A Detour into Gun Law, pt. 1

Many social issues are kept at arm's length on this forum, and the role of guns in society is definitely one of them. I have a very strong personal belief on this issue, but I see no gain of trying to force it onto others. The contours of the debate over the last few years, each time whipped up by another more horrific event, show how little progress can actually be gained from this process. To put things very bluntly: there isn't anything that can be done right now, no matter how upset everyone is.

Nonetheless, the issue can be analyzed through the lens of political economy. The first obviously, is incentives. The strength of one side's adherence to ideology and the asymmetry of the benefits and burdens will pretty much guarantee that the status quo continues for a very long time. The long history of political economy has shown that a well-organized an aggressive minority can easily trump the will of the minority when sacrifices are not shared evenly on both sides. 

Think about the subsidies to individual companies/ industries. These could represent millions of dollars of revenues for these companies, at a cost of only pennies to individual tax payers. It's obvious to see how the side of subsidies wins these debates. They're just far too motivated.

There's also a very distinct political incentive problem too. (The threat of) gun control tends to be a very high priority issue among low-income whites, and Democrats are terrified of alienating this group any further. There's enough divide in the opinions on gun control that they wouldn't really benefit from pushing for more, since the only time we talk about it is after events like these and no one really cares during the rest of the year. The party that is supposed to address this issue has very little to gain, politically, by pursuing the law while it has lots to lose. This is another reason to believe that nothing will happen.

Public views on gun laws, via Mother Jones.

So the bad news is that nothing is really going to happen with US gun laws. On the other hand, the good news is that the public response to mass shootings follows the typical pattern of the availability heuristic. We are (rightly) outraged and upset over what happened in Connecticut, but mass shootings are a small problem in a world that is flawed in many profound ways. Our reaction tends to be disproportionately large.

We should be thankful of the fact that a mass shooting remains rare enough to make us this upset.110 people have died this year from these sorts of events, but they are an incredibly small portion of the 8,000 or so that will die to gun violence this year. To put things in perspective, 30,000 or so will have died from traffic accidents in 2012, and 2 million will die from things like inactivity. The odds of getting struck by lightning are still three times higher than the odds of dying in a mass shooting.

And while the US is has a high gun violence rate, it is not that violent of a country, in the grand scheme of things (although its much more violent than most of the OECD). We should be relieved to remember that. We are not northern Mexico or Brazil, and the murder rate is the US is still just a small portion of that in Kazakhstan and Russia.

Despite the advanced world's most lax guns laws and the highest concentration of guns, the US has become less violent in recent years. The murder rate is about half of what is was in the 80s. We can hope that the movement for limited drug legalization will cause that to continue to fall.

Most Americans think of freedom as some completely unalloyed good thing. Events like this show that it's not. We pay a price for our incredibly lax gun laws, just as we would pay a price for lax drug laws and open borders. As a whole, Americans seem to be willing to pay that price and unwilling to go through the intensely freedom-limiting process of a national gun buyback and strict carry laws. You may personally disagree with that, but that's life in a democracy.

Until we see a broader cultural change away from the social and economic liberalism of the last 30 years, we're not going to see any change on gun control laws. I don't see that happening anytime soon. My advice on days like today is the same as that of the Libertarian Party (even though I couldn't be any further away from them on this issue): don't overreact to terrible news like this, be thankful for the freedom that you have, recognize its costs and honor the dead in whatever way you find appropriate.  It's not as bad as it initially seems, and we shouldn't whip ourselves into a frenzy over something that won't happen