1) I've known two people who have bought handguns. Both did so for self defense reasons after being victims of violent crime/break ins. The perpetrators didn't have a gun, but were bigger and stronger (one had a knife and a buddy). Both were middle class white people not living in the ghetto. The perpetrators were defiantly on drugs in one encounter and possibly on drugs in the other.
2) When I was a single young adult I got into skeet shooting for awhile and found it very relaxing. I gave up my gun once I had kids.
3) I don't think gun regulation is a particularly important matter. I think it would probably save lives, but not that many. I'd rather target crime more directly rather than pretending guns are the driver.
I also believe that targeting crime will never happen because we'd have to talk about blacks.
4) One bonus of banning guns would be getting rid of insane fantasies of some right wingers that people could somehow engage in an armed uprising against the government in 2023. I find that notion absurd and distracting from the real fight against tyranny.
5) One thing that really bothers me is active shooter drills in schools. Like every other fear based bullshit they push on kids these days it drives me up the wall.
6) On that note, the entire gun control demographic gives off an authoritarian safety-ism streak that I'm thoroughly exhausted by. Maybe beating their head against the NRA distracts them from whatever other bullshit they would be working on in our lives. I have a gas stove I'd like to keep among other things.
#4. Popular gun ownership actually is definitely a check on govt tyranny - that is 100% accurate. It’s not that a band of gun-owning citizens is going to successfully overthrow the govt or win a civil war. But if the govt were to get very out of line in the future - say attempt genocide on a sub-segment of the population - that is much harder to do vs an armed citizenry. It’s not impossible, and if the full strength of the govt attempts it, they’ll win. But the population being armed makes it far less likely they’ll attempt it in the first place.
Further - an armed population has the same deterrent effect against a foreign invader.
#3 - I don't get this point. You can absolutely target crime. You don't have to talk about race at all because you can just punish criminals on an equal-opportunity basis. It's the other side that insists on talking about race in order to stop you from punishing criminals equally. We seem to be caught in a cycle on this question. The left cries racism and forces society to go soft on Criminals of Color, until crime gets out of control to the point that people no longer care about the cries of racism. Then, when peace returns, people grow receptive once more to the message that there are so many Prisoners of Color, and crime is way down, so why does our racist society have to keep them there?
#4 - It's probably not as insane as people like to suggest, the IRA is the model, not the Taliban (see not just the Troubles but also Michael Collins and the Irish War of Independence). Presumably the scenario is a popular Southern state government nullifying Federal law, followed by an unpopular Federal invasion of that state.
If it's impossible to resist, it's not the tanks and planes that make it so, the British had those things even in 1920. It's the superiority of the US government's domestic intelligence apparatus compared to anything seen before in a free society.
#3 Yes, we are stuck in that equilibrium. I don't think it will change as long as blacks can vote.
#4 Yeah...let's try secession again. What did the union do the first time again?
Britain had been debating Irish independence for a long time. Home Rule had already passed but got restricted by WWI. When Britain wanted to suppress Irish rebellion it managed to do so for 700 years or so. Ireland was the beginning of a long de-colonization project in which Britain willingly gave up its empire not because it had to but because it was in its interest to.
No partisan group did anything to stop the 20th century dictatorships on their own. The only places they were effective is when the dictatorship was fighting a real war against a real foe, and then only in support of that foe not as a threat in and of themselves. Even the dying Third Reich still surpassed the Warsaw Uprising.
I agree on intelligence difference but also think the killing power of modern weapons vs riflemen is vastly higher then it was fifty years ago.
The main thing holding back the state is its willingness to use force (for moral or political reasons), not its fear of the rabbles force making ability.
Whatever happens, it won't play out like the US Civil War because in that day, the US Army barely existed as a force in being. New armies were thus raised from scratch by both sides and the result was a basically symmetrical conflict. We won't see that again.
You're basically suggesting that Michael Collins' way of war wouldn't have worked on Stalin or Hitler's government. I firmly agree. It worked on Lloyd George's government though (even if all it did was speed along the inevitable, it certainly sped it along). In the end, the British were politically constrained from bringing the full force of their firepower down against the Irish people. My supposition is that any 21st century internal armed conflict in the US will operate with those same constraints. Washington will not be able to simply carpet bomb Tallahassee.
If the regime in Washington does NOT operate under those constraints, if it CAN carpet bomb Tallahassee with political impunity, it means the US constitutional order has effectively dissolved and you're probably looking at something more like the Russian Civil War, with Washington playing the role of the Reds. It's still possible that widespread small arms ownership in areas hostile to Washington would make a difference in that war, but who knows, a lot is contingent on how exactly that comes about because it's a much more fantastical scenario than the one I'm describing.
I agree on all points. As an addendum to point #4 I would like to add that it annoys me that many gun nuts act as if guns are the only thing that matters. It's a combination of "might makes right" and also just caring about them the most when there are a lot more important things to worry about.
"What’s the big deal if you have to wait a week to buy a gun? By itself, the answer is plainly, “Yea, it’s not a big deal.” "
I had a few events in my life that make me disagree with this. The first was that somebody I knew threatened one of my children. The second was that someone broke into my car and stole my garage door opener, which I assumed meant they wanted to get into my house. On both occasions I considered arming myself. Had it been necessary, a one week waiting period would have been a nightmare. It's very easy to imagine other situations (rioting, looting, domestic violence) where someone could have an immediate need for a gun to protect themselves or their property.
