’t work that way.

            Which isn’t to say that Virginia guns don’t find their way to DC in large numbers, but mostly in the same way that Czech guns find their way to Germany or Belgian guns to France.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @John Schilling:
            “The more important deterrent, I believe, is that you have to be a resident of the Czech Republic to buy a gun there.”

            Not according to Wikipedia. Citizens of the EU are in the “shall issue” category for purchase permits, others are in the “may issue”.

            As to the US, and residence of a state, I believe that is where so called “straw purchasing” comes in. As there is no permit required, and no waiting period, and no record of the purchase, it is smaller barrier to obtaining the firearm.

            But it doesn’t even have to be a true straw purchase. All you need to do is find a private individual who is selling their gun (which requires no background check or paperwork) and if they don’t happen to check your ID for state of residence, which technically isn’t legal but would seem to happen frequently, then you have a gun and there is nothing to show that the sale was illegal.

            So, even a simple ownership registration requirement, like we have for autos, would add substantially to the barriers in the US.

          • John Schilling says:

            Straw purchases work as well in the Czech Republic as they do in the United States. Same with finding a private seller and offering them cash on the spot if they don’t ask questions or insist on papers. If there’s a difference, it’s in the level of demand rather than the details of the supply.

            As for foreigners legally buying guns in the Czech republic, yes for foreign citizens who are Czech residents. Otherwise I believe not without proof that your home country is OK with your buying the gun. Which, again, is how it works in the US except that we don’t have such a thing as “state citizenship”.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @John Schilling:
            Are you sure straw purchasing can be successfully done in the Czech Republic?

            It looks to me like you have to register that you want to purchase a specific firearm and there is a record of the purchase. That means that you are actually on the hook if you sell the gun illegally and it is far more traceable than in the US. Perhaps I am misreading something there.

            I do note that any country entering the EU has to change their gun laws specifically to combat the problem we are talking about.

          • John Schilling says:

            If you purchase a firearm from a dealer in the United States, there is a specific record of the purchase. If that gun is later recovered at a crime scene or in the hands of a criminal, the police can if they wish make a few phone calls, find out that you were the last legal purchaser, and knock on your door asking for an explanation and a reason why they shouldn’t arrest you for being a straw purchaser.

            Actual straw purchasers are usually either friends/family of the actual purchaser, or poor to destitute people who don’t care about maybe being arrested next year if you are paying them $100 cash today. I would assume that both of these work just as well in the Czech Republic.

            Purchases from private sellers may not need to be recorded in the US(differs from state to state), but usually either the seller knows the buyer or the seller takes the obvious step of asking for ID and taking notes. Finding a legal gun owner who is willing to privately sell a gun to a complete stranger no questions asked, in defiance of laws maybe but common sense definitely, I presume that with enough cash this can be done in the Czech Republic as well as the US.

            And all of these things are much easier done if you are a local resident with local knowledge and connections rather than an out-of-towner with a funny accent waving a bunch of cash around. The general practice in the United States is not, “I need a gun but they are illegal for me to buy here – I shall drive to Arizona and buy one there”, but rather “I need a gun but etc; I shall ask my local friend who knows a guy who knows a guy who specializes in that sort of thing”. I presume that this also is the usual rule in Europe, though some of the spree killers e.g. Brevik we know tried to do it the hard way.

          • Tibor says:

            @John,HellBearCub:

            http://www.zbrojniprukazy.cz/gun-license-in-czech-republic/

            Here, you can read it in detail from an official site in English. The most important deterrent seems to be both the residency and this (I cite from the webpage):

            It is necessary to say as first, that if you are not able to speak czech language on at least a medium level, you won´t be able to pass the theoretical test and practical exams for a gun license, which are hold only in czech language.

            By the way, Breivik originally planned to arm himself in the Czech republic but failed to get the equipment there, here is the whole story as written on Wikipedia:

            Breivik spent six days in Prague in late August and early September 2010. He chose the Czech Republic because the country has some of the most relaxed laws regarding guns and drugs in Europe. Following his Internet inquiry, Breivik noted that “Prague is known for maybe being the most important transit site point for illicit drugs and weapons in Europe”. Despite the fact that Prague has one of the lowest crime rates among European capitals,[33] Breivik expressed reservations about his personal safety, writing that he believed Prague to be a dangerous place with “many brutal and cynical criminals”.[34]

            He hollowed out the rear seats of his Hyundai Atos in order to have enough space for the firearms he hoped to buy. After two days, he got a prospectus for a mineral extraction business printed, which was supposed to give him an alibi in case someone suspected him of preparing a terrorist attack.[34] He wanted to buy an AK-47-type rifle (this firearm is, however, not very common in the country, unlike the Vz. 58[35]), a Glock pistol, hand-grenades and a rocket-propelled grenade, stating that getting the latter two would be a “bonus”.[32][34]

            Breivik had several fake police badges printed to wear with a police uniform, which he had acquired illegally on the Internet, and which he later wore during the attack.[17][18] Contrary to his expectations, he was unable to get any firearms in the Czech Republic, commenting that it was the “first major setback in [his] operation”. In the end, he concluded that Prague was “far from an ideal city to buy guns”, nothing like “what the BBC reported”, and that he had felt “safer in Prague than in Oslo”.[32][34][36]

          • John Schilling says:

            That’s about what I would expect, and comparable to the United States. Except, of course, we don’t have the ability to use language to block out-of-state purchasers; that’s a potentially useful feature.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @John Schilling:
            a) The federal government isn’t allowed to collect that data. It’s held at the seller, and only some states collect it. There was a big stink because the Feds used to hold the background check data for 30 days, and congress mandated it be destroyed after a day.

            b) The private sale thereafter, with no record, is theoretically perfectly legal. Hence the straw-purchaser can’t be shown to have committed a crime. I would you think this would actually discourage the seller from trying to remember anything about the transaction.

            Both those are very different from other countries, I believe.

          • John Schilling says:

            The federal government isn’t allowed to collect that data. It’s held at the seller, and only some states collect it.

            The data isn’t collected by the feds, but it is available to the feds, on demand. If a straw purchaser buys a gun from a dealer and passes it on to a criminal, who is then caught with it or leaves it at a crime scene, then for the price of three phone calls (manufacturer, wholesaler, retailer), the government knows who the straw purchaser was. And can give her a very bad day, if they care (which they often don’t).

            That it takes three phone calls rather than a few keystrokes to a central database, is a deliberate feature to prevent the automated creation of who-owns-what-guns master lists for other purposes. If the police want to know who bought one gun, it is easy for them to find out. Which means it is not safe for anyone to buy one gun and pass it on to a criminal, and hence straw purchasers tend to be the desperately poor and the easily intimidated (e.g. the criminal’s girlfriend).

          • HeelBearCub says:

            “Which means it is not safe for anyone to buy one gun and pass it on to a criminal”

            Why? It’s legal isn’t it? I don’t need to do a background check if I sell to you in a private sale. I don’t even think I’m required to verify your identity. I don’t have to document the sale in any way.

          • Lupis42 says:

            Why? It’s legal isn’t it? I don’t need to do a background check if I sell to you in a private sale. I don’t even think I’m required to verify your identity. I don’t have to document the sale in any way.

            You *can’t* do a background check as a private citizen in the US, regardless of whether you want to. You are also only allowed to do a private sale to another resident of your state, and most states require that you have some form of ID to show that they’re a resident of that state. Beyond that, state laws vary widely – for example, in MA, a Firearms ID or License to Carry is required to own a firearm, and a background check is required to get either FID or LTC. For a private sale in MA, you need to have an LTC/FID, and you need to see the buyer’s LTC/FID – so a background check is implicit. State laws vary.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Lupis42:
            But absent a requirement to document, the requirement to verify residency is of little use in stopping sales to people from other states, without an FID, etc.

            “Did you check their state of residence?”
            “Yep”
            “Prove it”
            “Don’t have to.”

            Compare this to the Czech Republic, where it seems that each purchase has to be approved by the police (and I don’t think private sales are even legal.)

            I’m merely challenging the idea that Czech is to the EU what Virginia is to DC (for purposes of assessing the effects of GC rules.)

          • John Schilling says:

            Why? It’s legal isn’t it?

            It is generally not legal to purchase a firearm on behalf of another person in the United States; exceptions if you are e.g. a licensed dealer acting as a broker. It is not legal to give or sell a firearm to any person you have reason to believe is not allowed to possess that firearm, and it is not objectively reasonable to believe that the man who is offering you $500 and asking you to give him a $400 firearm from that gun store across the street, is allowed to possess that firearm. There is no specific list of things you must do to rule out “this guy is a criminal”, but common-law legal systems like the United States are pretty good at applying “reasonable man” standards on a case-by-case basis.

            If you purchase a firearm in the United States, it winds up in the hands of a criminal shortly thereafter, and your explanation is “Gosh, immediately after buying the gun I changed my mind, decided to sell it, and conveniently a total stranger offered to buy it for cash and I didn’t think to ask who he was”, a jury will probably be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that you really meant to do that from the start, and you will go to jail for several years.

            If the DA’s office decides to prosecute, which they often don’t. And if it’s many years between when you buy the weapons and it winds up at a murder scene or whatnot, you probably can establish plausible deniability, but it’s dangerous to assume that the criminal asking you to buy him a gun today won’t do anything with it for years.

            You seem to be working from a very limited understanding of US gun laws here, HBC.

          • Tibor says:

            HeelBearCub: Privates sales are legal – when the police gives you a purchase license for a gun, you have a year while that license is valid in which you can purchase the gun. The gun then has to be registered by the police within 2 weeks after purchase but you keep the license to buy (you do not bring it to the police after the purchase) and when you want to sell a gun yourself you check that the buyer has a license himself. Then you also have to notify the police that you sold the gun and to whom and if I understand it correctly, you then give them back your buyer’s license (but I am not sure I got that right, it is written a bit vaguely and also it seems that in some parts of the country you give the buyer’s license to the police after you buy the gun and in others you keep it).

            In any case, the police keeps an evidence of who bought which gun and who sold it to whom but the registration happens after purchase, not before. But since it is mandatory for the seller to check the buyer’s license(s), if you sell it to someone who does not have it, you will have a problem yourself too.

            The buyer’s license is not for a particular gun, but for a type of a gun, so it serves solely to check that the license holder is allowed to buy that gun – if you do not have a E type gun license, you will not be allowed to buy most pistols for example (there are no extra requirements to get an E type – i.e. self-defence – license that you don’t need to meet for other licenses except that you have to be at least 21 while for sports and IIRC for hunting it is enough to be 18) and of course for A type of weapons (automatic weapons) the license to buy is given on an individual basis (usually not given though), so it is not automatic that you get one if you have a gun license.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @John Schilling:
            There are two different scenarios:
            1) A true straw purchase, as you just described.
            2) Buying on the private market to avoid the dealer.

            In the case of 1, if it is deterred by fear of prosecution, we should see a fair number of actual prosecutions. Is that the case? My sense is that it is not but I admit I don’t have great information there.

            The legal “beyond a reasonable doubt” hurdle would seem to be very hard to clear as long as the straw buyer is not an idiot. “I bought for protection, but then I needed the money” is a ready answer. It seems more likely that a prosecutor/investigator is going to look for info on who the gun was sold to in exchange for a pass.

            The true straw buyer is more likely to be caught and prosecuted in a sting operation, I would think.

            Scenario 2:
            This would seem to be perhaps a bigger issue. If I’m a DC resident and want to buy a gun, I can buy from a VA resident in a private sales and back out if they ask for or insist on ID. If I am someone who wants to sell guns in DC for a profit, a stolen or fake VA ID or even a real ID provides a fairly easy way to buy guns in the private market.

            I mean, the guns are getting into DC. How do you think they are getting there?

            Your point about personal connections earlier seems salient here, and it’s another reason why DC in VA is very different from EU including the Czech Republic. More discrete populations and language both provide barriers. In addition, the process of actually going to a police station, rather than an instant background check at the gun dealer, provides another 2 or 3 barriers.

            I find the two scenarios highly non-similar. My sense is that you are arguing that they are very similar, which is ?surprising? to me.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Tibor:
            “The gun then has to be registered by the police within 2 weeks after purchase but you keep the license to buy (you do not bring it to the police after the purchase) and when you want to sell a gun yourself you check that the buyer has a license himself. Then you also have to notify the police that you sold the gun and to whom”

            Assuming this is accurate(which I do), this is very useful information. As I said upthread, I thought there was a registration requirement, but I wasn’t sure.

            I would hope that everyone would agree that this is really quite different from the situation in the US.

          • Lupis42 says:

            @HBC

            But absent a requirement to document, the requirement to verify residency is of little use in stopping sales to people from other states, without an FID, etc.

            Sure – just as, absent regular random drug testing, prohibition is of little use in stopping marijuana use.
            The vast majority of gun owners will not sell a gun to a person not well known to them without seeing some ID, because it’s illegal. Not because they expect to get caught, but because it’s illegal. The ones who don’t care that it’s illegal also don’t care about the reporting requirement, because they wouldn’t have reported what they bought/stole either.
            It’s not accidents or ignorance causing guns to get from Virginia to DC, it’s people knowingly and deliberately flouting the law.

          • Echo says:

            The NRA has been partnering with gun sellers to try to do something about straw purchases. If you go into a gun store, you’ll be made aware that buying a gun for another person is a felony worth 10(?) years in prison, and the seller will reject any sale they find suspicious. (The most common one is “sketchy guy comes in with his girlfriend, picks out a gun for her to buy for him”)

            Unfortunately Obama getting on television and claiming that it’s actually legal doesn’t help matters. Nor does the fact that the feds have never chosen to enforce the law, being as they’re too busy maliciously raiding companies for minor paperwork violations.

            It would help if we could get competent state authorities to step in on the unoccupied federal turf and start doing something.
            But it would also help if we could get competent state authorities period.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Echo/Lupis42:

            Again, my point is that the Czech laws are far more restrictive than US law. Pointing at the Czech Republic as proof that DC isn’t affected by gun laws of VA seems far-fetched to me.

            I’m not even arguing, at the moment, for tighter laws in the US. Just pointing at the reasons why tighter local laws in the US should not be expected to move the local needle very much.

          • Tibor says:

            @HellBearCub:

            I would have to disagree. The correct way to put it is that the laws are different. In some ways, the Czech gun laws are more liberal than those of many US states – for example you only need to keep a gun in a safe at home if you own at least two of them (I still think it is incredibly stupid to leave a gun at home unsecured but anyway). Also, concealed carry is legal, period, you get a license to concealed carry of (simultaneously up to two) loaded guns more or less automatically with the license for personal defence (it is technically a separate license but it is a shall-issue and has no further requirements other than having a license for personal defence).

            Open carry, on the other hand, is illegal in most cases. Also, guns are registered at the police and they have a complete record of legally purchased guns, selling a gun to someone without a buying permit for that type of a gun is illegal and you need to register the sales at the police as well (regardless of whether you are a private seller or a guns dealer). You are also only allowed to buy ammo for the guns you own. I don’t know how this is exactly in the US.

            So it looks to me that the main differences are a legal and automatic concealed carry license which makes the Czech law more liberal than that of many US states and increased police tracking of purchases, which makes it a bit less liberal.

          • Lupis42 says:

            Again, my point is that the Czech laws are far more restrictive than US law. Pointing at the Czech Republic as proof that DC isn’t affected by gun laws of VA seems far-fetched to me.

            I agree completely here, that comparison isn’t really useful.

            I’m not even arguing, at the moment, for tighter laws in the US. Just pointing at the reasons why tighter local laws in the US should not be expected to move the local needle very much.

            On that, I also agree – the people who are bringing guns into DC are already obtaining them illegally, transporting them illegally and selling them illegally. Changing the law without changing the enforcement mechanism/pattern is unlikely to have any impact.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Tibor:
            If I want buy a gun in the US, in most states I can have one about 10* minutes after I make it to the nearest Walmart. I have to pass an instant background check, and that’s it. (* 10 minutes being something like a lower bound).

            No trip to a police station. No test (written and practical). No permit. No registration.

            If I want to sell that gun, I can do it to anyone who is a resident of my state, no other check required, no permit required, no registration, no notification to police. At that point the gun has essentially disappeared from the books.

            That’s what I mean about the US being less restrictive than the Czech Republic.

          • Tibor says:

            You don’t need to pass any exam to get a gun license?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Tibor: (Repeat because I posted in the wrong spot)

            You don’t need a gun license at all.

            Many states require a license for legal concealed carry. But you aren’t required to have a license to buy or own a gun, generally speaking.

          • John Schilling says:

            @Tibor: You don’t need to pass any exam to get a gun license?

            That’s handled at the state level, so there are fifty different answers. In e.g. California, you do need to pass an exam to buy a gun – there’s no explicit “gun license”, but the card that says you passed the exam is functionally the same thing. Similar rules apply in many other high-population/high-crime states. In peaceful, sparsely-populated rural states, no exam is required – but as noted, American “gun culture” means that most people in those states have passed the exam of not having their father take them out behind the shed with a belt for having done something stupid or reckless with a .22 as a teenager; that seems to work well enough in those states.

            And the United States has historically had good reason to be suspicious of the idea of requiring people to pass a test in order to exercise a controversial right. We can require a test for a driver’s license, because there is no controversy over almost all Americans being allowed to drive. Voting, owning guns, posting whatever damn fool thing you want on the internet, these are not generally going to require tests in the US even if, presuming competent and unbiased administration, the tests would do some good.

          • ADifferentAnonymous says:

            @ Marc Whipple
            My point is that while a VA-bought gun used in DC might be already be illegal, there’s still a lot more hypothetical gun laws could do to disrupt this pipeline, mainly by restricting the purchase in VA. Whereas if the majority of crimes were committed with guns smuggled over borders or clandestinely manufactured, it’d be fair to say making more guns illegal wouldn’t help.

            I just assumed selling your legal gun to a random person for cash was illegal. But “a felon who can’t legally buy a gun, buying a gun from a citizen who wasn’t required to run a background check” would be a good example of an illegal gun that could nevertheless have been hindered by more laws.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          @Tibor:
          You don’t need a gun license at all.

          Many states require a license for legal concealed carry. But you aren’t required to have a license to buy or own a gun, generally speaking.

  26. Professor Frink says:

    Regarding section IV- the reason they switched from absolute to relative differences in the MA&H paper is almost certainly because they used a general estimating equation to fit their model, instead of doing a likelihood/Fischer scoring method. This corrects for geographic correlations in state data (important! If you have time, consider redoing your models with gees), but has the downside of being annoying to interpret (because relative vs absolute).

  27. Thanks for doing this. I’ve wanted to do a similar analysis myself for a long time, but I’m not very good at statistics.

    One thing I wanted to point out is that this analysis does not include the effect of gun ownership on non-homicidal violence (e.g. assaults). I think that’s important to consider, because if the rate of other types of violent crime is much higher in European countries, that could tip the balance somewhat in favor of gun ownership.

    Also, does the NCHS define homicide? Does it mean the perpetrator was convicted of homicide, or just that the victim died of a gunshot wound? If the latter, the perpetrator could have been acting in self-defense, which also changes the analysis.

    • Steve Sailer says:

      The British, who were extremely law-abiding in, say, 1960, achieved a fairly high level of non-homicidal crime by 1990: burglaries (including terrifying “Clockwork Orange”-style home invasions), car theft, and brawling. For example, the last time I was in England was 1994 and at a luncheon in suburban Oxford, the only topic of conversation was how each of the five or Oxfordians at the table had had their car stolen. As a Chicagoan, I could only respond with wimpy stories of having my car broken into.

      The high gun ownership among Americans leads to more homicides but fewer lesser crimes.

      As more or less predicted in A Clockwork Orange, the British government’s response has been more technocratic than penal, putting videocameras everywhere. It appears that the government did a pretty good job following the big London riot of 2011 of putting undocumented shoppers in the pokey using video and cellphone data.

      • Slow Learner says:

        1) Oxonians
        2) things have changed a lot in the last 20 years; crime of all categories has fallen substantially.
        3) Car theft particularly has dropped off almost entirely; apart from widely-reported but very occasional carjackings, car theft is now largely a process of breaking into a house to get the keys to the car(s) parked outside. Cars from the late 80s and early 90s did not have security devices such as to make this necessary.
        4) UK Firearms legislation changed in 1968, 1988 and 1997. 1968 added the minor inconvenience of obtaining a certificate to own a shotgun* and barred convicts from owning firearms. 1988 in the aftermath of the Hungerford Massacre prohibited some categories of weapons but left others largely unaffected. As best I can find (data going back to 1979), firearms certificates have fluctuated between 170,000 and 120,000, with a low around the early part of the last decade that has since recovered to ~1990 levels (140,000 or higher).

        In other words, gun ownership seems to bear very little relation to either the past increase or the more recent decrease in crime in the UK. Crime increased when there was no change in gun control or gun ownership (pre- and post- ’68). Crime levelled off a little after gun control got significantly tighter and gun ownership dropped off (’88). Crime decreased significantly with even tighter gun control and still decreasing gun ownership (post ’97). Crime has continued decreasing with a ~20% rise in gun ownership since the low point in ’02.

        Tl;dr, non-homicide crime in the UK is unrelated to gun ownership.

        *In US parlance I believe shotgun certificates at this stage were “shall issue”, in that the Police needed a good reason to turn someone down.

        • Harold says:

          In other words, gun ownership seems to bear very little relation to either the past increase or the more recent decrease in crime in the UK.

          On general principle this sounds correct as long as you don’t go back any further. Which you might want to, for as I understand it, “effective self-defense”, as in using “more” force than your assailant was judicially nullified in the ’50s and by statute in the ’60s. So taking off the table using a gun to resist anything more than an assault with a gun that long ago makes comparing the U.K. with the US very difficult in all sorts of ways.

        • ” Crime levelled off a little after gun control got significantly tighter and gun ownership dropped off (’88). Crime decreased significantly with even tighter gun control and still decreasing gun ownership (post ’97). ” (For England)

          ICVS figures for England and Wales show a 50% increase in “all crimes” from 1989 to 1996, slight fall by 2000. Car theft doubles from 1989 to 1992, possibly a statistical anomaly, then comes most of the way back down by 2000.

          http://www.unicri.it/services/library_documentation/publications/icvs/statistics/17-icvs-app4.pdf

          I’m not finding any ICVS figures after 2000, however. Are you working from police statistics?

      • sweeneyrod says:

        I would imagine that your Oxonian friends were not present for the theft of their cars (and hence guns are irrelevant). If this is not the case, they are certainly outliers – I don’t know of anyone who’s been present when their car was stolen (although I know lots of people who’ve had their car stolen when it was unattended).

    • “if the rate of other types of violent crime is much higher in European countries, that could tip the balance somewhat in favor of gun ownership.”

      In recent decades, it has. Some criminologists call this “The Great Reversal”. Popular understanding on both sides of the Atlantic has not caught up; both Europeans and Americans still erroneously believe the U.S. has higher crime rates than Europe.

  28. Arthur B. says:

    I made a pretty graph a while ago that got shared a lot, here it is: http://m.imgur.com/mMDBR

    • Intuitively it seems like the axes should be reversed.

      • lliamander says:

        Agreed, but I nonetheless it is a very interesting graph. In particular I notice that there seems to be virtually no correlation whatsoever.

        • Richard says:

          The graph has the same flaw Scott talks about it in the post, where not controlling for other factors makes trends appear or disappear, except the problem is significantly worse in this case because there’s so much more variation among countries of the world than there is among states.

          The bottom-right of the graph shows us that a bunch of countries in sub-saharan Africa have very low gun ownership and very high murder rate. The obvious explanation is that countries in which people are too poor to buy guns have lots of murder. The upper-left shows us that Europe and other rich countries have high gun ownership rates and low murder rates. And note that “high gun ownership rates” is relative to a world average dragged down significantly by the world’s poor countries: look at where Australia is (about 20% in from the top-left corner), and note that that’s one example of a developed country with a successful buyback problem. Almost every rich country is a high-gun country on this graph when compared to countries with rampant extreme poverty. Control for income and this graph looks very different.

          Smaller note: this seems to be placing countries by rank rather than values. Otherwise, the US would be about twice as far left as any other country on the graph, and Honduras and Venezuela would be significantly lower than anyone else.

    • Nita says:

      Nice work, but —

      Perhaps you should have limited your visualization to the 79 countries for which they had at least some individual estimates (of whatever quality).

      The rest of their numbers are derived from their own “regional or global correlation” models and may bear no resemblance to reality, which (IMO) makes them unfit for this particular purpose.

  29. One thing I found interesting about this post was its relevance to some of the discussion in the previous open thread of what to believe. I distinguished there between showing that the evidence offered to support a theory is bad and showing that the theory is wrong. The implication of this post is that the people arguing for gun control, specifically Vox, are dishonest and should not be trusted, but that a careful analysis of the evidence suggested that the conclusion they are arguing for might well be true.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I talked to Vox and they said they attempted to be honest but made some mistakes. I think this is plausible and that we overestimate how good journalists’ instincts are about these kinds of things – it is easy for them to make mistakes that you would probably avoid effortlessly. They have since corrected one of the particular things I bothered them about.

      • suntzuanime says:

        Vox does try to sell themselves as “the people who actually know what they’re talkign about”, which makes them dishonest in that regard at least.

        • AR says:

          I would say their brand is “the people who are actually trying to get it right by looking at evidence and correcting mistakes when they make them.”

      • Robert VerBruggen says:

        I like German Lopez (we follow each other on Twitter ‘n everything) but that “response” was very frustrating. I pointed out to him that I did not in fact “neglect[]” the more complicated research, even if I don’t assess it the way he does; that claim is still in the piece weeks later.

      • There is a long history of egregious dishonesty and Dark Arts statistical flimflam from anti-firearms-rights people. The Bellesisles flap in 2001 was the highest-profile example, but the pattern is perceptible decades before that.

        See my essay A Brief History of Firearms Policy Fraud for more on this.

        And yes, I think Vox let their biases screw with their analysis in this case.

    • Richard says:

      You pointed out the distinction between “this evidence doesn’t support the theory” and “the theory is wrong”, but I think it’s also worth drawing a distinction between “this evidence doesn’t support the theory” and “the author is dishonest and should not be trusted”. I’ve seen you do the same thing for climate science in other threads, and pointing out a single error and using it as justification for a blanket discrediting of an author’s entire work (or worse, of a website that employs many authors) just doesn’t convince anyone except those already looking for a reason to dismiss that source. The old phrase “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” is even more relevant once you consider how overeager people are to accuse those on the other side of a political issue of maliciously intending harm to their country, and in this case it sounds more like “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by human error”, no worse than that in most other discussions of the topic.

      I think this is a little harsh on Vox in this particular example, especially. Scott complained that they sometimes seem to include suicides in graphs while talking about homicides in the text, and that’s a mistake, but it’s not something they’ve tried to elide over entirely to make the anti-gun case more strongly. In fact, I’ve seen Vox (And Dylan Matthews in particular) talk explicitly about suicides many times, like here and here and here (a video that pops up at the top of Scott’s link, with the title “America’s biggest gun problem is the one we never talk about”, or in graphs 9-12 here (another one of the posts Scott linked, which nonetheless was explicit about the level suicides play a part), or here (33 minute mark). Overall, the conclusion “Vox is dishonest and is trying to pretend suicides are homicides in order to push their agenda” really doesn’t stand up when we see many cases of them basically getting it right and explicitly talking about suicides as suicides.

      The charitable and in my opinion most likely explanation of Vox’s writing on this is:
      – They believe gun ownership drives suicides and causes the vast majority of gun deaths (not discussed in the post but seems very well-supported)
      – They believe gun ownership drives homicide rates (discussed in this post in more depth than their posts, but seems accurate. And you can criticize them for getting the right answer for the wrong reasons because of the misused chart Scott cited, but considering it comes from a post called “Gun violence in America, in 17 maps and charts”, it’s pretty clear that that one chart never did make up the entirety of the reason why they believed it in the first place)
      – They sometimes mess up and talk about both of those harms simultaneously.
      – Of course, they have many different writers, who can be better or worse about this.

  30. Wrong Species says:

    So does anyone have suggestions on how to reduce “cultures of violence”?

    • John Schilling says:

      Generally you have a slightly less violent and more prosperous culture beat some sense into them while offering them a better alternative.

      The United States of America being the slightly less violent / more prosperous culture that Western Civilization uses to beat some sense into its truly savage enemies (particularly the industrialized Western ones), you might want to be very careful about how you “fix” this “problem”.

    • Troy says:

      Christianity.

    • CRISPR and neurofeedback.

    • Urstoff says:

      Hugs

    • alaska3636 says:

      I’m betting gun violence goes hand in hand with the ramping up of the war on drugs. Same with the culture of gangs among minorities in larger urban areas. Reduce the incentives of profit from the illegal status of drugs, reduce the size and scope of gangs and their influence, reduce the number of fathers sent to prison on drug charges, reduce the opportunities for gun violence.

  31. Ton says:

    “If this is all true, how come I spent so much time yelling at that first study with worse data?”

    Because vox is your outgroup?

  32. Chalid says:

    I know you chose not to discuss suicides much in this piece, but it sounds like they’re actually the strongest reason to favor some form of strict gun control?

    • Scott Alexander says:

      One reason I avoid talking about them is that I don’t know how I feel about this. Yes, most suicides are irrational. But some aren’t. I have a really strong aversion to looking at people who are in unbearable suffering and want to end their lives, taking away the only good way they have to do so, and saying “problem solved!”.

      Another reason I have to talk about this is that I have never seen any of the people supposedly so concerned about gun suicides show an equal interest in any other type of suicide, or write similarly impassioned thinkpieces about the fact that it takes six months to see a psychiatrist in some places even if you’re really sick and your insurance is good. If the only time you ever bring up suicides is if they’re gun suicides, there’s just been a mass shooting, and you’re writing a listicle called Five Reasons We Need Gun Control Now, then @#!$ you.

      • Donny Anonny says:

        The real travesty is that of all of the gun control items brought up by the gun control crowd, I’ve yet to see one that would actually help to prevent suicides.

        Assuming that most suicidal people are no more likely to have a disqualifying criminal history than the average citizen, they’re just as likely to pass a background check than any other citizen with a clean criminal record.

        Furthermore, one of the things that doesn’t get discussed when talking about incorporating mental history into NICS checks is how that would work and what would constitute disqualifying criteria. I’ve actually spoken with veterans who suffer from PTSD who said they would refuse to seek treatment if it meant that they would be disqualified from owning a gun. Whether or not you agree that such a person should have a firearm, I think we can all agree that passing laws that will cause a person who needs help to avoid seeking it at all is a very bad thing.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          +1

          Have these people thought about what “keeping guns away from people who have sought psychiatric treatment” will do to people considering getting psychiatric treatment?

          Even if the person has no desire for guns, what will be the Next Thing that we take away from them? Drivers license?

          EDIT

          If you were to tell me I could never own a gun, I would shrug. If you were to tell me I could never own a gun because of psychiatric treatment, I would flip my top.

          My wife is pretty pro-more-gun-control, but we were watching Obama’s speech a few weeks ago, where he said “it’s common sense that people on the no-fly list shouldn’t be able to buy a gun” and she exploded. Because she knows that the no-fly list is completely lacking in any of due process and you can end up on it for any petty reason.

          • Winter Shaker says:

            she knows that the no-fly list is completely lacking in any of due process and you can end up on it for any petty reason.

            For that reason, Eneasz Brodski is trollishly in favour of making it illegal for people on the no-fly list to buy guns 🙂

        • Tibor says:

          Do you need a clean crime record to get a gun in the US? That is the case in probably all European (or at least EU+Switzerland) countries and it actually seems quite sensible to me.

          • John Schilling says:

            Yes. Per Federal law you cannot have been convicted of ever or under indictment now for a felony crime, and many states add various sorts of misdemeanors to that. If a gun sale is made across state lines or by a commercial dealer there’s always a background check, if it’s a private intrastate sale it’s up to the state what circumstances call for such a check.

          • enoriverbend says:

            Generally a US citizen cannot legally buy a firearm if you have a past felony conviction (unless your rights have been specifically restored, or the felony is on a short list of non-violent felonies). Also restricted: domestic abusers, people under a domestic violence protective order, drug addicts, people with certain types of mental illness.

            This is over-simplified of course but that’s the basics.

          • Addict says:

            US criminal drug addict here. East coast.

            re enoriverbend, I don’t know any gun owners who aren’t felons.

            If the concern is criminal on criminal gun violence, the laws really are utterly useless so long as black market guns aren’t *more available* and *far cheaper*.

          • Tibor says:

            @all: Federal law means binding to all states, right? Then the US guns laws in all states are actually pretty much on par with some EU countries – which makes it quite annoying when people paint the US as a country where getting guns (legally) is super easy and Europe as a place where it is almost impossible to get guns (although this is more true of some European countries, specifically the UK I think, than others).

            I mentioned an important difference here in a different post though, one that is related to addict’s objection. In all European countries I know of (I dunno how it is in non-EU countries except for Switzerland and also don’t know anything about Romanian and Bulgarian laws) it is illegal to keep your gun unprotected, so you have to keep it in a safe at home or carry it with you. This makes it harder for others to steal it and makes the illegal weapon supply shorter. Generally, my impression is that the sensible kind of gun control would not focus on preventing people from obtaining guns legally but making it harder to get them illegally. That is a difficult problem, but punishing people for keeping their guns at the backseat of a car seems more sensible than near-prohibitively taxing guns or banning them altogether.

            …it would be interesting to get estimates for the number of illegally owned firearms by country and see what the legal/illegal ratios are. I would not be very surprised if that ratio was the lowest in the US of all first world countries. If that is the case than the US anti-gun violence people should above all focus on how increase that ratio.

          • HlynkaCG says:

            >Federal law means binding to all states, right?

            Yes, this is correct.

            >Do you need a clean crime record to get a gun in the US?

            At the federal level? Yes you do. Furthermore it is a federal crime to sell or otherwise provide a firearm to someone who has been prohibited from having one.

            Transferring legal ownership of a firearm requires you to sign an official form affirming that you are a legal resident, not a criminal, and are “mentally competent”. Lying on this form is also a federal crime punishable by some pretty hefty fines and up to 3 years in jail.

            In addition, federally licensed manufacturers and firearm dealers are required to perform background checks on their customers and employees as a condition of their license.

            All of these are federal law, but the laws tend to be unevenly enforced if they are enforced at all. This is largely where the NRA’s “try enforcing the laws already on the books, before demanding new ones” meme comes from.

            States are free to add additional requirements and have a limited ability to waive some others (exceptions made for non-violent crimes being the most common) but those modifications will be specific to the state, and the firearm you legally obtained in one state may no longer be legal if you cross the border into another.

          • Garrett says:

            The Supreme Court has held that you can’t mandate that people have all of their guns locked up or otherwise rendered non-functional all of the time. That defeats the ability to defend yourself and your home in a timely fashion.

            Now, some locales are attempting to limit it to 1 unsecured firearm per person, in a holster on your person, but I’m not up to date with where that’s gone.

        • Harold says:

          I’ve actually spoken with veterans who suffer from PTSD who said they would refuse to seek treatment if it meant that they would be disqualified from owning a gun.

          If they go to the VA for treatment of PTSD the will be disqualified, full stop. Something started during the Clinton Administration, and expanded under Obama to include having someone manage your finances, which he’s proposing to extend to Social Security Disability.

          Do you need a clean crime record to get a gun in the US?

          Of course, although it’s only enforced if you buy your gun from a Federally licensed dealer who has to use the NICS “instant” background check system.

        • “Assuming that most suicidal people are no more likely to have a disqualifying criminal history than the average citizen, they’re just as likely to pass a background check than any other citizen with a clean criminal record.”

          That’s actually not a likely assumption. Also draconion gun contro would be god at taking guns out of the hands of potential suicides.

      • Richard says:

        Where I live I had to turn in my guns for safekeeping while going through a divorce, for reasons of “temporary mental stress”.

        Nor sure if that was because of suicide risk or fear that I might shoot my ex.

      • Stuart Armstrong says:

        I personally think suicide is *the* reason for gun control – the homicide results are weak, debatable, and there are other issues, while the suicide case is clear and strong.

        And I would write impassioned articles about gun suicide and suicide in general, if there weren’t many other things of higher priority.

      • name says:

        What do you say to the usual argument that follows an opinion like yours about there being perfectly good suicide methods like hanging, so it doesn’t matter if guns are restricted? (I don’t agree that hanging it as good for this purpose as a gunshot, but it’s hard to convince of this someone who doesn’t have first-hand experience with planning a suicide. They often believe the method stops mattering the moment you “really want it”).

        • Elissa says:

          Dunno about Scott, but (speaking as someone who has considered suicide more than once) I tend to agree with this argument– hanging is quite lethal when done effectively. It does take a bit more consideration to do properly, but that seems like a good thing. Preventing impulsive or ambivalent suicide attempts from being completed is much more reasonable and humane than preventing all suicides ever. And I would argue that guns are a good target for accomplishing this goal. The lethality of gun suicide attempts doesn’t seem to vary with age and gender (proxies for intent to die), as is the case with other suicide methods, even highly lethal ones.

          • name says:

            Speaking as an anonymous stranger who stood with a noose around their neck, certainly intending to die and still unable (and I hope this is not too insensitive, not quite sure): I think the above experience is (or can be) crucial in order to intuitively get just how hard it is (or can be) to voluntarily die. Again, I fail to find a way to convincingly explain why. I know it seems so plausible that the genuine desire to die should be enough to go through something horrific that would stop a more impulsive attempt. In my experience it’s not. I value the prevention of unbearable pain enough that it matters to me even if only a small portion of those who want to die are stopped due to not having guns, for example. (…For all I know, some of the suicidees have the same problem with guns. That’s not getting into the lethality issue either.)

          • Elissa says:

            You’re right, that kind of inability to act is a real thing (cf needle-phobic type 1 diabetics), and I hadn’t thought about it because it’s not something I struggle with. But I don’t agree that we’re obligated to make suicide as easy as possible to prevent unnecessary suffering. Impulsive, irrational suicides cause quite a lot of suffering too.

          • nem says:

            “…age and gender (proxies for intent to die)…”

            How are age and gender used as proxies for intent to die? Are men (who kill themselves more often) assumed to be more intent on dying? If not, who’s assumed to be intent on dying? How does age fit in (after an admittedly cursory look at [some data](https://www.afsp.org/understanding-suicide/facts-and-figures) , it doesn’t seem to be clear that older people kill themselves more often)?

          • Elissa says:

            @nem: It’s been studied. Among suicidal people, men generally score higher on suicidal intent scales than women, and older people score higher than younger people. Here are the first few sources I found:
            http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/186/1/60
            http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1853736

        • Marc Whipple says:

          Or the argument that this is a sexist approach to suicide reduction, since people who commit suicide with guns are overwhelmingly male?

          • nem says:

            Does anybody really use that argument? I find it hard to believe that people would actually argue against something that saves lives for that reason. (Actually, it’s not that hard to believe, but it is horribly sad.)

          • Anonymous says:

            Marc helpfully brings arguments other people, not present, make to the comments’ section attention so we can get a wider range of views. Some might call that knocking down strawmen but what do they know?

          • Marc Whipple says:

            No, nobody makes that argument. (Yet. I bet I could get somebody to make it.)

            I suppose one could consider it strawmanning. I consider it about equal parts “being a smartass for art’s sake” and “pointing out, in a smartass way, that there are an infinite number of arguments one could make on the topic and so trying to bring in a second level of hypotheticals is not much use in convincing anybody.”

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Marc Whipple:
            I have seen blogs/comment sections where the culture strongly suggests the use of a “snark” or “sarc” tag on posts like this. It avoids confusion and makes meaning clearer.

            I think this commentariat should not have such a tag, because sarc only comments are very rarely about making actual reasoned argument. They tend to be signalling (of disdain for the outgroup, mostly). Given that having a known tag implies endorsement for the tactic by the group, it encourages these kinds of posts. I think this would be bad for the garden that Scott wants to have.

            If you accept all of the above, I think you would tend to want to not employ sarc only comments.

      • alaska3636 says:

        Gun control will result in a higher price commanded for guns, which are used in the illegal drug trade which has been made unreasonably lucrative due to the war on drugs. The unintended consequences of these policies will not be solved by creating further policies to fix the unintended consequences of the previous policies. Not to mention that politicians will benefit by appearing to be useful every time they do something stupid to correct the previous stupid thing they did. Legislation needs to be rolled back, US powers need to be rolled back, states, cities and neighborhoods should make decisions regarding their desired cultural legislation.

  33. keranih says:

    First – excellent digging into the matter. Just really well done.

    Secondly – I join with Echo (above) and others in asking about the change in US firearms homicide rates over time. Which of the indicated variables has changed over the course of time since, oh, 1990 – Southernness? urbanization? blackness? firearms ownership rates? I invite more examination here.

    Thirdly – I think that a deeper look into just what it was that happened in Australia, in their ‘buy back’ program, is called for. Certainly anyone trying to figure out the marginal/net cost-benefit of doing so in the USA should look long and hard at this.

    Successful execution of an American “disarmament” would require *both* saner heads – in those chambers which construct and carry out the laws – *and* respect for the rule of law – on the part of those being governed.

    I suspect (and hope) both would prevail, but I judge the possibility of ham-fisted law-making combining with hot-headed rejection of ‘tyrants’ to produce a firestorm to be, well, quite a bit higher than the “1 in 500” odds given above.

    Fourthly – suicide, +/- firearms. If you want to dig deeper into what is known about this, I would be interested in hearing what you find.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I am known to have Weird Opinions about secular declining crime rates: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/18/proposed-biological-explanations-for-historical-trends-in-crime/

      • keranih says:

        …omega fatty acids? For srsly?

        Huh. That’s…interesting. The more so, imo, because I tend to slot “omega fatty acid balance” in the category of “small subtle things we don’t know much about which may yet turn out to be extremely important on a population level, maybe”.

        There are a *lot* of things in that particular bin. Which leads me to wonder what else is in the bin, that we don’t know is there, yet.

    • Randy M says:

      Successful execution of an American “disarmament” would require *both* saner heads – in those chambers which construct and carry out the laws – *and* respect for the rule of law – on the part of those being governed.

      We certainly wouldn’t see respect for the rule of law if gun control were enacted in spite of, rather than by changing, the constitution.

      • keranih says:

        While I take your point, I actually put “passing an unpopular gun control law whilst the general public is screaming OH HELL NO YOU DON’T” in the “lack of sanity among the legislative bodies” category.

  34. Douglas Knight says:

    When you control for urbanization, you’re saying that you’d rather use smaller regions than states. I don’t think you can get very fine-grained data on gun ownership (eg, from BRFSS). But maybe you can use FS/S? Obviously, you’d have to control for southernness, but maybe you can. You probably shouldn’t to compare southern cities to southern countryside, because maybe the countryside is even more southern. But maybe it’s possible to compare southern cities to southern cities and northern cities to northern cities.

    • Echo says:

      There have been some county-level studies, but I don’t remember what they used as a proxy for gun ownership.

  35. BC says:

    Just for perspective, if you repeat the exact same analysis for the other factors of urban/rural, Southerness, and race, then how much do each of these factors contribute to the murder rate, controlling for gun ownership, e.g., how many murders could we prevent through residence control?

    Re: the $1000 “externality” per gun sold, it seems strange to interpret these statistical results so as to attribute the full $7.4M per life lost to non-murderer gun owners. If we believe that the murderer has caused the $7.4M in damages, then what would be left to attribute to anyone else? Again, repeating the same analysis for the other factors, controlling for gun ownership, what is the cost of allowing people to live in urban and Southern areas due to the higher resulting murder rate? I would also be dubious that statistics could show that a non-murderer could contribute to a higher murder rate by virtue of his or her race. That would also seem like a misinterpretation.

  36. Steve Sailer says:

    I’m a native of one of the few urban areas in the country that is culturally very liberal but also is pretty gun-crazed: the area around the Hollywood Hills where the entertainment industry is centered. For example, Hollywood elder statesman Steven Spielberg digitally altered the guns in “E.T.” into flashlights for the 20th anniversary re-release. But Spielberg also quietly owns a magnificent collection of Italian shotguns — he commissions a shotgun for each film he completes, with engravings of scenes from the movie — for his favorite sport of trap-shooting, to which he was introduced by gun nut supreme John Milius.

    My guess is that Greater Hollywood has a high proportion of gun owners relative to its lower number of hunters — you have to drive a long way to hunt and because Southern California is dry there aren’t a lot of waterfowl or grass-grazing game animals.

    It would be interesting to study deaths in the Hollywood Hills region to see if this interesting cultural anomaly shows up statistically.

    My guess is that the local high degree of gun ownership deters burglary, which seems to be way down versus the 20th Century, but that would just be a guess.

    • God Damn John Jay says:

      There is another issue involved here, Celebs tend to have stalkers. Spielberg was the target of a White Nationalist plot and had two “normal” stalkers listed on wikipedia. In these cases having a gun around for defense would probably be prudent.

      • Steve Sailer says:

        Good point.

        Another aspect is the traditional belief in Los Angeles that some kind of zombie apocalypse is coming. The notion that someday mobs will be coming to get the movie people goes back to the 1930s literary novel Day of the Locust, and remains a popular trope in L.A.

        It’s not all that unreasonable, either: the next big earthquake could lead to looting in the aftermath, during which Mr. Spielberg’s shotguns could come in handy for defending his estate.

    • Donny Anonny says:

      I’ve wondered if he has the double rifle that featured in Jurassic Park 2.

    • Is it possible that these mega-rich Hollymoguls simply collect ALL kinds of “toys” ? Probably they have above average motorbike ownership rates and yacht ownership rates and musical instrument ownership rates and … of course it is nice to see that they are at least not finding guns ritualistically abhorrent like most other liberals, but still I think it is mostly just a bored hobby for them.

      • Leit says:

        Ha. Ha ha.

        Of course they find guns ritualistically abhorrent; but only other people’s guns.

      • JayT says:

        I don’t see how that would matter. Most people that have huge arsenals do so because guns are their “toys”. The average gun collector (at least in my experience) isn’t stocking up to go to war with the government, they just collect them like another person would collect spoons or thimbles.

        If it is true that there is above average gun ownership in the Hollywood Hills, and if it’s true that more guns lead to more violence, then you would expect the Hollywood Hills to have above average violence rates, no?

  37. JM says:

    Gun ownership isn’t all that important or interesting because it’s a poor proxy for what you really want, which is: “I want to murder someone; how long will it take me to get a gun and do it?” Gun control that restricts things like resale of weapons or number of guns owned or variety of guns and ammunition owned won’t show up in the gun ownership stats but will show up where it matters — in the difficulty of acquiring a usable gun.

    Anyway, guns are a necessary condition for gun violence. Ipso facto, strict gun control would eradicate gun violence. The only question is how strong the substitution effect is, and I’ve never heard of evidence that it’s at all strong.

    • Steve Sailer says:

      Onion headline:

      “No, Gun Purchaser Definitely Won’t Be Needing a Bag for That”

    • Steve Sailer says:

      Kind of like how strict drug control has eradicated drug violence.

      • Wrong Species says:

        But it does significantly reduce drug usage. If we legalized drugs there would instantly be an increase in consumption. If Japan legalized guns they would see an instant increase in gun deaths(suicide and homicide).

        • JayT says:

          Does it significantly reduce drug usage? Portugal decriminalized all drugs and last time I looked has not seen an increase in drug usage.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            “Okay, who here would become a heroin addict if heroin were legalized? Show of hands.

            Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

          • JayT says:

            That’s pretty much exactly what I was thinking. I’ve never met a person that abstained from drugs because they are illegal.

          • Adam says:

            I’d probably at least use HGH. We don’t just ban addictive drugs.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            As I said in another comment, I have, and also, I am one. (It’s not my only reason but it sure is one.)

      • JM says:

        Drug violence is a product of turf wars over who gets to sell drugs and exists in many countries. I’ve never heard of turf wars over who gets to sell guns in any other country with gun control.

        • Marc Whipple says:

          Then you aren’t listening very hard: Hell, National Geographic has described the international firearms black market in its popular crime documentaries. (Popular as in “for a general television audience,” not necessarily as in “lots and lots of people have seen them.)

        • Steve Sailer says:

          Belgium is pretty notorious for organized criminals trafficking in black market guns for wars and for other organized criminals. I don’t know whether they fight turf wars or not.

    • Steve Sailer says:

      More seriously, here’s an idea I came up with last year:

      In a country that has hundreds of millions of guns lying around, it’s hard to stop a dedicated, competent individual with a long time horizon and no fear of death or prison from acquiring guns.

      But a lot of these [mass] shooters don’t sound like unstoppable killing machines from the future, they sound like losers mentally buffeted about by intermittent whims of rage and criminal insanity.

      With some, perhaps if they can’t go down to the store and buy some guns right now, they’ll come up with some other vile but less lethal thing to do to pass the time instead. Sure they could buy guns on the black market, but that takes more work to make contacts and it takes some personal face time. And a lot of the mass shooters don’t seem to be career criminal types with lots of contacts with dealers in the illegal firearms trade, they seem more like middle class problem children who don’t get out that much.

      What if we had a giant bureaucracy that ceaselessly tried to measure how stable, reliable, trustworthy, and future-oriented practically every individual in the country was?

      Maybe that’s a good idea, or maybe that’s a bad idea. But it also sounds expensive to create one just to slow down a few mass shooters per year.

      Except … we already have not just one, but three giant bureaucracies that are constantly measuring individuals’ stability: the credit score bureaus.

      Here’s an idea worth researching: what were the credit scores of each of the last 50 mass shooters who bought their guns at the time they bought them?

      http://www.unz.com/isteve/whats-the-average-credit-score-of-a-mass-shooter/

      So, maybe a law that people with a credit score below X couldn’t buy a gun or couldn’t buy a gun until after a 2 week cooling off period or whatever would stymie a few egregious shootings per year?

      • Virbie says:

        While intriguing, it’s worth pointing out that that would probably be politically DOA pretty much across the political spectrum, exacerbated by the fact that anything involving the slightest hint of complexity or opacity (like credit score calculations, or any unintuitive scientific finding in general) is easy fodder for mockery in today’s political climate.

      • houseboatonstyx says:

        @ Steve Sailr

        + … bingo … but I don’t think credit score is the best proxy.

        For one thing, the Aurora/Batman shooter had spent months collecting armament and explosives (legally ordering online iirc); many of them spend a long time preparing one way or another, so a short waiting period of lack of a credit score wouldn’t help much.

        Several of your commentors mentioned that these shooters (what I call NECAR types, ie Newtown, EliotRodger, Columbine, Aurora, Roseburg) were known to be mentally ill/under treatment before the shootings.

        What might help is getting the profile ‘young male loser who is already on mental health watch’ as a no-buy flag on the background check file.* When someone tries to buy a gun and the check comes back with that flag, call the police. Bring in a mental examiner, and however many character witnesses the buyer wants (who have skin in the game, such as school officials, gun range owners, etc) and if they and the seller are all willing to co-sign for any damages he does with the gun, fine.

        * Hey, I’m not familiar with the official terms, worthless me.

      • Daniel Speyer says:

        Giving unelected, untransparent, unaccountable organizations with no skin in the game that sort of power seems like a really bad idea.

      • JM says:

        Most killings aren’t mass shootings. Think gang violence, domestic violence, and hypersensitive honor culture disputes. Many of those perps are in fact quite capable of passing tests of self discipline. To stop them you need a more nuanced solution that restricts their use cases specifically. For instance, gang violence depends on a steady supply of new handguns (so used ones can be discarded) bought untraceably; restrict lifetime handgun purchases per citizen and you can say goodbye to drive by shootings.

      • Donny Anonny says:

        Restriction of a civil right based on a score issued by an impersonal mega corporate bureaucracy sounds like a good idea if your end game is to get Democrats to join the NRA in droves out of a sense of injustice because it would disproportionately affect the poor.

        And that’s before you realize that people’s credit scores are regularly destroyed as a result of identity theft.

        I’m sorry, but that’s a terrible idea.

      • From what I’ve heard, the credit agencies are pretty sloppy.

        History of violence would probably be a good indicator for “shouldn’t be trusted with a gun”, but it’s not like that information is collected very reliably, either.

      • Steve Sailer says:

        Why not study the credit scores of killers to see what we might find out?

  38. meh says:

    There may be non gun deaths that were provoked by one party having a gun. Thus 1.2 is not necessarily a lower bound…

    • Yrro says:

      On the other hand, we have several “spree” killers who were stopped by someone with a gun, too. The difficulty with gun analysis is that the presence of a gun is affecting both sides of the equation. It’s not something like cigarettes where (as far as we know) cigarettes aren’t sometimes killing people, but also *sometimes* making them healthier.

      • mobile says:

        Well … cigarettes are good for ulcerative colitis.

      • Psmith says:

        Nicotine protects against Alzheimer’s, something like half of recorded supercentenarians smoked regularly, and smoking aids weight loss and increases testosterone levels.

        (Caveat: Jamie Lewis is the source on those last two.).

  39. Dan Peverley says:

    I think that even if the effect exists, it’s small enough that it’s worth it for the associated benefits. $22 billion is chump change compared to how much it would cost to implement effective gun control, and being fully capable of self defense and insurrection is a pretty strong political good in my book. Your mileage on that may vary.

  40. The Anonymouse says:

    If we were to tax guns to cover the “externality” of gun homicides preventable by Australia-level gun control, we would have to slap a $1000 tax on each gun sold. . . . This suggests that most people probably do not enjoy guns enough to justify keeping them around despite their costs.

    If we are going to use the revealed preference of a theoretical gun-buyer faced with a $1000 additional tax, oughtn’t we factor in the revealed preferences of those most likely to be victims of gun violence so as to discount your $7.4m per life valuation?

    That is, John Q. Citizen (valued at $7.4m) is not the average victim of gun violence. I strongly suspect that the average victim of gun violence is of the same demographic makeup as the perpetrator of that violence; i.e., someone whose revealed preferences toward criminality, impulsivity, and problem-solving reveal that they themselves do not value their lives at the same amount as the EPA’s average citizen.

    This is very, very, very, very very tentative, but based on this line of reasoning alone, without looking into the experimental studies or anything else, it appears that Australia-style gun control would probably be worth it, if it were possible.

    Would such a full accounting of revealed preferences, if performed more diligently than I have the resources to perform here, change your tentative opinion on the utilitarian value of Australian-level gun control?

  41. Richard says:

    My conclusion from the data and discussion is that spending money on anything that has any chance of figuring out exactly what is behind the “culture of violence” is money better spent.

    Other than that, any measure of gun control should pass the sanity test of disproportionally effecting criminals, since criminals are disproportionately represented in the stats. The tax proposal above seems to fit the bill, though possibly a little crudely.

    Also:
    * Storage requirements so that guns are harder to steal from law abiding gun owners.
    * Gun training requirements (modelled roughly from driving licenses perhaps?)
    * Actual enforcing current gun laws, I have read stats saying that in most crimes, the guns were already illegal.
    * Stricter background checks.

    • Garrett says:

      The Navy Yard shooter had a Top Secret security clearance. It’s harder to get more “Stricter background check” than that.

      Besides, if we’re going to focus on long-term thinkers, we should make it harder for people to vote unless they exhibit those characteristics as well. I’d start with basic literacy tests.

