Saturday, July 21, 2012

Bad Gun Control Arguments: Armed Citizens Are As Dangerous As Mass Murderers

I'm torn on the issue of gun control, but there are some unequivocally bad arguments on each side. We need to filter these arguments out from the get-go if we're ever going to make any progress in figuring this out.

One bad argument, which I'll call the Better Off Unarmed argument, is used in several different ways by those advocating gun control (e.g. it's used as an objection to the argument that law-abiding citizens with concealed firearms can help stop mass murders like the Colorado Batman shooting). The BOU argument goes roughly like this:
Consider a hypothetical mass shooting/mass murder. Suppose one or more of the potential victims was/were armed. Now, without training, and in the heat of the moment, these people, and their firearms, are likely to be ineffective against the murderer, likely to have their guns taken away from them, likely to shoot innocent people, perhaps even each other. So armed response to mass shooters won't work. So...etc.*
This is a bad argument. An armed citizen responding in such a case will simply not, on average, accidentally injure or kill nearly as many people as an armed murderer who is intentionally trying to kill people. [See EDIT below!!!]  But the BOU argument only works if you think that such a citizen will injure or kill more people. Sadly, in such debates we must grant that harm will occur, and we can only ask which option is likely to minimize it. Consequently, advocates of BOU are committed to the following position: suppose you are in a position to make a decision for a roomful of people who are about to be attacked by a maniacal mass murderer. You can choose for one of the potential victims to have a concealed weapon, or you can choose for everyone in the room to be unarmed. Advocates of BOU are committed to the claim that you should opt to leave the victims entirely unarmed. Arming them decreases their chance of survival. That, of course, is madness.

Note also that, if it were that easy to take guns away from shooters, we'd expect that more such shooters would have their guns taken away by their victims. Advocates of the BOU argument are committed, inconsistently, to a view according to which guns, in the hands of criminals, are terribly effective; when in the hands of those resisting such criminals, however, they are utterly ineffective and, in fact, counterproductive.

Needless to say, this doesn't settle the issue. But banishing the BOU argument from rational discussions would be a step in the right direction.

[Edit:
As Spencer notes, I didn't say what I meant/should have said. We need to compare:

(Attempted) mass murders in which there is no armed response by citizens

to

(Attempted) mass murders in which there is an armed response by citizens

What I meant to say above is that, on average, there will be fewer innocent deaths and injuries in the latter kind of case than in the former kind. What I actually wrote was egregiously imprecise and totally different.

I am hanging my head in shame.]




* One place this argument shows up is in an unutterably terrible and intellectually dishonest episode of 20/20, in which Diane Sawyer sets up an experiment to prove the relevant claim above. A few college kids are put in an absolute worst-case scenario, with paint guns shoved into their waistbands. They aren't informed that a police firearms instructor is about to barge into the room, knowing exactly where the "armed" student is sitting. Needless to say, the firearms instructor is able to best the student almost every time. The one time a student does shoot him, it's dismissed because she "only" hit him near his femoral artery... Another time, a result they don't like is dismissed because one of the students almost shot another student, who had been specifically instructed to run across his field of fire... It was a shameful bit of pseudo-science...
(An earlier post on that program)


8 Comments:

Blogger Pete Mack said...

Umm. Don't know where to begin on this. The usual argument for gun control isn't that armed citizens aren't as dangerous as the bad guys, it's that citizens should be safe without having to go armed.

as for the Aurora case: the guy showed up in full body armor. It's not likely that a few concealed handguns would have reduced the carnage by much.

Maybe what we need is to have projection technicians trained as snipers. A high powered rifle in the projection booth would have leveled things out.

6:47 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Well, both of those are different points, that should be dealt with separately.

Here and now, I'm only addressing the "Better Off Unarmed" argument.

6:54 PM  
Blogger Spencer said...

I'm not sure what to think about all this. A cursory glance at the empirical research suggests a lot weaker case than I would have expected supporting more gun control.

As to the BOU argument, you say: "This is a bad argument. An armed citizen responding in such a case will simply not, on average, accidentally injure or kill nearly as many people as an armed murderer who is intentionally trying to kill people."

Is the BOU argument really invested in the respective average injure/kill rates of citizen vs. murderer? It seems to me that it's not. Rather, it's interested in the average injure/kill rates of two different kinds of incidents: one where only a murderer is armed and one where murder and citizen(s) are armed.

Do such statistics even exist?

8:47 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

S,

Egad, you are so right. What I wrote was irresponsibly sloppy.

Gotta edit...

4:56 PM  
Blogger matthew christman said...