Even though there hasn't been a mass violent counter-response to despotic pushes in the past, the expected risk of democide versus the expected risk of violent population unrest should be weighed. I think its only a fool who would say 80 million small arms owners have zero impact on the degree to which the existing government is despotic. Even if the existing government carpet bombed its civilian population like Biden insinuates (a dubious proposition as why didn't china carpet bomb the protestors recently); this ignores a few facts 1. Those jets need to refueled and rearmed, 65% of our oil is produced domestically and conservatives with guns are really the only people that work in that industry. 2. Why do we have a ground force if air forces are all that is required to win conflicts? 3. Things sure went well for them in Afghanistan with our oil infrastructure in place, superior armor and superior air power...
Even if democide is not actually being held at bay by the 80 million gun owners (and who knows?), those 80 million people feel that they have some responsibility for their own safety vis a vis both criminals and, at least potentially, the government. I think this is what really bothers authoritarian types. Gun ownership potentially facilitates a kind of psychological independence from government institutions, making gun owners potentially less dependent and biddable.
I think the problem is that people think about it in a binary. I think its a gradient, in the same way that North Korea bothers to propagandize even though it can just mow everyone down. I think there is an incentive however small to maintain a sense of legitimacy. Its not so much that guns present a clear strategic threat as in the case that if the situation where to destabilize, the casualties would be substantially higher for the states goons and subsequently it weakens the leaderships perceived legitimacy (china is still cautious over an invasion of Taiwan, despite the fact that now they could still likely win with higher casualties. I think even if this reduces probability of democide by 1% its worth it to arm our civilians.
I think gun ownership has zero impact on despotic government.
Yes, if someone was actually trying to overthrow the government seriously they would get carpet bombed.
Jan 6th people (mostly) didn't get shot because they were a riot and not a real insurrection really putting the state in danger.
China did slaughter its own people when it really felt in danger (Tiananmen). China COVID protests were a good excuse to give up a policy they needed to give up anyway. Nothing about COVID restrictions was existential to the CCP, if anything it was weakening China.
Look, COVID was probably the only time in life were I would have been OK with violent resistance. As it stood guns did nothing to stop COVID tyranny.
Afghanistan fell because we decided to leave and we didn't really care what happened afterwards. We could have continued drone striking people in mud huts indefinitely if we wanted to be cruel and stupid. Wasn't twenty years enough?
Horribly wrong. Carpet bombing is not an option when you’re occupying the same space. F-18s would have zero role defending the capitol or WH from armed citizens. None.
Just think about it from the other direction. If I could magically transport an AR-15 and 10,000 rounds of ammo to every NK citizen, how much would KJU pay me not not? The correct is answer is all the money he could find.
We field infantry that waits for us to carpet bomb the enemy into submission with total air superiority and then they mop of the remainder with vast force disparities.
The crux of my position isn't that the 80,000,000 people could attain victory, its that it presents another factor that destabilizes the legitimacy of the leadership. You could say they don't care about perceived legitimacy, but it begs the question why do they bother to propagandize their citizens? It's why my original objection was wanting to compare risk factors, not absolutes. Its not that I expect victory from a disorganized mob, that would be absurd, but much higher casualties suffered on part of the goons, and civilian population lionized by their ability to create more casualties all things equal does create more room for instability than peaceful protestors mowed down by their regime. Again China did not carpet bomb them, they used tanks sure, but they mostly contained their murder to their intended targets.
I think that the only thing holding back state violence is the states interest. Mowing down its citizens does have a political (and quite frankly moral) cost to those in charge of the state. It's not something the state does lightly.
But we are posing some theoretically totalitarian state that is having its very power existentially threatened. Of course it's going to use whatever degree of force is necessary.
Do I think many states would give up on non-existential issues rather then risk the backlash of mowing down their own people, yes. But it's not clear to me that gun ownership levels change this. We had plenty of guns during COVID and none of them ended a stay at home order or took a mask off a toddler. The Chinese people were able to end their COVID restrictions without any guns.
Fair points, but again I don't consider this effect zero, nor do I consider our covid restrictions an exercise in absolute tyranny (soft tyranny for sure). Its a far cry from the organ harvesting the CCP is engaged in for instance. We have engaged in a lot of soft tyranny for a long time, espionage act, rounding up Japanese people ect...The advantage of firearms is the transition cost in the form of potential instability, because the state doesn't do things lightly. After they dive headstrong into say organ harvesting and gun collection, sure all bets are off, since I'm certain they are fully committed if civilians start shooting back. All things equal though, the more death and destruction within the territory of concern the better from an international standpoint. Case in point: is it better to have a rich well populated China who can shut down shipping lanes coming out of the strait of Malacca and eventually dictate terms to all nations reliant on that trade? Or a nation Russia with their lower GDP, who lacks significant infrastructure to project power much beyond its borders? I suspect that as Chinas demographic bomb goes off this will be a good thing long term, as it will limit their relative international power (especially with India's demographics on the rise on the other side of Malacca). This also where I tie my Afghanistan reasoning in, that war had a negative effect on our military capability internationally for several reasons, some economic, some causing us to invest in certain military equipment not conducive for fighting peer rivals.
Here is another problem - if you're pro gun control, and you think #3 passes a risk/reward assessment, you should feel *badly* about taking away firearms from so many law-abiding citizens.
Similarly, an honest progressive might think that taxing the rich is the most efficient path toward prosperity.
In both cases, they should feel badly about hurting innocent people, admittedly in service of an important goal that potentially justifies it. However reviewing progressive rhetoric tells me that progressives often enjoy these aspects of policy rather than feeling badly about them.
The problem is that most people are terrible at understanding numbers and percentages. 700 out of 60 million is only .001% of the population, but that .001% gets massive attention. Mass shootings almost never happen, but mass shootings get massive attention when they do. We need better math education in this country, especially statistics.
