There Are No Gun Rights

Despite their immediate pleas that we honor the victims of guns violence by waiting to "politicize" the tragedy, gun rights advocates will always take the opportunity to defend their deadly hobby.

The saddest commentary on last night’s shooting was the growing realization among many that such tragic events are now commonplace and have become another facet of 21st century American life. The United States is a significant outlier in terms of shootings—no other comparable country sees anywhere near our level of gun violence. There are multiple direct causes of this sad distinction, from a lack of mental healthcare resources to economic and environmental stressors to the alarmingly widespread culture of prejudicial, fascist violence found in many of the most well-armed areas of the US. None of these causes are as significant a statistical factor as the proliferation of guns in the US, though. In America, there are simply has too many guns available legally and illegally, which elevates the potential damage a disgruntled person is capable of inflicting on others exponentially. Take every other variable and remove the ease of obtaining a gun, and we are left with an angry but impotent would-be mass murderer, who may still someday manage to procure an illegal firearm but will be delayed for some period if guns are no longer legal to sell, during which time there is the potential for second thoughts, an arrest for a different crime, or some other development.

Gun ownership in the US, already profligate, is only increasing in recent years, according to the BBC:

There were 1.5 million of them between 1968 and 2017 - that's higher than the number of soldiers killed in every US conflict since the American War for Independence in 1775.

In 2020 alone, more than 45,000 Americans died at the end of a barrel of a gun, whether by homicide or suicide, more than any other year on record. The figure represents a 25% increase from five years prior, and a 43% increase from 2010. ...

The US ratio of 120.5 firearms per 100 residents, up from 88 per 100 in 2011, far surpasses that of other countries around the world.

More recent data also suggests that gun ownership grew significantly over the last several years. One study, published by the Annals of Internal Medicine in February, found that 7.5 million US adults - just under 3% of the population - became first new gun owners between January 2019 and April 2021.

This, in turn, exposed 11 million people to firearms in their homes, including 5 million children. About half of new gun owners in that time period were women, while 40% were either black or Hispanic.

A separate study, published by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2021, linked a rise in gun ownership during the pandemic to higher rates of gun injuries among - and inflicted by - children.

Even many gun rights advocates will concede the undeniable point that America has a striking gun violence problem, but they argue that an occasional massacre is a small price to pay for the right to freely own guns as was putatively laid out in the Constitution and quickly blame other cultural factors, such as violent video games and other media (no connection exists here).

David Marcus @BlueBoxDave

We are a free society. We can have guns. So these tragedies are going to happen. It’s horrible. But it’s the trade we make. That’s just the brutal truth. It’s no good denying it.

There are several typical arguments for gun ownership that advocates will be quick to trot out in the wake of the latest shooting, all of which are wanting in their own unique way. To begin with, they are correct that the glut of massacres and mass shootings involving guns does not provide a self-sufficient case for their illegalization, though victims whose emotions are riding high might use the gory scene to advocate for stronger laws. It is not only the frequency of gun misuse that legitimizes their confiscation, because as gun rights advocates would be quick to point out, any object can be misused in a similar (if less effective) fashion. It is instead the uselessness of guns as a valid tool for self-defense that calls into question anyone’s need to own one. Show that gun rights are not worth protecting, and suddenly the visceral nature of recent tragedies provides a much more compelling case for their removal.

According to Pew Research, self-defense is the most common reason Americans own guns:

Personal protection tops the list of reasons why gun owners say they own a firearm. In a Gallup survey conducted in August 2019, gun owners were most likely to cite personal safety or protection as the reason they own a firearm. Roughly six-in-ten (63%) said this in an open-ended question. Considerably smaller shares gave other reasons, including hunting (40%), nonspecific recreation or sport (11%), that their gun was an antique or a family heirloom (6%) or that the gun was related to their line of work (5%).

The number of guns used in a valid self-defense setting is vanishingly small, however, to the point that gun ownership is more of a danger than it is a potential life-saver:

The latest data show that people use guns for self-defense only rarely. According to a Harvard University analysis of figures from the National Crime Victimization Survey, people defended themselves with a gun in nearly 0.9 percent of crimes from 2007 to 2011.

David Hemenway, who led the Harvard research, argues that the risks of owning a gun outweigh the benefits of having one in the rare case where you might need to defend yourself.

"The average person ... has basically no chance in their lifetime ever to use a gun in self-defense," he tells Here & Now's Robin Young. "But ... every day, they have a chance to use the gun inappropriately. They have a chance, they get angry. They get scared."

Gun ownership, as Hemenway plainly states above, is a losing gamble. Yet gun rights advocates would be quick to point out that the rarity of self-defense use does not invalidate the need for legal gun owners to be able to access equivalent weaponry to that of their potential attacker, as the old “if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns” chestnut states. Ban guns, they argue, and we are only weakening the potential ability of law abiding citizens to fight back against armed muggers, burglars, rapists and murderers.

