Gun Control
TLDR: Discussion of guns is often warped towards anecdotes and irrationality. The few good studies find that gun control has a modest but still positive impact on suicide and homicide rates. Utopia bans private ownership weapons that could easily kill a crowd of unarmed people, including guns, but still allows supervised access and training to responsible adults.
Prerequisites: None
I grew up in a fairly gun-friendly household. As a child I learned to shoot, and was at least introduced to ideas like “an armed society is a polite society” and “if you make guns illegal, the only people with guns will be criminals.” More broadly, most people in the USA have some experience with guns, and even Democrat politicians rarely take a hard stance opposing guns — the right to bear arms is front-and-center in the Constitution, after all.
But from a global perspective, the USA is a weird outlier here. There are a few western countries, such as Switzerland, Finland, and the Czech Republic that have gun cultures, but no western country is as permissive as the USA, and the vast majority of the world sharply restricts private access to firearms.
Unfortunately, the discourse and research around this topic is mired and polarized. People often feel very strongly about guns, and this makes them hard to discuss in a rational way. Pro-gun advocates will bring up anecdotes about self-defense or make sweeping arguments about the abstract need to resist tyranny and stand up for basic liberty. Anti-gun advocates, meanwhile, will bring up anecdotes about mass-shootings or gesture emphatically at graphs like these, as though it’s obvious who’s right:
These are not good graphs. Or rather, these graphs reflect a confused and broadly pathological subfield of public health that has been eroded by partisan bias and deliberate obstructionism. As an example, consider that “gun deaths” and “gun homicides” are pretty fake things to care about — if someone kills someone with a knife instead of a gun is that somehow better? “Gun deaths” is particularly obnoxious, as it lumps suicides and accidents in with homicides and doesn’t even distinguish gang shootouts from self-defense. “Guns owned per capita” is probably a worse metric than household gun ownership rate, since the USA has a bunch of gun collectors who can each have dozens or even hundreds of guns. Also, the choice of countries to compare the USA to changes the narrative a lot — the USA has a homicide rate 2.5x that of Canada, which has fewer guns and stricter gun laws, but Mexico has a homicide rate over 4x that of the USA, and also has fewer guns and stricter gun laws!
In this field, bad methodology is the norm, rather than the exception, and there’s reason to suspect that the political leaning of universities, scientists, and journal editors leads to the suppression of findings that support pro-gun positions. But, regardless of whether there is suppression of research on the left, there is obvious suppression from the right. The Dickey Amendment, passed by Republicans in 1996, effectively blocked the CDC from spending any money promoting research that might result in an anti-gun finding (ie all studies on the topic) for over twenty years.
And yet, the question of the value of guns in society is important enough to warrant close investigation. Through deliberate effort to set aside our biases and preconceptions, we have the opportunity to examine the topic in a hard-headed way that holds space for tradeoffs when they arise.
Distraction: Militias
Let’s start by addressing the aspects of the topic that I think are mostly distractions. For example: are guns important to resisting tyranny? The Second Amendment seems to say they are:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
But also… that was written in 1789. Things worked slightly different, back then.
Are militia a meaningful concept in this age of tanks, fighter-jets, nuclear weapons, and lethal robots? My sense is yes! Through guerilla warfare, urban combat, and harsh terrain, individual humans with guns can be a meaningful threat, even to an army with war machines. But also, militias can be given high power weapons of war!
Take Finland, for instance, where there is only a small standing army of only about 24,000 soldiers, but there are more than 35 times that many citizens in the reserve. These men and women actively train on and have access to military equipment, including anti-tank missiles, artillery, and air defense systems. This policy of having a strong reserve is a product of having a history of successfully defending the forests and lakes of their homeland against invaders — most notably the Soviet Union during the Winter War of 1939. Similarly, when Ukraine was invaded in 2022, the reserve militia (now grown in number following the 2014 conflict in Crimea) was quickly mobilized to seriously bolster the ranks of active soldiers and help fight back against Russian invasion. If such groups are useful against foreign invasions, it seems reasonable to expect them to be useful in resisting domestic tyranny.
But both Finland and Ukraine also serve as counterpoints to the Second Amendment. The high-power materiel in Finland isn’t exactly sitting in people’s basements and gloveboxes. Prior to 2022, Ukraine had some of Europe’s most restrictive gun ownership laws. Being skilled and familiar with a gun (or other military equipment) is entirely compatible with not owning one, personally. And in case of emergency, citizens can rapidly arm themselves from reserve stations and bases.
