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”?
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.]
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).
I think you have a point here, but there’s a more fundamental problem—there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that gun control affects the ability of criminals to get guns.
The problem here is similar to prohibition of drugs. Guns and ammunition are widely available in many areas, are relatively easy to smuggle, and are durable goods that can be kept in operation for many decades once acquired. Also, the fact that police and other security officials need them means that they will continue to be produced and/or imported into an area with even very strict prohibition, creating many opportunities for weapons to leak out of official hands.
So gun control measures are much better at disarming law-abiding citizens than criminals. Use of guns by criminals does seem to drop a bit when a nation adopts strict gun control policies for a long period of time, but the fact that the victims have been disarmed also means criminals don’t need as many guns. If your goal is disarming criminals it isn’t at all clear that this is a net benefit.
there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that gun control affects the ability of criminals to get guns.
Mass murderers such as school shooters aren’t really typical criminals, though. They’re very unusual criminals. Do they have access to black-market guns the way that career criminals might?
Some school shooters (e.g. Wayne Lo, Seung-Hui Cho) bought their guns legally. Others (e.g. Adam Lanza) used guns belonging to family members. Harris and Klebold had another person purchase guns legally for them, but also purchased one gun illegally. Kip Kinkel was given guns by his parents, but also bought a gun that another student had stolen from a friend’s father.
the fact that the victims have been disarmed also means criminals don’t need as many guns.
If criminals, police and piblic are all disarmed, there’s just less bulletts flying around generally. There may still be plenty of crme, but there is a lot less homicide (suicide, innocent bystanders caught in corssfire, etc)
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.
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”?
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.]
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).
I think you have a point here, but there’s a more fundamental problem—there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that gun control affects the ability of criminals to get guns.
The problem here is similar to prohibition of drugs. Guns and ammunition are widely available in many areas, are relatively easy to smuggle, and are durable goods that can be kept in operation for many decades once acquired. Also, the fact that police and other security officials need them means that they will continue to be produced and/or imported into an area with even very strict prohibition, creating many opportunities for weapons to leak out of official hands.
So gun control measures are much better at disarming law-abiding citizens than criminals. Use of guns by criminals does seem to drop a bit when a nation adopts strict gun control policies for a long period of time, but the fact that the victims have been disarmed also means criminals don’t need as many guns. If your goal is disarming criminals it isn’t at all clear that this is a net benefit.
Mass murderers such as school shooters aren’t really typical criminals, though. They’re very unusual criminals. Do they have access to black-market guns the way that career criminals might?
Some school shooters (e.g. Wayne Lo, Seung-Hui Cho) bought their guns legally. Others (e.g. Adam Lanza) used guns belonging to family members. Harris and Klebold had another person purchase guns legally for them, but also purchased one gun illegally. Kip Kinkel was given guns by his parents, but also bought a gun that another student had stolen from a friend’s father.
If criminals, police and piblic are all disarmed, there’s just less bulletts flying around generally. There may still be plenty of crme, but there is a lot less homicide (suicide, innocent bystanders caught in corssfire, etc)
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