Why are the anti-gun people so very anti-gun? On the surface, the goal makes sense — remove guns, end crime. More importantly, since they don’t typically have experience with guns and the laws won’t effect them, they naturally have no problems with the law becoming as restrictive as possible.
The unfortunate problem with most activists/liberals is that they have a special mentality in which the goal they are pursuing overrides rational analysis. This is very sad because it means that time and effort end up being wasted rather than in pursuit of accomplishing their desired goal.
So, how bad is the “gun” problem. To help out this analysis, I will assume that the only valid use of guns is for sport and hunting (not true, but, why make my job easier by saying that guns can actually prevent crime)… Ok. 1/3 of Americans own guns which would mean that there are 100,000,000 American gun owners. So, to ban all guns would mean that 100,000,000 people would have one of their enjoyable hobbies removed from their lives. Anti-gun activists don’t own guns, they don’t care if a complete ban will lessen the life enjoyment of a full third of their kinsmen.
Clearly the harm done by firearms must clearly outweigh the benefits to these 100,000,000 people. What is the harm? If you check out the Brady Campaign website, they will cite numbers that roughly say that 30,000 Americans a year die from firearms and another 70,000 are injured. If you do the math, that means your chance of dying from a firearm is something like 1 in 18,000 over your lifetime.
Overall this means that almost 100,000 people a year are either injured or killed by a firearm. From a society perspective, is it ok to allow 100,000 Americans a year to suffer so that 100,000,000 Americans can enjoy their hobby? At this level of analysis, you might think not. This is where the activists end their analysis… Let’s see if we can tease out a little more of what is going on….
Chris on his AnarchAngel blog has done a wonderful job of putting these statistics into a reasonable perspective. To summarize, here were some things I did know:
- Odds of death by car: 1 in 83
- Odds of death by cancer: 1 in 600
- Odds of death by plane: 1 in 5,500
- Odds of death by gun: 1 in 18,000
- Odds of death by lightning: 1 in 84,000
At this point, you might still argue, we try to make cars safer, we try to cure cancer, it is EASY to outlaw guns and remove that risk… Well… Here are the statistics I mostly DIDN’T know…
- Half of gun deaths are suicides (ok.. I did know that one)
- Of non-suicides, 60-80% of gun deaths involve 1 felon shooting another felon
- Of the remaining deaths, 20% are accidental (yikes!), 80% are murder.
- Of these murders, 80% are committed by felons.
I had never realized that the proportion of gun homicides was so skewed in the direction of felon on felon violence. OR, for that matter, that 80% of the murders of non-felons were committed by felons!
So, let’s work out some math… If there will be 30,000 gun deaths this year:
- ~15,000 will be suicides
- ~11,250 will be 1 felon murdering another felon
- ~2400 will be murder of a non-felon by a felon
- ~750 will be accidents
- ~600 will be murder of a non-felon by a non-felon
In this context, what does this mean to you? If you are not a felon and you don’t own a gun (cutting out your overwhelmingly high suicide by gun risk) you odds of being killed by a gun are about 1 in 144,000 which is almost as risky as being killed by a meteor strike (1 in 500,000). PS this includes the, now, relatively high risk of dying by accidental shooting which is also reduced if you have decided not to own a gun. In other words, non gun owners want to stop the hobby of 100,000,000 Americans because of that 0.0007% chance of death by firearm.
Ok. Let’s assume you have decided that risk is too high. What can we realistically affect with legislation. Suicides *may* go down. This would be great, but, it is also hard to judge. There are clearly many ways in which a person can end their life. Removing firearms will lead to an increase in alternative methods of suicide, but, the overall number may be reduced. Again, this is hard to judge — Especially since there was a recent study that showed that gun owners are, overall, more happy than non-gun owners.
So, what else can we effect… pop quiz…. Are felon’s in the United States allowed to own guns? Here is a hint: NO. This means that we have already demonstrated that legislating the possession of guns by felons is not as effectual as would be desired.
What’s left… With legislation, we, perhaps, can affect the deaths of ~1,350 people per year. 750 accidents and 600 are murders. Of the murders, some of them would still be committed even without a firearm.
So, if you had to decide public policy and you knew these statistics, what would you do? Personally, Here is my conclusion: 100,000,000 Americans seem to enjoy firearms for some reason. I can only affect very little of the deaths that occur by firearms — I may very well choose to do nothing. If I did want to act, of the things I can effect, it looks like safety is where I can have my strongest impact. I would develop campaigns that strongly promoted basic gun safety, I would pay for these campaigns with a $50 fee that would be added to every gun purchase. This fee would be waived if the buyer has taken an approved safety course (probably about at the level of the CA handgun safety certificate — read a booklet, take a multiple choice exam). I would create laws that severely penalized parents if their kids engaged in an unsafe act with an improperly stored firearm. I may mandate loaded chamber indicators.
Realistically, it seems like a lot of time and effort for very little effect. I’d save a LOT more lives by funding more inspections of hospitals to insure they are following proper hand washing protocols.
Oh! And I would probably outlaw meteor strikes, they seem pretty scary too.