Regarding “Gee, what if they own a gun?” point, I live in a cop neighborhood in Chicago, situated on the edge of the city. City employees must reside within city limits, so there are a couple areas like mine that have would-be suburbanite first responders (typically with families). Crime is low here, murder nearly unheard of. I often joke that I benefit from herd immunity to crime: who's going to break into a house or garage if there's a chance a cop is going to wake up and grab his or her gun? Everyone seems to agree with my immunity metaphor, including those who think guns should be illegal.
But to admit this "herd immunity" effect is to admit more gun ownership generally SHOULD have a similar effect on deterring break-ins, right? I don't claim this is a slam-dunk argument, but I get the impression the pro-gun control crowd does seem to dismiss this potential benefit as just a grasping at theoretical straws.
Brian's kids are obviously very smart. A better guide for normal kids might go like this:
"Johnny you know how you like toy guns and mean teacher Karen made you cry by shouting at you for bringing it to show your friend? Our town, our country, and the whole world are run by big versions of Karen. If you let them take your guns, they win."
Most anti-gunners are targeting "assault rifles". Per FBI stats, the total number of people killed by rifles of all kinds is typically around 200 per year. This is nothing statistically speaking, and includes all rifles, not just the scary black ones. People pushing for such bans have other motives besides saving lives - maybe step 1 in a larger gun ban plan, or maybe just wanting to stick it to a deplorable demographic they despise.
I think most folks with this attitude are just ignorant. The media hides what's actually going on so people think assault weapons whatever that means is the problem. I'm all for having less guns around, but the problem is hand-guns in cities. We should ban hand guns, people should be able to go hunting with a riffle in spots where that's allowed. Its not the problem.
I believe in noblese oblige. Black americans will not stop shooting each other, and their lives matter. White people keep shooting themselves, and their lives matter too. Notice you didn't mention suicide in your post. We need to have fewer guns we should make ownership mostly illegal, espically of hand guns, which aren't useful for hunting or defense against the state, and are used in 80% of gun homicides. we should have buy backs and amnesties, it'll take a while, but long term we can greatly reduce the number of guns in the country and the number of shootings. It's the right thing to do, I expect gun owners to do the right thing and eventually hand their guns in, or eventually get fined, if they don't. We know from australia this works. They are similar to us and not Japan.
I do think we need to talk about suicide, but I also think that America, though more similar to Australia than Japan, is not really that similar, and our culture will not respond the same way. I still think Bryan is right that if you remove the guns from the law abiding, you basically create a huge flock of helpless victims for the law breakers to slaughter. Just look at the vast majority of mass shootings - they take place in schools and nightclubs - gun free zones - aka "no one will shoot back at terrorists" zones.
Other countries really don't have that much of a problem with this. Mass shootings are not really much of a problem, they represent a tiny percentage of homicides. Also in a mass shooting if you have a gun you just create a problem that now everyone is shooting each other and no one knows who the bad guy is, it will not go how you think. I feel like this is one of the problems with lack of military service in the country, if you've never been in a fire fight you just have no fucking clue about how uncertain everything is.
That doesn't answer my central claim at all, though. America is not the same as other countries, so acting like doing the same thing as other countries will have the same results as other countries is insane.
Also, your original post doesn't actually engage with ANY of the claims Bryan makes at all. I'm starting to see a pattern. Can you respond to what's actually being said, instead of grandstanding in the comments?
Actual claims, why punish a few for the crimes of the many. Brian exaggerates by how few. 1 in 4k to 1 in 900. It won't work, bullshit, it will over time, there are exceptions, and but the correlation of gun ownershipt to shooting is positive, we can lower the shooting. Brian's position is fatlistic bullshit. I grew up in late 80s early 90s NYC, Homicide rate went down over 80%. It's totally possible, you need to get rid of hand guns.
1) 1 in 900 still seems like punishing a few for the crimes of the many. And the additional 3100 you add to Caplan's number are mostly suicides, and how are you going to punish them? They're dead. I think you're being really goofy on this, and I am the one who raised the suicide issue independently of your ridiculousness.
2) It won't work - ok. It would help if you were both less crass and obnoxious and a better speller. Also probably if you didn't call yourself a simp. Yes, I'm doing a bunch of ad hominem, but your arguments and argumentation are really annoying. I'm not convinced about the correlation of gun ownership to murders/crime, given the correlation in other countries that Caplan provides in his post.
3) Your argument about NYC is one worthy of consideration. I'm curious why it's not brought up more often as a success story by a Republican mayor who used gun control to reduce crime. Why is it ignored by the left? Obviously the right would want to ignore it because it works against their narrative, but the left should bring it up a lot more if it's really true.
Your point rests heavily on the ambiguity of "often". How often? And what of the rest who are not among the often? What of the rest whom you would condemn to a living hell?
Well. I suppose it really depends on whether you believe in actual hell there. But I think the idea that living is the bad thing and death is the good thing is...well, let's just say I hope you change your mind and feelings about that darn quick.
I don't hold that opinion of my own life, but it's not hard to imagine hypotheticals; e.g. if I'd joined the military I might have been among the people who got their legs blown off by IEDs in bumfuckistan.
How many lives would be saved if we reduced the federal speed limit back to 55? Do you support that? How about banning swimming pools? 5 gallon buckets (a leading source of child drownings)? As Bryan pointed out, gun owners should count. People like you are just willing to sacrifice our rights because you don't personally care about it.
I think guns are different, since they express purpose is to hurt and maime, and they do that well, that is not the purpose or cars or pools....I think driving by non-robots should be banned in the next 10 years. Same magnitude of problem. About 40k deaths a year. Maybe we should require AI camera based life-guards for home based pools. Could save a ton of lives.
