A Short List of Gun Product Safety Laws

One substory of the gun insanity in the US I had been unaware of previous to Newtown, was the bevy of liability shield laws (including a federal one) that protect gun manufacturers from the very normal product liability lawsuits that any other product maker would be subject to when their product's flaws cause injury or death to someone.

This is truly amazing when you stop and think about it.  There are all sorts of very powerful businesses who would love to have blanket immunity from the harm their faulty products bring, and if we include tobacco companies, the obvious and known harms of using their products as intended, but none seem to manage to get such specific protection. 

I'm not even talking about the thousands of people killed deliberately with guns, where the shooter is more or less using the gun in its intended fashion.  I mean, it's arguably fair that gun manufacturers should not suffer liability for that (also arguable that they should, but I can at least understand someone making that claim).  If a person gets beaten to death with a shovel, it would be bizarre to sue the shovel maker (even as that is not the intended use of a shovel). 

But instead, think of all the tragic gun accidents where some better design and additional safety features could actually save lives (and save gun nuts lots of bad press from children getting shot and such).  Week after week, Daily Kos' KagroX posts a round up of "gunfail" stories largely involving such tragedies:

1. LEALMAN, FL, 2/12/13: Not sure how I missed this one. A Bay Area church congregation is rallying together in prayer for their pastor's daughter. The young woman was accidentally shot. According to officials with the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, church member Moises Zambrana was showing a 9mm handgun to two young men in a closet near the recreational area. Detectives say one of the men, who is Kelley's boyfriend, was interested in getting a gun. While Zambrana was showing him the safety features, authorities say the gun went off. The bullet went through the wall, and hit Kelley in the head. According to authorities, Zambrana did take out the magazine clip, but a bullet was still in the chamber. She died on Feb. 18.

That's completely typical.  I've noticed people in the comments to his People Who Died posts often rage on about how "stupid" these gun owners are.  I don't disagree, but that's really the point of why widespread gun ownership is not a great idea.  Lots of people are stupid.  Some people are smart most of the time, but everyone has stupid moments.  I was in the Canadian Forces for 8 years, in the Infantry and we drilled safety continuously and I still saw a couple dozen negligent discharge events - most with blank ammo and no one ever got hurt thankfully. Soldiers train regularly and have NCOs enforcing numerous means of gun safety discipline, yet still have ND's be common enough that every soldier knows what an "ND" is (we no longer refer to "accidental discharges" though they're remotely possible if a weapon suffers a mechanical failure which causes a round to fire).

All this is to say while convincing the population they don't need guns and are better off without them is the best approach, it would still be worthwhile to consider what the gun makers should be forced to do in order to make their products moderately safer, such that many moments of stupidity or irresponsibility by gun owners are less likely to end in tragedy:

• All guns should have a safety mechanism.  It's ridiculous that any gun can lack such. I don't even buy that Police or Military need such a thing. I don't care what design compromises it introduces, a thing that emits death at literally the pull of a trigger needs a safety.
• All guns need an indicator that shows whether there is a round in the chamber.  Mechanically this isn't hard to engineer.  One of the depressingly common Kagro stories goes "I thought it was empty when I pulled the trigger."  A visible indication from outside showing there's a round in there would save lives.
• Triggers need to be harder to pull as shipped from the manufacturer.  Yes, I'm sure some gun types will alter it and make a hair trigger.  But many won't bother, default settings should always be safer. If you go out of your way to make it less safe, fine.  Many children would be saved if triggers were harder to pull.  We made cigarette lighters and pill bottles harder for kids to use, why not guns?
•  Require proof of, or purchase of, a trigger lock when buying any gun, including private sales.  Yes, idiots would game this by having 1 trigger lock for 50 guns.  Nothing's perfect but many people who wouldn't buy one otherwise would get one and would use it, since they have it.
• The safety should be put on by the act of loading the magazine or chambering a round.  I'm less certain this can be done mechanically but if it can be, it should be.  Safety should be the default, rather than having to remember to put the safety "on" when readying the weapon, you should have to remember to take it off to fire it.  I'd also be more than fine if it is spring loaded and the shooter has to hold the safety off in order to keep firing, that it re-engages once their hand is removed.
• Require trigger guards.  Stupid but some weapons don't have them. Brushing up agaisnt something or dropping the weapon shouldn't pull the trigger.
• Two-handed holding to fire.  You could design weapons that required two hands on the weapon to fire.  Rifles could require the weapon be in your shoulder to fire.  There are a variety of ways to really help ensure the weapon only fires when you're positively aiming and mean to pull the trigger.  That won't stop all forms of tragic stupidity, but it will help.
• Sell a device that is designed to catch at least low power rounds.  Idea here is that this is where you aim when clearing the action of your weapon in the home/garage/etc.  I know at CF bases in warzones, the practice was to require a little sand-bunker area by the gate, so returning patrols could safety their weapons (removing magazines and chambered rounds) and "fire" the empty action into the sandbags - even if a mistake was made and a round fired, no one would be hurt.  Kagro always has a bunch of "pointed it at the floor/wall and it fired, bullet went through and killed someone on the other side" stories.  Like trigger locks require gun owners to have at least one of these things.  One that will stop a .44 or a 7.62mm round is of course likely impractical but something that would stop a .22 is not. Lots of people are killed by .22 rounds.
• Warning labels on boxes of Ammo ("This calibre can kill children. Don't leave guns loaded!" etc).  Safety manuals with the guns like the ones you get with a kid carseat (lots of diagrams with bad uses of the carseat and warnings "death will result if you do this!").  

