Where's My Gun?

A.D. Freudenheim, The Editor

The gun violence in America is seemingly endless. Just this afternoon, as I sat down to write about this issue after two weeks of rumination, the news flashed yet another story of more of the same: “Police: NC nursing home shooting kills 6, hurts 3,” reports the Associated Press. I find nursing homes aggravating and dispiriting, too, but I have no plans to shoot them up.

Here is what is on my mind about this whole subject, prompted by the shooting spree in the towns of Samson and Geneva, Alabama on 11 March 2009: if the National Rifle Association (NRA) claim that an armed populace helps stop crime is so true, how did Michael McLendon manage to kill 10 people before being stopped by the police? That’s the question, and it’s just that simple. And here is some context to help consider this issue.

According to the Violence Policy Center (VPC) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2005 the “Household Gun Ownership” rate in Alabama was 57.2%, while the “Gun Death Rate” was 16.18 per 100,000. Alabama ranks 5th in the VPC’s rankings of per capita gun-related deaths (behind, in descending order, Louisiana, Alaska, Montana, and Tennessee). The VPC’s argument is simply stated: “States in the South and West with weak gun laws and high rates of gun ownership lead the nation in overall firearm death rates,” and the statistics seem to back this up.

At the same time, according to the Alabama Policy Institute's web site, “Firearms are used far more often to stop crimes than to commit them. In spite of this, anti-firearm activists insist that keeping a firearm in the home puts family members at risk, often claiming that a gun in the home is 43 times more likely to be used to kill a family member than an intruder.” Of course, to be fair to the Alabama Policy Institute (which thanks visitors to its web site for their “commitment to Alabama's families and Alabama's future”) they are not being super-thoughtful about their gun policy perspectives, and are instead just quoting from “Fables, Myths, and Other Tall Fairy Tales about Gun Laws, Crime, and Constitutional Rights,” by the National Rifle Association, as noted at the bottom of their page on “Gun Control Myths.” Surely the NRA would not lie. Right?

So, again: where were the guns during the Alabama shooting spree, aside from the ones being used by the murderer and, eventually, the police? If 57% of Alabama households have guns, and guns are used more often to stop crimes than to commit them, did Michael McLendon just happen to pick targets within the 43% of non-gun-owning households in Alabama? It was not like he was particularly stealthy or selective: the Reuters article reports that he was “firing at random” as he drove through town, including during an apparent stop at a service station. No one at the service station had a gun? Perhaps they just couldn’t get to it fast enough, or maybe they were too afraid, given that McLendon seemed to be shooting randomly. (That’s not blame: I know that in all likelihood I would be searching for safety in a situation like this.)

I am not blaming the victims of this terrible, terrible tragedy. They didn’t ask to be shot and killed. Among them was the wife and child of a deputy sheriff there, and that too raises further interesting questions, worthy of pursuit and pondering: what is this sheriff’s take on gun control issues? And the rest of the police in Alabama, too: do they also subscribe to the “if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns” perspective?

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In accepting my own contradictions, I’m comfortable calling myself a solid libertarian who nonetheless finds some intellectual appeal in the Thaler / Sunstein approach to laws and decision-making. What does that mean in plain English? Here goes—in four parts.

Part 1. The libertarian in me supports the fundamental Second Amendment right to own guns. This is less because of the United State’s Constitution’s Second Amendment per se, and more because (as a libertarian) I do not like unnecessarily restricting people’s freedoms or blaming an object for its misuse by human idiots. (It is, to my mind, largely true that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” and people have been killing each other aggressively since long before the invention of guns.) From cars to cigarettes to people who mix household cleaners containing chlorine and ammonia, we live in a dangerous world. But it’s not the fault of chlorine and ammonia that someone dumped them together.

Part 2. At the same time, the positions of the NRA are generally unsustainable; it is too simplistic by far to say there should be no restrictions on gun ownership at all, period. We agree, as a society, to regulate a broad swathe of things for the common good—from automobiles to zoos—so the idea that guns alone should be exempt from such a regulatory process is absurd.

Part 3. Part of what American society needs is a more honest and open debate about the cost to our society of gun regulation or deregulation. We have never really had a genuine national assessment of the issue—the “issue” here being the cost to our society in human life, not the regulation of guns. I don’t hold out much hope for this, just as I am not holding my breath for health care “reform” or that the Obama administration will push back on AIPAC, but it’s still a worthy goal.

Part 4. In the Thaler / Sunstein mold, we should consider moving away just from broad attempts at regulation or deregulation of guns, and towards a system that incentivizes responsible ownership and citizenship across the board—while imposing harsh penalties for those who abuse their rights.

We cannot simply eliminate guns from our society and our country; to think that we can is as simplistic as the views of the NRA. We can do a better job of trying to learn from tragedies like the one in Alabama, and do a better job of having real discussions about the impact of our choices—while pushing back on the fuzzy-headed thinking about this issue that comes from the extreme right and extreme left of our political spectrum.