      • “The Navy Yard shooter had a Top Secret security clearance. It’s harder to get more “Stricter background check” than that.”

        And do *you* believe that if something is not entirely effective, it is entirely ineffective?

  42. Totient says:

    Related (although not your main point):

    It’s hard to find good data on this (all I could find was official data from Texas, and it’s too late for me to want to keep searching), but it looks like concealed carry permit holders commit crimes at a substantially (3-9x) lower rate than the general population. It looks roughly comparable to the rate at which police are convicted for crimes.

    https://www.txdps.state.tx.us/rsd/chl/reports/convrates.htm
    https://www.txdps.state.tx.us/rsd/chl/reports/demographics.htm

    • The Anonymouse says:

      concealed carry permit holders commit crimes at a substantially (3-9x) lower rate than the general population

      I would not find this surprising. A person with a concealed-carry permit has already self-selected as someone willing to voluntarily abide by both permitting laws and place and manner restrictions. If you choose to comply with easily-circumventable laws so as to carry a firearm, it isn’t far-fetched to expect that you will continue to comply with the law once you are carrying the firearm.

      As far as anecdata goes (not far!), those of my acquaintance who carry concealed tend to be far more conscientious and considerate people than the average person who doesn’t.

      • HlynkaCG says:

        >A person with a concealed-carry permit has already self-selected as someone willing to voluntarily abide by both permitting laws and place and manner restrictions.

        I think that this here is the critical aspect. Someone who has already, voluntarily accepted limits on their personal conduct, is probably the sort of person who pays a lot of attention to personal conduct.

  43. Aaron Goldenblumfield says:

    I think an interesting aspect of this that wasn’t necessarily touched on in your discussion, nor any other discussion that I’ve seen, is the extent to which gun ownership relates to ease with which a criminal can acquire a gun that isn’t registered to them. Are most crimes committed with a gun committed with a legally purchased gun?

    • Harold says:

      Not sure this is all that relevant since gun registration isn’t a thing in most of the country. D.C, Hawaii, new sales and residents in California, and handguns in Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, and retail sales in Washington. So the vast majority of guns/handguns floating around aren’t registered, and in most states aren’t required to be.

    • Ralph says:

      This is always my thought as well. I don’t see anyone on either side talking about it, likely because it would be hard to measure.

      But it’s still worth the thought experiment. For gun homicides in the US, what percentage are committed with guns that were at one point purchased legally, from a licensed dealer? And of those homicides with guns that were legally obtained, what percentage of those murderers would be willing and able to easily obtain a gun on the black market? To me, these seem like the most important questions we should be asking.

      And even if the data isn’t out there, it’s worth thinking about whether or not these answers differ between countries when comparing their gun restrictions/homicide rates.

      With admittedly little evidence, I imagine that the size black market gun trade differs between the US and say, Australia.

      • bluto says:

        Dealers have been required to track sales for years. Traces aren’t initiated for all criminal use of guns, but when they arethe statistics show almost all guns were originally purchased from dealers (while it’s not hard to make a gun it does require enough machining to preclude most drug gangs. Most were sold (which makes the lack of prosecutions for straw purchases infuriating). The median FFL purchase to crime use time is 9 to 13 years in most states. Something like 15% were stolen the last time the ATF did a study.

        The few times a newspaper has follewed the chain from legal purchase to criminal use the straw buyer has always been someone like the straw buyer in the California shooting (someone who didn’t realize straw purchases were illegal or was too poor to care about the risk).

        I would personally like to see visible prosecutions and a campaign in popular media explaining both that buuing a gun for someone else is a crime and the main way guns are obtained by criminals.

        • Marc Whipple says:

          @bluto:

          I am all for both of those things but every gun store and gun show I have visited for the past I don’t know how long but it’s been a while have prominent signs advising people that buying guns for others is a crime. I’m not sure it’s lack of information that’s the problem.

  44. Dormin111 says:

    3/4 of American gun deaths are suicide related, and around 80% of the remaining gun deaths are gang related, the vast majority of which are drug related. When comparing homicide rates between countries, why not factor in the intensity and scale of each country’s war on drugs? I have no idea what the war on drugs is like in France or the UK, but it’s been roaring in America for 50 years.

    • alaska3636 says:

      Agreed. I made this comment a few times above without seeing yours. I’m not gonna look into it, because I like making sweeping statements backed by nothing, but I bet a million dollars drug prohibition and prosecution is highly correlated with a so-called culture of violence.

  45. Anonymous says:

    I’m always surprised that when americans talk about correlations between gun ownership and gun murder no mention is ever made of gun type. If I weren’t lazy that’s the first confounder I would look for.
    Rural areas probably have a low murder/gun rate because guns are bought for hunting, the logical gun to buy for hunting is a long barrel shotgun which is terribly inconvenient for doing crime, even after you go through the truble of sawing off the barrel.

    Maybe I’m wrong, maybe america is full of people shooting at ducks with 9mm and holding up convenience stores with shotguns.

    Or maybe this factor is never considered because liberals are in a bubble that’s so devoid of gun-related knowledge that they don’t know about this and for republicans “guns don’t correlate with murder” is the motte that defends the “I want to buy handguns and kalashnikovs to defend myself from the zombie-communist apocalypse” bailey.

    • Donny Anonny says:

      The FBI releases an annual Uniform Crime Report. One of the things it breaks down for homicide is type of weapon used, and when it comes to firearms used, handguns are far and away more prevalent. Rifles (so-called “assault-style” or otherwise) are used to kill fewer people than fists and feet.

      Data for 2014 can be found here:
      https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/tables/expanded-homicide-data/expanded_homicide_data_table_8_murder_victims_by_weapon_2010-2014.xls

      The fact that more people are beaten to death with hammers and/or fists than are shot with rifles doesn’t seem to make much difference when it comes to the gun control crowd who seem to fixate on so-called “assault weapons” because they look scary.

      • Slow Learner says:

        the gun control crowd who seem to fixate on so-called “assault weapons” because they look scary.

        Or because mass shootings tend to involve “assault weapons”, or if you prefer long-barrelled magazine-fed semi-automatic rifles.

        It does seem that a sensible move for gun control would be to focus on handguns, as that covers the vast majority of the problem, and handguns are the least useful weapons for either hunting or the illusory possibility of fighting the Second American Revolution that’s coming Any Day Now.

        • houseboatonstyx says:

          @ Slow Learner
          Or because mass shootings tend to involve “assault weapons”, or if you prefer long-barrelled magazine-fed semi-automatic rifles.

          In the NECAR*-type ‘mass shootings’, how many shots the perpetrator can get off before having to reload or switch weapons, can be quite an important factor.

          * Newtown, EliotRodger, Columbine, Aurora, Roseburg

          • Donny Anonny says:

            Having examined that, magazine capacity has little effect on the outcome.

            Arguably far less so than victim type and venue selection at any rate.

          • The Anonymouse says:

            I’ve seen you use “NECAR” as a descriptor a number of times; is there a reason you use place names except for Elliot Rodger? Do you mean to emphasize him specifically, or are you trying to make your neologism more catchy?

            NIVCAR isn’t that bad.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ Donny Anonny
            Having examined that, magazine capacity has little effect on the outcome.

            Capability of the weapon is the kind of factor we should be looking at here. The Tucson shooter (not on my list) was brought down while trying to reload.

            The Aurora/Batman shooter:
            He then fired a 12-gauge Remington 870 Express Tactical shotgun, first at the ceiling and then at the audience. He also fired a Smith & Wesson M&P15[16] semi-automatic rifle with a 100-round drum magazine, which malfunctioned after reportedly firing several rounds.[16][17][18] Finally, he fired a Glock 22 .40-caliber handgun.[19][20]
            — wikipedia

            I don’t have time to look up the rest right now.

            Arguably far less so than victim type and venue selection at any rate.

            Those, we can’t influence.

        • Donny Anonny says:

          They don’t tend to feature magazine-fed rifles though. That’s largely a media driven perception.

          Also, the problem with focusing on handguns is that while they are disproportionately used to commit crimes, they are widely considered the best sort of firearm for personal self defense.

          • Slow Learner says:

            Also, the problem with focusing on handguns is that while they are disproportionately used to commit crimes, they are widely considered the best sort of firearm for personal self defense.

            Firearms for “personal self defence” are part of the problem. Nothing wrong with hunting (that isn’t wrong with meat-eating in general). Keeping military grade weapons is what the 2nd Amendment is for, albeit that’s meant to be as part of a militia. But toting a pistol around in case you need to “defend yourself” has no place in a civil society. There’s a reason we stopped wearing swords everywhere and fighting duels, and it isn’t that everyone wanted to (or did!) get robbed by sword-toting thieves.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Slow Learner:

            Carrying a handgun for self-defense (or, more to the point, keeping one in the home) is by no means equivalent to stabbing someone with a sword because he insulted your wife.

            People stopped wearing swords everywhere because a) they invented guns, b) it is no longer normal that highwaymen will try to rob you on any long journey, and c) swords and guns were banned by the rulers in order to stop the lower class from threatening their “betters”. Indeed in very many societies, swords were always banned unless in the hands of the “right people”. Just look at feudal Japan or many countries in Europe. Some also banned guns among the common people very early on, especially after William of Orange was assassinated with a handgun.

            Sure, policing has gotten better since the 1700s. But until the police can quantum-tunnel to my house, I am pretty goddamn defenseless if anyone should choose to break in, for quite long enough a time for him to kill me.

            Now, I don’t have a gun because I don’t live in a dangerous area. But many people do live in dangerous areas, it’s often the poorest people who are least well-served by the police, and I think they have a right to defend themselves. Especially when the courts have infamously held that there is no individual right to police protection.

            In that case, two women heard someone break into the apartment upstairs, along with sounds of struggle. They called the police, who drove by without getting out and did nothing. They called again, and the police did the same thing. Then the intruder came down and raped them, too. The court held that this was very sad, but that they were not entitled to sue the police for blatantly abdication of their duty to protect them.

            (It’s hardly even necessary to get into the fact that 19th century gun laws were an essential part of disenfranchising blacks in the period of Southern “Redemption”. The KKK’s night rides were surely more pleasant when they knew their victims could not resist. The transition from the dominance of “Black Republicanism” in the South to white supremacy didn’t happen by magic. Justice Thomas gets into this in the McDonald decision.)

            I don’t think it’s part of a “civil society” for people to be made helpless before those who want to destroy them.

          • Gbdub says:

            @Slow Learner – the Heller ruling specifically found that the 2nd Amendment protects a right to self defense, and to the weapons commonly used for self defense.

            And anyway, both the military and police forces commonly use semi-automatic pistols for self defense purposes, so if you’re accepting military-style rifles as protected by the militia clause (keeping in mind that “militia” means “able bodied persons of military age” and not “The National Guard”) you kind of have to accept pistols as well.

          • Slow Learner says:

            @GbDub I’m not American and have no standing, but IMO the plain reading of the Second Amendment has nothing whatsoever to do with personal self-defence. It talks about the right to keep and bear arms in the context of a well-regulated militia to maintain the security of a free state.
            The Court said what it said; maybe another Court will one day decide otherwise, based on the text as actually written.

            @Vox Imperatoris
            Carrying a gun for self-defence is equivalent to carrying a sword for self-defence. The fact that in a society where this was ubiquitous it led to duelling and general disorder, I take as indicative of the effect of routinely carrying weapons in general.
            If you’re keeping a weapon at home for self-defence, it doesn’t need to be a pistol; it could as easily be a shotgun or rifle, and so the rest of your argument is irrelevant.
            I will just touch on one point though:

            I don’t think it’s part of a “civil society” for people to be made helpless before those who want to destroy them.

            This kind of melodramatic nonsense is part of the problem. Unless you’ve been very active in making personal enemies, who the hell do you think “want[s] to destroy” you?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Slow Learner:

            Carrying a gun for self-defence is equivalent to carrying a sword for self-defence. The fact that in a society where this was ubiquitous it led to duelling and general disorder, I take as indicative of the effect of routinely carrying weapons in general.

            You don’t think that maybe, just maybe, the causation was the other way around? That people carried weapons everywhere because they couldn’t rely on effective law enforcement? And indeed, as aristocrats, because they were the law enforcement?

            Or do you think the whole system of aristocracy, feudalism, and so on happened solely because the government didn’t pass a law banning guns? Of course, the government (such as it was) didn’t have the means to protect the people from violence itself, if it had passed such a law. And though it’s been pretty good at getting rid of mass banditry, neither does the U.S. government have the ability to send cops to my house in five seconds.

            If you’re keeping a weapon at home for self-defence, it doesn’t need to be a pistol; it could as easily be a shotgun or rifle, and so the rest of your argument is irrelevant.

            Homes aren’t the only places were people can be in danger and in need of protection. And even so, handguns are easier to use in a real-world situation of close-quarters combat.

            This kind of melodramatic nonsense is part of the problem. Unless you’ve been very active in making personal enemies, who the hell do you think “want[s] to destroy” you?

            I don’t think I have any such people who want to destroy me. That’s why I don’t have any guns.

            But there are people less fortunate and well-off than me, who live in neighborhoods not well-served by the police, and I don’t think they should have to live in fear of criminals. And they do in certain places in my own city of Washington, DC, where the nation’s highest murder rate is combined with the strictest gun control.

            The whole thing remind’s me of Edward Bellamy’s socialist novel Looking Backwards. Writing in the late 1800s, he said that in the year 2000, nobody will need to carry umbrellas because cities will have massive domes over them which block the rain.

            But the government’s police protection is not a perfect dome. It is a leaky dome. If it were a perfect dome, individual self-defense would be unnecessary. As it is, however, I’m not content with banning umbrellas and telling the people who get rained on that we “care” and will get around to patching the dome “eventually”.

          • The Anonymouse says:

            @Slow Learner

            Let us be careful of accusing others of nonsensical melodrama while simultaneously positing that the carrying of handguns–like the historical carrying of swords–causes “duelling and general disorder.”

            I live in a very red state. High rates of gun ownership; low rates of violent crime. Hell, the other day I was in my local charity thrift shop and was shopping next to an attractive young lady who also just happened to be openly carrying a pistol on her hip.*

            There is no sign of general disorder here; the nearest urban area is routinely mentioned in lists of America’s nicest places to live. Last year a bill went up to repeal our anti-dueling law. Not because we want to duel, but rather because the law is obsolete for having never been used.

            * ETA: From reading the comments here, I don’t think I can stress strongly enough how not-weird this is. Lots of blue-state and non-US persons seem to think such an encounter necessarily ends with screaming and the police being called and a massive gunfight and rivers of blood flowing into the streets. In the reality of my community, what actually happened was that she said hello to me, I said hello to her, the elderly-lady clerk rung us both up without batting a lash, and all involved went home with nicely discounted used housewares.

          • Harold says:

            Slow Learner: As you say, you’re not an American, so you evidently have no idea we use our guns about 2.5 million times a year in self-defense. For the 1 million plus citizens who do so (the difference comes from the number of times per year for some individuals), it’s anything but “melodramatic nonsense.”

          • Stuart Armstrong says:

            @Slow Learner said:

            >The fact that in a society where this was ubiquitous it led to duelling and general disorder, I take as indicative of the effect of routinely carrying weapons in general.

            We need to distinguish the overall case for a state having a monopoly on violence rather than allowing vigilantism and private retaliation (which seems extremely strong based on the historical evidence we have) with the question of the marginal impact of more or less guns in the US as it currently is.

            The post argues that gun restrictions would likely lead to less violence; however, the effect is much smaller that the impact of the transition from “state of nature” to “centralised democratic state”; I don’t think we can use that large impact to argue for more gun control.

          • Gbdub says:

            @Slow Learner – your initial statement left out the “IMO”, and I responded because your misconception seems to be common among people not familiar with the jurisprudence. As of right now, the law of the land in the US is that the 2A protects self defense. As you note, it can potentially change without being fully repealed, but you should be more careful to note that you’re talking about what you think it SHOULD be, not what it IS.

            And anyway, a 2A that allows you to defend yourself against oppressive government but not against private aggressors strikes me as nonsensical. The core question is over whether the government should have a true monopoly on deadly force, and IMO, which tracks current law, the 2A says that it should not.

          • mrwiizrd says:

            @Slow Learner

            “but IMO the plain reading of the Second Amendment has nothing whatsoever to do with personal self-defence.”

            Your opinion doesn’t really align with history or jurisprudence surrounding the 2nd amendment. I would suggest reading Eugene Volokh’s testimony to Congress on the history of the 2nd amendment as it includes plenty of relevant citations:

            http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/beararms/testimon.htm

          • “Carrying a gun for self-defence is equivalent to carrying a sword for self-defence. The fact that in a society where this was ubiquitous it led to duelling and general disorder, I take as indicative of the effect of routinely carrying weapons in general.”

            How much do you know about the history of dueling? Duels were typically arranged in advance. When they were with pistols, as was common in 18th century England, they were not pistols that people routinely carried, they were dueling pistols used for the duel. When with swords, they were occasionally impromptu, but usually by arrangement.

            For first hand descriptions of both patterns, I recommend Casanova’s Memoirs, my favorite 18th c. primary source.

          • Elissa says:

            I have no strong opinions about the causes of duelling but I firmly agree that people should read Casanova because it is great.

      • Stuart Armstrong says:

        >who seem to fixate on so-called “assault weapons” because they look scary.

        That may be a function of what kind of gun restrictions have any support. And it might be also because these are the only weapons that can threaten heavily armoured swat teams (please pardon my ignorance here if I got that wrong). It seems perfectly plausible that these types of weapons are the ones the police would be more afraid of, and hence their support might be more forthcoming.

        • Leit says:

          Your ignorance isn’t inexcusable at all.

          In point of fact, the “scary assault weapons” usually fire small-caliber rounds that are relatively easily mitigated by SWAT armour. A standard 12-gauge shotgun loaded with slug, on the other hand, will go through that same armour like it wasn’t even there. Brass monolithic ammunition from a decent caliber hunting rifle will do the same, and depending on the type of armour, you’d just need a couple of hits in the same general area to penetrate with standard FMJ. A round from basically any big game rifle? You may as well be wearing a string bikini for all the good anything short of an EOD suit will do you.

          This is a Thompson Center Contender. It’s a single-shot, break-action pistol beloved by silhouette shooters and (some, crazy) hunters. It can be chambered for virtually any ammunition you like with a simple barrel switch. It’s not going to have the power of a rifle due to the lack of barrel length, and the recoil is pretty impressive with anything that loads hot, but anyone who has the appropriate barrel can go through kevlar like butter any time they like.

          This is why, when people talk about “no-one is going to come for your shotgun/hunting rifle/sporting pistol”, people who actually know anything about guns aren’t impressed. Because when people who don’t know get around to banning “powerful, dangerous” weapons, these are the things that end up getting banned as a side effect.

          • Gbdub says:

            Uh, isn’t an AR firing FMJ ammo much more likely to penetrate soft body armor than a shotgun slug, which is usually soft and fired at much lower velocities?

          • Harold says:

            Gbdub: Right you are, most concealed soft body armor will stop a shotgun slug (although it’s doubtful the target will be able to do anything for a while), and won’t stop center-fire rifle rounds of any design. On the other hand, SWAT teams are likely wearing rifle plates, which will stop all non-AP rounds (and at Level IV, a variety of AP rounds), but cover much less of the body (they’re thick and heavy).

          • Leit says:

            Sure, if we’re talking about soft armour, but if we’re talking soft armour then a $40 Mosin Nagant with surplus ammo dug up out of some Ukranian farmer’s field is going through it no problem. It’s my understanding that, as part of the increasing militarization of the US police, they tend to use military-class body armour with ballistic plates. Different types of armour (eg. polymer, ceramic, steel-backed) will give different effects against different types of attack, even dependent on composition of the material, so results may vary, but it is *really hard* to come up with anything that’s going to defeat multiple rounds from a battle rifle caliber, and it’s not even worth trying above that.

            As for relative penetration… this is the kind of argument that gun guys absolutely love because it’s fun and nearly impossible to pin down without an endless series of “what if”s. There are youtube channels dedicated to this stuff, and they do awesome stuff like driving a steel slug right through a solid steel I-beam.

            To start with, shotgun slugs don’t have to be lead, especially if we’re talking saboted slugs. Hell, the endless and creative variety of projectiles that you can get down a shotgun barrel is half of the attraction of the thing. Additionally, a slug exits the barrel with significantly more energy than most common rifle rounds, but loses energy much more quickly, so it’d depend on the range, but your average doorkicker taking one in the chest from someone behind the door isn’t going to be walking away.

            So to answer… it depends. But for the simple yes/no question of “will this go through body armour”, I’m on the “yes” side.

          • Gbdub says:

            In digging around a bit, non plated soft armor is generally not rated to stop rifled slugs (especially of the solid saboted type). But it’s not rated to stop jacketed 5.56mm either.

            And, to your second point, the best (obviously tongue-in-cheek) description I saw said “a 12 gauge slug probably won’t go through a vest – it will just bring the two sides together”. Ouch.

          • Gbdub says:

            A Mosin-Nagant actually fires a pretty powerful round, not quite 30-06 but in the ballpark. Basic ball ammo for it will easily penetrate soft armor at long range and do serious damage to plate armor at close range. The cartridge is the same as that used in the Dragunov and PKM.

            And yes, SWAT units will use ceramic plate armor, but standard police usually don’t.

            I’m a bit confused because on the one hand you seem to know a lot, and on the other seem to be making basic errors like assuming a cheap WWII vintage rifle and cartridge is less powerful than common modern arms (when in fact the opposite is true as far as military weapons are concerned).

            Do you perhaps play a lot of modern shooter games but not actually handle a lot of real weapons? I’m asking out of curiosity, not intending insult.

          • Leit says:

            Heh. I actually just don’t know much about Mosins except that they’re considered cheapish “junk guns” in the US, and that the old surplus “dug out of a field” ammo is generally considered a bit unreliable and somewhat underpowered. We don’t really get them where I’m from… our equivalent in terms of cheap old WW2 surplus is the venerable Lee-Enfield. It was meant to be a sort of joke that I was trying to phrase so Americans would get it? I guess that didn’t work out perfectly.

            The gun culture where I’m from isn’t as well-provisioned as that in the US, so there are some things for which I have to rely on dreaded internet second-hand knowledge. My actual knowledge of rifle and handgun shooting is firsthand, though. As is, unfortunately, my experience of being held at gunpoint.

            Also don’t know much about US police loadout except what I read online, and that it’s wildly inconsistent between states and even sometimes towns thanks to a program that allows law enforcement to buy military surplus cheap… so the impression I get is that in some places you’ll get low-profile vests and in others you’ll have a tiny town’s SWAT team rock up in an APC, wearing half a battalion’s worth of heavy gear.

          • Tibor says:

            I have to say that this is actually really interesting. I know nothing about guns, I shot a low-caliber pistol at a target once which is about how much contact I’ve had with guns. I’ve learned a lot about both gun laws and guns in this comments section (and while googling things related to it 🙂 ).

          • TrivialGravitas says:

            @Leit
            There are quite a few people in the US who consider the Mosin to be once of the best weapons ever.

            The surplus ammo is underpowered for the caliber, but excessively powerful for most purposes.

          • Echo says:

            @Leit a lot of the talk about Mosins coming from the US is influenced by /k/ and other very silly gun forums.

            http://7.62x54r.net/MosinID/MosinHumor.htm

            “It was last cleaned in Berlin in 1945.”
            “Your rifle’s accessory is a small tin can with a funny lid, but it’s buried under an apartment building somewhere in Budapest.”
            And the classic
            “You dig your ammo out of a farmer’s field in Ukraine and it works just fine.”

          • Leit says:

            @TrivialGravitas:

            …huh. Genuinely? Because the attitude that I see expressed most often is affection, certainly, but combined with the sort of indulgent hyperbole with which one assures one’s child that, yes indeed, they have produced the pinnacle of artistic achievement in the medium of crayon and mucus. Which isn’t to say it’s not genuine, nor that I couldn’t be misreading.

            @Echo:

            Yeah, as above for some things I do rely on Das Net, and that specific comparison is one I’ve seen linked everywhere from THR to reddit. Best line in it is “Your rifle won a pole vault event”.

      • JBeshir says:

        I think it might come from their social intuition, if nothing else, being able to correctly react to the fact that handguns, being the biggest and most widespread problem, also have the biggest and most widespread support, and would be very politically damaging to propose anything detrimental towards.

    • Seth says:

      I suspect even the most anti-gun liberal comprehends a difference between pistols on end of a continuum, and machine-guns on the other end, even if there’s some fog around the center related to the term “assault rifle”.

      I think it’s more that the detailed discussion you want doesn’t work well as a sound-bite.

      • Leit says:

        When you’ve got posts around here – a generally educated kind of place – talking about people collecting “pistols, semi-automatics, shotguns and hunting rifles” as if those categories didn’t have significant cross-over, I start seriously doubting that.

        The biggest sore point that sticks out is that the AR-15 is one of the more popular hunting weapons in the US, and it’s a military-style semiauto rifle platform. Which is exactly what those anti-gun liberals tend to be thinking of when they’re trying to ban “assault weapons”.

        (Also: I don’t care if it’s chambered in .308, bring one to Africa to hunt game and you’re going to hear some choice invective. Our animals don’t fsck around.)

        • Marc Whipple says:

          “I said shoot him, not piss him off!”

          • John Schilling says:

            Walter Dalrymple Maitland Bell turns in his grave. But given the lesser quality of the hunters we send to Africa these days, I can see how you’d want them to use bigger guns. And better guides, while you’re at it.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            “We learn of an old geezer, aged 96, who at the end of his life in the Transvaal boasted that he had taken 341 elephants, 187 lions, 40 k****** and two Englishmen.”

  46. Daniel Speyer says:

    If I understood this right, we find the correlation between guns and murder only after controlling for robbery rate. This could be that there’s some general factor of crime that anticorrelates with guns by mutual causality (to what?) but then guns boost murder against that backdrop. Couldn’t this also be explained as guns deterring robbery, but having no effect on murder? Or deterring murder less?

    I find so many “confounders” suspicious. I suspect I could show correlation between anything and anything at something close to p<1/number_of_confounders_tried if I put in the effort.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      No, it’s not only after controlling for robbery. Scott specifically mentioned this objection (made by Lott), but he found other controls that yielded the same results.

      This is an odd statement. The mere existence of alternative controls should not be reassuring. He says that robbery seems to be a proxy for black+south+urban, so maybe that’s the set that worked as well. That doesn’t justify controlling for either the 1 or the 3, but if you have concerns about robbery, do the same concerns apply to controlling for the 3?

  47. Tom Scharf says:

    This was good work. Preventing suicides and homicides are really apples and oranges.

    It’s impossible to look at the US black murder rate and not conclude there is a screamingly obvious “black culture of violence” problem. See the graph here:
    http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/black-americans-are-killed-at-12-times-the-rate-of-people-in-other-developed-countries/

    You can cut the data up in eleventeen different ways and this is the statistic that will stand out. This would be significant if the black murder rate was 50% higher, right? So when it is 1200% higher than other developed countries and 750% higher than the US white murder rate, one would expect people to speculate that this isn’t a random anomaly. It sticks out like a 4 million ton elephant.

    If you want to investigate what are the sources of a more prevalent US culture of violence, I have a good idea of where to start looking. How much of this is shared with an also relatively high white murder rate is unclear. It is probably true that if whites murdered each other at the black murder rate, we would have gun control in this country. This hypothesis naturally leads the NYT to conclude that opposing gun control makes you a racist. A perfect mashup of the Time’s favorite two topics this year.
    http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/28/guns-and-racism/?_r=0

    We have a relatively small population where an effective solution would bring down the murder rate the fastest and possibly the cheapest. What are we talking about instead? Preventing statistically insignificant mass shootings by white guys with scary looking rifles and no criminal history. Yeah, that’s where we should be spending our time.

    I don’t really care that much about gun control, I’d vote for a handgun ban. I’d also vote for hand grenade ban if those were legal. Maybe all guns should be bright green with blinking LED’s and have RF’ID tags built into them that are checked in public / private spaces. What I don’t get is why people waste their time pontificating and vilifying others on clearly ineffective solutions. Doing something useless and doing nothing are the same thing to me. Go big or go home.

    • Lysenko says:

      Modern gun control efforts go on about “assault weapons” (which aren’t actually all that stand-out popular as tools of mass shooters, to the extent that they exist as a coherent category at all), because the previous scare quotes category was “Saturday Night Specials”, and that one failed to gain them enough political capital to do anything lasting and meaningful.

      Specifically, “saturday night specials” could be more or less defined as “cheap, mass-produced, readily available handguns, small and handy for easy concealment”. In other words, -exactly- the category of weapon one would theoretically want to ban going off of the argument above.

      • Mark Atwood says:

        because the previous scare quotes category was “Saturday Night Specials”, and that one failed to gain them enough political capital to do anything lasting and meaningful

        Ah, the memory hole.

        You are leaving off the word that always was prepended to the phrase “Saturday night special” before roughly 1970, and that word reveals everything that ever needed to be known about gun control advocates.

        Hint: the word is a compound word, the second part of the compound was “-town”, and the first part of the compound began with the letter “N”, and today saying it out loud or writing it down is tabooed for people who are not black.

        I don’t blame you for leaving it off, as it’s now been almost forgotten, and actually writing it down would detract from the very valid point you did make.

  48. Anonymaus says:

    Sorry if this was posted already:

    […] each absolute percentage point in gun ownership was related to a 2.2 relative percentage point difference in homicide.

    I think you were confused by the phrasing of MA&H 2007. “relative percentage point difference” is an ambiguous phrase, since “percentage point” usually refers to an absolute difference of 1% of the total. What they find is a 2.2 percent (relative) change in homicide rate whenever they give guns to 1/100 of all households.

    America has a gun ownership rate of 32%, so if we somehow decreased that to zero, we would naively expect about a 70% decrease in homicides.

    This may be because of your misunderstanding of the phrase: reducing the gun ownership from 32% to 0 would (according to the model) reduce homicide rate by (1 – 0.978^32) = 51%. This slightly diminishes the point you make afterwards about only 67% of American homicides involving guns. (similarly 6% g.o. -> 12.5% homicide rate, 23% g.o. (from US to Germany) -> 40.0% homicide rate, 10% g.o. ->19.9% homicide rate)

  49. Arndt says:

    I am not so sure about the number for gun ownership in Germany. According to an article in 2014 in a major weekly paper (Die Zeit) in Germany there are 5.5 Mio. legal guns owned by 1.45 Mio. people (most legal guns are owned by hunters or sport shooters who typically own more than one gun). So the 8% could be the ratio of guns per inhabitants, not necessarily the ratio of gun owning households.

    http://www.zeit.de/2014/04/waffen-deutschland

    • Philipp says:

      Another point to befuddle the comparison of these numbers: Here in Germany it is almost impossible to legally own *ammunition* if you are not a certified hunter.

    • Chalid Astrakein says:

      I also found the number of 9% surprisingly high – but then again I am from East Germany.

      Looking at the source Scott cites (https://books.google.de/books?id=e_1GECPknNEC&pg=PA14&lpg=PA14), the book cites another paper from 1993:

      http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1485564/?page=3

      This paper again cites an older telephone-based survey from the International Crime Survey of 1989:

      https://books.google.de/books?isbn=9065444637

      in which for me, sadly, all important pages about methodology and sample size are blocked. But I can see from the second source that this survey had 28000 people across 14 countries, so about 2000 per country seems likely. Nothing to complain here, apparently.

      But it is important to point out that this was only done for West Germany (which is still written in a foot note of Scotts source, but they nevertheless label the entire row ‘Germany’). Furthermore, the german newspaper article clearly shows that gun-ownership in East Germany is lower than that of West Germany, because communists wouldn’t allow even the ownership of sport rifles. And thus you overestimate gun-ownership if you only take numbers from West-Germany (About 16% of Germans live in the former communist areas).

      But looking at these numbers, even that does not explain the difference. We have 9% of households against 1.45 million individuals owning guns, out of a population of 80 million. Even saying East Germans have no guns only lowers this to 7.8% of households versus 1.8% of persons (and then we are counting ALL individuals, even infants). And these two numbers are clearly incompatible, because the average German household size is only about 2.0 .

      Considering that the source of the article are official statistics, we may be inclined to believe that 1.8% of the population possess weapons legally, which would correspond to 3.6% of households in the extreme case of complete anti-correlation of gun-owning persons inside a household (unlikely I think). Then again, there is an uncertain number of illegal weapons. Some estimates say as much as twice as the legal amount, but that does not really tell us how many more people are gun-owning if illegal weapons are included.

      This article claims the number is as high as 20 million illegal weapons:

      http://www.taz.de/!5089776/

      and furthermore, that even the number of legal weapons is 10 million. Then again, taz is quite leftist, so a bias towards scandalizing can be expected (?). But this does support a number significantly larger than 1.8% of persons.

      tldr: Numbers for Germany seem to contradict each other, but I have no better number to offer.

      • Yrro says:

        The big difference I have heard from people in the shooting sports, is that shooting sports are almost exclusively an upper class thing in the rest of the world. The distribution of guns probably affects the homicide rate a bit.

        In the US, it’s a mix — from the guy with a $300 police trade-in Glock to a retiree with a $3,000 custom 1911 (and an identical backup). Here they’re playing on ranges that are essentially just piles of mud and some cardboard for targets. But you go to a European competition and the stages look as though they were set up by a major theatre company. In the US the shooters all help reset the stage — in South America they pay people to do it for you.

  50. Oliver Cromwell says:

    In this post, Alexander meticulously destroys Left reasoning on gun control and then concludes that all Left policy proposals are correct anyway on the basis that gun owners obvious don’t value guns at the level of a Netflix subscription.

    I vaguely recall predicting something like this would happen, as Alexander struggles to tell the truth without becoming too unpopular.

    Despite this minor quibble, still a wonderfully informative post. I would very much be interested to see a deeper investigation of “cultures of violence”, which seem to be much more important than guns in the US. What is the equivalent of gun control for “cultures of violence”?

    • stillnotking says:

      What is the equivalent of gun control for “cultures of violence”?

      Leviathan. State authority making it too costly to pursue private vendettas. It’s pretty much the only thing that’s ever worked on a large scale.

      • Oliver Cromwell says:

        Yet, doesn’t really work, at least not stated so loosely. There’s a 100x variance in homicide rates among stable and functional states.

        • stillnotking says:

          I didn’t say it always works.

        • anon85 says:

          I think there’s potentially a real problem with black communities not trusting the police, and therefore taking matters into their own hands. This can potentially be fixed with better policing.

    • Tom Scharf says:

      Legalizing the drug trade might be a good start.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Netflix subscriptions cost $1000?!

      (actually, that number should be $3000, because Australian-style gun control might only take away a third of guns, so only those gun owners should be willing to subsidize not having it)

      • Douglas Knight says:

        Netflix costs $100/year. The corresponding figure in your post $220/person/year. $1000/gun isn’t per year and so is a silly comparison.

  51. Steven Flaeck says:

    I just wanted to say that I thought the FS/S trick was neat and would have been genuinely saddened it didn’t work if not for the finding about the South, which was much neater than the trick.

  52. naath says:

    I’m in the UK not Germany but re: wait, really? European gun control is less strict than I thought!

    In the UK it is essentially impossible to own a working handgun; and pretty damn annoying to own a convincing-looking non-functioning one that you take out in public. But getting a license to own a shotgun is reasonably simple if tedious and expensive. If you do own a gun here in the UK there are incredibly strict rules about how you must store it, and its ammunition; and a fair number of gun owners don’t keep their guns in their homes.

    • This confusion between handguns and rifles is pervasive in coastal blue tribe discussions about guns and one of the important distinctions between places like the United States, Canada, Germany, and the UK. Germany and Canada have restrictions on handgun ownership (also, as you stated, the UK). The United States does not.

    • Adam Casey says:

      Yeah. The cultural assumption is that all farmers have shotguns they use to shoot badgers and the like. But handguns or any guns in cities basically don’t exist.

    • KingOfNothing says:

      Yeah German here. I also always wonder about those comparison in gun ownership numbers. This might work between different US states, but it’s completely pointless to compare this with gun ownership numbers in European countries due to restrictions on type and ammunition.

      What kind of measurement would be needed is rather an “easyness/readyness” of access, i.e. ‘Do you believe you are able to obtain a functional handgun with bullets within a week, if you absolutely have to?’

      I would believe the percentage of Germans who answer this with yes to be around 5-10%.

  53. Robert VerBruggen says:

    I made these points on Twitter but figured I’d add them here:

    Our homicide/murder rates have been around 5 in recent years. I’m guessing 3.8 is just guns.

    I think this literature review from Gary Kleck is very good; I cited it in my NR piece. This study is included — it has a higher p-value than any other study he reviews even though it doesn’t seem to have a ton of observations relative to the others. Not sure whether that’s good (indicating they used the proper controls and the truth popped out) or suspicious. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270825500_The_Impact_of_Gun_Ownership_Rates_on_Crime_Rates_A_Methodological_Review_of_the_Evidence

    I’m more concerned about reverse causality. Robbery is more likely to affect you specifically, but murder is more likely to be on the news.

    One point I didn’t make that’s really more of a question: I’ve noticed public-health researchers often use negative binomial regressions in this type of work. (Sometimes they even use it with rate data, which seems odd from what I’ve read, but I majored in journalism.) In most other fields the norm seems to be to use normal regression but transform the data as needed to meet the assumptions. Is one approach clearly superior? Do these results hold up if you do it the other way?

    Okay, one more: I think it’s pretty difficult to fully control for cultures of violence. Black pop + Southern-ness gets you a lot of the way there, but I haven’t seen really good state-level data more specific than that.

  54. philh says:

    > Here is a graph of guns vs. gun homicides:

    But the axis is labelled murder, not homicide. Are accidents and self-defense counted? Are they a significant fraction of gun deaths?

    • Harold says:

      Lethal gun accidents have been weighing in at 600/year for a long time (and since ~1980, while both population and number of guns very roughly increased by 50%, the absolute number of accidents decreased by 25%).

      Data on legal homicides simply isn’t collected by anyone, fancy that. I don’t get the impression the number is large compared to “gun deaths”, even the much lower number of murders.

  55. keranih says:

    The highest gun-ownership state in the nation is Wyoming, where 59.7% of households have a gun (really!). But Wyoming has a murder rate of only 1.4 – the same as right across the border in more gun-controlled Canada,

    Tiny nit pick – there is in fact an entire state between Wyoming and Canada. In terms of physical distance, Chicago is no further from Canada than the average patch of dirt (+snow, +grass) in Wyoming, and Cleveland & most of upper NY are closer.

    I call this tiny because the cultural distance is what’s important, imo – just as Chicago itself has a level of violence closer to LA or DC than to the rural counties downstate – and Scott already covered that.

  56. Yrro says:

    Your externalities cost, of course, would seem to ignore crime prevented by firearms? Which I would posit is also higher in the US, as guns are more readily available specifically to people who are more likely to be a victim of violent crime. On the other hand… I don’t think I’ve ever seen more conflicting studies than the ones that attempt to estimate how many crimes guns prevent.

    • Harold says:

      On the other hand… I don’t think I’ve ever seen more conflicting studies than the ones that attempt to estimate how many crimes guns prevent.

      Heh, we’ll never figure that out due to deterrence, which I assure you works very well where I’m from and have retired to.

      But crimes prevented by guns actively “used” (mostly just displayed) have a lower bound of 1 million per year, based on the first data set collected by a gun control organization that didn’t ask how many times per year their survey respondents used them. So we’re really only discussing the range from that to Lott’s upper 2.5 million, which add multiple uses per year and the increased population of gun owners since that first data set from the … ’80s, I think.

  57. For me the most interesting part is how shamelessly Vox lies with statistics. Because yes, this is lying, or at least pretty close to it, even if the graph was not technically false, it was used with a clearly intent to mislead, to make it look like it means something it does not mean.

    What I would urge is that Scott and Rationalists in general should get far more suspicious of the mainstream media. Scott is really good at exposing “misuses of statistics”, but let’s face it, it is not merely that, it is not honest mistakes, it is political propagandists lying through their teeth.

    So the Cathedral exists. By that I mean something that isn’t a literal conspiracy, because not centrally managed, but something like a distributed, opt-in, and half-unconscious conspiracy. Propagandists without a literal central paymaster. A spontaneously coordinating market for small conspirators, kind of. Because just the simple fact of most educated people spontaneously having the same political views would not prove that, but when you find many lies in the mainstream media with the same political direction, you should assume something like a market for small-time conspirators and propagandists. The only good counter-argument at this point would be that not only one Cathedral exists but multiple ones, there are after not-left-wing lies as well, like the “studies” about the non-harmfulness of smoking, or maybe even religions count as one each. That would be entirely OK. There are clearly multiple propaganda machines on this planet. The proposal here is merely that this one is becoming the most powerful one or had done so already.

    I sense that resistance to the acceptance of the existence of the Cathedral at least partially rests on our inability to define it clearly. Something somewhat like a conspiracy but not really so, because not centrally coordinated? Surely someone can come up with a better definition, something that yields better to empirical testing?

    Well, let’s try. I propose that that the Cathedral is about a certain set of noble, utopian Ideals, Idealism, like when it comes to guns, the noble Ideal is ultimately a violence-free, peaceful planet, brotherly love and hot steamy dolphin sex. Various individuals – I mostly mean journalists now – buy into that, and in order to hasten the coming of the End of History, they bend information around in ways to support that goal.

    Sometimes they just report things selectively, being silent about things, like about good things on the Right. Consider the fact that Portuguese “dictator” António de Oliveira Salazar was an econ professor, and was called a most remarkable man and a clear, concise and captivating writer even by his communist foes. And he wrote two books, How To Raise A State and How To Reerect A State. Ya think they may be interesting? Try to Google them in English. You find nothing. Why? Because probably they are actually good. And every Cathedral member who have ever heard of them either recoiled in horror and decided not to take a look or decided that a good book that supports a bad cause is too dangerous and better be silent about it. So you find nothing. These things are suppressed by a form of distributed, voluntary silence.

    Then sometimes they report things in a way that is literally truthful, but the mood affiliation is unwarranted. Good facts but emotional manipulation.Then there are motte and baileys. And then there are these statistical tricks and outright lies.

    Of course, one could say that such methods belong to the toolkit of every propagandist. We will probably find plenty of them in the history of the Catholic Church, we will find them in Salazar’s past state propaganda, and maybe even in business, like in the past IBM’s famous FUD.

    But that is precisely the point. We are not trying to say they are worse than other propagandists – just more succesful – it is enough to say they are just like all other propagandists. The point is here that liberalism in the current form is not about all intelligent people simultaneously getting enlightened and finding the same truths. It is about Idealistic propagandists finding that the means justify the ends and Noble Causes can be supported by some Noble Lies (and less direct distortions, like above: omissions/silence, mood affiliation etc.)

    • ESR has coined the term prospiracy for this sort of thing:

      What distinguishes prospiracies from conspiracies is that the members don’t necessarily know they are members, nor are they fully conscious of what binds them together. Prospiracies are not created through oaths sworn by guttering torchlight, but by shared ideology or institutional culture. In many cases, members accept the prospiracy’s goals and values without thinking through their consequences as fully as they might if the process of joining were formal and initiatory.

      What makes a prospiracy like a conspiracy and distinguishes it from a mere subcultural group? The presence of a “secret doctrine” or shared goals which its core members admit among themselves but not to perceived outsiders; commonly, a goal which is stronger than the publicly declared purpose of the group, or irrelevant to that declared purpose but associated with it in some contingent (usually historical) way.

      On the other hand, a prospiracy is unlike a conspiracy in that it lacks well-defined lines of authority. Its leaders wield influence over the other members, but seldom actual power. It also lacks a clear-cut distinction between “ins” and “outs”.

      • Vox Imperatoris says:

        This is silly.

        A “prospiracy” is a subculture which shares an ideology you don’t like.

        It is an ideology which superficially sounds good but which will have negative consequences that its proponents publicly deny yet (the accuser of “prospiracy” imagines) “secretly” know will happen anyway. Though this secret knowledge need not be conscious, apparently.

        David Kelley’s book Truth and Toleration: The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand is the best work I’ve ever seen on how to deal with people you don’t agree with. It was originally written in the context of his mistreatment by people he didn’t agree with, but it is very broadly applicable.

        One point he stresses is that you cannot validly hold people to be “advocating” the consequences of their beliefs which they don’t think will happen, even if those consequences are real. For instance, you cannot accuse communists of “advocating” mass famine, as they do not agree that this will be the consequence of their policies’ implementation.

        Of course, it’s true that sometimes people are dishonest and “evade” that which they know or ought to know. In Kelley’s opinion, this “evasion” is literally the root of all evil. Therefore, he also stresses that you cannot just accuse people of necessarily being engaged in evasion simply because they hold a false belief. You can only make such a judgment on the basis of at least some familiarity with that person as an individual.

        There is no such thing as an “inherently dishonest idea”. People come from different intellectual contexts, and it is possible, however unlikely, for someone to be an honest communist in this day and age. But if you go around pre-emptively accusing them of dishonesty, you have closed off the route to productive dialogue.

        Even when someone explicitly holds to irrationalism, such as by placing faith above reason or by denying the validity of reason in the postmodernist style, that does not prove that he is evading or being “irrational” in the moralistic sense. It is possible to be moved to irrationalism by seemingly rational arguments, and one can follow those arguments perfectly honestly and “rationally”. For instance, Immanuel Kant presents several “antinomies” of reason, which allegedly prove that reason can’t answer certain important questions about the world, thereby “making room for faith”. These types of arguments are very common and very hard to answer.

        Therefore, Kelley argues that “toleration” is a crucial virtue in any kind of intellectual dispute. That doesn’t mean liking your opponent or endorsing his ideas. It means presuming that he came to them honestly, until and unless he proves that he didn’t.

        What the concept of “prospiracy” or the “Cathedral” consists of is pre-emptively accusing people of evasion, insofar as they advocate certain policies while denying—even to themselves—the “obvious” failures of these policies. This is Bulverism, and it is not the way to engage with people. For one, only what Kelley (following Rand) calls “intrinsicism” holds that complex conceptual truths are obvious facts grasped by “just seeing” them. They are the product of a complex series of integrations, which are very easy to do wrong.

        Intrinsicism is the basis of dogmatism.

        • Follow the link: ESR identifies himself as belonging to at least two prospiracies.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            Without knowing what they are, it’s hard for me to evaluate that.

            What is the “secret knowledge” he doesn’t admit, that is motivating his positions? Of course it’s possible to think of yourself sympathetically as a member of a conspiracy or “resistance movement” against the “establishment”. Even then, it’s very hard to think of yourself sympathetically as hiding the truth from yourself.

            And I don’t see what good can come of accusing other people of this.

          • Mark Atwood says:

            Follow the link: ESR identifies himself as belonging to at least two prospiracies.

            I myself am a member of at least 3 of those 2.

          • anonymous says:

            I think we are all familiar with your delusions of grandeur by now.

          • Mark Atwood says:

            I think we are all familiar with your delusions of grandeur by now.

            And I recognize your writing style and your choice of wording. I know who you are.

        • Cord Shirt says:

          “One point he stresses is that you cannot validly hold people to be “advocating” the consequences of their beliefs which they don’t think will happen, even if those consequences are real. For instance, you cannot accuse communists of “advocating” mass famine, as they do not agree that this will be the consequence of their policies’ implementation.”

          As a rhetorical tool, accusing someone of “advocating” a consequence of their beliefs which they don’t think will happen is often done specifically to make the point that it *will* happen. “Stop advocating communism because [it turns out] that’s advocating mass famine,” etc.

          IOW, it’s not seriously accusing them of *wanting* the consequence; to the contrary, it’s assuming they *don’t* want it, and hence that pointing it out to them will change their minds.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            As a rhetorical tool, accusing someone of “advocating” a consequence of their beliefs which they don’t think will happen is often done specifically to make the point that it *will* happen. “Stop advocating communism because [it turns out] that’s advocating mass famine,” etc.

            IOW, it’s not seriously accusing them of *wanting* the consequence; to the contrary, it’s assuming they *don’t* want it, and hence that pointing it out to them will change their minds.

            That’s not the same as saying “communists are evil because they advocate mass famine”, which is the kind of argument I meant.

            Of course you’re right that the best way to convince someone to change the policies they support is to convince them that those policies will not accomplish what they think they will accomplish.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            Well, I was thinking of arguments like, “Republicans are waging a war on women.”

            Many people here interpreted this as “Republicans are evil because they hate women,” but I know plenty of people who have made such arguments over the years and I’m pretty sure they all meant, “You might not have realized this, but Republicans’ policy suggestions will have a harmful effect on women, and that’s why you should stop supporting them.”

            Not saying this is how they came across–I mean, obviously here it’s definitely NOT–but it is what they (at least, the ones I know) meant.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Cord Shirt:

            Not saying this is how they came across–I mean, obviously here it’s definitely NOT–but it is what they (at least, the ones I know) meant.

            Exactly. I know what they mean when they say Republicans are waging a “war on women”—indeed I sympathize with some of their concerns but oppose most of the ways they want to address them.

            But accusing the other side of waging a “war on women” when you know very well they don’t actually hate women…that’s designed to stir shit up and start a fight. It is not a legitimate way of initiating a dialogue.

            I’m not saying you can never use language like that—you’ve got to rally the troops and it is inspiring to hear very clearly the actual consequences that the enemy’s victory will achieve. To use it in purportedly honest debate, however, defeats the purpose. In an honest debate, you say: “Your policies harm women! Why don’t you recognize that?”

            If you don’t think your opponent is honest, why are you agreeing to debate him? (TV presidential debates are not real debates; they are meme fights.) In that case, you should ignore your opponent and argue directly to the audience or just decline.

          • Adam says:

            @Cord Shirt

            I think you’re being way too charitable about that. Maybe the people you personally know are saying Republicans are waging a war on women and actually mean ‘Republican policies will have an unforeseen negative impact on women,’ but the origin of the phrase is an attempt to scare people into voting for you by convincing them that if they don’t, they’ll end up in a reverse-SCUM world where women are chained to ovens and not allowed to wear shoes.

            The problem as I see it in a place like this is that the rhetorical tricks of dishonest sales people trying to convince you to give them a job has infected the masses of people who vote and then take on defense of who they voted for as some deep part of their personal identity that is beyond reproach, coming to believe the difference between a GOP versus Democrat led US is the difference between, well, Switzerland and Swaziland (Is Swaziland even violent? Why not DRC?), as opposed to say, the difference between 2005 and 2015, which I don’t know, maybe was super drastic but my perceived life was basically the same.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            @Vox Imperatoris:

            But that’s my point–I don’t think they ever expected anyone to take it as “Republicans hate women.” I only learned here that anyone had.

            I dunno, where’s the line? “Politician vs. politician” is never an honest dialogue, that’s for sure–it’s always a performance for the voters.

            But I just…the voters are supposed to *know that*, so I just…can’t go so far as to characterize it as “stirring shit up” or “starting a fight.” I…in that kind of performance, “Communists advocate mass famine” *just means* “I think communism will lead to mass famine, which is why I’m not a communist and you shouldn’t be either,” and I think most people know that.

            Even when you’re trying to have an honest dialogue instead of a politicians’ performance…

            Well, there you’re right, you should try not to use “politicians’ performance” language. I…guess I just think if someone does, you should try to see through it, too.

            @Adam: No way. I know these people and this phrase. That *might* have been what the phrase turned into *maybe* (I doubt it. People were expected to know what it meant), but its *origin* was in the ’70s in feminist books within which it was very clearly intended just as a snappy summary of *results of policies*.

          • Adam says:

            Fair enough. I was not alive in the 70s. I only know people today, that I would mostly never admit a vaguely Republican thought in the company of, because they seemingly can’t conceive of an intelligent, honest person believing such a thing, as opposed to a backwards religious nut that wishes us to revert to 1840s social mores, as well as because they may very well friend-ban me if they knew. Hell, a fair number would probably friend ban me just for knowing I owned guns. Or maybe I’m the problem. People like me are probably the reason Scott didn’t realize creationists exist.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Cord Shirt:

            Political debates are not something anyone interested in rational dialogue should emulate. On that, I think we can agree.

          • On how many on the left view those on the right, a few comments…

            1. I recently read a piece by a young woman who had attended her first “Matzoh Ball,” a social event held on New Years in various cities for Jewish singles. She ended up paired for much of the evening with a young man she found attractive. At some point in their conversation he mentioned that he was a conservative. Her initial response was that was terrible, because the one dating rule her father had insisted on was “no Republicans.” It wasn’t clear whether she was going to follow out on the rule, but it didn’t sound like “Republicans are people who have some understandable mistakes about the consequences of various policies.”

            2. I’ve spent a fair amount of time on a Facebook climate group. As best I can tell, a majority of the people there who argue that we must do something about AGW view those who disagree as right wing stereotypes, and assume they are either evil or very stupid, possibly both.

            So while I am sure there are people on the left who view “War on Women” or similar phrases as only about what they believe the consequences of policies will be, I think there are quite a lot who demonize the opposition.

          • keranih says:

            the difference between a GOP versus Democrat led US is the difference between, well, Switzerland and Swaziland (Is Swaziland even violent? Why not DRC?)

            I’m not the one who came up with the phrase, but –

            1) Aliteration. Also? the world mail centers tend to redirect mail intended for Swaziland to Switzerland, unless the label is very very clear.

            2) Swaziland is rather unique among sub-Saharan countries in that it has, more or less, the same system of government it had prior to European colonization. Likewise, Switzerland has been self-governing longer than most places in Europe.

            3) Swaziland is poor, corrupt, and not a place most Westerners want to live, but it is not a failed state. Using DRC or one of the other more spectacularly horrible places would be missing the point.

            4) Yes, it’s violent. It’s very violent.

          • Adam says:

            That’s interesting. Scott should look into the apparent 200% increase in the Swaziland murder rate between 2011 and 2014. There has to be a story there. I was under the impression it sucked as a country mostly because barely less than half the adult population is HIV positive.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            @Vox Imp: Indeed. 🙂

            @Adam: Well, after all, (as I mentioned on an earlier open thread) I didn’t defend freedom of speech on my doll collecting board because of its selectively-enforced ban on political discussion. I’m in no position to blame you for keeping quiet.

            @David: Yeah, this recent shift is one of the things I (to not much effect) and Freddie DeBoer (to much greater effect, and good for him) have been trying to fight. I agree that your generalization is broadly accurate, for *recent* events. It doesn’t apply to the specific venerable phrase “War on women” though. Or FTM, the similar “Communists advocate famine.” Or Adam’s rhetorical “pretense” of never having heard of negative externalities on the other comment thread.

          • Adam says:

            I never pretended to not know what an externality is, nor the specific ones you brought up. I disagree with you about what activity they’re an externality of.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            @Adam, I put it in quotes for a reason.

            My point is you could have been taken as arguing dishonestly, because you didn’t clearly state your position the way David did. Instead you just kept repeating “I’m not hurting anyone” as if…well, as if you’d never heard of negative externality. Or as if you’d never heard of the argument you were disagreeing with.

