
 The gun control that works: no guns  - dhathorn
http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2012/12/gun-control
======
jacquesm
If you combine average people with lots of guns and then say 'people are the
problem, not guns', you're missing out on an important fact.

People are not a constant. They're not #defines, they may be sane today,
insane tomorrow and sane the day after that.

They are impulsive, prone to error and there are a thousand circumstances in
life where otherwise perfectly normal people do things that we later label
insane.

Temporary insanity is a plea that is heard sometimes in the courts. The basic
idea is that during the act the person was insane but is now sane.

This is usually to either get a reduced sentence or none at all. The concept
hinges on the fact that we are prone to mood swings, sometimes extreme ones.
And that in a fit of anger or worse than that someone can do things that they
would normally not do.

And that's the _sane_ people, claiming that. Imagine those that are not 100%.
So if you mix a large number of guns with a large number of people without
much training, oversight, discipline or checks you're asking for trouble. Some
of them are bound to be unstable, and even they don't know about it, yet. But
you'll read about it in the paper when they do find out.

The 'right to carry arms' is a card played by people that are afraid they will
no longer be a allowed to play with their toys, and cynically used by
politicians to get them to vote against their own best interests.

There is no way that an armed revolution will be initiated by them, or if it
were initiated would be won by those with their guns. Even a large number of
them vs the military is a foregone conclusion. If that were the case it should
have happened when that was still possible. Now it's just a relic, a symbol of
a nation born from violence unable to let go of its past. The only way to win
a conflict like that is to get the military to side with you, or to fracture
it to an extent that the outcome is no longer a certainty.

And every year a hundred or so (or even a few thousand if you count the
injured) people will die because of this stupidity.

In incidents of 1 or 2, or 28.

In a civilized country individuals do not need guns, should not need guns and
should not have guns. If you do insist on that then you should also take
responsibility for every time an insane person managed to get hold of one
(note that the kid that did this didn't use his own guns but the guns legally
owned by his mother, now murdered with her own weapon).

edit: this thread has already been flagged off the homepage.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Are we going to play this game? How dare you call guns toys. Do you have any
idea of how many crimes guns _stop_ every year? How many rapes, how many
robberies, how many homicides? This is not a small thing, some estimates put
the number of rapes per day stopped due to the potential victim being armed or
thought to be armed at more than a thousand. Per day.

The naive math of no guns = no gun crime is so easy, and so mentally
satisfying to people who have no experience with guns. People who live in safe
neighborhoods where crime is uncommon. People who have never been faced with
life or death situations where having a gun could save someone's life, or save
them from being raped, or robbed. But when the math becomes a more complex
question of potentially trading off rape, or even homicide vs. potentially
reducing one kind of mass homicide then the answers aren't quite so pat and
easy are they?

~~~
jacquesm
> This is not a small thing, some estimates put the number of rapes per day
> stopped due to the potential victim being armed or thought to be armed at
> more than a thousand. Per day.

How does that work in the rest of the world then? I don't see thousands of
people being raped here _per day_ , so clearly something else must be stopping
those rapes.

Really, guns are toys. Get over it.

The chances of you facing a life-or-death situation where a gun will help you
are ridiculously overblown.

We're not trading off homicide vs one kind of mass homicide, that just brings
things to the attention of a larger audience. The real trade off is citizens
murdering other citizens with guns versus them not being able to do so or to
do so easily. Sure there will be criminals with guns, they're not going to
magically disappear. But there will be _far_ less of them.

~~~
pingbear
>I don't see thousands of people being raped here per day

Because no one reports on it. No one reports on the impoverished of India
killing each other when someone cuts in line at the water pump in the morning.
No one reports on the gang murders in Eastern Europe that happen everyday.
Rape goes on all the time. Just because the West has NGOs and charities
dedicated to women's issues and run campaigns and just because they have
statistics (such as they are) showing that rape incidence might go down, that
doesn't mean that rape doesn't happen on a massive scale on a daily basis.

Seriously, how ignorant can a person be?

~~~
jacquesm
America is in the West. Last I checked at least.

What you are describing is a country with a disfunctional police force.

------
happywolf
In my opinion, no guns definitely will mean gun-related criminal cases will be
lesser, but this doesn't make it safer to stay. Take Malaysia for example, a
country that I am quite familiar with. In Malaysia, guns are banned, however,
machet-wielding robbers and windshield-crashing bad guys abound. Violence is
so common that newer houses are built gated-and-guarded (G&G) where locals
literally live in cages in certain areas in central and south. Those who are
interested about this and would like to see real-life examples could search
YouTube for 'robbery in Malaysia'. The OP takes the relatively low crime-rate
of UK to 'prove' no gun is a good choice. My opinion would be it holds true so
long the overall crime rate isn't high. When the crime rate shoots up and more
crazy/violent people go around the neighborhood, I would bet having fire-arms
would be a good idea.

