It is analogous to a policy that would jail all young men between the age of 17 and 24 in order to prevent 39% of murders (see my post “A Simplistic Model of Public Policy”; see also “The Purpose of a Gun is Not to Kill.”)

It’s interesting to me how many on the American Right see the argument you present here against gun control as rightfully nonsensical, but will then make the exact same argument against immigration and international trade.

Some sobering statistics from PubMed:

Objective: Determine the relative frequency with which guns in the home are used to injure or kill in self-defense, compared with the number of times these weapons are involved in an unintentional injury, suicide attempt, or criminal assault or homicide.

Methods: We reviewed the police, medical examiner, emergency medical service, emergency department, and hospital records of all fatal and nonfatal shootings in three U.S. cities: Memphis, Tennessee; Seattle, Washington; and Galveston, Texas.

Results: During the study interval (12 months in Memphis, 18 months in Seattle, and Galveston) 626 shootings occurred in or around a residence. This total included 54 unintentional shootings, 118 attempted or completed suicides, and 438 assaults/homicides. Thirteen shootings were legally justifiable or an act of self-defense, including three that involved law enforcement officers acting in the line of duty. For every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.

Conclusions: Guns kept in homes are more likely to be involved in a fatal or nonfatal accidental shooting, criminal assault, or suicide attempt than to be used to injure or kill in self-defense.

Injuries and deaths due to firearms in the home

Gun control continues to be one of the most hotly debated issues of our time.  I’m personally opposed to repealing/abolishing the 2nd, as I am any right guaranteed under the constitution.  If anything, constitutional rights should be expanded, not contracted.

A more reasonable alternative to ratcheting down gun rights is for manufacturers to pursue smart gun technology that would effectively disable firearms in the hands of unauthorized users:

A personalized—or “smart”—gun is a firearm that employs authorized-use technology, like the thumb scan or passcode available on many smartphones, to turn stolen guns and guns accessed by children into harmless pieces of steel. If widely implemented, it would be a game-changer for keeping guns out of the hands of children and criminals (Smart Guns and Gun Safety Features – Everytown Research and Policy).

 

We’ve had this debate before. The same argument but this time with vehicles.

Drivers have been running an “arms race” on American roads by buying increasingly large vehicles such as SUVs and light trucks. An important reason for the popularity of large vehicles is that families view them as providing better protection to their occupants if a crash occurs. But when families drive large vehicles, they pose an increased danger to occupants of smaller vehicles and to pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcyclists. This paper measures both the internal effect of large vehicles on their own occupants’ safety and their external effect on others. The results show that light trucks are extremely deadly. For each one million light trucks that replace cars, between 34 and 93 additional car occupants, pedestrians, bicyclists or motorcyclists are killed per year and the value of the lives lost is between $242 and $652 million per year. The safety gain that families obtain for themselves from driving large vehicles comes at a very high cost: for each fatal crash that occupants of large vehicles avoid, at least 4.3 additional fatal crashes involving others occur.

The Arms Race on American Roads: The Effect of SUV’s and Pickup Trucks on Traffic Safety

Much of the statistics offered about the danger of having a gun are poorly compiled, violating rules that would not be tolerated in medical research.  For example, comparing your increased danger of being murdered if you buy a gun mixes inequivalent domains of people.

For example, I am more likely, I am more likely than average to privately possess or acquire a gun if I am a street gang affiliate, or a police officer, a person under threat (e.g. from a stalker or vengeful ex-husband).  I am also more likely than average to acquire a gun if I have in mind to commit suicide with a gun.

People in all of the above categories are significantly more likely than average to be shot to death.  Since people in those categories are included in the diverse domain of gun owners on whom statistics are taken, this raises gun-death percentage in this heterogenous domain.

However, if I am not in any of the above under-danger categories, my decision to arm myself will not put me in any of those categories.  But it does put me in the general armed category which does include those (for me) unrepresentative high-danger subcategories.

If you’re doing nutrition research, you are expected to search hard for covariances which could provide alternate explanations for the diet covariances you uncover.  A search for alternate explanations is, in contrast, not demanded of people doing research in gun violence.

Furthermore, I am reminded of the research done on the danger of smoking under research grants funded by tobacco companies.  Their wrong results (no danger found) was unsurprising considering that the researchers had incentives to get that wrong result.  (In their case, the incentive was the availability of future grants.)  But nobody seems to care about the incentives affecting people who do research on the consequences of firearms ownership.

People who get grants to do statistical research on firearms ownership work at universities, where the success of their careers is heavily impacted by the political implications of their results and whether those results will be welcomed by the academic community.  (There is a reason universities are no longer doing research in, say, the definition of intelligence and its heritability.)

Personal morality also provides a bias-producing incentive.  I believe college professors tend to believe that it is immoral, barbaric, or at least uncivilized for the general public to go about prepared and determined to kill any robbers who dare threaten to maim, cripple or murder those who refuse their demands.  People who feel that way would no doubt welcome research results that could be used to discourage people from doing this, and would not be happy to hear results that encourage people to own and carry guns.

I certainly have never heard a researcher say:  “When I began this research I had hoped that ordinary private citizens carrying guns could help eliminate the muggers and burglars whose numbers seem to have greatly increased since the 1960s.  Sadly, I find from my research that owning a gun simply increases danger for the gun owner too much to rely on this solution.  Let us hope that perhaps we can get the police to kill these criminals via stake-outs and decoy operations.”   No, compared with criminals getting shot, these researchers personally prefer that thieves and robbers complete their crimes successfully with no one hurt.

Therefore, results results on gun ownership danger coming from such people should be viewed with as much skepticism a results funded by tobacco companies saying that smoking is safe.

I just finished reading volume 2 of The Gulag Archipelago, and started on volume 3.  I took a long break in 2020 because the parallels to what we saw during covid were extremely depressing and I had to put it down.

The reality of soviet Russia is sobering.  Thousands of times worse than Nazi Germany (not worse morally but exponential in size); that’s not even to mention communist China.

It is important to remember and to truly understand why the second amendment exists, and it is not to protect against home invasions and mall shootings.  I own guns partly due self defense and defense of others.  I support universal ownership of guns not because of self defense, but because I know what human beings in power are capable of when populations are powerless.