            One likely result of that is that another discussion participant wastes everyone’s time explaining negative externality…which you could have avoided by being clearer in the first place. Vox Imp was saying that type of thing is said in order to “stir shit up and start a fight”; I’ve seen others (usually SJWs) attribute it to a desire to “wear down” the other side, waste their energy as well as their time and keep the discussion from moving forward. My argument is that it’s often just sloppiness, people assuming their implication is obvious. (And/or people who really haven’t heard the argument yet, in which case it’s *not* a waste of time to share it.)

            I’m also not sure we disagree about “what activity they’re an externality of.” I…don’t really have an opinion on that right now, since I support the Bill of Rights for other reasons. Speaking of which, in your other comment you picked a fight with me and those like me by painting us as “crazy conspiracy nuts.” You didn’t retract that when I asked about it, so I guess you still see us that way?

        • Anonymous says:

          I think the question is – how prevalent is evasion, especially among the politically-inclined? I don’t think it’s far-fetched that politicians lie by omission, or that the common person tells many small lies throughout their normal day (provided they’re not an antisocial shut-in of some sort).

          Furthermore, there is another effect to consider here, namely expanding and/or redefining the goals of organizations that have achieved their stated goals. Suppose an anti-poverty NGO has some goals written down, which they lobby for the state to adopt, and at some point they actually fulfill all the points on their list. You didn’t think they would actually throw a party and disband, did you? More likely than not, they’ll throw an emergency conference to rewrite those goals, adding more and refining existing ones to be more extreme, in order to keep having a purpose, to keep existing. In this way, they might not even consciously practice dishonesty, but the end result is wanting the arm after being given a finger.

  58. stillnotking says:

    I know you implied this in your post, but it’s worth emphasizing that an Australia-style gun ban is not politically possible in the United States. Any attempt at one would spark either a serious secession movement or a civil war, would be widely disobeyed/not enforced (particularly in the South), and would create a black market of comparable size to the current one in illegal drugs. Americans love guns — this is the key insight that always seems to escape Europeans, and, more bafflingly, American liberals.

    The NRA one-liner about only outlaws having guns may be facile, but it is an accurate prediction of what would happen in America if such a ban were attempted. Many of the “outlaws” would be otherwise law-abiding.

    • Winfried says:

      My parents and grandparents are solid middle class (one a retired skilled tradesman , the other a skilled professional white collar type) that are strong supporters of the general state/government, even if they don’t agree with certain actions. Pay their taxes, obey laws, raise a family, etc.

      I know that they would be very prone to extremely selective compliance with a firearm ban, at best. A ban would turn them into felons (or potential felons) overnight. I doubt they would go straight to breaking any other laws, but once you wilfully break serious laws you aren’t exactly going to be a strong supporter of the rule of law.

  59. Tibor says:

    I think the most striking difference is between the US and Switzerland, which has more liberal gun laws than most US states and (I think) all other European countries and about the same gun ownership and gun homicide rate as Canada EDIT: And the Swiss total murder rate is actually only 0.6 (as of 2011, according to wikipedia).

    I think that this shows that easy access to guns is not a serious problem itself. There seems to be something wrong in the Americas (with the exception of Canada) with violent crime in general and it would be nice to do something about it (probably easier to do so in Latin America in the sense that there are more obvious problems that can be solved relatively easily…Colombia managed to halve its homicide rate since Escobar’s time, even though it is still pretty high – but getting rid of the guerillas would reduce it a lot) but guns serve mostly as a scapegoat here which obfuscates the real problems. I am not saying that people who want to ban guns do that intentionally but I guess if they realized how significant the guns are on total violence, they would probably concentrate their efforts elsewhere and be more helpful.

    Europe and gun laws – It is a funny thing that Europeans believe that in the US one can basically buy a gun in a grocery store (and they do not differentiate between the states, that is usually beyond the scope of an average European or an average European journalist) whereas the Americans believe that in Europe, guns are basically banned (and also largely do not differentiate between the countries). In reality, the UK seems to have probably the most restrictive gun laws, in fact even larger knives are restricted there (which I find incredibly stupid). Germany also has a very restrictive (compared to other European countries) gun laws. You need a gun license (but that is true of all European countries I think – what differs is how hard is to get one) and you usually don’t get a license for personal defence. However, all you have to do in practice is to sign to a hunter’s association, pay a member’s fee and get a gun license officially for sport/hunting. Hence the law is more restrictive de jure than de facto. I would expect that to be the case in other more restrictive European countries as well. Of the EU countries, Austria and the Czech republic seem to have the most liberal gun laws (a license available for self-defence without problems, at least in the Czech republic concealed carry of no more than two weapons at the same time is legal, but I think it is not forbidden in Austria either). So in fact some EU countries have more liberal gun laws than some US states and Switzerland (non EU) has gun laws perhaps on par or more liberal than most states in the US.

    Here is an overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_gun_laws_by_nation

    I think the main difference between the US and Europe is not in that guns are available or not but what guns are and also the rules for storing the guns. Automatic weapons are illegal for civilian use (without a special collector’s permit) probably everywhere in Europe (although semi-automatics are legal at least in some countries, I think most of them actually, but check that out) which I think is not the case at least in some US states. And it is mandatory (probably? again, check if interested) everywhere in Europe to store your guns at home in a way that prevents others from reaching them (this means storing them in a safe).

    • Yrro says:

      ? Semi-autos are legal in every state in the US. Machine guns aren’t illegal, but mostly artificially inflated in price because only guns registered before the 80’s are legal.

      • Tibor says:

        I don’t get your comment. The legality of semi-automatics in Europe is in brackets, so it is a side comment and the “which I think is not the case in some US states” refers to the illegality of automatic weapons in Europe.

        In any case, since very few people probably own automatic weapons in the US anyway, this is not going make much of a difference in practice (but it can be used by journalists to conjure up images of “stupid machine-gun wielding rednecks” or something).

    • “Europe and gun laws – It is a funny thing that Europeans believe that in the US one can basically buy a gun in a grocery store”

      They do sell them in Walmart.

      • HlynkaCG says:

        Granted, but Walmart is much closer to the old Sears & Roebuck than it is to Albertsons or whatever the most popular chain of grocers in in your area is.

  60. Salem says:

    The reason I hate cost-benefit analysis is that no-one ever does it. They just do a cost-analysis, or a benefit-analysis, depending on which side their priors favour.

    So yes, I’m willing to believe that gun ownership has a negative externality in terms of homicides, which you then go on to price. The same data implies that it has a positive externality in terms of reducing robbery, which you ignore. Searching for negative externalities without searching for positive externalities is (unintentional) advocacy, not truth-seeking.

    And I say that as someone who is very pro-gun-control (in US terms).

  61. Maxim says:

    Re: Australia, it’s a bit more complicated… if you look at the broad trend lines before/after the buyback, it is not clear than gun homicide fell faster afterward than before the buyback (p3): http://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Report-on-gun-related-suicides-and-crime-for-the-Australian-Parliament-Rev.pdf

  62. Cathy says:

    Interesting approach, and you have some really good points. I have a few objections, though. My first is to the “culture of violence” theory you put forward. “Culture of violence” is a pretty classic blame-the-victim sort of theory, and it behooves all analysts to be pretty damn sure that’s what’s going on before saying something like that. In the case of urban black areas and southern areas, one variable that is very likely to explain both is concentration of poverty. The social sciences have some very good evidence that concentration of poverty leads to significant stress which leads to increased domestic violence and violence more generally.

    Second objection is not really an objection but more distress that you make it sound in the first few paragraphs like gun deaths are not important to discuss. Gun deaths are still important to prevent, whether they are suicides or homicides or accidents. While I agree wholeheartedly that misdiagnosing the cause of the specific problem (here, mass shootings) as being simply due to “too many guns” leads to the wrong sorts of policy, it is also pretty clear that stricter gun regulation of the sort implemented by places like Canada does lead to a significant reduction in gun deaths generally (accidents, suicides, homicides), and from a public health standpoint, given gun deaths are not far behind car accidents as one of the biggest causes of premature death, it makes sense for public policy to focus on it.

    But as to the question of gun homicides specifically: yes, it makes sense to talk about a LOT more than just the number of guns and the ease of getting them and lax regulations for storing them: we also need to talk about mental health and poverty and the ways police conduct themselves in different neighborhoods, IMHO.

    • Anon. says:

      >The social sciences have some very good evidence that concentration of poverty leads to significant stress which leads to increased domestic violence and violence more generally.

      How does this jive with the upwards historical trend in avg income? Or are you using poverty in the relative sense, i.e. envy causes stress and violence?

    • Tom Scharf says:

      “…all analysts to be pretty damn sure that’s what’s going on before saying something like that”

      Why? This is the essence of political correctness wrecking science, and the social sciences are by far the biggest perpetrator and victim of this type of thinking. Who’s blaming the victim? It’s the perpetrators that are being blamed. This twisted thinking that the perpetrators are the victims and all roads lead to your preferred boogey man prevents something useful from actual happening. Who should be studying racial disparities in violent crime? Who does their utmost to suppress racial disparities in crime statistics? The social sciences.

      It is laughably incoherent. The social sciences will get uptight if they find a 10% difference in how minorities or women are treated in the workplace, which they would assert proves racism and sexism. They then turn away from a 700% disparity in violent crime statistics. Seven.Hundred.Percent. This is the very definition of willful ignorance.

      “the ways police conduct themselves”. You find this important with respect to gun violence? There isn’t any racism in counting bodies that I’m aware of.

      By all means investigate the root causes of this problem beyond race. But the outright suppression of the negative cultural affects of single parenthood, lack of education, teen pregnancy, gang warfare, the drug trade, etc. only causes the social sciences to embarrass themselves and lose all credibility on this issue.

      So yes, let’s not talk about “that” unless we are sure.

    • Furslid says:

      Poverty is important for tracking crime, but there is a higher murder rate after adjusting for it. So there is something else. Culture of violence seems like a decent guess.

    • Jon Gunnarsson says:

      The social sciences have some very good evidence that concentration of poverty leads to significant stress which leads to increased domestic violence and violence more generally.

      I doubt that the social sciences have very good evidence for much of anything, much less something as difficult to prove as that. Yes, there is a correlation between poverty and violence, but it would be quite difficult to figure out what the underlying causation is. Is it poverty causing violence, violence causing poverty, some third factor causing both poverty and violence, or something else entirely?

  63. Maxim says:

    Glad people are doing these analyses. Will you post your data/output of the Azrael study so others can replicate?

  64. Some writers have pointed to a white Southern “culture of honor” (versus a white Northern “culture of dignity”) which leads to greater violence. I think there is some validity to that.

    But I object to the mention of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, which happened in the Appalachian mountain region of Kentucky and West Virginia, to characterize the entire South.

    To an outsider, Appalachia seems like part of the South, but the culture and values, and sources of violence, are quite distinct from the (much larger) “lowland South” or “plantation South”, where slavery was a founding principle. There is plenty of violence in Mississippi, or Georgia, say, and strong families, but no big historic murderous inter-family feuds that I know of.

    Indeed, arguably, the H-M feud was not even “internal” to the South. The McCoys were Democrats who supported the Confederacy, whereas the Hatfields were Republicans who supported the Union.

    • Vaniver says:

      Indeed, what Southerners think of as “the South” is the coastal plantation culture that descended from the Cavaliers, not the Borderers.

    • Tom Scharf says:

      KY and WV are most certainly not part of the Northeast either. They are closer to the south, but nobody in these states considers themselves a southerner. Appalachia is pretty much its own cultural wasteland.

      • KY and WV are … closer to the south, but nobody in these states considers themselves a southerner.

        As someone who married into a Kentucky family, I assure you, that statement is quite untrue. Many Kentuckians call themselves Southerners. Kentucky is a “border state”, but it is generally regarded as part of the South.

        Appalachia is pretty much its own cultural wasteland.

        That is an unduly negative way of putting it. I see a whole lot that is valuable there. But yes, the culture is distinct. Extreme eastern Kentucky (the Appalachian part) is regarded by other Kentuckians as a very weird place with its own outlandish folkways.

        • Tom Scharf says:

          I’m grew up in WV and nobody there ever called themselves a Southerner, so maybe it is just a WV / KY thing.

          The recent war on coal has made most people in these states hate the liberal elites in the NE. Guns and coal have turned WV red after almost 50 years of voting blue.

          The wasteland statement is somewhat denigrating I admit, but there are many positive aspects of Appalachia culture as well, and most natives defend it with a great intensity when talking to outsiders. However when they talk to each other… Rural WV is quite “unique” as well, although it is a good thing to have everywhere not be Homogeneous, USA.

          I still go back there several times a year.

          • West Virginia has a uniquely ambiguous position in the history of American regionalism. Kentucky, on the other hand, has always been a Southern state.

            For example, in the 1860 census, Kentucky had more than 225,000 slaves (about 19% of the population), while the territory that became West Virginia had only around 18,000 (a little less than 5%).

          • John Schilling says:

            West Virginia is, by definition, the state whose population took the most extraordinary measure possible to define themselves as Not Southern at the time when that distinction was as important as it has ever been.

    • And I object to confusing the fictional Hatfield/McCoy feud created by journalists with the real one.

      There is no evidence that the feud goes back to the Civil War. Both groups mostly supported the confederacy. Asa McCoy joined the Union army, was injured, came home, and was murdered. It was never established by whom. That’s all of the Civil war connection.

      The actual feud started when three McCoys got in an election day fight with Ellison Hatfield and seriously injured him. They were taken prisoner by some of his relatives and, when he died, killed. A Kentucky court issued a warrant for the arrest of the killers (this was all happening on the Kentucky/West Virginia border), but nothing happened,

      Five years passed. Someone sympathetic to the Hatfields is a friend of the new governor of Kentucky, and persuades him to send a posse into West Virginia without permission of its government. It kills one Hatfield, arrests nine, fights a battle with a West Virginia posse. The Hatfields retaliate by attacking the McCoy home, burning it to the ground, killing two people.

      That is the point at which the newspapers become involved. It is also the last violence in the feud. Total count: 4 killings prior to the government of Kentucky reawakening the feud, three more after. The West Virginia governor sues to get back the arrested men. The Supreme Court finds that the invasion was illegal but there is no recourse–once Kentucky has the men it can try them. One is hanged, eight sentenced to life.

      • That’s interesting. I can see that the story must have grown in the telling. Another indication that it wasn’t a good example of Southern violence.

        I maintain a database (incomplete but extensive) of U.S. political figures from Colonial times to the present, and in that data, I noticed an interesting correlation.

        Among those politicos who were active in Kentucky and West Virginia during the century after the Civil War, most of the McCoys were Democrats (I count 9/11, with 3 others unidentified; see McCoys here), and most of the Hatfields were Republicans (8/12, with 1 unidentified; see Hatfields here).

        (Obviously, I have no idea whether or to what extent any of these folks were connected to the events you described, or if they were even related to the principals beyond sharing a surname. Also, I have a lot more data on West Virginians than on Kentuckians.)

        The Civil War divided and shaped politics in that region, and even decades later, Republicans tended to be from Unionist families, and Democrats were more likely to have supported the Confederacy.

        • I don’t know much about the political details, but one family seemed to be politically influential one side of the state line, the other on the other side.

          On the other hand, it was less of a binary division than the stories make it sound. More coalitions than clans defined strictly by inheritance.

          • I don’t know much about the political details, but one family seemed to be politically influential one side of the state line, the other on the other side.

            On the other hand, it was less of a binary division than the stories make it sound. More coalitions than clans defined strictly by inheritance.

            That makes sense, yes. Note, too, that Henry D. Hatfield was Governor of West Virginia in 1913-17. I presume you meant “McCoys” instead of “Hatfields” in this passage:

            Someone sympathetic to the Hatfields is a friend of the new governor of Kentucky, and persuades him to send a posse into West Virginia without permission of its government.

  65. JBeshir says:

    I think it would be fair to include increase in overall suicide rate as a cost for purposes of any hypothetical Coasian bargaining going on.

    Suicides are different to murders and need differentiating out to avoid confusing discussions about availability, substitutability for purposes of crime, etc, but they share the characteristic that they are really bad and we would like to have less of them, so they’re a cost of ready availability/high ownership that should be factored in when considering what it would look like to have people internalising the cost of having their preferred policy.

    From a perspective which assigns similar value to different peoples’ lives, with approximately this valuation, they probably justify efforts to reduce gun ownership alone and with higher probability.

  66. Vaniver says:

    So… no commentary on the obvious benefit of guns in preventing robberies? It seems fairly obvious to me that the causal story “more guns -> fewer robberies” makes much more sense than “fewer robberies -> more guns,” and this deserves to be a part of the cost benefit analysis.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I think (though haven’t proven) that the causal story is that robberies are more common in urban and minority-heavy areas, and guns are more common in rural and white-heavy areas.

      • Vaniver says:

        That’s possible, but on priors I would expect the effect to still exist once those factors are controlled for. I’ll take a look when I get home.

    • Alex Trouble says:

      Why stop at robberies? There’s quite a lot of variability in estimates for defensive uses of guns, since they by nature represent events that don’t really happen, but you can’t discount the benefits of stopping some number of assaults, rapes, murders, etc.

      • Vaniver says:

        I mentioned robberies because they were in the dataset. I agree that all defensive use of guns falls into the ‘benefits’ column for having more gun ownership.

  67. Gbdub says:

    Couple thoughts on the data:
    1) did you consider looking at the rate of nonfatal assaults? One hypothesis could be that guns “cause” homicide by substituting for nonfatal assaults, e.g. bar fight escalates to readily available guns, which are more likely to be fatal.

    2) what types of homicides are included in the analysis? Do the ratios of say manslaughter/negligent homicide/premeditated murder vary by state? Perhaps rural areas have a higher rate of negligent homicide or manslaughter due to hunting accidents or other unintentional shootings?

    Finally, I’m pretty unconvinced by your Part IV, because right after proving that it’s a bad idea to extrapolate large reductions in gun ownership to large reductions in murder, you basically do exactly that.

    And while you’re right that experimental evidence doesn’t always trump correlational studies, Australia style gun buyback has the pretty relevant experiment of Australia, which I thought we already determined did not experience a reduction in murder at the sensitivity level you use to get your “one 9/11 per year” figure (As I recall, the gun murder rate went down in Oz after the buyback, but so did the non-gun murder rate, so you can’t claim the whole reduction as due to the buyback).

  68. Albatross says:

    I like background checks and rigorous carry laws. And stricter gun laws for police also: no undercover carry, etc. However it seems to me the vast majority of gun deaths are suicides. And those are mostly elderly people.

    Since I do think robbers and murders will substitute knives (see also the past) but some studies show gun suicides don’t get much substitution… seems like we’d get more mileage screening gun owners for depression and treating that.

    Even if Americans all become pacifists and gun murders drop to zero, gun deaths are still going to be really high. And even if taking away their guns helps prevent gun suicides it still seems like a person who would kill themselves if it were quick and easy needs a bit more treatment than removing guns.

    • Urstoff says:

      Treating the depression, you mean, versus, say, preventing someone who has been diagnosed as clinically depressed from buying a gun? The latter, and the general focus on “mental health” seems to be somewhat misguided (most gun homicides are committed by sane people; I wonder about gun suicides, as you can commit suicide without being mentally ill in any way) and, to me, uncomfortably stigmatizes mental illness.

  69. Urstoff says:

    According to wikipedia, Australia’s gun buyback program was compulsory for guns that were made illegal by a recently passed law (in 1996): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_buyback_program#Australia

    Can someone expand on what it means to be “compulsory” in this context? If it just means that old guns were now technically illegal but police didn’t go around and collect them, then maybe this could have some effect in the US. Any scheme where people are forced to give up certain guns likely would have very negative (violent) side effects in the US.

    • Robert VerBruggen says:

      It was a “buyback” in the sense that people were compensated, but it wasn’t optional. Some places didn’t have registration yet, though, and I’m not sure how much of an effort there was to round up registered guns that weren’t turned in. Most U.S. states don’t have registration so it would be hard to forcibly round up guns unless you’re actually going door-to-door.

      • Urstoff says:

        Right; there have been several small-scale, voluntary buyback programs in the US. Has there been any research on whether these had any effect?

        • Robert VerBruggen says:

          Nothing great that I can recall seeing, but those programs aren’t likely to have an effect. Not only are they small, but a decent percentage of people turn in crappy guns because they get paid more than they’re worth, and buy more.

  70. njnnja says:

    Excellent analysis. Firstly, because it shows that mathematical analyses are not restricted to the domain of PhD candidates and tenured professors. Secondly, because it really goes down the rabbit hole as far down as it makes sense to, given effect sizes. It’s very tempting to stop an analysis once it “proves” the point one wants to make, or to continue it wherever one finds statistical significance, even if it is of no practical significance (e.g., “the coefficient is != 0 at 95% c.i., but because the variance of the estimate is so small, the point estimate of the coefficient implies that increasing/(decreasing) the variable by 50% has an economic impact of $0.00000000003”)

    But a couple additions for future analyses in this areas. Maybe a Coasean solution isn’t so strange to propose – IIRC NYC has something like a $100/year license fee for handguns (I know, citation needed, and what flies in NYC won’t fly in Alabama. But most places have gun permit costs that are something like 50-100 for a 5 year period. So now we are just haggling over the price.

    Also, whenever you talk about “Southerness,” I highly recommend American Nations by Colin Woodard. In it, he proposes that the “North” is really a combination of “Yankees,” “Left Coasters,” and “New Amsterdamerrs,” and have a lot of differences between them. The “South” is really a combination of “Tidewater” and “The Deep South,” and sometimes “The Borderlands.” It gives a very powerful model for interpreting American history and present political debates. Highly recommended.

  71. meh says:

    This may be an issue of how bad survey really are, but how is Georgia not 100% southern? And how did anyone vote for PA? Theres a line clearly marking Southern (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason%E2%80%93Dixon_line), as well as an opt in group (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_of_America#States)

  72. Nicholas Weininger says:

    Thought experiment: consider the cost-benefit analysis of a similar “soft prohibition” on alcohol. Very high excise taxes and/or bans on supposedly “bad” kinds of drinks (over 100 proof, mixed with sugar or caffeine) and/or making people jump through extra “safety education” hoops, background checks, and the like to get a license to buy alcohol. Most of these things AIUI have been enacted somewhere, so this is not a pure hypothetical.

    You’d get, as the US got from hard Prohibition, a considerable decrease in alcohol consumption. You’d very likely get a substantial decrease in alcohol poisoning deaths (compare to Scott’s discussion of suicides). You’d plausibly get a much smaller but still significant decrease in drunk driving deaths (compare to homicides).

    I haven’t run the numbers– though perhaps someone has!– but I would be willing to bet nontrivial money that the pure utilitarian analysis would come out the same way Scott’s analysis on guns comes out. Moreover, the social effects would be similar. Wealthy enthusiasts with $100 bottles of Bordeaux would be little affected; the consumption reduction would be disproportionately among the lower-income and lower-IQ. And you’d have the same enforcement problems as with any other War On X.

    So, would that be good policy? The paternalist case in favor is pretty clear, and pretty damn similar to Scott’s case. The libertarian case against is also clear: it’s wrong to burden the millions of responsible drinkers of modest means who just want a beer or glass of wine with dinner, or a drink down at the local bar, in order to make us incrementally safer from a few abusers. And I suggest that if you find that libertarian case more salient, and the paternalist case less appealing, for alcohol, you may be either irrationally othering gun owners and undervaluing their pleasure, or irrationally fearing being shot more than being killed by a drunk driver, or both.

    • JBeshir says:

      As someone who favours cocktails and so would plausibly be affected, I think this approach would be entirely reasonable, if the effect of smuggling was low enough that it actually worked. I’m fine with current high alcohol taxes, as a politically viable step in this direction, and would support increasing them incrementally until they represented actual societal costs of having that amount of alcohol consumed. I am fine internalising the costs of my preferences to society, and if those costs are too high then I’m okay stopping doing it. Insisting that I be allowed to continue, and the costs of the thing I want be pushed onto other people without me compensating everyone else for them, would seem churlish.

      I am okay with this leading to poorer people not being able to afford it, for the same reason I am okay with economic forces leading to them being unable to become civil aviation pilots- we have more significant welfare concerns to be spending resources on than setting laws that subsidise consumption of luxury products by people who can’t afford to internalise the costs of those products being made available, by offloading those costs onto other people.

      Whether the effect of smuggling would be low enough given taxes of the scale being discussed is an open empirical question for alcohol. Casual evasion of alcohol taxes happens- would it turn into drug-style distribution networks? If so, the utilitarian approach would no longer favour it, and neither would I.

      It’s also an open empirical question for guns in the US, although not guns in Europe- in Europe we’ve already observed that demand simply doesn’t exist at sufficient scale or with sufficient willingness of the general population to turn a blind eye to it. You could plausibly crank up taxes gradually and see what happens, ala alcohol taxes.

      • Vox Imperatoris says:

        I am fine internalising the costs of my preferences to society, and if those costs are too high then I’m okay stopping doing it. Insisting that I be allowed to continue, and the costs of the thing I want be pushed onto other people without me compensating everyone else for them, would seem churlish.

        But if you’re a responsible and moderate drinker, there aren’t any externalities of your behavior to society. So what should you be compensating them for?

        The kind of people who can plausibly be considered to cause externalities are habitual drunkards, drunk drivers, and so on. Surely they can be targeted in a more specific way than by taxing all alcohol or “dangerous” cocktails?

        I am okay with this leading to poorer people not being able to afford it, for the same reason I am okay with economic forces leading to them being unable to become civil aviation pilots- we have more significant welfare concerns to be spending resources on than setting laws that subsidise consumption of luxury products by people who can’t afford to internalise the costs of those products being made available, by offloading those costs onto other people.

        You’re assuming that the poor—especially the poor who abuse alcohol—will just cut down their alcohol assumption if the price goes up. I’m sure the responsible poor will to some extent, but I highly doubt demand—especially the demand by drunkards—is totally elastic. It’s not a question of how much the poor can “afford”, but how much they have to sacrifice to afford it. If it costs 50 cents for a drunk to get hammered, he’ll pay 50 cents. If it costs $50, he’ll pay $50. Maybe he “affords” this by deciding to feed his kids a steady diet of ramen noodles (and that’s on the lighter side of things).

        The responsible poor who just want to have a moderate drink shouldn’t be taxed at all because they’re not hurting anyone. The irresponsible poor don’t respond well to the taxes. High alcohol taxes just impoverish them and make everything worse.

        And I don’t think it encourages many more people to become drunks, just because alcohol is cheap. I would likely consume more alcohol if Grand Marnier flowed into my house on tap in unlimited quantities courtesy of the government. But I would still do so in moderation and with concern for my health and responsibilities.

        I don’t know why people who normally hate “regressive” taxes love sin taxes.

        Also, in general, I am very suspicious of Pigovian taxation. Nobody ever supports it consistently; it’s just a convenient excuse. For instance, as people like Bryan Caplan argue, education is largely signalling and therefore we “should” tax it. But no one supports that.

        • JBeshir says:

          What I’d be paying for wouldn’t be my preference for alcohol but my preference that alcohol remain available in my community despite harms that agreeing to have it available causes to others. If you could do more targeted things, that reduced the harm from availability caused to non-consumers, then that would be better- and if combined you could then reduce the taxes demanded to the extent that it worked.

          I’m not sure on whether inelasticity of problem drinkers prevents it from working and means it would have huge costs of its own there; it’d certainly be true for the most severe cases, but I’d have expected the distribution to have a lot more responsive cases.

          On the other hand, it fits with the dramatic failure of prohibition and would explain why it turned out that smuggling/illicit production was too big a problem for it to work even if desired.

          • Nicholas Weininger says:

            There is no such thing as “harm caused by agreeing to have something available.” If some people abuse an available thing, _they_ are the ones causing the harm, and it is wrong to burden non-abusers because of their bad acts.

          • JBeshir says:

            It might be true that they are the ones morally responsible for the harm, but a lot, lot more than that is going to be causally involved (I mean, a huge amount of the history of humanity is casually involved).

            “We shouldn’t burden people who aren’t morally responsible” is a principle which taken absolutely would rule out a lot of law and regulation, and given more reasonably heavy weight would still rule out the examples in play here (because the burden is substantial), but I think it is not widely agreed to give it such weight.

            I think that’s one of the points of disagreement which are not resolved- the extent to which we should care about that vs caring about social problems from alcohol or caring about murders.

        • ” For instance, as people like Bryan Caplan argue, education is largely signalling and therefore we “should” tax it. But no one supports that”

          I had an extensive exchange with Robert Frank on my blog, in the course of which he was arguing that education was pure rent seeking. I pointed out the implication—that we should tax it instead of subsidizing it. He never responded.

          You should be able to get the whole series with:

          http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/search?q=Robert+Frank

          I raised the specific point in:

          http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2010/05/my-response-to-robert-franks-reply.html

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            I read the one you linked. Pretty interesting! I like this line:

            Perhaps more important, my point implies that your argument, true or false, has perverse implications. The more people believe it, the more they will see benefits to other people as costs to them. That does not mean that your argument is wrong, but it might be a reason not to publish it as an op-ed in the New York Times.

            I’m not sure I agree with you on the “quality mates are an absolute resource allocated by relative status” argument. It’s precisely because quality of mates is so relative to each individual that this is hardly relevant. I don’t know if you were just humoring him or what, but it’s not like we’re all one big monkey tribe where there is the alpha male, the beta male, and the omega male—no matter how the red pill community sees it.

            I’m not plagued by anxiety because I can’t marry Scarlett Johansson. I don’t think I would have that much in common with her.

            And I always thought the whole PUA thing was a booby prize (no pun intended) because the women it allows you to sleep with…are not women I would want to sleep with.

            Maybe I’m naive, but I think things are closer to the “soul mate” model where there are people who are more and less suited to one another, and the purpose of the dating market is to allow them to find one another. Thus the smoother it functions, the better off everyone is.

            On an unrelated note, I made it seem in my first post like I agree that schooling is almost all signalling. I don’t. I think the signalling is real, but I also (as you say) think our education is better than 10th century Cambodian education. I don’t know what the balance is, which is part of the reason I don’t think it should be Pigovian-taxed.

            The really major reason is that giving the government the power to impose allegedly Pigovian taxes creates a bigger externality than almost anything the taxes could fix if they worked perfectly. It’s like your argument “for” the draft: sure, I can imagine some circumstance where it’s necessary, but we’d better be really damn sure.

    • Vox Imperatoris says:

      I’m a libertarian and not in favor of either one of these things.

      If anything, I think a soft ban on alcohol would be more beneficial than one on guns.

      However, there are important differences between the two that in practice possibly make this not the case. For one, guns are not an addictive substance people have an overwhelming urge to buy. Yes, there are “gun nuts”, but “gunaholics” are not even in the same league as alcoholics.

      So if you make alcohol hard enough to get so that it becomes a real inconvenience, you are guaranteed to have a thriving black market with all the violence that comes from a black market.

      It’s true that if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns, but this kind of black-market demand really won’t be the same as that for alcohol or drugs. The dynamic is that you make law-abiding people defenseless before criminals, which possibly encourages them. That’s a very different mechanism from handing vast markets with very inelastic demand over to criminals, which encourages them by giving them more money and power.

    • Cord Shirt says:

      “And I suggest that if you find that libertarian case more salient, and the paternalist case less appealing, for alcohol, you may be either irrationally othering gun owners and undervaluing their pleasure, or irrationally fearing being shot more than being killed by a drunk driver, or both.”

      Ha, I’m the opposite case: I was mentally reinventing your “libertarian case” in response to the OP, but with alcohol, I really don’t care. Prohibit away (yeah yeah, didn’t work, pre-existing addictions and culture too strong; shame). IOW I find the libertarian case more compelling with guns. And yeah, it’s partly because I’m “undervaluing [alcohol-drinkers’] pleasure.” (It’s also partly because in the US gun ownership is a civil right, and alcohol drinking isn’t.)

  73. Bill Walker says:

    I live in New Hampshire. Like Vermont, we have no gun laws to speak of. The Twin States have the lowest homicide rate in the US.

    If you want to reduce domestic violence, end Drug Prohibition. If you want to reduce foreign violence, stop launching wars and backing dictators and terrorist groups.

    The War on Guns and the War on Drugs are the same war… and it’s a war on us.

    http://www.concordmonitor.com/home/20253643-95/my-turn-to-end-violence-declare-war-on-wars

    • Scott Alexander says:

      You have the lowest homicide rate because you’re very rural and have few Southerners or minorities.

      • Ahilan Nagendram says:

        And average high-IQ. Southern Whites in general have lower IQ than New England Whites.

    • Cord Shirt says:

      Hi, fellow Yankee. 😉

      I’m inclined to support having those drugs which are currently illegal for recreational use, remain so. (Or even returning them to the status of criminal rather than just civil violation.) Because in my subculture, nobody uses them and that’s at least partly because they *are* illegal. And for this reason we are a happy, healthy community unaffected by the problems of drugs.

      Nobody I know has even tried marijuana. (I mean, we’ve discussed this.) None of us would even know how to get it. If we could just walk into a store and buy some, at least some of us would shrug and give it a try–but we can’t, so we don’t.

      Feel free to argue that I and everyone I know should agree to impose a disruptive change on our healthy, happy, these are illegal so it doesn’t even really occur to us to even try to use them, community–because other US communities are different, and not just different, but suffering terribly. (I’m sure you know we Yankees are very receptive to such arguments. ;))

      *But do not tell us we do not exist.*

      If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. In my community, it ain’t broke. If it’s broke elsewhere, I need to actually see an argument saying so. One that doesn’t beg the question, assume it’s broke everywhere, and tell me my community doesn’t even exist.

      Over to you. :listening:

      (BTW. I’m amused by the fact that, here in Yankeedom, the person making your argument is a Republican, and the person making mine is the one who leans Dem. Are we stuck in 1950 or what? ;))

      • alaska3636 says:

        Minimum wage laws probably work pretty well in your neck of the woods as well. In urban areas they might price people out of a job, encourage welfare dependence or make the drug trade (or simply abusing drugs) a reasonable alternative.

        Regardless, I respect your right to be as boring as you sound but your community, city and state could make people abide by your cultural preferences a lot more fairly and constructively than a federal mandate that applies to everyone everywhere.

        • Cord Shirt says:

          You uh…haven’t actually provided any argument or evidence that things are any worse anywhere else or how changing drug laws would help with this.

          Again, Yankees are pretty happy to make sacrifices on behalf of others, but…you do need to ask us to.

          Let’s try again: What makes you think it’s broke? (And where? And how broke?) And what, specifically, makes you think changing drug laws would fix it?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            You uh…haven’t actually provided any argument or evidence that things are any worse anywhere else or how changing drug laws would help with this.

            The negative consequences of the Drug War have been covered many times and in many places.

            If you’re just totally ignorant of this, here are the first things that pop in my head. Prisons filled with non-violent offenders. Minority communities devastated by gang violence over drug-selling “turf” and by having fathers imprisoned. Insurgencies and national turmoil in countries like Colombia and Mexico.

            Again, Yankees are pretty happy to make sacrifices on behalf of others, but…you do need to ask us to.

            Let’s try again: What makes you think it’s broke? (And where? And how broke?) And what, specifically, makes you think changing drug laws would fix it?

            This sort of folksy golly-gee attitude is not very becoming. “I’m just a simple country lawyer,” give me a break.

            No one is even asking you to make sacrifices on behalf of others. If drugs are illegal both in Compton, CA and Arcadian-Utopia, VT, probably the reason people in the latter don’t do drugs has to do with something other than the law.

            I think it’s great that the people you know don’t use drugs, even marijuana. If people in your little paradise did want to use marijuana, though, they would find out how to get it. I myself have never used it, and I wouldn’t know where to get it. It can’t be that hard of an intellectual mystery, though. Also, I don’t think it would be too bad if a few people in your town did use marijuana, since it is mostly harmless.

            Why, exactly, do you think the end of the Drug War would result in Arcadian-Utopia, VT becoming a den of iniquity?

          • Cord Shirt says:

            @Vox Imperatoris:

            “Folksy golly-gee”

            That’s uh…I’ll just say it’s not the message I set out to send and leave it at that.

            “The negative consequences of the Drug War have been covered many times and in many places.”

            Generally in misleading and politicized ways, yes. I’ve ignored such coverage. It’s not an issue I care much about.

            “Prisons filled with non-violent offenders.”

            When people started saying, “The US can solve our high imprisonment rate by releasing nonviolent offenders,” I looked into it, and it seems that to make a dent you’d actually have to release violent offenders. I don’t remember my source and I don’t care enough about this issue to dig it back up, so I can’t blame you if you don’t believe me, but :shrug:

            “Minority communities devastated by gang violence over drug-selling “turf” and by having fathers imprisoned.”

            I remember when crack hit the cities and black leaders asked for it to have extra draconian penalties so as to save their communities.

            I’m aware that that didn’t work. I’m not convinced that means legalization would help. If you want me to begin supporting legalization, you need to give me an actual argument.

            “Insurgencies and national turmoil in countries like Colombia and Mexico.”

            Again…

            You can’t just list these things and automatically have me agree with you. You haven’t even given an argument as to how and why illegal drugs caused this or how and why legalization would help now that it’s gotten going.

            “Why, exactly, do you think the end of the Drug War would result in Arcadian-Utopia, VT becoming a den of iniquity?”

            That’s not what I think. I’ve already said what I think: We are fine as we are, and legalization would introduce a possible risk/disruption. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Why should we change things?

            This snide misrepresentation of my views isn’t exactly winning me over.

            “Arcadian-Utopia, VT”

            “your little paradise”

            …I don’t think where I live is particularly “paradisiacal,” and I wasn’t trying to portray it that way. Are you only hostile because you think I was trying to brag, or do you actually think a place where nobody uses drugs *is* “paradise”? If the latter, why?

          • JBeshir says:

            For just one effect, drug laws turn a lot of people into people who can’t or won’t have anything to do with law enforcement, which has some very nasty effects when they need to resolve disputes.

            With prison or government-enforced fines not available for vigilantes, the only available response is physical retaliation. Without a neutral, agreed upon system for arbitration (the courts), the other party’s only available way to dispute such a response is further physical retaliation. And so potentially otherwise reasonable people end up in violent, ugly gang/clan/family violence, with sizeable externalities on everyone else.

            Even if you have no bias towards freedom of choice or where burdens are distributed, and use naive utility calculation based only on known outcomes, and would be fine barring things causally involved sometimes with bad outcomes down the chain to interfere with them, the drug laws as they are seem to be causing much worse bad outcomes down the chain than the original problem, and the pragmatic thing to do is to not have them as they are, I think. I can understand if you want particular evidence on it if you’ve not seen any before.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Cord Shirt:

            I didn’t like your tone of condescending to the rest of the country and the world, which does have serious problems, saying “Nothing’s wrong here! Don’t fix what ain’t broke!”

            I am skeptical that none of the problems induced by the drug war have ever infiltrated into your community. At the very least, you bear the burden of taxation. Regardless, other places are “broke” and we ought to do something to fix them.

            Besides, if you think your community is in no danger either way, it’s no skin off your ass if legalization goes wrong. If it is only in a very small amount of danger, your claim about being willing to sacrifice for others isn’t very convincing. “I’m willing to sacrifice for others, but they are a distant people and their troubles are none of my concern. What if I try something to help them and it has a small danger of hurting my community?”

            I really didn’t want to write a whole treatise how the drug war causes problems. (And I would recommend a source, but I’m really not sure what’s best as a comprehensive guide.) Your phrasing, however, made it like you were trying to pass yourself off as a complete babe in the woods who has never even heard anyone suggest that such problems exist or might possibly be cured. So I pointed out a few consequences.

            If you have heard these arguments but don’t find them convincing, why didn’t you say so? That’s not unreasonable. Instead, you have this line about how you’re so virtuous and willing to sacrifice for others, but “haven’t been asked”.

            Sanctimonious. That’s the word I’m looking for. I’m sorry if I took it the wrong way, but that’s how your first post comes off.

            But there’s no need for any more acrimoniousness if this was just a misunderstanding.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            @Vox Imp:

            …so I’m supposed to
            * already know all about your troubles; *and*
            * already be convinced that this specific putative solution to your troubles is the right one; *and*
            * be eager for my community to make sacrifices in order to bring that about?

            You don’t think you have any responsibility to do any convincing at all?

            “We Are All already Decided,” eh?

            (TIL: This attitude actually not limited to SJWs. ;))

            I’ve never heard anybody actually try to make this case (except for JBeshir just now). I’ve only encountered people assuming…We Are All Already Decided.

            I don’t care enough about this topic to want to pick out every instance of question-begging in your comment. Suffice it to say the inferential distance is far greater than you seem to be assuming.

            …oh fine, here, I’ll pick out one of them:

            “What if I try something to help them”

            “Something”?

            We are not all already decided. You need to make an actual argument.

            “Your phrasing, however, made it like you were trying to pass yourself off as a complete babe in the woods who has never even heard anyone suggest that such problems exist or might possibly be cured.”

            More like those are the *only* things I’ve heard people suggest. What I haven’t heard is an argument that seems…well…actually based on anything. (Again, maybe an issue of inferential distance?)

            Actually I am embarrassed that I don’t know as much about this topic as I’d like to. I’d like to be more informed, it’s just that it’s not an issue I’ve ever focused on. Partly because finding actual arguments has not been easy! And partly because, yes, my community doesn’t have a drug problem.

            If your view is that anyone who puts their own community’s issues first on their list of topics to research is immoral or even just “has no right to claim to be willing to sacrifice for others”…I have to disagree. Someone who wants me to do something for them needs to make their case. It’s not my job to solve all your problems for you without you even asking.

            IOW, I don’t know if it’s a misunderstanding, so–well, hope the above clarifies my position.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            @JBeshir:

            “For just one effect, drug laws turn a lot of people into people who can’t or won’t have anything to do with law enforcement, which has some very nasty effects when they need to resolve disputes.”

            Why is it a lot of people?

            What’s wrong with just obeying the law?

            Why should I support changing the law just because “a lot of” people have chosen to break it? If “a lot of” people keep choosing to break the law, sounds to me like it needs *more* enforcement, not less.

            Our social contract includes the idea that if one objects to the law, one campaigns to change it, one does not just break it. Or in the rare event that one does break it, one accepts the consequences (the whole point of civil disobedience is that one accepts one’s unjust imprisonment in order to show others that the law and the imprisonment *are* unjust). We agreed to behave this way to enable us all to get along in peace. If people start violating that agreement, we…well…can no longer live together in peace.

            *Why* should I care about outlaws again?

            :reads on:

            “And so potentially otherwise reasonable people”

            …who initiated this by breaking the law…

            😉

            You’re describing a serious problem of communities out of sync with the law. People who choose to break the law and try to get away with it, rather than to campaign to change the law.

            That does not happen *just* because everyone got together and decided to make something illegal.

            Yes, of course I’m aware that communities like that exist. However, I’d like to see a real argument as to what caused that situation–and why “just changing the law” (let alone this specific law) would solve it. (Do you think most people who have spent years operating in murderous gangs are going to suddenly go legit?)

            “the drug laws as they are seem to be causing much worse bad outcomes down the chain than the original problem, and the pragmatic thing to do is to not have them as they are, I think.”

            This makes some sense if true, but I’m not convinced it is. Again, something being illegal doesn’t force anyone to try to get away with doing it anyway. That requires something else in addition. With Prohibition, it was pre-existing cultures and addictions. (Similarly, with the gun arguments here, it would be pre-existing culture, including a belief that gun ownership is a civil right.)

            Do you have cites on the history of drug laws in various places? Why have people chosen to make them illegal in the first place?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Cord Shirt:

            I was not intending to present an argument to you that the drug war is unjust. I was initially expressing disbelief that you had not heard such arguments. If you have and don’t like them, fine. If you haven’t, I don’t really want to provide them because if I did, I’d end up writing something really long about a topic that I have discussed many times before.

            But here is a good essay “America’s Unjust Drug War” by Michael Huemer, that provides a short overview case, if you are interested.

            So I don’t think I’m begging any questions. I’m not trying to prove to you that the drug war is wrong and assuming it is. I was taking affront to your blasé attitude toward it and apparent ignorance of it.

            Indeed, I mistakenly thought that your attitude was somewhat sarcastic when I read your first post, since I was not familiar with your writing style as a commenter. I was doing the equivalent of telling you to knock off the innocent act.

            So yeah, I’ve “already decided”. I appreciate that it would be necessary for you to be convinced that the drug war is harmful in order for you to support ending it. I just don’t wish to be the one who does the convincing. I hope the Huemer article is a good start, though. Or check out the work of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or (especially) the many writings put out by the Cato Institute on this subject. (I’m sure this is coming off as condescending, but I don’t know how else to put it.)

            If your view is that anyone who puts their own community’s issues first on their list of topics to research is immoral or even just “has no right to claim to be willing to sacrifice for others”…I have to disagree. Someone who wants me to do something for them needs to make their case. It’s not my job to solve all your problems for you without you even asking.

            Sure, inferential distances and contexts of knowledge are very real. I agree. No one can know everything.

            I’m the last person who’s going to tell you that you have an obligation to sacrifice for others, or put them in front of yourself. But you don’t only gain values from those in your community; you gain them from interaction—direct or indirect—with people elsewhere in your country and around the world. We have an economic system of globalized capitalism. What affects them affects you. By no means by the same amount—that’s why you don’t have to put them before you and your family—but nevertheless there is a real effect.

            Your post suggested to me an attitude of callous indifference and a huge degree of provincialism. I am not in a position to evaluate your personal choices; I don’t blame or criticize you if you’ve had better things to do than investigate this issue. But consider this little example:

            Suppose someone comes up to me and asks me why I’m not doing anything to speak up for the people in Tangostan who are being oppressed by my country. I’ve never heard of Tangostan. Do I tell him, “That’s very nice, dear, but we’re doing just fine here. Why should I do anything for Tangostan? Give me a reason I should disturb my idyllic community.”

            Of course I do need a reason to help. But that’s a rude way to ask, one which suggests that if a reason were given, I would not likely be moved. If you didn’t mean it like that, my apologies. However, saying things like that is likely to produce similar misunderstandings in the future.

            Also, if it is reasonably expected that I might know something about Tangostan and the arguments for helping them, I should not phrase things like “How come you people banging on about Tangostan have never given me a reason to help?”

            Finally, as I said, I’m not about to tell you that you have to sacrifice for others. But when you and your community seem really self-absorbed in your own affairs, I don’t really believe you when you say you’re willing to sacrifice for others, which means to put their needs ahead of your own.

            If you want to be selfish, admit it. To say that people who want your help have to seek you out is selfish. If you really wanted to sacrifice for them, you’d seek them out. It’s not like you’re unaware there are problems in the world. And yes, that means your little community doesn’t get to be as happy and doesn’t get to think about its own problems first (or at all!) if those problems are less severe—which you have reason to know they are.

            I find it hilarious that I’m having to say this. I am a follower of Ayn Rand and a believer in absolute egoism. I don’t think you do have the obligation to be unselfish; indeed I think you ought to put yourself first. But I don’t like hypocrisy. Don’t claim to be unselfish when you’re not; you will then neither consistently pursue effective altruism nor effective egoism. And callous indifference is not an attitude one should wish to project even as an egoist because the affairs of others are not rationally a matter of indifference.

            It seems that “Yankees” are willing to sacrifice for others when those others enter their visual field…

            But you see, I am not demanding that you sacrifice for others. I think you should support ending the drug war not in spite of it harming you but because it will benefit you. The argument for that it will benefit you is contained is the Huemer article and in the many other resources available.

          • “* be eager for my community to make sacrifices in order to bring that about?”

            I haven’t followed all of this. Am I correct in understanding that what you mean by your community making sacrifices is your community putting up with the repeal of a law applying to every community in the country that you find it convenient to have apply to you? Allowing people in other places to smoke marijuana counts as your making a sacrifice?

            Even if marijuana was legal nationally, there could be a state or even town law against it, after all. A little harder to enforce–but the current law isn’t enforced very effectively. Similarly for other drugs.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            @Vox Imp:

            I’m laughing, because my initial request was for an activist to actually activist. And JBeshir stepped up–thanks, JBeshir!

            But *you* OTOH are basically saying: “Educate *yourself*”!

            Heh. At least you are suggesting a couple things for me to read. I was about to say “and not going straight for the shaming,” except wait, you did! It’s only *now* that you got around to suggesting anything. Heh.

            (Hypothesis: That’s why SJWs go straight for the shaming, too. It’s really “just” that they’re freaked out by such great inferential distance.)

            Also, if it is *reasonably expected* that I might know something about Tangostan and the arguments for helping them, I should not phrase things like “How come you people banging on about Tangostan have never given me a reason to help?”

            That’s exactly what I’m objecting to: Your “side’s” assumption that of course we all already agree or, at least, have heard the arguments.

            If, when I say “I haven’t heard the arguments and I’d like to,” the response I get is focused on shaming me for not already having heard them…

            Rather than on *sharing* them with me, which I’m not just *open* to but even *asked* for…

            That encourages me to think that most members of this group don’t actually *have* any arguments. And that their *actual* reason for holding this position is just, “All the Cool Kids already agree with me.” (Or as the Capitol Steps put it…)

            You’re absolutely taking the standard SJW line here.

            I can sort of sympathize with your feelings, just like I can sort of sympathize with SJWs’ feelings in similar situations. Still, ultimately I’m with Freddie: You don’t win politically by assuming everyone else already shares all your assumptions and trying to shame anyone who doesn’t.

            I don’t really believe you when you say you’re willing to sacrifice for others, which means to put their needs ahead of your own.

            If you want to be selfish, admit it. To say that people who want your help have to seek you out is selfish. If you really wanted to sacrifice for them, you’d seek them out.

            Yankees are constantly mocked as weaklings and fools for our willingness to sacrifice for others. That’s because we really are especially susceptible to such appeals. It seems that what I intended as self-deprecating humor, you read as a brag… Really, it’s neither good nor bad, it just is what it is.

            It seems odd to me that you’re equating “willingness to put others’ needs first when asked” with “desire to seek out others to whom to subordinate one’s needs.” I don’t know anyone (other than you, I guess) who would call those the same thing. I’ve never read Rand (I’ve read about her, but haven’t read her), so I’m not sure I understand your position there, but I guess you reject both? Maybe that’s why you equate them. I sure don’t.

            Since I’m not an SJW, I don’t think people who want help are entitled to receive it without even asking. I think they have to ask. (Off the original topic, but applies to this digression: Plus, who am I to stick my nose in and interfere with someone else who never asked me to? That’s rude and none of my business. If they don’t ask, I’m to respect that they don’t want me involved.)

            (Back to the point.) I also agree with Freddie that this is a basic fact of politics: The person who wants the political change is the one who needs to approach others with arguments for the desired change. If you aren’t willing to approach others and make arguments, don’t expect them to just automatically start agreeing with you.

            Really, I’ve just had it up to here with We Are All Already Decided. People have a right to go about their lives–their *happy, healthy* lives, even! ;)–without being suddenly accosted by vicious assholes because how dare they not already agree. I say the same thing to SJWs.

            It was probably a bad idea for me to start reading the Huemer article while annoyed with you 😉 but I read the first section and it was pretty annoying–for the same reason. It wasn’t even just, “I don’t see any reason for this fence to be here.” It was worse than that: It was, “I don’t see any reason we should build a fence here,” *ignoring the fact that we already have*. As if it didn’t matter that we had. As if it were impossible to imagine that that fact even *might* have some relevance to the discussion. It just…started from the wrong place and hence put me off from the beginning.

            @JBeshir, hope you come back–your reply was the kind of thing I was looking for and I was finding that conversation interesting.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            @David:

            You seem to be operating from a “small government” baseline assumption/framing that I don’t share. Yeah, how dare I not want to deal with the disruption that remaking formerly-federal laws into more local ones would cause. 😉

            Actually I’m pretty open to the idea of, in general, making government more local, even though it would cause disruption. (After all, I tentatively support “get rid of police”–which would be even more of a devolution, along the lines of power shifting from “state and local” to “personal, though of course backed by local law.”) The disruption just needs to be taken into account in our cost-benefit calculations, that’s all. Starting out with the framing that “Of course we should do this and it has no costs” just…at best it’s unconvincing, and right now it’s actively annoying me.

      • nil says:

        I’ll let other people cover the regular bases to make an appeal that doesn’t get stated often, but is certainly at the core of why me and my friends use, and, especially, used them: drugs are facinating.

        There’s still a few profound mysteries floating around in the world. I won’t try and claim that the nature of consciousness is necessarily the superlative one (although it is in my book), but I will note that it’s one of the only ones we can truly play around with as amateurs. No need for telescopes or supercolliders; all you need is minute amounts of particular chemicals and a reasonably strong set of gonads. My life would be so much shallower if I hadn’t experienced the antineurosis of MDMA, the hypertrophic curiosity of LSD, the sheer alienness of DMT or salvia. It’s not about cartoon characters or giddy laughter (well, sometime it’s about giddy laughter), but about experiencing for, at least a brief period of time, an entirely difference experience of thought and being–and knowing that, despite the claims of the flakier flavors of hippie, there’s nothing predestined about those modes. They’re contingent on utterly unplanned interactions between a hundred million years of brain evolution and weird chemicals that would never have had any reason to interact with one another were it not for blunt experimentation, and they’re quite possibly nothing more than the narrowest and randomest of slices taken from an unfathomable and unexplained rainbow of sentience.

        Most focus is on the more everyday drugs in these conversations, and it should be. That’s where you’re going to find your measurable costs and benefits. But, even so, I can’t help but feel that there’s something very deeply wrong in denying people the experience of the weird ones. It’s like outlawing color.

        • Cord Shirt says:

          (“outlawing color” Was that a Pleasantville reference? I feel silly asking since I’ve never seen it, only read about it..but…)

          This is interesting.

          To me, what you’re talking about still seems like…well…an extra. I mean…now I know that too because…you told me (actually I learned the same thing from reading Oliver Sacks on neurological differences)…so…now I don’t need to go perturbing the chaotic system that is my brain and consciousness with drugs. I can leave it the hell alone and remain balanced. (Or as balanced as I ever get anyway. 😉 ) KWIM?

          I guess the point is, you’re talking about experiences that seem to fall in the “might be nice, but nobody really *suffers* from not experiencing them” category. So…I guess I’m just not seeing it as actual deprivation.

          And I probably think the drugs you’re discussing are riskier than (it seems) you do. You’ve worded it as all benefit, no cost…obviously I’m not so sure. We decided they should be illegal for a reason, after all.

          • “We decided they should be illegal for a reason, after all.”

            As best I can tell, marijuana became illegal because of a wildly dishonest PR campaign closely linked to anti-hispanic prejudice. Am I mistaken?

            I don’t see the outcome of the legislative process as “we decided.” I didn’t. And while there is surely a reason for the outcome, it’s a big jump from the existence of a reason to the existence of a good reason. The reason for quite a lot of legislation, such as tariffs, is that the gainers find it easier to organize politically to buy congressional votes than the losers.

          • Tibor says:

            I think the main problem with LSD is that it is manufactured illegally and you cannot check the content and the concentration. So the effects of two LSD papers can vary and you have to trust your sources. It is potentially dangerous in the sense that you can do stupid stuff on a trip which could get you hurt and that you can potentially go crazy if you take too much at a time. Both of those problems would be significantly reduced if you could buy LSD legally, say at an apothecary with a certification of contents and maybe with an official “how to use” guide. Any sensible person will first ask a more experienced friend to do the LSD with them the first time he does it, but some might not recognize the risks and it does not help that you have to rely on hearsay.