All of the design requirements add to the complexity, cost and so forth of guns.  Boo hoo.  Safety addes to the complexity and cost of every system.  The purest designs have to be compromised to handle the rigours of real world application.  All of these are just at the mechanical level.  They've already started adding electronics to guns which means sky's the limit as far as safety features go.  Passwords, biometric coding to owners, detection of human targets, all sorts of features are possible once the thing's computerized.

A basic tenet of user interface design in computer science is to make errors more difficult and the consequences less severe.  Design so that the things people commonly do work out as intended or at least do no harm.  That's why most software will prompt you "are you sure?" when you've chosen to do something irreversible like delete a bunch of files or format a drive.  Why certain powerful options are buried in an "advanced" menu so you have to go looking for that possibly dangerous feature and really mean to turn it on.  Guns delete lives, it's not too much to ask that they get the nearest analog of an "are you sure?" prompt built in at design level.

Oh and don't you dare tell me that gun culture takes seriously safety.  If it did, everything above would already be baked into the design of "mainstream" guns and any guns lacking these features would be some kind of antique or exotic find, like the guy you know who has a car old enough to be grandfathered in before seatbelts were mandatory.  Unsafe guns (as they would be regarded) wouldn't be allowed at ranges and would be illegal to use hunting.  Collectors might have them but they wouldn't be in regular circulation.  Instead, gun culture would fight tooth and nail against most or all of this and instead rely on the proven failure "individual responsibility" as if people themselves will somehow magically evolve to be smarter and more reliable than we really are.  People are flawed, we know that, you address that by improving the system, not demanding better people.

Newtown: Another Expose on Conservative Ideological Bankruptcy

While liberals debate various forms of gun control, improvements to the psychiatric care system, and other actual measures to make slaughters like Newtown less likely, the abject bankruptcy of conservative thought is something to behold.

The Tea Party suggests more George Zimmermans are the answer.  Armed vigilante squads patrolling school zones.

Gun "academic" John Lott suggests abolishing even more gun laws, specifically gun-free school zones.

Libertarian law Professor Glenn Reynolds approvingly cites a pro-gun man who later shot and killed his wife in a botched (?) puerile gun stunt.

Supposed "reasonable" conservative Eugene Volokh says to arm the teachers.

Libertarian individualist Megan McArdle proposes a creative collectivist solution:  Train seven year olds to rush adult shooters and overpower them.

Is there anything one needs to say in response to such stupidity?  They can't honestly believe this egregious nonsense.  This is the utter and complete bankruptcy of conservativism and right wing thought in general.  It is incapable of responding to this, and thus can only provide risible self-satirizing ideas to cover its shame.

I wrote about this some time ago, and this is more of the same.  Conservativism has no useful answers to the problems of society.  They simply wish to leave problems to fester, where action would impose the least inconvenience or costs on themselves.  If some problem magically solves itself, they might be ok with that, but for anything else, we are simply left to endure what we must.   They simply don't really believe problems can be solved. 

There shouldn't be 40% of Americans (and 30% of Canadians) willing to call themselves "conservatives" in the face of this.  This is shameful, and frankly disgusting.  The Emperor has no clothes.  People with ideas this monstrous need to experience sustained criticism and even scorn for refusing to rethink such bad ideas in the face of their self-evident horrific failure.  Teach children to rush at mass murderers?  Encourage more vigilantism?  What has to go wrong in your life that you even could entertain these thoughts, never mind publish it to millions in evident seriousness?

Responsible Gun Owners

It's not "news" but it's news to me:

In 2002, [NRA President David] Keene’s son David Michael Keene was driving on the George Washington Memorial Parkway when, in a road-rage incident, he fired a handgun at another motorist. He was sentenced to ten years in prison for “using, brandishing, and discharging a firearm in a crime of violence.” I asked Keene if this private tragedy had left him uncertain about what the N.R.A. had wrought. He said no: “You break the law, you pay the price.”