The idea that armed citizens will reduce the number of deaths and injuries in a spree-killing situation assumes a whole bunch of things. It assumes that those citizens with concealed weapons are competent in the disposition of firearms. Now, how can we know that? Maybe they've taken a firearms safety course or a tactial defense class, but how does any of that assure that they will be able to actually execute competent firearms use in the heat of the moment, having found themselves, for the first time in their lives, in a live-fire situation. In the Colorado case, it also assumes that ONLY ONE armed, trained citizen is in the audience to 'take out' the armor-clad assailant. As soon as you raise the number of armed theatergoers to two (or three, or four, etc.) you introduce a whole new component: why, in the smoke and heat and noise of a gunfight in a dark room, would any of these would-be saviors have cause to assume that THE OTHER armed gunmen in the smoke-filled, darkened room full of screaming people, have cause to automatically assume that any of the other armed people in the room were not co-horts of the shooter and to act accordingly?

It seems to me that arguments in favor of a "more guns in public" solution to spree shootings can't just entail an endorsement of concealed carry laws. If anything, it requires endorsement of OPEN CARRY laws and, really, COMPULSORY OPEN CARRY laws. That's the only way to ensure that any would-be spree killer would know that any target population would include a significant number of armed people and that gun-carries in public settings who might use their weapons to stop a spree killer would know that there were other armed "good guys" in that same group of people as well. That's the only 'armed citizenry' argument that refutes the point that a randomly-distributed number of people with concealed weapons (and inconsistent ability to use them) can't possibly deter spree killings.

Of course, the real take-away is that, as Leonard Pierce points out in this article: http://ludickid.livejournal.com/1008438.html, deranged people who want to kill large numbers of people in public are going to do so with any weapons at their disposal, and the knee-jerk need to find a SOLUTION to the problem whenever it happens is ultimately pointless. Maybe a legal requirement that all adults who leave their homes must carry a loaded firearm in plain sight might trim some of the (tiny) number of victims of spree killings in a given year, but such a plan would be just as much an intrusive infringement on liberty as a blanket ban on gun ownership.

12:29 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Matthew,

I have to disagree.

First you write:

"The idea that armed citizens will reduce the number of deaths and injuries in a spree-killing situation assumes a whole bunch of things. It assumes that those citizens with concealed weapons are competent in the disposition of firearms. Now, how can we know that?..."

Well, this sounds suspiciously like an appeal to skepticism. How can we know--or, better: be justified in believing--anything about such a situation? One might respond: how can we know it won't? Better, though: Well, we know that one person is better off armed against a killer. We know that, if two people face a killer, they are better off if one of them is armed. We know this holds for three, four, five people... So what's the number of people for which it ceases to be true? My guess is: there is no such number. However, the burden of proof is on you to argue that there IS such a number.

Second you write:

"Maybe they've taken a firearms safety course or a tactial defense class, but how does any of that assure that they will be able to actually execute competent firearms use in the heat of the moment..."

Nothing "guarantees" anything here. Again, we are talking about probabilities. If Smith and Jones are both intended victims of a mass killer in a crowd of people, the killer is targeting the crowd. If Smith is armed, he is then targeting the killer. The cones of fire will be targeted differently. The odds that any given person, including Jones, will be killed accidentally by Smith is lower than the odds that they will be killed intentionally by the shooter. This could easily be confirmed by empirical testing--something I fervently wish someone would do.

I urge you to drop this Better Off Unarmed argument. It's clearly wrong, and makes the pro-gun-control position irrational in virtue of its embracing an obvious falsehood. The strong arguments for the gun control position lie elsewhere.


the compulsory carry argument is irrelevant here, for reasons noted above. It's also unsound. First, and as I made very clear, I am only discussing a very specific argument: the Better Off Unarmed argument. As I note, the question of whether increasing CCWs is a good policy, or likely to work, is a different question. We are asking: *is it better or worse IF someone in the pool of victims is armed?* The answer is: better.

As for the soundness of your argument: no, compulsory CCWs wouldn't be necessary, just an increase in their prevalence. There are routes to this other than making it compulsory, and we use them to encourage people to do things all the time. (Tax breaks is one mechanism.)

Incidentally, I do not support the policy of increasing the number of CCWs. You simply assume that I do. I don't know why.

8:54 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I will keep this simple.

Is there a statistic (I haven't found one yet) where it compares the locations of these shootings? Meaning is there a complete randomness, or are all of these directed toward public places where the victims have a very small chance of carrying guns?
If there are an equal amount of killing sprees happening at gun ranges, military complexes, or police stations where the victims are almost all garunteed to be armed.

It seems to me that this alone can prove the theory that being unarmed makes you more of a target.

Also we are assuming that is the murderer is going to stay standing in the crowd shooting if shots are being fired back his directions. Say an armed person in the crowd does hit and innocent. How many more were saved due to the armed murderer running off from being fired upon?

2:02 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

@ anonymous. I believe John Lott has done a long term study on shooting locations. You'll have to do a little digging. Sorry I couldn't be of more help.

12:07 AM  

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