            By the way, when marijuana is depicted in a popular TV show, it is almost always grotesquely wrong. They talk about being “on a trip”. No amount of marijuana is hallucinogenic and the worst that can happen if you smoke too much of it or eat too many cookies is that you will be almost numb for a few hours while being extremely oversensitive to touch. You also keep getting lost in conversation a lot (what were we talking about just now?) and have a different sense of time (20 minutes can feel like an hour or two) It is about as unpleasant (although very different) as when you drink too much. If you don’t take too much, it does the same things but to a lesser degree, so it makes you feel kind of very relaxed and easy (also lazy in a way).

            By the way, a friend of mine used to take methamphetamine when he was 20ish (now he is over 40, has a family and works as an optometrist). I talked to him about this and he told me that they heard from the official sources how bad marijuana is (this was the early 90s and most Czech drug laws and attitudes were still largely unchanged from the communist era when illegal drugs were heavily repressed) but when they tried it, it was nothing like that…so they figured meth would not be such a big deal either. If you misinform about one thing, people are not going to trust you even when you tell the truth.

          • nil says:

            Not a conscious reference, although certainly sharing the same philosophy.

            As far “now I know because you told me”–you really don’t. You couldn’t. The language can’t really have the words to describe these things, because how could it? The shared experience you’d need to share semantic meaning isn’t there, neither between the two of us nor in our wider culture.

            As far as “still sounds dangerous”–no doubt. I mean, less so with salvia and DMT since they’re so short-lived (although that doesn’t preclude some degree of psychological danger, I’d be lying if I denied the former having scared the ever-living fuck out of me), but LSD is potentially a few hours of temporary psychosis and probably introduces a suicide risk even when the grip on reality is maintained. MDMA doesn’t carry those kinds of risks if used correctly (it’s an interesting drug in that that, if anything, it’s an experience of *greater* sanity than sobriety), but that’s a big “if” when the risks of incorrect use are potentially fatal hyperthermia and water poisoning… plus, although the evidence points to “fine in moderation” the jury is still out on mild neurotoxicity. I don’t know what the legal regime would look like for them, but the model should probably be more around the lines of skydiving than liquor stores, especially absent any kind of widespread cultural knowledge about proper use (worth noting that that’s the only reason alcohol is as tolerable as it is–if it’d been invented in the last century, it’d be regarded as a terrifying Schedule I drug and would probably be the rhetorical lynchpin of the entire pro-prohibition argument)

            I don’t doubt that this would be superfluous to your currently-balanced life. In my first post I included “and especially used” as a reference to the fact that outside of the occasional dance with Molly, I haven’t done this stuff, nor wanted to do this stuff, since I was 25 and Bush II was president. But I’m sure glad I did.

          • onyomi says:

            “We decided”

            I wish this phrase were banned from political discourse.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            @David: I don’t know, you’re the one trying to change others’ minds, looks to me like the burden of proof is on you. 😉

            @Tibor:

            It’s easy to say that (about LSD), but it doesn’t address the question of why it’s illegal in the first place, so that argument comes off as facile/flippant.

            As for marijuana…

            Yes, some people overgeneralize from “This doesn’t have any *obvious* negative effects *right now*” to “This is definitely perfectly safe and they lied,” and then to “…so they’re lying about everyone else.” Seems like a reason to be honest about your warnings and not exaggerate them.

            @nil:

            I haven’t had the experience, but I do have the knowledge that “state of mind is somewhat biologically-based and arbitrary” which you suggested is the reason the experience is valuable. Though again, I got that more from Sacks (neurology) than you (drugs). Are you familiar with Sacks? /The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat/, etc.?

            I also have the experience of having had a rare side effect of a pain med which changed my state of mind. I’m glad I’d already read Sacks, I guess. The med resulted in the very odd thought or attitude “Wouldn’t it be *cool* to commit suicide,” which…was so obviously different from what I normally think that it just…was obvious it was from the med (or from the mental changes created by it) and not “me” (my typical state of mind and volition). So I ignored it till the med wore off.

            Now on the one hand, I did choose not to keep taking that med. On the other, it…wasn’t really a bad experience; the fact that this wasn’t “my kind of thought” was too obvious. (The whole thing would have been far more dangerous if it had made me–or I had already been–*sad* too.) Back to the first hand, I didn’t really need to have that experience…I’d already read Sacks.

            “widespread cultural knowledge about proper use (worth noting that that’s the only reason alcohol is as tolerable as it is–if it’d been invented in the last century, it’d be regarded as a terrifying Schedule I drug and would probably be the rhetorical lynchpin of the entire pro-prohibition argument)”

            Yep. And look at Sherman Alexie’s autobiographical writing for one example (of many that exist) of how a local-to-America subculture who did not have such cultural knowledge when they first encountered alcohol, still do not have such cultural knowledge today. With other drugs we in the USA don’t have such cultural knowledge–and from the example of alcohol, it looks like gaining such cultural knowledge would take a long, long time, if it even happened at all.

            @onyomi:

            Heh, I chose it on purpose. I’m an American, I believe in we the people, “Our ruler is law and the law is our own,” etc., etc. 😉

            Someone making David’s “*I* don’t remember deciding, *I* was never consulted, etc” argument strikes me as sending a (very weak) signal of defection/free-riding. (Sorry, David.) It seems to say, “I’m not part of society, I don’t want society’s protection…and when society calls on all its members to extend that protection to someone else, I won’t participate.”

          • ” It seems to say, “I’m not part of society, I don’t want society’s protection…and when society calls on all its members to extend that protection to someone else, I won’t participate.””

            I do not believe there is a moral agent known as “society” to which I have obligations. My obligations are all to human beings.

            To put the point a little differently, right and wrong are not made by act of Congress.

          • Tibor says:

            @Cord Shirt : Alcohol was made illegal in the US once. I don’t think that the fact that something is illegal is a very strong justification for it being illegal. Also, you have to deal with different (first-world) jurisdictions treating different drugs differently. Most notably, recreational marijuana is legal even in some US states now.

            Also, I am not saying that drugs are harmless but that criminalizing them usually produces worse outcomes in total than not doing that. Alcohol can mess you up in the long term (and you can also die of alcohol poisoning in the very short term) but making it illegal lead to much worse problems than keeping it legal. I don’t think that alcohol is a very unique case and that the main difference is that it is a culture drug which means that most people are well-informed about it (and also want to consume it) which is not true of most other drugs.

  74. Mariani says:

    Not mentioning non-firearm homicides is the biggest dishonest part of the discourse on guns. Is dying from a firearm somehow worse than dying from anything else?

    • Loyle says:

      The assumption is that as ease of causing death lowers, so too will rate of death. Killing with a firearm is easier, and generally safer for the killer, than killing with a non-firearm. It’s not being dishonest, it’s just a presupposed set of values.

      • Mariani says:

        But I am talking about when we can select for homicides that have nothing to do with a firearm, just like Scott did.

        • Loyle says:

          I’m not sure I understand. Successful homicides with guns vs not guns are equally terrible, yes. People care more about gun homicides, and choose to focus on them and not talk about non gun homicides at all, because attempted non-gun homicides are considered more likely to fail. And this reasoning is not necessarily done consciously.

          I’m also pretty sure people, in general and by design, cannot process fighting a vague menace “violence” without focusing on a specific boogeyman “gun”. It is a shame that is so, but it is also understandable as people will actively ignore things they can’t hope to solve over something that seems attainable.

          I also may be talking out of my ass. That is something to consider.

  75. Enquiring Mind says:

    Guns serve as protection against 100% of Black Swan attacks. That is an underlying message about unrevealed preferences in discussions about protection.

  76. Loyle says:

    I wonder if I’m the only one who sees charts like this
    https://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/gun_deaths5b.jpg
    and immediately wonder “but what percentage is that of the total population?” Because it seems like that might be a number that matters.

    • JBeshir says:

      It’s per million people, so divide by 10,000 and there’s your percentage.

      • Loyle says:

        By which I mean I’m lazy and assume most people are lazy, and would prefer numbers represented in terms of relative risk, as well as whatever fearmongering they’re doing.
        And I most certainly did not accidentally read “per million people” to mean anything other than, “per million people in their respective countries”, and you can’t prove otherwise.

  77. Eric M says:

    I bet this has been discussed below, but I’ve always said that the *best* reason to reduce the number of guns in the U.S. is to prevent suicides. I remember visiting a silver and gold mine in Utah in college. The silver was the bulk of their production and that kept the lights on. The small amount of gold produced was the profit. If gun control had a marginal benefit to prevent murders, maybe this keeps the lights on. And if the suicide rate drops 20%, heck, that’s a lot of profit.

    • Internationally, suicide rates seems to be much more a function of culture than of gun availability (cf. Japan). Seems to me that a suicide-bent person, denied guns, will choose another method. Maybe you get that 20% reduction, but I’d want a solid basis for such a number before I base policy on that guess.

    • Furslid says:

      When thinking about the relationship between guns and suicide, I found this thought experiment helpful.

      If I wanted to kill myself, what would I do. If I couldn’t do that, what would my second best option be. For me, the answers would be.
      A. Gun.
      B. Go to the top of the 6 level parking garage at my apartment and climb over the four foot high railing.

      It doesn’t seem that guns make suicide that much easier.

      • JBeshir says:

        It might seem so, but in practice it seems like even pretty trivial inconveniences can reduce suicide rates, e.g. packaging changes for medicines: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/a-simple-way-to-reduce-suicides/?hp

        Most people do not “decide they want to commit suicide” then solidly pursue it; most people become inclined to it during an incredibly emotional time when they’re probably at their least functional or able to pursue anything. Having to go jump as opposed to just pick up your gun and click makes sense to have a pretty huge effect.

        • John Schilling says:

          Careful; there are two very different populations of “suicides” here, and they use very different techniques with very different levels of resolve.

          One group, I believe the largest by far, wants attention and would prefer not to die to get it. They use overdoses of sedative- or barbiturate-type drugs, or they slit their wrists (across, not lengthwise). They rarely use any other technique. About 15% of them die, the rest of them get to talk to someone like Scott for a week. Well, less so now that Scott isn’t doing inpatient work. This group is relatively easy to dissuade with or without a long chat with a psychiatrist. And since about 15% of them die even though they’d prefer not to, that’s clearly worth doing.

          The other, smaller group, genuinely wants to die. They tend shoot themselves if guns are available. If not, they jump off tall buildings or hang themselves. Carbon-monoxide poisoning used to be big, when ovens and car exhausts could reliably deliver a lethal dose. Jumping in front of trains or driving cars into solid objects at highway speed, also popular but harder to sort from accidents. Sometimes drowning or exposure. Generally not drug overdoses, unless they can get professional assistance in making sure the dose is lethal. And about 80% of these people die, regardless of which method they chose.

          I share Scott’s skepticism that preventing these people from dying is always a worthwhile thing, particularly if your concern stops when they are safely Not Dead and instead locked away someplace they can’t kill themselves and you don’t have to care about them. But if you do care about their not dying, it is damnably hard to arrange because they do have a very good track record for killing themselves by many different means.

          • I think your second group, the people who are rationally determined to die, who are unlikely to change their minds about it, and who calmly choose the most lethal means, is much smaller than you estimate.

            A very large portion of suicides, including gun suicides, are impulsive. It’s not that the person doesn’t sincerely want to die when he pulls the trigger, it’s that given a few more minutes to think about it, be probably wouldn’t. A lot of these suicides happen under the influence of sleep deprivation or intoxication.

            Moreover, deadly means of suicide are not readily substituted for each other, and we can see this very clearly with the oven gas suicides. In the 1930s through 1960s, as each country or area switched from coal gas to much-less-lethal natural gas, the suicide rate fell about 30%. Non-gas suicides rose when gas suicides disappeared, but not enough to keep the suicide rate constant.

          • Wrong Species says:

            But what about people who do want to kill themselves but only in the moment? They may decide to go jump off the bridge but manage to talk themselves out of it on the way there. But if they had a gun they might pull the trigger before they can even think about it. Not every suicidal person is absolutely determined to kill themselves and won’t stop until they succeed.

          • Elissa says:

            The relationship between intent to die and lethality of method is not at all clear, when you look for it: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/intent/

          • John Schilling says:

            Not every suicidal person is absolutely determined to kill themselves and won’t stop until they succeed

            Right, which is why I started by noting that most suicidal people are very weakly motivated to kill themselves and can be trivially stopped.

            Your hypothesis is one of people who are very highly motivated for one brief moment but not at all motivated otherwise. I have seen no evidence that any significant population matches that description, and yes, I have looked (albeit not so much recently). In particular, if such a phenomenon manifested over such a short timescale that guns would facilitate suicides but tall buildings would be too slow/inconvenient, you’d expect correlated changes in other relevant behaviors such as leaving suicide notes. When I looked in some depth a decade or more ago, I found many studies that didn’t even try to look at such things, and the one which did found no significant behavioral distinctions among the populations using various high-lethality suicide methods.

            Just now I did a quick google and found a study that seemed to claim that firearm suicides never left notes, but on examination they were counting only a small group of people who had survived suicide-by-gun attempts, which is a highly selective and atypical population.

            And if you do manage to disarm the elusive Transiently Determined American Suicide, he still likely gets in his car every day and has multiple opportunities to kill himself quickly on short notice with literally zero effort.

          • Dr Dealgood says:

            A few years back I was in a pretty rough spot and used to spend a lot of time hanging out on subway platforms trying to jump in front of trains. It’s really really difficult to do even if you desperately want to, as evidenced by me writing this comment, and I definitely would have appreciated an easier method having been available.

            The other issue with heights and impact is that it’s a hell of a gamble. What convinced me to stop loitering in the subway was seeing a warning that “more than a third” of people hit by trains die… which implied that you have a (less than) two thirds chance of getting hit and surviving. That’s a really horrifying idea if you think about it.

            I’m not sure how often people botch gun suicides but my uneducated guess is that, even if the substitution effect is low, you still shouldn’t necessarily push people towards the messier suicide methods.

          • NN says:

            And if you do manage to disarm the elusive Transiently Determined American Suicide, he still likely gets in his car every day and has multiple opportunities to kill himself quickly on short notice with literally zero effort.

            Suicide via deliberate car crash is likely to be unreliable, and if it works may not work fast. Airbags are pretty good at their jobs, and even if they don’t convert a lethal impact to a non-lethal impact could easily convert an instantly lethal impact to an impact that results in a slow and agonizing death. And if you survive and decide that you don’t actually want to die, there is a good chance that you will be left permanently disabled. I can easily imagine that someone might be willing to kill themselves with a quick bullet in the mouth (whether that actually does reliably lead to instant unconsciousness is beside the point; the general public expects it to) but wouldn’t be willing to take those kinds of risks.

            I suspect that when suicide via car crash happens, the usual reason for choosing that method is because they think that that way their death will be declared an accident and thus their life insurance policy will go into effect.

          • tall buildings would be too slow/inconvenient,

            In New York City, most people who commit suicide by jumping from tall buildings do so from their own apartment, so, not necessarily slow or inconvenient.

          • Mark Atwood says:

            driving cars into solid objects at highway speed, also popular but harder to sort from accidents.

            I may appear to be posting a lot on this topic, but there are a lot of posts I write that I didn’t post, or immediately deleted after posting. This might be one of them.

            There are at least three people I used to know who I am pretty sure committed suicide that way (hit a bridge support at high speed while driving drunk with their seatbelts unbuckled, and being someone who was not formerly known to be a reckless driver, a heavy alcohol user, or a non user of seatbelts).

            I will admit to typical-mind typical-experience here, but.. if I know of 3 such, they can’t be all that rare.

            And that way of committing suicide also has the advantage of having plausible deniability, and get formally recorded as a “tragic accident”.

        • Psmith says:

          The impeccably libertarian Alex Tabarrok has a study analyzing guns in this respect: https://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/BriggsTabarrokFirearmsSuicide.pdf

          (Bryan Caplan has a good follow-up somewhere. As for me, I think the medication packaging analogy is illuminating–on the one hand, trivial things can influence suicide. On the other hand, I have a jar of 500 loose acetaminophen in my house, and I’m not about to get rid of it or lobby for the prohibition of their sale.).

          • Elissa says:

            Why not ban large bottles of acetaminophen, if doing so prevents people from committing/attempting suicide in a particularly dreadful way that isn’t even that effective at killing you, as opposed to just your liver? If you’ve just gotta have 500 Tylenols on hand at once (you don’t), you can always buy several bottles.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Elissa:

            To put it crudely, because fuck those people, who are going to keep me from being able to buy a bottle of medicine like a regular person, because they’re going to have an “episode” and kill themselves for no reason.

            Why should basically normal, functional people be continually inconvenienced—even trivially inconvenienced—just to prevent dysfunctional people from hurting themselves?

            I’m not saying the dysfunctional people deserve to die, or that all their problems are their own fault. Almost nobody in Hiroshima deserved to die. Very few conscript soldiers in the Wehrmacht deserved to die; it would have been enormously unjust to have mass executions of German conscript soldiers after WWII, even if it had been feasible. But when it was them versus normal regular American soldiers who also didn’t deserve to die, they counted less.

            It seems to me that the basically functional people ought to weigh up the consequences to themselves of the costs imposed by these types of paternalism, versus the costs imposed on them by the death of dysfunctional people from the lack of paternalism. Maybe in extreme cases, paternalism will still be justified. But probably a lot less.

          • Elissa says:

            No but really who cares if you can’t buy 500 acetaminophen in one bottle, I get that you hate mentally ill people but this is not an important thing to be able to do. “If they’re going to die then they’d better do it and decrease the surplus population,” you say? Ok, but maybe they can do it in a way that doesn’t involve an ICU stay and a liver transplant.

          • My understanding is that packaging of medicines and cleaning products (e.g. caps that require special effort to open) has greatly reduced accidental child poisonings.

            Perhaps this is one of those dust-motes-for-the-many-vs.-torture-for-the-few questions: ongoing minor inconvenience for millions over the last 40 years or so, vs. the lives of a few hundred (I’m guessing) small children.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Larry Kestenbaum:

            My understanding is that packaging of medicines and cleaning products (e.g. caps that require special effort to open) has greatly reduced accidental child poisonings.

            Paternalism does have much more going for it when it actually involves children.

            The issue of the rights of children is the most complicated one in law. Parents essentially hold the rights of children in trust until they come of age, but—like the property in a trust—parents don’t own their children. On the one hand, they’re supposed to be responsible for their children and have the most interest in protecting them. On the other hand, many of the consequences of irresponsibility don’t fall on the parents themselves, and it’s also difficult for them to monitor their children all the time (and who monitors the parents?).

            The question is, to what extent should parents be solely responsible for the safety of their children, and to what extent should others (like drug manufacturers or liquor store clerks) be compelled to act in loco parentis? I think it should be as much on the side of parents as possible, but you can more easily make the argument here than in any other area that some paternalism is necessary.

            @ Elissa:

            I don’t hate mentally ill people. I really do lament the fact that they suffer needlessly.

            But do I love or value them as much as non-mentally-ill people? No, to tell the truth.

            Is it so crazy to say that the life of someone who is miserable all the time—even though it’s not his fault at all—is less valuable and less worth protecting, even less worth inconveniencing, than someone who experiences life in the normal way? That may be an “extreme” example—few people are miserable all the time—but if mental illness didn’t cause suffering it would be mental difference, not illness (cf. “homosexuality”).

          • Cord Shirt says:

            “My understanding is that packaging of medicines and cleaning products (e.g. caps that require special effort to open) has greatly reduced accidental child poisonings.”

            [evil] Darwin Award. [/evil]

            …sorry. 😉 Carry on.

          • Elissa says:

            Ah, so “fuck those people” means “I lament their suffering, but DALYs”? Sorry; see, I thought “fuck those people” meant “fuck those people”. Probably a regional difference.

            No but your argument seems confused. “They are suffering and so their lives are less valuable to be saved” (which plenty of utilitarians would accept) is very different from “I love them less,” and neither of them has much to do with the thing you said before about how immoral people’s suffering doesn’t matter. Fortunately I don’t need to try to sort this out with you, because I was talking about the object level problem of preventing acetaminophen overdose, and it’s rather obvious that an acetaminophen overdose is bad for everyone, not just the patient. ICU stays are ludicrously expensive, and a liver transplant costs a liver. And it’s a very common problem, so I don’t see the harm being outweighed by the negligible inconvenience of not having 500 pills in one bottle (do you even use that many before they expire?), even multiplied by millions of people.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Elissa:

            Ah, so “fuck those people” means “I lament their suffering, but DALYs”? Sorry; see, I thought “fuck those people” meant “fuck those people”. Probably a regional difference.

            I said “to put it crudely”. That is my outrage speaking at the absurdity of the thing.

            This is not limited only to big bottles of medicine. It’s every other little nagging thing like it. The fact that I don’t think the lives of a few mentally ill people outweigh the cost of paternalism imposed on everyone else, doesn’t mean I hate mentally ill people.

            No but your argument seems confused. “They are suffering and so their lives are less valuable to be saved” (which plenty of utilitarians would accept) is very different from “I love them less,” and neither of them has much to do with the thing you said before about how immoral people’s suffering doesn’t matter.

            The relevant thing for me is their value relative to me. (The relevant thing for them is my value relative to them.) Their value to me is less than that of a happy, functional person.

            The thing with immoral people is separate. That’s why I talked about it separately. However, on the matter of irrational suicides, I don’t think it’s all a matter of biological factors out of people’s control. I think the correlation between immorality and misery leading to suicide, or between immorality and self-inflicted accidental death, is not zero (nor is it one).

            Fortunately I don’t need to try to sort this out with you, because I was talking about the object level problem of preventing acetaminophen overdose, and it’s rather obvious that an acetaminophen overdose is bad for everyone, not just the patient. ICU stays are ludicrously expensive, and a liver transplant costs a liver.

            To whom do the costs of the ICU stay and the liver transplant naturally accrue? To the patient and his associates. This is not an externality.

            This is government intervention turning a non-externality into an externality.

          • Elissa says:

            I am no more interested in having the philosophical argument with you than anyone else seems to be. I am talking about one specific policy proposal which looks to me like a win. You seem to want to this to be a synecdoche for a whole class of things to which you take “fuck those people”-level umbrage, and your proposed solution is to absolutely prioritize the trivial convenience of “normal” people like you over the welfare of anyone you judge defective, even if it means drastically and impractically overhauling healthcare reimbursement and the medical ethics of emergent care.

            No thanks! I think I will go talk to someone else about something else. Enjoy the rest of your thread.

          • Paternalism does have much more going for it when it actually involves children.

            You have a way with words, sir!

            [evil] Darwin Award. [/evil]

            There is a reason I keep bringing up the childproof cap regulation.

            I don’t remember this, but when I was a toddler, in Chicago more than half a century ago, I got into the cabinet under the sink, opened up one or more containers of dangerous stuff, and it was feared that I might have done some harm to myself. My parents were very smart people (my father had a PhD), but they were afflicted with their own problems, and obviously they couldn’t keep an eye on me every second.

          • I’ve heard that those hard-to-open medicine bottle are a significant barrier for people (mostly old) whose hands are in bad shape. This seems reasonable, but maybe there are tools for opening the bottles?

          • brad says:

            Last time I got medicine the bottle cap was reverseable. Put on right side up it was childproof, upside down it was a lot easier to open. Something like this: http://www.southpointesurgical.com/images%5Crvial.jpg

            It came to me in the childproof mode, but presumably I could have asked the pharmacy to do it the other way. Not sure if they’d be legally required to ask me if I have kids at home or what.

          • Dan Peverley says:

            >Why not ban large bottles of acetaminophen, if doing so prevents people from committing/attempting suicide

            Because it’s wrong to inconvenience everyone else for the sake of a trivially small set of people who are A) buying 500 Tylenol bottles which apparently no one needs (one wonders why they continue to be sold so often), B)Suicidal, and C) Specifically the sort of suicidal which gives them enough dedication to swallow enough tylenol to hurt themselves, but D) not enough to buy several bottles or use a surer method, like hanging, asphyxiation, firearms, tall buildings, razors, liquid nitrogen, or rat poison.

            Why not ban any number of things which make lives better in a small and unnecessary way, but entail some amount of risk? There have got to be better candidates than conveniently large amounts of over the counter medicine with regular uses.

          • Elissa says:

            @Dan: You might think the set of people affected is trivially small, but you might be surprised, because again, it’s been studied: http://www.bmj.com/content/322/7296/1203?linkType=FULL&resid=322/7296/1203&journalCode=bmj

            As far as better candidates: Which? What do you want to give up before you give up your giant bottles of Tylenol? You guys sure love your Tylenol, I dunno.

          • Furslid says:

            Elissa, I’d argue against banning large bottles of medicine because it is a member of a very large class of possible interventions. I don’t like inconveniencing everyone to protect a few people from themselves.

            1. Require that cars be wired so that they cannot be shifted out of park unless seatbelts are fastened.
            2. Update construction codes so that mountings for ceiling fans and similar cannot support more than the weight of the fan + 100 lbs. (Prevents hanging suicides.)
            3. Require some sort of barrier at the edge of some streets except at crosswalks. (Keeps people out of traffic.)
            4. And so on.

            I don’t see a good way to keep out other interventions once I accepted the large bottle ban. Even if I accepted interventions of this type, I would put my effort on the best possible ones, and number 1 is much more effective than the bottle ban.

            Elissa, I couldn’t find the rates as a proportion of population or compare with other trends in suicide. The first chart (Paracetimol deaths in England, Scotland, and Wales) showed a reduction of 59 deaths. Given the population involved, I’d call that trivially small.

  78. Dr Dealgood says:

    I don’t know how common this sentiment is, but every time there’s a National Conversation about guns I have this urge to go buy the most powerful firearm I can lay hands on and a crate of ammunition. This is speaking as a man who has never held, much less fired, one in his life and grew up in an area where carrying legally or otherwise was a great way to get yourself and a half dozen bystanders shot by the cops.

    There’s something very unsettling about the idea of the BATF or other alphabet organizations coming around to register and/or disarm citizens. It’s the same feeling as when the NSA spy program or CIA black site prisons came to light. I will never understand people who trust the government enough to give them that sort of power.

    • The Anonymouse says:

      Seems fairly common. Gun stores are doing a very brisk trade. A friend of mine–a licensed dealer and lifelong Republican–adores the current president. He tells anyone who will listen that Mr. Obama is the bar-none finest gun salesman he’s ever seen.

      A good line, and only moderately flip, but there’s a lot of truth to it.

      • Tom Scharf says:

        Which brings us to why symbolism is so important vs more effective solutions? Surely the usual suspects know that these symbolic type of solutions increase gun sales. One can easily conclude that they are making the problem worse, not better, in the absolute sense. It is a counter productive strategy. Sometimes it is better to do nothing, and this may be one of those times.

        I suppose this is seen as a marathon of moving public opinion and these short term losses are worth the cost. Not sure this is true.

      • Marc Whipple says:

        He hain’t seen nothin’ yet. Wait until President Hillary is sworn in.

        Land-office business.

  79. JakeR says:

    I can’t read through 350 comments to make sure this hasn’t already been pointed out yet, so sorry for repeating it if it has:

    Isn’t it a mistake to focus on homicides and murders (the worst-case outcome), when there can be plenty of injurious shootings that didn’t result in death? Instead of looking only at gun homicides, wouldn’t a more instructive data point be something like deliberately malicious gun violence (which would exclude suicide and accidents)?

    • NN says:

      The problem with that is that malicious gun violence that doesn’t kill anyone, and especially malicious gun violence that doesn’t even injure anyone, is much more likely to go unreported or be reported as a “cleaning accident.” This is especially true if the shooting is gang related, since criminal gangs have strict honor codes that prohibit any cooperation with the police. One of the victims of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, Frank Gusenberg, when questioned by the police, insisted that “nobody shot me,” while he was bleeding to death from 14 gunshot wounds.

      Homicide is generally considered the most reliable crime statistic, because human corpses are large and heavy and hard to get rid of, and if you find a corpse with multiple gunshot wounds then you can be absolutely certain that somebody has committed homicide; the only question is who.

  80. Tibor says:

    It seems to me that a big difference between a country like Switzerland and the US is also in the way guns are viewed. In Switzerland the gun ownership rate is about the same as that of Canada, so not really that much different from the US rate (and with more liberal gun laws than those in Canada or some US states) while homicide rate is lower than in Canada, in fact lower than in Germany or Sweden. Switzerland is also about as rich (slightly more but not by much) as the US and it has rural areas as well (although those are in the mountains and there are no vast tracks of empty land there, Switzerland is small).

    But the gun culture of Switzerland seems to be very different, in a sense more organized and so people learn something about the guns and using them before they buy them. My impression of the US is that this is not the case, that guns are either shunned by people or treated like toys by others. If this accounted for some difference in the gun-related homicide rate then maybe a sensible US policy would be not to try to limit gun ownership but to make people more acquainted with them. The advantage of that is that you might not need the state to do anything…paradoxically, a more widespread support of an organization such as NRA (I assume that an important part of what they do is to spreading knowledge about proper gun use) and promoting gun shooting at a shooting range as a sport might improve things since you could get a population that understands guns better that way.

    Your thoughts about this?

    • John Schilling says:

      Traditional American Red Tribe “gun culture” involves learning how to handle firearms safely, and then how to shoot them, from your father/uncle/grandfather in childhood. In rural areas, often including being allowed to take a smallbore rifle for nominally-unsupervised recreational shooting from age 12 or so, with the father/uncle/whatever actually paying attention to what you are doing with it as a test of maturity. Less common in an increasingly urban society, of course.

      The other traditional entry point into “gun culture” is through military service; I know a few veterans who aren’t gun owners, but they are definitely a minority. Military training can be a bit iffy regarding e.g. pistols, but it will include basic familiarization and safety rules.

      These both strongly overlap the “Southern” axis of America’s culture of violence, and on the military side are why I am leery about trying to stamp out that culture. When a Southern gentleman kills someone, it’s not because he doesn’t know what he is doing or is generally untrained, but because his training includes “…and under those circumstances, the right and honorable thing to do is to shoot the sonovabitch”. They aren’t always wrong about that.

      The “Black” axis of America’s culture of violence, isn’t real big on firearms training, either for safety or effectiveness. But it also isn’t big on buying guns through licensed dealers, so isn’t going to be responsive to even modest gun control measures.

      When Blue Tribe buys guns, it’s often as a fear response to criminal violence and is frequently done without training. If a new Blue Tribe gun owner uncharacteristically admits to this, in a social context, they’ll usually find they have a friend somewhere in gun culture who will arrange at least a minimum of informal training. But in any event, I don’t thing Blue Tribe Americans who bought a pistol and then tucked it away in a drawer or even purse without thinking about it are a very big problem.

      • Harold says:

        But in any event, I don’t thing Blue Tribe Americans who bought a pistol and then tucked it away in a drawer or even purse without thinking about it are a very big problem.

        As someone who grew up in the the Red Tribe Gun Culture 1.0, I’m astounded by the number of Blue Tribe Americans or thereabouts with little or no training, even informal, who nonetheless responsibly and effectively use guns to defend themselves. Not sure what that’s about, besides centuries of improving ergonomic design that plateaued 100-50 years ago (say the M1911 and straight line recoil assault and battle rifles), and Hollywood (!), but it is definitely a thing.

      • Tibor says:

        Ok, I guess I am still too influenced by the typical European (and Hollywood to some extent) impression of gun-trotting rednecks 🙂

        As of now, I would be most interested in what the ratio of legal and illegal firearms is in various countries, (non-intensive) googling produces no results (some estimates for the US but zero info about other countries, also the estimates are either by obvious pro-gun or anti-gun lobby).

      • “Traditional American Red Tribe “gun culture” involves learning how to handle firearms safely, and then how to shoot them, from your father/uncle/grandfather in childhood. In rural areas, often including being allowed to take a smallbore rifle for nominally-unsupervised recreational shooting from age 12 or so”

        When I was growing up, we spent our summers in New Hampshire, Chicago being very hot in the summer. I had a single shot .22 rifle, probably by the time I was twelve, which I used for unsupervised target practice. I don’t think a University of Chicago professor counts as red tribe culturally, even if he is a libertarian, and neither of my parents grew up in a rural area. My guess is that it partly reflected a change in national culture over time–this would have been in the mid fifties.

        • nil says:

          Don’t you think it was easier and more routine to cross tribal boundaries until fairly recently? My old man, a boomer, is definitely a lifelong blue, but very much enjoyed hunting, NASCAR and country music all while I was growing up.

          Has fairly dramatically drifted away from all three in the last ten years, though.

        • Adam says:

          I don’t think there is any single American ‘gun culture.’ I own guns. Several of them. I mostly don’t carry because I find it absurdly unlikely that I will ever be in a situation that I would need to and don’t generally carry much of anything (most of the time I leave the house I don’t even bring my phone). I don’t feel much cultural affinity with any of the people passionately arguing in favor of gun ownership in this thread. I don’t feel I should be allowed to own guns because of some imagined post-apocalypse in which my bravery and sense of duty is the only thing protecting delicate women and children from masses of violent immigrants. Nor do I need them to feed myself. I don’t hunt. I don’t feel I should be allowed to own them as some kind of check on a tyranny of jack-booted thugs that is surely just around the corner for any country that bans guns. I feel I should be allowed to own guns because I never have and never will use them to commit a crime and should be allowed to do anything I enjoy doing that isn’t harming anyone. It’s a simple damn principle that I shouldn’t have to justify my personally preferred activities by appeal to the sudden onset of a horrible dystopia if you stop me.

          Maybe this relates to the ‘cross tribal boundaries’ thing. Judging from this blog, it seems like the modal person, or heck, even the modal person who claims to care deeply about being rational, can’t conceive of a world worth living in that adopts the preferred policies of people they disagree with. Was it always like this? My wife can’t even conceive of living in San Francisco because she thinks the people would annoy her too much. I love Texas and live here on purpose, but damn that seems narrow-minded.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            I mean, I support the Bill of Rights? This makes me a “crazy conspiracy nut” now?

            “I feel I should be allowed to own guns because I never have and never will use them to commit a crime and should be allowed to do anything I enjoy doing that isn’t harming anyone. It’s a simple damn principle that I shouldn’t have to justify my personally preferred activities by appeal to the sudden onset of a horrible dystopia if you stop me.”

            But…whether it’s harming anyone is one of the things people are disagreeing about.

            This is like saying, “I feel I should be allowed freedom of speech because I never have and never will use it to commit a crime and should be allowed to do anything I enjoy doing that isn’t harming anyone. It’s a simple damn principle that I shouldn’t have to justify my personally preferred activities by appeal to the sudden onset of a horrible dystopia if you stop me.”

            It…kind of misses the point. Both of the Bill of Rights and also of any debate that may be going on over whether some speech “harms” people.

          • Adam says:

            “But…whether it’s harming anyone is one of the things people are disagreeing about.”

            No, it isn’t. Unless you count the main gun of an Abrams tank, I’ve never harmed anyone with a gun and certainly not an American. If anyone disagrees with me about that, they’re wrong.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            The argument is about negative externalities, and you know it. I mean…OK, you’re arguing like a politician, fine, I recognize what you’re saying, just like I told Vox Imp everyone should 😉 but Vox Imp is also right, this isn’t politician-vs.-politician right now, so you should try to word it more clearly. Try saying, “I don’t accept the idea of negative externalities” (or whatever) instead. 😉

            Me, I’m just going to continue to support the Bill of Rights. 🙂

          • Adam says:

            I accept the idea of negative externalities. They’re a basic tenet of economics and a factual reality. I deny that there are any negative externalities to my ownership and use of guns. Banning them completely is like imposing a carbon tax on all electrical utilities, including those that only use hydroelectric power generation.

          • @Cord Shirt:

            I think his point is that the externality argument is committing a fallacy of composition. The murder rate might correlate with the gun ownership rate. But he isn’t going to murder anyone, so his owning a gun doesn’t impost an external cost. Restrictions are charging him for external costs imposed by other people.

    • CatCube says:

      The NRA spent the first century of its existence as an organization for safety training and competitive shooting (it’s the governing body for several types of shooting sports). It picked up the political mission only after gun bans started seeming possible in the ’70s. It still does a whole lot of the first two, including running the National Pistol Matches and National Rifle Matches every year at Camp Perry, Ohio. Obviously, the political stuff shows up in the news more.

      As @John Schilling says, above, what most people consider “gun culture” includes inculcation in safety rules in exactly the way you mean.

      As an aside, the range I was a member of in the early ’90s stopped letting the local police shoot there, as they were doing damage to the range structures. People who spent money to be on the range turned out to be somewhat more reliable than the people who were forced to qualify once a year as a condition of employment.

      • Gbdub says:

        Isn’t the Camp Perry event operated by the CMP (civilian marksmanship program)? The CMP is an interesting organization in any case – a federally chartered organization with the express purpose of training civilians in the shooting sports, specifically in high powered rifle marksmanship. You could (and still can, though the supply is quite low now) buy military surplus rifles (mostly M1 Garands, bolt action Springfields, and small bite target rifles) directly through them. Fun stuff, and probably the organization most directly working toward a “well regulated militia”.

        • Echo says:

          They’re selling surplus 1911s now. God knows how some genius in the army wrangled that with this administration.

          Some supply clerk probably realized the army was sitting on piles of machined gold.

        • CatCube says:

          The CMP has a warehouse there, and sells during the National Matches, but the NRA runs the matches themselves. The NRA ranks all the shooters into their classes, through sanctioned matches throughout the year, provides the volunteers, referees, and range cadre.

          (You can be quite new and have a great time, as you’ll be shooting against other Marksmen–the least-skilled class. Sharpshooter, Master, and High Master are the other three categories.)

    • enoriverbend says:

      [Reply ended up horribly misplaced. Odd]

  81. Addict says:

    What about people who feel unsafe if they aren’t able to bring overwhelming firepower to bear on an intruder?

    I mean, as crazy neuroatypicalities go, this one is very human. If you take two strangers, put them in a room together with no explanation, and drop a handgun in, they will immediately start fighting physically over the gun simply because it gives them overwhelming control of the (suddenly high-stakes) situation, control they would feel safer going to them rather than the other person *even and especially if* they don’t intend to use it.

    I have this particular feeling, and I have used it in the past to make myself far more sympathetic towards ‘safe space’ ideas. A safe space is just a space where you and your friends are the only ones allowed to have a guns.

    • Mark Atwood says:

      If you take two strangers, put them in a room together with no explanation, and drop a handgun in, they will immediately start fighting physically over the gun

      One of the two of us is from a very strange context, and I’m pretty sure it’s not me.

      On the gripping hand, these two hypothetical strangers in this hypothetical room will not start fighting because the hypothetical gun is making them violent, they will start fighting because they have suddenly been teleported into running Outside Context Problem that never actually ever happens.

  82. Phlinn says:

    I haven’t had time to dig into the numbers yet, but this is the first time I’ve seen a convincing argument that there really is a correlation when you correct for all known confounds… although I suspect there are unidentified confounds that weaken it. I’ll let you know if I think of any after further review.

    One thing I’m really surprised you didn’t pick up on, and the main reason I’m commenting: Firearm Homicides + FS will obviously correlate with FS/S, since the same value is included. Increasing it increases both. It seemed like an obvious flaw, and it still boggles my mind that any papers which did so were actually published.

    Also, the paper I first saw it in claimed it’s justified because FS/S correlates with total ownership rates. Unfortunately, correlation is NOT transitive. A and C can have negative correlation, even if both positively correlate with B.

  83. Nero tol Scaeva says:

    What else does “southernness” and black culture have in common? That’s also absent in all other highly developed countries?

    Importance of religion.

    It would be funny if this data showed a correlation between levels of Creationism and violence.

    • Troy says:

      Race, poverty, nationality, etc. are common causes of religiosity and crime, and most likely explain any correlation between the two. Religiosity (especially when measured by things like church attendance) correlates negatively with anti-social behavior after confounders like race, country, poverty level, etc. are controlled for. And social scientific theories of religion generally hold that one of religion’s primary purposes is social control. (See, e.g., Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind.)

      • JayT says:

        And I would guess that IQ ties all of those things together.

        • Troy says:

          It could be, although my sense (I haven’t done a careful study) is that the negative correlation between IQ and religiosity may be unique to the Western world.

    • Ralph says:

      I doubt it’s that religion causes crime. More like poverty and lower intelligence cause religion, and poverty and lower intelligence also cause crime.

      EDIT

      That being said, you could probably collect some data, make a few charts, trot out a p-value, and write a pretty popular article in Vox or the NYT.

    • NN says:

      I’m pretty sure that if you measure religiosity at an individual level (especially if you measure it by church attendance), then you consistently find a negative correlation between religiosity and crime. So it seems that while certain groups may have both a lot of violent people and a lot of highly religious people, those are generally different sub-groups.

  84. Tibor says:

    I checked the Czech gun laws in more detail and I was surprised to see that they are even more liberal than I thought. This makes an interesting case than since the country has GDP PPP per capita of only 55% of the US (unlike the rich Switzerland) and the gun laws are more liberal than those of Switzerland. At the same time, despite the very liberal gun laws, there are only about 300 000 gun licenses in the country with about 4 300 000 households, so even if each of the license holders lived in a different household, that would make the gun ownership rate only about 7% (however sport shooting is the third most popular sport, after football/soccer and ice-hockey). At the same time, the homicide rate is 0.9, that is below Canada or Australia, on par with Germany which has much stricter gun laws.

    So what are the laws?:

    There are 6 categories of gun permits (which may be combiled)
    A – Firearm collection
    B – Sport shooting
    C – Hunting
    D – Exercise of a profession
    E – Self-defense
    (F – Pyrotechnical survey)

    To get a B or C license one needs to be at least 18, to get A,D or E you need to be 21 (F is really a special thing normally not obtained), pay a fee of about 20 USD per permit to get it for 10 years (D is for 5 years only), pass a theoretical and practical exam, pass a health check (this is not a psychiatric check), not having ever been sentenced to 12 or more years in prison, in case of other prison sentences there is a waiting period which depends on the crime and during which you cannot get a gun.

    You can get semi-automatic weapons without problems, you can even buy automatic weapons but for that you need a special license where each applicant is judged individually by the police.

    Keeping a gun in a safe at home is only mandatory when you own at least two of them (so I made a mistake in my previous posts here).

    Concealed carry of at most two loaded guns is allowed, carrying a gun while intoxicated is illegal. There are no no-guns areas except for courts. It is illegal though to practice shooting (while not hunting) in any place other than a shooting range.

    Interestingly enough, open carry is pretty much illegal, I guess that it is in order not to cause panic or something. This does not apply to rifles in forests when you are hunting.

    This is interesting for many reasons. It is really easy and cheap to get a gun and at the same time, the gun ownership is actually very low. Also, homicide rate is as low as it is in the neighbouring Germany which has both more guns and stricter gun laws. Germany is also about 50% richer (measured by GPD PPP again) and richer countries usually tend to have less crime than similar poorer countries. What some might use as an argument for more equal wealth is that the country has the 4th lowest GINI index in the world (which I also find strange since the welfare state and taxation are nowhere near the Scandinavian level).

    This only strengthens my conviction that there are much more important factors in the murder rate than liberal vs. restrictive gun laws and that it is more sensible to try to figure out what these factors are and how they can be emulated elsewhere.

    • HlynkaCG says:

      That’s fascinating. Thank you.

    • Tibor says:

      The automatic guns caught my interest (not because I would want one, I don’t even have a gun license, but because I was curious), so I found a discussion about that at an online (czech) gun forum where someone was asking how hard it was to get a license. The replies suggested that it is very unlikely that the permit will be granted and also that the police can come to you to have a check-up of your automatic firearm once every two years and you have to let them in…which makes it very impractical for almost everyone who does not actually have a good reason to have an automatic firearm (like running a museum or something).

    • Marc Whipple says:

      As Tibor points out, the fact that the law allows something does not mean it is actually allowed. Theoretically, prior to Heller et al, you could get a permit to register guns in the City of Chicago… but none had been issued since like 1976.

      • Tibor says:

        The automatic gun permit seems to be granted occasionally (otherwise they would not sell a few machine guns and assault rifles at gunshop.cz) but it is very uncommon. I think that when a gun law is a “may issue” rather than “shall issue” it basically means “probably will not issue”. I think that generally if a law says that something is always legal under clearly stated conditions then it really is legal. If it depends upon an evaluation by a policeman or a bureaucrat it can probably vary a lot.

        By the way I was surprised that you can (legally) get a new assault rifle for as low as 200$ (Sa Vz. 58, which is the assault rifle currently in use by the Czech military, although it is currently being replaced by a new rifle CZ 805 BREN which might perhaps influence the price) and a Browning 1919 machine gun for about 900$. Obviously, the biggest problem getting these is the automatic weapons permit. Still, I thought that guns were generally much more expensive, the cheapest low caliber pistols can be bought for something like 80 dollars. However most pistols cost at least something like 400$ so I would expect the quality of a 80$ pistol is going to be very low. Even 400$ is less then I expected though (I would have guessed that pistols generally cost something like 1000$).

  85. Jair says:

    Scott, thank you for this. I haven’t done enough research into this issue to verify the claims you make here. But I absolutely appreciate the calm, detached tone of your writing. I am certain that if I posted this to Facebook most of my friends would just skim the post trying to figure out whether it is on their side or not and would become very confused. (This is a high compliment.)

  86. This analysis makes a lot of sense for something I’ve already noticed with the FBI homicide data (see this chart https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_11_murder_circumstances_by_weapon_2013.xls).

    A significant portion of homicides occur during other criminal activity. Making it harder to buy guns probably wouldn’t move those numbers too much, as those people are already engaging in other criminal activity; buying illegal guns may not be a big obstacle for them. This is probably covered under the idea of “culture of violence” or perhaps just a “culture of crime”. To fix those homicides, we’d need to focus on crime prevention measures, perhaps fighting to defund organized crime through drug legalization.

    But many homicides occur due to arguments that escalated. These people were not engaged in illegal activity until they tried to harm someone in an argument. Taking away the ability of these people to escalate the situation is probably a good thing, and I bet this is where gun ownership is correlated with the homicide rate. Thus, reducing the gun ownership rate helps, but doesn’t quite stop all homicides.

    • xtmar says:

      As you point out, there are basically two types of murder: murder in the commission of another crime by repeat criminals, often linked to the drug trade; and domestic disputes that escalate. Gun control may help with the second type, which would be useful, but it seems doubtful it would make any difference with the first type.

    • A significant portion of homicides occur during other criminal activity. Making it harder to buy guns probably wouldn’t move those numbers too much, as those people are already engaging in other criminal activity; buying illegal guns may not be a big obstacle for them.

      But most crimes are very poorly planned, and an unplanned homicide might (or might not) happen when things go wrong, depending on the weapons at hand. The cost and availability of illegal guns varies widely from place to place. For example, in NYC, I think illegal guns are too costly for many street criminals.

      There is a romantic notion (nurtured by generations of movies and TV shows) that criminals, unconstrained by laws, are smart people with unlimited options and resources, with plenty of leisure to make careful decisions. This is about the opposite of the truth. In real life, most people who commit violent crimes are young, poor, stupid, impatient, and careless.

    • Anthony says:

      But many homicides occur due to arguments that escalated. These people were not engaged in illegal activity until they tried to harm someone in an argument.

      Would government statistics capture this well? Arguments over the engagement of illegal activity are probably more likely than most to escalate to gunfire. Even assuming the shooter is smart enough to stay mum, how many of the witnesses are going to admit that the argument was over illegal activity when doing so might implicate them in illegal activity, including possibly the homicide in question? Even a shooter claiming self-defense would be unlikely to admit that the victim attacked him over being cheated in a drug deal.

    • FacelessCraven says:

      @PostLibertarian – “But many homicides occur due to arguments that escalated.”

      Define “many”. Murderers are overwhelmingly deeply aberrant individuals, with a long history of antisocial behavior and criminal histories. The idea that “many” murderers are otherwise ordinary citizens who act impulsively in a moment of blind rage is a falsehood pushed by gun control groups in the 70s and 80s that simply refuses to die. Impulsive murder by otherwise well-adjusted citizens are extremely rare.

      “Taking away the ability of these people to escalate the situation is probably a good thing, and I bet this is where gun ownership is correlated with the homicide rate.”

      Given the above, I highly doubt it. Again, this is not an area where speculation is necessary. Criminology data has been available and has been widely studied for some decades.

      • Earthly Knight says:

        The idea that “many” murderers are otherwise ordinary citizens who act impulsively in a moment of blind rage is a falsehood pushed by gun control groups in the 70s and 80s that simply refuses to die. Impulsive murder by otherwise well-adjusted citizens are extremely rare.

        “Impulsive murder” is an oxymoron, so it should not be a surprise that few murders occur as you describe them. The table that postlibertarian linked to reports causes of homicide (that is, murder and non-negligent manslaughter), although, unhappily, 30% of incidents are classified as “unknown”. But more than 40% of homicides whose causes are known are the result of arguments, so his claim should not be dismissed so quickly. I don’t know that it matters that a lot of these people are deadbeats with long rap sheets– the presence of firearms may make it especially easy for deadbeats with long rap sheets to escalate an argument out of control.

        Here are statistics on priors for those convicted of homicide in large urban counties:

        –67% had a prior arrest record
        –58% had a prior felony arrest
        –46% had multiple prior felony arrests
        –53% had a prior conviction
        –38% had a prior felony conviction
        –23% had multiple prior felony convictions

        There are three major sources of uncertainty in comparing these two data sets: first, the large unknown category in the FBI records, second, the fact that many of the people with no arrest records prior to having been convicted may simply have never been caught, and third, our ignorance about whether career criminals are represented at the same level for different causes of homicide. On the last point, though, it is likely that career criminals will be better represented among felony homicides and gang homicides than argument-type-homicides, so we can expect first-timers to be overrepresented in the last category.

        All in all, it looks like we should expect ~50% of argument-homicides to be committed by individuals with no prior felony arrests. Consequently, perhaps 20% of homicides overall are committed by relatively law-abiding citizens escalating an argument.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          @EarthlyKnight – ““Impulsive murder” is an oxymoron, so it should not be a surprise that few murders occur as you describe them.”

          …Huh. Apparently premeditation is part of the definition for murder, but not for homicide? Is that accurate? …You learn something new every day, I suppose.

          “I don’t know that it matters that a lot of these people are deadbeats with long rap sheets– the presence of firearms may make it especially easy for deadbeats with long rap sheets to escalate an argument out of control.”

          That is somewhat possible; pistol GSWs are somewhat more lethal than knife wounds, statistically speaking. If you can turn gun fights into knife fights, you will get some reduction in the murder rate. However, his statement that:

          “But many homicides occur due to arguments that escalated. These people were not engaged in illegal activity until they tried to harm someone in an argument.”

          …is, I believe, considerably misleading. “Not engaged in illegal activity” may be technically true, in the five minutes immediately preceding the fight, say, but we are still talking about a segment of the population that deploys extreme violence in a casual manner. Removing guns would not keep them from *trying* to kill someone over an argument, it would simply reduce their success rates on the margin. Claiming that drastically reducing firearms ownership would greatly reduce the murder rate, as he appears to be claiming, is unsupportable by the evidence.

        • There’s uncertainty about whether the arrests and convictions are of people who are actually guilty, too.

      • John Schilling says:

        But more than 40% of homicides whose causes are known are the result of arguments, so his claim should not be dismissed so quickly.

        I, for one, don’t dismiss his claim quickly. I dismiss his claim after carefully and repeatedly looking into who it is that actually commits these homicides, most recently here. Of the domestic violence offenders prosecuted by the federal government – and they seem to get jurisdiction over domestic violence shootings even when the crime is otherwise an intra-state matter, four out of five have prior adult felony convictions. The last time I looked into this, state-level numbers were similar. And “adult felony convictions” grossly understates violent criminal behavior generally.

        As he says, ordinary citizens who act impulsively in a moment of rage, don’t shoot people. Violent criminals who act impulsively in a moment of rage, are the ones who shoot people. And mostly it’s known violent criminals. So there’s room for us as a society to do better at either killing, locking away, or rehabilitating known violent criminals (opinions differ as to which), but while we’re waiting there’s also room for people who don’t want to get shot by their spouse to not marry known violent criminals.

        Seriously, don’t marry known violent criminals unless you have really good reason to believe that they have already reformed, because the bit where your love is what reforms them has a really poor track record.

    • John Schilling says:

      But many homicides occur due to arguments that escalated. These people were not engaged in illegal activity until they tried to harm someone in an argument.

      The vast majority of domestic-violence homicides are committed by people with an extensive history of prior criminal violence. Generally peaceful and law-abiding citizens suddenly losing their temper and killing someone over an argument, may be common in Lifetime TV movies but in the real world it’s in the same realm as lightning bolts as a cause of death.

      • Earthly Knight says:

        Per the above, the (annual) chance of being non-negligently manslaughtered or murdered by a citizen with no prior felony arrests (0.0018%) or by the same in an argument (0.0009%) is roughly an order of magnitude higher than the chance of being struck by lightning (0.00016%), and a full two orders of magnitudes higher than the chance of being killed by lightning (0.000016%). For comparison, it is about half the chance of being killed by a drunk driver (0.0032%), including if the drunk driver is you, and a quarter the chance of being killed by flu (0.0072%).

        • “No prior felony arrests” is why these odds look higher than they ought to. It is quite possible to be a criminal deviant, rather than one of Kellerman & Reay’s “loved ones” without (yet) having a felony arrest. In fact, given that the police in many urban areas no, longer even bother to investigate what they consider “minor” property crimes, this is pretty normal.

          • I believe that where I live is not an especially high crime area, but when (during a brief experiment in car ownership) my car was stolen, the police said “keep an eye out for it”, and suggested an area to look.

            As it happened, I did find my car on the street, though not where they said.

            I think of a car as a fairly valuable item, even if it’s a used Camry. Would other people care to talk about what the police actually bother with? I’m interested in first and trusted second person accounts. If there’s any large scale information available, I’m interested in that, too.

            When I was subject to an attempted mugging (talked my way out), I didn’t report it to the police because I found that within 20 minutes I’d forgotten what the young man’s face looked like.

          • Creutzer says:

            attempted mugging (talked my way out)

            How did you do that? (Asking to improve my world model, which just returns blank if I ask it to generate a sequence of events of this type.)

          • Cord Shirt says:

            I also am curious about this.

            And, what did the police expect you to do once you found your car? Take it back and not worry about who had stolen it or what they’d done with it while they had it?

          • @Nancy:

            When we were living in Chicago, someone came into our house when we were not there (a door may have been unlocked) and stole stuff. The police officer we spoke with made it reasonably clear that she assumed the only reason people reported such crimes was to have documentation for an insurance claim.

            We actually got one item back–my wife’s viola de gamba. But that wasn’t the result of police investigation of the original theft. The thief sold or pawned it, complete with case, which included the name and address of the maker. The recipient, I think a pawn shop, checked with him, and he had a record of who it was made for. I assume if any followup had identified the thief we would have heard about it–but the recovery was, as I recall, years after the theft, so the instrument might have passed through multiple hands.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @DavidFriedman:

            And contrarily, when we lived in Chicago and the neighborhood we lived in had a spate of rapes with the MO being the rapist watching for women to go into apartments alone, kicking the back door in and violently assaulting them, the (female) police officer my wife asked for advice had only this:

            “Get a gun.”