(emphasis added)  I wonder if the other driver agrees with Keene? 

That incident is far from the focus on that (excellent) New Yorker piece, but let's be clear, Keene was trying to shoot the other driver:

[Police] said Keene allegedly shot a bullet into another car Dec. 1 while traveling along a stretch of the George Washington Memorial Parkway, shattering the car's rear window.

The bullet lodged in the driver's seat and came within inches of striking the driver, police said.

So he's probably lucky he wasn't prosecuted for attempted murder.  The other driver is lucky not just to not get shot, but that he didn't panic and crash, and that he was able to get Keene (Jr)'s license plate.  For all we know, this wasn't the first time Keene had shot at someone over sheer petty rage.

Anyway, all this really adds an anecdotal highlight to something that there is statistical evidence for, that so called "responsible" gun owners too often turn out to not be very responsible at all:

Most purported self-defense gun uses are gun uses in escalating arguments and are both socially undesirable and illegal

We analyzed data from two national random-digit-dial surveys conducted under the auspices of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center.  Criminal court judges who read the self-reported accounts of the purported self-defense gun use rated a majority as being illegal, even assuming that the respondent had a permit to own and to carry a gun, and that the respondent had described the event honestly from his own perspective.

Hemenway, David; Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah. Gun use in the United States: Results from two national surveys. Injury Prevention. 2000; 6:263-267.

Keep that in mind when you hear gun proponents citing their ridiculous inflated statistics on the number of "defensive gun uses" per year.  Much like "Stand Your Ground" incidents, these are typically based on one party's side of the story.  Yet even their own naturally personally biased accounts of the incidents are very often themselves actually crimes!

My main point here is to back up what I was getting at with my other recent post on preventing gun deaths, that this crystal clear distinction some have between hard core career criminals and decent, law abiding people just doesn't hold up.  James Holmes is really a strong example of what I was getting at, a person who had no criminal track record, and yet for some reason (and mental illness is a pretty decent theory) decided to engage in a horrific one.  Few gun owners will do what he did, but there's a range of lesser, but still serious crimes they can and do engage in, often without realizing or acknowledging that they've done so. 

Guns: Recap

From what I'm seeing in the debate at other sites, many of the usual bad arguments against gun control are still very popular.

Here's some of my past writings in reply to these:

Why guns aren't like knives and arguments to regulate or ban the former don't have to make sense against the latter:

The argument to regulate or ban guns rests on guns being especially amenable to restriction due to their very specialized use cases, and to the high degree of inherent risk to life and limb from any use of them.

Why criminals don't necessarily find it that easy to get guns under stricter gun control laws:

It turns out that many, possibly even most guns used in mass murder events were obtained legally.  One definite problem here is we don't know how many would-be mass murderers couldn't get ahold of guns, and gave up on their schemes.  Japan suffered a rare mass murder event not perpetrated with a gun, and it's worth asking if many more than 8 children would have died that day if the mentally disturbed killer had found it easy to obtain a gun in Japan.

Why "criminals" are not really the sole reason to ban or restrict guns:

You can't neatly segregate people as "criminals" and "law abiding" as if these were immutable attributes that cannot change through a person's life.  It's true that people who earn their incomes legally don't often become "professional" criminals or mobsters, but taxpaying citizens do commit violent crimes.  You also can't forget that the problems with guns do not end with deliberate crime, but also includes accidents and suicide.

Finally, why Switzerland and Canada are really bad examles for pro-gun rights people to cite:

This arrangement is often portrayed as "every Swiss male has a fully automatic weapon at home" which clearly is not the case.  Signficant numbers of Swiss males are excluded for physical (like say having very poor vision which isn't something that even comes up in context of US gun laws but really should - if you can't see well enough to know what you're aiming at, how can you possibly use a gun responsibly?) and more importantly psychological reasons.  You also have to pass a variety of handling and aptitude tests to prove you are able to handle that weapon safely.  Would the NRA ever get behind forcing US would-be gun owners to undergo anything like this?  When they already oppose requiring criminal background checks for guns sold at gun shows, it's hard to imagine them supporting psychological screening and extensive training requirements.

Hoping I can do my small part to put away some of the tiredest canards of the pro-gun position and maybe they can at least surprise us with some fresh material if not some actual fresh thinking.  Hearing yet more "if you ban guns they'll just use knives" stupidity is one of the more depressing feaures of this debate.

