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.

On Comparing US healthcare to Canada

Krugman is doing good work as usual in bringing the right international context to the Medicare debate, and I want to highlight a point I made back at Open Left when this sort of "comparing the US to other places" was in vogue during the HCR debate, where I imagined two scenarios, one in which other rich countries had proportional GDP to America's, and the effect that would have on their absolute health spending levels, and then imagined that they also spent an equivalent amount of their new US-level GDP on health, and found that Canada would have an extra $95B 2006 dollars to spend on health (where we actually spent $125B):

As we can see, Canada could supplement its 176 MRI scanners with a hefty 5,300 more, just under the first scenario.  We probably wouldn't buy that many, so we could address our nurse and doctor shortage with some combination of 40,000 surgeons, 80,000 GPs or 300,000 nurses.  It would be less, as we'd have to build a bunch of hospitals to put them in, but I think the point is clear enough.  If Canada spent on health care like the US does, I'm not sure we would even know what to do with the money.  I have a hard time imagining there would be wait list problems for MRIs or hip replacements.

Realizing that there's many implied assumptions, but I think the basic point should be made that America is the most powerful and richest country in the history of the planet.  If Canada somehow managed to have a military that was even arguably superior to the American one (and I'm not knocking our military) this would be a big scandal in America, as what kind of amazing Pentagon incompetence would that entail?  That the health care system of a country one-tenth the population size and much lower population density and lower per-capita income even arguably beats the US system (and I believe it does) should be taken as a serious problem.  That we do so while spending less of our already smaller national income exacerbates the failure.

This reminds me of a second point, the Zombie Lie that Canadians flock in large numbers to the US for health care due to the deficiencies in our system;  While Paul posts the obligatory link to the great 2002 study "Phantoms in the Snow" which looked for these hordes of Canadians and couldn't find any evidence of them, I do have to say that for the reason above of just sheer economies of scale, no matter what kind of free market fairies Canada looses on its health care system, we will have wealthy Canadians going to the US for speciality treatment.  America will always be ten times our size, and will tend to have more centres of excellence in various specialities.  Canada can only have so many places like the University of Toronto, which produce ground breaking research, and the US will always have the advantage in this.  Canada has a free market consumer goods economy and yet Canadians actually do visit the US often enough for improved shopping opportunities.  The reason for this may slightly be about higher sales taxes, but generally it's just economies of scale and product availability.  Companies prefer the market with 300 million people to the one with 30 million people.   Anyone thinking the invisible hand would give Canada a half-dozen Mayo clinic equivalents is going to be disappointed if we ever do privatize our system because it won't happen.

McClatchy with the must read on Fannie/Freddie

It's a great piece, but I think this needs to be put on T-shirts or something and maybe kill a zombie lie:

Q: What role did Wall Street play?
A: For most of their history, Fannie and Freddie performed their role without problems, helping home ownership grow and freeing up banks to lend more. In the late 1990's, Wall Street began aggressively pooling mortgages into bonds — called private-label mortgage-backed securities.

After 2001, these Wall Street firms focused heavily on subprime loans given to the least creditworthy borrowers. In 1999, 81 percent of new U.S. mortgages were securitized by Fannie and Freddie. By 2005 and 2006, the final years of the housing bubble and the period most characterized by the deep erosion of lending standards, Wall Street firms were securitizing two out of every three new U.S. mortgages.

Clearly Fannie and Freddie must be totally at fault for the housing meltdown.  Oh wait, also this:

Q: Didn't government requirements to lend to minorities and the poor fuel this subprime lending?
A: This is a narrative spun by some conservatives that is not grounded in fact. Beginning in 1992, Fannie and Freddie were directed to foster more lending to minorities by purchasing and securitizing these loans — when the loans met guidelines.

 Go, read, enjoy.