It’s an economic question because it deals with individual incentives. And it’s a one-line question (in a four-line post): Why don’t madmen and mass shooters attack gun clubs or shooting ranges?
Aug 14 2019
Every summer, I run a two-day festival of nerdity at my home. This year, we have a special guest - Zach Weinersmith of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - and my collaborator on Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. He's be doing an Ask Me Anything around dinnertime on Saturday. Other featured gue...
Aug 14 2019
Over the last few decades, behavioral economists have found rational limitations or biases that, they claim, prevent individuals from pursuing their own good. State agents who intervene to correct individual biases, however, are typically not subject to biases that would prevent them from implementing the common good. ...
Aug 14 2019
It's an economic question because it deals with individual incentives. And it's a one-line question (in a four-line post): Why don't madmen and mass shooters attack gun clubs or shooting ranges?
READER COMMENTS
Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan
Aug 14 2019 at 12:51am
No one has been quite that great a madman.
john hare
Aug 14 2019 at 4:33am
Same reason bullies don’t pick on big guys. Not looking for a fair fight or even one in which the victim has a chance. Uncertainty is a demotivater.
Peter
Aug 14 2019 at 8:09am
Because the vast majority of mass shooters are gang bangers shooting another group of gang bangers over street cred. As for mad men, well if you want to assume they are mad then nobody will ever know because they are mad but since we all know damn well they aren’t, it’s simply about signaling and grievances. Gun range hobbiest don’t really offend anyone. The fact they are armed (your implication) is irrelevant. As a person who regularly goes to a gun range if I wanted to be mass shooter I could get a dozen at the range before being stopped.
Joseph E Munson
Aug 14 2019 at 8:07pm
Yeah, but you get more than a dozen if you went to a place where everyone wasn’t armed.
Dylan
Aug 14 2019 at 8:32am
Why would they? I think we can make a large list of places they don’t/haven’t targeted yet, and it doesn’t seem particularly illuminating. Why not dog shows? Or Pokemon conventions? Or yoga retreats?
I think it first makes sense to classify what seem to be the basic motivations for mass shootings as far as we understand them. I should note that I do my best to avoid much reporting on mass shootings, so completely possible I’ve missed something here, but I think we can broadly put motivations into 3 buckets.
Animus towards a particular institution or set of people. I think a lot (but not all) school shootings fall into this bucket, when they are by a current or former student or employee. The goal seems to be striking back in some way against someone or something that is perceived to have harmed them in some way. There is also the benefit that they are familiar with the target, and maybe even the response that can be expected.
Shootings that have some kind of political message associated with them and are rightfully classified as terrorism, domestic or otherwise. In these cases sometimes the target may be specific (i.e. church, synagogue, gay nightclub) or it may be more general and just selected for a place where they can do maximum damage and cause the most terror.
More random killings, where the goal as much as we can tell just appears to be kill as many people as possible.
Target selection only seems like a particularly interesting issue for #3 and a subset of #2. And, if your goal is to kill as many people as possible, it seems the sensible choice is a place where there are a lot of people together in close proximity and few exits.
Gun ranges and gun clubs, in my experience, generally don’t meet the lots of people criteria. Sure, the fact that everyone there is armed, relatively well trained, and at a shooting range is likely to have a loaded gun in hand is a big negative, why would you choose a place like that when you have millions of better soft targets available? But the implication (maybe not yours, but certainly of other people that have raised this question) that this translates to places where concealed carry is common doesn’t seem to hold. Certainly the recent shooting in Walmart where many customers could be expected to be packing provides at least one data point that this isn’t the case, and I’m sure someone that is more tuned in to these events could probably list other examples.
robc
Aug 14 2019 at 8:34am
Other than the obvious answer, there are also just far less of them than there are schools, or walmarts, or movie theatres.
So, even if targets were chosen entirely at random, gun ranges would be a rare choice.
Thirdly, I think places are chosen based on something about the place upsetting the shooter (hence schools being a common choice), and gun ranges are just plain fun. And stress relieving.
Fred
Aug 14 2019 at 9:50am
Doesn’t the term “madmen” encompass all the limitations on understanding their motivation one needs? By definition, they don’t make rational decisions. Tautology.
robc
Aug 14 2019 at 10:36am
Some say that madmen make rational decisions, just based on irrational premises.
The crazy comes from the underlying premise, not the thought process.
I am not sure I agree, but I can accept it mostly.
nobody.really
Aug 14 2019 at 12:01pm
“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
John Hare
Aug 14 2019 at 9:59am
if the shooter ROI is body count, then a place with no defense maximizes that.