Of course, it still might be sensible to let army-reserve militias keep their weapons at home and practice on their own time. This is how Switzerland handles its reservists, for example. But the point is that general gun ownership, especially of handguns, is largely orthogonal to how well prepared a country’s militia are to handle a large-scale threat.
Distraction: Hunting and Animal Defense
Some people like to hunt. Historically, hunting was a major source of food, furs, and other resources. Nowadays (in the developed world) it’s mostly for recreation and cultural reasons. If we set aside the intrinsic value and the value of trophies, skilled hunting is probably somewhere between $1/hour and $36/hour,1 in terms of net economic productivity. $36/hour sounds pretty productive until one takes into account that this is an optimistic estimate for the output of a skilled professional that has put in perhaps hundreds of hours of time preparing and training, and that hunting scales really poorly — most governments have to restrict licenses and hunting seasons to avoid game species getting wiped out. (Meat also has disease risks, and some animals may be people, but I’m going to ignore these problems here.)
The direct productivity costs of restricting guns in terms of making hunting harder are quite low. Which is not to say the overall costs are low; there’s a cost to any sort of restriction of freedom, and many people enjoy the recreation for its own sake, or gain aesthetic or spiritual value from trophies. But I claim that aesthetic, spiritual, and sporting values can be celebrated without having to grant wide-spread access to guns, such as by synthesizing artificial furs or by hunting with bow-and-arrow. And likewise, in the case that a society really thinks gun hunting is a vital freedom that’s worth protecting, it seems totally reasonable to have hunters temporarily check out their guns at a station near the hunting grounds, then return them after they’re done.
On a related topic, some people are worried about wild animals, such as bears, and think it’s important to carry a gun for protection in the countryside. This is basically a fake concern, statistically. Bears kill about one person per year in all of North America, and not because people are fighting them off with guns. Mountain lions and wolves kill even fewer people — only 28 people are known to have been killed by mountain lions in the past century, and in that same period of time we only know of 2 cases of deaths from wild wolves in North America. Moose, elk, and especially dogs are all far more dangerous, mostly because people underestimate them. In general, people who get killed by wild animals are usually making generally bad decisions, such as walking alone, off trails, and/or trying to get closer to take photos.
For those who go hiking, bear spray may be warranted. Those who are particularly concerned might want to take a friend with them, or stay in more well-trodden areas. But the overall threat from large, wild animals is a rounding error away from zero.
Distraction: Mass Shootings
Speaking of things that are basically a rounding error: mass shootings aren't worth being personally worried about. They are, of course, unspeakable tragedies worthy of grief and anger, but they’re also really rare. Alas, as part of the general smokescreen around gun control, there’s no shared definition of what a “mass shooting” even is — pro-gun advocates like to restrict the term to make them seem more rare, while those who are anti-gun favor broader definitions that encompass things like turf wars by organized crime. A lower-bound on the annual fatalities from mass shootings in the USA per year is something like 100, while an upper bound is around 700. This is a far bigger threat than wild animals, but regardless of definition, is still in the ballpark of other extremely unlikely events like getting struck by lightning or being hospitalized by a dog attack.
Some might argue that even a single mass shooting is worth getting rid of guns, especially when the victims are children. I sympathize with this sentiment, but strongly disagree with the attitude that rejects cost-benefit-analysis. In my essay on airplanes, I argue that increased security in the wake of 9/11 has resulted in more loss of life than all (western) terrorist attacks in modern history. The costs to getting rid of guns is large, and the number of lives directly affected by mass shootings is small.
Which is not to say that the number of lives indirectly affected is small. Every time there’s a major mass-shooting in the USA, it gets blasted into the news feeds of hundreds of millions of people, often with horrific images or narratives accompanying the basic facts. These news stories cause immediate distress, but may also make the problem worse — there’s reason to suspect that mass shootings are a social contagion. In the 20th century and before, school shootings were very rare. Then, after the Columbine massacre made national headlines for weeks, many lawmakers and school districts began enacting shooter drills and making school shootings something to focus on preventing. 25 years later, we can decidedly see that not only did those efforts fail to prevent additional school shootings, but we’re currently at something of an all-time high, even factoring in population growth.
I don't want to overstate the evidence for social contagion. While the graph shows that we're failing to solve the problem, it also seems to indicate that the trend was present before the Columbine shooting in 1999, and it's possible that in the absence of active shooter drills and other efforts, the problem would be even worse.