Cross Border Gun Tragedies

As both sides of the Canada/US border have been struck (Denver) by large incidents of gun violence (Toronto) within a short time span, I suppose it is natural that many (at least in Canada) are connecting the two events.  There are obvious similarities (large numbers of victims, the pointlessness of it) but important differences too (most of the victims in Toronto were unintentional, the result of cross fire between fighting parties, whereas in Denver we are talking about a lone shooter intent on deliberately killing as many as he could).

But to the extent they are similar, I have two comments for the gun-proponent crowd: 

• Is there anything that would have been better about either shooting if more people in those crowds had been armed?  Is there any realistic chance an armed "law abiding citizen" could have done anything but add to the mayhem and victim count by drawing yet another weapon and opening fire?  In Toronto you already have multiple (possibly 3 or more) shooters firing at one another.  Who are you going to shoot?  What  In Denver, you're in a crowded and dark movie theatre, and there is some kind of tear gas or smoke grenade making it very difficult to understand what is going on.      

• Where is the deterrent effect?  In both cases, the shooter(s) had a pretty reasonable expectation that one or more of his targets could or would have a gun to shoot back.  Colorado is not a strong gun control state.  Obtaining a concealed carry permit is easy.  Open carry of handguns is even legal. This was not a school or some place which searches patrons to prevent guns getting in.  Why didn't this dissuade the shooter?  For that matter, where were the armed civilians to save the day?  Where are these supposed anti-crime benefits of lax gun laws?  Gun proponents suggested the Virginia Tech shooting might have stopped if not for a campus rule prohibiting guns, what's the excuse here?   At what point do we start asking when at least one of these mass murder situations will actually be stopped by an armed civilian?  As for Toronto, the (as yet uncomfirmed) rumour is that the shooters were gang affiliated and if so, had every reason to expect their targets were armed.  Which is generally the case for "gang" shootings:  If gangsters are not scared off engaging in gun fights with their fellow "hardened criminals" known to both possess and be willing to use guns, what makes anyone think criminals are much afraid of armed civilians when contemplating crimes?  Where is this supposed deterrence effect of an armed populace?   

If anything, it appears the shooter in Colorado simply accounted for the possibility of return fire from his victims by wearing armour and using some kind of smoke/gas grenade to create confusion.  Is this the "benefit" of an armed populace, simply better armed and prepared mass murderers?

And while it's true Canada's gun controls did not prevent the Toronto shooting, by the numbers there's just no comparison to US gun crime or general violence levels.  Is there any reason to expect that Canada relaxing its gun laws would lead to anything but more such shootings, without any of the promised upsides of widespread civilian gun ownership and carrying?

Preventing Gun Deaths on Two-Dimensions

In the first part (below), I argued against the simplistic notion that banning guns merely results in "law abiding" honest people giving up their guns, while criminal scum-bags all find it as easy as ever to get the guns, and run rampant in the now unarmed society of easy prey, as is implied in the line that "only criminals will have guns."


Toward the end I noted the knife crime problem that gets so much coverage in Britain.  While gun rights proponents sometimes cite this as proof of the futility of banning guns ("they'll just use knives!") in fact the prevalance of knife crime is proof that British gun control is having a useful effect in keeping a bad problem (lots of angry gang affiliated youths) from becomming much worse (lots of angry gang affiliated youths with guns).  Let's put this into visual terms because I think it is an important way to think about gun violence once you get past a simplistic binary view of society being criminals versus citizens and all gun problems coming from the former.


A Societal Model


To express this in a crude graphic grouping people into four categeories:



For clarity, by "willing to kill" I mean someone with a general intent or willingness to kill a human, including suicidal people, but not someone who knows they might kill under self-defence or some other justifiable circumstance, but would rather avoid it if possible. 

A gun control advocate should want that at least most people be in box 4, with no desire to kill anyone, and no easy means to do so.  Box 1 is red for obvious reasons, everyone agrees such people are the biggest danger.   Last, they're both yellow but the people in Box 2 (no gun, desire to kill) are of course a bigger concern than those in Box 3 (have gun, no desire to kill), as one can't deny that people with intent to kill will sometimes do so with means other than a gun.  People in Box 3 aren't free of problems though, given the greater propensity for lethal accidents in gun-households and of course, many legal guns are stolen from them and then used by people in box 1 to kill with.

