On Monday, in The Gun Control Post Part 1, I focused mostly on the differences between how conservatives and liberals approach the issue of gun control. In short, liberals see gun control primarily as a public health problem. Guns, like asbestos or lead, are a dangerous part of the environment that lead to tragic deaths through suicide, murder, and mass killings. In order to limit this unnecessary loss of life, guns should be restricted. Liberals often include a condescending exception for “hunters and sportsmen”, but the real consequence of that rhetoric is to preemptively invalidate the conservative view of the issue. In reality their paradigm leaves little room for co-existence with guns of any kind. An ideal liberal society is a society with practically no guns in the hands of private citizens.
Of course I realize this does not describe all liberals, but I believe it is a good representation of the majority view on the American left. Furthermore, it is a reasonable position to hold. Societies like Japan and Western Europe, where civilian ownership of weapons has been heavily regulated for centuries (before firearms even existed, in many cases), have significantly lower murder rates and it is due at least in part to the fact that guns are extremely rare. A desire to move our society in that direction is neither intrinsically un-American nor a symptom of some nefarious desire for centralized control. Longing for a society where we are all safe from violence (and especially the most vulnerable) is a noble and American sentiment, and wanting to minimize the availability of guns in society to move towards that goal is rational. That is why the liberal position must ultimately entail not only limited measures such as universal background checks or bans on assault-style weapons, but in the end a near-total prohibition. The liberal vision is a society by and large without guns in the hands of private citizens.
It is worth pointing out, however, that the link between firearm laws or firearm prevalence and violence is anything but simple. This FactCheck.org article has a rundown of some of the claims from both sides, and shows how each cherry picks (or in some cases fabricates) statistics to their liking. I also did some ultra-simplistic analysis on some data that was gathered and made available for download by The Guardian. One of the interesting observations in the article is that the US has–by far–the highest rate of civilian ownership in the world. In the US, there are privately-owned 88 guns for every 100 citizens. The runner-up, Yemen, has a rate of only 55 for every 100 people. Despite this fact, the homicide rate for the United States is nowhere near #1 in the world. We’re at #28. I put together a comparison of the firearm homicide rate per 100,000 people vs. the firearm rate per 100,000 guns for the United States and some comparable nations, and the results are pretty interesting.
When you just look at homicide rate per 100,000 citizens, the United States is a huge outlier (at least compared to this group). But when you consider the firearm homicide rate per gun (in other words, a very naive attempt to control for the fact that the United States has a lot more guns floating around), we go from being well more than triple the #2 country to placing fourth in the list. Portugal, Ireland, and Belgium all have higher firearm murder rates per gun than the United States, and other developed nations like South Korea aren’t very far behind either. Over all, the rates are much more evenly distributed. It would be very interesting to compare this data to aggregate crime data (non-firearm homicides along with assaults, burglaries, etc.), but in the meantime it’s a simple snapshot illustrating how complex inter-country comparisons can be.
Back on the conservative side of things, however, the American right does not see the issue in terms of public health but in terms of civil liberties. Conservatives believe that individual Americans have a right to personal protection and that in practice this means they ought to have access to the kinds of weapons they can reasonably expect to encounter. Furthermore, conservatives believe that the widespread distribution of arms throughout society acts as an important deterrent to criminals, a last line of defense against foreign invaders, and a vital check on the growth of centralized government authority. Fundamentally, conservatives recognize that there is a cost to be paid for preserving the Second Amendment, but they also believe that there would be an even heavier cost to be paid in sacrificing it.
Most of the debate, however, does not take place at the level of rational discussion, but at a much more visceral level. Conservatives and liberals increasingly behave as separate and opposed tribes within American politics. They fundamentally do not understand each other, and from that lack of understanding extremism spreads. Although I certainly have an opinion on the gun rights debate, and I tend to come down with the conservatives, I am also deeply troubled at the divide that I believe is growing within our society.
So my goal in my concluding post on gun control is two-fold. First: I want to critique the gun control policy debates and uncover what I see as a fundamental lie that both the conservatives and liberals engage in. Secondly, I’d like to present my own proposals which address the shortcomings in current proposals and at the same time seek to find common cause among liberals and conservatives. I certainly don’t think I have all the answers and I expect my ideas to take heat from both sides, but I’d at least like to be talking to rather than at both sides of this debate. So, here goes nothing.
Read more
