Gun Violence and Gun Control I

This entry and those that will immediately follow it seek to approach the very current problem of gun violence in a meaningful way.  The whole idea of starting this blog was to develop a site in which I could develop some of my ideas on politics, culture, and (oddly enough as an economist) economics in an open space for the world (or whoever really wanted to take the time to come online and interrogate my thoughts on important subjects).  It should come as little surprise that the horror of the Newtown shooting in December should have brought gun control back onto the national political agenda.  The incident raises a lot of important questions in my mind about the health of the federal system in the U.S., the nature of Constitutional rights, the structural role of firearms in violent acts, the definition of mental illness, and the relevance of community in this era of economic globalization.  Being long-winded, it’s going to take a few entries here to play this out, but if you are willing to read on, then maybe it will be worth it!  As much as this line of thought will probably amount to an extended, and well thought out, political rant, I am going to try to structure all of my points as specific conclusions about the larger issues of gun violence and gun control.

1.  There will be NO legislation supporting gun control passed by this Congress.

This point should be very basic in reference to the current debate over gun violence in the U.S.  Irrespective of particular political issues like gun control, the political process of consensus building and compromise in the federal government is currently, though almost certainly not permanently, BROKEN, in the same way that this process was largely broken from the end of post-Civil War Reconstruction to the turn of the Twentieth Century.  If the American public currently maintains an abysmally low opinion of Congress (averaging 15% approval (!) in 2012 according to Gallup, see Kumar (2013) in the Christian Post: http://www.christianpost.com/news/congress-had-lowest-ever-approval-rating-in-2012-gallup-says-88222/), supported at least to some extent by the inability of Congress to effectively address the federal government’s fiscal problems and aid the recovery of the U.S. economy, no meaningful road to compromise between entrenched Democratic and Republican positions on current issues of importance appears to be forthcoming in this Congress.  Part of the problem here is that, notwithstanding the obvious impact of campaign financing, the composition of Congress paints a relatively faithful representation of regional constituencies.  We are a big, diverse country, made up of people with a lot of different, but geographically concentrated, opinions on how to deal with issues like deficit spending, the role of government in health care, and gun violence, supported and accentuated by recourse to divergent politically sensitive media outlets on TV and the Internet that tell us the news that we want to hear the way that we want to hear it.  If two houses of Congress cannot come to definitive agreements to resolve the nation’s problems in any meaningful way, it is probably because, as a national society, we have no consensus on how to solve those problems and, regionally speaking, we are moving farther away from each other in our conclusions about what is to be done to move the country forward.  If, at other moments in our history, we, as a national society, were somewhat more willing to accept compromises on our partisan positions in the “general interest,” the current political culture, shaped by the media, favors dogmatism.  This topic is too big for the little space that I am consigning to it in this larger rant on guns, but the point is that we will not see any national level legislation addressing gun violence, in large part, because citizens living in Idaho or Kansas tend to have fundamentally different perspectives on what needs to be done to address the recent prevalence of mass shooting incidents from citizens living in Massachusetts or New Jersey, and we elect Congressmen and Senators who reflect the dysfunctional, regionally divergent political landscape of the American polity.  At some point, federal politics will need to arrive at a winner take all scenario, with one party holding both houses of Congress, the White House, and a favorable balance of jurists within the upper levels of the federal judiciary if the country is to move in an uncompromising way in one direction, dragging lots of disempowered partisan losers kicking and screaming along amid threats of secession (and, maybe, finally, a nasty or not-so-nasty national breakup)!  Until then, the alternative will be to muddle along in an unsatisfying political mediocrity, reflected in every Gallup poll that tells us how much less we like Congressmen than either used car salesmen or cockroaches.       

            And then there is the issue of money and the role of lobby groups, principally the National Rifle Association (NRA).  According to the Center for Responsive Politics (http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000000082), in 2012, the NRA contributed $1,345,301 between direct campaign contributions and contributions to political action committees, $2,205,000 in lobbying efforts directed at members of Congress, and $19,289,775 in outside spending through Super PACs and other sources of indirect political advocacy.  All this money buys a lot of political support against gun control across both major political parties, even if Republican candidates get the lion’s share of NRA support ($5,712,894 spent in support of Republican candidates compared to $35,076 spent in support of Democratic candidates in 2012).  More generally, considered against the regional background of a highly divided American public, NRA contributions to the political process have intensified the partisan divide, not necessarily between Democrats and Republicans as much as between regions where gun rights enjoy broad public support and regions where gun violence, particularly in cities, generates support for restricted access to firearms.  One ponders what demographic shifts within the American public (i.e. the continued movement of populations from rural environments to metropolitan regions) will mean over the course of the Twenty-First century for the constituencies funding the NRA.  For the time being, the NRA is simply contributing to the overall dysfunctional character of political debate at the federal level.  The organization’s categorical opposition to any measure of gun control legislation and its willingness to enforce this opposition through generous expenditures against candidates with the gall to support even modest measures like an assault weapons’ ban or a waiting period on gun purchases ensures, especially with the current tenuous balance of partisan power in the Senate, that there will be NO gun control measures passed by the 113^th Congress. 