To begin with, the above argument ignores the plainly obvious impact laws have even on those who wish to ignore them. The fewer guns there are as a whole, the more difficult it is to procure one on the black market. Indeed, gun laws are effective at significantly reducing access to weaponry across the board and therefore reducing violent crime according to virtually all research. This 2017 Vox article discusses one such large international study:

So what do Santaella-Tenorio et al. conclude? First, and most importantly, that gun violence declined after countries pass a raft of gun laws at the same time: "The simultaneous implementation of laws targeting multiple firearms restrictions is associated with reductions in firearm deaths," the study finds.

This finding doesn't highlight one specific law, like an assault weapon ban, in isolation. There were "so many different kinds of laws," Santaella-Tenorio told me, that it was hard to make good international comparisons on every specific kind of gun restriction.

Rather, countries passed big packages of gun laws, which overhauled the nation's firearm code fairly broadly, which all tended to share similar features. According to Santaella-Tenorio, they generally included:

• Banning powerful weapons, like automatic rifles.

• Implementing a background check system.

• Requiring people to get permits and licenses before buying a gun.

South Africa's comprehensive Firearm Control Act, passed in 2000, contained all these measures. One study found that firearm homicides in five major South African cities decreased by 13.6 percent per year for the next five years.

Another study, this one from PNAS, finds similar results:

Many US states have tried to regulate firearm storage and use to reduce the 39,000 firearms-related deaths that occur each year. Looking at three classes of laws that regulate children’s access to firearms, the carrying of a concealed firearm, and the use of a firearm in self-defense, we found that state laws restricting firearm storage and use are associated with a subsequent 11% decrease in the firearms-related death rate. In a hypothetical situation in which there are 39,000 firearms deaths nationally under the permissive combination of these three laws, we expect 4,475 (80% CI, 1,761 to 6,949) more deaths nationally than under the restrictive combination of these laws.

There is then the issue of proportionality: ignoring the statistics, shouldn’t victims have access to the same kind of weaponry their potential attackers do? The argument that law-abiding citizens should be able to own to guns because criminals can still find them occasionally leads very quickly to a slippery slope in which the justifiable deadliness of the response escalates indefinitely. Say for example a criminal invades a home armed with a knife, so because the homeowner must be allowed to have access to equivalent weaponry in order to defend themselves against the attacker, knives are legalized. No problem so far. If the intruder has a gun, then guns must be legalized. If the intruder has an automatic weapon, then automatic weapons must be legalized. If the intruder has a missile launcher, must we legalize those too for civilian purchase? After all, in a few rare conceptual situations, it might be the only thing that allows a homeowner to survive the invasion of their home by a well-armored gang wielding missile launchers of their own. The conclusion here should be obvious: the potential for an object to be necessary for the preservation of one’s life in any potential situation is not a sufficient reason to maintain its legality in all instances.

This is also the reason that arming teachers or increasing security presence at schools is a band-aid at best and a potential extra danger at worst (there is also the psychological impact of visibly armed guards on the young students—remember that gun rights advocates are many of the same who argued against masking young children because of the purported stress and discomfort it causes).

The gun rights advocate will be quick to accuse of us of trying to justify the deaths of those rare victims who do use guns to save themselves from harm. They too excuse deaths, as in the above tweet. The difference is that they excuse much more, and their position facilitates those deaths directly, whereas the “gun-grabber” only admits that not all murders can be prevented in any realistic capitalist system. The impossibility of achieving a zero murder rate is a strawman argument used to dismiss any program that could vastly lower it. What the gun rights lobby desires is to increase the danger and equivalently ratchet up the response to it, rather than minimize the preexisting danger. They wish to allow crime to continue so that it can be violently thwarted. Life, however strongly they may want it to be, is not a Western film.

Another kind of slippery slope argument, this one employed against gun control advocates: if we deny the right to bear arms as laid out in the Constitution, other rights will be similarly jeopardized in time. The 2nd Amendment may or may not purport to guarantee the kind of gun ownership currently enjoyed in America, but the Constitution is a living document and changes to one clause or amendment do not lead inextricably to other more dangerous ones. The authors’ true original intent is mostly irrelevant and unknown, and the vast differences in the deadliness of guns between now and then is reason enough to take their provisions as something more akin to a suggestion rather than a holy writ, in the same way that other amendments and rights have been clarified and altered throughout the ensuing centuries. To rely on the 2nd Amendment alone as a compelling justification for the proliferation of guns in America in 2022 is to take a problematically originalist view of moral rights that sees the framers more as gods than as what they actually were, men who were aware of their fallibility and the malleability of their document. What would Thomas Jefferson make of the Buffalo or Uvalde shootings? What difference does it make?

In a similar vein, a well-intentioned leftist may occasionally argue that guns are the last potential bulwark against a full on fascist takeover of the United States, and sufficient weaponry therefore needs to remain in the hands of potential leftist resistance fighters. This is an unrealistic scenario, though: guns are not going to be used to stop a fascist takeover, they will be used to enforce it. If such a thing happens and the military and police are compromised, guns will be essentially useless against the commandeered tanks and Humvees; most gun owners will have sided with the fascists and will be quick to turn in their armed yet questionably-loyal neighbors. Trying to fight back in a dystopian scenario such as that will only end in death or imprisonment and very likely, a further crackdown.

There is no consistent, compelling argument for legal gun ownership of any kind, and laws to heavily restrict their possession are both logical and reasonable.