JFA
Aug 14 2019 at 10:06am
Can’t really get mass shootings where there aren’t masses of people. Preferences or budget constraints?
Jon Murphy
Aug 14 2019 at 11:36am
Ever been to a shooting range on a weekend? Where I used to go in Manchester, NH you’d have to reserve a spot for the upcoming weekend the weekend before. Any given day, there could be 50-70 people there between the range, waiting area, and readyroom
JFA
Aug 14 2019 at 12:53pm
Yep… I have been to shooting ranges on the weekend. It’s often not that crowded. And even when they are fully maxed out, they still provide orders of magnitude fewer targets than many other places.
JFA
Aug 14 2019 at 10:15am
The question was asked on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Has-there-ever-been-a-mass-shooting-at-a-shooting-range
This part was very revealing: “The man in the tan shirt pictured above had a very human reaction to the murder, turning in shock towards the woman and pressing back into his booth, calling out in alarm and standing frozen until she put the gun in her own mouth and pulled the trigger. He did not draw a weapon on her and drop a Hollywood one-liner, he did not tackle her to the floor. He survived.”
If it’s not the number of guns, then please explain the number of shootings (mass and otherwise) in the US relative to the rest of the developed world.
Jon Murphy
Aug 14 2019 at 12:37pm
Some of it is definitional. By some measures (typically the ones quoted), any firearm discharge in a place with multiple people is a mass shooting. So, for example, if a gun were to accidentally discharge while a person is at a shooting range, that is classified as a mass shooting (we see similar things with the topic of school shootings; by the commonly-quoted measure, any discharge that occurs on school property is a school shooting. One such example is a person committed suicide in his car while on school property at night and they counted it as a school shooting).
A lot of it is gang-on-gang violence, as opposed to the senseless mowing down of innocent victims.
You take out those figures and the US looks a lot closer to the ROW (I think, if memory serves, even with the ROW or slightly better).
JFA
Aug 14 2019 at 12:56pm
First, what is ROW?
Second, you can exclude all mass shootings, and the US still doesn’t look good when it comes to homicides, mainly because guns are deadlier than knives, so when all you have is knives, you have fewer deaths.
Jon Murphy
Aug 14 2019 at 1:22pm
Sorry, rest of the world.
Yes, because mass shootings account for an extremely small percentage (less than 0.1%, if memory serves) of homicides in the US.
But also, see my above point about gang violence. That tends to make up a large portion of the homicide figures.
Logically, I see your point, but empirically I don’t think that holds. There’s little correlation between the number of homicides in US states and the proliferation of guns. I mean, murder is often aimed at a single person. In that case, relative deadliness doesn’t matter a whole lot (especially if it is a crime of passion, in which case the criminal is going with whatever he happens to have on hand).
JFA
Aug 14 2019 at 2:04pm
Thanks for the clarification. To the second point, of course if you take out a subset of murders, the US will look better relative to the ROW. It would seem odd to say that if you excluded fat people, the US obesity rates would look better relative to the rest of the world.
This review of the literature (https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/essays/firearm-prevalence-violent-crime.html) does suggest that there is a positive correlation between guns and homicide.
Peter
Aug 14 2019 at 7:28pm
There appears to be a nesting limit so this is response to JFA and not you Jon.
I believe what Jon is implying JFA (and accurately as well) is tools are irrelevant. To the person being assaulted it really doesn’t matter if you were killed by a knife, gun, being pushed down the stairs, or happened to survive the attempt. The US has a comparatively (in the modern West) violent culture and hence banning guns, while maybe lowering the homicide rate, is an irrelevant statistic as the real public policy concern is “violence against another party period” and hence you can’t really compare the USA to lets say Liechtenstein (where the last murder by any means IIRC was in 2007). To use your obesity example, we all recognize the absurdity of claiming “Japanese eats on average 1100 kcal a day, the US eats on average 8000 kcal hence the way to reduce obesity is force Americans to eat sushi”. I live in Hawaii, you can eat 8000 kcal of sushi a day just fine and you aren’t losing weight. What you eat (as opposed to the amount) is irrelevant here if your sole concern is BMI outside the margins, i.e. an anorexic person can eat 100 kcal a day of the most calorie dense nutritionally poor food in existence and they aren’t going to be obese. Guns (or even homicide itself) is no different here.
