Founded in England 197 years ago, The Lancet is a venerable medical, public-health, and social-justice-warrior journal. It just expressed its contentment in the fact that “after a hiatus of more than two decades, Congress and President Donald Trump agreed to add funding for gun violence research to the federal budget in December” (“Decisions To Be Made on US Gun Violence Research Funds,” February 8, 2020). It apparently foresees that the new research, to be commissioned by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will justify increased gun controls and challenge the right of ordinary people to own and carry guns.
A good argument can be made that gun violence—as well as many other problems or phenomena—should be the subject of scientific studies, although the argument that they should be paid for by the taxpayer is more questionable. When commissioned by government bureaus and realized by public-health experts with no knowledge of economics (which knowledge suggests to take all individuals’ preferences into consideration), no knowledge of the economics of politics (which would incorporate the danger of Leviathan), and, philosophically, no knowledge of the classical-liberal tradition, such studies nearly always reach the conclusion they are designed to reach: selfless politicians and good government bureaucrats should limit the individual liberties of non-favored groups in society—”deplorable” gun owners in this case. This approach is consistent with what, in a previous Econlog post, I called the “simplistic model of public policy.”
You can see the bias between the lines, and even on the lines, of the Lancet‘s article, which comes with the obligatory picture of a gun shop counter with firearms for sale to ordinary citizens:
Gun-related injuries are the second leading cause of death among children, said Cunningham, who also leads the NIH-funded Firearm Safety Among Children and Teens Consortium, involving 25 researchers at 12 universities. In a study published in JAMA Pediatrics last year, the consortium identified 26 areas of research aimed at reducing these fatalities. Their questions were divided into five categories: epidemiology and risk and protective factors; primary prevention, including safe storage; secondary prevention; efficacy of gun safety policies and laws; and improving data collection and access. …
But Eve Levenson, federal affairs director for the activist group March for Our Lives, has great hopes for the government’s gun violence research projects, comparing them to the studies on motor vehicle accidents that led to seat belt rules. “We believe this is really going to be a game changer for the gun violence prevention movement and for being able to save lives.”
It is a bit more complicated than that. “Safe storage” typically means what it means in Canada: that you are legally obliged, in your own home, to “store” your guns in locked cabinets or safes without ammunition, so that they are not available in case you need them for self-defense. You cannot carry a gun in your own home or a handgun on your own land. The slippery-slope history of gun control in Canada is, like in the UK, very instructive. If you think I am exaggerating, you might like to read my review-essay “Disarming Canadians” on the Law and Liberty side of this site.
As for children’s deaths, they are among the tragic events that should be minimized if doing so does not require universal convent life or police-state measures. Again, it is more complicated than the Lancet suggests: many other causes weigh more than firearms. A third of the 4,162 accidental deaths of American children less than 15 years old in 2017 come from motor vehicle accidents. Some 17% were due to accidental drowning and submersion. Some 2% were accidentally poisoned (“accidental poisoning and exposure to noxious substances”) and 1.5% died from firearms accidents. One more child (63 in total) died from “complications of medical and surgical procedures” than from firearms accidents. Two-thirds of the 522 children who committed suicide (a very troubling figure) did not do it with a gun. Of the 937 children who were victims of homicide, 72% did not die from firearm injuries. (Data from Kenneth D. Kochanek et al., “Deaths: Final Data for 2017,” National Vital Statistics Reports 68:9, US Department of Health and Human Services, June 24, 2019, Table 6.)
The proverbial visitor from Mars would think that the Trump administration, which has no ideas but only intuitions (some good, most bad), has been eaten alive by the culture-bearers, word-crafters, and trend-setters of the left. The Lancet explains the signification of the new research budget:
In the 1990s, a bipartisan group of senators threatened to cut all funding for the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, which they contended was pursuing a gun control agenda. The ensuing debate led to passage of the Dickey Amendment, a 1996 law that prevents federal gun research funds to be used to advocate for gun control measures. But it also had a chilling effect that led to a virtual ban on such funding, said Cunningham. “This is the first time there has been dedicated funding.”
It is true that in conflictual politics, that is, politics conceived as the struggle of groups over who will control whom, as opposed to an exchange process for producing public goods unanimously desired, horse-trading is essential. That the Trump administration traded that research horse against other goodies from the Democrats shows the depth of its proclaimed support for the Second Amendment.
