Gun Control: How would we know?

if that was answerable we as a culture wouldn't still be arguing about it.

Who is "we", white man? ;)

Here in France there seems to be very little public debate around firearm legislation - there probably is some, somewhere, but it gets very little media attention.

The existence of public debate around an issue doesn't seem to be very strong evidence on whether the question can be answered conclusively given the available evidence, since public debate around issues varies from country to country, and in some places there are public debates around issues where anybody with half a brain should be able to tell which side is right. Heck, sometimes there's a lack of public debate because everybody agrees on the wrong conclusion.

(my default stance is that all teachers should have concealed carry permits and mandatory shooting range time requirements)

Let's assume that your suggested policy would bring school shootings from about the rate they're at now to 0. I can't imagine the benefit would be much better than that, and it would probably be a lot worse. Wikipedia says that there have been 38 school shooting deaths this year (not including the suicides, and including the recent attack, making it much higher than other recent years). According to this, there are about 3 million public school teachers in the US and they make about $50,000 per year each, so their value of time is probably somewhere around $30/hour, so it would cost about $100 million per year to require all of them to spend an hour per year on the shooting range. If that saves about 40 lives per year, that works out to $25 million per life (Edit: oops, no it doesn't). None of the estimates on wikipedia suggest that lives should be valued at more than $10 million per life. And I haven't even mentioned the costs of equipping the teachers with guns, so the actual cost of the policy is probably much higher. So mandatory firing range time for all teachers is a bad policy under the most ridiculously pro-gun assumptions I could come up with.

If gun control arguments make me want to shoot myself, does that just prove their point? by Yvain

I have tried to be good.

I have tried not to talk about politics on Facebook, because that's not the place for it, and it only annoys people, and it's not what people want to hear about right after a terrible disaster.

No one else has tried this. I don't think people who post about politics on Facebook all the time realize that everyone else who agrees with them is also posting about politics on Facebook all the time, and so every day I have to scroll through half a dozen image macros making fun of how stupid anyone who doesn't want immediate gun control is, or catchy anti-NRA slogans. The day after the tragedy, there was almost nothing else in my entire newsfeed.

The posts are never "I think we need more gun control". It's always "Anyone who doesn't want gun control has been brainwashed by the NRA and thinks school shootings are great." I am constantly amazed by how small a buffer the average person has between "I don't believe X" and "Believing X is irredeemably evil and we must mock and shame it until the very possibility of expressing it is beyond the pale".

So this blog entry is for everyone who is posting angry calls to action on Facebook. It's not intended to convince you that the pro-gunners are correct. I'm not even sure I believe that myself, although I will take that as a devil's advocate position through most of the rest of this essay. It's intended to convince you that being pro-gun is a sufficiently credible position that you should start to engage with it instead of just trying to mock and shame it.

...

Compare Would Baning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence, published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy and written by a liberal and conservative working together. Not only do I find their science much better controlled than the average Facebook variety, but they cite other research as well, some of which I've followed up on. And the overwhelming conclusion from people who do the math, whether they are liberal or conservative, is that gun control doesn't work.

...

I now think of myself as politically moderate, but the evidence against gun control is so strong I accepted it even back in college when I was super-liberal. Even researchers who previously reported correlations between gun control laws and homicide rates have later corrected themselves after getting new data. I won't say the field is settled, because nothing ever is in population research, but it seems a heck of a lot more obviously-leaning-to-one-side than any of the health-related issues I usually research. I don't want to have to turn this into posting twenty studies and then dissecting each one, but if anyone disagrees with my analysis of the consensus, I invite them to investigate the data themselves ("investigate" does not mean to Google "study that supports gun control" and then leap on the first one that you find).

...

Okay, you remember the last terrorist attack? And how people wanted to do everything right now to make sure that it would never happen again? And you, as a reasonable sane liberal, pointed out that terrorist attacks killed fewer people than lightning bolts or meteor strikes or whatever, and you laughed at the naivete of people who were demanding a War On Terror rather than a War On Lightning just because they were gullible and the media had whipped them into a panic?

Right. School shootings kill fewer people each year than terrorist attacks. In fact, all large gun massacres that make the national news combined kill fewer people per year than terrorist attacks (the average year has more massacre deaths, but terrorist attacks, though rarer, are also bigger). Obviously the optimal number of either is zero. But if you think it's outrageous that the government might be monitoring your Hotmail account in order to prevent something as ridiculous and low-death-toll as a terrorist attack, have some sympathy for conservatives and gun owners right now.