Guns are also used for hunting and recreation, and non-violent self defense. They also have the psychological benefit of allowing me to feel like a free person and not a helpless sheep.
But, if they should be banned, should they be banned from the military and police? If not, why not? Do they have useful purpose in the hands of government agents, but no useful purpose for regular citizens?
Honestly my ideal gun control regime is non-automatic riffles are allowed. They are not the problem and are conspicous when carried in public. They need to be locked up, unless you are target shooting or hunting. In a locked case when transporting. Hard to shoot yourself with a riffle. Only people who can have hand guns are the police.
Ideally, the UK gets by with thier bobbies not packing, I think eventually that is the way to go in the US, but it would take a long time. Also I'd love to see more non-leathal weapons development. Cops should never kill someone, Tasers aren't good enough but we need more disabling more effective, less leathal weapons. We should shoot things like a cloud of gassthat hits a large area. Like it can't miss within 4 feet, becauase it's gas, and use something that's not likely to kill. Although I haven't really seen something like that. Russia gassed a school with terrorist inside, didn't go well, but the idea is sound, need to get 100 engineers on it.
You don't think people would just find a different way to commit suicide? There are countries, like Canada, who offer assisted suicide while also banning guns. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
I hate to support this guy, but removing easy access to suicide ennabling implements does seem to have a significant result of mitigating the number of suicides. Often suicides are impulsive, and having access to something that makes suicide easy increases impulsive suicides.
That being said, I remain in favor of gun rights over gun control. I just think that we need to think sensibly about what we're arguing for and the consequences of it.
Hard to say but in 1996, delta of LE between US and AU was 2 years, it's now 5. But causality is tricky.
From Rand: Australia’s 1996 National Firearms Agreement (NFA) banned several types of firearms and resulted in the government buying hundreds of thousands of the banned weapons from their owners. Studies examining the effect of removing so many weapons from the community have found that homicides, suicides, and mass shootings were less common after the NFA was implemented, although such incidents were declining prior to 1996. The strongest evidence is consistent with the claim that the NFA caused reductions in firearm suicides, mass shootings, and female homicide victimization.
How about between Switzerland, that also has lots of guns, and Australia? Switzerland has nearly half the homicide rate of Australia.
Even the study you cited says that the specific measures they were looking at were declining already. They also only looked at gun related deaths, so how do they know that people didn't switch to commit homicide and suicide with other implements? And what amount of reduction are they confident in anyway? They said it probably reduced them, but by how much and who gets to decide if that reduction was worth taking guns from innocent people who did nothing wrong?
Black culture in the UK and US is also completely different. You're comparing apples to oranges and attributing the difference to your preferred policy goal.
Stop and frisk, works, gets rid of guns, also buy backs, stopping sales of new guns, stopping sale of Ammo. Existing guns get old and don't work anymore. Reducing guns over time is fine, saying things won't happen immediately is correct but not really relevant. If I told you we could reduce guns 50% in 10 years, 90% in 50 years. That would be fine.
3) You could reply, “Sure, banning guns is unfair to the vast majority of gun owners. But the gains of banning guns are so massive that we should do it anyway.”
Try this with Alcohol which kills 140,000 Americans a year. Drunk driving alone kills as many people as are murdered by guns. So why don't we apply the same solutions? Require a permit to purchase, purchase limits, a waiting period, safe storage, relatives can call police to confiscate. No one will take you seriously because alcohol isn't scary like guns to many people.
Thankfully, I've never known anyone killed by a gun. I have had friends in 5 different DUI accidents. Three dead, one seriously injured, one out of work for 3 months, and 3 just banged up.
The big difference is that people should be allowed to make risk-reward decisions with respect to their own lives; but carrying a gun around incurs a risk not only to the self but also to other people.
What about gun related accidents? As I understand it deaths and injuries caused by accidents are way higher than actual murders. (I remember an amusing but not very helpful statistic that said that more people get shot by their own dog every year in the US than killed in terrorist attacks!)
I'd also raise the issues of suicides, which I've read are the highest number of gun-related deaths. Suicides went down when the mechanisms on gas ovens that allowed women to kill themselves by sticking their head in those ovens were made less available, so gun control advocates say reducing access to guns would reduce gun suicides as well. I don't agree with those gun control advocates, but I think it's worth mentioning.
Kevin Williamson has many very good articles on guns and gun control. One good point he often makes is that America is just a violent country; we kill a lot of people with guns, but we also kill a lot of people with our hands, hammers, bats, etc
"A prince, who fills the throne with a disputed title, dares not arm his subjects; the only method of securing a people fully, both against domestic oppression and foreign conquest."
My understanding is the vast majority of US gun deaths are suicides. An issue most likely to impact young men. I am also given to believe that making it harder to kill yourself, does drastically reduce the rate (gas oven legislation in the UK).
1) I've known two people who have bought handguns. Both did so for self defense reasons after being victims of violent crime/break ins. The perpetrators didn't have a gun, but were bigger and stronger (one had a knife and a buddy). Both were middle class white people not living in the ghetto. The perpetrators were defiantly on drugs in one encounter and possibly on drugs in the other.
2) When I was a single young adult I got into skeet shooting for awhile and found it very relaxing. I gave up my gun once I had kids.
3) I don't think gun regulation is a particularly important matter. I think it would probably save lives, but not that many. I'd rather target crime more directly rather than pretending guns are the driver.
I also believe that targeting crime will never happen because we'd have to talk about blacks.
4) One bonus of banning guns would be getting rid of insane fantasies of some right wingers that people could somehow engage in an armed uprising against the government in 2023. I find that notion absurd and distracting from the real fight against tyranny.