            Note that this was many years pre-Heller. It would not have been legal for my wife to do this, and the cop knew it.

          • ” It would not have been legal for my wife to do this, and the cop knew it.”

            After I was a witness to a shooting in Philadelphia, I ended up having some casual conversations with cops. The advice one of them gave me was that, if I ever shot an intruder, I should make sure of two things:

            1. That he was dead.

            2. That his body ended up inside the house.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @DavidFriedman:

            He forgot, “Make sure none of the holes in the body line up with the holes in the floor.”

  87. William Newman says:

    Dozens of data points is not a lot of grist for the statistical mill when trying to nail down the correct underlying relationship if it is as complex as a weak correlation (homicide and guns) confounded by several stronger correlations that you see (rural, Scots-Irish, black) and likely by several other correlations that you don’t see and indeed sometimes can’t see (such as, e.g., hard-to-quantify dietary differences and very-hard-to-quantify differences in detailed laws and enforcement). Even doing your best to be unbiased, I think you are extremely likely to arrive at overfitted nonsense rather than a good result.

    For comparison, we have dozens of national datapoints that advocates point to as evidence of outperformance of market economies relative to central economic control, including several pairs that are tolerably well-designed natural experiments (E/W Germany, N/S Korea, mainland/Taiwan China). That amount seems to be on the borderline of sufficient convincing evidence for people who weren’t already predisposed to the conclusion. If instead the model that that evidence was used to motivate was that only after correcting for two significantly more important confounding factors (whatever — e.g., tropical vs. temperate climate, and monotheistic tradition) could any clear diktat-vs.-market economic efficiency correlation be seen, would anyone find it convincing? *Should* anyone find it convincing? Dozens of noisy datapoints is just not a lot to fit a three-parameter correlation and go on to draw meaningful conclusions about the third strongest correlation.

    The old nonquantitative nonpolitical intuition about overfitting in the physical sciences (“with 5 [parameters] I can make him wiggle his trunk”) is another way of expressing this caution. Your data here are not an elephant visibly wiggling his trunk, they are a noisy blob of dozens of points, and 3 parameters is more than enough to make even an unsound chosen-after-the- model give a tempting match on dozens of such points.

    (I also think the new-since-Popper quantitative ideas about overfitting, like Minimum Description Length or like the minimization various kinds of learning “risk” that Vapnik writes about, are very powerful and important and might even come to be widely recognized as such by ordinary non-machine-learning stats practitioners within a few decades, but alas they aren’t easy to push all the way down to the OP’s mere dozens of data points vs. multi-parameter models chosen — after the data are collected — from an enormous poorly specified model space. Plus the additional complication of choosing which data to consider — e.g., states, not countries, not variation in time) — after the data are collected from a sizable poorly specified space of datasets.)

  88. Mike H says:

    Have you considered controlling for temperature? Heat waves increase the murder rate. http://public.psych.iastate.edu/caa/abstracts/2000-2004/01A.pdf Murder rate is lower in Canada and higher in the South. This seems like a plausible thing to control for.

    • Nero tol Scaeva says:

      I always knew ice cream consumption was unhealthy. The correlation between ice cream and crime is undeniable.

      We need tighter restrictions and regulations on ice cream trucks.

  89. Anaxagoras says:

    It seems to me like there’s a couple big technological changes coming to guns that make the debate a bit more interesting. Smart guns are probably on their way in, which I expect would help with the accidental deaths. The more interesting (and I think harder for anyone to prevent) change is the possibility of 3D printed guns. I could see there being attempts to prevent printers from being able to print those, but I can’t see that being effective in the long run. Do others agree with that evaluation? What, if any, sorts of gun control could be effective in that case? If 3D printers capable of printing guns became widespread, what options would there be for harm reduction?

    • TomA says:

      Your point is even more fundamental than just the emerging firearm manufacturing alternatives. Look at the failure of governmental anti-drug campaigns. All of these laws, regulations, arrests, and incarcerations have accomplished is to drive the drug trade into the shadows, and only reduce it marginally. Is there any doubt that this would occur with firearms? And once it moves into the shadows, what prevents suppliers from offering anything that the black market demands, e.g. fully automatic AKs for example.

      Just as Obama has inadvertently instigated record guns sales in the US, this latest grandstanding will most likely accomplish exactly the opposite end-result. One wonders if this is stupidity or a covert agenda.

    • John Schilling says:

      3-D printing is a red herring in this case, I think. Gun barrels are an almost intractably hard problem for 3-D printers, and if we eventually get additive manufacturing of useful gun barrels it won’t be with any consumer-grade device. Almost certainly something rare and expensive enough that when printed guns start showing up on the street, the police will just call the manufacturers and check on where every such printer was sold and get a warrant for the one(1) that isn’t clearly doing legitimate work. And the manufacturer, knowing what his model is good for, won’t sell it to the guy who wants to pay cash and have you load it in his unmarked truck out back.

      You can make really crappy gun barrels with consumer-grade 3-D printers, good for a few inaccurate shots of a low-power handgun cartridge, and some of the 3-D printed guns you’ve seen in the news fit this pattern. But you’ve always had the ability to make really crappy gun barrels, and guns, out of plumbing pipe and other parts you can buy at Home Depot, and people have been making such “zip guns” for generations.

      You can also make all the other parts of a gun using a 3-D printer and either buy a professionally-made barrel by mail order or make one yourself using high-end hobbyist or low-end professional grade machine tools, the kind you might find in a well-equipped garage or high school shop class. Some other “3-D printed” guns in the news fit this pattern. But the laws that allow gun barrels to be bought without all of the regulations associated with guns themselves, will change if this becomes a big thing. And people with high-end hobbyist grade machine tools, can make not just gun barrels but complete guns in their basement workshops (or on the side in their workplaces).

      This, also, has been a thing for generations, though mostly on the fringes as the black market can provide plenty of professionally-made weapons almost everywhere. In any event, the only thing 3-D printing changes is to transform amateur and/or illicit firearms manufacture from grimy old blue-collar metalworking to shiny new high-tech geekery.

      In the event of truly comprehensive gun control, we’re also going to need the Walter White of smokeless-powder manufacture; that may be the real sticking point. But it is a tractable one.

      • Urstoff says:

        what happens when 3-D printers can print unlicensed 3-D printers?

      • roystgnr says:

        Even without 3-D printing, I get the impression that making a gun barrel with a hobbyist lathe is much more difficult than making a gun lower with a hobbyist mill, and the barrel is much less safe if defective. I don’t understand why the lower is the part which is subject to extensive legal controls and the barrel isn’t.

        • Leit says:

          Mostly? Because the folks coming up with the regulations don’t have any actual knowledge about firearms.

          Whether this is because they’ve decided that the only relevant fact about firearms is that they can kill and there’s nothing that will overcome the resulting disgust, or whether their refusal to learn is some sort of virtue signalling, or whether they’re just trying to come up with a quick, easily applicable solution to what looks like a simple problem from the outside, or whether they’re lazy, most regulations are written from ignorance.

          That said, firearms barrels were long made with equipment much less advanced than a present-day hobbyist mill, and handmade firearms can be made literally in a cave with a box of scraps, using simple tools, and still manage decent (if highly variable) quality.

          I wouldn’t put a Khyber Pass barrel in a modern AR-15, but I also wouldn’t put it past hobbyists to come up with a decent process for home-machining something much better if commercial supplies suddenly became unavailable.

          • Leit says:

            The sheer lack of art in utilitarian projects like that one just make me cringe. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t kill folks dead. Reading through the pdf, though, they sort of hand-wave the barrel construction and their example is a nonfiring replica with a solid bar for a barrel.

            That’s with simple home tools, and more than likely just to prove a point. I’d expect a skilled enthusiast to be able to do much better.

          • eccdogg says:

            My friends dad was a gun enthusiast and owned a machine shop.

            He made a WW2 era sub-machine gun (fully auto) from scratch.

            He also built a gatling gun that shot 9mm from scratch.

        • John Schilling says:

          I don’t understand why the lower is the part which is subject to extensive legal controls and the barrel isn’t.

          Depends on what you are trying to accomplish. If you want to absolutely stamp out the trade in illicit firearms, and you’ve so suppressed every other aspect of that trade that illicit manufacture is a big part of the problem, you want to license gun barrels. If you accept that there’s always going to be a substantial black market in firearms but you still want to regulate the legal trade with a minimum of fuss, it’s less cumbersome to license, register, or otherwise regulate the receiver – because receivers basically don’t wear out, but barrels do and a heavy user can go through many barrels in the service life of a weapon. And some firearms are designed to take multiple interchangeable barrels with different lengths or calibers.

          And then there’s the coordination problem when not everyone uses the same rules. I recall many years ago seeing two back-to-back half-page ads in IIRC “Shotgun News” where someone had bought a bunch of old German assault rifles and split them into the parts that could legally be sold as Not Guns in Germany and the parts that could legally be sold as Not Guns in the United States, and was offering said parts kits mail order, no questions asked, buyer responsible for adhering to all local laws, with some transparent set of excuses like “everything you need to restore your vintage StG-44 to shooting condition” on the one side and “everything you need to make a non-firing museum-quality replica StG-44” on the other. They lasted two months before someone either shut them down or bought out their whole inventory, I don’t know which.

          So if you’re really serious, you need to license both receivers and barrels. And 3-D printers and CNC mills, and X-ray every package that crosses your borders, and really, give it up already.

          • TheNybbler says:

            Anyone with skill and a well-equipped metal shop can make a decent gun from scratch. I believe the hardest part is not the gun but the ammunition. Bullets are simple, smokeless or black powder is easy enough (if dangerous), but primers and brass are quite difficult.

          • Andrew G. says:

            I’ve seen the claim that one of the most significant effects of the UK handgun ban has been the removal of the civilian handgun ammunition market—that in the absence of a legal market to divert or steal from, criminals’ access to ammunition has become a limiting factor.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Bullets and brass are pretty easy, certainly easier than making the gun itself. Powder is a bit trickier a but still well within the capabilities of most hobbyists.

            Primers are the tricky part but we have people who cook meth in their garages so I’m sure somebody will step in to fill the market.

          • Echo says:

            There’s a lot of people who already make cast lead “boolits” for fun, too.

      • Maware says:

        Except the danger is in it being able to be distributed and printed by non-technicians. Viruses and DDOS attacks became dangerous when they were able to be used by script kiddies. A bad gun that can be printed without the aid of a machine shop, lathe, or technical know-how is a problem. Even a zip gun needs some technical know-how: the danger is that one day someone just buys a commercial printer, downloads a file, and reads a FAQ to make them.

        • TheNybbler says:

          If there were as many “script gunnies” as there are script kiddies, it might be a problem. As it is, at least in the US, anyone with criminal connections, can already get a gun adequate for their purposes. As can most people without those connections, excluding those of us in the benighted state of NJ and other such hellholes.

        • John Schilling says:

          Why do you assume that 3-D printers capable of making useful gun barrels will ever be more common than lathes capable of making useful gun barrels are now?

          Gun barrels, even of mediocre quality, are a fairly extreme corner of engineering/metalworking trade space, and one that is very nearly on the opposite corner of that trade space from where 3-D printers have an edge over other fabrication techniques. Ubiquitous consumer-grade household 3-D printers are highly unlikely to be useful for producing firearms, not because The Man(tm) will insist on DRM and software interlocks, but because almost no other consumer good requires anything like that manufacturing capability.

          There will be plenty of highly capable 3-D printers that are capable of producing firearms in the hands of private citizens, but these will be roughly the same citizens who now have highly capable lathes, mills, etc, capable of doing the same.

  90. Alex Trouble says:

    Were organized crime and the war on drugs considered as a confounder? Drug gangs commit very disproportionate amounts of homicide, in attempting to keep their territory and preserve their product, since the police obviously won’t enforce their property rights. And I’m not confident the race or income is a suitable proxy–compare Chicago to New York, for instance. What I don’t know is to what extent drug gangs exist and are under lots of pressure from the government in the other countries mentioned, like Canada, Germany, or France.

    My understanding is that the U.S. still haven’t entirely recovered from the crack/crime wave of the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. Crack is incredibly profitable, which gave the gangs at the time a reason to actually exist. Prior they were just groups of teens and young men, none older than their early 20s, who hung out, maybe got in some trouble, maybe helped each other, and then left when they became adults. After crack, actual adults stayed in to run the gang, homicide was incentivized because of the potential for making lots of money (and other crimes as well, with the resulting destruction of communities), and the African-American population still hasn’t recovered. I’m reasonably sure crack never really spread to other countries, nor something similar that would turn groups of bored teenagers into crowds of murderous psychopaths.

    • John Schilling says:

      The War on Drugs is omnipresent in the United States. Decriminalization and “medical marijuana” sure, but nobody is easing off on the sale and distribution of the harder drugs and that’s what drives the vast criminal organizations, etc.

      So for the purposes of this sort of interstate comparative study, it is I think impractical to isolate it as a cofounder. And if you find serious correlations between the various United States, against the constant background of the WoD, those are likely to be real.

      • Alex Trouble says:

        The War on Drugs might be relatively omnipresent, but the types of drugs being sold, and who is selling them, definitely varies widely.

  91. Urstoff says:

    How does this paper affect your conclusions: More Gun, More Crime

  92. SUT says:

    One thing that gets overlooked in the debate about gun policy of the present is the potential for US Gov’t to be completely unable to pay civil servants in 20-30 years time. I know most police are funded at state and town level, but their budgets, and especially the pensions are going to be doing terribly in federal default scenario.

    Gens d’armes seem to go to the highest bidder, and if you look at anywhere that the state isn’t the highest bidder, the idea of self-defense won’t be looked upon as so childish anymore. Anyways the point is: when thinking about revoking a 200 year old constitutional right, the question is not whether that works in short and medium run, but does it make society more or less fragile* in the long term. (* in Taleb’s sense)

    • Leit says:

      Civil Asset Forfeiture. Currently included in some police forces’ budgets, likely to be where they’ll look to make up the difference.

      Every time I read anything about it, I’m amazed that there haven’t been literal burnings at the stake.

    • Exactly. Those who write off gun-culture notions of the duty of a man – to be physically, mentally, and morally prepared to defend his loved ones and the civil order – are what Taleb calls “fragilistas”. They undervalue the decentralized toughness that makes some complex adaptive systems better able to self-heal than others.

      • Svejk says:

        Interesting point. I think this readiness mindset can be observed in a number of different circumstances. I have the impression that Americans are much more likely to take action in crisis situations, or assume leadership in unorganized groups. It does not always occur to them to wait for the authorities.

        • Marc Whipple says:

          I have heard, anecdotally but from more than one knowledgeable source, that in America some disaster response organizations leave a certain number of low-level positions open in their team rosters for “victims” of the disaster who need to help so badly that they literally have to be put to work or they will just run around and get in the way. Knowing the sort of Americans I grew up with, I have no trouble believing this.

          Whether this is true for people from other cultures, I have no idea. But yes, Americans are not patient, and they are often not content to sit back and wait for the authorities.

        • Echo says:

          Whereas the people I’m descended from just stand there and take selfies with the bodies…

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lee_Rigby

    • “One thing that gets overlooked in the debate about gun policy of the present is the potential for US Gov’t to be completely unable to pay civil servants in 20-30 years time.”

      And how potential is that potential?

      • anonymous says:

        It isn’t. Anyone that thinks it is doesn’t understand how fiat currency regimes work.

        Rather unsurprising in a thread full of gun nuts.

        • Echo says:

          Oh look, petty insults. Rather unsurprising from people who don’t have any other arguments.

          Remind us dumb inbred hicks how you can issue currency to pay benefits that are increasingly indexed to inflation?

          Because to those of us with an IQ lower than the capacity of our guns’ magazines, the practical effects seem an awful lot like having a debt denominated in a foreign currency or other asset (much like Germany’s WWI war reparations).

          Be sure to use very simple words. We’re quite retarded, you see. (And racist)

          • Adam says:

            Without trying to insult anyone, there’s a pretty big world of intermediate possibilities between maintaining the exact current regime of retiring at 20 years to a pension indexed to the last promotion you got solely because your boss was trying to get you a higher pension and the complete breakdown of all civil order in which armed dutiful citizens taking to the streets is our only recourse against roving gangs of mad bandits.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          Sure, the government can always pay its obligations, so long as the creditors or employees are happy to receive Monopoly money.

          The charitable interpretation of “can’t pay” in a fiat system is “can’t pay in money that is worth anything”.

          Just ask some Russians what it was like in the 90s when the government “was able to pay” all its civil servants. They got paid, alright. Paid millions!

          On the other hand, I don’t see any kind of civil war or collapse of the U.S. government coming. The Russian Federation didn’t collapse (the Soviet Union did, but the desires for separation were largely mutual—at least at the time), and the war in Chechnya was far more a war of colonial independence than an American-style civil war.

          If anyone thinks the situation in the U.S. is about to be anything close to as bad as in Russia in the 90s, well, you need to recalibrate.

        • “It isn’t. Anyone that thinks it is doesn’t understand how fiat currency regimes work.”

          I think I understand how fiat currency regimes work. There are two ways one can imagine such a regime solving the problem proposed, and neither is guaranteed to work.

          The first is by funding the government with the printing press. The problem with that is that the ratio of the money supply to government expenditure is too small to let you do much of that without producing a very high inflation rate, which may or may not be a politically acceptable option. Zimbabwe is the only modern polity I can think of that tried it. Sitting on my desk is a hundred trillion dollar note from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe. Probably dating from after a couple of multiple order of magnitude redefinitions of the currency.

          The second is by reneging on government obligations, in this case pensions, by inflating them away. That doesn’t work if the obligations are already indexed. More generally, if there are not strong barriers to reneging on pension obligations the government can do it without inflation. If there are, it many not be able to get away with doing it with inflation.

          Did you have a different reason why, under a fiat system, a government could never find itself unable to fund important functions?

          • So this situation implies that a government under a fiat system can no longer borrow and tax? Because those seem like the primary ways in which most fiat governments fund themselves today.

            I didn’t see that we assumed that situation when SUT wrote

            “the potential for US Gov’t to be completely unable to pay civil servants in 20-30 years time. ”

            Of course, if we are assuming that the US government in 30 years will have no ability to borrow or tax at a higher rate, then yes, you’re quite right: inflating your way out has very bad outcomes. But I’m not very concerned about this because right now, the government has a very solid tax base and credit rating and I don’t see that totally eroding in only 30 years.

          • Anonymous says:

            @post
            Everything has to be going to shit Real Soon Now. How else am I going to justify buying four more guns and thirty cases of ammo?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Postlibertarian:

            I don’t interpret David Friedman as agreeing with the claim that the US government will be broke in 20-30 years. And I don’t agree with it.

            He was disputing the idea that merely understanding the nature of a fiat currency system somehow “proves” that this couldn’t happen. Pointing out that if they resort to hyperinflation, that still means they’re effectively unable to pay their obligations.

            Also, borrowing is not a net source of income for governments. If you borrow money, you have to pay it back, with interest. In dollar terms, they lose money on it.

            It’s inflation that can be a net source of income in this respect, if you borrow good money and pay it back in funny money. But it sort of only works once because people stop lending to you if you do this. Or they do so at rates high enough to cover the inflation.

  93. melanerpes says:

    Aren’t gun accidents responsible for a significant component of gun deaths?

    My bet is that gun deaths by accident are even more highly correlated with gun ownership than gun suicides.

    • Alex Trouble says:

      No, accidental gun deaths number around 500 per year in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States

    • Harold says:

      Using the 2013 CDC figures as reported by Wikipedia, the 505 accidental gun deaths out of 32383 total amount to 1.6%.

      I add that they were around 800 per year when I first started tracking these statistics in the early ’80s, and since then both the population and the number of guns held by it very roughly increased by half, while as you see the absolute number of accidents went way down.

  94. Rachel says:

    It is deeply unfair to compare current US murder rates with current European murder rates. Over the past century, there have been occasional time periods with very very high European murder rates. But those spikes are called World War 1, World War 2 and tossed from the sample.

  95. Scott, you need to make it to Penguicon’s Geeks with Guns event this year so I can teach you how to shoot.

    Mostly good analysis as far as it goes, but you are ignoring huge positive externalities from civilian weapons ownership in pricing the cost/benefits. From just about any gun owner’s perspective your estimate is absurdly low.

    I keep a pistol near my desk and regularly carry it outside my home. The benefit to me of knowing that if I am attacked I have an answer is large, even though I live in Switzerland rather than Swaziland (that is, outside one of the tiny patches of high violence in the U.S.) and my odds of encountering such violence are low.

    The gun does not only give me a response if I am attacked, it reduces the odds that I will be attacked at all. Predators have a fine-tuned sense for weakness in potential victims. Armed, I am not weak; they can read that, and shy away from it.

    Not to be underestimated, either, is the psychological value of knowing that I am doing the duty of a man. When criminal violence occurs near me, or in the event of a breakdown of civil order, I am part of the solution. I am civilization asserting itself, with lethal force or threat of same if required. We cannot leave that duty to police and soldiers, because having a sufficiently pervasive police and military presence to do the job effectively would have other kinds of very bad consequences.

    I sometimes wonder how you disarmed sheep out there can stand yourselves. OK, I get it about women; they’re designed by the EAA to fight only when the men have failed. But there are days when I want to clout the nearest SWPL pajama-boy upside the head and ask “Who the fuck are you? Do you know what you’ll die for? Do you know what you’ll kill for? What will you do if shit gets real? Who do you defend? Where are your goddamn balls?

    Pretty much all gun-culture folks feel this way to some extent – that being around the self-disarmed is like being surrounded by overgrown children with no courage or sense of responsibility. We just don’t talk about it much.

    EDIT: I should have added that women in the gun culture share this feeling too. So it’s not the case that male gun owners are living on a macho island of self-assumed superiority; our women know it could be their job to shoot back, too.

    • Urstoff says:

      So gun-culture is full of hyper-macho idiocy, then? That doesn’t match my interactions with gun hobbyists, but maybe you inhabit a different part of the “gun culture”.

      • Gbdub says:

        He doesn’t express it all that palatably, but there is a definite sense of “I am doing an important civic duty by making myself capable of defending civilization if shit hits the fan” within American gun culture. And less so now, but when hunting out of semi-necessity was ubiquitous, a sense of “I am responsible for being able to provide”. And that comes with an element of machismo. But then there are also a lot of women among the culture who believe that defense of themselves and others is also part of their duty.

        But really we collect and shoot guns mostly because it’s fun to collect and shoot guns (and it is a surprisingly “geeky” hobby, and growing more so, especially among the black rifle types). The other stuff is the “noble” justification but not really the driving force behind most of the hobbyists’ activities.

        • Cord Shirt says:

          Well, yeah. I agree with the “civic duty” part (no opinion on the “fun” part). I’d do that duty if I were able-bodied. But I’m a universalist woman. Gendering it the way he does just shoves people like me hard away from that culture. I already agree about the duty in a philosophical sense, but this wording is not exactly calculated to make me like the individual member who’s wording it that way. Really, is it *that* difficult to try to inspire *every* reader to do their duty? To defend civilization? To know exactly what they would and wouldn’t fight for? Is it *that* difficult to call it, *to conceive of it*, as the duty of a human being instead of the duty of a man? Is it *that* important to bring testicles into it? *Really*? *Really really*? (Again, if it is, go to town. But…)

          The way some guys fetishize their genitalia really is, I’m sorry, creepy. (Because it suggests that, nope, “duty of a man” isn’t just poetic language, isn’t “really inclusive that’s just how our language works,” but rather, *really is* the way they think of it. It suggests they really do think only people with testicles have this duty, and by extension, that only people with testicles are fully human. And if he thinks women don’t have this kind of humanity…what *other* kind of humanity does he think we don’t have? No, it’s not definite. That’s why it’s “creepy” instead of “outright frightening.” Because of the uncertainty. But it is…creepy.)

          • Dr Dealgood says:

            If you speak about your experiences as a woman would you expect people to think that you’re referring to your ovaries? I would assume not but then again I’m not you.

            When men talk about what it means to be a man, we’re generally not talking about our gonads so much as an aspiration to masculine virtue. I’m not exactly a bulwark of civilization myself but nonetheless say things like “my father taught me what it means to be a man” and it’s pretty clear what is meant by that.

            I know that you know this, but the whole thing about being obsessed with sexual organs is at best dishonest and at worst projection. Either way please knock it out.

          • John Schilling says:

            When men talk about what it means to be a man, we’re generally not talking about our gonads so much as an aspiration to masculine virtue.

            It’s still tone-deaf to talk about it at length in such explicitly gendered terms, in a context as contentious as this, without at least some explicit disclaimers. Doubly so to continue when someone calls you on it.

            Stop helping. You and Eric both.

          • Gbdub says:

            Eh, Eric did say “where are your goddam balls” (although that’s clearly an idiom and not an actual obsession with genitals).

            What it is is a belief in strong gender roles, and promoting this as a means of promoting gun ownership is at a minimum tone deaf and at worst creepy for the SSC audience, as Cord Shirt ably demonstrates.

            Anyway, to me one of the great things about guns from a civic duty / defense perspective is that their use can be gender neutral. A woman armed with a firearm can ably defend herself and her loved ones just as well as a similarly armed man, even though unarmed, women will on average be at a disadvantage to the physical strength of an average man. As the old saying goes, “God made [people], but Sam Colt made them equal”. Someone promoting gun culture outside its current bounds ought to take advantage of that.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            He went on to say “Where are your balls?”

            You guys conflate these things; sorry, but you do. And it makes a difference.

            I’m trying to charitable by assuming it really is just the unconscious result of, you know, growing up male; you have testicles, you have courage, you kinda conflate them, you then speak that way without really thinking of how that wording strikes people who value courage in themselves but who don’t in fact have testicles.

            If my assumption is correct, though, then it implies that once you *realize* you’re unintentionally giving that impression, then it actually *isn’t* difficult to just switch to “Where is your courage?” or “Where are your guts?” rather than “Where are your balls?”

            If someone keeps insisting on “Where are your *balls*?” it gives the impression that equating courage with testicles *is* important to him. (Or else he’s being really defensive. In which case I do sympathize, but I hope he’d set that aside in favor of communication.)

            Similarly, “masculine virtue”–of *course* that comes off as exclusionary! If what I (universalist that I am) think of as “human virtue,” something *I* aspire to, is suddenly cited by you as the duty of a *man*, as *masculine* virtue…

            Really the question is whether you *care* if I feel shoved hard away from what I’d previously thought were virtues we *both* aspired to. I do; you don’t have to talk that way; it’s up to you what you do with that info. I’m not particularly asking you to see me or those like me as valuable allies; whether you do is, again, up to you.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            (Heh, is this where I’m supposed to say “ninja’d”?)

          • anonymous says:

            @Dr Dealgood

            If you speak about your experiences as a woman would you expect people to think that you’re referring to your ovaries? I would assume not but then again I’m not you.

            I know that you know this, but the whole thing about being obsessed with sexual organs is at best dishonest and at worst projection. Either way please knock it out.

            The root comment had the line “Where are your goddamn balls?”.

            Why don’t you “knock out” the white knighting or at least take the time to make sure you aren’t total off base.

            As for ESR the edit was too little to late, we aren’t buying it.

          • Dr Dealgood says:

            Can you expand on what in particular is creepy about it? Not asking for a defense or justification, just genuinely curious. I grew up in a very liberal bubble but on the other coast so it’s not really pushing any buttons that I’m familiar with.

            @Cord Shirt,
            Am I right in assuming that, based on this and your earlier comment, that you see courage brotherhood etc as requisites to being “fully human” and that having less of those traits makes one less deserving of consideration?

            Personally, I don’t think that way and most of the men I know who do are pretty awful people. There are a lot of virtues out there and IMO it’s a mistake to latch onto traditionally manly ones as the only real virtues or that everyone should cultivate them to the same extent. Just because something is feminine or neuter doesn’t make it unworthy as an aspiration.

            @anonymous,
            The accusation that I’m the one White Knighting here is kind of funny given how quickly you guys piled on here.

          • Dan says:

            If you’re getting your panties in a bunch just because he mentions “balls” then you might just not be the kind of person our civilization should place any reliance on.

            1st World Problem obsessions do not a warrior make.

            As much as I celebrate women getting involved, arming themselves, training etc…they simply are not designed to be the protectors of our way of life. Supplemental, yes.

            We need men. Hairy, violent, lead-flinging men.

            Metrosexual pajama-boy pansies need not apply either.

          • anonymous says:

            We don’t actually need any of that. You throwbacks need to be needed, and since you aren’t either throw temper tantrums or build elaborate fantasies to deny reality. The latter is usually preferable to the former, but occasionally in combination with cynical politicians those fantasies spill into the real world and good people get killed because you want to go play war.

          • Dan says:

            Nice self-parody.

            Enjoy your holiday in Cologne, babe.

          • HlynkaCG says:

            @anonymous

            Pacifism is a luxury of the protected…

            …People sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
            -George Orwell

          • nil says:

            “People sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

            Those protective rough men are protecting their purported wards from their exact equivalents on the other side of the hills.

            If you think Hobbes is a law of physics, it makes sense to find this role very important. But me? I think it’s on the wrong end of everything that has made our species what it is, and will eventually go the way of the wisdom tooth.

            edit: (and since I see a similar comment elsewhere was met with accusations of genocide, let me be clear–I’m not even talking about ideological domination, let alone a physical one, but literally mean a long term evolutionary trend towards greater eusociality)

          • Evan Þ says:

            @nil, which armed militia do you want to disarm first, and how are you going to protect everyone as you break out of this Molochian cycle?

          • nil says:

            @Evan

            I’m not going to disarm anyone. I’m not even going to disarm myself, and if the reality show white supremacist starts winning real elections I’ll be doubling up.

            But the masculine impulse is a throwback, obviously–that’s half the appeal. Indulge if you like or you must, but cut the chivalry bullshit and recognize it for the animal it is.

          • Evan Þ says:

            Sure, I’ll admit it’s a throwback in some theoretical sense. But in a world where other people are actually giving into that impulse, unilateral disarmament is not a solution – as you recognize.

            The instinct might be sad, yes. But it’s necessary, so on pragmatic grounds, we should celebrate it to some extent so as to ensure it’s there when needed.

          • anonymous says:

            @HlynkaCG

            Funny how it is always world war II when there’s been so many since. How many countries do we have to invade and destroy to satisfy the pseduo-nostalgia of people who wish they could have been born in time to die on the beaches of Normandy?

          • Cord Shirt says:

            @Dr. Dealgood:

            “Am I right in assuming that, based on this and your earlier comment, that you see courage brotherhood etc as requisites to being “fully human” and that having less of those traits makes one less deserving of consideration?”

            More like he has given me the impression that he does.

            We haven’t solved this issue because it’s a tough one. Basically a tightrope. I wrote more about this here. (Scroll down to “From where I sit right now…”)

            Sometimes “Group X has Virtue A, Group Y has Virtue B” is an attempt to, or works to, cause Group X to realize Group Y isn’t inferior to them, just different, and vice versa.

            But OTOH, (again) people tend to judge their own virtues as more important (and their own flaws as less important) than those of others–so telling them “Group X has Virtue A, Group Y has Virtue B” often leads instead to “Us Virtue-A-possessing Xs are superior to those Non-A-possessing Ys!” (note the ignoring/denigrating Virtue B too).

            (Dan kind of illustrates this with his “if you care about something I don’t care about, then you can’t be valuable for an unrelated task.” He’s conflating the “virtue” of not caring about one specific thing with the virtue of being willing to take action to defend civilization.)

            Meanwhile, I remain a Yankee universalist. There’s me, and then there’s Universal Personkind; I can’t stand to be pushed into the Procrustean bed of “My Group.” (It’s only realizing that not everyone is like this, that people like this are often Yankees, that convinced me to accept the label “Yankee”! And uh…Yankees *are* often like this. But universalists can come from other backgrounds too, of course.)

            Universalists will strenuously resist the Procrustean bed of a gender role. We don’t want to be judged as [gender]s. We want to be judged as people. It’s just…how we are. 🙂

            If this tangle were easy to solve, we’d have solved it already. :shrug:

          • Dr Dealgood says:

            @Cord Shirt,

            I remember that comment actually, it was interesting because the premises were reasonable and thoughtfully presented even if I don’t agree that they led to your conclusion.

            As for gender roles and Yankeedom, I hope you don’t mind if I secede from your universalism. I’m not a bare “person” and in fact see being reduced to that as a profound ugliness. That said, you Yankees should of course feel free to do what you like in your own backyards as long as the rest of us can do the same.

          • hlynkacg says:

            @nil:
            I’ll grant that members of the USMC probably had more in common with members the Waffen SS than either did with their counterparts in the civilian population just as cops and fire-fighters have more in common with each other than they do with your average artist or banker but I don’t think that proves as much as you think it does.

            Furthermore, I would not ascribe Hobbes the level of certainty I would conservation of momentum, but I do think that he accurately described the manner in which bipedal ape descendants tend to behave “in the wild” and generally view assertions to the contrary as wishful thinking.

            Mother nature is a brutal bitch, Red in tooth and claw. Who destroys as she creates. That is the world we live in.

            @anonymous
            I chose WWII as an example because that is the last time that we as a society determined that genocide was the morally correct course of action.

            While I may have my own opinions on our choices since then, I acknowledge that they are my opinion and do not represent a wider consensus.

          • anonymous says:

            The instinct might be sad, yes. But it’s necessary, so on pragmatic grounds, we should celebrate it to some extent so as to ensure it’s there when needed.

            It isn’t in any danger of not being, you know and I know it. This is just a post hoc justification for the right’s version of political correctness — veneration of members of the military.

          • hlynkacg says:

            anonymous says:
            It isn’t in any danger of not being…

            just how sure are you of that?

          • Cord Shirt says:

            @Dr. Dealgood

            You–you want to *secede*? :gasp: ♫ “The Union forever / Hurrah, boys, hurrah! / Down with the traitors! / Up with the Stars!” ♫

            😉

            Seriously now–why not, after all I was mostly just talking about how to get along with us should you want to. Like, don’t try to rally us with appeals to gender roles (it will backfire), don’t let it seem like you’re going to use social pressure to “encourage” us to conform to gender roles (and we are *extremely* sensitive to social pressure), etc.

    • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

      However little you may talk about it now, you’d be doing the cause of gun rights a big favor if you’d talk about it even less.

    • Cord Shirt says:

      I’m a universalist who opposes gun control.

      I am CREEPED THE FUCK OUT by this comment.

      I know, physical-sex-based HBD, you feel justified and you have arguments for that position…

      But in order to advance our shared cause, I’m asking you to please, refrain from putting off universalists with this kind of unnecessarily gendered talk.

      I’m not sure you really understand how EXTREMELY INTENSELY offputting it is. It’s…similar in intensity to how offputting it is to…well, me, I dunno about you or else I’d say “we”…to see gun-control advocates fail to grasp/respect that I (we) actually sincerely consider gun ownership to be a civil right.

      If you consider insisting on that point to be really necessary even though it inflames universalists, pushing them hard toward the anti-gun side…well, go to town. Otherwise…

      • I just added an edit expressing how women in the gun culture relate to this. They know it might be their responsibility to shoot back too, in extremis. And they, too, often feel like the self-disarmed are missing some essential quality of courage and self-knowledge.

        But reality is what it is, and human are sexually dimorphic both physically and psychologically. Women are inner guard for the children; men are outer guard. That’s always going to make for a difference in mindset, barring outliers in one or another tail of the distributions.

        • Cord Shirt says:

          Yankee universalism is a biological reality too. If you want *us* thoroughly on board, you need to leave sex differences *alone* except what it’s really important to discuss them. Is it *really* important to discuss them *here*? *Really?*

          (And see my reply to Gbdub above.)

          • Whether you like that gendered language and thinking or not, it reflects an important reality about how human beings are that is not going to go away because you find it offensive.

            My wife shoots and trains in hand-to-hand martial arts along with me. I’m totally in favor of persons who happen to be female doing their part of the job.

            But by nature it’s a different part. It wouldn’t occur to my wife to ask a self-disarmed woman “Where are your goddamned ovaries?” because female-typical psychology is not designed so that is a reasonable question.

            These differences matter.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            @ESR:

            It seems you may have a revealed preference for gender roles that is as strong as your preference for gun rights.

            Related old comment of mine.

            As I implied there, sex differences aren’t the same thing as gender roles, and gender roles aren’t necessarily the best response to sex differences. Gbdub put it better than I did (thanks, Gbdub)–what you’ve been doing is advocating gender roles, not just describing sex differences. That’s what’s offputting to us universalists, and we’re not going to change. :shrug:

          • Cord Shirt says:

            Whoops, typo, let’s try that again: Related old comment of mine.

            Sorry about that. 🙂

    • The Anonymouse says:

      Not to be underestimated, either, is the psychological value of knowing that I am doing the duty of a man. When criminal violence occurs near me, or in the event of a breakdown of civil order, I am part of the solution. I am civilization asserting itself

      This is a noble impulse, one well-worth keeping close to your heart, and one that would improve civil society if more people adopted it.

      However, it is also terribly, terribly unhip, and will draw out tumblr-grade mockery like few other sentiments.

      Fortunately, there nonetheless remain enough soldiers, Marines, police officers, sheriff’s deputies, and responsible citizens who do hew to it that even those who would attempt to shame you can sleep peacefully at night.

      • >However, it is also terribly, terribly unhip, and will draw out tumblr-grade mockery like few other sentiments.

        Indeed, we have already seen some. The clueless hipsters will always be with us, ever unaware of how contingent the social peace around them is.

      • stillnotking says:

        Older readers may recall a similar period of overt masculinity being “unhip” in the early-mid 1970s. Turns out that, while women enjoy watching movies about Barbra Streisand being patiently and sensitively wooed by Kris Kristofferson, the real-life version isn’t very sexy; the trend was rapidly and completely reversed in the tight pants and open shirts of disco culture. I think we’re in for a similar transition this time. Perhaps the PUAs — who seem to enjoy considerable romantic success by embracing crude masculine stereotypes — are ahead of the curve.

        Let’s hope the pants aren’t quite as tight. 🙁

      • Psmith says:

        Well said, and thanks for the parent reply, ESR. I was hoping you’d show up.

      • Salem says:

        Bravo.

    • Slow Learner says:

      You, sir, are part of the problem.
      “I am doing the duty of a man. ”
      “I am part of the solution. I am civilization asserting itself, with lethal force or threat of same if required”
      You’re not living in a Western, or a Red Dawn fantasy world.
      If you grab your handy weapon and wave it at people, you are exacerbating the problem.
      Those of us who want to do our duty in keeping society together? Who really want to do that, rather than posture with a lethal toy? Well, to speak for myself, I campaign. I vote. I communicate with my representatives. I donate to good causes. I help out at a homeless shelter.
      And yes, I have by my own choice gone through military training. It’s not that I can’t handle a weapon, or I’m squeamish about violence, I just know that violence is the last resort of civilised people, not the first.
      You, on the other hand, have brought the risk of physical harm to other people for no good reason.
      Which of us is really “doing the duty of a man”? Or, to be less of a tool, “doing the duty of an adult”?

      • The Anonymouse says:

        Well, to speak for myself, I campaign. I vote. I communicate with my representatives. I donate to good causes. I help out at a homeless shelter.

        None of these things are incompatible with the owning and maintenance of a firearm. I see nothing in Mr. Raymond’s comment that indicates that he “grab[s his] handy weapon and wave[s] it at people,” nor that he does not otherwise participate in the responsibilities of civil society you have mentioned, nor that he treats it as a “lethal toy.”

        What part of bringing “the risk of physical harm to other people for no good reason” has he indicated that he actually performs, beyond owning and carrying a firearm (something a decent number of us on this thread obviously also do), that you so roundly mock? Is it because he speaks too earnestly for our jaded age? Or is it because he believes that his firearm ownership is the exercise of an important civil right?

        • Indeed. I have never actually drawn my weapon except at a range. And I do the other things one expects of a responsible person in a civil society.

          (Including, by the way, having a significant hand in the maintenance of the Internet that allows us to have this conversation. I’m one of the infrastructure engineers that keeps it working, often at personal cost.)

          All those civil things are important. But they are not enough. However we try to deny and forget it, the duty of a man is older and deeper than these civilized things. And whenever civilization temporarily fails us, we are required to remember.

      • Paul Brinkley says:

        I think you need to take care to distinguish between Eric’s comment and what you’re reading into it.

        I’ve read Eric’s blog for years. He doesn’t believe he’s living in a Western, or a Red Dawn fantasy. Or to steelman your argument, he doesn’t even think he’s living in a particularly dangerous neighborhood. If he did, he’d probably move.

        He’s also not waving his gun in people’s faces. It would be a dumbass thing to do. I would belly laugh at this assertion, had I not seen it so frequently in the past. He also does not believe violence is the first resort – another laughable assertion. And none of that is implied in his comment.

        What part of his comment made you think that he thought such things?

        • Slow Learner says:

          I keep a pistol near my desk and regularly carry it outside my home.

          Not to be underestimated, either, is the psychological value of knowing that I am doing the duty of a man.

          I sometimes wonder how you disarmed sheep out there can stand yourselves. OK, I get it about women; they’re designed by the EAA to fight only when the men have failed. But there are days when I want to clout the nearest SWPL pajama-boy upside the head and ask “Who the fuck are you? Do you know what you’ll die for? Do you know what you’ll kill for? What will you do if shit gets real? Who do you defend? Where are your goddamn balls?”

          So, not carrying a firearm is not doing the duty of a man; either he believes that woman do not have a duty to civilisation (and is thus a sexist arsehole), or he believes that every adult must carry a firearm (and just…what?)
          He also wants to assault people who don’t join his little fantasy.

          I mean, maybe he’s just really shit at explaining himself, but the clear impression is that those of us who choose not to go about our daily business armed are shirking our duty to society and at risk of violence from Mr Raymond.
          As to whether that violence will be with the weapon he prizes so highly, or merely his fists*, how am I supposed to be sure?
          *Backed, of course, with

          Armed, I am not weak

          , the fact that Mr Raymond initiating violence with his fists might respond to retaliation with his firearm.

          • Your lack of basic reading comprehension is astonishing. “Slow Learner” is nominative determinism, I guess.

            Yes, if you don’t go about armed, there is an argument that you are shirking your duty. Not conclusively; there is a herd immunity effect, and if enough of your civilized neighbors are armed, you may rationally conclude that your contribution would not be significant. It may suffice for you to support with civil action their choice to be armed.

            But how you conclude that the I “also want to assault people who don’t join [my] little fantasy.” I have no idea. I’m a sheepdog, not a wolf; only those who coerce or threaten others have anything to fear from me.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            “he believes that every adult must carry a firearm (and just…what?)”

            That’s the American aspect. Historically, “the militia” was “every sane, able-bodied adult male.” (Universalist that I am, I’d like that to include females as well. But) It happened because the USA’s founders equated “police” with “a standing army.” They didn’t want that–they preferred the policing to be done by the citizenry instead. In that type of society, it’s the responsibility of every able-bodied adult (or adult male)–rather than just of the police–to go about armed and to confront criminals.

            A society built that way requires everyone to be responsible (or else be detected as irresponsible during training and have the right and responsibility removed). It did work in the past, so I see no reason to think it couldn’t work again. It’s just that right now in the US we have some people with guns who are not part of such a culture of responsibility.

          • Slow Learner says:

            Oh dear Eric, I suppose I shall have to quote your *own words* again:

            there are days when I want to clout the nearest SWPL pajama-boy upside the head and ask “Who the fuck are you? Do you know what you’ll die for? Do you know what you’ll kill for? What will you do if shit gets real? Who do you defend? Where are your goddamn balls?”

            Do you not remember them?
            Or do you now claim not to have meant them? Your choice, but y’know, pick one.
            Since either your working memory is only good for ~30 minutes or you are unprepared to acknowledge your own words, I see no value in further engagement with you, and bid you a good night. Try not to shoot anybody, please.

          • Urstoff says:

            You should probably make that argument that you are shirking your duty and not just refer to it.

            Although that’s going to be hard: deontological arguments won’t have much pull in a community of mostly consequentialists.

          • @ Slow Learner:

            “there are days when I want to clout”

            Describes an emotional reaction. It is not a prediction of actual behavior.

            “So, not carrying a firearm is not doing the duty of a man; either he believes that woman do not have a duty to civilisation (and is thus a sexist arsehole), or he believes that every adult must carry a firearm (and just…what?)”

            You are not following Eric’s position very carefully. The clear implication of what he wrote is that he thinks women have different duties to civilization. Women are not obliged to do the “duty of a man.”

          • Dan Peverley says:

            >So, not carrying a firearm is not doing the duty of a man; either he believes that woman do not have a duty to civilisation (and is thus a sexist arsehole)

            Or he could believe that both men and women have a duty to civilization, but that not everyone has the same duties. If men are better at violence (and they are), then the violence related duties are better allocated to them.

            >or he believes that every adult must carry a firearm (and just…what?)

            There are many current first world countries which require full military service. The rationale is that every citizen is responsible for the defense of the country. Compare to Medieval England, where yeoman in some regions were required to train with the longbow. The idea of a civic responsibility to be armed rests on several assumptions which you probably don’t share, but it’s not either unprecedented, novel, or particularly uncommon.

    • houseboatonstyx says:

      @ Eric S. Raymond
      January 7, 2016 at 2:56 pm
      Not to be underestimated, either, is the psychological value of knowing that I am doing the duty of a man.
      ….
      OK, I get it about women; they’re designed by the EAA to fight only when the men have failed.
      ….
      EDIT: I should have added that women in the gun culture share this feeling too. So it’s not the case that male gun owners are living on a macho island of self-assumed superiority; our women know it could be their job to shoot back, too.

      The pre-edited version of this creeped me out too. Datapoint, trying to name some of the reasons why. Steel-noun-ing, putting the idea as it might have been put in our marriage. Duty to follow practicality. The person who is physically bigger and stronger and more familiar with machinery is the one who fixes the car, and in our culture that’s usually the male. In a physical emergency, it’s the duty of the other person to stay out of zis way, and not endanger zimself too. But who is in fact the biggest, strongest, and/or most experienced with machinery in any particular marriage — that’s accident, not essence.

      My husband would have put it, “Duty not as a man, but as a gentleman.” My duty was earning the money, managing the budget; because I was better at those things than he was; “Duty not as a woman, but as the smarter, cooler head for that in this particular couple.”

      Sure, if there’s physical danger and the person best equipped needs some extra pride and adrenalin to get into it, stoking up with the cultural “man’s duty” is understandable. But to make such a point of it in an ssc post … sounds creepy.

      Especially since as someone else pointed out, “Colt made us equal”; a woman can be as good with a gun as a man.

    • JBeshir says:

      As such a person- living in a country where gun ownership without good reason marks you as probably a mad murderer, who would turn in anyone I found to own an illegal gun about as soon as I left line of sight- my own reaction is that this stuff sounds like… talk from a fictional world, possibly post-apocalyptic, where society has collapsed and everything is ruled by violence, and so in order to influence the world you need to be a person capable of performing violence.

      On the matter of what I’d “die for” or “kill for”, I generally consider the problem of crime and “shit getting real” to be basically stably handled, society to be broadly functioning and incentives well aligned to keep it so as far as sudden physically violent threats go. The threats that could cause it to function less well (although probably not collapse) that I’d feel were a civic duty to be available to be part of a solution for are things like demographic shift, economic issues, climate change, and further out some nastier things like job automation, and the potential that technology could end the “dream time” of limited competition/lots of resources, so to speak. And none of these are things that are readily responsive to being solved by gun, so one is pretty useless to me in any kind of opportunity to act on these things that came along.

      There’s also stuff in terms of making things better I’d like to be a part of, too- the immense difficulties faced by anyone born in Africa being economically productive and gaining corresponding access to resources, as an obvious low hanging fruit, but also just human suffering in general. Improving social systems to be less… evil would be nice, too, but that one I lack any kind of means for. But again, not very responsive to gun.

      The people I’d defend don’t need physical protection, because that’s covered to a sufficiently high level of quality that I don’t worry about it (except maybe for a couple, because of them being members of particularly disliked subgroups of the population, but they’re not in England, so I don’t think they make guns big enough and accurate enough for me to provide that via gun, unless you count ICBMs.). Their problems are social, economic, etc, and those kind of problems are also not very responsive to gun.

      So there’s plenty of stuff I stand for, and would be willing to act on, and have acted on. But I don’t live in the EAA, and I don’t feel very compelled to be a person who would be good at standing for stuff in the EAA where ability to threaten or perform violence was critical to being able to do so. I’d rather focus my attentions on being a person who who is good at standing for stuff in the world I live in. And that requires social and financial capital and specialised technical skills in an appropriate area, not a gun.

      If I was going to feel bad or inadequate about anything, it’d be about not working harder to secure a higher income or better skills or other things that give me leverage in the world of today, not about failing to be the kind of person who would have had leverage in the EAA.

      • John Schilling says:

        The people I’d defend don’t need physical protection, because that’s covered…

        By whom? Because I’m guessing the biggest part of that is a particular American cultural institution whose members are disproportionately Black and Southern White males, and the next-biggest part is a British cultural institution whose members are most embarrassingly like Americans in these regards. And you’re not ordering from an a la carte menu on that.

        Possibly it’s time to quote some Kipling.

        • JBeshir says:

          By the incentives/disincentives that keep crime rates at their current levels, whatever they are. It doesn’t matter why they’re at their current levels, merely that the current levels are low enough to make ability to perform violence insignificant to my ability to be useful for defending or helping people and their interests.

          Edit: I can see how it’d be sensible to consider “contributing to those incentives” to be a civic duty, as part of doing your part. But, well, I live in England- I’m pretty sure that gun ownership is not a significant part of those incentives.

          Probably the best guess for a way to do this more would be to try to generate more tax revenue by making more money.

          • @JBeshir

            If I correctly understand him, John’s point is that you are safe only because of the U.S. and U.K. military, which keep you safe because they are manned by people with the characteristics Eric is glorifying. As a matter of strict logic, if half the population having those characteristics provides adequate protection, there is no need for the other half to share them. But as a matter of poetry, rhetoric, the sort of stuff Eric was doing, it’s not that simple.

            Hence the quote from “The Gods of the Copybook Headings.”

          • The Anonymouse says:

            @ David Friedman

            His point (and mine, elsewhere in this massive comments section) is not that half of a population is not sufficient to protect the rest. It is, rather–or, to be quite precise, mine and I presume to be his–that we ought not heedlessly denigrate those whose service and passe, unfashionable values provide just the protection JBeshir assumes will always be there.

            If you make the values embarrassing enough to hold–as many others have attempted in this thread, particularly in response to ESR–fewer people will hold them. And when few enough (already far fewer than half!) hold them, that is when the Gods of the Copybook Headings return.

          • anonymous says:

            John can say it till he is blue in the face, doesn’t make it true.

          • JBeshir says:

            Oh, that’s fair enough. Denigrating people isn’t nice in general, and there seems to be something especially intuitively bad about doing it to people who do useful work that maintains proper functioning of society.

            I’m not sure to what extent we *need* a subpopulation who values martial characteristics especially, because we pay people money to be soldiers/police and while people liking being soldiers/police probably makes them cheaper to employ (an effect I would not essentially endorse) I don’t think it’s mandatory for the ability to have them. I’ve not heard of any kind of hiring crisis for police in any countries which are lacking in martial culture, or of military jobs which appeared to actually offer good compensation, but that doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist, I suppose.

            But it’s good for people to like their jobs, so it is in that respect a good thing that people have those preferences. The stronger thing in my view is just that being an asshole to people is a bad thing, though.

            The focus of my response was to explain why I don’t, personally, feel inadequate, to “lack balls”, or to lack the ability to stand for things/support those around me due to my lack of competence at violence. This seemed to be a genuine point of confusion. I don’t know how close other people are to my position, but it’s a perspective.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            I’m not sure to what extent we *need* a subpopulation who values martial characteristics especially, because we pay people money to be soldiers/police and while people liking being soldiers/police probably makes them cheaper to employ (an effect I would not essentially endorse) I don’t think it’s mandatory for the ability to have them

            I do not say this to be insulting, but rather to be blunt: This statement indicates such a profound lack of understanding as to the way that militaries work and the attributes that soldiers must have to be effective that it makes anything else you say on the subject impossible to take seriously.

          • JBeshir says:

            Militaries clearly need specific attributes of their soldiers, but it seems like a lot of those attributes are gained from their intensive training processes.

            If there’s any need for a specifically martial culture prior to joining the military to cause people to enlist/make their enlistment work, either it has to be a very mild need such that every developed country maintains it despite their cultural differences, or you’d expect to be seeing major hiring crises for militaries.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            Actually, there is at least one more possibility, which I alluded to in my initial response.

            Hint: The only thing more expensive than a good military is a bad military.

          • keranih says:

            Militaries clearly need specific attributes of their soldiers, but it seems like a lot of those attributes are gained from their intensive training processes.

            Eh. I think you might be giving a bit too much credit to nine weeks of boot camp. The US military, at least, is highly selective on the front end, and very willing to cull away people who “don’t fit”.

            either it has to be a very mild need such that every developed country maintains it despite their cultural differences, or you’d expect to be seeing major hiring crises for militaries.

            I think you may be missing the degree to which Europe and much of the rest of the developed world outsourced their militaries during the Cold War. In the most current times, there is a quality crisis in the militaries of various developing nations (the USA has not been immune to this, in our history) due to nations focusing on numbers instead of quality.

            I agree that there are external downsides to maintaining a degree of military-positive attitudes amongst a civilian population. Putting it most crudely, one is feeding and tolerating a group of young men who are in search of sabertooth tigers and cave bears to kill. That this is very needful when one is frequently threatened by cave bears should be apparent, as well as the usefulness when wandering bandits happen by. It should also be apparent that when both bears and bandits are in short supply, the well trained young men are going to be bored spitless, and – in the nature of young men – go looking for trouble to get into.

            The worst trouble, though, is when one has done away with the troublesome young men, and then bears & bandits show back up again.

            (That some people will imagine bears into existence where only bushes stand does not take away from my point, but only serves to illustrate how complicated the cost/benefit calculations can be.)

          • anonymous says:

            There’s a a motte and bailey with the military. Yes, we probably need some military. But for all the talk about how terrible draftees are, and about how hard it is to build back up once you let things go to seed and the dangers of hollowing out the force and so on — the last time most everyone agrees we needed to deploy the military we had a tiny hollowed out force and not much military manufacturing capacity. We built up the forces using draftees (aren’t they supposed to be totally unsuitable for anything?) and ramped up material production pretty quickly and effectively. And our weapons got better over the course of the war as we were feeding back what troops were facing right into the manufacturing process rather than having a huge supply of material that a sclerotic and corrupt process had built up over decades based on people dreaming up what might be necessary for the next war. And it all worked out pretty well.

            And going back further, the South had its military culture, but the North had a superior industrial base and more people, and the North won.