Typo in The Lancet, February 8, 2020
In an involuntary illustration of the weaknesses of social planners—after all, they are just humans who want to control other humans—the Lancet’s editors, quoting a NIH spokeswoman, make a funny typo:
We are coordinating with CDC to ensure that our research efforts are complimentary [sic], and we anticipate issuing funding announcements in the near future.
Indeed, they will get $25 million in gun-control research money, compliment of the taxpayer. Of course, errare humanum est, and that include typos. “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” (John 8:7) Perhaps the typo (see picture above) will have been corrected by the time you click the link to the article (this one being the pdf version). But, I fear, the Lancet’s bias against ordinary people’s preferences, choices, and liberty will remain.
READER COMMENTS
Phil H
Feb 9 2020 at 8:18am
Another one in a series of terrible ideas! PL believes that he knows what the outcome of a research process will be, therefore believes that it is bad that research should be funded. This is a fundamentally anti-knowledge position, and aligns you nicely with Bolsonaro, and of course the communists who banned any research that would not definitely produce the answers they wanted.
For people who have the weight of a full entry in the Bill of Rights, and supposedly “ordinary people’s preferences” behind them, gun supporters really are a nervous bunch.
Jon Murphy
Feb 9 2020 at 8:36am
Given that he explicitly says otherwise in the article (see the opening line of the second paragraph), it is hard to see how you draw the conclusion you do.
Phil H
Feb 10 2020 at 4:22am
Alright, if you really want me to say it explicitly: I read that particular sentence as a flimsy untruth. When right-wingers in particular know that they are saying something deeply wrong, they often throw in a little general and dishonest feelgood. Think back to the bad old days of “No one is saying gay people should be harmed, but I believe they should be excluded from marriage, jobs involving children, and public life in general…”
I could be doing PL a disservice. That is possible. But it’s 100-1. When gun advocates say “of course we want research, just not this research,” 99% of the time, they are lying. They do not want any research done at all.
Mark Z
Feb 10 2020 at 3:33pm
Do you want the government to fund research on the genetics of IQ and how it relates to race and ethnicity? Would you support them funding Charles Murray to conduct it? If you – or any ‘left winger’ – said no, could I safely assume it’s because deep down you know what the results will be, and won’t like them?
Or… maybe people genuinely distrust people or institutions they believe are biased to conduct (especially publicly funded) research on topics related to the putative bias!
In fact, this is almost a tautology. Of course I believe research that agrees with me is better quality, obviously research that comes to the correct conclusion is more likely to be well done. So, of course a libertarian will prefer Bryan Caplan getting funds to study education than Raj Chetty, and of course if you’re a progressive you’ll prefer Chetty getting the funds.
And to someone critical of gun control, the CDC seems to have a strong pro-gun control bias, which they’d see as polluting the research. They’d likely be less concerned about, say, the RAND corporation conducting such research. I’d say you’re groping for the most cynical explanation for what Pierre wrote (and by imputing something he didn’t write, what’s more). But if you ask someone why they don’t think the Pioneer fund should get funding to study the effects of immigration, the simplest explanation is: they don’t trust that institution to research that topic because they disagree with the institutional ideology on the matter. So too for government agencies, as it would be naive to pretend they don’t have institutional ideologies and biases as well.
Phil H
Feb 11 2020 at 12:27pm
Hi, Mark. I mean, what you’ve written there really confirms what I said: that’s anti-knowledge. If you’re only willing to support research that you think will come out the way you like it, you’re not honestly seeking after truth, and that’s a disastrous position for an academic.
On the specifics:
“government…IQ…race and ethnicity…Charles Murray” – I can honestly say that this kind of research doesn’t worry me. I mean, Murray is/was a professor, so he at least gets some government funding through his university, right? And I have no problem with that.
“education…Caplan…Chetty” – again, I’m a progressive (I think!) and I’m here. I love reading Caplan on education. He could be completely wrong, but he has to do the research for us to find that out, right?
I mean, I admit that there probably are a bunch of lefties/progressives who would and do protest Murray (and maybe Caplan). But I think they’d be wrong, and I think PL is wrong, too.
