Gun Control: How would we know?

rlpowell

I don't know how to keep this topic away from http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/ , so I'm just going to exhort everyone to try to keep this about rationality and not about politics as usual. I myself have strong opinions here, which I'm deliberately squelching.

So I got to thinking about the issue of gun control in the wake of a recent school shooting in the US, specifically from the POV of minimizing presumed-innocents getting randomly shot. Please limit discussion to that *specific* issue, or we'll be here all year.

My question is not so much "Is strict gun control or lots of guns better for us [in the sole context of minimizing presumed-innocents getting randomly shot]?", although I'm certainly interested in knowing the answer to that, but I think if that was answerable we as a culture wouldn't still be arguing about it.

Let's try a different question, though: how would we know?

That is, what non-magical statistical evidence could someone give that would actually settle the question reasonably well (let's say, at about the same level as "smoking causes cancer", or so)?

As a first pass I looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate and I noted that the US, which is famously kind of all about the guns, has significantly higher rates than other first-world countries. I had gone into this with a deliberate desire to win, in the less wrong sense, so I accepted that this strongly speaks against my personal beliefs (my default stance is that all teachers should have concealed carry permits and mandatory shooting range time requirements), and was about to update (well, utterly obliterate) those beliefs, when I went "Now, hold on. In the context of first world countries, the US has relatively lax gun control, and we seem to rather enjoy killing each other. How do I know those are causally related, though? Is it not just as likely that, for example, we have all the homicidally crazy people, and that that leads to both of those things? It doesn't seem to be the case that, say, in the UK, you have large-scale secret hoarding of guns; if that was the case, they'd be closer to use in gun-related homicides, I would think. But just because it didn't happen in the UK doesn't mean it wouldn't happen here."

At that point I realized that I don't know, even in theory, how to tell what the answer to my question is, or what evidence would be strong evidence for one position or the other. I am not strong enough as a rationalist or a statistician.

So, I thought I'd ask LW, which is full of people better at those things than I am. :)

Have at.

-Robin

Let's try a different question, though: how would we know?

That is, what non-magical statistical evidence could someone give that would actually settle the question reasonably well (let's say, at about the same level as "smoking causes cancer", or so)?

So, I thought I'd ask LW, which is full of people better at those things than I am. :)

Have at.

-Robin

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:

Make people less likely to decide to kill, perhaps by reducing priming and availability-to-mind of the concept of killing.
Reduce the availability of effective means to kill, so that an intended killer is unable to find a way to do the deed.
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"?

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.

Two is in. Poisons and bombs arent readilly available anywhere in the first world. Knives are less effective, which is why the army and police are armed with guns.

Compare this -- machete attack, 7 injured non-fatally with this--gun attack, 17 dead

4gjm13y

I agree with JonathanLivengood and would like to state the issue a little differently: you omitted an option that we might call 2b: reduce the effectiveness of available means to kill. If guns are made less available then even if other effective means of killing are available they might be ones that lead to fewer deaths. One thing about guns of the sort used (e.g.) at Sandy Hook is that someone armed with one can kill an awful lot of people in a short period, without putting himself[1] in a vulnerable position by having to stop to reload. Note 1. Somehow, it almost always is a "himself" rather than a "herself". This paper has some interesting thoughts about why, though various stylistic features will probably be unappealing to some LW readers. [EDITED to fix a formatting glitch caused by my preferred footnote format.]

2JonathanLivengood13y

What is the evidence that 2 is out? Suppose there are five available effective means to some end. If I take away one of them, doesn't that reduce the availability of effective means to that end? Is the idea supposed to be that the various means are all so widely available that overall availability of means to the relevant end is not affected by eliminating (or greatly reducing) availability of one of them? Seems contentious to me. Moreover, what you say after the claim that 2 is out seems rather to support the claim that 2 is basically correct: poison, bombs, and knives are either practically less effective for one reason or another (hard to use, hard to practice, less destructive -- in the case of knives) or practically less available for one reason or another (poisons not widely available).