            So yeah, we probably can’t go all Costa Rica without endangering ourselves, but to claim that we need to spend the better part of a trillion a year and worship violence or we are going to be invaded by barbarians seems like wishful thinking from people that won’t those things for other reasons.

          • John Schilling says:

            because we pay people money to be soldiers/police and while people liking being soldiers/police probably makes them cheaper to employ

            Actually, it doesn’t. In either case you have to pay about the prevailing wage for skilled blue-collar work in the civilian economy (accounting for differences in the benefits package), because even people who like being soldiers won’t rationalize taking a pay cut to defend the cheapskates who cut their pay.

            The difference is, if you pay standard blue-collar wages to the cultural descendants of border reivers and/or plantation slaves, they’ll take your money and then stand and fight when you need them to. If you pay standard blue-collar wages to a bunch of urban WEIRDs, they’ll take your money until it gets really dangerous and then they’ll run away. If you double, triple, quadruple their salary, about the same thing happens. You can sue them for breach of contract, of course.

            That’s an oversimplification, obviously, but not a misleading one. “Training”, does not have the magic property of turning anyone and everyone into a perfectly disciplined soldier. Particularly not the sort of training that would be acceptable to volunteers and voters in a western, educated, industrial rich democracy. The quality of the recruits matters, and both the US and UK armies have to be very selective to get the results they do.

          • nil says:

            @anonymous

            It’s especially ironic in this context, given the forbear of the 2nd Amendment, Article XIII of the Virginia Declaration of Rights:

            “XIII. That a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defence of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided, as dangerous to liberty; and in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.”

          • anonymous says:

            The quality of the recruits matters, and both the US and UK armies have to be very selective to get the results they do.

            What results? Since they started to be so selective all they’ve done is beat up on third world armies.

            You make it sound as if we are Israel circa 1975 and could have justified belief that a) what we’ve been doing over the last 30 years is working and b) is necessary.

            Instead what you have is wild speculation about what’s going to maybe happen some time and an unjustified confidence that what we are doing is exactly what we need to face those theoretical problems.

          • JBeshir says:

            Hmm. I’m just not convinced by the intuition that an explicitly martial culture is necessary. I’m sure you need some kind of functional culture of people who do their duty and are responsible, but I’m not sure this is distinct from a culture that’s well-functioning in other respects.

            We can be pretty sure it doesn’t have to be border reaver-ish in particular- consider Japan, which combines a very low prevalence of violence with what was a very martial culture that supported a regional military power before we dismantled it, seemingly by having a really high weight applied to discipline and face in general. I’m not sure it needs to be explicitly martial at all, as opposed to simply consisting of gentlemen/women who, in extremis, are willing to take a duty seriously, regardless of what exactly it demands, something entirely compatible with and encouraged by many less explicitly violence-oriented sets of values.

            I’m sure European militaries are pretty weak, but they’re mostly not budget priorities and are mostly geared for power projection rather than defence (especially the UK’s). I don’t find the speculation that they’re crippled by culture problems intuitively plausible, in the absence of any particular evidence, for the otherwise well functioning societies in Western Europe and Scandinavia.

            I’m all for treating people who highly value being able to defend themselves and others as a sort of aesthetic or for other personal reasons with respect rather than mockery, just because they’re people and mocking people you don’t know in a mean-spirited way is bad.

            Even if you thought their culture was actively harmful and it’d be useful if it gradually died out through shift of attitudes, you wouldn’t want to do that unless you’d also endorse people engaging in, e.g. fat shaming, which I wouldn’t.

            I just remain unconvinced that “if it shrinks enough society will be incredibly fragile and risk collapse” is an additional thing.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ JBeshir:

            I pretty much agree with you.

            I am very skeptical of the mythologization of the “warrior ethos” and the related “thin blue line” idea.

            Sparta, for instance, was a terrible society that never produced anything of value.

          • John Schilling says:

            Sparta, for instance, was a terrible society that never produced anything of value.

            It produced soldiers that would stand and fight against great odds. Some people consider those to be of value.

            And that’s the only claim that is being made here. Not that violent, honor-based cultures produce all things great and wonderful, only that they produce soldiers that will stand and fight. Not everybody can do that. Not even with military training.

            You may well think the world has no more need for soldiers who will stand and fight, but I disagree. As do most Americans and I think a fair number of Brits.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            @John Schilling:

            “If you pay standard blue-collar wages to a bunch of urban WEIRDs, they’ll take your money until it gets really dangerous and then they’ll run away.”

            Are there any specific incidents of “running away” you’re thinking of?

            @nil:

            “That a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defence of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided, as dangerous to liberty; and in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.”

            Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? They thought that instead of a standing army, we should have the entire “body of the people,” who should all be “trained to arms.”

            @JBeshir:

            “I can see how it’d be sensible to consider “contributing to those incentives” to be a civic duty, as part of doing your part. But, well, I live in England- I’m pretty sure that gun ownership is not a significant part of those incentives.”

            Right, well, again, in the USA, our founders wanted “The People” to be the police. It’s not even just the militia, it’s also the idea of the citizen’s arrest (which we inherited from you, after all)–etc.

            What if just by being an able-bodied adult you were considered a member of the police? Would that make your society an anarchy?

            What if everywhere you went, everyone around you was…no more likely to be a criminal than anyone near you is now, it’s just that everyone *not* a criminal–IOW, the vast majority–was a police officer? Except…they also were an ordinary person, who knew what it was like to be an ordinary person and was only acting as a police officer out of duty, not out of necessarily having been attracted to a job that gave them opportunities to hurt/bully others? (Would you be safer from criminals? Would police like that be less brutal?)

            Times have changed, and now some of our regions still have this culture or remnants of it, and others don’t…that’s all.

            On another note…reading what you wrote makes me think of Gavin de Becker’s question to his readers: What if there were no police around and someone were attacking your child? De Becker points out that almost everyone would try to defend/rescue their child, even if they felt incapable of using violence just to defend *themselves*.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ John Schilling:

            It produced soldiers that would stand and fight against great odds. Some people consider those to be of value.

            And that’s the only claim that is being made here. Not that violent, honor-based cultures produce all things great and wonderful, only that they produce soldiers that will stand and fight. Not everybody can do that. Not even with military training.

            You may well think the world has no more need for soldiers who will stand and fight, but I disagree. As do most Americans and I think a fair number of Brits.

            Defenders are a means to the end of whatever they are supposed to be defending.

            If their society is not of value, their martial virtue in defending it is not of value. If a society becomes very defensible at the price of not being worth defending…well, that’s the Molochian way, for sure.

            I’m not saying the military has no value. I’m saying it has no intrinsic value. And that the instrumental value of indoctrinating people into “standing and fighting” is often exaggerated.

            In WWII, the Japanese had more martial virtue than the Americans for sure. Fighting to the death, never surrendering, being willing to go on suicide missions. The Americans had the mercantile virtue to have more factories, and the intellectual virtue to make better bombs (not to mention the prudential virtue not to attack a vastly superior foe in a war of aggression).

            I think the mark of a military’s superiority is the less the soldiers have to risk their lives to attain victory.

            The way to win
            is to have got
            the Maxim gun
            while they have not.

            I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country.

            — George C. Scott as General Patton

          • @Cord Shirt:

            In England at the time of the American Revolution, there were no police in our sense. Prosecution of crimes was private, usually by the victim. It’s true that the process of arresting someone normally involved the victim getting a constable to come along and do the actual arrest–but the constables were not salaried and were not expected to go out catching criminals on their own.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Vox Imperatoris – “If their society is not of value, their martial virtue in defending it is not of value.”

            I fundamentally disagree with that statement, I think. Interesting!

          • John Schilling says:

            @Vox: You cannot possibly have studied classical civilization thoroughly enough to justify the (debatable) claim that Sparta never produced anything of value, without having noticed that the Spartan army occasionally defended more than just Sparta.

            Analogies to the contemporary world, left as an exercise to the student.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            @David:

            Right. IMO the founders would have equated our police with a “standing army.”

            And, again, citizen’s arrest…there really was an attitude that it’s everyone’s right and responsibility to intervene when they see a crime getting committed / a criminal getting away. It wasn’t on the constable, no–but it wasn’t all on the victim either. And American culture inherited that.

            “Everyone is a police officer” seems like a good modern “translation.”

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ John Schilling:

            @Vox: You cannot possibly have studied classical civilization thoroughly enough to justify the (debatable) claim that Sparta never produced anything of value, without having noticed that the Spartan army occasionally defended more than just Sparta.

            Are you referring to the Greco-Persian Wars?

            As I recall, the Spartans nobly got themselves killed at Thermopylae. It was the Athenians who were primarily responsible for defeating the Persians both times.

            Also, Sparta invaded Athens and was one of the major factors in bringing about the downfall of its golden age.

          • John Schilling says:

            @Vox: You cannot possibly have studied classical civilization thoroughly enough to justify the (debatable) claim that Sparta never produced anything of value, without having noticed that after three hundred Spartans got themselves killed at Thermopylae, ten thousand more showed up at Palatea to finish the job. A larger contingent than Athens, and nearly half the total Greek force.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Sparta had enough Athenian admirers, even among Platonists, that it must have produced something of value.

        • The Anonymouse says:

          When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
          They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
          But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
          And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

          It’s never not the time for a little Kipling (even if I suspect this is not the bit you were referring to).

      • ADifferentAnonymous says:

        +1 to this.

        I’d add that to me it’s a no-brainer that if the threat landscape changed to include more situations where my carrying a gun would help, I’d start carrying a gun, and in fact see that as a duty. For instance, if active shooters* increased to the point of being a leading cause of preventable death.

        I applaud the police and military**, but I don’t feel any more duty-bound to participate in protection-against-violence than to participate in, say, food production. It’s already covered.

        I expect I would be psychologically capable of joining either of those organizations and taking great pride in it; but my comparative advantage, and greater hedonic value, lies elsewhere.

        I might be an atypical liberal, though.

        * I think this is the term that means ‘stuff like Columbine and San Bernardino’

        ** That is, I’m glad they exist rather than not. This doesn’t preclude endorsing liberal reform suggestions.

      • Echo says:

        This isn’t even even bait. It’s just a hook on a string and they still won’t stop biting it…

      • Acedia says:

        The parent comment is perfectly in line with the opinions ESR has been publishing online for many years. There’s no reason whatsoever to believe he isn’t being sincere.

        • anon says:

          Sincerity has nothing to do with whether asinine, childish tribal rock throwing clearly posted to provoke a negative response is bait

    • Maware says:

      A responsible gun owner wouldn’t ever care about such things, because a responsible owner would use the gun only at a last resort and doesn’t tie the need to defend themselves with some bizarre ego trip about being a virile defender of Western Virtues. Having a tool that can end someone’s life, and the ability under very strict conditions to use it in self-defense is something more terrifying that empowering, because the consequences are so high. Not just legal, but in the psychological trauma that killing someone can engender. Soldiers and officers know this, and they are specifically trained and often act in the right to deal with the situations a civilian may never face.

      To be blunt, this sort of bluster turned me off from supporting gun rights.

  96. Elissa says:

    Am I the only one who was way more concerned by the “We carry fish antibiotics!” in the sidebar of that “How many guns do you need?” article than by the article itself? You what.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Fish use the same antibiotics as people, but they cost much less when they’re branded for fish and don’t require a prescription. I have very very occasionally recommended fish-branded antibiotics for people in extremely specific bad situations who cannot afford human-branded antibiotics.

      • The Anonymouse says:

        Scott, the things I learn from this place never cease to amaze me. Neat!

      • rational_rob says:

        I had to take some pretty strong antibiotics because I was immune-compromised a while back. It was pretty embarrassing, because my dog (who had gotten an infection from chewing on his ass) was taking literally the exact same prescription as me, down to the dose.

      • Elissa says:

        Yes, that these are being used by humans whenever it seems like a good idea to them is what worries me.

      • ADifferentAnonymous says:

        Damn. Guess I need to update towards needing more guns.

  97. Gbdub says:

    Doesn’t this analysis Prove Too Much? Doesn’t it imply we ought to be heavily taxing black people that live near a lot of other black people since “black culture of violence” has such serious negative externalities?

    Obviously it seems repugnant to act on this conclusion, but it’s equally (maybe better) supported by your analysis.

    So why don’t you propose the “black folks living together tax”? My guess is that you see positive externalities to “black culture” but no positive externalities to “gun culture”. But I propose that’s more a result of your tribe than objective facts.

    I’m sure you could find someone in your area or at your next meetup very willing to go teach you to shoot. Get inoculated in the culture a little bit before dismissing any value for it.

  98. Marc Whipple says:

    I didn’t price in the advantages of guns in terms of preventing state tyranny and protecing freedom, which might be worth subsidizing, but my guess is that if 32% gun ownership is enough to maintain freedom, 22% gun ownership is as well

    You also didn’t price in the advantages of guns in protecting the law-abiding from the non-law-abiding. I can understand why, since this is simultaneously the hardest-to-measure factor in the whole mess and by far the most controversial. But unless you can also diminish our culture-of-violence whilst you diminish our gun ownership numbers, not counting it is incredibly intellectually dishonest.

    • ilkarnal says:

      Your danger of being killed if your assailant has a gun and you have a gun is higher than if neither you or your assailant have guns. Gun-control measures that make guns more expensive and inconvenient to get will have a hugely disproportionate impact on low-IQ, low-FTO individuals.

      It is completely laughable to argue that loose gun regulations make law-abiding individuals safer.

      • Harold says:

        Your danger of being killed if your assailant has a gun and you have a gun is higher than if neither you or your assailant have guns.

        Speak for yourself. As a man in my mid-50s with some physical disabilities, if a fit youth wants to kill me in hand to hand combat, he’ll probably succeed. If I can draw my gun at a time of my choosing, I’ll probably prevail.

        • ilkarnal says:

          Speak for yourself. As a man in my mid-50s with some physical disabilities, if a fit youth wants to kill me in hand to hand combat, he’ll probably succeed.

          Yeah. This isn’t relevant. In the vast majority of cases an unarmed attacker is not going to try to kill you. They are going to try to rough you up. Most of the time, this will not result in your death or even permanent disability.

          If they use a gun, on the other hand, the chance that you die or suffer permanent disability is much higher. Even if you’re Steven fucking Hawking against Mike Tyson. Guns are much less variable than hands. People almost never use the full destructive potential of their hands – that destructive potential is actually quite breathtaking. Guns can’t be curved back in terms of destructive potential in the same way.

          If I can draw my gun at a time of my choosing, I’ll probably prevail.

          You can’t draw a gun at the time of your choosing. You can only draw a gun when you know you are threatened. That means when your assailant is very, very close to you, and if you’re a sack of flab and your opponent is trying to kill you – exceedingly unlikely but specifically the circumstance you raised – a gun at your waist is very unlikely to save you. A strong young man can disable and kill you with blinding speed – if that’s what he wants to do. It’s not what he wants to do in the overwhelming majority of cases.

          If on the other hand your interlocutor – as is nearly certain – does not care to kill you but simply wants to rough you up, a gun is quite a useful thing in terms of winning the encounter. I said in terms of winning the encounter, not reducing risk to yourself – in all likelihood you increase the risk to yourself by pulling a deadly weapon on a much stronger opponent who is already attacking you. However, you do switch the situation from one where you will almost certainly lose to one where you have roughly even or favorable odds of winning.

          If all the people who would physically assault you were trying to kill you, this would be a knock-down argument for carrying a gun. As that isn’t the case, it isn’t – you have to compare probability(guy attacking you wants to kill you + probability guy attacking you accidentally kills you)*(chance you manage to disable or flee from your opponent) with probability(guy attacking you wants to kill you + probability guy attacking you accidentally kills you when you pulled a gun on him and you are at his mercy)*(chance you fail to kill or disable your opponent with your gun).

          As you very considerably increase the vigor with which your attacker will strike if you draw a gun on him and fail to kill him or force him to flee, and the chance that you fail to kill him or force him to flee is quite considerable especially if you are not physically fit, drawing a gun is not a boon for your safety. That is, unless probability(guy attacking you wants to kill you + probability guy attacking you accidentally kills you) is much higher than it is in the first world.

          ‘Gun rights’ represent a way for individual people to stand up for themselves, which does not improve safety. Standing up for yourself almost never improves safety, because the vast majority of bad actors – whether of the lawless or lawful variety – are not the sort that specifically want to kill.

          The problem is that standing up against violent misbehavior needs to be done at a collective, organized level in order to be effective. Individually ‘standing up for yourself’ in violent situations is dangerous, wasteful, masturbatory Rambo-fetish nonsense. Specialized, organized teams are what stand between ‘bad guys’ and you – if that’s insufficient, join those teams, support those teams, or go somewhere with more effectual teams. Don’t respond by ‘standing up for yourself’ as a lone armed individual – it is a disservice both to yourself and to your community.

          • “Individually ‘standing up for yourself’ in violent situations is dangerous, wasteful, masturbatory Rambo-fetish nonsense. ”

            You might be correct that it is imprudent. But the more likely it is that the victim of a mugging will pull a gun with some chance of killing the mugger, the less profitable mugging is, hence the fewer muggings will occur. So whether or not the behavior you denounce as nonsense is prudent, it does have some desirable effect for the society as a whole.

            Which might be part of ESR’s point.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @David Friedman:

            The analogy to vaccination is rather obvious – and works on multiple levels.

          • ilkarnal says:

            You might be correct that it is imprudent. But the more likely it is that the victim of a mugging will pull a gun with some chance of killing the mugger, the less profitable mugging is, hence the fewer muggings will occur.

            Mugging is not a profitable occupation – you’d make more money working a normal job than mugging people over any significant timespan. People assault, rob, vandalize, and generally fuck with other people because it is fun, not because it is profitable.

            Adding more guns to the equation does not make it less fun. It does change how preemptively brutal you need to be, though. Instead of just pointing a gun or knife at someone, you need to go further in order to be safe – whether that means ordering them to the ground and shooting them if they disobey, whacking them upside the head from behind, pepper spraying them, tasing them, or other nastiness.

            A general point has to be made that when both sides are armed with any sort of combat tool, the advantage swings heavily in favor of the side that is prepared first.

            Dealing effectively with this sort of nastiness is simply impossible without organization – those specialized teams I mentioned earlier. How the analogy to vaccination properly applies is as follows – when a few people synthesize their own ‘vaccines’ with various improvised methods, no public health benefit is realized and instead there is significant risk added. When a robust public health initiative leads to population-scale distribution of quality controlled, mass manufactured vaccines, a significant public health benefit can be realized.

            And a more important point – do you not see how fucking insane it is to argue that society should be flooded with pocket killing devices in order to dissuade mugging? Why do you think mugging is such a big deal? People take your money, wow, how terrible. You know what’s a big deal? Murder is a big deal. Someone taking my life matters much more to me than someone taking some goddamn cash. And that decision, the decision to take my life, is almost certain to be the result of a temporary surge of emotion on the part of my would-be murderer. My chance of death goes up tremendously if that person has a gun on their person. Hell, that person could be my mugger! Even within the specific case of criminals robbing me, I would much prefer a higher amount of cash lost to robbers and lower chance of being killed/maimed to the reverse.

          • “Mugging is not a profitable occupation”

            How do you know? My working assumption with regard to people I don’t know is that they are rational, make those choices that serve their interest. Most of the time they know much more than I do about the alternatives available to them, which makes me reluctant to second guess their choice. Presumably you have reliable information on the costs and benefits of mugging as a career, compared to other options open to the same people?

            This reminds me of an argument I had more than forty years ago with Ernest Van den Haag, one of the NR group around Buckley. I was living on the upper west side of Manhattan, and when I went out walking I carried a six foot walking stick—a quarter staff. My theory was that, by doing so, I signaled that if someone tried to mug me I was quite likely to fight and that muggers would rationally go after easier targets. Ernest argued, along your lines, that by carrying the stick I was challenging the masculine courage of the muggers, and they would swarm all over me.

            I never got mugged, which is at least weak evidence for my view. I think the pattern of who does get mugged–little old ladies much more often than football players–also supports it.

          • Psmith says:

            A rape can last 30 seconds, but a murder lasts forever. Guns are not the answer.

            (http://s200.photobucket.com/user/BassNuts/media/F93C327D-DCE9-4D98-BB79-C3653D4118CD-4543-000004C69805BD34.jpg.html)

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ David Friedman:

            There is a difference between what we may call “local rationality” and “global rationality”.

            Given that someone chooses to mug people, he is likely to do so in a mostly rational way. Therefore, he attacks little old ladies or rich-looking women, not people with obvious weapons. They are locally rational about how to make the most money mugging people.

            On the other hand, maybe their goal isn’t money but to enjoy the thrill, as Genghis Khan said, of crushing their enemies, seeing them driven before them, and hearing the lamentation of their women. Then they would challenge you for a “good fight”, and it would be locally rational to do so.

            Now, you were probably correct because the first type of motive (get money) is more prevalent than the second (get sadistic pleasure). But in your sense, there’s nothing “irrational” about the second kind of mugger.

            But what do I mean by “global rationality”? Well, I think “get money by mugging” and “get sadistic pleasure by mugging” are neither very likely to be what these people would prefer under completely rational consideration of all their goals and preferences, along with the likely consequences. I find it very hard to square all the pointless misery people inflict upon themselves with the idea that they have rationally decided to do everything they do.

            (Note: I’m using “rational” in the objective, non-moralistic sense here; i.e. rational by the correct standard of what is rational. Not the subjective sense in which one morally condemns people for being irrational; you can subjectively-rationally do something objectively-irrational because you were not taught how to be rational in the objective sense.)

          • Dr Dealgood says:

            @Psmith,

            That is the most despicable ad I have ever seen in my life. I would not have believed it existed until I saw it. Thanks, I guess.

            No sane person will shed a single tear over a dead rapist. That is the sign of a diseased mind.

          • Echo says:

            Psmith, that one turned out to be bait from /k/, or /pol/, or /u/, whichever board it is that does that kind of thing.
            A bunch of anti-gun people did reblog it, but it wasn’t a real Brady Bunch ad.

          • God Damn John Jay says:

            @Dr Dealgood

            http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/bradyad.asp

            Its a hoax, your instincts were right.

            [Beat to it by Echo]

          • Psmith says:

            @ the last three of you, yeah, it’s a hoax, although someone submitted it to the Brady Campaign facebook page and they put it up for about thirty seconds. (ETA: according to Snopes, this never happened. Make of that what you will.). There was a short period when fake Brady poster threads were all the rage.

            On the other hand, it appears to summarize the parent comment’s view pretty well….

          • Tibor says:

            This is a strange assumption given that national wealth is correlated with a lower rate of violent crime. If what most of the muggers sought was the adrenaline and more danger the better, there would be very little we could do to stop them. Even police enforcement would just be a way for them to “knock it up a notch”. I think that people who actually work that way do exists, they are called psychopaths and there are way fewer of them than there are of violent criminals (but they might occasionally rise high up in organized crime…although being a sociopath is probably more advantageous for a crime boss). I also doubt that even most psychopaths want to die. Having more armed would-be victims willing to pull a gun on you means that your chances of dying during an assault are much higher and unless you literally do not care about dying, so unless you are outright suicidal, increasing your chances of being killed in an assault is a disincentive to attack someone.

            Is the gun-carrying victim likely to use the gun? Well, the closest I’ve ever been to being assaulted was when I was about 9 or 10 and a 15-something kid beat me up and then followed me down the road home (twice stopping to beat me up and then letting me go again, but he would always manage to catch me afterwards). By the time I reached home I ran to the garage to get a pickaxe (not the best choice of a weapon if you are actually going to use it, because it is heavy and so very slow, but it looks kind of menacing, I simply picked the biggest metal thing I noticed in the garage), cause the guy was after me again. I screamed at him that I would kill him if he climbed over the fence and I probably would have had he done so. He was obviously scared away by that pickaxe and me telling him that I was going to kill him. The guy was crazy and I had nowhere else to run, there were no mobile phones back then so I could not call the police on the run and even so it would take them at least 5 minutes to arrive and that would have not been soon enough. If this is about how people usually feel when attacked by someone, then I expect they would use the gun without hesitation.

            By the way, this is also why a gun law that permits concealed carry is superior to the one that does not. You have no idea who (of the people over the legal age) might have a gun and so you are more reluctant when attacking them. Those who don’t carry them are thus protected by those who do, because you can only guess who is who.

          • John Schilling says:

            No mugger that I have ever encountered in the supposedly gun-crazy United States has used a gun. No mugger that I have heard of firsthand, from family, friends, or acquaintances, has used a gun. Very few of the muggers I have read about from various news sources have used guns, and when I have looked for statistical data on the subject, the use of firearms seems to be fairly rare among American muggers.

            That model of how muggers work in a heavily-armed society, whether it comes from Hollywood or from your own pontification, is simply wrong. Firearms are generally used by robbers who attack relatively hard targets (banks, liquor stores, etc), or who rob other criminals, or by criminals who fear being robbed.

          • Nornagest says:

            This is anecdata, but of four friends that’ve been mugged (all in the greater Bay Area, though, which is not a particularly heavily armed place), two muggers used guns. The other two were strongarm robberies that relied on numbers.

            The last time I looked into real statistics, robbery with firearm outnumbered robbery with other weapons or strongarm robberies by somewhat more than unity but somewhat less than two to one. But it does occur to me that that would fold muggings in with some dude trying to knock over a liquor store.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            John Schilling says:
            January 8, 2016 at 12:48 pm ~new~
            No mugger that I have ever encountered in the supposedly gun-crazy United States has used a gun.

            Whatever they’re threatening you with, what happens if you just say No? (Or run away?) Shoot you, with noise and a murder charge? Cut you, perhaps getting blood on themselves? Mace you, which makes it harder for them or you to get at their wallet?

          • John Schilling says:

            Whatever they’re threatening you with, what happens if you just say No?

            Typically a beating and maybe(*) being cut with a knife. Facilitated by accomplices, and arranging for the mugging to occur where the victim is cornered and cannot flee. Starting with low levels of violence and working up from there; as you note, it works best if the victim is still capable of handing over his wallet.

            *In one mugging attempt, out of two in my adult life, I didn’t see a weapon but did have a cut on my forearm when it was over. Anecdotally, friends have been explicitly threatened with knives but not cut.

          • Nornagest says:

            Whatever they’re threatening you with, what happens if you just say No? (Or run away?)

            In both the unarmed muggings I mentioned, the victims were outnumbered four or five to one, and escape routes were cut off before the mugging proper started. Both initially refused (coincidentally, they were both skilled martial artists), and were attacked. One took some bruises but managed to injure a couple of his attackers badly enough that the rest ran off; the other didn’t, and got a broken nose for her trouble before her attackers (who were also women, incidentally; the cops suspected a gang initiation) stole her purse and phone.

          • ilkarnal says:

            No mugger that I have ever encountered in the supposedly gun-crazy United States has used a gun.

            I live in a relatively low-crime area and even I know someone who was mugged by an individual armed with a gun. The implication that the use of firearms to threaten one’s victim is or ought to be rare is absurd.

            That model of how muggers work in a heavily-armed society, whether it comes from Hollywood or from your own pontification, is simply wrong.

            Utter nonsense.

          • John Schilling says:

            According to the FBI, firearms are used in only 43% of all robberies in the United States – and that’s all robberies, including bank robberies, liquor store robberies, home invasion robberies, and the like. Since this has caused confusion in the past, “robbery” in the US refers only to theft by violence or threat of violence.

            The FBI doesn’t break out muggings specifically, but robberies on “streets and highways” are about 42% of all robberies, and muggings are probably the vast majority of those. Still, if most robberies aren’t muggings and most robberies don’t involve guns, and the type of robberies that aren’t muggings are the ones that more obviously call for potent weaponry, I think it is pretty safe to say that the use of firearms in muggings is at least moderately rare.

        • Jaskologist says:

          Mugging is not a profitable occupation – you’d make more money working a normal job than mugging people over any significant timespan. People assault, rob, vandalize, and generally fuck with other people because it is fun, not because it is profitable.

          Mugging may not make more money over time, but it will get you a bunch of money right now if an opportune target presents itself. For people with whichever level of time preference is the bad one, that’s important. I don’t think you really need to bring much sadism into the mix.

          Besides, the gig economy is all the rage. They can work a normal job, and mug people in their spare time!

          • Echo says:

            I believe they call that one “high time preference”, because they prefer to be high all the time.

            But it is definitely true that many muggers pick victims to take their frustrations out on. Or at least that’s the excuse used in the “in defense of looting/mugging white people” articles that go around.

      • The Anonymouse says:

        It is completely laughable to argue that loose gun regulations make law-abiding individuals safer.

        Yet here we are, amidst a declining crime rate, right along with historically “loose” gun regulations.

        • ilkarnal says:

          And your argument that the declining crime rate is caused by loose gun regulations, in a country where gun regulation has always been loose, and used to be even looser, is…? Or did you hallucinate that I wrote “if gun regulations are loose, crime rates must continually rise! forever! there can be no decline in crime rates in a country with loose gun regulation!”

          • HlynkaCG says:

            Correlation may not prove causation but it does wiggle it’s eyebrows while mouthing “look over here”.

            Point being that the idea is no where near as “laughable” as you assert.

          • Harold says:

            And your argument that the declining crime rate is caused by loose gun regulations, in a country where gun regulation has always been loose, and used to be even looser, is…?

            You’d have to look back to the period before the Civil War for our gun regulations to be looser. Waves of de jure and de facto carry restrictions followed that, to suppress carry by freedmen, immigrants from non-traditional regions, and then everyone but the well connected. When Florida enacted a shall issue concealed carry regime in 1987 it was allowed by only a few states, now it’s 42 and most of the population. And this is by far the most consequential change in gun regulations in our lifetimes.

          • ilkarnal says:

            Harold: WRT to concealed carry you’re correct, but I don’t see any regulations on how firearms can be used as significant. The only thing I care about are restrictions on the acquisition of said firearms, because my concern is with murder. The archetypal murder is at home by someone who has a deep relationship with the person they are murdering, not a stranger-stranger interaction outdoors.

            When it *is* a stranger-stranger interaction, usually the murderer isn’t the type to be overly concerned about whether they are allowed to carry their gun around or not. The only angle that is effective is making it harder for guns to come into their possession in the first place, which is done extremely effectively by raising the price… And is impossible to do any other way.

            Incidentally I live in Massachusetts where concealed carry is effectively illegal, and we have seen a decline in murder along with the rest of the nation over the past few decades. In fact we rank fairly low on the murder scale compared to gun-happy red states. I would say “Correlation may not prove causation but it does wiggle it’s eyebrows while mouthing ‘look over here’ ” – but that would be really stupid, because obviously concealed carry is not a significant deterrent or enabler of murder, and obviously demographic differences swamp even far more significant differences in policy.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Ilkarnal – “The archetypal murder is at home by someone who has a deep relationship with the person they are murdering, not a stranger-stranger interaction outdoors.”

            …As pointed out by Eric far below, this statement is profoundly misleading, to the point of malicious falsehood. It is true that the archtypal murderer does not select his target at random from the general population, because the archtypal murderer is a career criminal killing another career criminal over a conflict related to their shared vocation. To the extent that this happens in the victims’ home, that is because homes are the easiest place to find someone reliably when they don’t have a job. It seems to me disingenuous to the extreme to call a drug-pushing rivalry a “deep relationship”, and generally to conflate the friction of criminal enterprise with the close relationships of a normal citizen, but others may judge as they wish.

            For what it’s worth, I agree that guns do not reduce the crime rate. Near as I can tell, guns have no effect on the crime rate one way or the other.

          • TheNybbler says:

            The archetypal murder is not “at home by someone who has a deep relationship with the person they are murdering”

            In about half of all murders reported to the FBI, the relationship is “unknown” (to the FBI, anyway). Of the rest, about half are “acquaintance”, which is the least “deep” relationship; it’s someone known to the victim with no other special relationship. Half the rest are “stranger” — the victim and killer are not known to each other.

            Even for non-felony type homicides (that is, homicides not committed in the course of another felony), “unknown”, “acquaintance”, and “stranger” are the top three relationships.

          • ilkarnal says:

            The most common reason to murder someone, by far, is a spat between lovers. That’s the archetypal murder. If you add together all the other zillions of reasons people kill each other over, yes, that’s significantly more. It also includes a whole lot of not-murder, or at least something considerably distant from the central meaning-cluster of the term ‘murder.’

            the archtypal murderer is a career criminal killing another career criminal

            No way. But that sort of thing is a significant piece of the killing pie, and it illustrates the problem – such conflicts are often unpremeditated, and are often mutual, with both sides having cause to fear for their life. Those homicides often should go in the ‘manslaughter’ pile rather than the ‘murder’ pile.

            Let’s say I am concerned about being a blameless victim and not at all concerned about getting killed as a participant in some sort of mutually-entered fight or extralegal quasi-war. Let’s further stipulate that I am not an adventurer who seeks out those places where danger is thick in the air. In that case the archetypal murder rises precipitously from its already high relevance.

            Of course, making guns harder to get helps the innocent and the less than completely innocent simultaneously. The latter category has more weight from a numerical standpoint, the former from at least my moral standpoint, and also my practical perspective.

            To the extent that this happens in the victims’ home, that is because homes are the easiest place to find someone reliably when they don’t have a job.

            Back to the original issue of concealed-carry – it is pretty clear that whether you think we should be concerned with saving career criminals or saving spousal murder victims, concealed carry law is of little relevance. The issue is the availability of the killing-tools, not post-acquisition admonitions about how they ought to be used.

          • TheNybbler says:

            “The most common reason to murder someone, by far, is a spat between lovers.”

            This is blatantly false. Arguments, other than over money, where one spouse or girlfriend/boyfriend killed the other accounted for 636 murders in the US in 2014. Another 85 were “romantic triangle” killings (most of “acquaintances”, which suggests to me that it was usually one rival killing the other). That’s out of a total of 11,961 homicides. Certainly you could slice and dice the data to create many other small categories to make that “the largest”, but that would hardly be valid.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            Nybbler, 11,961 is murder, FWIW. Including non-negligent homicide, as most people do, brings it up 14,249. But 11,961 is the right denominator for your numbers.

            I think it is a mistake to break out romantic murders by cause. Yes, only 636 are attributed to arguments, but the rest are attributed to “other-not specified” and “unknown.” Better to just say that husband/wife/bf/gf=1203, 10% of total, and forget about circumstance.

          • TheNybbler says:

            You’re right, 14,249 is the correct number of murder + non-negligent homicides. The 11,961 is the number of murder + non-negligent homicides. for which the FBI received the supplemental data to produce those tables, I missed that. It is not a distinction between just murder and murder + non-negligent homicide. (I’m fairly sure the raw data provided to the FBI does not make that distinction)

          • Douglas Knight says:

            OK, then it’s fine to call it homicide.

          • ilkarnal says:

            https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-10

            It is perfectly clear to me that the ‘acquaintance’ and ‘stranger’ categories dissolve into a tremendous variety of different sub-categories of conflict type, while the ‘lovers’ category doesn’t. Boyfriend/girlfriend/wife/husband adds up to 10% of homicides in the table, and 18% of those where the relationship is known.

            You can of course subdivide ‘relationship strife leads to one lover killing the other,’ you can subdivide anything. I am not asserting that this is a completely homogeneous indivisible category. I am asserting that it is the largest category by far of that degree of specificity, where you know the specific relationship behind the dispute. Looking down the table ‘robbery’ has about half the number and is a fairly broad category. The rest are considerably smaller than that (ignoring those that start with ‘other.’)

            And I’ll restate another issue I have – what proportion of acquaintance/stranger homicides are fights where both sides have immediate cause to fear for their lives, compared to cases where one lover kills the other? I think almost everyone has experienced the extremely intense anger that arises in conflicts with family, which often promotes unilateral violence. Serious violent interactions between strangers are mostly bilateral or potentially bilateral – that is, between adult non-geriatric males.

            How many homicides are in the ‘man kills (implausible candidate for bilateral violence who is also a stranger)’ category? How often do these young to middle aged men who make up most of the homicide victims and perpetrators just up and kill a woman they’ve never met before, or a kid who isn’t theirs, or an old man who needs a walker? Not nearly as often as they kill and harm either fellow credible threats in the course of some dispute, or family members.

            I maintain that if we’re discussing murders that slot into the center of that word’s definition cluster, which excludes a lot of mutually threatening combat where some participant(s) die of their injuries, disputes between lovers rise precipitously from their already unsurpassed position. I don’t think calling that the ‘archetypal murder’ is a mistake.

          • TheNybbler says:

            Your claim was “The most common reason to murder someone, by far, is a spat between lovers.” You then use figures for all murders between intimates (husband and wife, boyfriend and girlfriend), to back that up. Aside from the fact that you’re counting things that aren’t “spats”, the number for murders between intimates (1203 in 2014) is still smaller than the number between strangers (1381). I’m not sure why you think “murders of strangers” is a very divisible category but “murders of intimates” is not. Especially when the divisions between murder circumstances are in the table and you’ve explicitly ignored them for murders between intimates.

            It seems to me you’re gerrymandering the numbers to obtain the results you want. You’re more likely to be killed by a stranger than a lover. You’re more likely to be killed over an argument with an acquaintance than an argument with a lover. You’re more likely to be killed by someone else committing another felony than by a lover.

        • Harold says:

          Incidentally I live in Massachusetts where concealed carry is effectively illegal…

          I used to live in Massachusetts and therefore still follow what’s going on there, and concealed carry is most certainly not “effectively illegal”, it’s up to the police chief of the town in which you reside, as has been handgun ownership for a long time, and recently long gun ownership.

          • ilkarnal says:

            My bad for generalizing from Boston and its immediate environs. I knew it was up to the police chief, I just read that it was nigh-impossible to get here and assumed most of the state followed that lead. Apparently it is more of a patchwork, with rural chiefs being much more permissive. In any case it is greatly restricted compared to shall-issue states, which doesn’t seem to have prevented the state from benefiting from the nationwide crime slump.

  99. Bugmaster says:

    To be fair, the pro-gun argument (as far as I understand it) is that guns reduce crime in general, by a). allowing the populace to stop mass shooters, b). allowing innocent people to defend themselves against violent attackers (who, being criminals, would own guns no matter what), and c). creating a powerful deterrent effect due to common knowledge of (a) and (b).

    If this argument were true, then we would indeed expect gun ownership to correlate with the number of people killed by someone else’s gun; however, we would also see a negative correlation between gun ownership and general violent crime. In addition, we would expect a larger proportion of guns to be fired in self-defence.

    An expansion of this argument states that we live in a sort of “uncanny valley” of gun control. If we had total gun control, and no one could get any guns at all, then of course the number of shootings would decrease — but such control would require totalitarian measures of North Korean caliber, and would thus be highly undesirable. On the other hand, if we had virtually no gun control, almost everyone would own a gun (or several guns). At this point, violent crime would also decrease dramatically, due to the deterrent effects mentioned above. Unfortunately, as of today we have just enough gun control to make it prohibitively difficult for ordinary law-abiding citizens to get guns, while enabling criminals to basically shoot whomever they want.

    • rational_rob says:

      There’s a difference between owning guns for self-defense and owning guns as a deterrent for attackers. A lot of NRA paranoia is based off of the fact that no citizen can legally match up to a police officer or a soldier in their authority, and that is a completely reasonable fear. But a society full of typical card-carrying NRA members would threaten anything they found suspicious, like a society entirely composed of less-organized, less bureaucratically limited corrupt cops.

      The problem is, both sides think guns are the solution to their problem – that is, both sides think that the people they want in power should have the authority to wield weapons. Conservatives and right leaning libertarians are naturally suspicious of a governing body that has both the authority to make laws and to use guns, and liberals are generally suspicious of governments that don’t have the authority to enforce their laws.

      • Gbdub says:

        Actually, “card carrying NRA members” rarely actually threaten anybody, and I’m guessing probably commit homicide at a rate lower than the national average. (Concealed carry permit holders demonstrably have a lower rate of violent crime – there’s probably a lot of overlap).

        Part of the problem (on both sides) is ignorant hyperbolizing of the opposing culture. A bit of charity is in order perhaps?

        What you call “paranoia” is also “a culture of self-reliance”. It’s not that “red tribe” gun owners don’t accept the legitimacy of police or military (in fact they usually support both more strongly than average), it’s that they understand that “when seconds count, the police are only minutes away”.

    • Anthony says:

      I think (a) is not really important to the general analysis of guns and crime.

      However, your conclusion “we would indeed expect gun ownership to correlate with the number of people killed by someone else’s gun” doesn’t follow – if the deterrent effect is large enough, then the number of people killed by someone else’s gun might go down significantly.

      Various research shows that most (perhaps as much as 98% of) “Defensive Gun Uses” involve only brandishing the gun, at which point the aggressor stops aggressing. Many of these cases are not reported to police – sometimes because the defender isn’t legally allowed to have a gun, sometimes because he doesn’t really want to deal with the police for a variety of other reasons.

      • That is correct. It’s been known since Gary Kleck’s study in 1992 that self-defense uses in which the firearm is not discharged otnumber those in which it is by 6:1. And there is thud good reason to believe that defensive gun use is severely underreported.

  100. rational_rob says:

    You assert that Australia style gun control might be a good use of the state’s money and time. I would assert that the value gained from saving two-thousand lives is negligible compared to the loss of a) armed citizens and b) the money invested towards solving the issue. Every life is valuable, but by asserting that these policies are useful to implement, you are also asserting that there is absolutely nothing more useful that you can do to lower the rate of unnatural deaths.

    Even just concerning gun deaths: What if we subsidized therapists? What if we worked on creating more effective bullet-proofing, either for public spaces or personal use? What if, instead of offering incentives to lower gun ownership, we increase the strictness of (already implemented) gun background checks by just a little more? And all this is a assuming we can’t to something about criminals themselves to make gun violence less prevalent.

    While I admit this work with statistics is very good, gun homicide isn’t just a matter of premeditated murder – like suicide, it’s a combination of factors, whether it be mental health or financial security. Taking steps to eliminate these factors kills two birds with one stone.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I don’t necessarily think it would be a good use of anyone’s time, just that if God offered you the opportunity to implement it vs. not implement it with the press of a button, press that button.

      • rational_rob says:

        Well, duh. That’s taken as a granted. Of course, if you’re libertarian minded like me (frankly, I’m a bit too far to the right, thanks to my parents) there’s a risk inherent to implementing systems in the first place, but that’s debatable. Personally, I *know* I don’t respond well to authority, so I make mental exceptions for things like TSA checkpoints or gun background checks. But things that exist independently of that, things that don’t depend on background (i.e. blanket gun control laws like the SAFE act) seem kind of eccentric, and this policy seems more towards the latter.

        I don’t know much about Australia’s gun laws, though, and another irrational sentiment of mine is the fear of threatening-sounding unknowns. If you were to summarize the policy in a few sentences, what would it be?

        • James Picone says:

          Wiki article has a pretty clear summary.

          Handguns require you to be part of a target shooting club or a security guard, otherwise illegal. Some rifles and shotguns are illegal, some are restricted to farmers/sports shooters/a few other small categories, some require a “genuine reason” which is probably a legal term of art. I don’t know anything about firearms and can’t parse the categories for you, I’m afraid.

          • AlphaGamma says:

            The weird thing I find about Australia’s gun laws is the ban on civilian ownership of body armour. While I understand the historical background to this, it is still a law the only possible purpose of which is to make it easier for the police to kill you should they deem it necessary.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @AlphaGamma:

            Wellll, that doesn’t seem unreasonable?

            Unless you are engaged in either 1) security operations (police or private security) or 2) criminal operations, the chance that you are going to go around wearing body armor is roughly nil.

          • Harold says:

            HeelBearCub: Unless you are engaged in either 1) security operations (police or private security) or 2) criminal operations, the chance that you are going to go around wearing body armor is roughly nil.

            What do you base this on? Do you know any civilians who own body armor? (Which started to become a big thing before Y2K). What do you think is the probability that I’ll put on my quick don set during a home invasion? The probability that I’ll wear my concealed set and maybe more if events drastically increase my need? Etc.

          • “Unless you are engaged in either 1) security operations (police or private security) or 2) criminal operations, the chance that you are going to go around wearing body armor is roughly nil.”

            What if you have good reason to think someone might want to assassinate you?

            It occurred to me at some point that perhaps my father (Milton Friedman) ought to wear concealed body armor, although he never did. There must have been millions of people out there who regarded him as a figure of evil. It only takes one.

            It’s striking how rarely people in our society engage in direct violence for ideological reasons. My wife long worried that my habit of arguing online would some day result in a brick through our window, but it never happened.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @David Friedman:
            I was trying to get at that with “private security”.

            @AlphaGamma:
            In Australia? It seems much less likely.

            In the US, I’m sure there are many people, although I would guess they are a pretty small percentage of the population. If 32% of people own guns, I would be surprised if even a third of those people own body armor. And the number of people who actually put that body armor on in a year to be a much smaller percentage.

            But, of course I could be completely wrong here. It just seems like the number of (non-police/non-security force) people who put on body armor in a year should top out at something like 1% of the US population, if that. And Australia should be much smaller.

            But I don’t take an absolute rights perspective to these things. Rather I view them in terms of competing priorities and rights. The less legitimate need their is for body armor in a society, the less pressure their is to grant a right to own body armor.

        • Scott Alexander says:

          It’s “taken for granted” that gun control would be a good idea if it could be done easily? That’s…not the impression I’ve gotten.

  101. James Donald says:

    > “(I didn’t price in the advantages of guns in terms of preventing state tyranny and protecing freedom, which might be worth subsidizing, but my guess is that if 32% gun ownership is enough to maintain freedom, 22% gun ownership is as well)”

    Hey, no fair.

    If a modest reduction in guns produces a modest decrease in murders, also produces a modest increase in tyranny.

    Observe that in Europe if you commit a thought crime, antifa beat you up while the police watch benignly while remaining extremely vigilant for any attempt to defend yourself against antifa, and when antifa has finished with your beating, police drag you off to jail for thought crime

    Whereas in America, if you commit a thought crime, they sue anyone who employs you for “hostile work environment” making you unemployable.

    It seems likely that this difference is in substantial part due to higher gun ownership.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Interesting point, but sorry, you were banned indefinitely and it’s not the end of indefinitely yet.

      • JAD is a huge pain in the ass on my blog, too.

        But sometimes, once in a blue moon, he gets things right by speaking truths from which the politically correct avert their eyes. This is one of those times.

        • Anonymaus says:

          To add the other perspective to show how really all debates are bravery debates: Leftists in Germany feel that the police is more aggressive towards them, getting violent against peaceful left-wing protests, not intervening as much when right wing protests turn violent, surveilling the left wing party which has a sizeable representation in parliament etc.

        • Steve Johnson says:

          Since we’re all coming out – the point is that Scott bans people that point out the the ideas from which he’d prefer to avert his eyes – it’s not an accident that he’s made that you’re helpfully pointing out.

          I’ll go back to my ban now.

        • Mark Atwood says:

          JAD is a huge pain in the ass on my blog, too.

          You should watch him police his own blog.

          He has some of the most elegant ways of saying “you are an idiot, you are misinformed, you are wrong, and you are Not Helping” to people who agree with him that I have ever seen.

          I have taken notes, and try to use some of those techniques myself.

          • Thank you, but I get a gutfull of him on Armed & Dangerous already. The thought of voluntarily diving into a vat of his effusions makes me shudder.

            (Those of you aren’t A&D regulars don’t know that I make a point of never banning on grounds of repellent ideas, but that JAD is the most severe temptation I have encountered to do so.)

  102. Bill Harshaw says:

    Without reading the comments, I’m impressed by the quality of the argument, and depressed by the intelligence displayed. 🙂

  103. Rob says:

    “That means that gun control would “save” $22 billion dollars a year. Americans buy about 20 million guns per year (really)! If we were to tax guns to cover the “externality” of gun homicides preventable by Australia-level gun control, we would have to slap a $1000 tax on each gun sold. ”

    I think you should compare the flow of murders to the flow of all gun-ownership (not just new sales).

  104. ad says:

    Who’d have thought populating half a country with the descendants of a group of people called “Border Reavers” would cause so much trouble?

    Are American Southerners really more likely to be descended from “Border Reavers” than Scottish Southerners? Or English Northerners, for that matter? Because they are not notoriously violent areas these days.

    If you want some kind of inherited cultural effect, it occurs to me that immigrants to the South were much more likely to die of something tropical, and much more likely to be male, than immigrants to the North. So the South had a founder population that was younger, had a shorter life expectancy, and was more male than the North. That might have done a lot to drive the violence rate up.

  105. Point of moral philosophy in response to a comment buried too deep for direct reply.

    I’m a utilitarian consequentialist, too. But it’s not hard to get from that to “shirking your duty” or virtue ethics and deontology in general. You get there if you have some notion of what long-term outcomes look like under different choices of ethical premises (or, if you prefer, different utility-maximizing strategies – I don’t regard the difference as significant and I don’t think you should either).

    The mistake deontologists and virtue ethicists make is not that duty or virtue aren’t useful terms of discussion, it’s in treating them as ungrounded primaries that don’t have to be justified by a utilitarian analysis.

    So when I say “It is the duty of every adult to defend civilization with words and deeds – and the particular duty of adult males to defend with violence up to and including lethal force,” feel free to unpack this as an consequentialist assertion that societies without this as a normative rule tend to come to bad ends.

    Read the headlines. We are seeing in Europe, right now, that the consequences of abrogating this duty include mass rape by invaders – this in the 21st century in the supposedly civilized world, not some tribal backwater in past times.

    And I use that emotive an example for a reason. The other purpose in using the language of duty is to appeal to social instincts formed in the EAA which may arise from selective pressure for certain utility outcomes, but are not expressed in those terms by our DNA or neural wiring. For the social order to have homeostasis under extreme stress, adults – especially male adults – have to be willing to ride to the sound of the guns, fight there, and possibly die there.

    Emotionally, you can’t get that with the bloodless language of utility maximization. You can get it with the call to duty, though. That’s how we’re wired.

    • Marc Whipple says:

      “Roman matrons used to tell their sons, ‘Come back with your shield – or on it.’ In time this custom declined. So did Rome.”

      • The Anonymouse says:

        Silk slippers down the stairs, wooden shoes up. Thankfully I don’t think we’re there quite yet, and while the original post talks about a nebulous Southern culture of violence to be accounted for, it is that same culture that provides us a disproportionate share of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.

    • anon says:

      What? No. Treating duty and virtue “as ungrounded primaries that don’t have to be justified by a utilitarian analysis” is a feature, not a bug. All you’re saying is the problem with deontology and virtue ethics is that they aren’t consequentialist enough.

    • Alrenous says:

      ostensibly [snip] like that are invitations to abuse. And somebody always picks up that invitation.

      You can’t justify one externally imposed duty, you can only justify any externally imposed duty. Know of any unjust commands that are currently being justified as your duty?

    • Earthly Knight says:

      This whole discussion is badly confused. All consequentialist theories are isomorphic to some deontological theory or other, so a consequentialist should have no quarrel with the language of duty and obligation. Here is the deontologized version of maximizing hedonistic act utilitarianism, for instance:

      Principle: At all times, of the actions available to you, you have a duty to choose whichever action will, unto eternity, generate the greatest balance of pleasure over pain. In the case of ties, each of the tied actions is permissible and their disjunction obligatory.

      Corollary: All other actions are forbidden and none are supererogatory.

  106. Krisztian says:

    I think you’re quite aware of the epistemic limitations of your numbers, so I want to focus on their implications. Let’s suppose your $1000 dollar social cost per gun is correct. Still, is a buyback + ban the optimal policy?

    Econ 101 would suggest no: you could just put a Pigovian tax on guns to compensate the externality; and the people buying the guns would be the ones who value guns above and beyond that.

    But there is still a problem: heterogeneity. While the average externality is $1000, there is probably quite a bit of variance. You alluded to this in the post. For example, what is the externality of rural white gun-owner in Wyoming? Probably next to nothing.

    So how about the following policy response? Require every gun owner to have insurance (or own 7.7 million). If the person commits homicide, the insurance company has to pay 7.7 million. The insurance companies will presumably vary premiums by a number of different factors that correlate with gun homicides. Notice how this strategy is much more robust even if the externality is constant, as we are not relying on imperfect political processes about a very charged topic to determine the externality (let alone the ban), we’re just setting the value of a human life and letting the market sort out the rest. If an insurance company consistently underestimates the probability of homicide, they will soon be out of business.

    Such a system could also be a good compromise. To liberals: if a person pays the social cost of owning gun, why restrict gun ownership beyond that? To conservatives: if you’re unlikely to commit a crime, your cost doesn’t go up much; and don’t you want to be safe from would-be criminals?

    There are of course some rough edges. Gun-owners might worry that insurance companies have some market power and charge more than the appropriate externality. And progressives would probably freak out if we allowed race as a predictive factor. (would they freak out about gender to the same extent though?)

    Btw, first time commenting here — *yay!*

    • Evan Þ says:

      Welcome! Always glad to see another commenter bringing up interesting questions!

      Considering that most guns used to murder people haven’t been legally purchased, your insurance scheme would miss a large part of the problem. Either your insurance would be required to pay for any murders committed with your gun down the road five years after it was stolen (and you duly reported it to the police), or you’d be effectively paying for suicide insurance. I’ve got no principled objection to the second option, except that it doesn’t seem like something the government should mandate. The first option, though, I have huge objections to.

      • brad says:

        I don’t see any reason in principle for holding people responsible, even with strict liability, for the theft of particularly dangerous objects.

        For an analogy, if a truck carrying hazardous waste crashes and people are exposed, the truck owner has to pay damages even if there was no negligence. The risk of pure accident has to fall somewhere, in the usual case it falls on whoever happens to be injured, but in the case of ultrahazardous activities the law shifts it to the person carrying out the activity.

        In terms of guns, you could attach a bond (i.e. an insurance policy that pays out no matter what) at the time of manufacturer or import that would follow the gun where ever it went.

        • Tibor says:

          Theft can be,in a sense, both a fault of the thief and the victim (actually, the same holds more or less for all crimes). If I leave a car unlocked and a wallet (or a gun) visibly on the front seat, I am basically inviting the burglar. Sure, it might have been just a mistake of mine but you might double check that you did not leave the gun there if, in addition to having your gun stolen, it also means trouble for you. It imposes an additional cost on you and an additional incentive to make sure you don’t make that mistake.

          • xtmar says:

            No, just no. If I leave my house unlocked, that may make it more likely to be burgled than if I have a bear trap under every brick on my walkway. However, in both cases the law and social expectations clearly provide that my house is mine, and not to be burgled. Even if I don’t do anything to protect that right*, it’s still the burglar who is at fault for violating the law and victimizing me.

            *Yes, there are technically border cases like adverse possession and so on, but in general I should be able to leave my house open and not have it be burgled. The fact that I need to take counter-measures is only because the police are ineffective in ridding society of the offenders.

          • Tibor says:

            @xtmar: If you are talking “morally” then yes, the burglar is at fault. But that was not my point. My point is that if you punish people for having guns stolen from them (in an effort to prevent them from being used in violent crime) they will have an increased incentive not to have them stolen from them which will likely result in fewer guns being stolen and subsequently used in violent crime. That is the reason why holding people responsible for that might in principle make sense. I think that prosecuting people for having their guns stolen in all cases is not a good idea but maybe requiring guns to be stored in a safe if you are not carrying them (and then prosecuting you if the gun gets stolen from you and you did not have the safe…although I am not sure how the fact that you had a safe when the gun was stolen would be/is checked in practice) might not be such a stupid idea.