~~~
apl
You're comparing wildly different situations. I'm honestly not worried at all
about the US equivalent of machete-wielding robbers. Plus, even if I was, I'd
prefer a thousand criminals with machetes to a thousand criminals with rifles
(all other things being equal). There's no reason why US law enforcement would
become less efficient if people's guns were taken away tomorrow.

Trouble with firearms boils down to their utterly disproportional power -- a
single madman sporting a gun is capable of killing dozens of people before
intervening forces can end the spree. A single madman sporting a knife may
kill one, two, five, ten others, but not more. Knife-attacks are horrific yet
self-limiting.

~~~
happywolf
I do agree these two are different situations. However I would think banning
firearms in the states would be next to impossible, given how widespread
firearms are, and the strength of the weapon makers in lobbying the congress.
Instead, I would say having teachers trained in shooting and equipping
firearms in schools for emergency access could be easier to realize (compared
to outlawing firearms). I kept wondering if the teachers were armed, would the
death toll be any lesser?

~~~
jacquesm
> I kept wondering if the teachers were armed, would the death toll be any
> lesser?

No, the total will be higher.

From all those cases where right now there is no weapon a weapon, so no
incident at least one suddenly becomes available. The number of incidents
would go up, but in case of an incident the death toll would go down.

~~~
ryankey721
I don't know about this, why would the number of incidents go up if teachers
have weapons? Especially if they are trained to handle situations.

Another post on HN talks about a school district in Texas allowing teachers to
carry firearms, but it takes a lot of training in both using the gun and
hostile situations. This is a recent thing, so it's still undecided if it will
help, but I feel like it helps to have the teachers trained.

<http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,404721,00.html>

~~~
skyhook_mockups
The fact that through an unfortunate twist of history you even need to
consider arming your teachers is simply incredible. There are a lot of great
things about the US, but sadly the gun ownership fiasco is not one of them.

------
ISL
A revolution that worked: American Revolution.

By some measures, it began in Lexington (the linked Economist column is
"Lexington"), when the British government moved to seize citizens' arms.

We must better understand how it is that those who would choose to harm many
people reach such a decision. Guns are a tool. So was anthrax, in the
post-9/11 mail scare, and it could have been much worse. Mutual respect,
understanding, education, kindness, and vigilance are our greatest bulwarks
against tragedy.

Banning guns won't solve the problem.

~~~
skyhook_mockups
My perspective is different since I come from a country with a different
culture. Here in Australia there is essentially zero gun ownership by private
citizens. We also had a gun buyback (1996) and changes in legislation after
the Port Arthur massacre[1]. Basically, I would feel _really_ nervous just
being in the same room as a gun.

So from my perspective statements such as _'Guns are a tool'_ just don't wash.
They are the only tool that comes to mind that are specifically designed to
kill humans. There is no other use (besides sport shooting) that I can think
of for a handgun. The same goes for high powered fully automatic military
style rifles. Zero use for hunting an animal, perfectly tailored for hunting
humans. That's disturbing to me, and I wouldn't want to live in a society that
vehemently fights for the right to bear these arms.

Of course it is better to fix the root cause (mental illness, lack of empathy,
education etc). Fighting the root is _really_ hard and will take America
generations of effort. Removing semi and full auto weapons can be done over
night (the actual effectiveness could be argued ad nauseam, but at least the
laws could be in place and some claw back of the 300 million odd weapons could
begin).

Psychos would still rampage, but there's a lot less damage you can do if you
only have a knife, or you have to reload after each shot.

[1] -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Australia#The_P...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Australia#The_Port_Arthur_massacre_and_its_consequences)

PS: I'd be happy to be corrected, but from the little I know about the issue,
the meaning of 'right to bear arms' in the US constitution has been twisted
away from the original intent of organised and well disciplined militias, to:
hey look ma I bought a M16 from Walmart today hur hur

~~~
angersock
Please educate yourself about American gun availability before you give the
wing nuts a reason to discredit your point. We do not sell automatic weapons
without a whoooole lot of paperwork and money, we could not remove the weapons
overnight, and your Walmart example is tasteless.

~~~
apl

      > We do not sell automatic weapons without a whoooole lot
      > of paperwork and money
    

Availability of money has zero bearing on mental health and fitness to carry a
weapon, so that criterion goes right out the window. What kind of paperwork is
required? Does it entail thorough background checks etc.?

Erecting barriers isn't sufficient; we need the _appropriate_ type of barrier.

