Maybe we’re looking at the problem wrong. Maybe instead of putting so much energy into efforts to keep people from buying guns, we should be trying to change which guns the buy. Instead of trying to make gun purchases more onerous, we should try something more radical: help people buy long guns instead of handguns.No, I haven’t gone crazy. I’ve just been reading a provocative new paper from economists Bradley Shapiro, Sara Drango and Sarah Moshary.They start from a few simple and correct premises. First, handguns are associated with more harm than long guns — they are involved in 90 percent of firearm violence and a huge number of suicides. People own significantly more handguns because they are just easier to carry around and easier to conceal.Second, most people who buy guns say they want them for personal or household safety. That’s a use for long guns as well. Displacing handgun purchases with purchases of less convenient long guns could reduce the likelihood of tragedy when the owner becomes angry or despondent.So, what if the government gave first-time gun buyers a subsidy to choose a long gun instead?
The numbers on handguns vs. long-guns are well known to readers of the Hall. America is a safe country, a fact that is obscured by a few neighborhoods in a few cities in a few counties creating a vast bias in our statistics. The media likes to report on 'assault weapon' mass shootings, but those are a tiny percentage of the gun violence problem: long guns of all kinds, 'assault' or otherwise, account for a couple percent of the murders. If we then are only interested in mass shootings we reduce that percentage to statistical noise; they just get a lot of coverage in the press because the stories are exciting and drive clicks and viewers. In fact, almost no American guns as a percentage are ever involved in violent crime: once you appreciate that we have more guns than people, the math becomes overwhelming.
That said, the money to be made in reducing gun homicides is clearly with illegally-possessed handguns: not new laws, since these things are already illegal (e.g. stolen) or illegally possessed (e.g. by felons), and readily done by increased policing in those few neighborhoods in those few cities in those few counties. Nobody ever raises that solution because it doesn't address the real issue that the politicians want to address, which is greater government control over the citizenry -- not the criminal class, but the law-abiding ones.
It would be perfectly Constitutional, however, for the government to require that all non-felon adult citizens arm themselves with a rifle suitable for militia service. Article I, Section 8, Clause 16 gives Congress the authority to "arm" the militia, which would embrace the idea of subsidies for suitable firearms. The AR-15 is the obvious choice: it's the one that operates most similarly to and shares many parts with our service rifles, and shares ammunition with what we have in large military stocks.
McArdle is only floating this as an idea to broaden the discussion, not as a serious proposal. Still, it has some points in its favor.
This is an area where I tend to be an absolutist on limited government.
ReplyDelete[M]ost people who buy guns say they want them for personal or household safety.
I'll leave aside the fact that a rifle is decidedly suboptimal for defense inside the home. I'm not most people; I do not say--will not say--why I buy, or don't buy, any firearm. It's nobody's business, most especially Government's or the general public's, whether I buy or don't buy and if I do, what I buy.
There are matters of courtesy and private property rights attendant, though. Were I to visit Grim, and either he or his wife expressed a dislike of firearms in his home (yeah, I know), the bar is well within their right to dictate what (or who) comes onto their property, and courtesy would prevent me from belaboring the issue with him/her. I'd simply suitably stow whatever firearm I might have had in my car.
To all of that end, I object to any government subsidy for buying any sort of weapon, firearm or otherwise. It remains none of the government's business what any private citizen chooses to arm himself with, or not, and such a subsidy would necessarily let the government know what I just bought and in what quantity. It's bad enough (but barely tolerable) that the government gets to know at least the fact of my purchase via the background check I generally must go through.
And this: It would be perfectly Constitutional, however, for the government to require that all non-felon adult citizens arm themselves with a rifle suitable for militia service. Article I, Section 8, Clause 16 gives Congress the authority to "arm" the militia, which would embrace the idea of subsidies for suitable firearms.
It's not that perfectly so. Against that I place the 2nd Amendment: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
With the Supreme Court having ruled (for now, anyway) that the right to keep and bear is an individual right with the Militia a beneficiary, not a reason, the government requiring me to arm myself is just that infringement: it eliminates my right not to keep and bear, a right without which there can be no right to keep and bear.
This, too: given such a subsidy, and given the modern militia's weapons suite (here I assume the subsidy is aimed at national guard militias and not State militias, many of which are, by design, unarmed), why should the subsidy stop at rifles? There's no limiting principle for subsidizing only those, and not larger weapons, including Neighborhood Watch type groups getting crew-served weapons, or aircraft (from drones all the way up) or combat ships. Not after the precedent set in our Revolutionary War where a significant fraction of the Continental Army's artillery suite was privately owned, either donated, loaned, or sold to the Army and where a significant fraction of the Continental Navy's combat shipping was privately owned, often even purpose built for the occasion, sailing under letters of marque.
Eric Hines
I think you're on solid ground to say that the government should keep its nose out of what you buy for yourself, or why; but Congress' right to discipline the militia when it is in Federal service is explicitly established. The states may also make such laws, for when the militia is not in Federal service.
ReplyDeleteStill, along the Bruen decision's 'custom and tradition' analysis, requiring you to own a particular rifle for militia service in addition to whatever else you might elect to own is very well established. In Savannah, Georgia, the beautiful squares throughout the town were originally for militia drills, which was a requirement for residents of the city from before the Founding. (The nearby Spanish colonies being the reason for that, by the way; the native Yamacraw were on good terms with Georgia from the beginning because Sir James Edward Oglethorpe saved their chief Tomochichi and his companions from being wiped out in one of their own wars; and the colony did not permit slaves, so slave revolts weren't the reason either. Georgia was established to provide a buffer to the Carolinas from Spanish invasion, as it did on several occasions notably at the Battle of Bloody Marsh.)
Early colonies often required public carry of weapons, ownership of muskets and other equipment, and so on and so forth. Periodic attendance at drill was also usual. We could probably assure an end to some of those very-dangerous neighborhoods' status by standing up local militias of responsible members of the community, arming and training them, and having them engage in militia patrols; but that would be a sort of self-government, not the kind of governance by 'professionals' that is preferred by the administrative state.
So I think it's well within the traditions of our Republic and even of the longer traditions out of which those traditions were formed.
Also, feel free to bring your firearms when you come to visit. We'll shoot some poker cards together.
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