5) One thing that really bothers me is active shooter drills in schools. Like every other fear based bullshit they push on kids these days it drives me up the wall.
6) On that note, the entire gun control demographic gives off an authoritarian safety-ism streak that I'm thoroughly exhausted by. Maybe beating their head against the NRA distracts them from whatever other bullshit they would be working on in our lives. I have a gas stove I'd like to keep among other things.
#4. Popular gun ownership actually is definitely a check on govt tyranny - that is 100% accurate. It’s not that a band of gun-owning citizens is going to successfully overthrow the govt or win a civil war. But if the govt were to get very out of line in the future - say attempt genocide on a sub-segment of the population - that is much harder to do vs an armed citizenry. It’s not impossible, and if the full strength of the govt attempts it, they’ll win. But the population being armed makes it far less likely they’ll attempt it in the first place.
Further - an armed population has the same deterrent effect against a foreign invader.
#3 - I don't get this point. You can absolutely target crime. You don't have to talk about race at all because you can just punish criminals on an equal-opportunity basis. It's the other side that insists on talking about race in order to stop you from punishing criminals equally. We seem to be caught in a cycle on this question. The left cries racism and forces society to go soft on Criminals of Color, until crime gets out of control to the point that people no longer care about the cries of racism. Then, when peace returns, people grow receptive once more to the message that there are so many Prisoners of Color, and crime is way down, so why does our racist society have to keep them there?
#4 - It's probably not as insane as people like to suggest, the IRA is the model, not the Taliban (see not just the Troubles but also Michael Collins and the Irish War of Independence). Presumably the scenario is a popular Southern state government nullifying Federal law, followed by an unpopular Federal invasion of that state.
If it's impossible to resist, it's not the tanks and planes that make it so, the British had those things even in 1920. It's the superiority of the US government's domestic intelligence apparatus compared to anything seen before in a free society.
Wendy,
#3 Yes, we are stuck in that equilibrium. I don't think it will change as long as blacks can vote.
#4 Yeah...let's try secession again. What did the union do the first time again?
Britain had been debating Irish independence for a long time. Home Rule had already passed but got restricted by WWI. When Britain wanted to suppress Irish rebellion it managed to do so for 700 years or so. Ireland was the beginning of a long de-colonization project in which Britain willingly gave up its empire not because it had to but because it was in its interest to.
No partisan group did anything to stop the 20th century dictatorships on their own. The only places they were effective is when the dictatorship was fighting a real war against a real foe, and then only in support of that foe not as a threat in and of themselves. Even the dying Third Reich still surpassed the Warsaw Uprising.
I agree on intelligence difference but also think the killing power of modern weapons vs riflemen is vastly higher then it was fifty years ago.
The main thing holding back the state is its willingness to use force (for moral or political reasons), not its fear of the rabbles force making ability.
Whatever happens, it won't play out like the US Civil War because in that day, the US Army barely existed as a force in being. New armies were thus raised from scratch by both sides and the result was a basically symmetrical conflict. We won't see that again.
You're basically suggesting that Michael Collins' way of war wouldn't have worked on Stalin or Hitler's government. I firmly agree. It worked on Lloyd George's government though (even if all it did was speed along the inevitable, it certainly sped it along). In the end, the British were politically constrained from bringing the full force of their firepower down against the Irish people. My supposition is that any 21st century internal armed conflict in the US will operate with those same constraints. Washington will not be able to simply carpet bomb Tallahassee.
If the regime in Washington does NOT operate under those constraints, if it CAN carpet bomb Tallahassee with political impunity, it means the US constitutional order has effectively dissolved and you're probably looking at something more like the Russian Civil War, with Washington playing the role of the Reds. It's still possible that widespread small arms ownership in areas hostile to Washington would make a difference in that war, but who knows, a lot is contingent on how exactly that comes about because it's a much more fantastical scenario than the one I'm describing.
I agree on all points. As an addendum to point #4 I would like to add that it annoys me that many gun nuts act as if guns are the only thing that matters. It's a combination of "might makes right" and also just caring about them the most when there are a lot more important things to worry about.
"What’s the big deal if you have to wait a week to buy a gun? By itself, the answer is plainly, “Yea, it’s not a big deal.” "
I had a few events in my life that make me disagree with this. The first was that somebody I knew threatened one of my children. The second was that someone broke into my car and stole my garage door opener, which I assumed meant they wanted to get into my house. On both occasions I considered arming myself. Had it been necessary, a one week waiting period would have been a nightmare. It's very easy to imagine other situations (rioting, looting, domestic violence) where someone could have an immediate need for a gun to protect themselves or their property.
Even though there hasn't been a mass violent counter-response to despotic pushes in the past, the expected risk of democide versus the expected risk of violent population unrest should be weighed. I think its only a fool who would say 80 million small arms owners have zero impact on the degree to which the existing government is despotic. Even if the existing government carpet bombed its civilian population like Biden insinuates (a dubious proposition as why didn't china carpet bomb the protestors recently); this ignores a few facts 1. Those jets need to refueled and rearmed, 65% of our oil is produced domestically and conservatives with guns are really the only people that work in that industry. 2. Why do we have a ground force if air forces are all that is required to win conflicts? 3. Things sure went well for them in Afghanistan with our oil infrastructure in place, superior armor and superior air power...
Even if democide is not actually being held at bay by the 80 million gun owners (and who knows?), those 80 million people feel that they have some responsibility for their own safety vis a vis both criminals and, at least potentially, the government. I think this is what really bothers authoritarian types. Gun ownership potentially facilitates a kind of psychological independence from government institutions, making gun owners potentially less dependent and biddable.
