Bi-Weekly "Metapolitics" Discussion in Fishtown

Following up on our last discussion on gun homicides in America, this meetup will discuss a related political topic -- gun rights & gun control. Most people will be familiar with a standard set of arguments & counter-arguments that are replayed again & again in the news media, but we'll examine the issue from a variety of less-common perspectives which may help you appreciate the intricacies of the gun control debates and the realities of gun policy a bit better. We'll start off by analyzing the gun control debate from a "moral foundations" and "cultural cognition" perspective and look at why people disagree on this issue, and then proceed to the moral & legal arguments that tend to be "deontological" - i.e. based more on principle than practicality. Then we'll look at the practical, "utilitarian" perspective and see how difficult it is (and in many cases, almost impossible) to translate one's ideal vision of the world into real-world reforms that actually produce net improvements in public welfare. We'll look at some approaches that are intermediate, focusing more on political possibility than ideal policy solutions, and they often call for certain types of limitations on gun ownership that still fall well short of the nearly complete civilian disarmament seen in many Western European countries.

• NOTE: Keep in mind the general 6-point outline you see below (excluding the 7th point) is what I propose we use in the future for examining other policy proposals for all types of social problems (e.g. alcohol & drug abuse, obesity, suicide, terrorism, police shootings, car accidents, pollution, tax evasion, etc.). Let me know if you think it can serve as a general purpose framework for policy analysis...

I've put together a list of over 60 articles, and I certainly don't expect you to read all or even most of them. You can get the general gist of what we'll be covering by looking at these 7 articles. If you read or listen to even one of them, you'll be ahead of probably 90% of the American public in terms of understanding the issues surrounding gun control. All of these can be found in the bibliography: Article #6 by Dan Kahan of Yale, Article #18 by Dylan Matthews at Vox, Article #21 by John Kaplan of Kean University, Article #25 by Brian Doherty at Reason, Article #26 from the "Freakonomics" podcast (Dubner & Levitt), Article #28 from Scott Alexander, and/or Article #44 from Sam Harris's "Waking Up" podcast.

What you'll notice first of all about the above writers is that they're fairly moderate and fall somewhere between the "right-wing gun nuts" and the "bleeding heart liberals" (although Vox is clearly liberal & Reason is clearly libertarian). Thankfully, they avoid a lot of the virtue signalling & simplistic talking points you'll run across in a lot of the mainstream media debates about gun control. You'll also probably notice all of them are somewhat cynical about the political possibility of passing laws that make sweeping changes in gun ownership rates & gun violence rates in America in the near future, they express doubts about the enforceability of laws that mandate widespread gun confiscation, and/or they point out that the correlation between legal gun ownership and gun homicides is not nearly as strong as the correlation between violent crime and socio-economic, cultural & demographic factors.

As with our gun violence discussion, I've cited information gleaned from the various articles by number and this refers to a bibliography in our discussion tab:

https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/messages/boards/thread/50196233

Here's the general outline we'll use for our discussion:

I. MORAL FOUNDATIONS, CULTURAL COGNITION & GUN CONTROL:

We've used Jonathan Haidt's "Moral Foundations Theory" (MFT) to elucidate the way that unconscious differences in our moral intuitions are often the cause of intractable political conflicts, and this certainly seems to be the case in the gun control debate. Liberals tend to rely heavily on the "Care/Harm" foundation and this makes them very concerned about gun violence, whereas conservatives & libertarians tend to rely more on the "Liberty/Oppression" foundation and this makes them more concerned about having their 2nd Amendment gun rights curtailed or eliminated. (2) A rhetorical study of pro- & anti-gun political speeches & newspaper op-eds at UC Berkeley seems to back this thesis up, and also suggests that conservatives arguing against gun control tend to invoke arguments related not only to "Liberty" but also to the "Loyalty" and "Authority" foundations as well. (6)

But why doesn't these moral foundations lead to the opposite conclusion? Hypothetically, liberals could see guns as a protective measure that helps innocent people (especially minorities) avoid harm from predatory criminals. Likewise, conservatives could see widespread gun ownership - especially by menacing or subversive members of their outgroup - as a trigger for their Loyalty foundation (which relates to ingroup/outgroup distinctions) and as a threat to their Liberty (in the sense of having their freedom of movement curtailed by fear of violence) and a subversion of their Authority (another moral foundation conservative tend to rely on). To a limited extent, this has happened historically. In the past, the NRA backed gun control legislation in the 1920s to curb Prohibition-era gangsters and in the 1960s to curb left-wing radical groups like the Black Panthers. And a few left-wing groups, like the Black Panthers and anarchist groups of the 1960s & '70s, and more recently some gay organization like "Pink Pistols," have advocated gun ownership for minorities to protect themselves.