JFA
Aug 15 2019 at 9:45am
Peter, you say “To the person being assaulted it really doesn’t matter if you were killed by a knife, gun, being pushed down the stairs, or happened to survive the attempt.” To the person being assaulted, it actually does matter whether the attacker uses a knife, a gun, or pushes you down the stairs. A gun is more likely to kill the person. This book (https://www.amazon.com/Crime-Is-Not-Problem-Violence/dp/0195131053) suggests that crime rates are comparable, but it is guns that cause deaths. This article (https://www.criminaljusticedegreehub.com/violent-crime-us-abroad/) reports much higher violent crime rates in Britain and Wales. I don’t know what to make of those sources because different definitions might be used (and guns might make it easier to commit violent crimes). I’ve been to many countries in Eastern and Western Europe (along with extended stays in seedier areas in the US), and it’s not clear that the US is a more violent place. And there are certainly other countries that I would consider much more violent but have a much lower homicide rate than the US.
TMC
Aug 14 2019 at 2:40pm
“guns are deadlier than knives, so when all you have is knives, you have fewer deaths.” Tell that to London, who has more murders than NYC this year, most of them by knife.
JFA
Aug 15 2019 at 9:20am
Please don’t use that statistic when it is a year old and only applied to one month out of the year and the murder rate (and the number of murders) in London was half that of New York in 2018 and has been at most half of New York’s murder rate for many decades. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2019/03/20/lies-damned-lies-and-statistics-why-londons-murder-rate-is-not-higher-than-nycs/
If you wish to refute the claim that there are fewer murders in London and the London has a lower murder rate than New York, please cite some data.
Dylan
Aug 15 2019 at 4:57pm
I believe that London had a month this year with more murders than London, but my quick check of current rates show that it is about 4x lower than NYC, and about half on a per capita basis. And of course NYC is one of the safest large cities in America, things would look much worse if you compared per capita rates in London to Chicago, Philadelphia, or Houston.
TMC
Aug 16 2019 at 9:18am
Ugh. Older article that I saw. London had a bad few months, but NCY overtook it. They are both a bit more than 8 million people, but NYC is running 1.5x the rate now.
Dylan
Aug 16 2019 at 2:28pm
@TMC
I’ll take your word for it on the 1.5x. I remember seeing when NYC overtook London in homicides for the year, and didn’t recall that reversing, so just did a quick search to see what the current level was for each city and got the 4x estimate. However, wasn’t clear that the two articles I saw were using the same methodology.
Chris
Aug 15 2019 at 5:06pm
By most measures, including the federal government, mass shootings are defined as four or more people killed in a single event. Some data uses four injured, which would give a larger number of events.
Not sure how you can make any rational argument that involves taking out a large number of the samples, just because they are gang related. It seems like you are trying to downplay the statistics by misinterpreting and misrepresenting the data validity.
Thomas Sewell
Aug 14 2019 at 8:53pm
First, the U.S. doesn’t lead the world in deaths from mass shootings.
Second, The U.S. has increased it’s number of guns owned over the last few decades, yet the numbers of mass shootings (and other shootings) have declined over that time, to where we’ve lately been in the same range as the 1960s/1970s. We’re actually at a relatively low point in U.S. history for murders and shootings.
Third, the places within the U.S. with less guns and tighter restrictions on owning guns have the highest shooting and crime/murder rates. I’m talking about the inner city/rural divide, where the rural areas have way more guns, but the cities have all the shootings. Rural U.S. locations are similar to OECD averages.
How can the answer simply be “number of guns”, when the number of shootings doesn’t correlate with number of guns in a country, correlated negatively with the number of guns available in the United States over time, and negatively even with the number of guns in a specific geographical location.
Clearly there’s more to it than just “number of guns”.
David O'Rear
Aug 14 2019 at 10:28am
Perhaps those who choose fire arms as the means of expressing their anger, frustration, or other emotions feel some sense of comradeship with people at gun ranges. That is to say, they feel less empathay toward people NOT at gun ranges.
Us vs. Them.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 14 2019 at 5:35pm
David: Then, why don’t they attack police stations or government buildings?
nobody.really
Aug 14 2019 at 5:46pm
‘Cuz they prefer bombs for those purposes.
Marc
Aug 14 2019 at 10:31am
it is a matter of incentives, not disincentives. Mass shooters want target rich environments. Shooting ranges are mostly devoid of other people. So there is no incentive there, regardless of what disincentive in theory good guys with guns might provide.
nobody.really
Aug 14 2019 at 10:39am
In addition to the reasons raised by others, some shooters desire to provoke terror. To this end, they want their mayhem to arise in a context that the maximum number of people will identify with, and will have regarded as “innocent.” Fewer than a quarter of US citizens own guns, and fewer still go to gun ranges. As symbols of terror go, it’s a poor substitute for a Walmart, school, movie theater, or bar.
