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buybuydandavis comments on Gun Control: How would we know? - Less Wrong Discussion
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What's the difference between being randomly shot, and unrandomly shot?
The person pulling the trigger intends to hurt you vs. indifferent to hurting you / desires to hurt someone else and missed.
Criminal law generally doesn't distinguish between these circumstances, but perhaps their causal stories are sufficiently different that some interventions would be more effective about one vs. the other. As a toy example, free marksmanship training for low-level thugs / gang-members might reduce the number of bystander deaths (and might or might not increase the number of deaths of targets of thugs).
Unrandomly = intends to hurt you
Randomly = indifferent to hurting you / desires to hurt someone else and missed.
Is that right?
You're talking about minimizing deaths of people a gunman is not trying to shoot?
Actually, I think I misread rlpowell. As he seems to mean it:
Unrandomly = shooter is known to victim (e.g. husband kills wife)
Randomly = shooter is unknown to victim (e.g. the recent tragedy)
That's a different distinction that I originally described, and a much less interesting distinction - assuming gun murders are like other murders in that most perpetrators and victims know each other.
Why not? The drive-by shooting with dead target and dead innocent bystander (i.e. child down the lane hit by stray bullet) is strictly worse than the drive-by shooting with only dead target.
Not that I'm aware of any worthwhile interventions to change the relative frequencies of those two events - my toy intervention is likely to have undesired knock-on consequences in the real world.
What I was going for is the difference between wanting a particular person dead (i.e. one's wife, one's boss, etc), in which case I'd assume that access to particular weapons is irrelevant because you'll find a way, vs. wanting to kill lots of people, or to kill lots of people in a particular category (i.e. school shooting mass murders, which as I implied is how I got on this topic). It seems at least possible that weapon limitations could help limit the latter, whereas if person X really wants person Y, specifically, dead, weapon limitations seem unlikely to be relevant.
As I understand it, research suggests that most desires to kill are temporary - moral philosophers might say that they aren't reflexively stable, behavioral psychologists might say that people are easily put off by trivial inconveniences.
Regardless of the causal mechanism, the evidence is pretty good that unavailability of highly effective weapons prevents both random and unrandom murders. Thus, weapons limitations are likely to be relevant to all kinds of murders.
Even if that isn't true, random murders are so uncommon that designing interventions specific to them is very similar to focusing medical research on curing the injuries people suffer only when struck by lighting. In short, probably a waste of attention in terms of marginal improvements.