~~~
FelixP
The short answer is that it is _very_ hard to acquire fully-automatic weapons
in the US today. Aside from the fact that anything available for sale to
civilians will be both prohibitively expensive (1-2 orders of magnitude more
expensive than a comparable semi-automatic weapon) and most likely an antique
(only weapons manufactured before 1986 are available to civilians), the
acquisition process itself is pretty arduous (e.g. FBI background
investigation, signoff from head of local law enforcement, etc.). From my
understanding, these weapons are almost never used to commit crimes.

The real danger are handguns - something like 3/4s of gun deaths are from
handguns.

------
noonespecial
America was made from violent revolution against tyranny, so as part of its
'DNA' (constitution) it includes a simple inoculation against that sort of
tyranny in the future in the form of the right of private citizens to be
armed.

It was technology that threw the founding fathers the unforeseen curve ball.
What seemed like a simple question of allowing or disallowing private weapons
was really an un-enumerated, technology restricted question of the form
"should a private citizen have the means to deploy deadly force against 1 to 3
others".

Today we ask a different question. " _How many_ other citizens should a
private individual be allowed the power deploy deadly force against." Now the
answer can be 0, 1, 5, a classroom, a neighborhood, even a small town. But the
top end is getting higher every year.

The 2nd amendment is useless to us in answering this question. All that's left
is haphazard whack-a-mole bans on emerging technologies.

The founding fathers didn't mean to give us a binary choice between total
forced disarmament and allowing red-necks to have their own black-hawk
helicopters.

Its time for an amendment.

~~~
angersock
Your history is wrong, and the killing power of your average citizen hasn't
gone up significantly since the end of the 1920s. Look up the Bath school
bombing in 1927-near double the casualties of the current tragedy.

Your interpretation is interesting, though.

Edit--Okay, say, the roaring 20s with the Thompson.

~~~
noonespecial
The 2nd amendment: 1791. The first practical automatic repeat firing weapons
didn't show up until almost 100 years later and they still required a crew to
operate. There was a touch of progress in that first 100 years.

I'm going to go ahead and make the weak point that bombings, poisonings, and
sabotage are a slightly different animal than purpose build firearms and would
likely be treated differently in the law. There is a huge element of luck to
those attacks.

The crux of it is, that rampages last 5 to 10 minutes. This is probably going
to be true whether the first responders are armed citizens or police. We're
going to have to decide how many people we're going to allow a private citizen
the capability of killing in that time. We're going to have to very explicitly
choose or technology will choose "a whole damn lot" for us by default.

I'm thinking your point just indicates that we should have started addressing
this long about the time Swing was King.

------
cpursley
There is an important fact that is always missed in the gun control debate.
People like to get caught up about minutiae - who and what type of guns should
we be able to own, if at all.

Not sure how people miss this - the largest groups of murders in human history
are governments by a long shot - events that typically take place some time
after guns are confiscated. Ultimately, the right to bare arms is about a last
resort against tyrannical government.

------
leephillips
This article does a fairly convincing impression of being reasonable and
balanced. However, a typical sentence is this one:

"And my hunch is that the model found in places like Japan or Britain—no guns
in homes at all, or almost none—is on balance safer."

My hunch is that the author did very little real research or any analysis
beyond the attempt to compare statistical enumerations that do not seem
properly comparable. He's entitled to his "hunches", but they are not useful
to me.

~~~
summerdown2
> My hunch is that the author did very little real research or any analysis
> beyond the attempt to compare statistical enumerations that do not seem
> properly comparable.

Assuming it could be carried out, what research would you find convincing?

~~~
leephillips
At a minimum I would like to see a clear statement of what hypothesis is being
examined.

~~~
summerdown2
Hypothesis: removing guns from a society can be done to a tolerance of X
within Y years. (i.e. there will always be some guns, but you can restrict
them to rare status)

Hypothesis: doing so reduces deaths from A to B.

... assuming there could be a study of the above, and it came up with yes in
both cases, and A >> B, would the case for gun control be made?

The question I'm asking is whether there is a study that would be acceptable,
and gun control simply depends on whether this can be proven, or whether the
question of reducing death is a red herring, and gun ownership is believed
worth it regardless?