Overall, however, the trend since the 1980s has been for conservatives to oppose gun control and liberals to support it. This may relate to the differences in "locus of control" we discussed last time, which leads people with an external locus of control to feel they can't personally control their safety & must rely on external aid, while people with an internal locus on control feel they can protect themselves. It may be a historical accident that people with an external locus on control currently tend to identify as "liberals" while those with an internal locus of control tend to identify as "conservatives" or "libertarians".

However, the split on gun control vies may also be due to the historical experiences of different groups in American society. Dan Kahan notes that the "unconscious emotional dynamics at work here" include the "predictably parochial nature of our empathic sensibilities, which lead us to attend selectively to forms of suffering and loss that are in fact universal in their nature and concentrated disproportionately on certain members of our society." Kahan has found that while African-Americans tend to score "liberal Democratic" in terms of their overall political values, when we account for ideology, "African Americans are more supportive of gun control, and less supportive of marijuana legalization, than whites of comparable political outlook." Kahan relates this to the life experiences many African-Americans have as members of inner-city, largely minority communities that are profoundly and distinctively affected by our policies on guns and drugs. (7)

In our last discussion, we also looked at Dan Kahan's "Cultural Cognition" theory and how it explains attitudes towards guns & gun violence in terms of "identity protective cognition" and how it links this with differences in people's worldviews which are divided along two dimensions, hierarchical vs. egalitarian and individualist vs. communitarian. At least in our present political climate, conservatives & libertarians tend to be hierarchical-individualists while liberals tend to be egalitarian-communitarians. (1)

• David Roberts at Vox thinks that conservatives' love of guns could be due to their tendency to have a stronger "negativity bias" due to a larger right amygdala (a structure in the brain that detects threats). He also theorizes that for conservatives, especially older blue collar men, "guns have become a last ditch effort to impose control on a world that's slipping away". Roberts ties conservative gun ownership to economic & cultural anxieties related to a relative decline in the importance & power of blue collar white males. (1)

• The psychologist Sarah Thompson explains liberals aversion to gun in terms of several psychological defense mechanisms. Some liberals may feel surges of anger occasionally & harbor some resentment towards some of their neighbors, but they can't accept these emotions or openly express this because it would clash with the liberal ethic of tolerance & compassion. "Reaction formation" leads them to go to the opposite extreme and claim they have a universal love for all mankind, but the anger is still lurking in the background. Their repressed anger can also lead to "projection" where they attribute their level of anger to others, which makes them afraid of what their neighbors might do with a gun. A liberal's fear of their own victimization could also lead to "denial" where they will argue that violent crimes like muggings & home invasions are so uncommon that only a paranoid person would want a gun to defend themselves. (3)

• In a discussion after his TED Talk, Jonathan Haidt opined that "I see no sign that there will be any left-right agreement on [gun control]," and explained the conflict between the Care/Harm & Liberty/Oppression foundations in layman's terms: "Conservatives tend to see the world more in terms of good-versus-evil and, for some of them, the nightmare is a disarmed citizenry that can be preyed upon by criminals. They know that having a gun in the house would increase the risk of an accident for a member of their family, but they’re willing to take that risk. Liberals are more prone to utopianism... Liberals are horrified by violence, and especially violence against children. So they demand a policy response. And while I want a policy response too, I think we have to make the response be based in the research on what will actually work." (5)

• Dan Kahan has drawn on his research on "cultural cognition" to try to understand the gun control debate better, and he thinks that often "the point [of the debate] isn’t to save lives" but rather "to capture the expressive capital of the law." He argues that the role of guns in American history has vacillated between "overthrowing tyranny and perpetuating conditions of slavery and apartheid; taming the frontier and assassinating Presidents" which has "imbued guns with a rich surfeit of social meanings. Wholly apart, then, from the effect gun laws have (or don’t) on homicide, they convey messages that symbolically affirm or denigrate opposing cultural styles." Kahan goes on to argue that "we are a liberal democratic society, comprising a plurality of diverse moral communities [and] the individual liberty provisions of our Constitution forbid the State to 'enforce on the whole society' standards of private conduct reflecting any one community's 'conceptions or right and acceptable behavior'." Kahan argues that many people don't want the judiciary to be impartial and want to "use State power to resolve whose way of life is virtuous and honorable and whose vicious and depraved" and this leads us to fixate on laws that have ambiguous public-welfare consequences but express unambiguously partisan cultural meanings".