The main point here is to say some people will move between boxes in their lifetimes.  This is why it makes sense to not only combat the causes of violent crime (move box 1 people to box 3, and box 2 people to box 4) but to reduce the availability of the most lethal means for committing it.  People in Boxes 3 and 4 are equally prone to becomming depressed, or being borderline violent personality types that get pushed over some mental limit by a bad divorce or economic distress.  In fact, there's some evidence that people with violent tendencies like spouse-abusers will tend to gravitate to Box 3 anyway, but even assuming such people are no more likely than non-abusers to own guns legally, the fact is that a spouse abuser in box 4 who loses his temper completely is much less easily able to murder his wife in a moment of irrational rage.  You can't grab your gun and shoot that person you're so red hot angry at if you don't have one.  Yes, you can grab a knife or blunt object, but for reasons previously discussed the victim's chances of survival are usually better with any weapon other than a gun. 

Gun rights proponents like to draw a bright line between criminals and "law abiding" people, but that's really not how life works.   Serious violent crimes are sometimes committed by people who had never previously put a foot wrong.  Many gun restrictions may not be as effective when it comes to hardened criminals in Box 1, but that's where a second set of measures designed to keep people out of such life paths would help.  As for "responsible gun owners," the research shows they often don't really understand the law that well themselves, and a lot of what they believe are self defensive gun uses turn out to be illegal:

Criminal court judges who read the self-reported accounts of the purported self-defense gun use rated a majority as being illegal, even assuming that the respondent had a permit to own and to carry a gun, and that the respondent had described the event honestly from his own perspective.

How many people get guns pointed at them on the highway, or brandished in mall parking space disputes, and the gun owner walks away thinking they've done nothing wrong?  If you doubt that, ask yourself if you've ever been cut off in traffic, honked and been given the finger by someone clearly oblivious to the fact that they were in the wrong.  People are well known to often judge their own behaviour in the best possible light and it's pretty easy to imagine a gun owner using a gun in a situation that did not legally permit that level of threatened or actual force yet feeling completely justified and in the right.  They "felt" threatened, and thus felt justified in what was done to deter that threat, but the subjective feeling of being threatened is not sufficient when it comes to the legal standards required for a violent act of self-defence (which is of course why "Stand Your Ground" laws are popular with gun rights types, a very convenient way to stay "law abiding" is to change the laws to make your unjustified use of force legal).  A paranoid person who assumes everyone is about to kill them and responds accordingly would be locked up even through they legitimately and honestly feel their life to be in danger.  The perception of threat has to be based on reasonable grounds, which is a nebulous concept, but unfortunately it's what we have. 


The stories that came out of the Katrina aftermath were much worse than merely mistaking unthreatening people for threatening.  There are evidently some "law abiding gun owners" seemingly waiting for Mad Max to come true so they can set up armed camps and shoot anyone (or anyone not the right skin colour as was sadly the case in Katrina) that approaches the gates.  Do these people think of themselves as "criminals"?  No, but they became such once they felt order had broken down. 

You can't neatly segregate people as "criminals" and "law abiding" as if these were immutable attributes that cannot change through a person's life.  It's true that people who earn their incomes legally don't often become "professional" criminals or mobsters, but taxpaying citizens do commit violent crimes.  You also can't forget that the problems with guns do not end with deliberate crime, but also includes accidents and suicide.  In a trivial way the gun slogan at the top is true, if guns are illegal everyone who has one is de jure a criminal, but it's a trite and glib way to ignore the vast potential upside that comes from a substantial reduction in gun ownership.  Keeping guns out of the hands of people in boxes 1 and 2 is vital, but the people in boxes 3 and 4 can move to boxes 1 and 2.  I would rather they only moved to box 2 if possible, and so would any gun proponent if you told them the person in question is someone who had a grudge against them personally. 

I'm not ignoring the whole issue of legitimate self-defence uses, but that benefit of gun ownership has to be measured against the risks, which gun rights types are generally too willing to ignore.  Yes, in boxes 4 and 2 you are at risk of someone in box 1 or 3 using a gun on you and being unable to meet force with force, but your risk of that drops significantly if such people find it more difficult to acquire guns.  Meanwhile just because you have a gun doesn't immunize you to gun crime, it only helps if you see it coming and have time to get or pull out your gun.  I don't know if any of the victims of the DC Sniper had guns, but it wouldn't have helped any of them if they did.  If you're walking down a dark alley and a teenage male is approaching, you might rather be in box 3 at that moment, but you'd rather they were in box 2 or 4.  Best for all if you're both in 2 or 4 since you'll both walk away.  It's not hypothetical either, Trayvon Martin was in box 4, and if George Zimmerman had been there too, Martin would be alive and none of us would have heard of either person.

Guns: Not Like Knives, Also Not Ubiquitous

I recently took on why banning guns doesn't mean you have to ban knives, bleach, chainsaws or dirty looks.  Here's another familiar refrain from gun rights proponents:

"If you ban guns, then only criminals will have guns."