With this kind of question that borders on political/identity issues, they very first thing you do is build your lines of retreat: If guns cause death, what should you do? If guns don't cause death, what should you do? If guns reduce death, what should you do? You need satisfactory non-straw answers for all of those cases before you are qualified to look at the facts. After you have those answers, you will find it much easier to be neutral.

I think you'd have to notice the (anti)correllation between gun control and violent death across countries/states/areas, if it exists, then look at the three hypotheses: guns cause death, death causes guns, something causes both. Try to eliminate hypotheses.

You could note that Canada has more guns per capita and less murder. You could control for the effect of legislation by finding different groups of people who kill each other with guns or don't who live in the same legislative areas. You could find a culturally homogenous group who are split by arbitrary political lines (i.e. toronto/detroit/buffalo/etc, that country that is split in two in the carribean). etc.

Ban guns in a randomly chosen* selection of 25 states and see if fewer people get shot in those states.

*"randomly chosen" is important to avoid effects from regression to the mean etc.

(my default stance is that all teachers should have concealed carry permits and mandatory shooting range time requirements)

Even assuming that this eliminates all school shootings and doesn't result in even a single child getting their hands on a teacher's gun which isn't properly attended, or a teacher lacking in self control using one irresponsibly, I think this would probably still be a poor use of time and money with respect to lives saved relative to other equipment and training (emergency medical, for instance,) that teachers could receive. It sounds like much more a response to Bad Guy Bias than lives-saved maximizing.

A impressive essay. It's not exactly on topic, but I think it will appeal to LessWrongers as a clean presentation on a mind-killing topic. It's by a pro-gun leftist, and it's the first explanation of the definition of assault weapons that I've been able to focus on. The author is remarkably clear about the fact that other people don't start out by sharing his knowledge. There are no insults, and there are explanatory pictures.

There are two obvious effects (guns are more deadly than other weapons, but guns are also a deterrent) and it is not clear which is stronger. It's one of those issues where natural experiments or instrumental variables are our best bet for gaining knowledge, and of course anyone with a stat background will know the troubles with those techniques.

That said, there are studies using those techniques and they are better than a cursory glance at gun laws and homicide rates by country (or by state). And, to my understanding, the results of those studies are resoundly mixed. Some of these are quite controversial, but we're talking about tricky statistical techniques surrounding an emotional political issue, so controversy will abound even if the results are sound.

My takeaway is that this is not an issue worth getting very passionate about one way or the other. Your knowledge should drive your emotions, and if you don't know what effect is strongest, then you should save your emotional energy for more clear-cut or important causes.

If anyone knows of any very elegant studies, please correct me. Obviously I haven't read the whole literature.

While it's almost certainly impossible to answer this question to anywhere near the level of "smoking causes cancer", it's surely possible to get much closer than just comparing those two statistics you cited. One of the best attempts I've seen (and not just because it happens to support my position, I swear) is this study from the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy.

It attempts to find a statistically rigourous correlation between gun ownership rates and murder/suicide rates - importantly, not JUST gun-related deaths, but murder/suicide rates in general. Its results were counterintuitive even to me - a supporter of gun rights: they found a statistically significant NEGATIVE correlation:

Nations with stringent anti-gun laws generally have substantially higher murder rates than those that do not. The study found that the nine European nations with the lowest rates of gun ownership (5,000 or fewer guns per 100,000 population) have a combined murder rate three times higher than that of the nine nations with the highest rates of gun ownership (at least 15,000 guns per 100,000 population). For example, Norway has the highest rate of gun ownership in Western Europe, yet possesses the lowest murder rate. In contrast, Holland's murder rate is nearly the worst, despite having the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe. Sweden and Denmark are two more examples of nations with high murder rates but few guns.

Now of course I understand that doesn't really speak to causation, and the confounding factors are legion... but it seems like at least a step in the right direction toward rational analysis of the question.

Edit: Downvote explanation requested. Do you dispute the cited statistics, or are you just downvoting enemy soldiers?

