Tag Archives: shooting

Gun Laws: The Philosopher’s Stone of Violence

It’s happened again, there has been another unprovoked violent assault by a nut job with a gun. And with a predictability that would make Pavlov proud, the left has eructed onto the blogosphere and social media with smug condescension. Their target? The evil Republicans of course; they obviously WANT children to die. It’s as if the left honestly believes all we have to do is pass a couple of laws and (dusting hands) problem solved.

But, let us first dispel some fake new making the social media rounds. The first is the lie that there have been 18 “mass shootings” at schools in 2018. In fact there have only been 3, all others were either suicides, accidents or didn’t involve any injuries whatsoever.

Granted three is three is too many, however why not just tell the truth and say there have only be three? Why the constant need by the left to overstate the incidence of everything they find objectionable by redefining what those terms mean? Perhaps to make everything look like a crisis that requires immediate state intervention so their worldview can be forced upon everywhere else? Nah.

Likewise another tired narrative is how the US has far more shootings than any other country in the world. This is an example of the old false equivalency fallacy. Typically the US, a country of 300 million, is compared to some tiny little nation with a population of 5 million (Denmark say) without any mention of the difference in population. Clearly, every country equals every other country when comparing countries. But that is not how we do statistics.  Data must be normalized to population (rates per 100,000) and violent act (e.g. not gun assaults but homicides). When we do that, the US falls somewhere in the middle.

And if you look at individual US states and compare the strict gun law states to the loose gun law states and look at HOMICIDE rates (not gun deaths or suicides) you’ll see there really is no clear correlation one way or the other. Some super strict states (California: 4.9/100k) have a higher homicide rate than very lax ones (Montana 3.5/100k). New Hampshire has the lowest rate of any state (1.3/100k) – if you really believe laws make the difference then copy them. Isn’t the point to reduce all homicides, not just homicides using some particular weapon?

If the left were serious about stopping gun deaths they would lobby instead to end the drug war and make all drugs legal. It is easy to ignore the unseen, that is the non-newsworthy deaths of  a handful of people every day in every city all across the country due to drug-related gang turf disputes or shoot outs with authorities (bear in mind NONE of those would occur were drugs legal.) But roll a dozen or so deaths together in an afternoon and in one location and now it is Armageddon! Broken pipes get attention, but dripping faucets not so much.

Again not to belittle the deaths of anyone, but the point is it is trivially within our grasp to save the lives of tens of thousands every year by simply doing nothing – by simply ending the drug war. It costs nothing to do and in fact would yield a huge preventive dividend by allowing police to devote more attention to crimes with actual victims. But no, the left would rather continue to believe the fairy tail that somehow if we could only waive some magic wand and make all guns illegal (because that is the only reform that could even hypothetically have stopped mass attacks, all the other suggested reforms would have done nothing whatsoever to have stopped the attacks of recent memory) – well then we would have the promised land and all would be solved. Yes I hear it coming, the “Oh but Australia did it and it worked!” objection. Please. As I said above the difference in population between the two countries is 13:1. Since 1996 when Australia enacted a federal ban on firearms there have still been 11 mass attacks. Three involved guns (cough, banned, cough), the rest deployed other deadly means: arson, blunt objects, and vehicles. So yes, fewer “gun” attacks, but still plenty of violent attacks. On a per capita basis, in comparison to Australia’s rate, the US should have had 143 such attacks in the same period. The actual number? 34.

No Substitutions Please

Gun control does not and cannot “work” if the goal is to decrease human death. If the goal is to decrease gun ownership, then yes, it works just fine. Gun control affords an illusion of safety by virtue of willfully ignoring the substitution effect; that is, guns are simply a means to an end, if that means is denied, then another means may be substituted to achieve the same (or worse) effect.

Those that believe more stringent background checks will keep guns out of the hands of the “bad” guys, all I can say is consider the case of the Orlando nightclub shooter. He was investigated by the FBI. Twice. And he was still considered to be a non-threat. In other words, even if FBI agents personally engaged in full background investigations of every prospective gun owner, that nut still would have been able to buy a weapon. How are background checks supposed to improve the situation if even the gold standard of such checks failed in this case? Actual “bad” guys aren’t going to get guns the legal route anyway, so they can entirely avoid such checks. “Good” guys follow the rules, but since they are already “good,” background checks are a waste of time and resources. The “good in the past but planning something bad in the future” guys will slip through undetected as well since it’s impossible to know what someone might do. So in all cases it is entirely pointless.

In European countries they have managed to achieve the holy grail of limited gun ownership. This effectiveness affords us the opportunity to witness the substitution effect in action. Bomb attacks are unheard of in the US but are far more frequent in Europe. People that want to kill aren’t going to think “aw shucks, no guns, guess I’ll just go home and write angry Facebook comments”. No, people do what people have always done. They find another means to achieve their madness. In the case of the Nice, France attack far more people were killed with that truck (77 at last count) than would have been with an AR-15. It takes a long time to shoot 77 people with a gun – even automatically you have to pull the trigger 77 times (or more if you have bad aim). But a truck can kill scores in seconds. If guns are not available, then it pushes people to find other, more deadly, means. Next time it may be a bomb, or a biological agent. Those wishing the elimination of all guns should be careful what they wish for.

The recent attack in Munich, Germany oddly still has the gun control advocates crowing. They cite Germany’s low homicide rate by gun due to their restrictive gun ownership laws. Germany has a homicide rate of 0.9 (per 100,000) (notice I cited homicide rate, not gun death rate, as that is the proper apples to apples comparison metric). New Hampshire has a homicide rate of 1.0. New Hampshire’s gun ownership rate is 146 per hundred residents. Germany’s rate is 30. Interesting. Five times fewer guns yet the same rate of murder. Did I cherry pick New Hampshire? Of course. But that is the point – political boundaries are arbitrary distinctions. There are probably regions of Germany with a much lower and much higher murder rate. Citing countrywide statistics might be interesting fodder for navel gazing, but it does nothing to root out causes. Correlation is not causation, but for guns and deaths there isn’t even correlation. If you’re going to cite low homicide rates as being correlated with low gun ownership rates then don’t ignore the fact that it also correlate with high gun ownership rates. Likewise high homicide rates can be correlated with both low and high gun ownership rates. These are not one variable relationship and simplistic analyses do nothing to advance the conversation.