Don’t fret about writing this post. There are many of us out here that appreciate hearing the internal arguments of serious intellects, even if they are about divisive political issues. For others, politics is religion, and no bit of reasoning is going to have any effect. Most often these are the most vocal. Keep up the good work.

“The primary cost is a higher murder and accident rate. The primary benefit is a last-ditch, when-all-else-fails, emergency backup plan in case of tyranny. A tyranny bad enough to require the backup plan may not be very likely, but history is long, and you’re multiplying that probability times the multi-megadeath level catastrophe that the worst tyrannies so far have caused.”

You can make some guesses as to these numbers. Let’s consider per thousand years. The USA has roughly 12K gun deaths per year, so the cost of no gun control is about 12M people/1000 years. On the other hand, when governments go berserk historically they kill up to 10% of their citizens (about 30M for the USA). This needs to be multiplied by the probability that citizen gun ownership will help in this case to get the savings in lives. Assuming this to be 50%, then the benefit of no gun control is 15M people per government berserkness.

So the costs are roughly equal when the government goes berserk every thousand years. Averaged over all governments this seems not a bad guess, but democracies seem to do better (through fewer famines and fewer wars, if nothing else).

Presumably a historian (not me) could figure some numbers on this. How often does a country that was once a democracy turn on its own citizens? Presumably this number goes down the longer the democracy is stable. This experimental data was not available to the constitutional framers, when only a few country-centuries of democracies existed. I suspect they were right to be concerned, but we are now over-paying to prevent this particular risk.

This is also not taking into consideration accusations of political bias in the education community, particularly regarding the 2A. Hot button issues like this are breeding grounds for kool-aid manufacturers.

The second amendment, in both traditional and modern interpretations, is primarily concerned with individual self-defense and the self-defense of small, local groups of people. ICBMs are only useful and practical as large scale offensive weapons or extremely large scale defensive weapons. They are completely useless as an individual, or local group, defense weapon. Handguns and rifles however, are extremely effective for such a purpose. That’s the difference.

The second amendment is designed to give individuals and small groups of people the ability to defend themselves. It is not designed to protect the country as a whole, or even to manage local crime. We have a military for the former, and police departments for the latter. However, federal court has affirmed again and again that police (and I would wager military as well) have *absolutely no duty to protect individuals*. They have a utilitarian duty as law enforcement, but have no protective duties. There are some fun (i.e. frustrating/irritating) cases to read about where this fact determined the outcome.

On a slightly unrelated note, I’m curious to know what you mean by “assault weapons”. You probably mean “assault rifle”. The latter refer to a general class of fully automatic rifles. The former refers to a very specific and fabricated anti-gun definition that applies to semiautomatic rifles with detachable magazines and 2 or more features from a list of “evil” features that are entirely harmless and quite stupidly chosen. Any 1 of the features is fine by the standards of these crazed politicians, but 2 of them and it has crossed the line from a sporting/defense rifle to a “aiming not needed, spraying, killing machine”. This topic is a monster in and of itself that I won’t rant about here. But needless to say its a topic chock full of misinformation, stupidity, power trips, and stupid quotes from politicians.

The topic of whether or not the 2A does/should apply to *fully* auto weapons is a very interesting and subtle one. I’m not sure where I stand on it. But it is of no practical concern to most casual 2A arguments, as full auto weapons are extremely difficult to legally own. Federal laws are such that you can only own guns or sears that were registered before 1986. Such guns cost $10K+ due to limited availability. After obtaining one, you need to buy a $200 federal tax stamp and you’d have to hope you live in a state and town that allows you to own automatic weapons. Some localities additionally require very specific and difficult to obtain licenses.

“The assault gun thing is irrelevant because they’re basically never used or owned by civilians. They’re a rather specialized military weapon, fully automatic, short barrel, small caliber rifle, high mag capacity, etc, usually poor accuracy and high fire rate. They never seem to be used in crimes against civilians (I can’t think of one, ever) so making them legal or illegal is pretty meaningless. ”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbionese_Liberation_Army

They’re infrequent, but when these sorts of events occur they’re tragic.

That’s not quite what I said though, I merely said “book-sized” questions deserve book-sized treatment, and if there is no room it’s better to stay silent than to be glib. But then, I am not you .

“It’s relevant, of course, that the people who do write serious books and papers about gun control in the United States usually reach essentially the same conclusion that I did.”

I would love to be educated on this if you had references on this (I will send you mail). I suspect though that many papers on gun control address “solvable” empirical questions (e.g. correlation between ownership and accidents), not hard “philosophical/ethical/legal” questions: “how do we trade off public safety/paternalism”, “what is the relationship between government and governed,” etc.

It’s not entirely fair to characterize the public discourse on guns in the US as locked down by the GOP/NRA vs the more reasonable state of affairs in e.g. Europe. I think there are more complicated cultural things going on. It really is the case that city-dwelling blue-staters have a different perspective on guns floating around near where they live vs rural red-staters. I don’t think a global policy even necessarily makes sense. The democrats aren’t touching guns for a reason, and I think it’s not just that NRA is a very powerful group (although obviously they are). Groups like the NRA do not function in a cultural vacuum and cannot unilaterally impose a narrative without some sort of broad support.

I don’t agree with you that gun control in the United States is a particularly difficult question (politically intractable, sure, but that’s different). And this is not because I think no policy questions are difficult: some of them certainly are. Rather, it’s because the modern Republican Party has a habit of taking issues that would be matters of consensus in any reasonable society, and making them things that we still have to debate.

I also don’t agree that the argument in my post is a bad one—I think it’s fine as far as it goes—nor do I agree with the draconian notion that no one should ever opine on anything unless they’re an expert. (“Daddy, should I drink this rat poison?” “Not being a medical doctor, I’m unwilling to opine.”)

It’s relevant, of course, that the people who do write serious books and papers about gun control in the United States usually reach essentially the same conclusion that I did. Were that not the case, I’d be more inclined to think that there must be something wrong with my own simpleminded arguments even if I didn’t see what it was. But the fact that there is an academic consensus on the gun issue supports my view that this is really not a stumper like P vs. NP: rather, it’s a matter of reaching out to people and convincing them to adopt the solutions that are already known.

So, having said all that, why do I now admit that writing the post was a mistake? Because even if I’m right, and even if I have all the right in the world to say what I think on my own blog (that’s sort of what blogs are for), it’s now painfully obvious that hardly anyone cares or will be influenced by what I think about this. I was struck, in particular, by how many people seem to have liked my new post about MWI, compared to how many people disliked the gun control post. The “paradox,” from my standpoint, is that both posts were basically just ways to vent and procrastinate! I didn’t think any harder to write the one than to write the other. From now on, perhaps I should simply accept that people enjoy my mindless procrastination about quantum more than my mindless procrastination about politics.

I am not even necessarily disagreeing with you, I just find the quality of the argument quite poor.

Compared to that, it’s relatively sane to let someone own a nuclear weapon if they can ever find someone willing to liability-insure it for something close to a reasonable value of human life (and cover all victims).