II. MORAL & LEGAL PHILOSOPHY PERSPECTIVES ON GUN RIGHTS & RISKS - SELF-PRESERVATION, THE SOCIAL CONTRACT, THE N.A.P. & THE TROLLEY PROBLEM:

Later sections address practical utilitarian perspectives on gun rights & control, but we should look at the "deontological" views first - i.e. the idea that morality is based on a set of principles that should be followed for their own sake & regardless of the consequences.

Conservative scholars & jurists who take a deontological perspective often view the 2nd Amendment in terms of Enlightenment era philosophies that dealt with "natural law" & "natural rights", the foremost of which is the "right of self-preservation", which is closely related to the "right of self-defense". They view gun ownership as a direct representation of a citizen's right to self-defense, and any attempt to disarm law-abiding citizens is a direct attack on this basic right. (9)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_self-defense

Liberal/progressive scholars and jurists tend more toward utilitarian approaches, but those who take a deontological approach tend to rely more on the Enlightenment era idea of the "social contract". Under this theory, people enjoy unlimited freedom in the anarchic "state of nature" but are perpetually in danger both from the natural environment and other humans, so they join together to form a society and sacrifice some of their freedoms that might harm their neighbors. They view gun control as a good example of one of the ways a society can justly require that its members sacrifice some of their freedom for the common good.(9)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract

Conservatives often respond to the liberal "social contract" argument for gun control with 3 counter-arguments:

• Firearms are an "equalizer" that allows a weak person to defend themselves against the strong, so if we prohibit them we move society back towards the dangerous "state of nature" where might makes right. Sam Harris makes this argument, noting the havoc that thugs with knives or just superior size & numbers can wreak on innocent people in high-crime urban areas of the UK (43).

• It makes little sense to sacrifice one's ability to defend oneself when US courts have ruled that the police do not have a "duty to protect" individual citizens that are not in their direct custody and cannot be held accountable even if they don't defend someone who is being attacked in their immediate presence. (15) Conservatives in rural areas often know the police cannot respond in time to stop a violent crime, but this is also a concerns for some people in urban areas - including minority groups that are politically liberal. In an interview with The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch noted that the police's abdication of their "duty to protect" was particularly concerning for members of the gay community, who could often be beaten up or even killed and the police would show little concern in finding the perpetrators. This motivated him to support the gay gun owner's organization, "Pink Pistols". (43)

• By disarming law-abiding citizens and preventing them from effectively defending themselves, this can be seen as making the government that enacts gun prohibition an unwitting accomplice of violent criminals. The philosopher Michael Huemer compares laws that unduly restrict citizens' access to self-defense equipment as akin to a killer's accomplice holding a person prostrate while another person kills them, or taking away the victim's defensive weapon just before the killer arrives. (11)

Libertarians often use an updated form of the Enlightenment era ideals of self-ownership encapsulated in the "Non-Aggression Principle" (NAP). Under the NAP, a person is never justified in initiating the use of force or even threatening the use of force against another person. It's similar to a version of the Golden Rule - or more accurately the Silver Rule ("do not do to others what you would not have them do to you") that allows for self-defense, i.e. you can harm someone but only if they've unjustly used force against you or someone else. Under this logic, many libertarians believe that gun control laws are unjust, because they use the police to seize the guns of law-abiding citizens and this is an initiation of force.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle

Left-libertarians like Matt Zwolinski & Christopher Freiman have argued against this interpretation of the NAP. Zwolinski argues that living in society means we pose risks to each other all the time: "Most of us think that some of these risks are justifiable, while others are not, and that the difference between them has something to do with the size and likelihood of the risked harm, the importance of the risky activity, and the availability and cost of less risky activities. But considerations like this carry zero weight in the NAP’s absolute prohibition on aggression. That principle seems compatible with only two possible rules: either all risks are permissible (because they are not really aggression until they actually result in a harm), or none are (because they are). And neither of these seems sensible." (14)

Freiman argues that the NAP & other rights-based arguments for gun ownership fail because they'd allow a person to keep a weapon of mass destruction like an atomic bomb for self-defense which would pose "intolerably high risks to others." He argues gun ownership can only be defended on utilitarian grounds. (13) In his podcast, Sam Harris countered similar arguments that the 2nd Amendment could guarantee the right to own a bomb or tank or other military hardware by noting that no one needs to be able to destroy whole city blocks in self-defense, but argued that small arms like semi-automatic rifles & pistols are suitable for self-defense and, when all factors are considered, more or less meet Zwolinski's criteria. (44)