On the CDC, I think it’s an error to see them as biased. What they are is… kinda orthogonal. If they look at guns as a public health issue, of course they’re not going to consider the constitutional issue that guns are protected. They’re just going to look at the brute question: how many people do guns kill? And to regard that question as off-limits is obviously bizarre. We want to know how many people cars, escalators, and adventure sports kill. We don’t want to ban any of those things. Guns too. Of course the deaths guns cause is only one aspect of guns, so the CDC view isn’t complete, nor should anyone take it as such.
Pierre Lemieux
Feb 11 2020 at 1:15pm
Yes, Mark, you’re right. And I think that some commenters should reread my post more carefully–and get a feel for what “public health” is and read the Lancet more often!
Phil H
Feb 12 2020 at 3:34am
Just because it popped up on MR today: This is an example of looking at road deaths, and is the kind of thing I would hope the CDC do on gun deaths. It can’t determine car policy, because it’s only one aspect of what cars do; but it’s good information to have. https://peterattiamd.com/the-killers-on-the-road-reducing-your-risk-of-automotive-death/
Thomas Hutcheson
Feb 9 2020 at 9:34am
By all means let’s make sure that the studies of gun violence are done is such a way as to permit good cost benefit analysis to be carried out of any proposed measures. That probably means that CDC will need economists, but they need them for any kind of research that can lead to public health recommendations.
Thomas Hutcheson
Feb 9 2020 at 11:12am
Pierre’s concern, that new research on the links between gun ownership and use and death/injury can, given the history of politicized prohibition on such research, will be used to promote regulations with negative cost benefit analyses is not unfounded. And I think there is a lesson in political economy in this.
People who had this concern (I can conceive of such regulations) should have been promoting research that was not likely, less likely to be misused. Now that the “dam has broken” we may get what they feared.
It’s rather like, in my view, of those who fear that the cost of taxation of net CO2 emissions (especially in the messy, non-optimal way it could be executed) will exceed the costs of CO2 accumulation. Of course it could happen, but “just say no” has an opportunity cost. There are a lot of MORE costly ways of “doing something” out there (subsidies to electric vehicles, % set-asides for power generation, ethanol subsidies,) and sooner or later — and the later the worse — the “dam will break” and they are liable to start getting executed in force.
Pierre Lemieux
Feb 9 2020 at 3:25pm
Thomas: I appreciate your comment, but my main focus is a bit different from yours, although it was probably not clear enough in my (already long) post. “Private” research on guns has continued, if only from subsidized public-health academics in public universities. There has been a lot of that, and little from economists. (It’s a general problem in the public-health movement, which is very much Lancet-like.) So there is no justification for adding $25 million from taxpayers.
Thaomas
Feb 9 2020 at 5:41pm
Indeed, I was addressing a different point. I’d like to see the generation of some “big data” (analyzed by, inter alia, people from our favorite profession :)) on the ways that guns are used in non-mass shootings crimes, mass shootings, accidents, suicides, domestic violence, self defense. The US is just too much of an outlier internationally for there not to be SOME interventions with positive NPV’s. (My guess is that anything that can be shown to have a positive NPV will pass Second Amendment muster with SCOTUS.)
BTW, I see the costs and benefits of gun regulation being fairly geographically specific so the main role of the Federal Government beyond research would be facilitating enforcement of state and local regulations of, say, interstate transportation or providing an infrastructure for background checks.
Pierre Lemieux
Feb 9 2020 at 9:47pm
Oh, is Thomas Hutcheson and Thaomas the same Devil in two persons? If so here is a question: Would an exception to the 1st Amendment justified by cost-benefit analysis–say, the prohibition of advocating the existence of hell or of flag burning–which, especially for the second example, very likely has higher “social benefits” (it distresses the vast majority of Americans) than “social costs” (because it hits only a tiny minority) pass the Supreme Court?
Asking this question reminds one of de Jasay (his underlines):
JFA
Feb 10 2020 at 9:29am
There are laws/judicial decisions restricting the first amendment: limiting inciting violence, noise regulation, libel laws, etc. Also, while you bemoan what research the “SJW” public-health researchers would come out with (all the while suggesting that very little has been done by economist… which is not really true, but that depends on what you consider “very little”), to make your case against this kind of research and to downplay the risk posed by guns and you only focus on children. About the same number of Americans were killed by septicemia (40,922), firearms (39,773), and traffic accidents (38,659) in 2017 (13th, 14th, and 15th leading mechanisms for death, respectively). Firearms were used in about 75 percent of homicides in 2017.