I think the problem is that people think about it in a binary. I think its a gradient, in the same way that North Korea bothers to propagandize even though it can just mow everyone down. I think there is an incentive however small to maintain a sense of legitimacy. Its not so much that guns present a clear strategic threat as in the case that if the situation where to destabilize, the casualties would be substantially higher for the states goons and subsequently it weakens the leaderships perceived legitimacy (china is still cautious over an invasion of Taiwan, despite the fact that now they could still likely win with higher casualties. I think even if this reduces probability of democide by 1% its worth it to arm our civilians.
I think gun ownership has zero impact on despotic government.
Yes, if someone was actually trying to overthrow the government seriously they would get carpet bombed.
Jan 6th people (mostly) didn't get shot because they were a riot and not a real insurrection really putting the state in danger.
China did slaughter its own people when it really felt in danger (Tiananmen). China COVID protests were a good excuse to give up a policy they needed to give up anyway. Nothing about COVID restrictions was existential to the CCP, if anything it was weakening China.
Look, COVID was probably the only time in life were I would have been OK with violent resistance. As it stood guns did nothing to stop COVID tyranny.
Afghanistan fell because we decided to leave and we didn't really care what happened afterwards. We could have continued drone striking people in mud huts indefinitely if we wanted to be cruel and stupid. Wasn't twenty years enough?
Horribly wrong. Carpet bombing is not an option when you’re occupying the same space. F-18s would have zero role defending the capitol or WH from armed citizens. None.
Just think about it from the other direction. If I could magically transport an AR-15 and 10,000 rounds of ammo to every NK citizen, how much would KJU pay me not not? The correct is answer is all the money he could find.
And we field infantry because....?
We field infantry that waits for us to carpet bomb the enemy into submission with total air superiority and then they mop of the remainder with vast force disparities.
The crux of my position isn't that the 80,000,000 people could attain victory, its that it presents another factor that destabilizes the legitimacy of the leadership. You could say they don't care about perceived legitimacy, but it begs the question why do they bother to propagandize their citizens? It's why my original objection was wanting to compare risk factors, not absolutes. Its not that I expect victory from a disorganized mob, that would be absurd, but much higher casualties suffered on part of the goons, and civilian population lionized by their ability to create more casualties all things equal does create more room for instability than peaceful protestors mowed down by their regime. Again China did not carpet bomb them, they used tanks sure, but they mostly contained their murder to their intended targets.
I think that the only thing holding back state violence is the states interest. Mowing down its citizens does have a political (and quite frankly moral) cost to those in charge of the state. It's not something the state does lightly.
But we are posing some theoretically totalitarian state that is having its very power existentially threatened. Of course it's going to use whatever degree of force is necessary.
Do I think many states would give up on non-existential issues rather then risk the backlash of mowing down their own people, yes. But it's not clear to me that gun ownership levels change this. We had plenty of guns during COVID and none of them ended a stay at home order or took a mask off a toddler. The Chinese people were able to end their COVID restrictions without any guns.
Fair points, but again I don't consider this effect zero, nor do I consider our covid restrictions an exercise in absolute tyranny (soft tyranny for sure). Its a far cry from the organ harvesting the CCP is engaged in for instance. We have engaged in a lot of soft tyranny for a long time, espionage act, rounding up Japanese people ect...The advantage of firearms is the transition cost in the form of potential instability, because the state doesn't do things lightly. After they dive headstrong into say organ harvesting and gun collection, sure all bets are off, since I'm certain they are fully committed if civilians start shooting back. All things equal though, the more death and destruction within the territory of concern the better from an international standpoint. Case in point: is it better to have a rich well populated China who can shut down shipping lanes coming out of the strait of Malacca and eventually dictate terms to all nations reliant on that trade? Or a nation Russia with their lower GDP, who lacks significant infrastructure to project power much beyond its borders? I suspect that as Chinas demographic bomb goes off this will be a good thing long term, as it will limit their relative international power (especially with India's demographics on the rise on the other side of Malacca). This also where I tie my Afghanistan reasoning in, that war had a negative effect on our military capability internationally for several reasons, some economic, some causing us to invest in certain military equipment not conducive for fighting peer rivals.
Here is another problem - if you're pro gun control, and you think #3 passes a risk/reward assessment, you should feel *badly* about taking away firearms from so many law-abiding citizens.
Similarly, an honest progressive might think that taxing the rich is the most efficient path toward prosperity.
In both cases, they should feel badly about hurting innocent people, admittedly in service of an important goal that potentially justifies it. However reviewing progressive rhetoric tells me that progressives often enjoy these aspects of policy rather than feeling badly about them.
The problem is that most people are terrible at understanding numbers and percentages. 700 out of 60 million is only .001% of the population, but that .001% gets massive attention. Mass shootings almost never happen, but mass shootings get massive attention when they do. We need better math education in this country, especially statistics.
This is true! Hand guns are a problem, Mass shootings and assult weapons are a distraction.
Regarding “Gee, what if they own a gun?” point, I live in a cop neighborhood in Chicago, situated on the edge of the city. City employees must reside within city limits, so there are a couple areas like mine that have would-be suburbanite first responders (typically with families). Crime is low here, murder nearly unheard of. I often joke that I benefit from herd immunity to crime: who's going to break into a house or garage if there's a chance a cop is going to wake up and grab his or her gun? Everyone seems to agree with my immunity metaphor, including those who think guns should be illegal.
But to admit this "herd immunity" effect is to admit more gun ownership generally SHOULD have a similar effect on deterring break-ins, right? I don't claim this is a slam-dunk argument, but I get the impression the pro-gun control crowd does seem to dismiss this potential benefit as just a grasping at theoretical straws.