Another way to view the moral underpinnings of public policies like gun control is to look at it in terms of the thought experiment known as the "Trolley Problem". Imagine a trolley is speeding out of control along a track where it will kill 5 people, but if you pull a lever & divert it onto a different track it will only kill 1 person. Is it moral to pull the lever? Another iteration says that no lever is available to divert the trolley, but there's a fat man standing on a bridge overlooking the track and if you push him down onto the tracks he'll die but his bulk will stop the trolley. Is it moral to push the fat man to his death? Many people argue it's moral to pull the lever to save 5 lives at the cost of 1 life, but it's immoral to push the fat man to his death despite the fact that the cost/benefit ratio is the same. Essentially, most people favor a utilitarian view when they're more removed from a moral dilemma, but still accept deontological principles when they're directly involved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

One can argue that well-designed gun control laws, even if they're not perfect, are like pulling the lever to divert the trolley. (In this analogy, the person pulling the lever is the government and the trolley represents violent criminals.) The government could be seen as justified if they save more lives by disarming criminals than they cost by disarming law-abiding citizens of guns they need to defend themselves. However, the government also ends up "pushing" outside people into the equation with varying degrees of consent. The government sends police & social workers into high-crime neighborhoods to prevent crime at risk to their own safety. Also, to the extent that government policies strand people in high-crime neighborhoods (akin to the trolley tracks), the government is either pushing those people onto the track or at least failing to acknowledge their plight & help them escape the situation.

Sticking with the trolley analogy, one can argue that the government didn't cause the immediate "trolley crisis" (i.e. violent criminals are acting independently), but the government did have a big hand in building the "trolley track" (i.e. the urban environment & its failing economy). The government may have also disregarded certain safety measures that led to more "runaway trolleys" (e.g. the War of Drugs creates more crime) and more people "falling onto the tracks" (e.g. a rigged economic system & inadequate social programs trap people in high-crime areas). It may be if runaway trolley accidents were commonly caused by bad people pulling the levers or using a prybar to sabotage the tracks, the government might try to ban the civilian use of levers or prybars. However, a gun control law can be seen as akin to the government demanding that people stuck on the tracks not use a lever to divert the trolley away from themselves or use a prybar to break the tracks & save themselves because other people might use this technology irresponsibly or maliciously and cost more lives. People who've used the trolley problem to analyze gun control debate often wrestle with the government's complicity in creating more violent crime and also with the harm caused by police through unjustified uses of force. (11)

As Michael Huemer argues, a complete or nearly complete ban on civilian gun ownership is not merely violating some people's rights as a mere side effect of helping others but is directly violating their rights (to gun ownership) as a means of benefitting others. Therefore, Huemer argues it's much more akin to pushing the Fat Man than pulling the lever. Thus, he concludes that a gun ban would need to have much greater benefits than harms to be justified, and shouldn't be enacted if empirical studies indicate it will have only a slightly net positive impact (12).

III. THE UTILITARIAN EQUATION, FIVE LEVELS OF POSSIBILITY, AND THE PUNCTUATED NASH EQUILIBRIUM:

When we leave aside moral questions of a deontological nature and shift to utilitarianism (i.e. maximizing the "greatest happiness of the greatest number"), it seems we should be able to boil most social problems and their proposed solutions down to a fairly simple cost/benefit analysis. In the case of gun rights & gun control, the cost/benefit equation could be expressed thus:

If we omit gun injuries on either side of the equation (for simplicity, not because they're not important) and focus solely on lives, we will consider the following variables:

A: Lives lost to increased fatal accidents due to the current level of gun ownership B: Lives lost to increased homicides due to the current level of gun ownership C: Lives lost due to increased suicides due to the current level of gun ownership X: Lives saved due to crime victims' increased ability to protect themselves with guns, given the current level of gun ownership Y: Lives saved due to crimes that go uncommitted because of the increased deterrence factor of the current level of gun ownership Superficially, all that is left is to decide whether A + B + C is greater than X + Y. (12)

The first thing to note is that this equation is often miscalculated due to assuming a strong enough gun control law could cut the sum of A + B + C to zero or almost zero, or by focusing on accidents, homicides & suicides with guns and forgetting that B + C are intentional acts and some (possible many) people will find alternative means for homicide & suicide. And as we discussed 2 discussions ago, we shouldn't be surprised if changes in social phenomena like gun ownership displays aspects of nonlinearity: accelerating & diminishing returns at different stages, threshold effects & tipping points.