~~~
leephillips
Are these your proposals for research, or are they hypotheses that you claim
the author was examining and that I somehow missed? If the former and you're
looking for a critique, I would start by saying that I don't think hypothesis
#1 is well posed. Do you mean any society, or the USA? And do you mean by any
means at all, or only using legal, constitutional means?

In examining hypothesis #2, do we have available a sample of societies where
guns were removed and nothing else changed, so we can perform a statistical
analysis of the change in "death" rate following the sudden removal of guns? I
think that's extremely unlikely, and therefore I don't see how we can reach
reliable conclusions. Also, I'm confused about what you're proposing to look
at: by "death", do you mean murder by gun? All murders? Suicides? Accidents,
illness, etc.?

Of course we can be confident of tautologies: if all guns were made to
disappear, including those in the hands of the government, there would not be
any gun murders. But this does not seem very illuminating. Even in that case,
how do we know that murders by other means, and other violent crimes, would
not increase?

Your question is "whether there is a study that would be acceptable". I think
the answer is clearly yes, and there are studies on this subject in the
literature, of varying quality. My point was that the author seems not to know
or care much one way or the other, and prefers to sling "hunches".

I'm not sure I understand anything that follows "acceptable", but I think
you're wondering whether some people would be against a gun control measure
even if it could be known that said measure would lead to a net decrease in
murders. The answer to that (and I'm sorry if that's not what you were asking)
is obviously "yes" in some cases. As an analogy, many people are harmed, even
driven to suicide, by speech. This harm could possibly be reduced by enacting
speech controls. But there are people who, even if they agree that a
particular speech control measure would reduce harm caused by speech, would
nevertheless be against it.

------
ohwp
I think it's all about easy access.

All shooters of shooting incidents I can think of had easy access to guns. The
only exception is Breivik. But he was planning his attacks for years.

------
benjohnson
Disarming citizes is the frst step to genocide.

I trust my neighbor more than the governemnt we elect - just 60 years ago,
America rounded up our ethnic Japanese citizens and stuck them in
concentration camps. What would gave happened if the war didn't go so well for
us in the Pacific?

~~~
Erwin
So why wasn't there violent armed response to the American concentration camps
back then? Presumably you were at least as well armed.

What kind of event would it take for you to take up arms against the
government now? And whom exactly will you be shooting at?

Let's say that somehow a 100% tax on income above $50k gets passed through
legislation tomorrow -- who are you going to shoot to revert this? Or perhaps
the next president will order an invasion of Canada to take their natural
resources (without which many Americans would die: it's either us or them, and
voters agree).

In what countries in the world now would you say that access to guns is
helping to maintain democracy and liberty? How well are things going for
Palestine or Syria?

~~~
benjohnson
Let us discuss facts and now weird hypotheticals. In the last hundred years,
millions of people were killed when governemnts stripped the citizines of
their weapons and subsequently murdered them.

To think it "can't happen here" is is not historically unsound - gernocide
came frightengly close here in America, and it happened in 'civilised'
socialist Germany and communist Russia. The diference that I can find, is we
had an armed population tht would have revolted had our Japanese citizens been
murdered. To think that we're just better people is hubris.

------
mikeratcliffe
Criminals take what they need to commit a crime. If the victim is will be
armed then the criminal will bring a gun. If the victim is unarmed there is no
reason for the criminal to bring a gun.

Fairly simple really.

------
EugeneOZ
Is "Hacker News" a good place for the links to "economist.com"? Let's discuss
the situation of Venezuela here also.

~~~
rjknight
Discussing whether or not technology (guns, in this case) can be considered
morally neutral? Whether freedom to own and operate any technology of your
choice is a fundamental right? What kind of hacker isn't interested in those
questions?

~~~
EugeneOZ
> What kind of hacker isn't interested in those questions?