Thaomas
Feb 10 2020 at 10:15am
Yes. Years ago I started using the alternym and have continued for continuity’s sake, but I don’t think I ever say anything as Thaomas that I want to keep away from wetware friends and family. 🙂
What I meant by my surmise on SCOTUS was that any regulation that was clearly aimed at preventing loss of life and injury in a “least cost” manner would probably be consistent with a right to bear arms. Take even “extreme” regulations that are very unlikely to be on the table such as universal registration of ownership and transfer. I don’t know what the benefit would be (probably in the ordinary crime area) but the cost to gun owners ought to be so small as to make even trivial benefits pass an NPV test. And that would in no way infringe on the ownership rights.
Pierre Lemieux
Feb 10 2020 at 12:55pm
@JFA: And what percentage of your “were killed by firearms” in fact killed themselves with firearms, tell me? And please see my post on the simplistic model of public policy.
Pierre Lemieux
Feb 10 2020 at 12:58pm
@Thaomas: Your trust in the state is not justified. Have a look at my review-essay on the Canadian history of gun control linked above–or read Joyce Malcolm or Colin Greenwood for the UK. Institutions have their logic and you must factor in Leviathan.
JFA
Feb 10 2020 at 3:06pm
About 23,000 were suicides, though I’m not sure what your point is. I wasn’t implying that all the gun deaths were homicides, my mistake if you took it that way. But I don’t think that pointing out the majority of gun deaths are suicides weakens the case for the case for gun restrictions given the wide literature on regret from attempted suicides (i.e. people who survive a suicide attempt usually go on to not attempt suicide again… one interesting study was on those who survived leaping off the Golden Gate Bridge). Also, you ignore the point that the Supreme Court/lawmakers have loaded the first amendment with a number of caveats (many of which I mentioned and seem reasonable). Why should the 2nd amendment be any different?
There are also many ways to present the data and I’m not sure which one provides a truer picture of reality. You say, “Of the 937 children who were victims of homicide, 72% did not die from firearm injuries.” But you can also look at the other way: of the 531 deaths from firearms, 260 were homicides. So, for children less than 15, if a gun was involved in the death, about 50% were murdered. If you look at older children 5-14, that number rises to about 2/3.
“As for children’s deaths, they are among the tragic events that should be minimized if doing so does not require universal convent life or police-state measures.” This just seems hyperbolic. I know lots of people in other wealthy countries with greater gun restrictions, and they don’t seem to be in danger of some Orwellian police state. In fact, several countries (including Norway, Denmark, and Sweden) have better scores on various freedom indices than the US. Maybe they are frogs getting slowly boiled into a soup, but it doesn’t seem to that way.
Pierre Lemieux
Feb 10 2020 at 9:56pm
@JFA: Two things are pretty sure. If the 2nd Amendment was regulated as the first one is, a massive gun decontrol would be required. If the 1st Amendment was regulated like the second one, federal public-health bureaucracies would be spending $25 million to study speech violence.
JFA
Feb 11 2020 at 8:34am
That’s just like… your opinion man (sorry, I couldn’t resist an opportunity to use a Big Lebowski quote). I guess it really depends on why the first amendment is restricted. It seems that almost all the restrictions on 1A are to prevent harm in some form or fashion, and it’s not obvious that current restrictions on 2A are more restrictive based on that criterion. Whether the 2A is regulated such that the benefits of having guns widely available to the public outweigh the harms seems to be the crux of the debate.
Thaomas
Feb 11 2020 at 11:15am
I don’t think I “trust” than state any more than you “distrust” it. I just want to look at any proposed gun regulation on a case by case basis using a cost-benefit framework. I’ll stipulate that any resulting analysis that yields a virtual prohibition on gun ownership needs to be redone with different values on some of the parameters.
nobody.really
Feb 12 2020 at 5:19pm
F.A. Hayek, Why I Am Not a Conservative (1960)
David Brooks, New York Times (June 27, 2017), “The G.O.P. Rejects Conservatism.”
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Here’s a crazy notion: Let’s make public policy based on facts and analysis. And let’s get the facts and analysis first–and evaluate their implications for public policy second. Ok?
Comments are closed.