However, we must also realize that the government cannot automatically implement a policy, as soon as officials decide that the benefits outweigh the costs based on theoretical promise or empirical evidence of its success from other countries. Policy makers must consider 5 levels of possibility:

(1) Theoretical or "Subjunctive" Possibility: This can be broken down into 3 parts: Is a policy logically possible? Is it metaphysically & nomologically possible, i.e. is it consistent with the known laws of nature? And is it temporally possible, i.e. possible given the actual history of the world?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_possibility

Some gun control arguments strain logical possibillity - e.g. some liberals will complain that many police are racist thugs that abuse their power, but then argue only police should have guns. They will often argue that the vast majority of Americans are smart & responsible enough to vote & fulfill a wide variety of other civil obligations (e.g. serve in the military or law enforcement; serve on a civilian committee that oversees complaints about police use of force), but no one is level-headed enough to be trusted with a gun (aside from police or military). Similarly, some gun rights arguments seem illogical as well - e.g. some conservatives claim the government is essentially prone to tyranny, but then argue that the police & military deserves unquestioning support. Some libertarians who've argued the general populace is too irrational & ignorant for democracy to work (e.g. Jason Brennan), will then argue everyone is rational enough to be a responsible gun-owner. It may be possible to resolve these apparent contradictions, but we should consider if they stem from the illogical nature of political rhetoric & ad hoc political platforms. It may not be logically impossible to simultaneously give the police both more & less power, or to believe the general populace is both responsible & irresponsible, but we're getting close to logically incompatible beliefs.

The metaphysical/nomological issue is central to gun policies that rely on new technology - i.e. is it scientifically possible? For example, before considering a policy mandating smart guns, policy makers had to consult with experts in biometric technology to see if it was even scientifically possible before proceeding to the next stage by building smart gun prototypes to see if it was empirically possible. Similarly, fMRI brain scans are not at the level of sophistication that we can determine criminal intent and use them in lieu of checks on criminal records & mental health histories.

Temporal possibility crops up when people engage in wishful thinking and imagine how easy it would be to prohibit civilian firearm ownership if it never became very common. As Steven Levitt notes, if firearms were just invented today or they'd never became widely owned in the US, it would be much easier to enact complete civilian disarmament. However, we have to begin thinking about gun policies by accepting the fact that there's currently over 300 million privately-owned firearms in America. (26)

(2) Epistemic & Empirical Possibility: How do we know it is possible in the real world? Is there empirical evidence the policy has worked at least in one place or time? We can think of 2 stages for this level of possibility - Can a policy work in a controlled laboratory setting, and can it work in the real world in at least one locale? The first state could involve testing a technology (e.g. smart guns) as a prototype, or it could mean testing a social intervention with psych lab experiments & focus groups (e.g. how would people respond to a hypothetical gun buyback program) or on polls on a cross-section of the population (e.g. polling criminals to see if harsher sentencing for gun crimes would deter them).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemic_possibility

(3) Political Possibility: Given the current state of the legislature, is it possible that the policy will be supported by enough legislators that it will pass a majority vote and be enacted into law? This level of analysis often looks at "public choice theory" and how policies become politically possible based on the current structure of political incentives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice

If a legislator is likely to anger many constituents or lose campaign contributors by supporting a policy, he or she will probably reject it regardless of how promising it might be. There's various concepts that are relevant to this stage like the "Overton Window" (range of acceptable political positions) and the "third rail of politics" (controversial issues likely to politically harm any politician who tries to address them).

(4) Enforceability & Economic Sustainability: Can law enforcement officers enforce this policy in practice (i.e. can they catch enough offenders), and can the criminal justice & penal systems process the offenders in a way that is economically sustainable? This level of analysis often looks at the emerging field of "law & economics" which often pulls concepts from game theory & behavioral economics to examine both the intended & unintended effects of laws and assess which legal rules are economically efficient.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_and_economics

(5) Public Compliance/Deviance & Socio-Cultural Possibility: Given the current state of society & cultural norms, will enough of the populace agree to obey the law in regards to this policy so that law enforcement & the justice system isn't overwhelmed and so the occasional harm caused by enforcement efforts don't overwhelm the harm avoided by implementing this policy?

In our previous discussion on gun violence, we looked at how distribution of the risk form gun violence shows drastic fluctuations between the nations, between states in the US, between urban & suburban or rural areas, between rich & poor urban areas, and even within poor neighborhoods based on criminal "hotspots". Analysis of shifting crime rates over time also suggest that the social & cultural factors that underlie crime vary not only by locale but also by time period. This suggests what is socially & culturally possible in a given time & place may be somewhat unique, and that policies that work in one environment may fail in another & vice-versa.

