To figure out the solution to a problem you have to understand the root cause. In the case of violence and murders (note not gun violence/gun murders), the root cause is not the legality of guns or the proliferation of guns.
There are currently many gun laws already in effect that do nothing to curb gun violence. There are often times holes/gaps in the laws or execution of those laws. But fundamentally the laws won’t stop a determined person. I do have some ideas about things that might work.
Some of the data and conclusions will make you really mad and you will most likely call me names. Please try to be civil, I’m coming at this from a genuine desire to come up with solutions that will work.
Obviously I’m biased, I keep at least 20,000 rounds of ammunition and have about 10 guns. Still I will try to present things in an even handed manner and I hope you can respect the spirit of it. I try to deal with data and logic (and do it every day) and am open to persuasive arguments, but not ad hominem.
Ill address two quick points, most of you would probably call this an arsenal. The reason why I keep 20,000 rounds is not because Im a crazy gun nut, but because over the last 3 years it has been virtually impossible to get ammunition in the calibers that I shoot at a reasonable price (22 lr, 9mm, 223, 308). I shoot about 150 rounds/week to stay in practice which takes about an hour to two hours. That is around 7800 rounds/year. 20,000 rounds gives me about 3 years of ammunition; enough to last through historical shortages. The reason why I have 10 guns is because guns are tools and just like you wouldn’t have only hammer or one size screwdriver, multiple guns are used for multiple types of shooting. 22lr is incredibly cheap to shoot and short range and good for children. Compact 9mm to carry, larger 9mm for home protection, 223 rifle for medium range (under 300 yards), 308 rifle for longer range (under 1000 yards), shotgun for birds, 300 blackout for suppressed shooting, then duplicates of each for fine tuning (night hunting setup vs day hunting).
My entire position rests on two assumptions about the usefulness of guns. If you believe guns have no useful purpose in modern society, then I get why you are ok with banning them. You could stop reading and jump to the poll..
The first assumption is that guns are useful for self defense. I believe that guns are successfully used defensively every day. No one knows the true number but a reasonable number (from the CDC report) is about 500K defensive uses per year. The second assumption is that the purpose of the second amendment is for the people to have guns to resist tyranny of the government. Just last century, tyrannical governments have killed more people than any other non-natural causes of death.
Mao 50 million
Stalin 7 million
Hitler 12 million
etc.
Yes with how things stand today, it seems far fetched and impossible. I’m not a conspiracy nut and I do believe there is no way that would happen in our lifetime, but I believe it is irresponsible to take away the ability of future generations to be able to resist a tyrannical government, even at the expense of deaths today.
Madison wrote in federalist 46 about the purpose of citizens being armed to resist tyranny from the federal government:
Extravagant as the supposition is, let it however be made. Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops.
If you can’t agree that guns have the aforementioned important uses, want to violate the constitution by implementing a complete ban (fuck the 2nd amendment) or by repealing the 2nd amendment (good luck) you should just stop reading.
I’m not going to go over the complete state of gun laws, but I have seen a few misconceptions about the current state of gun laws:
Internet loophole: You cannot legally buy a gun over the internet and avoid a background check
Gun show loop hole: You cannot legally buy a gun at a gun show (from a dealer) and avoid a background check
You can buy a gun from a non-gun dealer in a private party transaction and avoid a background check.
When buying a gun over the internet you must have it shipped to a dealer in your state. When you go pick it up you will fill out a 4473 form and will get a NICS background check.
When buying a gun at a gun show (from a dealer) you will fill out a 4473.
Because face to face private party transactions do not require a 4473, if you meet someone at a gun show and do a private party transaction then you will not need a 4473. If you meet someone on the internet (e.g. gunbroker.com) then you have to meet them in person to execute the transaction. Requiring background checks for private transactions would not stop criminals from getting guns because they would just transact without the background check.
Without understanding the cause of the problem, how can it be solved? The problem of gun violence is a subset of our problem with violence. Virtually all existing gun laws are like band aids on an infection, not addressing the actual cause. All additional proposed gun laws except a complete ban and confiscation will do nothing to impact the gun murder rate in proportion to the price that we pay. Even then, there will be a substitution effect with other implements being used to commit murder so even a complete ban would not reduce the murder rate.
I will conceded one point that no one seems to know about but I will give to you as an offer of good faith. One right wing talking point is that crime and gun violence is dropping even as the number of guns massively proliferated. Yet when I did an analysis of the rate of decrease of violent crime due to other implements vs guns, gun violence decreased at a slower rate as compared to the other implements used in murders. Guns went from being used in around 65% of murders in 1980 to around 72% of murders in 2005. The rate of gun murders is dropping, but not as fast as other types of murder.
The raw data is here, the pertinent sheet is htus8008f42.csv.
To find a solution, the cause has to be understood. The data is relatively clear to me as to where to look. (This is where you are going to call me a racist).
The United States’ murder rate is about 5/100,000.
The United States’ gun murder rate is about 3.5/100,000
The United States’ gun death rate is around 10.5/100,000
Non-hispanic white homicide rate is about 2.5/100,000
Non-hispanic black homicide rate is about 19/100,000
This is a reasonable article that goes into the breakdowns a little further
fivethirtyeight.com/...
Our black homicide rate skews our average compared to our European counterparts. Our white homicide rate is about 2x comparable European countries so there is an issue there as well.
Poverty is probably the best correlated, yet it is not a sufficient explanation, otherwise there would be no difference in victimization rates by ethnicity. It probably ends up being something like penetration of illegal drugs into a community in addition to poverty.
