freakonomics on gun control

[DehydratedCorn]

Freakonomics » How to Think About Guns: A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast

<TLDR>
Gun control does not work, there are better ways to go about ending "gun violence"

 

[Kevin_NH]

"I don’t think gun violence should be on the political agenda at all. "

Steve Levitt is the guy who was sued by John Lott for defamation. I met Steve Levitt when he was doing public talks about guns after Freakonomics was published, at the time he seemed clueless about the realities of gun technology and about the "shelf life" of guns and ammo. Seems like he's wised up since then, as he mentions in this podcast "guns are a durable good that will stick around and if taken care of well will work for 50 or 100 years".

I used to think Levitt was anti-gun, and I still believe that deep down he's anti; but now he's a pragmatic anti-gunner who realizes that there are bigger more tractable problems with the world.

LEVITT: I would just say that anyone with any sense looks at the current political climate, thinks about the kinds of proposals that are being made and accepts the fact that none of these proposals are going to have any real impact at all. So if you want to have an impact I think you have to go back deeper and you have to look at the fact that if we’re not going to get rid of guns, but you want to get rid of gun violence, you got to get rid of the people who are doing violence with guns. By get rid of I don’t mean, you know…There are a lot of ways to get rid of them. I mean, one is to parent better, to have society indoctrinate people into more empathy and whatnot. I think those are the ultimate solutions. I’m not saying that any of them are easy, but fundamentally that’s where the answer lies. Right? If you don't have people who have the desire to go kill large numbers of other people then you don’t have a problem with gun violence. And so consequently I think that’s the dimension if I were forced to start thinking about it I would be operating on given the fact that we have 300 million guns in this country today, and my guess is we’re going to have more than 300 million guns in this country 100 years from now. And so you just got to live with that, and subject to that constraint find some other way to get at the problem.

 

[kingcrispy]

This is a good podcast and Levitt brings up some good points, however he puts 2a rights on a slippery slope - even if he didn't intend it.

Gun buybacks are one of the most ineffectual public policies that have ever been invented in the history of mankind.
.... Anyone who has a gun and wants to put it to a real purpose doesn’t bring their gun back for the buyback. So you get exactly the wrong kinds of guns. But more fundamentally, I think people are confused with respect to how dangerous a particular gun is. If I’ve done my calculations right, any particular handgun in the United States will kill a person about once every 10,000 years. Okay, so in order to prevent one homicide in a year, you would need to get 10,000 guns brought back in a gun buyback. Okay, but the thing is you don’t get 10,000 guns, and they’re not the guns that are used to kill people. So the typical gun buyback program I would guess saves approximately maybe 0.0001 lives.

When you have weapon that’s incredibly powerful, no one wants to fight because the costs of fighting are so high. But why is it in the context of guns we don’t think of guns as deterrents, we think about guns as, being this, causing the violence... in the old days in the fifties and sixties when there weren’t that many guns around, disputes would be solved with fist fights or maybe with knives, okay. And the thing is, look when you fight someone who’s much bigger and stronger than you, you know who’s going to win. And if you already know who’s going to win you don't need to fight, because if you know you’re going to lose, why bother? ... guns really destroy that order because anybody with a gun can beat anybody without a gun, right? It doesn’t matter how strong you are or whether you’re popular or unpopular. The gun basically makes it so that uncertainty of the outcome of the fight is immense. And then that actually has the opposite effect of deterrents, because now if anybody can win the fight there can be more fights, because it’s not like you’ve got a certain winner and certain loser, which means you don't have to fight in the first place. And I think that’s a really powerful idea.

...people who don’t have guns themselves, they tend not to hang out with other people who have guns, and consequently they really are at extremely low risk for being the victim of accidental gun shooting or gun violence, because such a trivial, trivial share of the gun deaths are of pure innocents who are, you know, being, you know slaughtered by people with guns. And so, it just gets back to what you said, which is that there’s something else. Either they’re misinformed about the risks that guns pose to them, or they feel the repugnance, but for people who don’t hang around guns, guns are almost certainly one of the least likely sources of death for them.

 

[Climbnsink]

They don't care, nor do I, nor should you. It ain't about gun violence, it is about sheepherding. I don't give a fruck about gun violence, stop playing to their stupid frame, you can't win with their frame. We need guns so we can kill politicians and their thugs just as the founders intended.

 

[mikem317]

I enjoyed the first Freakonomics book. I need to pick up the others.

Economics sorts of explains the deterrent effect of guns. If the "cost" of robbing somebody is perceived as "too high" then they don't do it. And by being "too high" that means that they can probably fight back. This fully explains the whole "armed society is a polite society". If the costs are perceived as "acceptably low" then that gives would-be criminals incentive to carry out their act of aggression, be it robbery, burglary, murder, kidnap, rape, larceny, etc. "Acceptably low" would mean that the intended targets are not likely to be armed.

Pretty simple if you think about it.