Who doesn't live in USA.

~~~
rjknight
I assume you don't live in the USA (neither do I, in fact).

However, the gun debate has a number of parallels with topics that hackers
obviously do care about, irrespective of geography. It wasn't all that long
ago that cryptography was considered to be a "weapon" which should be
regulated. I would not be surprised to see attempts at classifying some pieces
of software as "weapons" at some point in the future - botnets, say, or
certain "security" tools. In the fairly near future we can expect debates
about synthetic biology, 3D printing and "cyberwarfare", and we'll reach for
our existing legal traditions as the means to resolve them.

For hackers to offer meaningful input to these debates, we need to understand
how other difficult problems have been resolved. If someone tries to frame
"botnet control" as being "like gun control", we really need to understand how
and why gun control works, or doesn't work, and how and why the analogy can be
applied or refuted.

The future is almost certainly going to involve legal disputes over what we
are allowed to do with the technology that we create, own and operate. Some of
this technology will be dangerous. In the wrong hands, plenty of technology
already is! If you advocate gun control, you need to have a clear
understanding of why guns are different from cars, even though cars can kill
people too. If you argue against gun control, your arguments may be useful to
those who argue against cryptography control, or synbio control. 3D printing
could attack some of the fundamental premises of gun control (that it's
possible to control the physical flow of weapons and ammunition in a modern
society) and the attempt to re-assert control could undermine a number of
basic freedoms if done incorrectly. At this moment, I'm not even sure what the
'correct' regulation of 3D printing would look like, but we need to have an
answer soon, before someone comes along with a much worse answer and tries to
impose it. Sooner or later, someone is going to kill someone with a 3D-printed
weapon, and if we don't have good, well-researched and discussed answers to
how we deal with this, we'll end up with bad, poorly-researched laws.

~~~
EugeneOZ
And despite of so many words, I don't care about political problems of USA.

~~~
rjknight
Ah yes, but in a world where the USA is so important, its political problems
care about you.

~~~
EugeneOZ
Do you know something about political problems of China? China currently is
the most important country (i'm not from China, be sure).

------
wildranter
Guns kill people. Knives kill people. Rocks kill people. Truth of the matter
is if people want to kill people they will use any weapon available, even
their bare hands. Sure if governments all around the world ban guns people
will kill less people, but they still kill. Now, how do you stop all this
killing? Because, that's the point. Right?

People kill for different reasons, even with no reason at all.

~~~
jacques_chester
Guns greatly amplify the power to act out a killing urge. That is, after all,
their purpose.

I am, by most measures, a strong man.

But given a rock or a knife, I would not, _within 2 minutes_ , be able to kill
20 people and injure 12 in a crowded cafe in Port Arthur, before going on to
kill another 12 people and injuring 3 within the following hour.

Neither could I, with a rock or a knife, visit Utøya and kill 69 people and
wound 110 within _one hour_.

These acts are physically beyond me. I suspect they are physically beyond
anybody.

The only other way for me to kill so many people would be to use high
explosives. And guess what? High explosives are regulated out the _fricking
wazoo_.

~~~
Turing_Machine
"The only other way for me to kill so many people would be to use high
explosives."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Land_Fire>

Nonsense.

~~~
jacques_chester
Yes, I could also poison the food supply, start a plague or crack an ammonium
tanker truck near a school.

But the statistics show that people seem to find that using devices
ergonomically designed for maximum killing efficiency much more attractive
when they decide to entertain their particular psychopathology.

~~~
Turing_Machine
"But the statistics show that people seem to find...."

Nice weaseling.

You were wrong.

<http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM>

Actually, the statistics show that governments with too much power have killed
orders of magnitudes more people than have ever been killed by individuals
with guns.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _You were wrong._

Australia has had zero (0) gun massacres since Port Arthur. The major leading
cause of gun deaths in Australia is suicide, around 300 per year from among
the ~750k gun owners in this country.

I agree that totalitarian governments have been the leading cause of death in
the 20th century. But it's an orthogonal point. Look around: guns do not
prevent tyranny. Neither do high explosives. What counts is institutions. The
United States inherited a set of institutions (cultural norms, the rule of
law) from the British that went a long way to assuring economic success and a
culture of freedom.

So did Australia. Our freedom has never been guaranteed by the kind of
constitutional mechanisms the USA has; it has always been reliant on culture
and history. The freedom of the people of the United Kingdom is not guaranteed
by any written constitution; it is reliant on culture and history. And so on
and so forth. Widespread gun ownership does not banish shitty governments (ask
a Saudi).

We are not going to agree, and nothing I say will change your mind. Please
feel free to leave another triumphal remark below this one and let's both get
on with our lives.

~~~
Turing_Machine
"Australia has had zero (0) gun massacres since Port Arthur."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childers_Palace_Fire>

Your point?