Sociological research suggests that crime, like other social phenomena, displays "punctuated equilibrium". This means social conditions generally change only incrementally due to several restraints, such as the "stickiness" of local cultures, economic incentives, demographic trends, and the "bounded rationality" of individual decision-makers. Social change depends on changes in these underlying conditions, and is often characterized by long periods of stability, punctuated by large—though less frequent—changes due to large shifts in society, the economy, or technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium_in_social_theory

Several researchers have analyzed gun violence & the public reaction to gun control policies in terms of game theory and the found that not only the political gridlock but also the difficulties with enforceability & public compliance can be explained the concept of the "Nash equilibrium". The Nash equilibrium is the result of a competitive social situation in which each participant has chosen a strategy and no one can benefit by changing strategies unilaterally while the other keep their strategy unchanged.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

In the case of gun ownership & gun control laws, we can think of 4 players that are stuck in this Nash equilibrium: law-abiding gun owners, criminal group A, criminal group B, and the police. Some law-abiding citizens might agree to relinquish their guns if they knew everyone - not just law-abiding citizens but more importantly criminals - would also be disarmed. But if only law-abiding citizens are disarmed, this actually makes them even more vulnerable to armed criminals. Some law-abiding citizens may also be concerned with police militarization and want their guns to protect against government tyranny as well.

Ironically, criminals in both group A & B might prefer a lower level of gun ownership as well - after all, they're in danger from law-abiding citizens, the police & each other and usually suffer the highest homicide rates. If the entire society was disarmed, they could still commit rob people and protect themselves with other weapons like knives & baseball bats as many street gangs do today in Western Europe, and many of the street gangs in America did up until the late 1960 - early 1970s. But, of course neither criminal group A nor B wants to disarm if they other side stays armed. In his book, First, Stick, Knife, Gun: A Personal History of Violence, Geoffrey Canada talks about this escalation of violence from fist fights to gun fights he saw between 1956 & 1972 in a poor black neighborhood in the South Bronx. He says he felt the habit of carrying guns fundamentally changed the social equilibrium among young black men in impoverished urban areas, and made deadly violence far more common.

Meanwhile, if the criminals were disarmed, police might agree to give up their guns as well like the gunless bobbies in the UK, but they're certainly not going to disarm if the criminals aren't disarmed first. The police may also fear that some currently law-abiding gun owners may become criminals, so the police may also insist that the general public be disarmed before they give up their service weapons. This situation bears resemblance to the incentives that create arms races between nations in geopolitics - known as a "Hobbesian trap". (This is named for Thomas Hobbes' view of the "state of nature" as a "war of all against all".)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobbesian_trap

IV. FACTS VS THEORIES - DETERMINING WHAT APPEARS TO WORK, WHAT DOESN'T, AND MODERATE SOLUTIONS THAT BOTH SIDES WOULD DISLIKE:

This is the part of the discussion that most people in debates over gun rights & gun control want to skip to. They don't want to understand the data and the methods behind the research, they just want the "facts". You'll often hear people claim they "know the facts" about guns in America, and depending on which side they're on this will be some cherry-picked data about whether or not defensive gun usage outnumbers gun crimes. Keep in mind that from a scientific perspective - the effectiveness of certain types of gun ownership at preventing & deterring crime or the effectiveness of certain gun laws at preventing or lessening the harm from crime are "theories" that are supported by facts. People who don't understand this distinction should familiarize themselves with how this debate over "facts" versus "theories" has played out in the debate over evolution:

Kirk Fitzugh: "'Evolution' cannot be both a theory and a fact. Theories are concepts stating cause–effect relations. Regardless of one's certainty as to the utility of a theory to provide understanding, it would be epistemically incorrect to assert any theory as also being a fact, given that theories are not objects to be discerned by their state of being."

Stephen J Gould: "Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_as_fact_and_theory#Related_concepts_and_terminology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation%E2%80%93evolution_controversy#Theory_vs._fact

First of all, let's look at what experts said doesn't seem to show much effect...

• From 2000 to 2002, a CDC Task Force “conducted a systematic review of scientific evidence regarding the effectiveness of firearms laws in preventing violence, including violent crimes, suicide, and unintentional injury. The following laws were evaluated: bans on specified firearms or ammunition, restrictions on firearm acquisition, waiting periods for firearm acquisition, firearm registration and licensing of firearm owners, "shall issue" concealed weapon carry laws, child access prevention laws, zero tolerance laws for firearms in schools, and combinations of firearms laws. The Task Force found insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws or combinations of laws reviewed on violent outcomes.” (38)

• A 2005 expert consensus report from the National Academy of Sciences reviewed the existing gun research and "despite a large body of research, the committee found no credible evidence that the passage of right-to-carry laws decreases or increases violent crime, and there is almost no empirical evidence that the more than 80 prevention programs focused on gun-related violence have had any effect on children’s behavior, knowledge, attitudes, or beliefs about firearms." (37)

• A 2007 research study by Don B. Kates & Gary Mauser in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy concluded that a comparison of gun ownership rates & overall homicide rates among developed countries neither proved that gun control causes higher murder rates nor that increased gun ownership necessarily leads to lower murder rates via deterrence. "If the mantra 'more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death' were true, broad cross-national comparisons should show that nations with higher gun ownership per capita consistently have more death. Nations with higher gun ownership rates, however, do not have higher murder or suicide rates than those with lower gun ownership. Indeed many high gun ownership nations have much lower murder rates." (36)