Regardless, the actual numbers of people positively affected by getting national news about these events is tiny and the number of those who are negatively affected — sometimes traumatized — is very high. We’d be collectively better off if we focused on the much more frequent ways that guns impact people’s lives, and kept stories of exceptional violence out of national headlines.
On Priors and Margins
Before diving into the murky waters of trying to filter good studies from the slop and collect evidence, let’s consider where I think a reasonable person should start, just by reasoning from common-sense and basic knowledge. For example, guns are deadly weapons, and I think one should naturally expect that situations involving guns are more deadly when a gun is involved. That’s not to say that situations involving guns are intolerably dangerous in an objective sense — it’s possible to handle a gun safely — but rather that it’d be even safer for the average person involved2 if there was no gun there in the first place.
I also think it's reasonable to expect guns in society to make certain situations more frequent and others less frequent. For example, guns might increase the number of robberies because the robber can easily threaten their victim with deadly force that's hard to run away from, but they might decrease burglaries because would-be burglars are scared of getting shot while breaking in. In the absence of evidence, I think one should have wide error bars on basically all of these kinds of effects, including their direction.
I think it's also unreasonable to expect small changes, like banning “high capacity magazines” to produce large results. Marginal changes may have marginal results — they might help things a little bit — or they might not! If American gun-owning households have two guns each, and you force them to go down to one each (cutting the prevalence of guns by 50%!) I suspect that this won't do anything to impact suicide rates. Changes that take effect over the span of years, or that don't address loopholes or substitutions should similarly be expected to have little obvious impact.
Because the field is dysfunctional and the effect sizes of interventions are potentially small, one must be particularly careful to avoid traps such as confusing correlation with causation or taking any one study too seriously.
Suicide by Firearm
All that said, one thing that's crystal clear from the data is that men who try to kill themselves will use guns if they’re available and are very likely to die from the attempt. Despite the fact that women are more depressed and contemplate/attempt suicide more frequently than men, men die from suicide at a higher rate, in part because they prefer more lethal methods. Guns are the most lethal method of attempted suicide, and this is the majority of how people die from firearms.
People seek suicide because they are unwell, not because guns exist, but the presence of a highly-effective means of suicide creates opportunities for suicide attempts, especially for teenagers in households with a gun. Thus, increased numbers of guns in society lead to both more suicide attempts and fatalities. The overall research shows that gun control is a somewhat effective way to reduce suicide, though it certainly can’t eliminate it, especially in women.
Motivated people across the world are certainly capable of killing themselves without guns present. Countries with few guns per capita, such as South Korea and Japan, still have high suicide rates, and in general there seems to be little correlation on the level of countries between suicidality and access to guns, though this is sensitive to their specific countries we consider (especially South Korea). Marginal efforts to reduce suicide are probably best spent on directly improving mental health, even though the guns aren’t helping.
Cultures of Violence
The USA has a lot of guns, and also an exceptionally high homicide rate. Are the guns causing the homicide? Almost certainly not all of it, at least. For instance, Americans kill more people without using guns than people do in countries like Australia, Germany, or the UK overall, including with guns. In other words, even if all people in the USA who used guns for violence chose to use non-lethal methods instead, we’d still kill more people than in most comparable western countries.
Cultures of violence can be seen in the way that homicide rates vary quite widely across the USA:
Compare this with gun ownership:
North Dakota has more gun ownership than Louisiana, but people in Louisiana are way more likely to kill someone. Analyses that compare states find little correlation between gun ownership and homicide rates, after controlling for relevant variables such as overall crime rates.
As one might expect, it matters a lot who has the guns in question — a culture where criminals are plentiful and well-armed (eg Mexico) is indeed much less safe than one where sane and responsible adults hold guns and those with criminal backgrounds or mental illness are unable to get weapons. Through this frame we can see how targeted gun control efforts such as background checks, waiting periods, and laws restricting access to children can have a significant protective effect. Alas, gun control efforts on the state level have reduced impact due to the ease of trafficking guns across state lines.
The overall story with regards to the relationship between guns and violence seems to be that gun cultures are tied up with cultures of violence in a complex way that’s not straightforwardly causal, but marginal interventions can still help reduce homicide rates, assuming they take guns out of the hands of would-be criminals at least as fast as they take guns out of the hands of responsible adults. Removing guns from a society is not a panacea that eliminates violence, but it’s a reasonable step, at least if we ignore the costs of limiting personal freedom.