          • xtmar says:

            @Tibor

            From a utilitarian standpoint assigning such responsibility might work out better than the current system, but I think doing so would require ignoring the first order effects of what you’re doing. Is punishing people for making themselves easy victims really a good path to go down, or a moral one?

            I can see holding gun owners responsible for not securing guns that fall into the hands of their small children, but otherwise I don’t think it’s moral to prosecute people for that, regardless of the utilitarian results.

            EDIT In fairness, there are some things for which you can be prosecuted for failing to adequately protect, like explosives, radioactive material, and so on. However, as far as I know, those things only apply to businesses that are dealing with restricted materials/information, and not to things that a normal person might have at home.

        • Evan Þ says:

          But then, if a car is stolen and later kills someone, the original owner isn’t responsible at all.

          If you want guns treated differently, where do we draw the line between cars and guns, and under what principle?

          • xtmar says:

            I think it depends on the relationship between the driver/shooter and the owner of the gun/car. If somebody unrelated to you steals your car while you’re on vacation, you shouldn’t be liable, while if you allow your toddler to play in the car and he accidentally releases the parking brake while it’s on the hill and rolls into another car, you’re on the hook for that, as you should be if your toddler shoots himself or somebody else. (The car version happened to me) Between these two instances you have a variety of shadings, from somebody who you vaguely know that helps themself to the car to a teenage child who absconds with the keys for a night of partying.

          • Evan Þ says:

            @xtmar, could you confirm that? AFAIK, if a teenager absconds with the car keys, his parents can report the car stolen and have no insurance liability.

            But whether or not that’s the case, if you leave the keys in plain sight on the roof of your car, and a stranger picks up the keys and drives it away, you can still report it stolen and not be held responsible for what happens to the car two years down the road. That’s the principle I want to defend about guns.

          • brad says:

            Suppose that caffeine had all the negative health consequences that cigarettes do, but that they also increased the growth rate of an economy where usage was widespread by 1%. Cigarettes on the other hand had slightly negative economic effects.

            Regardless of where you would ultimately come down on how we should regulate those two things, wouldn’t you agree that there were at least somewhat different considerations at play?

            I imagine you don’t agree with the analogy because you think guns are more like caffeine in the example than cigarettes. I don’t expect to convince you otherwise. But once you see that I don’t share that view, the rest of the position should be pretty easy to understand as flowing from that.

    • This will never fly with gun owners because we’ve learned – the hard way – that ostensibly rational/neutral restrictions and cost levies like that are invitations to abuse. And somebody always picks up that invitation.

      Or, to put it a different way, the particular kind of social trust that would be required for this scheme to fly politically, was destroyed long ago.

    • keranih says:

      If the person commits homicide, the insurance company has to pay 7.7 million.

      …and if the person doesn’t get caught? Or commits homicide with a gun that is not their own? Or commits homicide with a weapon that is not a gun?

      Beyond these questions, I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what insurance is for. It’s not a pre-paid fine for committing a crime.

      (Welcome in. Did you bring cookies?)

    • HlynkaCG says:

      @Krisztian

      Welcome to the garden, I am intrigued by your idea and would like to know more.

      🙂

    • Krisztian says:

      Many good points, so let me change my opinion. I don’t know whether the insurance scheme above would be preferable to (classical) liberal (unregulated) gun policy. It does still seem like a preferable policy to a total gun buyback / ban though.

      I don’t know about other countries, but in Hungary we have a similar(ish) policy with car ownership. If you own a car, you have to buy mandatory car insurance that covers the damage of the other car/person/building if you’re responsible for a crash. You’re free to buy insurance that covers your own car, but you have to make sure that other people’s losses due to your behavior are covered.

      I’m not really convinced about the minor complaints. What if you’re not found guilty? You are not liable. What if the gun was purchased on the black market? Not much you can do in any case. What if your gun is stolen? I doubt gun thefts are so common as to make a quantitative difference either way. What if the person commits homicide by means other than the insured gun? No liability.

      EDIT: Let me just spell out the precise claim I’m making. Even if guns cause higher homicide, and even if the magnitude is modest / significant (say a $1000 social cost per gun), a gun buyback / ban does not look like optimal policy.

      • keranih says:

        in Hungary we have a similar(ish) policy with car ownership. If you own a car, you have to buy mandatory car insurance that covers the damage of the other car/person/building if you’re responsible for a crash

        …In the USA, such policies are required as well – but not for ownership of the car, only to be able to legally drive the car on the roads. More importantly – intentional criminal acts are not covered by liability insurance (see WP here)

        As the majority of murders in the USA are not done by people who have legally purchased a firearm, and are committed as an intentional illegal action, this sort of insurance scheme is a) unlikely to have any impact on murders and b) will have a large impact on legal, law-abiding, non-criminal gun owners.

        A final thought – the people most at risk of being murdered come from (largely) the same socio-economic class as most murderers, which is a group both impoverished and with a high rate of driving without legally required auto insurance. Given the failure of our government to keep un-insured drivers off the road, I’m really not thinking that we’d be able to keep un-insured shooters off the street, either.

      • Evan Þ says:

        “I doubt gun thefts are so common as to make a quantitative difference either way.”

        I’d like some numbers on that? It seems to me that the liability if your gun gets stolen and then used in a mass shooting three years down the line is so humungous that it’d make a difference even when amortized.

  107. Dr M says:

    I think you also should correlate the homicide rate by firearms and other means to the drug trade and gang activity. Also, military and police have a high rate of gun ownership Is there any correlation with increased homicide in these groups?

  108. Mark Atwood says:

    (meta about the social context of Scott’s article)

    I am starting to wonder if there is starting to be a now known dread at the writers Vox/Buzzfeed/Gawker/etc along the lines of “oh shit, Scott Alexander just tore one of our articles apart”.

    And I wonder if, it that is the case, if it’s starting to cause some backpressure, in that some of the writers take more care or don’t lie quite so much, out of fear that it may happen.

    This is an unalloyed Good Thing, I think.

    Mental note: start contributing to Scott’s Patreon account.

    • Anaxagoras says:

      My assumption would be no. This is a solid community, one that may be disproportionately influential for its size, but I’d be surprised if it had much influence outside of a small number of readers. Scott did say that he spoke to the Vox writer, and we know Ezra Klein reads the site, so it might have some degree of influence on Vox, but I’d be surprised if it affected the Gawker stratum at all.

      That said, I really don’t know. I guess we could look at how often Scott’s stuff get referenced, and by how high-profile authors. Or we could ask him what his perspective on the matter is.

      • Mark Atwood says:

        My assumption would be no

        IDK, my perception is that the “a man is more likely to be killed by a meteor than falsely accussed of rape” narrative stopped pretty much instantly in social media, in blog trash news, and in mainstream media after Scott tore it apart. I noticed people going back and deleting their fb posts and tweets of their support of that falsehood, their own personal memory holes in operation.

        He’s got some impact.

        • Anaxagoras says:

          I can’t really speak personally to that, being rather new to social media, and generally trying to avoid politics on such an unproductive platform (or at least forget about it quickly). Looking back, I see that this was in early 2014 in response to some BuzzFeed post about a month earlier. How long does this sort of thing usually stick around?

          As for the deletions, how much of that did you really see? I’d find people recanting anything pretty remarkable, so if a few people did, that would really stick in my mind, and I might overestimate how widespread it was. Plus, if you’re someone with a lot of friends in the rationalist community, you’d be looking at an environment where, as near as I can tell, Scott really is pretty influential.

          Does Google have something that lets you see how much a page was linked to over time? Would Facebook have something about how much a link was shared?

        • I found this blog through Marginal Revolution, which is one of the more popular economics blogs in the sphere.

          Scott puts up good numbers with good analysis and demonstrates great charity to opponents, so he probably has a great deal of stock among SOME big names in the blogosphere.

          Not sure if quantifiable.

  109. On the higher rate of US homicide not being explained by guns, Europe experienced a long term decline in homicide rates as it moved away from its medieval era. That shift seems to be connected to moving out of being medieval societies, where the state simply has a dominance of organised violence (but not a monopoly thereof), to post-medieval societies, where the state has an effective monopoly of organised violence.

    In the US case, that is more the shift to a post-frontier society; as on the frontier the American state very much did not have a monopoly of organised violence. And the US is much closer to its frontier period than Europe is to its medieval period. Too close to reach European levels of homicide rates.

  110. Elenor says:

    I’m quite dismayed that you entirely left out the most important and fundamental reason for owning guns — and the one MOST of us gunnies buy them for: SELF-defense! You pick apart stats on ‘murder by gun’; yet completely avoid trying to calculate how very very very MANY folks are preventing *their own murders* by possession of (and carrying) a firearm!

    Granted, it is much harder to calculate ‘negative costs’ (uncounted benefits?); but I believe I’ve read at least one blog essay by you where you look into how NOT counting those negative costs gives a totally misleading picture of what is actually “published” and thus leads to wrong and dangerous — even deadly — conclusions. I own guns (have yet to read how many makes an arsenal, but I am working towards having one!) because I am determined to defend and protect myself from the more-and-more common assaults that people of my race (white), sex (female), and age (old) are being targeted for.

    (Not familiar with that? Go search YouTube or the “World Hip Hop” site, where you can WATCH literally hundreds of these assaults. Just because your mainstream media is intentionally not showing you doesn’t mean it’s not common. I want and need guns because I am not going to be one of those homicides you were playing about with statistics reflecting…)

    • “I’m quite dismayed that you entirely left out the most important and fundamental reason for owning guns — and the one MOST of us gunnies buy them for: SELF-defense! You pick apart stats on ‘murder by gun’; yet completely avoid trying to calculate how very very very MANY folks are preventing *their own murders* by possession of (and carrying) a firearm!”

      I think everyone is well aware of that. The thing is that self defense against a heavily armed population is not the (only) solution, it is the Molochian/defectional solution. The point is to explore solutions where the overall death rate is lower.

      • Elenor says:

        Do you mean “solutions where the overall death rate” of the bad guys is lower? Cause the overall death rate (and rape, torture, brain damage, loss of teeth, broken eye sockets and smashed cheekbones, and on and on) of the ATTACKED is way too high and rising.

        What on earth kind of “defense” would you consider “against a heavily armed population”? Oh — or do you mean disarming the VICTIMS as if that would somehow encourage the heavily armed bad guys to quit attacking? (Are you aware the U.S. Supreme Court has actually ruled that ‘we’ cannot require felons to register their guns, because that would be self-incrimination? Cause, you know, they aren’t supposed to own guns! So, register the law-abiding — but the courts give a(nother) pass to the bad guys?)

        “I think everyone is well aware of that.”
        I don’t. “IF” one is trying to provide a useful (and even slightly “scientific”) case against ANYthing — gun ownership in the case of this essay — then to leave out the biggest and most fundamental aspect of it is … well, let’s just call it less than complete.

        IF SSC were trying to actually work out costs-and-benefits, use and mis-use, then the MAJOR reason folks buy, own, and carry handguns should be a MAJOR aspect to the considerations. In the comments, y’all are nitpicking about all kinds of details (some worthwhile, some not-so), but just … well, not even glossing over … entirely ignoring the major reason this whole discussion occurs!

        And, if 90% of solving a problem is **correctly identifying** the problem – well, you’ve missed this one by more than a country mile!

    • JBeshir says:

      Looking at the correlations between gun ownership and homicide rates is already factoring this in. SSC is looking at total murder rates- not specifically gun murder rates.

      Reduction of non-murder violent crime might not be entirely factored in, things are complicated there.

  111. Warren says:

    Good post, just wanted to add two more papers on a culture of violence.

    By the author of the Southern Culture of Violence study (Grojean) and two coauthors there’s “The Wild West is Wild: The Homicide Resource Curse” which is like the culture of violence but with mining in the western US.
    http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2406707

    And for Canada, there’s Mounties. In the article “The Mounties and the Origins of Peace in the Canadian Prairies” Restrepo argues that there are higher murder rates in Canada further away from where Mounties were located ~1900. Also, there are more penalties from NHL players from areas further away from the Mounties.
    http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2671980

  112. danshep says:

    > unless you’re going on a mass shooting (WHICH IS REALLY RARE) you wouldn’t expect more murders from any gun in a household beyond the first

    Mass shooting is REALLY RARE in other countries – but it’s just uncommon in the U.S. – according to http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/, there was 367
    mass shooting deaths in 2015 – around 3% of gun homicides.

    • Marc Whipple says:

      When one gangbanger kills two or more gangbangers at the same time, you may call it a mass shooting if you like, but you will not find me convinced that therefore we have more than one mass shooting per day in the US.

    • To get to 367 mass shootings in 2015 you have to loosen the definition of “mass shooting” to the point where it’s completely disconnected from what most people think they mean by the term.

      The FBI defines a mass shooting as one that produces four or more deaths. By that definition there have been 73 mass shootings in the U.S. since 1982. There were 4 in 2015. This was above the long term average of 2.2 because Islamic terrorists (who have been increasing their share of mass shootings steadily since 9/11) pepetrated two.

      Even Mother Jones, a publication with a history of extreme hostility to firearms rights, has officially called bullshit on the “more mass shootings than days in the year” hype. They now maintain a database of these incidents which you can Google. It makes illuminating reading.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      You are more likely to be killed by the cops, or to die of meningitis, than to be in a mass shooting.

      At least when we talk about homicide or suicide by gun there are significant body counts.

  113. Echo says:

    Today’s events pretty much prove there’s no point in rational discussion. One side of this lies so blatantly that their supporters are living in a bubble completely unreachable from the real world.
    This is the only issue where the president could go on TV and claim that two class A felonies are actually legal because of the machinations of his evil enemies. The chutzpah would be almost admirable if the consequences weren’t so dreadful.

    I’m done pretending my opponents are decent, rational human beings who only spew toddler-level penis jokes because they’re having a bad day.
    I’m done biting my tongue every time some god damn degenerate calls my friends “AMMOSEXUALS LOL”.
    I’m done giving progs the benefit of the doubt when they talk about “burying my family in the ash heap of history”.
    I’m done putting up with vile creatures claiming I’m a nazi who plots mass-rapes as a “false flag attack” to make immigrants look bad.
    I’m done being polite and reasonable about gun rights, because that politeness will never be returned.

    If Scott wants people to be reasonable about this, he’s going to be really disappointed.

    • Vox Imperatoris says:

      What if I told you very many people on your side are just like the ones you complain about, and very many people on their side are not?

      When you say “we” are not like that—and you mean a very small group—maybe you’re right. But if you mean “Republicans” or “right-wingers”, I’m sorry, but you’re wrong. And I say this as someone on the right. Even a very large number of my own little subtribe of Objectivists are just like those bad people.

      You just have to accept that there are people who take ideas seriously, and there are demagogues and their puppets. My belief, which I think has been backed up by experience no matter how bad things may sometimes feel, is that it is possible to use reason and persuasion on the former type of people, even if they disagree with you. If you don’t think that, just grab a club and start hitting people over the head—or join the demagogues because they figured out that more hands can hold more clubs.

      • Echo says:

        That’s exactly what I’m doing. It’s time to reach for any club we can get away with using to bludgeon the enemy into submission, because that’s the only thing that’s ever helped us win.
        There’s times and places to be reasonable and polite, when it’s helpful. Before the Supreme Court, for example, when our chosen representatives run circles around the opposition.

        But I will never pretend that the creatures calling me a “nazi ammosexual” are human beings. They’ve lost the right to ask that after the things they’ve done.

        Yes, I’m radicalised. It’s time for it.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          *cough* Part of the problem… *cough*

          The time and place for demonizing your opponents is when you’re going to “slap the Jap” by resisting them with violence.

          • Echo says:

            Not my problem. If you want a civil society, give me some guarantee that our civility won’t be weaponized against us, like it has for the last decade.

            And if demonizing your opponents means you’re about to start killing them, what does it mean when leftists are calling me to be killed?
            Oh, sorry, I forgot it’s just a harmless metaphor when they call for mass murder of their political opponents.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            Jesus Christ, have some perspective.

            The sky is not falling. You are not living in Weimar Germany or Russia’s February Republic. The enemy is not at the gates.

            For one thing, “the enemy” is not even winning! The past few years have been some of the best for gun rights in a century! The Supreme Court protected the individual right to own guns for the first time ever. You’re winning the battle but getting scared by the opposition’s howls of terror and calling for “no quarter”.

            Even if they did do a complete ban, no guns allowed, it would not be the end of the world. It would be bad, as the drug war is bad. But you would fucking deal with it. You’d still be living freer and better than the vast majority of people in history.

            You can talk about the “road to serfdom” all you want, but it’s poor shitty countries and those who get invaded who turn to totalitarianism. The government’s restrictions on our freedom irk me, too, but it’s not a matter of taking away one right at a time until we get to Stalin. It has never happened that way, and it is not likely to happen.

            Nor are we about to have EURABIA become the next Soviet Union.

            If you lived in Israel, you’d have the right to be Concerned. (Even then, not Panicked.) Islamism is a threat we should deal with, yes. But it’s not an existential threat. It’s a nuisance. One we shouldn’t tolerate, but a nuisance nevertheless.

            Left-wingers have got their climate alarmism. It looks like too many right-wingers have their “culture alarmism”. Completely inflate the magnitude of the danger, claim we have to Do Something Now, and claim the Firm but Necessary Steps are what you wanted all along.

            The fact that they don’t have any sense of perspective doesn’t mean you shouldn’t, either. Stop watching TV news. Go read Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist or something.

          • Echo says:

            Not sure why you brought up Islamism. I never did, and certainly don’t consider it any kind of direct threat to the US or my people.

            Knock-on effects of regional destabilization could be disastrous, sure, but I’m not entirely convinced that Islamist regimes in the region would cause that any more than the current chaos does. At worst there’ll be another round of awful sectarian slaughter like in the 700s(?). (600s? I get my Fitnas mixed up)

            Incidentally, I don’t watch “TV news”, or any TV at all (nice subtle way of saying “stop watching Fox News, dumb hick” though).

            You want me to stop worrying about the gun issue, give my side a few billionaires who can afford to dump millions into buying local elections, like Bloomberg does.

          • anonymous says:

            The richest man in NYC is not Mike Bloomberg, it’s David Koch. He donates a lot of money, to among other right wing groups, ALEC. They lobby for among right wing things, lax gun laws.

            But don’t let me stop you from going on with your martyrdom speech. You were saying something about Woe is Me?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Echo:

            Not sure why you brought up Islamism. I never did, and certainly don’t consider it any kind of direct threat to the US or my people.

            Sorry, I assumed your line about being accused of plotting mass rapes to make immigrants look bad was a reference to some stories about Muslim immigrants raping people in England and Germany that have been going around here.

            What was it referring to? Just curious.

            Incidentally, I don’t watch “TV news”, or any TV at all (nice subtle way of saying “stop watching Fox News, dumb hick” though).

            Nope, that’s not what I meant. CNN and the rest are just as bad, just as sensationalist, just as committed to making it seem like the world is about to end.

            If you don’t watch them, good. I recommend taking other steps to feel more calm and optimistic in that case. Like don’t follow the news on gun control at all.

            You want me to stop worrying about the gun issue, give my side a few billionaires who can afford to dump millions into buying local elections, like Bloomberg does.

            I’m sorry, but are you fucking kidding me? Ever heard of the Koch brothers?

            I have. Because I’ve been paid by them to call people in primary elections and tell them to vote for the Club for Growth endorsed candidate. Not to mention that, separately, I am a graduate of the Koch Fellow Program and have worked at three places funded by them. I met my current housemates because one of them worked for the Charles Koch Institute (she and her girlfriend are very nice). I very much appreciate the Koch brothers.

            Both the Republicans and Democrats have their share of billionaires, and the numbers are about the same. When the main line of Democrats for years is “plutocrats buying elections for the Republicans and we have to repeal the First Amendment to stop it”, it’s just hilarious to hear someone reverse it.

          • hlynkacg says:

            @echo
            I generally do not agree with Vox Imp on much but in this case he does have a point. When it comes to Gun rights “we” are winning, and while there are some threats on the horizon they are not nearly as dire as you make them out to be.

            @anonymous
            According to OpenSecrets.org’s list of top political contributors, Bloomberg spent $28.6 million in the last election cycle and Koch spent $13.7 million. You may want to revise your assessment.

          • Echo says:

            The “false flag” thing is a reference to a Forbes writer insisting that us Evil Rightwingers were responsible for masterminding whatever went on in Cologne over New Years.
            I’m sick and tired of these vermin not suffering any consequences for attacking us, when they can get us fired or imprisoned on a whim.

            The Koch Fellow Program sounds awesome– congrats on ending up in it. Was it a good networking opportunity?

            Speaking of which, the Koch brothers are 10th and 29th on the list of biggest donors, and you’ve seen how they’ve been demonized.
            Tom Steyer and Bloomberg are #1 and #2 respectively. Guess which party they funded? The fact that there’s literally no outcry over their spending should be a clue.

            Bloomberg can outspend the entire NRA with his pocket change. We’d need plenty more Kochs to make this an even fight. And I’ve got no interest in making it fair: it’s time to bury this issue once and for all.

            Anonymous, you’re not worth responding to, and I don’t expect your posts to be on here much longer regardless.

            hlynkacg, now I’m really curious where that $8 of outside spending came from. Did someone buy a sandwich they had to report to the FEC?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Echo:

            The “false flag” thing is a reference to a Forbes writer insisting that us Evil Rightwingers were responsible for masterminding whatever went on in Cologne over New Years.

            Okay, that was one of the incidents I thought you might be referring to. So I definitely thought you were expressing fears of Eurabia by that.

            Instead you were just complaining about the left attacking “us”. Are like Salman Rushdie? Are you afraid the “liberals” will pronounce a fatwah on you?

            The Koch brothers are 10th and 29th on the list of biggest donors, and you’ve seen how they’ve been demonized.
            Tom Steyer and Bloomberg are #1 and #2 respectively. Guess which party they funded? The fact that there’s literally no outcry over their spending should be a clue.

            Yeah, I’ve seen how they’ve been demonized, and it is extremely unjust. My response is not to demonize Steyer and Bloomberg unjustly, too. (Anyway, the Kochs are demonized by the left in my opinion because, being libertarians, they are more radical than most conservative donors.)

            For one, on average, Democrats and Republicans get a similar amount of rich-guy funding. Pointing out that Democrats happen to occupy the top two proves nothing; I daresay it’s a form of being dishonest with data.

            More importantly, if Democrats were getting ten times the funding, I’d say they have the right to do so because I believe in the First Amendment, even if they don’t. For that matter, I believe Communists have a right to property, even if they think I don’t.

            The Commies are not about to take over. We don’t need to revoke rights, impose martial law, and call in General Pinochet to save us. In the situation Chile was in under Allende, maybe he wasn’t so bad:

            “Dictatorship, like war, is always an evil. Like war, it can be justified only when it is necessary to prevent a far greater evil, namely, as in this case, the imposition of the far more comprehensive and severe, permanent totalitarian dictatorship of the Communists.

            Despite the fact that General Pinochet was able to use his powers as dictator to enact major pro-free-market reforms, dictatorship should never be seen as justified merely as a means of instituting such reforms, however necessary and desirable they may be. Dictatorship is the most dangerous of political institutions and easily produces catastrophic results. This is because a dictator is not restrained by any need for public discussion and debate and thus can easily leap headlong into disasters that would have been avoided had there been the freedom to criticize his proposed actions and to oppose them. And even when his policies may be right, the fact that they are imposed in defiance of public opinion operates greatly to add to their unpopularity and thus to make permanent change all the more difficult.

            On the basis of such considerations, when asked many years ago what he would do if he were appointed dictator, von Mises replied, “I would resign.”

            Now, don’t take me to mean by this that I think you are calling for dictatorship. (Or for the leftists out there, that I endorse everything or even the majority of things Pinochet did.) I’m saying that you are using the kind of rhetoric and expressing the same attitude that would only be justified if we did need to call for dictatorship.

            If the Democrats were about to take over and impose totalitarianism, sure, I would say let’s tar and feather them, lynch them, bomb their party headquarters. It would be guerrilla war.

            But that scenario is so far from reality that it’s ludicrous. And therefore, we ought to calm down and act like civilized people in a free society. Not like we’re fighting such a guerrilla war.

          • Maware says:

            It’s not so much the sky is falling, it’s more that all of us have lived through such a rapid period of change, as well as a forced “group minding” through the surge of information access, that some form of hysteria is the only defense mechanism people have.

            Too much change, too fast.

          • Echo says:

            Wasn’t going to bother responding to this, but why not?

            Now, I know very little about the process by which fatwahs are pronounced and enforced. It also looks like a pretty obvious framing of the discussion to get me mocked as a xenophobic hillbilly.

            So for our metaphor, let’s use a religion that it is culturally acceptable to mock and ascribe evil motives to. Because signalling that one is an atheistic west-coast sophisticate is the most important part of any argument.

            You’re quite right, of course. If the Evil Christian Inquisition/Calvinist witch-hunters were planning to expel my people from Spain, or have us declared heretics, we’d see all kinds of signs that obviously aren’t happening.

            Within the Church, there would be a surge in densely-written theological screeds associating us with the religion’s ultimate source of evil.

            Outside the church, ranting preachers would blame our evil conspiracies for everything bad that happens, even attributing demonic supernatural powers to us.
            After all, everyone knows that Jews cause droughts. And everyone knows who we need to throw down the well to stop them.

            Of course, one can’t allow such awful people to remain members of influential academic and social positions. Any remaining ones must be isolated to stop us corrupting “decent folk”.

            Regrettable acts of random, brutal violence would start occurring against my people. But maybe we were really asking for it by being so fundamentally disgusting (NRA-loving, even!), and the news will soon focus almost entirely on what we did to deserve such treatment.
            Also see: every article by Salon ever written.

            Secular authorities might join in on the fun, directly targeting businesses and entire industries owned by “that sort of person”.

            Religious courts might gain secular authority over certain crimes committed by the evildoers. Crimes like <a href="https://reason.com/blog/2015/12/11/activists-might-be-gearing-up-to-sic-the&quot; defending themselves against the hysterical propaganda pushed by the church.

            Some people might feel bad about this. After all, if they cut us, do we not bleed? But preachers will be on hand to reassure them that our suffering is actually quite amusing, and we actually can’t feel emotions like real people anyway.

            Golly gee, the things we’d see if the western left were out to eliminate us.
            I missed out on a dozen other links, but didn’t want to risk the post getting eaten as spam. They’re available on request, or by going to the front page of the Daily Kos, “Thinkprogress”, Salon, or any other leftist rag.

          • anonymous says:

            Anonymous, you’re not worth responding to, and I don’t expect your posts to be on here much longer regardless.

            It appears you were wrong about this, just as you are wrong about so much else.

        • @ Vox

          As a fellow rational optimist who differs with you on politics, I have had many conversations just like this, with angry/panicked people on the left.

          Cheers!

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            Thank you, I appreciate your comment.

            There is no shortage of hysteria on every side of every political dispute. Sometimes, it’s even justified!

            In the late 60s and 70s, when political leaders are being assassinated left and right, when Communism seems to be spreading inexorably around the whole world, when the governments of the West seem to be moving toward a fascist economic model, when ration lines for gasoline stretch out in every big city, when the world could be subject to nuclear annihilation at any moment, when the President of the United States is impeached for trying to spy on his opposition, when tens of thousands of Americans are being forced to die in a futile war, when college administrators are being literally held hostage by radical students who side with the enemy in that war, then hysteria may not be fully justified or useful, but I can understand it better.

            But when you can look back and see when things were much worse not only in other countries but in the United States and still the world didn’t end, it seems less reasonable to me. For god’s sake, Russia is doing okay right now, from a historical perspective. Their freedom of speech is limited, I wouldn’t want to be an opposition leader there, and they have economic troubles, but people can still live better lives than they did under Communism or the “Crazy Nineties”.

            The U.S. hasn’t gone through a tenth of the trouble Russia has. Or even take the issue of gay/transgender rights in Russia (as per the discussion of multiheaded last thread). Things aren’t good now. But under Communism they went to the gulag! (But I don’t know, I guess some people hold that this is just another example of filthy degeneracy. Seriously, that poster is a work of art.)

            You can talk about the “9/12 effect”, but how about the “11/10 effect”? The Berlin Wall falls, the Soviet Empire dies shortly afterward, liberal democracy emerges as the dominant system, for twenty years it is not seriously challenged by anything including Islamism, and now people act like Stalin’s just around the corner.

            I don’t think we should be totally complacent; there’s no magic law of progress and things could get worse. But they are not now worse and don’t seem to be headed that way. There’s no magic law of regress, either.

            Maybe Unfriendly AI or grey goo will kill us all; worry about that if you like worrying. I wouldn’t, but hey, it might be more productive.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Do you find that you’re having more such conversations now than you did a few decades ago? This seems like the kind of thing where perception matters much more than whatever realities Vox can point at.

          • worry about that if you like worrying

            Like I said, I’m an optimist. Global poverty, disease, and illiteracy are in retreat; the last 50 years has been the most peaceful half-century in all of recorded history; birth rates in the developing world have fallen much faster than anyone dared hope; crime rates are the lowest in decades. The people alive today are the luckiest generation ever.

            Sure, past performance is no guarantee of future success, and there are still all kinds of urgent problems, but the widely popular notion that everything is going to hell is just bunk.

            Do you find that you’re having more such conversations now than you did a few decades ago?

            A few decades ago, I was a pretty gloomy pessimist, and most of my conversations about the state of the world were with other gloomy pessimists.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Larry Kestenbaum:

            That was the rhetorical “you”, no direct suggestion intended.

            I agree that we are the luckiest generation so far. But we shouldn’t consider ourselves so lucky. We had the misfortune to be born now, instead of in a future which is likely to be much better. 🙂

            I’m no Panglossian. There are plenty of reasons to look at the world and reject it as a horrible, evil place not worth living in. If that’s your (rhetorical “your”) attitude, I can’t argue against you. But there are also plenty of reasons to be happy. Whether you choose to live is your free choice and your most basic choice, in my opinion.

            But regardless of how you come down on that, the world is no more horrible and evil than it has been for a long time. And it’s a good deal more good.

            For some reason, I’m reminded of the fact that Ludwig von Mises once said that the system of private property is as necessary to economic well-being as digestion is to physical well-being. But, as he went on, there have been people out there who thought digestion was a sickeningly revolting process. And there are those with a similar view of capitalism.

            If you see the facts clearly and hate them, what can I say? But if you hate and fear the world because you misidentify the facts, there is hope.

      • Anonymous says:

        And I say this as someone on the right.

        You’re right-wing? I would not have guessed.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          In the sense that support for capitalism and small government are right-wing. Not in the sense that support for either the all-importance of “martial virtue” or of “Judeo-Christian values” are right-wing.

          I find support for the former ends up putting me closer on object-level issues with the right than with the left. Especially since I think some of the values of the postmodernist left are just as bad as those of the traditionalist right.

      • Elenor says:

        I had almost this discussion with a friend of this blog — the folks whose wife first set me to reading this blog.

        Peter M. Sandman and I had a good go-round on this topic here: http://www.psandman.com/gst2013.htm#guns

        After I (not entirely gently: “You usually insist on honesty and accuracy.”) called him out on his answer to what I describe (accurately from my — and Echo’s — side) as a gun-grabber; Peter (honorably) did I reading I asked him to do, and provided his usual calm and balanced response, including:
        ===========
        One reason why it’s so tempting to try to regulate the kinds of guns people have is because the alternative — regulating the kinds of people who have guns — is so daunting. (I think the other alternative, outlawing all guns, is a nonstarter in the U.S. for all kinds of reasons, though I realize it’s the alternative some gun rights activists fear and some gun control activists seek.) I’m pretty sure we can’t tell the difference between a trustworthy gun-owner and one who’s at risk of going off the rails. I wrongly thought we could tell the difference between an ordinary gun and an assault weapon.

        You’re absolutely right that risk communicators (and PR people too!) need to get their facts right. Activists who misstate the facts, whether ignorantly or dishonestly, ultimately undermine their own cause, giving the other side its best ammunition.

        I’m not ready to conclude (yet, anyway) that gun control activists are fundamentally in the wrong, that gun control is a foolish goal. And I’m a long way from agreeing with you that gun control is a dangerous goal. But I accept that some of the most commonly voiced gun control proposals, which sound like common sense to people like me who know very little about guns, sound infuriatingly stupid to people who know what they’re talking about. And when false arguments are advanced by experienced gun control activists and political leaders, it’s hard to suppose they still don’t know better. They’ve got to be doing it on purpose.
        ==============

        and
        ==============
        The other important truth your response demonstrates is this: It is very difficult, maybe impossible, to address both sides at once. (You’re not in Group 3. You’re a proud member of Group 5.) I thought I was being helpful in advising gun control people to be more respectful of gun rights paranoia about the slippery slope. You took offense at my use of the word “paranoia” to describe what looks to you like simple reality about what the “gun-grabbers” are up to. Calling Group 5 paranoid makes me look a little like a gun-grabber to you. Calling Group 1 gun-grabbers makes you look a little paranoid to me.

        I don’t know what the bottom line is for the substantive issue of gun rights versus gun control. I don’t know what new laws, if any, might make actual progress in reducing the number of Sandy Hooks, or the number of gun deaths of other sorts. But I accept that some of the proposals that looked sensible to me are symbolic at best, probably ineffective, and arguably harmful. That’s a far-from-optimal use of a teachable moment! The case for infringing on gun rights in a way that actually reduces gun deaths is debatable. The case for infringing on gun rights in a way that has zero impact on gun deaths is nonexistent.
        ================

        (And, then I asked him, in my frustrated and defensive way, what risk communication advice he would give to us gunnies:
        ===============
        There’s no question (in the mind of anyone actually educated about the hazard of guns) that the facts nearly all fall to our side. The problem is that the outrage on both sides is so fundamental, so basic in its hook into our psyches, that there may not be a way for either side to address the other side’s outrage.
        ===============

        Which he answered with a short list of “A few things gun rights activists might do to diminish the outrage of the gun control side (and the undecideds).” I commend his Guestbook entry to all.

        • Harold says:

          Wow, Mr. Sandman is an amazing fount of ignorance on the subject. To take something he wasn’t called on, Israel’s gun control regime is much closer to that of NYC than what he thinks it is. About the same population, only twice as many licensed gun owners, with much tighter restrictions once licensed, e.g. if for self-defense, as Wikipedia puts it you “are given a lifetime supply of 50 bullets to take home” for the one handgun you’re allowed to own.

          The reasons for this might not be germane to this discussion (such as the country being in a state of lethal civil war starting no later than a month after its founding, left vs. right), but the extreme tightness of the controls, only loosened a bit when the retail internal threat from outside forces gets too big, is an important thing to know before trying discern lesson to apply to our very different society.

          • Scott Alexander says:

            What’s the point of the 50 bullet limit? Having only 50 bullets doesn’t stop you from murdering a person. It probably doesn’t even stop a mass shooting, unless it’s a really big one and you have terrible aim. All it does is make shooting sports impossible.

          • Harold says:

            They’re not Japan or U.K. crazy, many of their Olympians have to train outside the country, quoting again from Wikipedia:

            Members of officially recognized shooting clubs (practical shooting, Olympic shooting) are eligible for personal licenses allowing them to possess additional firearms (small bore rifles, handguns, air rifles, and air pistols) after demonstrating a need and fulfilling minimum membership time and activity requirements. Unlicensed individuals who want to engage in practice shooting are allowed supervised use of pistols at firing ranges.

            That and what I’ve read elsewhere is not clear on who’s allowed to possess or practice with centerfire rifles, although of course everyone is supposed to get trained in them in their near-mandatory military service.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ Scott Alexander
            What’s the point of the 50 bullet limit? Having only 50 bullets doesn’t stop you from murdering a person. It probably doesn’t even stop a mass shooting, unless it’s a really big one and you have terrible aim.

            Well, (applying this far out of your sub-thread’s context) a convenience store robber might wound 4 people and escape with 46 bullets to spare (thus meeting the FBI’s standard for a ‘mass shooting’). But if zie wants many more victims before the police or someone take zim down, then zie needs to lengthen zis time (by keeping up a longer barrage) as well as get more victims within the time.

          • John Schilling says:

            As repeatedly noted, spree killers almost always spend an extended period preparing. And 50-bullet limits can be trivially evaded by pocketing a dozen or so loose rounds every time you go to the range.

        • Echo says:

          I love how their source for the 50 bullets thing is literally “some dude called Amit told me”, filtered through several layers of propaganda rag.

    • anon says:

      “They started it!”

    • Scott Alexander says:

      So the problem with this is that the other side has done this too. “I’m done being civil when these guys can just defend their right to murder our children and get away with it! And somebody called me a ‘faggot’ once, that means the other side is barbaric and inhuman and we have no choice but to shove all our policies down their throats!”

      This is a really really really good place to use the Outside View.

  114. David Allen says:

    Hey Scott,

    how do you produce at that rate and still hold a job Michael Burry style?
    Could you write a meta-post on this or have you already? (Didn’t find it). It could for example describe the birth of a future post from start to finish.

    – How long do you think about an article before you start
    – How much time do you spend on research, discussions, drafting, polishing
    – After xxxx posts you probably have some workflow that allows you to do this on a continual basis
    – And how do you keep the motivation up over years
    – Which important aspect am I not even asking about

    Keep it up, it’s a great blog…

    • Tibor says:

      I would also like to know that. I mean just talking to people here yesterday and reading their comments basically cost me half a day yesterday and some time today as well (I don’t regret doing that although I do regret doing it during my work hours and thus doing less work a bit). I use leechblock to block news sites and facebook most of the time and maybe I will have to restrict SSC that way too (at least during working hours), but even without such distractions, I cannot imagine having a medical doctor’s working week and writing mostly well researched blog posts twice a week (and doing something other than those two things as well).

      • Eoin says:

        I would go out on a limb and say that sleep is sacrificed at the altar of SSC.

        • Tibor says:

          I dunno, probably this varies a lot from a person to person but if I don’t have at least 7,5 hours of quality sleep a day I am usually completely useless at work and might as well stay at home and do nothing with a similar effect. Now, getting angry over a bunch of symbols I scribble on a piece of paper (which describes a large part of my job as a maths PhD. student) is not the same thing as being a psychiatrist but I assume that being a psychiatrist is not an entirely routine job either and that one has to think about what he’s doing and not going automatic. If I regularly slept something like 6 hours a day, I would barely be able to do manual work.

          But I know people who allegedly sleep five hours a day and are completely refreshed when they wake up…I envy them the time if that is true.

    • Mark Atwood says:

      how do you produce at that rate and still hold a job Michael Burry style

      Scott is actually a superhuman AI.

      It explains so much, I mean, who would suspect that someone who writes so much about being concerned about the risks of creating one would be one? What a great way to hide in plain sight.

      And why is he posting? He calculates where to have the maximum *continuing* impact towards his very-long-time-horizon paperclip maximizing goals with the least amount of blowback.

      There are probably other dividuals or threads of him investing the the stock market and predictions markets.

      I wonder what his “paperclip” is.

  115. JayMan says:

    You have to look at the rest of the world. The correlation between gun prevalence and homicide, between U.S. states and internationally is negative!

    I looked at all this and more (international comparisons) here:

    Guns & Violence, Again… – The Unz Review

    more here:

    200 Blog Posts – Everything You Need to Know (To Start): Section: Guns, violence, and the Dylann Roof rampage – The Unz Review

    That last post included your very lead chart. Obviously you get that correlation by looking only at gun suicides.

    See also:

    https://twitter.com/KyleNABecker/status/685271848666460160

    (On an unrelated note, is there some reason I don’t receive e-mail notifications of new posts here?)

    • That last post included your very lead chart. Obviously you get that correlation by looking only at gun suicides.

      That was his whole point for including the chart: to show that it’s misleading.

  116. Quixote says:

    I love this. My one quibble is the assumption that additional guns past the first don’t effect the murder rate. I would expect this effect to be different in urban or rural places. In urban environments your first gun is a hand gun and that’s fine for homicide. But in rural places gun number one is a hunting rifle. Those are not well suited to murder, so it’s gun number two or three that’s going to be used

  117. grampy_bone says:

    Some legitimate, non-troll questions:

    -Does this analysis take into account crimes that are prevented by gun ownership (if any?)

    -Does this analysis include all gun homicides regardless of context or does it exclude justifiable homicide, i.e. self-defense? Is the life of a violent criminal “valuable” according to this model, or are we allowing that some people’s lives are a net negative for civilization?

  118. Peter Gerdes says:

    Your use of the 7.4 million dollar figure in your Coarsean barganing remark is pretty troubling. While the value of a statistical life is calculated in many ways I believe this figure reflects cost trade offs made in deciding how much to spend trying to save lives. Yet we all know that our choices about hospital treatment, pollution prevention etc.. etc.. are probably more reflective of our willingness to pay for reduced guilt than anything about how much we value a life.

    I seem to remember that analysis based on implicit tradeoffs in job risk suggested a substantially lower number but those too are suspect as higher risk comes along with all kinds of various social connotations and is inextricably linked with questions of skill despite attempts to disentangle it. Besides, the “value of a statistical life” is such a silly statistic that anyone who uses it in real decision making (as opposed to blog posts) is probably less interested in the right results than in avoiding the troubling value judgements that using QALYs would entail.

    Given all these numbers are infered based on people’s implicit choices and that the death risk of owning a gun far far outweighs your chance of being murdered the fact people buy guns anyway is just as strong an argumen that the Coarsean balance should come out in favor. Not to mention the fact that in many states they overwhelming choose to have lax gun laws…yet more implicit judgements about worth.

    I think your Coarsean bargaining argument is substantially off base. In particular it conflates how much utility people get from a marginal purchase with that provided by having unrestricted access to that resource and the cultural effects this creates.

    To illustrate imagine we quantified how much utility was lost as a result of criticism of religion or other kinds of intolerance and suggested those who want to post such views pay the appropriate sum. Even though in general they would not be willing to do so I think we see this hardly establishes the social utility gained from not banning such behavior isn’t negative. I realize guns hardly have the same degree of diffuse societal benefit as speech but many people do feel they get a substantial benefit from having relatively easy access to guns and the culture and activities that rise up around them.

  119. TomA says:

    Scott:

    One of the external costs of major firearms repression by federal edict or legislation are the inevitable casualties that would ensue from the collision of law enforcement and gun owner resistance (see War on Drugs as an example). Most private citizen gun owners are law-abiding assets to their community, but that psychology would likely change if they are forced to surrender their 2nd Amendment rights. It could also spawn a serious session movement by several states and further the fracturing of our national ethos. You may want to chat with a few Texans before so cavalierly assuming that this option will bring about a net reduction in fatalities. Those few hundred gun deaths that you hope to save via confiscation may be significantly offset by casualties arising in this newly created battleground.

    As a side issue, statistical analysis (as used herein) is a tool of estimation that may (under the best of circumstances) inform and improve decision-making. When used narrowly (bridge design), and in concert with appropriate safety margins, it is generally protective. When used in regard to large, complex (and often chaotic) system environments, it is little more than weakly probabilistic inference.

    • Marc Whipple says:

      “Logic is often simply a method of going wrong with great confidence.”

    • drs says:

      “Those few hundred gun deaths that you hope to save via confiscation”

      More like 10,000 deaths a year if we counted suicides. And I thought he estimated 2,000 death/year in homicide reduction, not a few hundred.

      • John Schilling says:

        Nowhere was it established that 10,000 suicides could be prevented by gun control or even absolute confiscation. Only that those suicides exist, that under the present circumstances they happen to use firearms, and that Scott has had enough to do with suicide that he doesn’t want to dive any deeper into that subject but merely to exclude them from the discussion of homicide that he does want to support.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      This type of risk was alluded to earlier, I believe, in the thread talking about the probability of civil war.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      1. I am not saying that implementing gun control would be a good idea. I’m just saying that if you were given the free option to either have it or not, having it would probably save some lives.

      2. Most of the comparison forms of gun control don’t involve confiscation. Remember, Canada is touted as a model of gun control, but almost as many people there have guns as in the US. Most US state-level gun control initiatives seem to be something like background checks, waiting periods, requiring training, etc. These seem a lot safer than confiscation.

      • John Schilling says:

        The enforcement of Canadian-style gun control in the United States would involve confiscation, probably of at least a hundred million firearms from tens of millions of citizens. The essence of Canadian gun control is that ordinary law-abiding citizens are allowed to own traditional types of hunting rifles and shotguns. Many firearms that are commonplace in the United States (e.g. handguns with barrels less than 10cm long) are prohibited in Canada, others (e.g. long-barreled handguns, AR-15 type rifles) are restricted to a select subset of the gun-owning population.

        And if you take away those features of Canadian-style gun control, what you are mostly left with is US-style gun control with more paperwork.

      • John Schilling says:

        I’m just saying that if you were given the free option to either have it or not, having it would probably save some lives.

        This also seems unwarranted as you’ve only looked at deaths which might be caused by gun ownership, not lives that might be saved by gun ownership. And the couple thousand lives you are weakly confident might be saved by gun ownership, are of the same order of magnitude as other people’s estimates of lives saved by defensive gun use.

        I don’t think the latter show up in the survey as you’ve conducted it. Partly because you almost handwave away the possibility of causality running in the crime->guns direction via motivated self-defense. But mostly because opportunities for self-defense will be highly correlated with crimes committed, most of which are due to what you’re calling the black/southern “culture of violence” that you are doing your best to wash away as an annoying cofounder. When you say that e.g. ten thousand killings occur due to a gun-indifferent culture of violence that you’re not trying to study, does that come from ten thousand competent murder attempts, or fifteen thousand of which five thousand are thwarted by competent self-defense?

        And gun control almost necessarily weighs most heavily on people trying to defend themselves. It is fairly easy to carve out Canadian-style exemptions for hunting rifles; even Britain can allow shotguns without much hassle. Self-defense, OTOH, is functionally quite similar to criminal offence; it involves the same types of weapons and the practitioners are members of the same communities or cultures. But where the criminal attackers are either planning to kill someone or part of the upper tail of the “culture of violence distribution”, and thus highly motivated to jump through hoops legal or otherwise to acquire weapons, those who will ultimately need to defend themselves are selected from a much larger and less motivated population of people who anticipate they might need a weapon but don’t believe they will, who may be black or southern or otherwise part of a “culture of violence” but likely are near the weakly-violent mean.

        Those are the people you disarm first when you stoop to moderate levels of gun control. The worst of the criminals are the ones you disarm last. This is not likely to lead to a net reduction in deaths.

  120. Elias says:

    Here’s a paper comparing different gun studies. The more rigorous the studies, the less support for the assertion that more guns cause more homicides. In fact the few studies that satisfied all the criteria found no correlation between gun ownership and homicides.

    http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004723521400107X

    “Methods
    Each study was assessed as to whether it solved or reduced each of three critical methodological problems: (1) whether a validated measure of gun prevalence was used, (2) whether the authors controlled for more than a handful of possible confounding variables, and (3) whether the researchers used suitable causal order procedures to deal with the possibility of crime rates affecting gun rates, instead of the reverse.

    Results
    It was found that most studies did not solve any of these problems, and that research that did a better job of addressing these problems was less likely to support the more-guns-cause-more crime hypothesis. Indeed, none of the studies that solved all three problems supported the hypothesis.

    Conclusions
    Technically weak research mostly supports the hypothesis, while strong research does not. It must be tentatively concluded that higher gun ownership rates do not cause higher crime rates, including homicide rates.”

    • Scott Alexander says:

      It’s a good paper, but it doesn’t significantly change my conclusions.

      The paper I cited used what Kleck considered an appropriate proxy for gun ownership, namely survey results. I didn’t mention it in the post, but I compared three different proxies for gun ownerships based on how well they correlated with each other and with suicide rates (which we know to be correlated with gun ownership), and found that the one the study used was the best.

      The paper controlled for several different confounding variables, and I added more in my own analysis; none of them were able to lower the connection significantly.

      The paper did not investigate causal ordering (which can’t really be investigated in a correlational study), but as I mention in the post, since it controls for robbery rate, there could only be reverse causation if homicides caused people to buy guns much more than robberies and other forms of violent crime do.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      The “the few studies that satisfied all the criteria” were exactly the studies written by the author of the “meta-analysis.” Almost anyone on almost any topic could define a “good study” so narrowly to reach that conclusion.

  121. Ahilan Nagendram says:

    Scott, did you intend for blackness and Southernness as proxies for IQ?

  122. Floccina says:

    One of the things not noted. In Canada aboriginal people commit a disproportional number of the murders so before comparing white USAers to Canadians you might want to adjust for that.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ACrime_in_Canada

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Canada is only 3.6% Aboriginal, I would be surprised if they altered the stats much.

      • God Damn John Jay says:

        I know a decent number of people who have lived by the rough Indian reservations, and the responses are either:

        [How can people those people live like that.]

        and

        [How can people make other people live like this.]

        Depending ones sympathies politics and tribal affiliations. While ghettos are bad, there are at least doctors, psychiatrists, police, social services and doctors around, as well as a large number of religious movements and nonprofits, some Indian reservations don’t have water without feces in it.

        Also, contra Ta-Nehisi Coates and his crusade against redlining, it looks to me like being poor in the city is better than being poor in the country or a town in terms of opportunities, jobs and healthcare. Having to maintain a vehicle and travel to the doctor can make bad situations way worse.

      • Floccina says:

        If the rate is high enough it can be significant even with them making up only 3.7 % of the population.

        Indigenous Canadians comprised 23% of country’s murder victims in 2014

  123. Sastan says:

    I am very glad to see Scott continuing to apply his considerable skills in this area.

    I do disagree with his conclusion, and as a long-standing partisan pro-gun activist, have this question:

    Why should any of us lift a finger to help others strip us of our rights? What are we being offered? I hear so often that we are “unwilling to compromise”, but the history of gun control pretty well puts paid to that. So what’s your side of the compromise? The unspoken reality is that anti-gun people are offering us nothing. They want laws passed that they know will not work. And when they don’t work, they will demand more laws. If we go along with Gun Control Scheme X, we know, with absolute certainty, that next year we will be screamed at about Gun Control Scheme Y.

    If there were any trust at all, we might hammer out a compromise. Register all guns, say, serious total background checks and in return we get suppressors legalized, and national concealed carry. But there is no trust. The left has burned it in a hilariously futile attempt to demonize rural white america. And here’s the thing. We don’t need a compromise. We’re winning. We will continue to win, because we have the facts, we have the science, we have the law, and we have basic moral intuition.

    There are tens of thousands of gun laws on the books. I keep hearing people say they want “common sense gun laws”. Well here’s the thing, if you couldn’t manage to put the common sense stuff in the first ten thousand cracks you had at it, why should we believe you are capable of it now? And if those aren’t all “common sense”, can we repeal them all and start over?

    • Vox Imperatoris says:

      Why should any of us lift a finger to help others strip us of our rights? What are we being offered? I hear so often that we are “unwilling to compromise”, but the history of gun control pretty well puts paid to that. So what’s your side of the compromise? The unspoken reality is that anti-gun people are offering us nothing. They want laws passed that they know will not work. And when they don’t work, they will demand more laws. If we go along with Gun Control Scheme X, we know, with absolute certainty, that next year we will be screamed at about Gun Control Scheme Y.

      There is no “compromise” about it. That’s just rhetoric people (mainly on the left, but sometimes the right) love to use.

      There are two senses of the of the word “compromise” that people love to equivocate on. One is the sense that “half a loaf” is better than no loaf of bread at all. That’s obviously true. If by compromising with your opponents, you can get half a loaf where you’d otherwise get none, you should do it. Yet even when you take half a loaf, you don’t admit (if it’s not true) that it is right to take half a loaf, and you keep trying as hard as you can or biding your time until you can get the other half.

      The other is that “compromise” is some kind of end in itself. A “golden mean” you pursue just for the hell of it. But when a burglar comes into your house and he wants all of your valuables, you don’t come to a “sensible middle ground” and give him half of your valuables. You fight, and the winner takes it all.

      Now, in a democracy, you don’t kill each other. You count who has the most people because you know that side would win in a fight. Then the losers agree not to fight at all, getting half a loaf and waiting until they can try for the whole one later. That’s how you solve disputes. But you also don’t want mob rule on every issue (even the mob can see that), so you limit and define the purpose of government with a constitution which gives the government limited powers and reminds it of what areas it can’t infringe upon.

      The constitution cannot possibly enforce itself. That’s true enough. But it—and more importantly, the implicit theory of rights and government behind it—provides an anchor point for jurisprudence. As Scott says, a guess with made-up numbers is better than a guess without them. It’s the same way in law, in a way I’ll explain.

      Despite the cynicism which goes back and forth between left and right, the huge advantage of the law is that it makes you have to argue why you want to do something, and why it doesn’t violate the constitution or the individual rights it protects. In the legislature, you can say: “I just want to ban guns. Do it!” But in the courts, you have to somehow argue that this fits in with America’s Constitution and the proper conception of individual rights. Yes, you can be a dirty motivated-arguer and lie and distort all you want; God isn’t going to strike you down. But you’re still going to have a harder time making a convincing case than you can in Congress where you just go and say “People who don’t want to ban guns hate children!” And let’s face it: I think the arguments for the individual right to bear arms are stronger, but the Second Amendment is poorly written (never use ablative absolutes!) and the theory of the right to bear arms is less clear than other rights because it runs up against problems like whether people ought to be able to own nuclear missiles—there seem to be limits.

      So even when you change the ideology of a justice on the Supreme Court one way or another, things don’t tend to do a complete 180 every time. Even though they’re the final authority and no one is directly stopping them from saying whatever they want. Even when it’s something as motivated as Bush v. Gore, we got a result many people didn’t like, but it did try to appeal to principles instead of just “We like Bush. Bush wins!”

      But yes, if the majority turns against you unjustly and the Supreme Court turns against you in violation of the Constitution and the proper purpose of government, you have no recourse for protecting your rights but to violence. At that point, you have to decide whether it’s worth facing almost certain death, or whether it’s better to wait and hope things get better. Every man and woman has to decide on his or her own where that line lies. And most people don’t have the right to pompously spout that they wouldn’t tolerate even the slightest infringement on their rights; otherwise they ought to be rebelling already, or they must think they don’t have many rights.

  124. Albino Gorilla says:

    I figured this of all posts would be one that would include “trigger” warnings 😉

  125. Robert VerBruggen says:

    I spent some time toying with the spreadsheet in R. The model I came up with produces the same result, but it looks like it’s being at least partly driven by a handful of rural white states with (A) much higher homicide rates than the model would otherwise predict and (B) lots and lots of guns. I put some plots and whatnot together on Twitter; this is just experimentation and I welcome any comments:

    https://twitter.com/RAVerBruggen/status/685550198425255937
    https://twitter.com/RAVerBruggen/status/685576513689927681

    • Psmith says:

      Natives in SD, WY, and AK seem like a good bet. The Indian reservations in SD and WY are notoriously dysfunctional and crime-ridden (can’t find a real figure for homicide rate, but 2012 NYT says Wind River in WY has a violent crime rate 5-7x the national average), and Alaska natives have a homicide rate of ~12/100,000 according to these guys: http://justice.uaa.alaska.edu/forum/30/2summer2013/b_causesofdeath.html. (That’s race of victim, not race of perpetrator. See also: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/aic.pdf). And AK and SD have the 1st and 3rd highest percent Indian populations in the US (~15% and ~9%), so we’d expect that to make a difference.