What you will see a lot is graphs like this:
www.motherjones.com/...
It is obvious and I will concede that reducing guns will reduce gun deaths. But where the right and left talk past each other is that generally graphs from the left show everything in relation to gun deaths. For example gun control reduces gun deaths and gun proliferation is somewhat correlated to gun deaths. Gun deaths include suicides but exclude substitution effects of using other methods.
The graphs the right use focus on homicides (gun or otherwise) which are *not* impacted by gun proliferation.
This graph shows the homicide rate vs Gun ownership by country.
This graph shows the homicide rate by gun ownership for each state. There is no correlation.
www.objectobot.com/…
This graph shows that gun control level is not correlated to homicide rate (but I concede it probably *is* correlated to gun homicide rate)
The left seems to want to portray single family homes as being every bit as good as two parent homes, followed with anecdotes (my mom was single and I turned out great! I had two parents and they sucked!). There is substantial data to show that single parent homes do not result in as good outcomes. This is just one example (which admitted doesn’t prove causation, just correlation).
Single parent families probably contribute tremendously to juvenile crime.
Including or excluding suicides from data also has a significant impact.
I’m sure many of you will disagree, but I think homicides are the most important area to reduce. While suicides form the largest number, my personal belief is that if people want to leave this world, they should be able to. Accidents and then accidents with children are statistical noise, less than the number of children who drown in pools.
I’m not intending to present a comprehensive analysis by any stretch, but a review of the data speaks to me the following conclusions:
Homicide rate is not correlated to strength of gun control laws
Homicide rate is not correlated to rate of gun ownership
Homicide rate is correlated to ethnicity
Homicide rate is correlated to poverty
Single parent households are strongly correlated to juvenile crime
For any changes to be effective, in addition to understanding the problem, it is also important to understand the goal. Im intentionally leaving out addressing suicides.
GOAL: Reduce homicide rate
Strategy 1: Reduce factors that cause homicides
Strategy 2: Reduce gun homicides
Constraint: 2nd amendment
Constraint: 300 million guns already in private hands
Here are the proposals from what you would consider a right wing nut job:
Fix welfare. Welfare is broken and causes multigenerational poverty which results in higher violence in impoverished communities
Here are some modifications
1) Welfare disincents people to get married. Allow people on welfare to get married (solve the issue of single parent families).
2) Welfare disincents people to work and save. The welfare loss of benefits should not start until higher rates of wealth and income (e.g. median). The benefit loss should be a small percent of income earned from work. For example 20 cents of benefits loss for each additional dollar of income/wealth earned/saved).
3) Welfare should not cut in until people have hit rock bottom. Perhaps after unemployment runs out and all wealth is expended.
This creates an asymmetric system where there is a path to get out of welfare and a barrier to get back on. Once you have saved money and have a decent income you would have to lose everything to get back on.
With the following you will probably accuse me of Eugenics or something nefarious:
4) Free birth control and abortions for those on welfare. The freakonomics team showed that legalization of abortion probably is the single most important factor resulting in decreasing crime rates in the 90s. (I’m aware of the rebuttals such as www.economist.com/...)
5) Pay those on welfare to get tubal ligations and vasectomies. For example if you have 1 child you get $40k, 2 children $20K, 3 children+ 5K.
Education
1) Competition is the key to successful schools. Im against private school vouchers, but why not vouchers within the public school system? Let people choose from schools within their existing system. Give more latitude to each school to operate. It will become obvious which schools students want to attend and then fire the poor performing principals. The key is competition between schools. Competition is the american way and virtually always results in better outcomes.
2) Allocate approximately $1000-2000 per student and create a local to national system of educational competitions with large prize amounts. The total primary and secondary enrollment in the US is approximately 50 million so the cost would be about $50-$100 billion (defund one major weapons program, stop fighting in the middle east?). Generate publicity and excitement around education supported by big dollar prizes. We need to drop the notion that education should be reward enough on its own. Many people don’t play sports just because it is fun, but because of the lottery ticket chance of making the pros. People love sports because of the competition.
The x prize and Netflix prizes created an order of magnitude of investment as compared to the prize itself.
The competitions could be anything. They could be at the class level, school level, district, region, state and national. They could be projects, debate, math skills, knowledge etc.
Drugs
Most poverty violent crime is related to the war on drugs. Addictive drugs are a scourge, but taking the wealth and then using it to manage the problem works a lot better than criminalizing the poor who are disproportionately affected. Portugal seems to be a success. www.thefix.com/...
1) use the tax money for treatment and anti drug propaganda
2) release all drug offense only criminals to make room for actual violent criminals
Gun control
I don’t believe that there is much that will help here, but here are a few items.
1) Any parent that allows their child access to a gun who then hurts others is culpable of at least manslaughter (this is only a hundred cases/year) and loses their right to own any guns of a period (or for life).
2) Straw purchasing is actually prosecuted as a felony. This is how the vast majority of criminals get their guns. Yet this is also very hard to prosecute. At the very least when someone is caught, they will not be able to buy more guns.
3) When guns are used in a crime, the penalties are increased substantially (this is a large number of cases/year). This will probably have the most impact, but is only possible if we release the drug only criminals
4) Trying to buy a gun as a felon results in incarceration. Right now virtually no felons failing the NICS background check receive any charges.
5) Improve the flow of data from states into the NICS system.
P.S. I have to work now so may not reply until later in the day.