 This one works on several levels, but aside from the slightly clever word-play truism where banning guns makes criminals out of previously legal gun owners, the more serious point behind this sentiment is that gun regulation simply won't work, and any effort to ban guns will only be effective on those who respect the law, and simply choose not to obtain guns legally.  You'll often see Prohibition cited in the same breath, because widespread disobedience of the laws banning alcohol somehow means that all laws that prohibit anything are therefore useless. 

Guns, Booze; Not the Same Thing

The first thing to say about Prohibition is that alcohol is a lot easier to manufacture than guns.  Archeological evidence suggests humans were making alcohol back in the Stone Age.  We didn't figure out how to use explosive propellents to launch projectiles with reasonable accuracy and effectiveness until the 1100s.  It simply doesn't follow that everyone capable of making a still or brewing beer in a bathtub would also be capable of producing usable guns.  In fact, of the few people with the skills to make a gun, it's quite likely they would make guns that were considerably less sophisticated, accurate, and effective than those made in major arms producers' high end factories.  Making an automatic weapon that can maintain a high rate of accurate fire with few jams and that doesn't explode isn't a trivial undertaking.  In fact, historically even the weapons made in factories have had major problems.  Meanwhile the dangers of bathtub beer and backwoods moonshine isn't that it's less effective, but that it's too effective and kills its users by poisoning them. 

The second thing is that Prohibition actually did succeed at substantially reducing overall alcohol consumption while it was in effect and even for a few years after it was lifted.  Yes, lots of people still drank, but many did not, and even of people who still drank, they typically drank less than they did before Prohibition.  Does that mean Prohibition was a policy success?  Well no, but the case against prohibition of alcohol doesn't rest totally on the ban being ineffective, but in the side-effects like the growth of organized crime, and in the deeper philisophical questions about whether it can be justified to ban alcohol in a free society.  In a universe where Prohibition saw widespread adherence, it would still be plausible to argue against it.

Supply and Demand Law Works With Guns Too

As relates to guns, the reduction in alcohol consumption levels most clearly points to the increased cost, and reduced availability of booze while it was illegal.  Some of the reduction would come from people afraid or unwilling to break the law, but given the widespread perception that many if not most people disobeyed prohibition, it's pretty reasonable to see that making alcohol considerably more expensive meant many people drank a lot less of it.  There's every reason to believe the same thing happens with guns where they are more heavily restricted.  For example: 

Although the street price for the handgun in Russia is between 500 to 700 U.S. dollars, the Sankei reports a seller willing to take the risk can command nearly 10 times those figures in Japan —- from 500,000 to 600,000 yen.

And closer to home, the RCMP reported in 2007 that '“[h]igh end” handguns are presently selling on the street for three times the retail price.'

The simple economic reality is that even with modern automation in manufacturing bringing down the production cost, guns aren't "cheap" - and multiplying the legal retail price (which a quick search shows starts at about $250 for the smallest handguns) will easily put guns out of the economic range of a lot of people.  When you restrict guns, in economic terms you increase the costs associated with connecting buyers and sellers - in the Japanese case, Russians smuggling them into Japan must certainly demand a fair mark up, and in Canada, those who drive over to the US to buy them "legally" do so as well.

Then there is the real problem of locating a seller.  If guns are illegal this isn't a trivial challenge either.  An important example:

The Norwegian man who has admitted to going on a shooting spree and being behind a bomb attack which killed more than 90 people, Anders Behring Breivik, came to Prague in search of an AK-47 and semi-automatic pistol. Breivik had a picture of the Czech capital as a dangerous place where he could make a weapons deal with drugs dealers in sleazy bars and brothels. He left the city after having sex with two women — likely prostitutes — but with no weapons.

An anecdote, no doubt, but a revealing one given that it involves a man highly motivated to procure guns, and found himself unable to do so even in a city famed for organized crime.  Breivik would go on to get his guns legally in Norway (though it took him longer).

It turns out that many, possibly even most guns used in mass murder events were obtained legally.  One definite problem here is we don't know how many would-be mass murderers couldn't get ahold of guns, and gave up on their schemes.  Japan suffered a rare mass murder event not perpetrated with a gun, and it's worth asking if many more than 8 children would have died that day if the mentally disturbed killer had found it easy to obtain a gun in Japan.