I think the issue is more who DOESN'T live near you rather than who DOES.
Brian's kids are obviously very smart. A better guide for normal kids might go like this:
"Johnny you know how you like toy guns and mean teacher Karen made you cry by shouting at you for bringing it to show your friend? Our town, our country, and the whole world are run by big versions of Karen. If you let them take your guns, they win."
Most anti-gunners are targeting "assault rifles". Per FBI stats, the total number of people killed by rifles of all kinds is typically around 200 per year. This is nothing statistically speaking, and includes all rifles, not just the scary black ones. People pushing for such bans have other motives besides saving lives - maybe step 1 in a larger gun ban plan, or maybe just wanting to stick it to a deplorable demographic they despise.
I think most folks with this attitude are just ignorant. The media hides what's actually going on so people think assault weapons whatever that means is the problem. I'm all for having less guns around, but the problem is hand-guns in cities. We should ban hand guns, people should be able to go hunting with a riffle in spots where that's allowed. Its not the problem.
I believe in noblese oblige. Black americans will not stop shooting each other, and their lives matter. White people keep shooting themselves, and their lives matter too. Notice you didn't mention suicide in your post. We need to have fewer guns we should make ownership mostly illegal, espically of hand guns, which aren't useful for hunting or defense against the state, and are used in 80% of gun homicides. we should have buy backs and amnesties, it'll take a while, but long term we can greatly reduce the number of guns in the country and the number of shootings. It's the right thing to do, I expect gun owners to do the right thing and eventually hand their guns in, or eventually get fined, if they don't. We know from australia this works. They are similar to us and not Japan.
I do think we need to talk about suicide, but I also think that America, though more similar to Australia than Japan, is not really that similar, and our culture will not respond the same way. I still think Bryan is right that if you remove the guns from the law abiding, you basically create a huge flock of helpless victims for the law breakers to slaughter. Just look at the vast majority of mass shootings - they take place in schools and nightclubs - gun free zones - aka "no one will shoot back at terrorists" zones.
Other countries really don't have that much of a problem with this. Mass shootings are not really much of a problem, they represent a tiny percentage of homicides. Also in a mass shooting if you have a gun you just create a problem that now everyone is shooting each other and no one knows who the bad guy is, it will not go how you think. I feel like this is one of the problems with lack of military service in the country, if you've never been in a fire fight you just have no fucking clue about how uncertain everything is.
That doesn't answer my central claim at all, though. America is not the same as other countries, so acting like doing the same thing as other countries will have the same results as other countries is insane.
Also, your original post doesn't actually engage with ANY of the claims Bryan makes at all. I'm starting to see a pattern. Can you respond to what's actually being said, instead of grandstanding in the comments?
Actual claims, why punish a few for the crimes of the many. Brian exaggerates by how few. 1 in 4k to 1 in 900. It won't work, bullshit, it will over time, there are exceptions, and but the correlation of gun ownershipt to shooting is positive, we can lower the shooting. Brian's position is fatlistic bullshit. I grew up in late 80s early 90s NYC, Homicide rate went down over 80%. It's totally possible, you need to get rid of hand guns.
1) 1 in 900 still seems like punishing a few for the crimes of the many. And the additional 3100 you add to Caplan's number are mostly suicides, and how are you going to punish them? They're dead. I think you're being really goofy on this, and I am the one who raised the suicide issue independently of your ridiculousness.
2) It won't work - ok. It would help if you were both less crass and obnoxious and a better speller. Also probably if you didn't call yourself a simp. Yes, I'm doing a bunch of ad hominem, but your arguments and argumentation are really annoying. I'm not convinced about the correlation of gun ownership to murders/crime, given the correlation in other countries that Caplan provides in his post.
3) Your argument about NYC is one worthy of consideration. I'm curious why it's not brought up more often as a success story by a Republican mayor who used gun control to reduce crime. Why is it ignored by the left? Obviously the right would want to ignore it because it works against their narrative, but the left should bring it up a lot more if it's really true.
If someone wants out of this mortal coil, who are you to tell them "no"?
Suicide is often very impulsive, and those who are stopped or saved often are glad they failed.
Your point rests heavily on the ambiguity of "often". How often? And what of the rest who are not among the often? What of the rest whom you would condemn to a living hell?
Well. I suppose it really depends on whether you believe in actual hell there. But I think the idea that living is the bad thing and death is the good thing is...well, let's just say I hope you change your mind and feelings about that darn quick.
I don't hold that opinion of my own life, but it's not hard to imagine hypotheticals; e.g. if I'd joined the military I might have been among the people who got their legs blown off by IEDs in bumfuckistan.
And who are you to say that their lives can't have meaning and joy? Are you a big proponent of Canada's MAID program?
Robin Hanson has a proposal for more directly bringing down crime:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/who-vouches-for-youhtml
Also when you add in suidices and accidents it's 1-900 gun owners causing a death. That is insane and worth regulating.
How many lives would be saved if we reduced the federal speed limit back to 55? Do you support that? How about banning swimming pools? 5 gallon buckets (a leading source of child drownings)? As Bryan pointed out, gun owners should count. People like you are just willing to sacrifice our rights because you don't personally care about it.
I think guns are different, since they express purpose is to hurt and maime, and they do that well, that is not the purpose or cars or pools....I think driving by non-robots should be banned in the next 10 years. Same magnitude of problem. About 40k deaths a year. Maybe we should require AI camera based life-guards for home based pools. Could save a ton of lives.
