Thursday, June 26, 2014

Gun Rights in a Bumper Sticker

Both guns and killers can both be causes of innocent deaths. We don't have to choose between them.
Since guns are an effective way of killing people, I expect the availability and cheapness of new and better guns to correlate with people killed.

On some margin, guns discourage deaths. In general though, I don' t think the American public are a bunch of Clint Eastwoods. So I don't think that guns prevent more violence than they cause.

Safety is not the only metric we care about. If you get familiar with risk of death statistics, guns should be low on your list of fears. Since it is already low, reducing gun deaths is relatively low benefit.

Private gun owners the vast majority of which will never hurt anyone spend a lot of money on guns (in the billions $). Thus I expect they derive a lot of utility from owning guns. There's a lot to lose (utility to gun owners) and little to gain (lower risk or gun violence).

It's hard enough to aggregate it into bumper sticker version, but it ends up sounding awful anyway (even though it's true).

"Guns kill people, but not enough to warrant taking them away!"
"Don't buy fewer school shootings by at the price of our guns!"
"My gun probably won't hurt anyone!"