(I sense many people have a visceral, emotional aversion to having armed people in schools because they associate schools with childhood and innocence. The idea of intentionally introducing guns into that environment provokes too much cognitive dissonance. There might be perfectly rational reasons to oppose the policy, too–but we never reach those because the emotional impediments are too great.)
chris
Aug 14 2019 at 2:23pm
Sometimes visceral reactions are based on the evidence, like knowing that the number of accidental gun deaths is orders of magnitude larger than the number of people saved by “good guys with a gun”. Or knowing that the guns would be held by either teachers whose training has nothing to do with firearms, or security officers, who are less well trained or regulated than police officers, who themselves have trouble dealing with mass shooting situations.
There is no reason to believe that armed schools would be more able to deal with school shootings, which are an extremely small portion of gun deaths, and lots of reason to believe that it would have negative consequences and most likely deadly in some number of situations. Due to the small number of school shooting deaths, it wouldn’t take many accidental discharges, mistakenly identified shooters, or escalated confrontations to offset the possible lives saved.
TMC
Aug 14 2019 at 2:50pm
There were 495 accidental gun deaths in 2016. I can’t say how lives were saved, but I’d guess more than a magnitude in the other direction out of the 2.5 million times gun owners used a gun to protect themselves.
TMC
Aug 15 2019 at 11:27am
There were 495 gun related accidental deaths in 2016 vs approx 2.5 million cases where a person has stopped a crime in progress by producing a gun. Your ‘orders of magnitude’ are backwards.
donny parker
Aug 14 2019 at 3:58pm
Prudence
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 14 2019 at 6:08pm
Yes or, what amounts to the same, incentives. If you want to kill as many people as possible, you better attack a 100-person school than a 100-cop police station.
Rebes
Aug 14 2019 at 6:35pm
I would like to add a question of my own. Why has no mass killing in the US been committed with hand grenades (unlike some terrorist actions in other parts of the world)?
Spoiler alert, here’s the answer: hand grenades have been outlawed since 1968. All arguments against banning assault weapons – Second Amendment, can’t control purchases, use for sports – fall flat when we already have an example for doing it successfully.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 14 2019 at 7:10pm
Interesting question, Rebes. Here are a few elements toward an answer:
(1) Hand grenades have been forbidden (for ordinary citizens), I think, in all Western countries (and quite certainly in other countries), often before they were in America. This would include, for example, Northern Ireland.
(2) Assault rifles are forbidden (for ordinary citizens) in a large number of countries–probably most of them. This includes France, where terrorists often use them in terrorist attacks. (I think that they even have used full-automatic, real assault rifles.)
(3) Other similar examples could be given.
(4) If you really want to forbid something that would prevent not only mass killings but also most crimes, try cars. Or try locking up all young men between 17 and 24, which could prevent 40% of murders: see “A Simplistic Model of Public Policy.” Can you find the error?
Rebes
Aug 15 2019 at 9:02am
Yes, I can find the error. The primary purpose of assault rifles and hand grenades is the same: to kill people. The primary purpose of cars is transportation, which provides enormous economic benefits.
Here is another one. If a type of car causes a systemic externality, like a manufacturing flaw that results in accidents, the manufacturer is held liable. Gun manufacturers enjoy immunity.
I am not arguing against the Second Amendment, I am only arguing to apply to assault weapons what we do in other areas already. Namely:
ban them like hand grenades;
hold their manufacturers accountable;
prohibit the free advertising for guns provided by Hollywood.
I live in New York. I see movie posters featuring guns everywhere, even on city buses. The exact same poster with a person holding a cigarette instead of a gun would be prohibited.
Walter Boggs
Aug 15 2019 at 2:28pm
If the primary purpose of so-called assault weapons is to kill people, why are such a tiny fraction of them ever used for that purpose?
Gun manufacturers are, in fact, held liable for manufacturing flaws that cause accidents. An act of criminal violence is not an accident caused by a manufacturing flaw.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 15 2019 at 4:42pm
You write, paraphrasing (and attenuating with a “primary”) a popular anti-gun slogan:
That this is false–except if “primary” refers to exceptions or collateral damage–is easy to demonstrate, especially in the case of assault rifles: if it were true, cops would not be allowed to have them, because they don’t have a licence to kill.
And think of all other purposes besides killing humans: self-defence, hunting, resisting tyranny.
chris
Aug 15 2019 at 5:20pm
Pierre,
All three things you listed are forms of killing, essentially, two of which against humans, and I do not believe assault weapons are terribly popular for hunting, so that’s not even very valid.
