6 thoughts on gun violence

Last updated on: October 6, 2015 at 6:28 am by Jane the Actuary

6 thoughts on gun violence 2015-10-06T06:28:06-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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1. Yes, once again, half the country is saying “we need common-sense gun legislation” and the other half is saying, “stop being so vague; what you want it a large-scale ban on private ownership of guns, and we won’t let you.”

This time the gun-control side is much more willing, in fact, to speak of places like Australia and the UK, with their gun confiscation programs, as models, as Obama did in his recent speech; at the same time, the National Review and others are quick to point out that Australia’s gun laws weren’t necessarily the cause of drops in crime.

At the same time, Nicholas Kristof has an op-ed in the New York Times which is now being shared widely by all my liberal facebook friends. His prescription? Free the CDC to fund research on gun violence under the rubric of “pubic health”. Also: “universal background checks; tighter regulation of gun dealers; safe storage requirements in homes; and a 10-year prohibition on possessing guns for anyone convicted of domestic violence, assault or similar offenses” and

We should also be investing in “smart gun” technology, such as weapons that fire only with a PIN or fingerprint. We should adopt microstamping that allows a bullet casing to be traced back to a particular gun. We can require liability insurance for guns, as we do for cars.

Are these the right steps? (Surprisingly, he doesn’t mention the usual bit about banning guns with magazines of greater than X capacity.) Are they “common-sense” laws? Some of these proposals get pushback such as “it’s a constitutional right so the government has no right to place restrictions on it” but that knee-jerk reaction feels extreme. At the same time: liability insurance doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. How would an insurer price it? Would a policy be payable if the gunowner used the gun to commit suicide, or to commit a crime, or if someone else stole the gun? How would you enforce this? A car driven on public streets can be identified as noncompliant, but would the police keep records of all gunowners and confiscate the guns of noncompliant gunowners? About microstamping I don’t know; I would be rather surprised if such a thing were possible and tamper-proof. And “smart guns” — again, it seems improbable.

As to the CDC and the research ban? To be honest, what feels wrong to me is the labelling of this as a matter of “public health.” Gun violence is not a “disease” and it hardly seems appropriate to classify it as such. At the same time: are our universities so dependent on government grant-making, even in the social sciences, that nothing can happen unless it’s funded by the government, so that it is imperative that some government agency or another fund research on the topic or it won’t happen?

2. Let’s look at Wikipedia’s statistics:

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2013, firearms (excluding BB and pellet guns) were used in 84,258 nonfatal injuries (26.65 per 100,000 U.S. citizens) and 11,208 deaths by homicide (3.5 per 100,000), 21,175 by suicide with a firearm, 505 deaths due to accidental discharge of a firearm, and 281 deaths due to firearms-use with “undetermined intent” for a total of 33,169 deaths related to firearms (excluding firearm deaths due to legal intervention).

In other words, suicides exceed homicides by nearly a 2:1 ratio.

And one of the projects of the Brady campaign is to spread a message to “suicide-proof your home“– surprisingly, they’ve going after comparatively low-hanging fruit, not even calling on people to get rid of guns but asking them to keep trigger locks on guns so that an at-risk teen (who they may not even know is at risk) doesn’t use the gun to kill themselves, or perhaps store a gun elsewhere “temporarily.”

Would suicide-planners simply find another means of killing themselves if a gun weren’t available? I’ve seen claims that because suicide is impulsive, if it’s harder to act on that impulse, people will abandon the idea; I’ve also seen claims that because there is no correlation between suicide rates and gun ownership in a country, there is no reason to believe that fewer guns will produce fewer suicides — and I’ve also seen misleading charts such as trends in suicide by gun, rather than overall numbers of suicides. I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right to say that suicide is impulsive, but I can well believe that, of the means of committing suicide, shooting oneself has a certain appeal because you can be fairly confident that you’ll succeed. Overdosing on drugs, by contrast, I would expect would be seen as too “risky” — that is, where the risk is that you survive but are maimed or at least have the problem of mental health professionals not leaving you alone.

3. How many gunowners could be persuaded to remove guns from the home?

Actually, this is something I’ve wondered: can private citizens purchase a taser for self-defense? Seems to me it’s not possible. But if it were, would that be a satisfactory, and non-lethal alternative for people?

And for people who own guns for purposes of hunting and participating in shooting sports, is there another alternative? My memory was that, back as an undergraduate, the student handbook instructed students living on-campus to store their firearms with the on-campus police; I checked the handbook online and it’s still there. (Why would a student bring a firearm to campus? This is Michigan. I had always assumed this was for students who went hunting on the weekends, but, turns out, MSU has a shooting sports center open to the general public, so there’s that, too.) Could Nancy Lanza have stored her firearms at the local police station, and checked them out for hunting or target-shooting? If not, could local communities be encouraged to establish such gun-storage policies?

4. It looks like, again, in the case of the Oregon shooter, we’re looking at a scenario of the Angry Young Man who wants both to commit suicide and to take people along with him to punish, well, someone, even if not the people who bore any responsibility for what he perceives of as injustices. The particulars of his anger aren’t yet clear — there were initial claims of white surpremacy, but he’s biracial (or, simply put, black, in the same way as most individuals with one white, one black parent are defined as black, especially if raised by that black parent); there are claims that his MySpace friend is a jihadist. But nonetheless: was he looking for fame? I don’t know; quite possibly he simply didn’t believe in right or wrong or eternal punishment, and figured it would be great to combine suicide and at the same time fulfill a fantasy of killing. Which to me suggests that the “solution” is not to keep the names and details about future killers secreted away, so that would-be killers don’t see this as a path to fame. Rather, the best answer, to the extent that we have any control over these events, is to take such a killer alive, and parade him around so that every misfit, angry-at-the-world young man gets the picture that a suicide-by-massacre has a very real risk of landing him in jail, a place that surely is a fate far worse than death. Ideally, he’d have tried to kill himself but end up leaving himself jailed and permanently disabled.

(Update: I unpacked this thought more here.)

5. But what about the remaining 10,000-odd murders, those due to gang violence and other causes? Do they get their guns by stealing them from law-abiding owners? Do they get them from the so-called “bad apple gun dealers”? Do they get them from straw buyers, or because, after all, until that first crime, just living in the inner city isn’t enough to disqualify someone from passing a background check? Do these statistics exist? If this is the sort of large-scale study that can only be done with government funding, well, then it would actually make sense for the government to commission this in some fashion, even if not via the CDC.

6. My husband — remember, he’s German — would be perfectly happy pulling the voting lever for “yes” for a constitutional amendment repealing the second amendment and giving the government full permission to restrict weapons any way it sees fit. I would probably pull the (metaphorical) “no” lever, while well aware that this is a very real cultural difference — I could likely no more pull that yes lever than buy a Japanese car.

I do believe that the 2nd amendment is about an individual right to gun ownership. After all, the alternative explanation, that only men in duly-established militias were granted this right, makes no sense. Why, in that case, would there be any need for an amendment which reaffirms the government’s power? It’s be like saying, “the right of the government to establish armed forces shall not be infringed by the government” — what on earth would the point be?

But is there a human right, a natural right to own weaponry, in the same way as the right of free speech and free exercise of religion are recognized as human rights? This feels far more doubtful. After all, there is no “right” to own surface-to-air missles, or even fully-automatic rifles. Is it a human right to be able to protect oneself against run-of-the-mill intruders?

I’d add a 7th thought with some commentary about the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of people using guns against criminals in their homes, or as defense in public via concealed carry, but to say anything remotely intelligent on this requires a lot more reading and research than I have the ability to do.

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