How Adults Talk about Guns

There was a shooting in a Baptist Texas church that killed 26 people. A 'Good guy with a gun' fired at the killer and chased him away into the next country.

Donald Trump says that tighter gun laws would have left "hundreds more dead."

Interesting.

Hundreds seems like a large number. How many shootings that aren't stop by an armed civilian reach hundreds? Not many. I am willing to concede that some extra people may have died in absence of the 'good guy with a gun'. And with tighter gun laws that good guy with a gun may just have been a 'good guy without a gun' and more people would have died.

So what?

I think we're at a terrible point in gun control discourse where every incident - every shooting, has to be proof that our side is 100% right and the other side is 100% wrong. In a country with 33,000 gun related deaths / year, and 300 million guns, every single instance of a gun death doesn't need to be fuel for your political belief.

The news is reporting another shooting in the U.S. Prepare ye facebook for the gun memes.

 I'm not one of those people who believe guns never save lives. They do. I'm just extremely skeptical that there are enough 'good guys with a gun' to counteract the bad guys with a gun.

I know I know, bad guys with a gun will get guns anyway. Sometimes. I am also of the belief that when you make something harder, more difficult, more expensive - people do it less. It's not like these random gun shootings are done by hardcore criminals who know the ins and outs of the black market. They're done by this guy,

The harder it is to get a gun, the longer it takes, and the more time you have to realize what you're doing is a bad idea. And it's not like all guns are the same either. In a competitive market for guns the price of better killing machines is pressured downward. In a black market - if you can even get access to the black market - it's far more expensive. You might just say screw it all and use a more convenient weapon instead. I've never heard of a school stabbing that took down hundreds of people.

Back to the 'good guys with guns' thing.

I don't think 'good guys with guns' are all that common. Even in States where gun ownership is very loose, is every attempted mass shooting being countered by a 'good guy with a gun'? We don't live in the wild west. We live in meeker times, and giving everyone a gun doesn't make them any less meek.

Surprisingly, the wild west had a very low homicide rate. All those movies were wrong. Yes that had a lot to do guns being everywhere, it also had a lot to do with the kind of people who lived there.

Step back. This is a more general problem. We have a way of thinking that the laws create the culture. I don't think so. I think the culture creates the laws.

That sounds very pro-government for a sort-of-libertarian like myself, but I don't think it is. For a lot of things we need a government to counter-act the culture. Some people like to use the nordic countries as examples of tight gun restrictions and low gun death rate. That's a very nice correlation, but instead of inferring causation I think we need to look at if the culture is creating both.

Do you really believe that if Sweden had U.S. gun laws their gun crime rate would reach U.S. levels? Or if the U.S. had Swedish gun laws their gun crime rate would reach Swedish levels?

We have to recognize that cultures start out different before we even bring government into the picture. Sweden could probably afford low gun restrictions because of their culture. And the U.S. could probably use tight gun restrictions because of their culture. Neither country gets their optimal policy because culture is in charge.

See, I'm not the kind of libertarian-ish person who believes government can't, it's that government doesn't.

Aren't I arguing that the U.S. is both a pro gun culture and an anti-gun culture? Well, yes. Compared to the wild west, we're anti-gun. Compared to Iceland, we're pro-gun. No problem here.

I'm going to give a few points to the conservative view on guns now. It's not going to be very emotionally appealing, but I think it's true.

Underlying every discussion (argument ( yelling match)) of gun control, is the assumption that all that matters is reducing the gun death rate. I for one don't believe that a single human life is worth all the joy of everyone else. If you don't think so too, then some amount of joy has to be worth a human life.

I stated earlier that there were 300 million guns in the U.S. and the vast majority of them never hurt anybody. And I don't think they all bought all those guns to counter-act all the other guns everyone else has. I think people like guns. They're shiny, it's fun to go out shooting them, and I think it's a form of fashion where people who own guns like to express themselves by showing them off.

I don't. I'm more likely to get a tattoo than a gun. But I respect other people's values. And when so many people spend so much money on so many guns, and those guns aren't hurting anybody, I have to believe they're getting value out of it.

So I guess mentally my math goes like this

Number of lives gun control law would save
-Value to consumers gun control would reduce / value of 1 human life
= (if positive) pass the gun control law (if negative) don't pass the gun control law

This has always been the way I've thought about it, though it's awkward to put it into an equation. I think it is objectively the right way to do the analysis. It should go without saying that when you don't do it this way you are hurting people. It's the way every numerate adult should do it. Instead of yelling on Facebook about how every instance of gun violence proves what you always knew in the first place.