My strategy in these cases is usually "look for lots of facts relevant to this issue and see what stands out". The things that jump out at me from just that page:

• Many American cities/states (and the entire UK in one very interesting case) have instituted or repealed gun control laws long enough ago that we can look at what happens to violent crime before and after the law is changed. In every case that they showed me, at least, places that pass gun control laws see an increase or no real change in their violent crime rate relative to national average.
• 1/3 of incarcerated US felons claimed to have been shot at, scared off, wounded, or captured by an armed victim, but only 1/12 of violent crimes committed in the US ever result in a prison sentence. My interpretation of these two numbers combined is that owning a gun makes it more likely that anyone who tries to commit a violent crime against you will not be successful, and also will more likely be punished by prison time and/or being shot.
• Just 8% of violent crimes are committed by someone visibly armed with a gun.
• About 11,000 murders per year are committed by gun in the US (in 2008), and about 160,000 people (in 1993) claim they've used a gun for self-defense in a situation within the last five years where someone would have died had they not had a gun. Based on these two numbers alone, and probably not exercising as much care as I should in producing such a pithy and easily-repeatable factoid, widely available guns (in the context of American society in the recent past) prevent on the order of three deaths for every one they cause.

The relative lack of facts that would justify stronger gun control laws on that site makes me suspicious, but I don't see anything wrong with the cited sources for any of these specific numbers.

In 2008, there were 14,137 homicides in the US (source), of which 9,484 involved a firearm (source). If we assume (very generously) that none of these would have happened if there were no civilian firearms, we'd save 9,484 lives.

In 2008 the value of a life was £6.9 million (source), so those deaths cost $65,400 million.

Banning guns wouldn't (supposedly) just save those though; it'd also save lives in future years. As this functions like an investment, we'll discount it by 10% (long run stock market return), and get a present value of $654,000 million.

There around 270 million civilian guns in the US (source).

In 2008 4,498,944 guns were produced (source), and industry revenue was $9.4 billion (source), for an average price of $2,089. (possibly a slightly over-estimate if military/police weapons cost more, but might also get bulk discounts).

So the total price of the US civilian gun stock (2008) is $564,000 million.

Now the contentious bit. If the ban magically destroyed all these guns, we'd lose not only their price but also their consumer surplus. Let us utter handwave and say the surplus is the same as the price. So we'd lose $1,128,000 million.

Therefore the net present value of a ban is $654,000 million - $1,128,000 million = negative $474000 million.

Contentious assumptions made:

• All homicides made using guns would not be made otherwise in absence of guns. (major assumption, favouring ban)
• The statistical value of a murder victim's life is the same as the average life. (somewhat major, as higher socioeconomic groups are murdered less often. favours ban.)
• All US civilian guns would be magically destroyed. There would be no implementation costs (favours ban) and no re-sale value (favours laissez faire. Market value of arms might collapse with US ban anyway though.).
• There are no other externalities associated with gun ownership. (major. I suspect favours ban, as the other major externality is deterrence of crime/state oppression).
• I'm not sure how to deal with the consumer surplus issue.

What would have to be true in order for increased gun control to mean fewer killings?

Why do mass murders happen? They do not happen by accident. Humans are optimizers, albeit flawed ones; we seek means to accomplish our goals. Once a human decides that killing people is a goal (terminal or instrumental), if they don't change their mind, some folks are likely to get killed. Mass murders such as those at Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, or Columbine are premeditated — goal-directed activity, not undirected acts of chaos. The killers decided they wanted to kill, chose what sort of targets to pursue, evaluated what weapons were available to them, and selected a course of action to meet their goals.

In order for gun control to mean fewer killings, it would have to accomplish something like one of the following:

1. Make people less likely to decide to kill, perhaps by reducing priming and availability-to-mind of the concept of killing.
2. Reduce the availability of effective means to kill, so that an intended killer is unable to find a way to do the deed.
3. Cause delay, for instance by waiting periods, so that the would-be killer loses their intention to kill.

2 seems to be out. In situations where guns are not readily available, people who have decided to kill choose other means, such as poison, bombs, or knives. The same is true when guns are insufficient to accomplish the intended destruction, as in the Oklahoma City bombing. Bombs are harder to use (the Columbine killers' improvised ones did not work) and harder to practice using. Effective poisons for mass murder aren't easy to come by for most people. But humans are not stupid even when pursuing bad goals; they choose guns when guns are available and effective, and not when they are not.

3 may indeed work. It's reasonable to suspect that waiting periods delay people who previously owned no guns from buying them for immediate murderous use, and delay them long enough that the intention has passed. School shooters seem to plan further in advance than that; but in the school shooting I know the most about — Wayne Lo's 1992 murders at Simon's Rock College, 20 years to the day before Sandy Hook — if the shooter had been delayed by a few days, the college would have been on winter break.

