The Texas state legislature is moving to legalize handguns on college campuses. The theory goes that this would make everyone safer, because law-abiding gun shooters would be able to take out rampage shooters before they do too much damage. But it didn't work out that way in Arizona, did it? In fact, there is a high correlation between permissive gun laws and shooting deaths. And the famously permissive Arizonans now poll ahead of national averages in favor of stricter gun control.
There is also a deeper problem here. We may buy our Second Amendment rights at the price of our Fourth Amendment rights.
It sounds reasonable that those without a history of violence should be unfettered in their exercise of the Second Amendment. But such a regime can only ever stop the second attack, never the first. (Jared Loughner had no history of violence and was under no court order restricting his access to a weapon.) In order to allow the "good guys" to buy guns and not the "bad guys", the state must be able to predict who will become violent in the future -- for example, based on mental health records. That means that they must have those records, must be allowed to share them across agencies, and must be allowed to restrict your actions based on hypotheses about future crimes you may commit -- despite doubts about the predictive usefulness of such records.
This is not just about health records. This is about a culture of surveillance. In an Information Age, we must protect our digital selves as we protect our physical selves. We have a choice to make: expose the personal information necessary to distinguish us from one another, and risk its misuse, or accept principled limitations on everyone's behavior while maintaining our privacy.
Reading your post has put me in a mood to watch "Minority Report." If we had future-seeing superhumans in captivity, they could tell us who would ultimately be trustworthy to have guns... but they wouldn't need guns because we could pre-emptively stop the bad guys who would misuse guns. Unless the superhumans were wrong.
ReplyDeleteA very interesting line of reasoning, Rick... thank you! :)
ReplyDeleteUmm, Rick, first, I don't think the data suuports a high correlation between gun laws and gun deaths (Google for rebuttals to the Daily Beast article), and second, correlation is not causality. In actuality, there are much stronger correlations between gun deaths and things like income, ethnicity (often a proxy for income), substance abuse, and other social causes. The state law vs. gun death comparisons are more often second order affects, that are actually mis-measuring the primary correlates.
ReplyDeleteKevin, I wasn't specifically making the claim that lax gun laws cause gun deaths. I was actually trying to critique what I see as three positions out there:
ReplyDelete1. Guns generally make us safer. There are good guys and bad guys, and the former gun owners will protect us from the latter. This doesn't hold water to me. If we observe that those places with lax gun laws are not actually significantly safer, then either they all coincidentally share more important correlates to violence that law-abiding gun owners are not able to effectively defend against, or the premise is incorrect. Either way, this is not a strong position.
2. Guns may or may not make us safer, but in any case we can distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys and only restrict the ability of the latter to own guns. I think this idea is common on the center-left, and it's the one I primarily attacked in this post. Even if we could categorize people a priori, which I believe we can't, doing so would be unacceptably invasive.
3. Limited and pragmatic gun-control laws can improve safety without invading privacy or significantly impeding the ability to self-defend. Allowing trained and licensed people to purchase a handgun would allow them to defend their persons and their homes. Allowing anonymous people to purchase assault weapons doesn't help the cause of self defense, but it does increase the chance that a crazy person will open fire in a public place and kill a bunch of people.
(In case it's not obvious, #3 is my personal position.)
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