• Determining the overall numbers for "Defensive Gun Usage" (DGU), and the cost/benefit ratio of gun ownership for the average American household, were two more areas that researchers seem to have difficulty parsing. Kates & Mauser addressed this in section 5 of their Harvard study, and found that "victims who use guns defensively are less likely to be harmed than those using other forms of self-protection" but noted that "whether these findings reflect underlying causal relationships or spurious correlations remains uncertain." They also looks at older studies that looked at household with a gun and found were nearly 5 times as many homicides and 37 times as many suicides as perpetrators killed in self-defense which had concluded “The advisability of keeping a firearm in the home for protection must be questioned.” Kates & Mauser took issue with this conclusion, noting that "effective defensive gun use need not ever lead the perpetrator to be wounded or killed. Rather, to assess the benefits of self-defense, one needs to measure crime and injury averted. The particular outcome of an offender is of little relevance. It might be, as Kleck (2001b) suggests, that the ratio of firearm-caused fatalities to fatalities averted because of defensive gun use is a more relevant comparison. Answering this question, however, requires researchers to address the fundamental counterfactual questions regarding the effects of both defensive and offensive uses of firearms that have been the subject of much of this report and have generally proved to be elusive." (36)

So now for what seems to have an effect according to the experts...

• Considering that, as we discussed in our last meetup, about 80% of gun crimes are committed by people who don't legally own the gun and typically have a long criminal record, many of the gun control solutions favored by the experts try to reduce theft & straw purchases and crack down on private sales (unlicensed sellers) and the black markets (stolen guns) & grey markets (straw purchases) - especially for handguns. Research by Philip Cook of Duke University found that it it's the flow of firearms, not the volume, that is the key factor in gun crime: "These market characteristics mean that regulations on transactions, even in the legal channels, can help increase costs in the black market and subsequently deter criminals from obtaining firearms. If gun regulations can effectively dampen the supply of new firearms and ammunition, thereby making transactions more challenging to complete, prices will rise and criminals will be more hesitant to obtain a firearm — and may even forgo it altogether." The effect of gun laws in staunching the flow of guns to criminals is measure by a stat called "time-to-crime", i.e. the time from which a gun is legally sold to the time it ends up at a crime scene. An ATF study in 2014 found that California, a state with strict gun laws, had an average time-to-crime of 13.52 years, versus a state with lax gun laws like Arizona, which had an average of 8.86 years. (30)

• In contrast to the CDC Task Force's findings, there were some more limited studies that suggested background checks for firearm purchases worked to reduce gun crimes & homicide overall. Dr. Daniel Webster at the Center for Gun Policy at Johns Hopkins University looked at the effects of the repeal of a 2007 Missouri law that had required showing a permit, contingent on passing a background check, prior to obtaining a firearm. he repeal of this law was associated with a spike in the murder rate by 14% through 2012 — an additional 49 to 68 murders per year. A similar permit requirement passed in Connecticut in 1995. It looked at homicide rates in Connecticut ten years after the passage of the law, and compared that rate with what would be expected had Connecticut not passed the law at all. The study found a 40% reduction in the state’s firearm-related homicide rate. (30)

• Another common type of gun control policy favored by experts is harsher penalties for even minor crimes that involve guns (24), and simultaneously relaxing penalties for non-violent crimes like petty theft or failure to pay child support or outstanding fines and "victimless crimes" like drug abuse, drug dealing, and prostitution.

• Lastly, many experts favor a long-term push to adopt a gun policy regime similar to Switzerland or Israel which would probably be consistent with the current rulings on the 2nd Amendment. Under this type of policy regime, civilians could obtain firearms only after many hours of formal training on both gun safety & the legalities of lethal force, as well as extensive criminal background checks & mental health assessment.(40)

Two more radical gun control measures that several experts thought may have some promise at reducing gun crime rates are a handgun ban and a restriction of gun ownership to the home (i.e. no open or concealed carry in public). However, these seem to conflict with the research by the NAS & the Harvard study that suggest regional cultures & socio-economic factors that drive criminal intent can trump even the most stringent gun regulations.

The key may be that democratic countries like those of Western Europe, Canada & Australia in which the majority of citizens push for greater gun restrictions and largely comply with them may signal that their culture has also shifted towards producing lower rates of criminal intent, whereas authoritarian regimes that disarm their citizens but produce poor socio-economic outcomes don't reduce criminal intent nearly as much.