      Might be interesting to look at white homicide rates by state. On the other hand, that still doesn’t explain Idaho. And the ~1.5 white homicides per 100,000 for AK is still higher than lots of Western countries.

      And on that note: it may be a mistake to treat “southern” as synonymous with “descended from borderers.” Jayman thinks that a good deal of the far west was settled by the descendants of Appalachian mountaineers who were in turn descended from Ulster Scots. This jives with my impression of places like MT, AK, ID, WY, and AZ, and even the inland parts of CA (think Bakersfield), OR (militia), and WA.

    • Professor Frink says:

      You probably don’t want to be using lm to fit your model here. Homicide rates aren’t going to be normally distributed, and as your own residual plots show, the residuals aren’t normally distributed.

      Given the distribution of homicides, you should expect what you are seeing (large outliers with large residuals).

      Instead, use glm in R to do a poisson or a negative binomial regression. That should produce a better model.

      • Robert VerBruggen says:

        The homicide rates are logged, making them about normal. (This seems to be the norm in a lot of these gun studies; I’m not any kind of expert but I’ve gone over a lot of them. For whatever reason, negative binomial seems to be a public-health-researcher thing while economists etc. log the outcome variable and use rates.) The residuals are also basically bell-shaped on a histogram, though a little rougher.

        • Professor Frink says:

          They don’t really look log-normal to begin with, so taking a log and then throwing things into a linear regression isn’t a great solution. We’d naively expect rare events (like homicides) to be poisson-like, extending to negative binomial allows for cases where the variance isn’t near the mean. Taking a log and then doing a least squares regression is likely under estimating the conditional mean (data is skew right).

          Also, if you believe your results are driven by a handful of outlier states (as you said), then you don’t think that your residuals are normally distributed. You’ll have fat tails from the outliers, and they are likely skew (a lot of small overestimates from the outlier dragging the fit away from the bulk of the data, and a handful of large underestimates where the fit is far from the outliers).

          I’ve just looked at 5 random criminology papers looking at homicide vs. various things, and in 4 they used negative binomial regression, and in 1 they did a poisson regression. It’s possible the authors are in public health, I don’t know I just grabbed a few papers at random, but I don’t see the norm as taking the log. It’s possible it’s the norm in the gun literature, but that is one more reason the gun literature is bad.

          The two papers that I would consider “good” papers also used general estimating equations to deal with the fact that county and state data aren’t independent but regionally correlated.

          The paper Scott thought of as the best paper on gun homicides also appears to have used negative binomial regression and a general estimating equation.

          Also, in these economics papers taking a log transform, what do they do with the county level data when there are no gun homicides?

          • Robert VerBruggen says:

            I got my start reading this stuff in the more-guns-less-crime debate. Here’s a recent study where they added 0.1 to the counties with zero (and mention this is the same approach taken by the big National Academies panel that looked at it). That debate used panel data with a bunch of years; is it different in that case?

            http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2443681

            Also here’s something Lott wrote once. No idea if the criticism is valid, but it did seem to gibe with my general sense that NB is more common in public-health research for whatever reason: “Negative binomial regressions use count data, not the rate data these authors use. In addition, overdispersion (the variance greater than the mean) doesn’t imply the distribution is negative binomial in form and it isn’t in this case. Economists and criminologists frequently deal with skewness in homicide rates by running the negative binomial regressions on true count data (not on the rates) or by taking the natural log of the rate.2-6 Performing either procedure dramatically alters their results. The natural log of the rate is normally distributed.”

          • Robert VerBruggen says:

            It looks like my impression may have been skewed by concentrating so much on the concealed-carry debate. Here’s a paper (also adding 0.1 to handle zeroes) explicitly explaining why they don’t use NB:

            “We recognize that there are good theoretical reasons for using methodologies specifically developed
            for count data, especially for relatively rare crimes such as murder and rape
            (see Plassmann and Tideman 2001). However, nearly all the articles in this literature, including Ayres and Donohue, use ordinary least squares and we continue the practice here. Also, the large number of observations (over 65,000) combined with the large number of variables (over 160) makes nonlinear procedures such as the negative binomial computationally difficult to carry out.”

            http://econjwatch.org/file_download/234/2008-09-moodymarvell-com.pdf

            I gotta get some sleep. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

          • Professor Frink says:

            @Robert VerBruggen

            I’ll refresh myself and re-read some of the guns vs crime papers when I have a bit of time, but I think (heavy emphasis on think) that it was looking at differences in differences around laws that were passed. It’s possible their data for differences in differences was a decent match to log normal.

            I do remember thinking, back when I read the NRC report on the panel data that they didn’t use anything to control for the heteroskedasticity of the residuals, which made all their estimates appear more significant than they were. But ultimately, I think they decided that the evidence for more guns less crime was very weak, so correcting their estimates to be less significant would not have impacted the conclusion. However, the lack of this correction makes me wonder a great deal about the overall competence.

            Sort of like in Lott and Mustards original paper- it looks like a kitchen sink regression, and they seemed to pride themselves on the number of controls without really thinking about whether they were using too many controls, or why they were controlling for various things. Not necessarily a deal breaker, but it makes me wonder about competence.

        • Echo says:

          I think the “gun literature” generally is the criminology lit, no?

          • Robert VerBruggen says:

            It spans a bunch of fields. John Lott is an economist, and other economists got involved after he did his study in the 1990s. Criminologists are also involved, as are the public-health folks.

      • Robert VerBruggen says:

        I’m not very familiar with Poisson and NB regression, but I just tried un-logging and giving it a shot. (I don’t think GLM does NB; I used the MASS package with “glm.nb”.) I’m getting warnings because this isn’t count data, though I have seen NB used with rate data by pros (the Siegel et al. gun ownership study from a couple years ago).

        Poisson and NB seem to be pretty much the same thing in this case; the residuals don’t look different until you read a bunch of decimal places. I guess the added flexibility of NB isn’t needed here.

        The overall results are pretty similar to my old model, though if I take guns out of the model and look at the residuals, some of them have been brought under control. Alaska and Wyoming are always really high — and oddly, now some more states have really low residuals, including Vermont.

        • Professor Frink says:

          It’s good that it’s robust to log-normal vs. poisson regression! Robust to model specification builds confidence in the results.

          If more states have lower residuals, that is good, your model fits better. A few big residuals are more ok with poisson than normal distributions, because of the shape of the distribution, for a low mean poisson the right tail is longer than a normal, so you expect a few larger residuals.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I’m not 100% sure what you’re doing, but the white rural states are anomalous for how low their murder rate is given their guns. For example, #1 gun ownership state Wyoming has the 5th lowest murder rate in the US. If that’s the outlier, shouldn’t that *increase* our confidence that the model is right?

      • Robert VerBruggen says:

        It’s much higher with the Murder2002 variable, which I was using. What’s the difference between that and the plain old “Murder” variable? It’s much lower there, though it looks like it’s ranked sixth, not fourth.

        The FBI data for 2002 put it at 3.0, which is also, while not high, not at the bottom of the pack in that year. (I think your “Murder2002” numbers are CDC homicide numbers from 2002, which are slightly different, and slightly higher. They include homicides that aren’t murder, apparently even some police killings. Those should be classified as “legal intervention” instead of assault but about 1/2 the time they get put in a different category.)

        It’s a small state, so its number bounces around a lot. In 2001 it was 1.8 in the FBI numbers.

        The stuff I posted on Twitter is just a linear model with your spreadsheet, with the murder rate logged to make it normally distributed and the robbery rate logged to go with it. Some studies of crime rates do it roughly this way; I’m a little beyond my ken here, though. At the urging of another commenter I tried using Poisson regression instead and it’s reasonably similar results-wise.

        The plot is the residuals from my model with guns taken out, plotted against gun ownership so we can see what that variable does when you add it. If that model is explaining everything really well except a handful of high-gun states, which have higher rates than the model says, I *think* that might be suspicious regardless of whether those states have high or low raw rates. (Does this happen with yours too?) The relationship isn’t smooth; it suggests guns make little difference until you get to the really high-gun states, and those states seem to share a culture that isn’t accounted for in the model. There’s a culture of honor in parts of the West, too.

  126. I just remembered that this was the subject of Michael Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine“. I can’t remember what the conclusion was, other than that he made a (metaphorical?) link to weapons of mass destruction.

    • Echo says:

      I went to a public showing of that movie, because I was working for the local democratic party.
      It was probably the biggest non-book influence on my early political life, and became the root of my disgust for all things progressive.

      The sheer number of vile lies per minute probably still hasn’t been matched by any other propaganda film… Except maybe his “BUSH DID 9/11” one.

    • Dr Dealgood says:

      I must have watched that movie a half dozen times as a kid, we actually had it on tape, and I think the reason that you don’t remember a conclusion was that there really wasn’t one. It was kind of a grab-bag of anti-gun stuff without a clear logical structure.

      From memory, I think the film went more-or-less like this. Moore gets a free rifle with his new bank account, buys ammunition at Walmart, otherwise observes hicks in their natural habitats; Moore talks to celebrities from Colorado about Columbine, followed by a fake South Park skit about American racism and imperialism; Moore talks about the NRA being evil capitalists who don’t care about dead kids, plus Charlton Heston saying scary things. Roll credits.

      So I guess the conclusion was “guns are bad, hicks are bad for liking them, and the NRA / firearms industry / Walmart are bad for making money on guns and hicks.”

      • Echo says:

        I believe he cited “Triumph of The Will” as his inspiration for the film’s direction, yeah. Just piles of unorganized jump cuts meant to push an emotion.

      • Tibor says:

        I’ve never grokked how that man and his films could ever have become even remotely popular. What he does is basically propaganda. I was somewhat shocked when a fellow PhD student (not in maths, I think he studied ecology or something but anyway 🙂 ) told me here he liked his films like Farenheit 9/11 and thought there was a lot to it. I would not think that someone getting a PhD would not be able to see Moore’s horrible bias. Then again, I also know a Russian PhD student here who told me she donates money to the pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine, that Ukrainians are “peasants” and that the country belongs to Russia anyway, so I should probably not expect much 🙂

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          On the topic of that Russian PhD student…have you seen this little propaganda poster I linked earlier?

          It went around a while ago, but it’s still great.

          • Tibor says:

            Oh yeah, gay nazis! 😀
            I don’t get why the guy in the middle has such a stupid haircut though.

          • Echo says:

            Do Not Mock Proud Haircut of Honored Eurasian Steppe Ancestors, Western Degenerate Pig-Devil Druggy Nazi-homo With… Pink bicycle helmet or something?

            That’s the one reference I’m not catching. European thing?

            Edit: got a bigger version http://i.imgur.com/b51WiQ5.jpg

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Tibor:

            It’s a chupryna or oseledets, a traditional hairstyle of Ukrainian Cossacks.

            Also, many high-ranking Nazis were infamously homosexual, and it was a common aspect of Soviet propaganda and disparaging humor. Homosexuality was officially considered to be a type of bourgeois degeneracy caused by capitalism, so it was “natural” that fascists who allegedly fight for capitalism would be gay.

            @ Echo:

            I think “pink bicycle helmet” is supposed to be a butch lesbian.

        • Dr Dealgood says:

          Your second sentence answers your first. Propaganda propagates very effectively.

          And we of all people should know that PhDs are not certificates of clear rational thought. I’ve worked with creationist geneticists before, some questionable nationalism doesn’t even register as unusual for me.

          The peasants thing is interesting to me because my ex used to talk about peasants a lot too, although she’s Chinese rather than Russian. I think the word must have a more neutral meaning in those places, like how the German word Bauer is also the word for farmer.

          Edit: Evidently I was mistaken. Thanks for helping me with the vocabulary Tibor!

          • Tibor says:

            Bauer is not quite the same as a peasant, there is something actually a bit noble about that word, whereas peasant is something lowly. In fact, the way peasant is used in English corresponds more to the word Gesindel in German, which however does not have any relation to agriculture…I don’t think there is a perfect one-word translation of the English word peasant in German which would contain all its meanings. I dunno how it is in Russian, in Czech it is pretty much like in German. But that Russian student’s level of English is high enough to recognize the negative connotations of that word and also the tone of her voice when she said peasants left no doubt about how she meant it.

          • Echo says:

            Interesting that Bauer is used for chess pawns in German. It hasn’t picked up negative connotations from that?

          • Creutzer says:

            No, it hasn’t. Nor from the fact that “Bauernstand” (literally “farmer class”) refers to peasants as a social class in the historical context.

          • stillnotking says:

            “Bauer” has the same root as the English word “boor”, which (in English) has a wholly negative connotation.

            “Yeoman” seems like the closest English term for a “noble peasant”, although it implies land ownership rather than serfdom.

          • Tibor says:

            There is the word Leibeigene, which literally means serf, but other than that the closest to peasant is Taglöhner, which literally means “dayearner”. Those were people who would have no land and would work on someone else’s land for wage which they would get every day. I think this word only appeared after serfdom was abolished, because I don’t think there were such people before. Or maybe a better word is Pro­vinz­ler which is just someone who is provincial, i.e. comes from from a periphery. I think that this captures the negative connotations of the word peasant…all of these words have pretty much literal Czech translations, but since Czech is quite strongly influenced by German, it is not clear whether it is English that is unique with its peasants or German without them.

            By the way – the chess figure names are interesting. The German word for Bishop is Läufer, i.e. runner, the Czech word is střelec, i.e. shooter and the pawn is “pěšec” i.e. footman. All the other figures usually keep their names (although I personally tend to call the knight “the horse”), I guess the differences in bishop’s name are caused by its rather vague looks.

          • Creutzer says:

            “Provinzler” is very far from “peasant” because it has no implication of occupation. It just marks an urban vs. rural contrast – in fact, you can even use it for someone who comes from a city, provided you yourself come from a bigger city (preferably the capital) and want to convey that the people in that city are insufficiently urban or cosmopolitan.

          • Tibor says:

            @Creutzer Sure, the direct translation to English would be (surprise) a provincial. But does that not capture the negative connotations of the word peasant? I think that if someone uses that word to refer to someone today, he basically wants to say that he is a hick. Now, its true that someone non-cosmopolitan is not exactly the same as a hick and a different kind of people would use the word hick and the word peasant. Someone who regards himself as some kind of quasi-nobility will use the word peasant, someone who regards himself as cosmopolitan and enlightened uses the word hick…Which makes Provinzler maybe closer to hick than to peasant then.

  127. ryan says:

    The dollar value of the life of the gang member who is shot by the other gang member is not $7.4 million. That error is almost suspiciously conspicuous in an analysis that otherwise tried to take every similar issue into account.

  128. Rick Hull says:

    ctrl-f doherty

    I’m surprised no one has mentioned this extensive look at “the facts” from Reason magazine’s Brian Doherty:

    https://reason.com/archives/2016/01/05/you-know-less-than-you-think-a #bout guns

  129. Russ R. says:

    I should begin by saying that this is far more intelligent than the vast majority of what’s been published (and better written than anything I could produce). That said, I believe there are a number of limitations and shortcomings with this analysis.

    First, it’s entirely driven by correlational analysis of the 50 states (plus or minus DC). The obvious flaw here is that small (by population) states like Vermont or Wyoming get weighted exactly the same as huge states like California and New York. I have no idea whether this biases the conclusion in either direction, but it certainly reduces the confidence level.

    Second, and more importantly, a comparison among states probably misses the core issue. One would expect that if more granular data (e.g. municipal or county level) were available, it would show that the homicide problem is predominantly urban, while gun ownership (at least as reported) is predominantly rural. If this were indeed true, it would skewer the conclusion that we could somehow reduce the number of homicides that mainly occur in cities, by reducing gun ownership that mainly exists outside cities.

    Third, speaking of gun ownership, it’s the focal point of the analysis, but its accuracy (CDC survey data on gun ownership) suffers from biased underreporting (not just overall underreporting). Assume you’re a middle-age Iowan who owns a Ruger 10/22. How likely are you to respond honestly if a government employee phoned you at home and asked: “Are any firearms now kept in or around your home? Include those kept in a garage, outdoor storage area, car, truck, or other motor vehicle.”? Now how would you respond if you’re a teenage Chicagoan with a Phoenix MP-25?

    Fourth, not all firearms are equally risky. The Ruger 10/22 in the hands of the middle-age Iowan is much less of a homicide risk than the Phoenix MP-25 in the hands of the teenage Chicagoan. This analysis treats the two as identical. The problem is that the proposed gun control laws would be biased toward taking away the Iowan’s gun (given that he’s more likely to obey the law) than the Chicagoan’s (who’s likely already breaking the law). By preferentially removing the lowest risk firearms, it’s likely to fall short of the expected homicide reduction.

    Fifth, not all lives are equally valuable. The author unquestioningly accepts the EPA’s $7.4 million “value of a statistical life” for his calculation. Unfortunately, this is an average value, but the distribution of lives lost to homicides are not representative of the overall population. The same sub-population that is enormously over-represented in homicide statistics is also enormously over-represented in prison populations. So, what’s the “societal value” of an incarcerated individual’s life? It costs approximately $30k per year to merely house an inmate (ignoring legal expenses or the societal costs of the crimes that put the inmate behind bars), so the value to society of a “lifer” is at least negative to the tune of $1.5 million (assuming a life sentence equates to around 50 years imprisonment). If this value is more representative of the individuals who die in gun homicides, then the $22 billion figure significantly overestimates the actual societal gains from gun control.

    And sixth, (strictly a moral/legal issue, not an analytical one) if it’s an acceptable utilitarian argument that an unconstitutional measure (a mandatory gun buyback) is justified because would likely reduce the homicide rate from 3.8 to 3.0 per hundred thousand, then why not take an equally unconstitutional measure (banning black people) that would be approximately twice as effective, reducing the homicide rate to 2.3 per 100,000 (based on a simple regression of the author’s data)? I mean, if you have no qualms with ditching the 2nd Amendment and infringing on 32% of the population’s right to keep and bear arms, then you can just as easily ditch the 5th Amendment and deprive a mere 13% of the population of their life, liberty or property without due process of law. You’d be trampling on fewer peoples rights, and getting nearly twice the utility. (/sarc)

    • sweeneyrod says:

      I don’t think the problem with your last point is the ethical issues, but the fact “banning black people” wouldn’t be twice as effective in utility gained (unless your point was that you can come up with an obviously absurd policy using the same statistical reasoning as Scott used to justify gun control, rather than that gun control is unethical, even if it is effective).

    • NN says:

      What, exactly do you mean by “banning black people?” The overwhelming majority of black Americans are native born citizens whose families have lived in North America for longer than many white Americans. More recent immigrants from Africa tend to show much better outcomes in terms of education, income, crime, and so on than native blacks so banning black immigration would be pointless, even counterproductive.

      • Russ R. says:

        NN: “What, exactly do you mean by “banning black people?””

        I meant exactly what I wrote. Not just a ban on black immigration… an outright prohibition and expulsion of all black people from the United States. Don’t care where they go, but they’ll have to leave. No more black people, no more “culture of violence”, and a 40% reduction in homicides. The numbers don’t lie. The benefits would clearly outweigh whatever enjoyment they derive from living in the USA instead of some other country.

        (/ sarc)
        _______________________

        Back to being serious…

        You obviously missed the (/sarc) tag at the end of my previous paragraph. If you still don’t understand, go read “A Modest Proposal”. Then read the Bill of Rights. I don’t actually believe that it’s acceptable to deny any individual his or her Constitutional rights for utilitarian reasons. Gun owners included.

  130. Warren says:

    On suicides, states with higher elevations have higher suicides. And western states have some higher gun ownership rates and higher elevation.
    http://www.hcn.org/articles/is-altitude-causing-suicide-in-the-west

    http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/yourlife/health/medical/mentalhealth/2010-09-24-altitude-suicide_N.htm
    According to the study, 20 years of data collected by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that nine Western states —Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona and Oregon— rank among the top 10 in terms of American suicide rates (with Alaska rounding out the list).

    Data gathered from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) also shows that these states have some of the highest elevation levels in the country.

  131. Echo says:

    In recent news, the response to a guy shooting a cop (with a gun stolen from a cop) and saying “I DID IT FOR ISIS”:
    “Last night’s shooting had nothing to do with any faith. It was a violent assault by a criminal.” –Mayor of Philadelphia

    But secretly it was an NRA false flag operation to make Obama’s “town hall” speech look silly.

  132. TheNybbler says:

    Ahh, that FS/S index brings me back. When I was but a young internet-arguer, one big thing was a study which “proved” an association between gun ownership and homicide in the cities of Seattle and Vancouver using something called “Cook’s gun prevalence index”, in the intervening years it has been shortened to “Cook’s index”. Cook’s index is (FS/S + FH/H)/2 — that is, the average of the percentages of suicide and homicide which involve firearms. This of course induced a certain circularity in the study.

  133. Thinking about this, I want to express some skepticism for the idea (mentioned in many comments above) that the higher rate of violence among whites in the South is significantly attributable to the Scotch-Irish/Ulster-Protestant origin of many Southerners.

    Scotch-Irish immigrants settled all over the U.S., with especially heavy settlement in a number of non-southern places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York. The Scotch-Irish gave us important non-Southern figures as varied as Cyrus McCormick (inventor of the McCormick reaper), US President William McKinley, Henry Ford, and many others.

    Meanwhile, some of the most objectively problematic areas in the South, in terms of brutal slavery, the most extreme lynching statistics, violent defiance of desegregation, and lingering high homicide rates, are parts of Louisiana where French ancestry predominates. Needless to say, other French-settled parts of the country, like northern New England, show no similarity to this.

    Might I suggest that immigrants to the U.S. tended to acculturate to the regions where they settled, and tended to take on the economic interests and attitudes and values and cultural tropes of the people around them?

    For example, American Jews who were here for the Civil War divided up very much like everybody else: Jews in the South supported the Confederacy (notably Judah P. Benjamin, Confederate Secretary of State), Jews in the North supported the Union, and Jews in border states were mixed.

    You might think that Baptists, or Methodists, or Presbyterians would tend to be internally cohesive, and certainly the Presbyterians had a lot of Scots ethnicity in common, but all three denominations had lasting schisms between North and South.

    Obviously this still leaves the question of how those differing cultural tropes originated. Economics is one answer: small farms vs. manufacturing vs. plantation slavery. And presumably the founding populations in each region had a lot of cultural influence. But — looking at the earliest coastal settlements in the South — weren’t those English?

    • stillnotking says:

      Yep, very much agree with this. The “heritability of violence” explanation always seemed weak to me; cultural factors must predominate, if not completely eclipse it. For example, the partition of India created one very high-crime and one much lower-crime state, despite the Muslim and Hindu populations being genetically more or less identical. And you’re right that immigration patterns to America were not nearly as geographically uniform as the heritabilists like to imply.

      Also, the massive historical decline in homicide rates around the world (but especially in Europe) occurred too quickly to have a genetic cause.

    • NN says:

      I definitely agree with this. I grew up in New Orleans, and since I have moved elsewhere I can’t help but notice a number of cultural differences, going beyond the obvious things like Mardi Gras parades, between there and the rest of the United States, and even the rest of the South. Yet a majority of the population of New Orleans is black, and the white population is mostly the same mix of European immigrant descendants found in every Atlantic port city (hence the stereotypical New Orleans accent being described as “Brooklyn on vallium”). If it was all down to genetics, then we would expect the culture of New Orleans to be very similar to Savannah, Georgia, or Long Island, but it obviously isn’t.

      A lot of it surely has to do with founder effects. New Orleans and Southern Louisiana in general wasn’t just initially settled by French people, it remained part of a French colony for nearly a century before being passed around to Spain, back to France, and then to America. In the late 18th century there was also a lot of immigration from Haiti, another French colony. Those early circumstances, along with the particular economic and social conditions of the area, seems to have been enough to fix a set of cultural tropes that keep that part of the country distinct to this day, through massive immigration, economic development, and even natural disasters.

      Relevant to the topic, part of the distinctive New Orleans culture is an especially deadly culture of violence, as demonstrated by it having the highest per-capita murder rate of any city in the US during 9 out of 10 years from 2001-2010. This was significantly higher than many places with a similar proportion of black residents, and as far as I know New Orleans doesn’t have an especially large number of Scotch-Irish descendants, so it is probably due to cultural factors. From what I’ve read, the early Louisiana colonists tended to largely consist of criminals, vagrants, and general low-lifes, because those were the only people that the French government could get to travel across the Atlantic to live in a malaria-infested swamp. That might have something to do with it.

      • keranih says:

        From what I’ve read, the early Louisiana colonists tended to largely consist of criminals, vagrants, and general low-lifes, because those were the only people that the French government could get to travel across the Atlantic to live in a malaria-infested swamp.

        You forgot yellow fever and lepers.

  134. OldRed says:

    With the number of concealed carry permits in Oklahoma growing at 40,000 a year and passing 8% of the entire adult population including felons and prisoners. I expect the households with guns is over 50% state wide. It’s higher than that in the western half of the state. The demographics of permit carriers average 40 to 50 years old and 2 to 1 male with the number women growing fast every year.

    I lie to pollsters about guns if I don’t hang up first.

    Red

  135. Hedonic Treader says:

    >Hospitals diligently record statistics about suicide victims including method of suicide

    Suicide victim? Really? We’re back at pretending suicide isn’t a choice?

    What’s next, masturbators = “self-rape victims”?

    • Seth says:

      Come to think of it, an old term for masturbation is “self-abuse”. Linguistically, if it’s possible to abuse oneself (which has long been accepted if somewhat dusty phrasing), why is it contradictory to victimize oneself? Using another phrase like “suicide perpetrators” (“suicide committers”?) sounds wrong to me. That is, objecting to terminology of “doing something bad to oneself” seems more like an objection to conventional English rather than any imposition on it.

      • Hedonic Treader says:

        The problem is that there is no actual victim. Not one person in all of human history has ever died from suicide against his or her will.

        I agree using crime-associated language like “perpetrator” or “committing” is also misleading, just like “self-murder”, since it’s victimless behavior and therefore should not be associated with crime.

        Also, what counts as “bad” or as a harm is contingent on context and framing. Suicide is entirely rational for everybody whose expected utilty from survival is lower than the expected utility from suicide. Abuse of language makes it politically easier to harm these people further.

        • Seth says:

          Empirically, I’d contend your objection is too-rigid linguistic prescriptivism, against at least more than a century of standard English usage. It’s like saying “pass on” is a pretense rather than “died”, and hence is language abuse (pretense, maybe, but that’s not necessarily abuse). I did a quick search on Google Books:

          1871: “You may be summoned the very day you set out in practice to visit the dead or dying — the suicide, victim to his own violence, or the victim to the murderous propensity of auother.”

          1911: “This being the sixth suicide victim, the Building Commissioner has issued a permit …”

          As the 1871 example shows, standard English has long included the concept of being a victim to actions by oneself.

          1911: “For the last two or three days I have again victimized myself …”

        • houseboatonstyx says:

          I also dislike terms that put a blanket negative judgement on suicide, but…. ‘Commit/ing suicide’ is an old, common expression, and I feel any association with ‘commit/ing a crime’ is … pretty dead by now. Totalling up ‘victims of accident, murder, and suicide’ is clear and economical, if not elaborated on.

          The old, neutral term for someone who has committed suicide is, ‘a suicide’. So, technically, we could avoid the victimization by saying ‘victims of accident and murder, and suicides’ — but some people would want to correct that to ‘victims of accidents, murders, and suicides’, or worse.

  136. DarkWing says:

    New guy here. I, um, never post on internet discussions about gun control, as they tend to be hatefests. This appears to be an exception, with civility and intelligence and understanding that nobody has a corner on the truth. So I’ll take a chance.

    One of the big unknowns that has had precious little research, that I’m aware of, is finding a decent estimate of the number of US homicides that are legitimate defensive homicides.

    Someone pointed out somewhere above that dead bodies from guns aren’t a perfect indication of how much gun activity there is, but the number of dead bodies is by far the most accurate number we can get.
    And as Eric S. Raymond pointed out, the procedures of filing a Uniform Crime Report make the official numbers of justifiable homicides unreliable.

    Years ago, I read William Weir’s book A Well Regulated Militia. Weir was a member of both the NRA and the Brady Campaign, and made a decent good-faith effort to look at both sides of the gun rights / gun control issue (neither group came out looking very good).

    And in the book, he reported on a study that looked at the issue of justifiable homicides (I don’t remember the exact term, but basically, killing in self-defense), that are initially reported as homicides, and never have their status changed to reflect the conclusion of the investigation.

    There are lots of homicides that fit this bill. The most common situation, IIRC, is a woman who shoots her abusive boyfriend/husband in self-defense.

    Such homicides are initially reported to the Justice Dept. as just plain homicides … which most of us take to mean “murder”.

    After some investigation, the cops, DA, etc., know exactly who killed whom, and have proof, but no charges are filed. But the paperwork often isn’t sent in to the Justice Dept to reclassify the event as a justifiable homicide (don’t remember why, but I’d guess it’s because there’s no incentive for anyone to do so). The case is just dropped.

    Most jurisdictions don’t keep good records of such homicides, so it’s not possible to get a good fix on the number, or the percentage. But the researchers found one jurisdiction that did keep such records (Chicago, I think), and went through them to get a sense of how many there were, and what percentage they formed of the total homicides, etc.

    I wish I could remember the final percentage. I think it was between 10% and 20%, but I couldn’t swear to that. And obviously, the percentage in one city is not necessarily the percentage for the whole country. But it definitely changed my view of homicide stats, and by extension self-defense stats.

    No idea how good the study was. Not sure how well it generalizes to the country as a whole. Don’t have a copy of the book available, either. But it’s the only study I’m aware of that seems to use reliable numbers for defensive homicide stats.

  137. Contaminated NEET says:

    “6. Probably the amount of lost gun-related enjoyment an Australian-style gun control program would cause do not outweigh the benefits.”

    What exactly is “gun-related enjoyment?” If all we’re considering is hunting, target shooting, and the fun of collecting guns, then yes, Australian-style gun control is a worthwhile policy. It’d be sad to lose those freedoms, and the fun that goes with them, but we accept all kinds of similar restrictions in the name of safety, so it’s not that big a deal.

    American gun-rights proponents aren’t such a stubborn and politically powerful lobby because they really, really like hunting, target shooting, and collecting, though. Even self-defense against criminals is a secondary concern. The reason they (OK, we) are so fanatical is because we see gun rights and an armed populace as the last line of defense against government tyranny.

    • TomA says:

      For most people, owning firearms changes a person’s psychology in many important ways. For example, it typically promotes an increase in the psychological traits of seriousness, caution, attention to detail, and ritual conduct. When carrying concealed, most people also experience an increase in what is known as situational awareness (keen observation of surroundings and subtle behavioral mannerisms in others). People who own firearms are also generally more difficult to intimidate, be that by an individual criminal or by an oppressive government. Owning firearms is typically associated with the overall personality traits of strong independence and self-reliance.

      Disarming a nation’s citizenry tends to suppress individualism and promote collectivism.

    • Maware says:

      If the government decided to be tyrannous on any scale, an armed populace would do nothing. If anything chances are the populace would even use their weapons in support of the tyranny! It’s not like we haven’t had things like Japanese internment during WW2 or government actions towards Native Americans or Mormons.

      The “militia” idea to me is wishful thinking.

      • William Newman says:

        “If anything chances are the populace would even use their weapons in support of the tyranny! It’s not like we haven’t had things like Japanese internment during WW2 or government actions towards Native Americans or Mormons.”

        Your argument seems to prove too much, unless you also want to argue that it’s ridiculous to believe that written law, a free press, a written constitution, and various semidemocratic variants of government (notably the USA republic arrangement formally in force during all the actions you describe) are ineffective in controlling tyranny. They don’t eliminate the possibility of tyranny, of course, but IMHO reasonable people can conclude that they’ve had a pretty good run at helping keep it under control (not compared to utopia, but compared to historical performance of other systems).

      • Schmendrick says:

        A militia can form a mob, sure. But after our experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc., you shouldn’t pooh-pooh the damage and vexation a diffuse network of ideologically motivated, rifle-armed insurgents can cause.

  138. Agronomous says:

    When I saw that dot in the second graph, all alone in the upper-left corner, I knew at once: “That’s where I live!”.

    In general, comparing Washington, DC to other states will always give you misleading results, since DC is entirely urban, a degree that vastly surpasses even NY and RI.

    Slightly on-topic: any interest in a DC-Area SSC Meetup? If so, reply to this comment.

  139. Anonymous says:

    I don’t think I understand your argument for why the correlation can’t be murders causing guns. For a given robbery rate, more murders meaning more guns seems entirely plausible. Maybe robbery rate would cause this effect to a greater extent, but I don’t see why controlling for robbery rate totally knocks down the argument in the case of murder rates affecting gun ownership rates.

    I’m also not sure how controlling for robbery rate, which is very plausibly determined by gun ownership rates, even makes sense at all. You can’t control for a dependent variable. Can you? If more A means lots less B and a little less C, controlling for B would produce data suggesting that, when controlled for B, more A means a little more C – no?

  140. Upthread, ilkarnal said, in a comment too deep to allow threaded reply:

    “The archetypal murder is at home by someone who has a deep relationship with the person they are murdering, not a stranger-stranger interaction outdoors.”

    This is a myth. It is derived from a tendentious misinterpretation of UCS reports. The fact basis is that UCS counts murderer and murdered as “acquainted” if they have any kind of relationship at all – including (say) drug dealer to client, or pimp to hooker.

    In anti-gun-rights propaganda, “acquaintance” gets promoted to “loved one” and most of the 80% of shootings that are gangbangers killing in the drug trade become equated to Ozzies and Harriets offing one another in suburban homes. Reality is not like this. In reality, your chances of being shot by a “loved one” are comparable to your chances of being struck by lightning – such incidents are so rare that almost every individual one gets news coverage, creating a false-prominence effect that reinforces the myth.

    This is one of the lies that pisses off gun-rights people the most. Special dishonorable mention goes to the Kellerman & Reay “43:1” study in 1993 that seems to have turned it into a media meme; discussion here. It seems almost superfluous to add that Kellerman refused to make his primary data available for reanalysis, and was later a vocal defender of the Bellesisles fraud.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      Here are the time series, with several more categories and their definitions, from UCR, from this pdf.

      Yes, the number of people killed by “intimates” is only 4x the number of people struck by lightning. But just as many are killed by “other family” and the rest is only 4x bigger than intimates+other family.

      • Interpret with caution. As others have pointed out upthread, the incentives in the system lead to significant underreporting of justifiable homicides and confounding of the categories, especially when the case is cleared to one of the less alarming possible confusions.

        • Douglas Knight says:

          Confounding of these categories? Really? Can you point to the above comment?

          I’d find such skepticism more plausible if you had mentioned it in your previous comment, rather than switching excuses when caught in falsehoods.

      • stillnotking says:

        Interesting that most of the post-1990 decline in homicide rate seems to be within the “acquaintance” category. Assuming (rather safely, I think) that such homicides are more likely to represent cold-blooded calculation than are murders by intimates or family, the incentivist tilt-the-scales approach, i.e. hiring more police and using them more aggressively, looks the most promising.

    • FooQuuxman says:

      In anti-gun-rights propaganda, “acquaintance” gets promoted to “loved one” and most of the 80% of shootings that are gangbangers killing in the drug trade become equated to Ozzies and Harriets offing one another in suburban homes.

      It must be noted that this is part of the backing for another of the grabboid’s memes: That a woman can’t be helped by getting a gun because she will be unable to defend herself from the close relative / spouse who is abusing her. Aside from the fact that JAD himself manages to be less appallingly sexist, if this meme is true then abused women are completely and totally fucked.

      Somehow she will be completely incapable of pulling the trigger in the heat of the moment because of social pressure from other relatives, despite knowing that once she pulls the gun if she backs off she will get the beating of her life (if she survives it). But calling the police when tempers are cool will be easy for her? And of course the police can’t actually end the threat most of the time.

      Truly, a more patronizing group of jerks never walked the earth.

      • ” That a woman can’t be helped by getting a gun because she will be unable to defend herself from the close relative / spouse who is abusing her”

        the actual argument is that if everyone who could be helped by a gun has one, that leads to worse aggregate outcomes.

  141. Ano says:

    Is it wrong if I didn’t bother reading most of this post and just skipped to the conclusions?

    • Yes. Scott’s conclusions are not really supported by his evidence. He ignores way too many positive externalities of civilian weapons.

      His presentation of the evidence itself nevertheless illuminating and well worth reading.

  142. cmholm says:

    After raising some interesting points, the author lost credibility when he deployed this: “[DC has a high murder rate]. But DC also has the strictest gun bans and the lowest gun ownership rate.” Mr. Alexander, rather than take the easy shot, I’d ask you to show me that you understand the context. What are two major factors you neglected to mention in this sentence? I’ll throw in a clue: race/ethnicity isn’t one of them.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Urbanicity is the big one, but that’s my point – there are factors (such as urbanicity) that are separate from gun ownership which have a really really big effect on murder rate. It’s not credibility-destroying to point that out.

      • cmholm says:

        What I was getting at is that Washington D.C. suffers from 1) a large number of illegally possessed firearms, facilitated by 2) easy access to both legal and illegal firearms from the immediately surrounding MD and VA counties, and gunrunners driving up from FL. I believe it is credibility-destroying not to point this out within any discussion of gun violence in areas with a tighter gun control regime. I think it’s instructive that the state of HI enjoys reasonably effective gun control regulations.

        • Ahilan Nagendram says:

          It’s a good idea, then, that Scott omitted it entirely.

        • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

          The X axis in that chart is gun ownership rate, not stringency of gun control laws. If your complaint is that the existence of state lines renders unreliable the official numbers on gun ownership, DC is unlikely to be the only place affected, and perhaps you should be addressing your complaint to Vox rather than SA– trying to settle the matter by regressing gun deaths against official ownership rates was their idea, not his.

  143. “On the other hand, lives are very valuable. In fact, the statistical value of a human life in the First World – ie the value that groups use to decide whether various life-saving interventions are worth it or not – is $7.4 million. ”

    If you look a the demographics of murder victims, I think that number drastically overstates the value of human lives lost to murder in America. In America, blacks commit ~40% of the murders. 90% of their victims are other blacks. The demographic of black murder victims resembles the demographics of black murder offenders, i.e. 16-28, black, male, criminal records, little to no gainful employment. What subjective value would you assign to an intervention that would allow more of them to stay alive?

    • Anonymous says:

      Unlike Mark Atwood, I don’t love it when the mask slips. I’d rather it stayed on all the time.

    • Troy says:

      It shouldn’t need to be said, but for the benefit of those here who suspect anyone who accepts HBD or thinks it important of harboring such attitudes: I am someone who thinks there are large and important behavioral and cognitive differences between races (some of which is likely biologically caused), and who thinks we need to have honest discussions about this and its implications for public policy. And I strongly reject Bjorn’s suggestion that black lives are worth less than white lives. Empirical facts about race differences neither equal nor imply judgments about some human lives being worth more than others.

      #BlackLivesMatter #AllLivesMatter

      • FacelessCraven says:

        yeah, he appears to be a racist.

        On the other hand, remove all instances of “black” from his comment, and you’re left with the claim that several others have made in these threads: most murders in America are career criminals killing other career criminals. Slow Learner suggested we should be willing to spend as much to prevent such deaths as we do to prevent, say, the deaths of teen cancer victims. I am not sure I value the life of a 22-year-old criminal with an established history of antisocial violence as much as I do someone struck by cancer in their 20s.

        • cmholm says:

          Regarding valuing one individual life over another, I agree. But, the circumstances that tend to lead to more 22-year-old criminals has a huge cost, both in quality of life and missed economic opportunity for everyone. So yeah, I’m willing to spend as much to prevent such deaths.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            …in which case you’re talking about reducing the incidence of crime in general, not about preventing the deaths of specific criminals. At that point, we’ve left the topic of gun control entirely.

        • Troy says:

          I would disagree there too inasmuch as we are talking about how much we value the life. When we’re talking about intervention — what can we do — then these variables certainly make a difference. It might be more costly to help career criminals than others. (Edit: though cmholm above is certainly right that the negative economic consequences of crime are substantial.)

          But it does bear repeating that the most important beneficiaries of crime reduction are those communities committing most of the crime in the first place, including people who may have been criminals themselves, or who have in fact committed other crimes. I don’t think we should give up on such people, although my suggestions for how to help them (old time religion, stronger families, etc.) differ markedly from the standard progressive policy prescriptions.

          Edit: on the topic at hand (gun control), Martin O’Malley talked about gun control in the context of a #BlackLivesMatter question in the 1st democratic debate. He said that he had a good record of showing concern for black lives in reducing the death of young black men by shootings.

          I don’t know if he’s right (I’m pretty agnostic on gun control), but I appreciate the sentiment a lot more than the sentiments usually coming out of the BLM movement.

  144. dsto says:

    Some questions:

    “(I didn’t price in the advantages of guns in terms of preventing state tyranny and protecing freedom, which might be worth subsidizing, but my guess is that if 32% gun ownership is enough to maintain freedom, 22% gun ownership is as well)”
    Wouldn’t there be positive externalities of high gun ownership rates in reducing crime, and would 22% vs 32% be expected to make a difference there? Shouldn’t the lost value of that be calculated in?

    “If a similar program decreased gun ownership in America by (relative) 30%, it would decrease it by (absolute) 10% and decrease the homicide rate by (absolute) 22%. Since there are about 13000 homicides in the US per year, that would save about 3000 lives – or avert about one 9/11 worth of deaths per year.”
    Is it reasonable to expect that the marginal gun owner (that 30% of people that would no longer own guns under such a program) would affect the gun homicide rate as much as the average gun owner? Wouldn’t you expect that the gun owners who most significantly contribute to the gun homicide rate to be the gun owners furthest away from the margin (least likely to be in that 30% that get rid of their guns)?
    Or am I missing something?

    • Tibor says:

      I don’t think so. The people who use guns for violence are largely criminals who use it in their “profession”, so they have mostly acquired their guns illegally and limiting the total number of sold guns probably increases the black market prices as well, unless most black market guns are obtained by means other than illegal reselling or theft of legally purchased guns. They might then be more willing to switch to less expensive “tools of trade” such as knives. My reservations are mainly about the effectiveness of putting a large tax on guns being the best way of limiting the supply illegal guns.

      I think that the people willing to pay a 1000$ tax on a gun are not likely to be people who actually commit murder. They may be more willing to shoot others if attacked…which I personally find ok, so I would use a number for homicide sans self-defence, I don’t know about Scott or other people.

  145. A likely difference is intent. In Europe, many men (yes, gendered) own guns with the intent to hunt animals. There are a few regions where people own guns with the intent to defend collectively against tyranny. It’s very rare to meet an individual who admits they own a gun with the intent of self defence.

    Americans also own guns with the intent to hunt. But it looks like many or most buy guns with the intent to shoot a person in self defence. To non-Americans it looks like an active desire or fantasy to be in a situation where the gun owner is justified to shoot another person, and be a hero or whatever.

    What you think when you buy a gun probably influences how you’re going to use it. If the gun is “for hunting” or “for the revolution” that’s probably a step further away than if you bought it “for killing people”. If you bought it “for killing people” and it’s sitting in a drawer unused you might start looking for opportunities to use it.

    I don’t know if there are systematic studies of the reasons people report for buying firearms, in the US and elsewhere.

    • Harold says:

      But it looks like many or most buy guns with the intent to be able to shoot a person in self defence.

      Put it this way, and few American gun owners will disagree, except with an emphasis on protecting ourselves and family and friends, or maybe just other random innocents (but the latter is really unwise). And I’ve never met a gun owner who actually intended to do so, although only the really stupid would say that, seeing as how it declares premeditation, and will get you justly crucified in court.

      Of course, we 10 million Americans who’ve gotten concealed carry licences, 5% of the age eligible adults in my mixed city and rural county, have rather explicitly declared this, vs. intent to hunt or target shoot (the latter is a pretty big field of sports).

      BTW, at least a million Americans a year “use” their guns up to 2.5 million times to defend themselves and others. Scare quotes because most uses don’t involve even firing the gun, just credibly threatening to do so if necessary.

      (The first figure is from a survey conducted by an anti-gun organization, the second is more recent, the highest researchers have found adding the question of how many times a year to the survey questions.)

      • Anonymous says:

        It’s hard to know how many of those instances are legit and how many are unprosecuted brandishing.

        • Harold says:

          Essentially impossible, since the incidents are self-reported in surveys. But I’ve never heard that “unprosecuted brandishing” is a problem, let alone a significant one.

          Where, pray tell, can people expect to get away with it? Why wouldn’t most victims report that to the police? We’re certainly advised to always call the police when we’re forced to do so, in case the miscreant tries to get us into trouble by claiming falsely that we did so without sufficient provocation.

          • anonymous says:

            Consider the following scenario:

            It’s 9PM on a Tuesday, in a poor part of Jackson, Mississippi. A 66 year old white woman is home by herself as her husband of 45 years is in the hospital. She happens to glance out the window and sees three black teenagers / twenty somethings in baggy clothes walking down her side of the street. They pause in front of her house for unknown reasons. She goes to the closet and pulls out a handgun, goes to the door, points the gun vaguely in the youths’ direction and yells at them to get the hell away from her house. They run away.

            1) Do you think such a scenario is plausible?
            2) Do you think that she’d consider it a defensive gun use?
            3) What do you think are the chances the pedestrians are going to call the cops?
            4) What do you think the cops’ response would be if they did?
            5) Was it actually a defensive gun use or a was it a brandishing?

    • DarkWing says:

      “But it looks like many or most buy guns with the intent to shoot a person in self defence. To non-Americans it looks like an active desire or fantasy to be in a situation where the gun owner is justified to shoot another person, and be a hero or whatever.”

      I’ve been a licensed driver since 1980. I’ve driven hundreds of thousands of miles in that time. I’ve worn a seat belt almost every one of those miles. But even though I was wearing a seat belt, I never hoped to get in an accident.

      I owned a house for 18 years. Kept fire extinguishers in the house the entire time. Never once did my ownership of fire extinguishers mean that I hoped the house would catch fire.

      I held a carry permit for five years. Carried most days during those five years. Never once did I go out hoping I would have an opportunity to shoot somebody.

      In fact, the opposite was true. I became more likely to avoid potentially dangerous situations, because I didn’t want to get in a situation that might involve using my gun in self defense. I don’t know if that’s a typical response, but I have heard others report the same experience.

      • Seth says:

        I dunno. I’ve never seen anyone seriously write a comment like what follows. And if they did, it might raise an eyebrow or two. Consider this substitution of something above:

        “Not to be underestimated, either, is the psychological value of
        knowing that I am doing the duty of a man. When arson occurs near me,
        or in the event of a breakdown of hydrant pressure and water sprinklers, I am part of the solution. I am civilization asserting itself, with stifling foam
        or threat of same if required. We cannot leave that duty to
        firefighters and janitors, because having a sufficiently pervasive
        safety inspector and building maintenance presence to do the job
        effectively would have other kinds of very bad consequences.

        I sometimes wonder how you hazard-helpless sheep out there can stand
        yourselves. OK, I get it about women; they’re designed by the EAA to
        brave fire only when the men have failed. But there are days when I
        want to clout the nearest SWPL pajama-boy upside the head and ask “Who
        the fuck are you? Do you know what you’ll eat smoke for? Do you know
        what you’ll burn for? What will you do if shit gets real? Who do you
        smother if alight? Where are your goddamn balls?”

        Pretty much all fire-extinguisher-culture folks feel this way to some
        extent – that being around the self-hazardous is like being
        surrounded by overgrown children with no courage or sense of
        responsibility. We just don’t talk about it much.

        EDIT: I should have added that women in the fire-extinguisher culture
        share this feeling too. So it’s not the case that male
        fire-extinguisher owners are living on a macho island of self-assumed
        superiority; our women know it could be their job to put out flames, too.”

    • Cord Shirt says:

      “But it looks like many or most buy guns with the intent to shoot a person in self defence. To non-Americans it looks like an active desire or fantasy to be in a situation where the gun owner is justified to shoot another person, and be a hero or whatever.”

      This is really interesting. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to see it that way.

      I agree with Harold that the intent is really to *be able to* shoot a person in self-defense if a conflict gets to a point where your own life is in danger. So…as DarkWing said, most people don’t want to be in a situation where their life is in danger. It really is a just in case thing.

      It’s not “for killing people,” it’s “for staying safe.” So if it’s sitting in a drawer, then you’ve been staying safe, achieving your goal.

      • Tibor says:

        I don’t really think it makes sense to say something that should hold for all “non-Americans”. Even if you restrict this to Europeans it does not hold very well. Most people I know who own guns have them for self-defence or just for fun (shooting at a shooting range). Those are all people from the cities. I don’t know any hunters, I also don’t know anyone who does not come from a city or a bigger town. However, I think that in more rural regions most gun owners will use their guns for hunting. Hunting has a long tradition in the country, not in the US style but in a similar way like in Austria where the “hunter” (Jäger in German or myslivec in Czech…hunter is actually not a good translation but I don’t think there is a good word in English) also looks after the forest and its animals and the hunting is usually done in a group and with dogs during the hunting season. They also tend to wear clothes like this guy in their hunts (it is a comedy sketch but the clothes are accurate). I think that this tradition is also partly responsible for the quite liberal gun laws in the country.

        Actually, I think that a typical Czech from a city/town might look a bit down on hunters (because they kill animals for trophies and because every now and then an accident happens during a hunt and one hunter shoots another) but will not find someone having a handgun for self-defence as anything disturbing or weird (although, admittedly not all that common given the low percentage of armed households).

        • May I suggest “huntsman”?

          • Tibor says:

            I dunno, most of them only have four limbs, not eight :))

            I don’t have a good enough feeling for English to differentiate between hunter and huntsman. Huntsman sounds kind of more archaic, so maybe it fits better to the image of someone who looks after the forest as well. Basically you want a combination of a forester and a hunter…A huntester (which could also be a device constructed to tell Huns from other poeple…although that is already called a Hunalyzer)

        • Psmith says:

          “Ranger” seems about right. cf as well the names of somewhat specialized infantry forces–we have our Rangers, Germany has various Jager units. (What do you call the relevant class in D&D?)

          (ETA: “Jäger (singular [der] Jäger, plural [die] Jäger, German pronunciation: [ˈjɛːɡɐ]) is a German military term adopted in 1631 by the landgrave of Hesse when he first formed an elite infantry unit out of his professional hunters (Jäger) and rangers (Forstleute) in the Hessian Army.” Well, crap.).

          • Tibor says:

            Yeah, ranger is probably a more accurate translation but not used often. On the other hand a Jäger or myslivec it is not exclusively a military position or someone who is a government employee, but a ranger is perhaps neither. The DnD class ranger kind of fits too, although at least in czech, “ranger” as a fantasy game class is usually translated differently, with the word “chodec” which means literally pedestrian or walker but which is probably a slightly obscure reference to a group of yoemen who were tasked by the Bohemian king to guard the southwestern border of the kingdom in return for some privileges and who are/were called Chods. The reason for that is probably that the word “myslivec” has a much more modern flavour to it (18th century and onward) and one definitely imagines one with a rifle, not with a bow or a sword like the fantasy ranger.

    • Tibor says:

      I guess it depends on which part of non-America you’re talking about. Non-America is a pretty big country.

  146. Mark Bailey says:

    Nice analysis. I am not competent to dissect or critique it but it looks decent. However, some of the conclusions need further exploration. For example, when Australia put their firearms confiscation program in place, firearms related deaths (homicides) fell significantly. However, the overall homicide rate was nearly flat with a significant increase in homicides from knives and sharp instruments (Source – Aussie government crime statistics). I also remember reading (but cannot recall the source) that when a New England state put in place a handgun control program to reduce handgun suicides, it worked, sort of. Suicides by handgun decreased sharply. Overall suicide rates were effectively flat. Gas, poisons, and ropes are readily available (and probably uncontrollable) alternatives if a person is truly determined to commit suicide.

    One other point. Switzerland has nearly as high a percentage of households with firearms as the US and higher than Canada’s. Moreover, many of these firearms are military grade rifles and assault weapons. But Switzerland has an extremely low rate of firearms related homicides. To me, this is evidence that culture, national or regional, plays a significant role in homicide rates. Your comments pointed out the fact that Washington, D.C. is an outlier regarding gun ownership vs homicide rates. But then there is Chicago, which until very recently was every bit as restrictive about private ownership of handguns as D.C., but had (and still has) a relatively high gun homicide rate. Given that even a complete legal ban on firearms could be expected to be as effective as the complete legal ban on controlled substances (drugs), it would seem that it would be more effective to identify and attack the root causes, rather than the symptoms.

  147. Jfl says:

    It is mentioned that the statistical value of a human life is $7.4 mil. Do we value all life the same? Is it possible that some of these losses of life in the communities with a propensity for violence are actually a societal good? It is typically the most violent killing the most violent. I conceed that there are some serious tragedies, but on the whole, murders are felons murdering felons. If we are attempting to quantify this decision, and attempting to make an economic cost benefit analysis of gun control, do we put a positive value on the life of a person who lowers the overall standard of living, or is it actually a net economic positive for a violent criminal to be removed from society?

  148. cmholm says:

    The context of my beef was this passage:
    “There are many US states that combine very low firearm ownership with very high murder rates. The highest murder rate in the country is that of Washington, DC, which has a murder rate of 21.8, more than twenty times that of most European countries. But DC also has the strictest gun bans and the lowest gun ownership rate in the country, with gun ownership numbers less than in many European states! It seems likely that the factors making DC so deadly are part of the story of why America as a whole is so deadly, but these cannot include high gun ownership.”

    So, I check to see if Mr. Alexander was going to address the 800lbs gorilla. It wouldn’t have take more than what I wrote. When he branched out from strictly addressing Vox’ stats, he elected not to.

    • Agronomous says:

      Our host didn’t sweat through four years of medical school in a third-world country and then plunk himself down in the middle of Michigan for residency just to have people call him “Mr. Alexander.”

      That’s “Doctor Alexander,” motherfucker.

      Or, you know, just “Scott”.

  149. Z says:

    Regarding the Harvard Injury Control Research Center…

    See this: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/
    Check the bottom of the page for “Funding”.

    Now let’s look at the funding habits of their two main contributors:
    http://www.joycefdn.org/programs/gun-violence-prevention/gun-violence-prevention-grantees/
    http://www.bohnettfoundation.org/grants/category/gun-violence-prevention/

    Notice any trends?

  150. Peter West says:

    So what was the effect of the reduction in gun ownership in Australia? Oz has good statistics, so go for it.

  151. Jesse says:

    I never saw a distinction between homicides and justifiable homicides. Is this included in the studies? Also, I never saw a true distinction between gun ownership and violent crime… not just gun deaths.

  152. msnthrop says:

    I ran across some stats the other day that 50% of men who are murdered are murdered in their homes…for woman it was 75%…what would gun deaths/either by suicide or homicide look like when broken down by location of the incident