How about 1? Plenty of folks have commented on "gun culture". The presence of weapons may make it more likely that a person think that the solution to their problems is to kill someone; as a matter of availability heuristic. How could we find out? How could we distinguish "having guns around makes it more likely you'll decide to kill someone" from "people who are more likely to decide to kill are also more likely to have guns around"?

my default stance is that all teachers should have concealed carry permits and mandatory shooting range time requirements

If you want to know about this specific belief, I'd suggest researching what portion of gunshot deaths occur at schools. It won't tell you whether giving teachers guns will hurt or help, but it will given you an upper limit on how much it could help. If it's only a tiny portion of the problem, don't worry about it.

(my default stance is that all teachers should have concealed carry permits and mandatory shooting range time requirements)

• How many kids do you think will end up being shot by teachers?
• Have you ever taught in high-school?

It might be interesting to reverse the question? What benefits do you think there are from gun availability?

The ones I hear often are:

• Self defence. People with guns can stop themselves being hurt. One could theoretically add up the number of times people have successfully defended themselves and compare it to gun homicides.

• Pleasure gun enthusiasts get from their hobby. Seems relatively minor benefit, as they could likely get equal enjoyment from other hobbies, and most forms of regulation wouldn't affect them significantly.

• Protection from government power. Brought up by libertarian leaning folks a lot, don't think there are any recent historical examples in developed countries.

My own view on gun control is that it's a kind of prisoner's dilemma equilibrium, with the "high gun" equilibrium (US) being the defect situation, and the "low gun" equilibrium (France) being the cooperate situation. And that like many cases of real life prisoner’s dilemma, an "external power" (in that case the state) enforcing the cooperation by adding an additional penalty to defection can work, but doesn't always work.

I definitely think the French situation is much saner than the US one, but I just don't know if it's realistically possible to apply it in the US.

You may be interested in http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/csarchive/Show-234---Aiming-for-Effectiveness/guns-shootings-firearms

The first step is to isolate. As I believe culture is the most likely culprit, I'd suggest isolating by culture. Compare murder rates in the US by Japanese first and second generation immigrants to murder rates in Japan. If similar, culture is likely a substantial culprit.

Here's a report by the National Research Council of the National Academies (specifically, the Committee to Improve Research Information and Data on Firearms). It is a rigorous report that extensively discusses the issues with demonstrating a causal connection (or lack thereof)--between level of gun control and innocents killed--and generally refrains from making particular policy prescriptions.

It will probably save time to look at recent research, which might be flawed but might also help answer some immediate questions. This might be a start; I'd quote and comment, but I broke my arm recently and typing is difficult.

Since the Kern County shooting, I'm noticing that this topic (and problem) is not going away. John Stewart nailed it: http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/tue-january-8-2013-stanley-mcchrystal

-where it's a problem about framing. But it's a comedy program, not a political forum.

[disclaimer: I may be a newbie, but if I'm breaking a rule here, I can usually hear it without freaking out.]

The main problem I'm having, is that gun violence in schools makes me angry, and that makes it harder to think straight. But if gun violence in schools doesn't make someone angry, then I'm not sure I want to talk to them. Does that push me over into the partisan camp?

Are we trying to be deontologist here (enough! we shouldn't have massacres of children!), or consequentialist (involuntary human deaths are bad).

If the former, this is a standard (note: I didn't say easy) causal inference problem. What you want to do, ideally, is select two reasonably large communities to serve as a test group and a control group. The communities have reasonably similar laws on the books, composition, etc. except we implement a form of gun control in one. We then check back later.

Some reasons gun control might work to stop photogenic tragedies: harder to access guns in general. Some reasons gun control might not work to stop photogenic tragedies: doesn't address the underlying problem (crazy people can use other methods to kill, like the recent China thing, or obtain guns illegally if there are enough in circulation like in the US).

In practice, the above setup is probably too good to hope for. Perfect randomized experiment are difficult to set up for social policy. What we can do is try to look for "natural experiments." That is, situations where somewhat similar communities exist that happened to have gone a different way on gun control. Barring that, we want to use observational data (that is no experiment was done), but control for enough confounders to be persuasive if we do a study. Things like ethnic and socioeconomic composition, community politics, mental health, etc.

If the latter, concentrate on reducing human deaths directly. Guns are not the best bang for buck for reducing deaths given American political climate and the relative deadliness of other sources of deaths compared to guns.