V. THE "AOI TRIANGLE" AND A BROADER, SYSTEMIC PERSPECTIVE ON THE GOALS OF GUN OWNERSHIP & GUN CONTROL - PREVENTING CRIME & SAVING LIVES:

"Means, Motive, and Opportunity" is a common summation of the three aspects of a crime that must be established before guilt can be determined in a criminal proceeding. Marc MacYoung, a self-defense expert, has adapted this for personal safety uses into the "AOI Triangle" - Ability, Opportunity, Intent. As with the fire triangle (heat, fuel, oxygen), all 3 must be present for a crime to occur, and so crime prevention can & should focus on removing any or all of those 3 aspects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Means,_motive,_and_opportunity

Gun control focuses on reducing a criminal's ability to commit violent crimes, but overall crime prevention and health & safety programs should also focus on reducing criminal intent and opportunities for criminals to commit crime (and evade apprehension after committing the crime).

• FiveThirtyEight looked at the "NOLA for Life" research program and found that gun homicides among young (predominantly poor & black) men in New Orleans could be reduced by "hotspot policing" and targeting recidivist criminals known from co-offender networks kept by police. (24)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_policing

• "Panopticism" and the Surveillance State

• Gated Communities & Checkpoints

• End the War on Drugs

• Combat Drug & Alcohol Abuse with Treatment Programs

• Prison Reform

• Stop the "School-to-Prison Pipeline"

• Addressing structural racism & poverty in urban black communities

• Reduce Income Inequality, Poverty Rate & Unemployment

• Address "culture of honor" among males

VI. IATROGENIC & KURTOSIS RISKS FROM SHORT-TERM, HEAVY ENFORCEMENT SOLUTIONS TO GUN VIOLENCE:

Fans of Nicholas Nassim Taleb's work will recall his concern with "iatrogenic risk" - a term from medicine that refers to the risk of harm from an medical intervention (e.g. drug, surgery) that was meant to help but ends up causing a side effect or complications that diminishes overall health.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iatrogenesis

In terms of gun control policies (and related policies like stop & frisk, no-knock raids, mandatory minimum sentencing, civil asset forfeiture, etc.), we must consider the "iatrogenic harm" caused by the enforcement of these laws, whether direct physical harm by the police or indirect harm caused by the suffering of prisoners in a violent, overcrowded penal system and the plight of poor communities (often minorities) that have large numbers of their young men incarcerated.

Another concern of Taleb's is the tendency of government officials & academics to assume social phenomena will display a "normal (bell curve) distribution" and this blinds them to "kurtosis risk" - i.e. risk that populate the "tails" of the bell curve either far above or far below the average but are high impact, what he calls a "Black Swan" event.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurtosis_risk

People familiar with Taleb's arguments about kurtosis risk will know that he often argues that the attempts of government bureaucrats to avoid small crises in the short term creates a much larger-scale problem that will provoke a big crisis in the long term. In the context of gun violence, this seems to tie in with Geoffrey Canada's argument that as bad as fist fights among young men in the inner city looked to police, teachers & city officials in the 1950s & '60s, it provided an outlet for social tension that usually didn't result in death. The attempts to suppress fist fights in school or on the street corner or basketball courts just pushes them into areas where they're less supervised and weapons are more likely to be involved. Canada has argued that martial arts training is an invaluable resource for reducing lethal violence among young men, even though it seems counter-intuitive to most school administrators & public officials that teaching young people to fight will reduce violence. (This is similar to the resistance school officials often have towards teaching sex ed classes or drug & alcohol awareness programs that are not "abstinence only".) The backfiring of an "abstinence only" approach to violence, sex & drugs suggest a social component to what's known as the "iron law of prohibition" - a theory that posits that as law enforcement becomes more intense, the potency of prohibited substances (or in this case deviant activities) increases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition

In regards to the overall decline in violence that has characterized modern history, Taleb takes issue with Steven Pinker's that because small-scale violence has declined on average in the developed world that large-scale violent conflicts have also become less likely. For our discussion of gun control, Taleb's theory (if valid) suggests that even if gun control works to diminish violent crime in the short term, we can expert mass violence in the long run in the form of not just wars between nation-states, but also terrorism, insurgencies, civil wars, and "democide" (mass killing of civilians by their own government). If this is true, then the US Constitution's 2nd Amendment must also be considered in regards to its original intent as a last-ditch check on a tyrannical government.

VII. "THE MILITIA" ARGUMENT IN THE 21ST CENTURY - PARITY, DISPARITY & MONOPOLY OF FORCE, MOVEMENT, SURVEILLANCE, COMMUNICATION & PROPAGANDA:

Do to space limitations here, the outline for this section has been moved to the meetup's Discussion tab:

https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/messages/boards/thread/50215410