Utopian Gun Control
It is difficult to weigh intangible costs on personal freedom, and I believe reasonable people can disagree on how important it is, on the level of principles, to allow people access to deadly items like guns. But I think most people agree that there are some things that it’s worth keeping out of the hands of ordinary citizens. For example:
Even if it’s important for a community/nation/government to have access to these things, only the staunchest libertarians believe that this access needs to be unregulated and unmonitored. And once we’ve agreed to keep certain weapons out of the hands of ordinary people, I think it’s probably the right call to extend that to all weapons capable of allowing someone to easily kill a crowd of unarmed people or credibly fight back against a team of police.
In my sense of Utopia, this “crowd of unarmed people” heuristic means that private ownership of almost all guns and explosives is banned, but compound bows, bladed weapons, BB guns, tasers, and pepper sprays are not. To reduce problems with weapons trafficking and jeopardizing the monopoly on violence, this ban is universal and enforced by the world government. Some local governments go further, restricting access to weapons such as bows and certain knives, depending on the values of those in the community.
My sense is that Utopians still have access to guns, however, and many people train in their use. While Utopia is peaceful enough to get away with a very small standing army (relative to the world population), having a much larger population of reservists across the world seems like a good precaution. Those in the military reserve gain the opportunity to practice shooting as well as train on more advanced equipment, which serves as a hobby for some. Weapons are kept in reserve stations under multiple levels of security (physical, social, and surveillance) to prevent them from falling into the hands of criminals. In the rare case where someone gets hold of a military weapon and commits an act of mass-murder, Utopia responds with the same story that’s deployed for other acts of terrorism:
“A very strange and disturbing thing happened today. The world is big, and so these rare things are bound to occur. It (so far) does not appear to be part of a trend, or like it merits a large change in how we live, as a society. We will thus do our best to counteract the bias in our minds that wants us to react, and instead redirect our focus to the common problems that our society faces regularly, and try to improve those so that they might be as rare as the tragedy that happened today.”
Thanks to the reduced risk of criminals with guns, police officers in Utopia are also restricted to weapons like clubs, sprays, and tasers that are meant to incapacitate rather than kill. Knives are the most common criminal weapon, and are still deadly enough that police still wear body armor in many situations.
Thugs have less to immediately fear when attacking small people or breaking into a residence, but it is generally recognized that the proper way to fight this kind of crime is through better policing. (I hope to write an essay on this before too long.) This is the cost that is paid for a greater sense of public comfort, especially around schools, public transit hubs, and political rallies. But the biggest benefits to Utopians from the scarcity of firearms is the opportunity to turn broadly away from cultures of violence and thereby marginally lower the rate of murder and especially to lower the rate of suicide, especially in boys.
Rough estimate of hunting productivity:
— Hunting ducks (pessimistic) —
1 duck in range per hour
25% hit chance
3 lbs of meat at $5/lb
Negligible value from feathers
20 minutes per bird for processing
6 hours of hunting, plus 1 hour of prep and travel per trip
Gross profit from 7.5 hours: $15
Ammo cost: $4
Fuel cost: $3
Amortized gear cost: $0.50
Net profit: $1/hour
— Hunting ducks (optimistic) —
2 ducks in range per hour
50% hit chance
4 lbs of meat at $8/lb
$10 from down
10 minutes per bird for processing
7 hours of hunting, plus 50 minutes of prep and travel per trip
Gross profit from 9 hours: $294
Ammo cost: $4
Fuel cost: $2
Negligible amortized gear cost
Net profit: $32/hour
— Hunting boar (pessimistic) —
1 boar in range per three hours
%25 hit chance
50 lbs of meat at $3/lb
Negligible hide value
3 hours per boar for processing
6 hours of hunting, plus 1.5 hours of prep and travel per trip
Gross profit from 9 hours: $75
Ammo cost: $6
Fuel cost: $5
Amortized gear cost: $1
Net profit: $7/hour
— Hunting boar (optimistic) —
1 boar in range per 2 hours
30% hit chance
70 lbs of meat at $5/lb
$20 hide value
2 hours per boar for processing
7 hours of hunting, plus 54 minutes of prep and travel per trip
Gross profit from 10 hours: $370
Ammo cost: $7
Fuel cost: $2
Amortized gear cost: $1
Net profit: $36/hour
This phrasing is meant to include criminals! If you’re being attacked, it might be safer for you if you have a gun, but it’s certainly more dangerous to the attacker.
There's no such thing as gun control for only the bad guys, and the government that controls your guns contains the majority of bad guys.
Gun control to prevent suicide is sadistic - this world is shit but we're not letting you out!