Guns are also used for hunting and recreation, and non-violent self defense. They also have the psychological benefit of allowing me to feel like a free person and not a helpless sheep.
But, if they should be banned, should they be banned from the military and police? If not, why not? Do they have useful purpose in the hands of government agents, but no useful purpose for regular citizens?
Honestly my ideal gun control regime is non-automatic riffles are allowed. They are not the problem and are conspicous when carried in public. They need to be locked up, unless you are target shooting or hunting. In a locked case when transporting. Hard to shoot yourself with a riffle. Only people who can have hand guns are the police.
Ideally, the UK gets by with thier bobbies not packing, I think eventually that is the way to go in the US, but it would take a long time. Also I'd love to see more non-leathal weapons development. Cops should never kill someone, Tasers aren't good enough but we need more disabling more effective, less leathal weapons. We should shoot things like a cloud of gassthat hits a large area. Like it can't miss within 4 feet, becauase it's gas, and use something that's not likely to kill. Although I haven't really seen something like that. Russia gassed a school with terrorist inside, didn't go well, but the idea is sound, need to get 100 engineers on it.
>I think guns are different, since they express purpose is to hurt and maime
This is true.
It's also true that sometimes hurting and maiming people is the only way to prevent them from hurting and maiming even more people.
You don't think people would just find a different way to commit suicide? There are countries, like Canada, who offer assisted suicide while also banning guns. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
I hate to support this guy, but removing easy access to suicide ennabling implements does seem to have a significant result of mitigating the number of suicides. Often suicides are impulsive, and having access to something that makes suicide easy increases impulsive suicides.
That being said, I remain in favor of gun rights over gun control. I just think that we need to think sensibly about what we're arguing for and the consequences of it.
How much did banning guns in Australia increase life expectancy by?
Hard to say but in 1996, delta of LE between US and AU was 2 years, it's now 5. But causality is tricky.
From Rand: Australia’s 1996 National Firearms Agreement (NFA) banned several types of firearms and resulted in the government buying hundreds of thousands of the banned weapons from their owners. Studies examining the effect of removing so many weapons from the community have found that homicides, suicides, and mass shootings were less common after the NFA was implemented, although such incidents were declining prior to 1996. The strongest evidence is consistent with the claim that the NFA caused reductions in firearm suicides, mass shootings, and female homicide victimization.
How about between Switzerland, that also has lots of guns, and Australia? Switzerland has nearly half the homicide rate of Australia.
Even the study you cited says that the specific measures they were looking at were declining already. They also only looked at gun related deaths, so how do they know that people didn't switch to commit homicide and suicide with other implements? And what amount of reduction are they confident in anyway? They said it probably reduced them, but by how much and who gets to decide if that reduction was worth taking guns from innocent people who did nothing wrong?
In the UK black homicide rate is 40 per million, in the US it's 22 per 100k. So 5x worse. The amount of guns matters. It's can be fixed.
Black culture in the UK and US is also completely different. You're comparing apples to oranges and attributing the difference to your preferred policy goal.
What's your plan to deal with the illegal guns that are, I'm fairly certain, causing most of these deaths?
Stop and frisk, works, gets rid of guns, also buy backs, stopping sales of new guns, stopping sale of Ammo. Existing guns get old and don't work anymore. Reducing guns over time is fine, saying things won't happen immediately is correct but not really relevant. If I told you we could reduce guns 50% in 10 years, 90% in 50 years. That would be fine.
3) You could reply, “Sure, banning guns is unfair to the vast majority of gun owners. But the gains of banning guns are so massive that we should do it anyway.”
Try this with Alcohol which kills 140,000 Americans a year. Drunk driving alone kills as many people as are murdered by guns. So why don't we apply the same solutions? Require a permit to purchase, purchase limits, a waiting period, safe storage, relatives can call police to confiscate. No one will take you seriously because alcohol isn't scary like guns to many people.
Thankfully, I've never known anyone killed by a gun. I have had friends in 5 different DUI accidents. Three dead, one seriously injured, one out of work for 3 months, and 3 just banged up.
The big difference is that people should be allowed to make risk-reward decisions with respect to their own lives; but carrying a gun around incurs a risk not only to the self but also to other people.
How in the world does drunk driving only incur risk to "their own lives"? Talk about completely missing the point.
Yeah, that's what you get for firing off a response after only having read the first line of the comment. Oops.
When people say, "you don't need a gun, and many lives would be saved", ask them if they favor alcohol prohibition.
Bryan. Beautifully argued, as always. Thanks. (I confess to being a 2A fundamentalist.)
What about gun related accidents? As I understand it deaths and injuries caused by accidents are way higher than actual murders. (I remember an amusing but not very helpful statistic that said that more people get shot by their own dog every year in the US than killed in terrorist attacks!)
I'd also raise the issues of suicides, which I've read are the highest number of gun-related deaths. Suicides went down when the mechanisms on gas ovens that allowed women to kill themselves by sticking their head in those ovens were made less available, so gun control advocates say reducing access to guns would reduce gun suicides as well. I don't agree with those gun control advocates, but I think it's worth mentioning.
Kevin Williamson has many very good articles on guns and gun control. One good point he often makes is that America is just a violent country; we kill a lot of people with guns, but we also kill a lot of people with our hands, hammers, bats, etc
A sentence from David Hume 1752:
"A prince, who fills the throne with a disputed title, dares not arm his subjects; the only method of securing a people fully, both against domestic oppression and foreign conquest."
*not an American*
My understanding is the vast majority of US gun deaths are suicides. An issue most likely to impact young men. I am also given to believe that making it harder to kill yourself, does drastically reduce the rate (gas oven legislation in the UK).
How would you discuss that with your children?