We also shouldn't pretend that mass murderers are the only people of concern when it comes to obtaining guns.  Violent spouses and depressed people who become suicidal may also buy a gun on impulse and kill someone.  When it comes to criminals, even if you assume every mobster will still have the ability to get guns, there are a lot of criminals who aren't high level mobsters or other professionals living a life of crime.  It's quite reasonable to argue that Britain has such a problem with stabbings because they have a) a big, poor, quasi-permanent underclass and b) it's damn hard/expensive/risky to get a gun there.   I'm not a fan of Britain's massive wealth disparity and calcified class system, but is there anything about the stabbing problem that would be better if those same kids had easy access to inexpensive firearms?


I'm going to break here, and take this up further in another post.

For the last time, guns aren't much like knives

Stop me if you've heard this one before:

Even if you managed somehow to ban all guns, are you going to ban knives too?  And axes?  And baseball bats?   If people can't get guns, they'll just use whatever they can get to kill with.

Not quoting anyone specifically here, but this general sentiment is repeated ad-nauseum in every gun control debate by gun-rights proponents.

Ok, listen up gun people.  There are two big things wrong with this general idea of equating guns with almost anything else that could be used as a weapon:

1) Guns are a lot more lethal than all those other things. 

Sometimes differences in scale are big enough to be differences in kind, and this is one of those times.  Guns in particular have the advantage of lethal at range, and requiring next to no physical strength and little skill to remain lethal.  The tragedy of a toddler killing someone with a gun is hardly unheard of, but do we ever hear of a bat going off in the hands of a toddler and killing a sibling?  Is there such a thing as a "drive by stabbing"?  I can only think of one mass murder which was carried out with a knife, and the victims were two women and a bunch of primary school aged children.  Meanwhile multi-murder events using guns are almost a monthly occurrence. 

There is a reason that guns are the primary weapon of every military's ground forces, and it's this.  There's only a few things generally more lethal than guns and that category has items like explosives and WMDs in it, which actually often makes them too lethal for most practical use (since they're hard to use without also killing yourself).  This category of "more lethal than guns" is also coincidentally comprised of items more heavily restricted, banned and/or regulated than firearms, and as far as I know, not even the most extreme members of the NRA argue that Stinger missiles, anthrax or hand grenades should be available for ordinary civilian use.  I know I'm belabouring the point here, but I really can't understand why anyone making the sort of point above could do so while being conscious of the vast disparity in lethal capacity between guns and nearly anything else an average person can get ahold of. 

2) Guns don't have uses other than as weapons.

The second thing wrong with this gun talking point is that it forgets the singular nature of guns as weapons.  That's all they are.  The only way to use them without killing anything is target practice, which is just practicing to be better at using them as weapons (and still requires elaborate care and safety procedures to ensure no one is harmed by mistake).  Obviously not everyone who target shoots will shoot some living thing with a gun, but that's still the point of target shooting.  Not everyone who practices martial arts gets into real fights, but no one disputes becoming effective at physical combat is an essential goal of martial arts.

Knives and those other objects have other non-weapons uses.  Knives in particular are indispensible as kitchen implements, in carpentry, surgery, camping and a host of other places where one needs something sharp to do something other than violence to a living being.  This is true of all the other objects generally named in this argument.  What's also true is many of them are so commonplace as to be effectively unregulatable.  How could we ban "blunt objects" even if we wanted to?  Sure, high security places like prisons or airplanes manage it, but in everyday life the host of objects that can double as clubs is innumerate.  It's reasonable to say "you can't take a crowbar onto a flight" but not to ban them from everyday use, where they're often useful. 

Guns are uniquely regulatable in this because they don't have other uses and there aren't hundreds of everyday objects that can be easily used as guns in a pinch.  You can build a gun if you're some kind of metalsmith or machinist with a set of specialized tools, but it's not something any ordinary object is easily converted into.  Prisoners often craft knives (or at least stabbing shanks) out of things as common as toothbrushes.  Prisons have good reason to go the lengths necessary to restrict even knives and things that could plausibly be turned into knives, but we could not run the wider world under such rules (even so, we do place some restrictions on knives, such as the length of knife one can carry concealed).  Effective restrictions on guns require no such lengths and burden on everyday life.

The argument to regulate or ban guns rests on guns being especially amenable to restriction due to their very specialized use cases, and to the high degree of inherent risk to life and limb from any use of them.   If knives or baseball bats met those criteria, then liberals would be talking about banning or regulating them too.  If there was something as lethal as guns but was also an indispensible daily-use household item or easily crafted from common indispensible items, we would probably just have to accept the downsides of these lethal weapons as part of life, focusing solely on every other social factor that would cause someone to use this item to do harm to themself or others.  Guns are not such a necessary evil, because they're simply not necessary and they enable great evil.

US Gun Rights Proponents Shouldn't Cite Canada and Switzerland

I'll paraphrase something I've encountered in US gun rights debates from time to time:

Look at Switzerland and Canada!  They're awash with guns but have low crime rates, this proves guns in the hands of responsible law abiding gun owners are not a problem.

