The argument for banning handguns and assault weapons

Paul Gibbons

The gun debate revolves around two issues, a technical issue (one which can be settled by facts and analysis) and a philosophical one.  We need to clarify which one we are debating. I hear them confused.

The technical issue is this: do hand guns and assault weapons in the hands of the general public make for a safer country?   Safer schools, malls, colleges, post-offices, and temples?

Topping the list of firearm related deaths per capita are: El Salvador, Honduras, Columbia and sister countries.  Then comes number 12, the US, with 9 deaths per 100,000 people.  The US can do better than compare itself with the unstable, poor countries of the South. 

The worst of the older, stable, wealthy democracies are Switzerland and Finland, where they like their guns too but where laws are much more restrictive.  They have just over 1/3 as many.  When you get to the old, Northern European democracies (UK, Germany, Ireland, and Italy) the average is just over 1 death per 100,000.  One-tenth, if you please, of the US numbers.

This is a correlation.  For the ‘fewer guns make safer streets’ argument to hold, it has to be a causal relationship.  Non-violent crime rates are similar, so it is not that the US just has more crime.  In fact it has less non-violent crime, such as robbery or car-theft.  They have mental illness, poverty, broken homes, bullying in school also. 

The onus of proof surely lies with the gun lobby.  Why does the UK have 58 firearm murders per year and the US 8,775?  Adjusting for population grosses the UK number up to 290: that is a 30-fold difference.

The UK has a multi-racial society, problems controlling immigration, a large wealth gap between rich and poor (although nothing compares to the US in this regard).  Cops do not carry guns (with the exception of anti-terrorism and other security sensitive work).  Why?  They don’t need them.  (And you can be sure that if cops were dying, or crime rates soaring the public outcry would be for gun-carrying cops.)

This will not settle the argument for the gun-nuts, but for thoughtful people in the middle, this should give them pause for thought.

The other argument goes:  well it is our right!

This invokes a silly dualism: individual rights versus collective good.  Trade-offs between these are made all the time.

The left need to acknowledge that preservation of individual rights is something that was fought for over centuries: freedom of conscience, freedom to associate freely, freedom of religion.  Those rights were enshrined not just in the US founding framework, but in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights approved by the UN in 1948. 

Nobody wants to withdraw those.  Gun ownership is a plausible right: ‘a man [sic] ought to be free to defend his home.’ 

Possibly.

However, as individuals we routinely and freely give up certain rights because even though those rights benefit the ‘rights holder’ they cause aggregate harm to society.  We give up our right to drive as we like, as fast as we like, or on whichever side of the street pleases us.  We give up our rights to dispose of refuse anywhere we like, or to allow our pets to do so.  We give up our right to listen to music at any volume we like at any time we like because to do otherwise would create an intolerable unruliness.

The country would be a horrible place with people dumping, driving and blasting as they please.

With each right comes consequences.  When ‘honest Joe citizen’ defends his right, he is (in a narrow sense) correct.  Yes Joe, taking away your right is a bad thing.  But there are worse things: honest Joe’s right comes with a price.

Here is the price:

-          There is a mass shooting, on average, every two months.  There have been five since the summer.  (Compared with three in the UK in the last three decades.)

-          We cannot easily restrict the rights of ‘dishonest, insane, or criminal Joe’ without also restricting Joe’s right.  ‘Background checks’ do not catch people with no backgrounds.  The Sandyhook shooter did not have a background, neither did the Columbine shooters.  They got their guns through leaks in the system.

-          Guns in the hands of ‘honest Joe’s’ mean that at least some guns will fall into the hands of crazies.  It only takes one crazy to shoot up a school, mall or temple.  We have 300m citizens, which means a lot of crazies.

-          Joe’s (and hundreds of thousands like him) purchase supports the gun economy, and this gun economy means gun stores.  Gun stores leak.  Gun store owners are human: they make mistakes, they have economic needs.  You are supposed to be 21 to drink, and 19 to buy cigarettes – but leaks happen.  Kids get drunk and smoke.  Same with guns.

-          The presence of 300m plus guns creates a gun culture, a culture of fear.  My kid lives daily with the knowledge (after Sandyhook), that a madman might walk into his school and kill him.  Dad has explained the probabilities, but those sorts of facts do not allay fears in adults, nevermind kids.  He will grow up with a fear that kids in other countries never ever experience.

The question becomes, with all these consequences, whether this trade-off is one we want to make.  Can we let go of this right, because in doing so, we make the country a much safer place?

The gun lobby assert – if you take away the guns of the good guys, only the bad guys will be left with guns.  

Nonsense!  We could not and should not expect an overnight and complete elimination.  That is fantasy. But.

Anti-hand-gun and assault rifle laws, if passed on January the 1^st won’t mean the Crips hand over their guns on the 2^nd.  But in shutting down the gun economy, we shut down the leaks.  By stiffening penalties for possession and use over time, the bad guys won’t have theirs either. Let’s go Draconian shall we:  when ‘Fred the Crip’ gets pulled over and has a Glock-9 in his glove compartment, he gets an instant five years. Assault rifle, ten.  Will we get them all, ever? No.  

Would an 80% reduction serve us and is it possible? Yes!  Will it take a decade? Perhaps. Is it worth the effort and the wait? You decide.

There are also hundreds of murders yearly caused by good people, who get enraged (as we all do), and who happen to have a gun nearby.  Our Kansas City linebacker was, until the recent tragedy, probably such a ‘good person’ overtaken by a temporary insanity.  The difference between here and Europe is his madness had a convenient means of instant expression.  Kids who find guns in homes (again a leak) will not accidentally shoot a sibling or friend (as also happened recently).

Let us ask ‘honest Joe’.  Joe, if we could, in a decade, reduce the number of gun deaths in the US to European levels; if we could reduce mass murders to once a decade (once a year would be a huge improvement); if we could stop kids accodentally harming themselves; if we could stop a crime of passion (madness) becoming a murder; if we could reduce gang murders (and the culture of fear where each side must arm themselves to the teeth) to a fraction of today’s; if we could walk into a mall, temple, school, college or post-office with a no fear (no rational fear) of someone firing off several hundred rounds?

Joe – would you pay that price?  Would you give up a little bit of individual liberty, for a whole lot of social good?  For your kids?