As for resisting tyranny, that reasoning hasn’t been rational in decades. There is no number of assault rifles that would protect you from the federal government if they chose to act against you. 200 years ago, the military had weapons in line with the common people and having a gun could possibly have acted to resist tyranny. That is not really the case any longer. If the federal government knows who and where you are and wants to act against you, that gun won’t matter. Thanks to the last decade of federal funding for local police to buy military grade weaponry as well, most city police could take you out.
If the second amendment was truly for resisting tyranny, then it has 100% lost its value and it’s time to either remove it completely or revise it to include all military grade weaponry, which seems like a truly terrible idea.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 17 2019 at 8:58pm
Chris: You write:
It’s not (only) a question of who has the most firepower, but of the cost imposed on tyrannical acts. The higher the cost, the less of them you will have. For example, if French Jews had been armed during WWII in France, the cost of the “rafles” [roundups”] of Jews would have been much higher. For example, it is not difficult to imagine that the Police Nationale would have balked at carrying the Vel d’Hiv rafles of July 16 and 17, 1942 if high police officials had feared that a couple of Jews would have fired on policemen and that this would be on the front pages of the newspapers. They were just bureaucrats, after all. Few Frenchmen had efficient guns and, as expected, there was not a single “bavure” when French cops rounded up more than 10,000 Jews.
Thomas Sewell
Aug 14 2019 at 8:42pm
Hand grenades are illegal in Sweden, yet apparently routinely used for attacks. So it’s probably not just because they’re illegal in the U.S.
The root of your question is the idea that murder is particularly bad if committed using a specific item. This is false. Tools for murder follow fashion (copycats), availability, desire, target characteristics, familiarity, etc… They change over time (For example, bombing used to much more popular in the U.S., but it never got more or less illegal, but tools for tracking and prevention did improve).
I suggest that how many people at a particular time or place are murdered, or what they’re murdered with, or what the crazy murderer was thinking at the time is less important than the bare fact that X people overall were murdered. I don’t care about those other things if I can prevent that last one.
So it’s valuable to look at trends and patterns and discuss how to make it more difficult/less likely for people to get murdered, but this obsession by some people with the rarest murders. 3x more people are killed using knives than rifles (including assault weapons). More people are killed with hands/fists/feet, or with blunt objects like hammers, than using rifles.
The murder solutions usually proposed appear more related to the news cycle than to any desire to actually dig in and prevent murder overall, but news coverage equals rare, not common. Let’s focus on the most common murders to create real solutions!
If you want to do that last, let’s (for example) give inner city neighborhoods with a crime/murder rate over some threshold the resources to hire security on each block answerable specifically to the residents of that block. That’s the sort of solution which makes sense and would work fairly inexpensively compared to the battles people actually fight on Facebook, but I guess those types of solutions are too easy to make the news pundit debates.
Chris
Aug 15 2019 at 5:42pm
I’m curious where you are getting your statistics on deaths. Multiple resources are showing your statement to be false, and by a wide margin. Here are two.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in-the-us-by-weapon-used/
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-gun-death-murder-risk-statistics-2018-3
Guns are a leading cause of death in America, not just the leading cause of violent deaths. No amount of hand waving is going to make that false and obscuring that reality is not a valid argument against gun control. So yes, let’s look at the leading causes of murder. It’s guns.
Guns are a terrible self-defense tool, with many non-deadly alternatives; useless for resisting tyranny at this point, due to the military grade hardware even local police carry; and the type of guns used for hunting don’t typically include handguns (the deadliest overall) or assault weapons (the deadliest at one time).
We’re so afraid of the second amendment crowd that we’re unwilling, as a society, to look at this rationally. At worst guns kill people, at best you can shoot animals with them. How is that a valid trade-off?
David S
Aug 14 2019 at 10:45pm
Apparently this actually happens so often that it is given higher billing at Homeland than active shooters:
https://www.dhs.gov/publication/iedactive-shooter-guidance-first-responders
The problem you may be having is mistaking a specific implementation (Grenade) for a type of weapon (explosive device). That would be like saying that there is no gun crime in the US because no one has used an M60 in a crime (which is true, I believe).
Sam Hardwick
Aug 30 2019 at 8:08am
It happened once in Finland: a woman killed three and wounded another at a shooting club. The victims didn’t realise someone was shooting people because, well, they were shooting at targets. She walked out of the club and lived to go to prison.
Comments are closed.