Gun Laws and Crime: "A Complext Relationship"*
Last year, at the NYT.
The importat point to keep in mind about this issue is that the preponderance of evidence currently fails to support the claim that more restricitve guns laws will, in general, reduce violent crime. (There seem to be a few fairly obvious exceptions--e.g. stricter laws about carrying guns illegally would be good.)
It's easy to forget where the various burdens of proof lie; remember, though: gun control skeptics need not show that firearms decrease violence, but only that they do not significantly increase it. And they seem to be on their way to carrying that burden.
And here's another important point ot keep in mind:
It's plausible to think that stricter gun laws will decrease gun violence; it just turns out not to be true--or so it currently seems.
My position on this is basically my default quasi-libertarian position: maximize personal freedom and punish the hell out of violent criminals who abuse it. There's a strain in liberalism that I've never understood nor sympathized with that advocates (a) restricting the freedom of law-abiding citizens in such cases and (b) eschewing severe punishment of violent criminals. This, to my mind, gets things backwards. Fortunately, the main questions here turn out to be empirical ones about the efficacy of various policies, and the more conservative/libertarian position here seems to get things right. (Though, as I'm fond of pointing out, conservatism and libertarianism actually don't agree that often about substantive matters.)
[Note: I may have notable bias here as I grew up on a farm and have always been comfortable around firearms. However, I did, for awhile, several years ago, incline toward the more orthodox restrictive/liberal/gun-control side of the dispute. So that's some reason to think that my thinking here is receptive to the arguments to at least some degree.]
* Um, I'm just kind of wondering: if the evidence were strongly trending in the direction of the pro-gun-control position, do you think the NYT would have titled the piece "a complex relationship"?
Last year, at the NYT.
The importat point to keep in mind about this issue is that the preponderance of evidence currently fails to support the claim that more restricitve guns laws will, in general, reduce violent crime. (There seem to be a few fairly obvious exceptions--e.g. stricter laws about carrying guns illegally would be good.)
It's easy to forget where the various burdens of proof lie; remember, though: gun control skeptics need not show that firearms decrease violence, but only that they do not significantly increase it. And they seem to be on their way to carrying that burden.
And here's another important point ot keep in mind:
...criminals are the people least likely to obey gun control laws, meaning
that the laws probably have a disproportionate impact on law-abiding
individuals. “For the typical gun control law,” Professor Volokh said, “you’ll
have very little positive effect but a possible negative effect.”
It's plausible to think that stricter gun laws will decrease gun violence; it just turns out not to be true--or so it currently seems.
My position on this is basically my default quasi-libertarian position: maximize personal freedom and punish the hell out of violent criminals who abuse it. There's a strain in liberalism that I've never understood nor sympathized with that advocates (a) restricting the freedom of law-abiding citizens in such cases and (b) eschewing severe punishment of violent criminals. This, to my mind, gets things backwards. Fortunately, the main questions here turn out to be empirical ones about the efficacy of various policies, and the more conservative/libertarian position here seems to get things right. (Though, as I'm fond of pointing out, conservatism and libertarianism actually don't agree that often about substantive matters.)
[Note: I may have notable bias here as I grew up on a farm and have always been comfortable around firearms. However, I did, for awhile, several years ago, incline toward the more orthodox restrictive/liberal/gun-control side of the dispute. So that's some reason to think that my thinking here is receptive to the arguments to at least some degree.]
* Um, I'm just kind of wondering: if the evidence were strongly trending in the direction of the pro-gun-control position, do you think the NYT would have titled the piece "a complex relationship"?
posted by Winston Smith at
11:50 AM
2 Comments:
I think it's equally clear that looser gun control laws don't necessarily decrease crime, either. These types of statistics are notoriously difficult to run.
I once looked at gun murder statistics from Washington, DC and found that gun-related murders increased slightly if you compare the year of the handgun ban with 2007, though by a significant number. However, during the 1990-1993 period, the rate was closer to 450 murders per year. This is too far removed from the time of the ban to be related to gun control in any meaningful way, and regardless the numbers came back down to rough parity with the pre-ban numbers without any change, to my knowledge, in Washington's gun laws.
Obviously, this isn't exactly a feather in the cap of gun control advocates, but neither does it support the aphorism that "an armed society is a polite society" or that legalised concealed carry is an effective deterrent to crime. In fact, it falsifies both the pro- and anti-gun hypotheses, suggesting that there's no connection between gun laws and violent crime.
Given that -- and I don't think I made this clear enough in the other thread -- I'm perfectly willing to accept a strict interpretation of the Second Amendment to guarantee gun ownership as a right. I just think that self-defence is probably the dumbest reason one could have for exercising that right, given the rarity of the situations where having a gun for self-defence would be helpful, the increased odds of escalation and injury to innocent bystanders, the chance that one's weapon could be taken and used against its owner, and the many "off-label" uses of legally-owned firearms (for instance, threatening a spouse -- which does not require firing the gun and committing a reportable act of murder or assault with a deadly weapon).
I feel the same way about knives, for what it's worth. I know people who carry them for self-defence purposes. I don't mind them being legally able to do so (in fact, I think anti-knife laws are probably too restrictive), but I think they're somewhat daft for actually doing it, absent a clear and present danger to themselves.
I think we're in the same political quadrant on this, Joshua.
Seems to me that the odds of having your gun on you at the right time s pretty slim--and absolutely not worth the trouble.
Given the way things have gone in my parents' neck of the woods, with my grandparents' abandoned farm, we all usually take some kind of firearm if we go over there to check things out--a shotgun or a handgun in open carry.
And I've gotta tell ya', it's kind of a pain. Get in the truck...huhwah? Did I accidentally sit on a carburetor? Oh yeah... They catch on things, they're heavy, and, well, they're GUNS. So if you're ridiculously safety-conscious (as I am), you're constantly thinking about them.
I plan to get my VA CCW...but there's just no WAY I'm carrying a gun around. It's a huge pain in the ass.
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