It is true that Canada and Switzerland have relatively high numbers of guns in civilian hands.  And while this point may be useful in arguing against some kind of total gun ban, that's really fighting a straw man.  If the US was to import the gun laws of Canada or Switzerland wholesale, US gun control groups would be ecstatic with joy and the NRA would lose their minds.  Canada has very strict rules on ownership of handguns and makes it nigh impossible to own a fully automatic weapon of any kind.  It's almost unheard of that anyone gets the exemption permit under the Criminal Code to carry a loaded handgun for self-defence.  Yes, Canada has lots of rifles and shotguns, but it's very evident that in the real world most violent crime committed with guns is done with handguns or guns small enough to conceal easily.  Long guns do present risks, like suicide, unintentional shootings and domestic violence issues, but rarely does anyone rob a liquor store with a rifle.  Still, Canada requires licenses to acquire even long guns and places legal restrictions on how they're stored when not in use.

Switzerland is a whole other case.  Famously, the Swiss give military style fully automatic assault weapons to all military members to keep at home.  Let's think about what that means in the context of US gun laws:

• Every one of these guns is registered to its owner by virtue of being issued and owned by the Swiss military.
• Every one of these soldiers undergoes military training on how to safely use, store, carry and shoot that specific weapon.
• Every recruit to the military is actually put through physical and psychological screening to ensure they are mentally and physically able to perform the duties of defending Switzerland.  Additionally, not everyone drafted/recruited makes it through basic training.
• The soldiers are not issued ammo for this weapon, and, outside of wartime, can only acquire ammo for it at a licensed range, and the ammo has to be used at that range.  
• These people are in fact soldiers, and their use of these weapons subject to much stricter military laws and laxer prosecution standards than is typical for civilians.
• There are legal rules about the transport of these weapons, generally only to and from licensed ranges or duty locations.
• Once they leave the Swiss military they are permitted to keep the weapon if they want, but it is converted to semi-auto and again the ammunition remains restricted.

This arrangement is often portrayed as "every Swiss male has a fully automatic weapon at home" which clearly is not the case.  Signficant numbers of Swiss males are excluded for physical (like say having very poor vision which isn't something that even comes up in context of US gun laws but really should - if you can't see well enough to know what you're aiming at, how can you possibly use a gun responsibly?) and more importantly psychological reasons.  You also have to pass a variety of handling and aptitude tests to prove you are able to handle that weapon safely.  Would the NRA ever get behind forcing US would-be gun owners to undergo anything like this?  When they already oppose requiring criminal background checks for guns sold at gun shows, it's hard to imagine them supporting psychological screening and extensive training requirements.

Even outside the military context, Swiss civilian gun laws are far more restrictive than most US states (perhaps all now in the era of DC v Heller).  Obtaining a permit to carry a concealed weapon requires both identification of a specific danger or threat to the applicant, and again passing a handling/aptitude test.  The NRA and associated ideological allies on the gun lobby have been pushing "shall issue" laws that require State authorities to issue such permits to anyone who applies (typically excepting only those with felony convictions). 

Finally there is also the rather important topic of the much stronger social safety nets found in Canada and Switzerland as compared to the US.  Given the long established links between crime and poverty, deprivation and lack of opportunity, these factors cannot be ignored.  If you want to use Switzerland or Canada to prove that it is possible to have a relatively peaceful, stable and safe society that also has significant numbers of guns, fine, I can buy that.  But it doesn't do anything to show that the presence of guns is helpful to those ends, merely that they are not necessarily fatal to them.   Nor do I see many US gun proponents arguing for a better US social safety net, or other measures to ensure actual economic opportunity for the historically crime plagued impoverished communities.    If you're going to cite Switzerland's gun laws, are you also going to look to their universal health care system?  Or their highly state subsidized university tuition levels?   The point here is that Swiss and Canadian gun laws exist in the context of those societies and analysis that tries to completely divorce them is liable to go wrong.  Of course, I think many gun proponents are being disingenuous or at least willfully ignoring this kind of context, because they usually don't just argue that Switzerland or Canada prove it is possible to have low crime rates and high gun ownership rates, they often argue that Swiss and Canadian crime rates are low because of high gun ownership rates, which is just completely unfounded and a classic post hoc fallacy.




For gun control advocates, my advice would be that if a gun advocate brings up Switzerland or Canada, embrace it and ask them to support importing either country's gun laws to the US.  The reality is the only states comparable to the US when it comes to gun laws are really failed states like Somalia where it is effectively a free-for-all.