I always thought about this: since the dawn of violent first person shooters, our self-appointed guardians of morality have been on a crusade to warn us of the dangers of playing video games with a little edge. According to them, if you play long enough, you’ll become desensitized to graphic scenes of death and torture, emerging from behind the console as a murderous monster ready to kill his fellow humans at a mere whim. Now, as video games are getting more and more sophisticated, there’s a renewed sense of panic. But this time, it’s not from the usual suspects. Instead it’s from a tech writer…

Of course on the human end of the question, what’s really happening here is simple scapegoating. We’re afraid of crime, we don’t really understand what motivates some of the most gruesome and violent events we have to live with, and in our fear we turn to an easily available culprit. It’s simpler to blame pop culture and games for vicious robbers and murderers than accept the fact that humans can be both very violent and very irrational, engaging in crimes for many reasons outside of our direct control..

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There's a science question here, and there's an engineering question here. They are two different questions.

Science asks, what are the numbers, what are the likelihoods? And there is always going to be more study needed. Consider that people are still arguing over evolution, there may never be numbers so compelling that they convince everyone.

The engineering question asks what we could do to change things. Engineers don't get to wait for better numbers, they have to do the best they can with what they've got. We don't really know why the violent crime rate has been going down for the last three decades, when everyone expected the rate to rise. Was it declining lead levels? Legalized abortion? How much consensus would we need to do more of it?

Lots of focus on fiction media- the videogames and movies that are supposed to be shaping young people's thoughts. I don't see news people asking questions on what effects their own reporting has had on the problem. Roger Eber thttp://boingboing.net/2012/12/15/roger-ebert-on-how-the-press-r.html and Charlie Brooker http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4 both make a compelling case that it's the way these events are reported that makes their recurrence inevitable.

Ultimimately, i think you have to decide how deeply you want to question these things. James Howard Kunstler http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ&feature=youtu.be#t=14m29s points to the architecture we live in as a primary source of dispair. I think he's got a point too.

Mass shootings are not the only symptom that we are doing it wrong. I doubt that it's even the worst symptom of us doing it wrong. They're just a symptom that few would disagree about that something needs changing.

I'm still reeling from http://lesswrong.com/lw/g0y/gun_control_how_would_we_know/84ky?context=1#comments ; I'm noticing how in other contexts "Why are we still talking about this we have better things to do?" is obvious, but it tends not to be for me in mind-killer contexts. Unfortunately, the impact of that point on my mind is such that I'm maybe not giving this thread the attention that all of your very well-thought out answers deserve, because I've suddenly stopped caring very much.

Regardless, though, y'all certainly have lived up to my expectations as polite, reasonable, rational debaters. Well done.

Good lord. I thought I had set LW to tell me when someone replied; having not received any email I assumed this post had been ignored. 0__o

-Robin

You might want to compare US and Canada, which were quite similar in terms of gun control and attitudes some 150 years ago, and then slowly diverged.

Is a Causal Diagrams and Causal Models-like approach possible?

"[in the sole context of minimizing presumed-innocents getting randomly shot]?

What's the difference between being randomly shot, and unrandomly shot?

The Rationally Speaking blog on guns might provide some interesting context.

You never know whether you've pinned down the causation, but comparing those two statistics is the strongest single piece of evidence I can think of. Also, you don't have to be absolutely certain to still use that evidence to strongly update against your previous beliefs. What else are you supposed to do with it? Ignore it because you can't be sure?

It makes sense, too. An abundance of guns lets heated arguments escalate easily into deadly outcomes and in general adds a kill-other-human option to your toolkit. As humans are wont to do, when being presented with an option consistently, some of them will use it. Furthering a frontier mentality in a vicious circle. In a culture where ubiquitous guns are common-place, I'd feel safer with one too. Problem of the commons combined with a cavalier attitude about being provided with the means of easily kill other humans. It's quite ridiculous from a mainstream European point of view, truth be told.

Mindkilling indeed, I was flabbergasted when I read your suggestion of having teachers carry guns.

EDIT: No, I don't see often scrawny and reclusive types getting remotely the same kill count, or often even going through with it, using a knife or other means. The barrier of getting up and personal makes the resolve needed another category entirely, in addition to the outcome being much less predictable. Even illegaly acquiring a gun will be beyond at least the many "spur of the moment" gun killings.

EDIT 2: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/sunday-review/more-guns-more-killing.html