2.  There is NO NEED for MORE gun control legislation anyway. 

This argument has been part and parcel of the case made by the NRA and most Republican politicians at the federal level.  Outside of the Gun Control Act of 1968 and its subsequent amendments and regulations, regulating the sale of firearms by licensed dealers, the structure of federal statutory laws regulating firearms is fairly limited.  It is so limited, in large part, because, outside of sensible regulation on the sale and transportation of firearms across state lines under Congress’ interstate commerce power, the federal government lacks the same constitutional leeway to regulate firearms that individual states possess.  On the other hand, a Byzantine array of legal restrictions on the possession and use of firearms exists on the state and local (municipal/county) levels (see the National directory of state gun laws at http://www.gunlaws.com/links/).  In regard to my state, Massachusetts already possesses an assault weapons’ ban.  Most other states lack such a ban.  Some states license individuals to carry concealed firearms while others do not.  Some cities restrict the use or possession of certain firearms while the suburban municipalities encircling them allow the possession and use of such weapons.  The American political landscape is a patchwork of gun regulations. 

            Recognizing the claims of gun control advocates and, in particular, big city mayors like Michael Bloomberg (New York), Thomas Menino (Boston), and Rahm Emmanuel (Chicago) that a lax federal structure of gun regulation ties the hands of local law enforcement against the capacity of criminal organizations to traffic guns into volatile urban environments from areas with more liberal gun laws, any effort to transform federal gun regulation to secure the needs of local law enforcement would require both a critical engagement with the limits of the Congressional commerce power and a vigorous expansion of federal gun regulatory bureaucracy (e.g. BATF, FBI) in order to develop a more aggressive local regulatory presence by the federal government.  In effect, the arguments advanced by pro-gun control mayors seek to get federal agencies to serve as adjuncts to local police departments in the effort to combat, in particular, drug violence.  If drug trafficking and the associated accumulation of firearms to protect organizational turf against rival organizations and law enforcement authorities are the problems here, then local police clearly need and deserve more support from their states and from the federal government to assist in enforcing existing laws.  In this sense, local governments would be better served by the federal government if the latter coughed up more fiscal resources to update local armories with better weapons and to train specialized police units to directly address drug enforcement and organizational/gang-related issues.  These matters only secondarily relate to federal regulation of firearms and trafficking of weapons across state lines and municipal boundaries. 

            Beyond these concerns, the larger question of the need for new federal regulation of firearms must take into account the relationship between currently proposed regulations and the realities of gun violence in the U.S.  The current initiatives in Congress, supported by the Obama administration through Vice President Biden’s steering, confront the ready availability of “assault weapons” and the number of rounds contained within magazines.  While both of these issues are clearly pertinent in dealing with at least some mass shooting incidents, they do not address the availability of semi-automatic handguns as the predominant means of gun-related fatalities in the U.S.  From 2007 to 2011, FBI Uniform Crime Report statistics consistently indicate that firearm-related murders attributable to handguns constitute around 70 percent of all firearm-related murders (see online UCR “Expanded Homicide Data Table 8 at: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8).  In the end, we have to ask what tangible impact such new laws will have if they do not address the main mechanisms of gun-related deaths.  Notwithstanding the Obama administration’s reasonable contention that the passage of new federal gun control laws would be justified if they contributed to the prevention of even one gun-related fatality, it seems unlikely that measures against assault weapons and expanded magazines would have much tangible impact on gun-related deaths even as they add to the clutter of gun laws nationally and in individual states.   

3.  Fatalities resulting from the Use of Firearms are NOT fatalities arising from other violent means. 

Having acknowledged the basic validity of one frequent argument by the NRA and gun rights supporters in my last conclusion, I want to next address what I consider to be one of the most inane, absurd rhetorical arguments in the cause of gun rights.  Specifically, I am talking about the sometimes knee-jerk reaction and sometimes intellectually developed claim that if the perpetrators of mass shooting incidents had not used a firearm to inflict death on their victims because guns were legally more difficult to obtain, then they would have achieved the same ends with some other instrument of death.  Thus, if the Newtown shooter had not utilized his mother’s legally purchased weapons, then he could have achieved the same murderous results by dousing Sandy Hook Elementary School with gasoline and setting it on fire.  If the Aurora shooter, James Holmes, did not have access to firearms, he could have slaughtered his movie house victims by rigging up a fertilizer bomb, Oklahoma City-style.  Other aspiring mass killers might do their dirty deeds with butcher knives or, perhaps, by crashing airplanes into buildings housing their erstwhile victims. 

            Two criticisms (one general, one particular) need to be addressed here.  First, in general, counterfactuals constitute an obvious and frequently effective rhetorical tool.  I have been educated in a profession (economics) that uses counterfactuals quite effectively in a lot of different circumstances.  For example, using historical data on workers’ compensation, food costs, and the sale price for human chattel, econometric (“cliometric”) analysis can advance counterfactual evidence to argue, definitively, that, contrary to the arguments of early Twentieth-century Southern Confederate apologists, antebellum cotton production with slave labor was not only efficient but extraordinarily profitable for plantation owners and in no danger of going away in the absence of its violent termination (see Fogel and Engerman (1974)).  In certain arguments, the deployment of counterfactual claims very clearly makes good sense and can be highly persuasive.  On the other hand, we need to be very clear that a counterfactual is always a counterfactual.  We can estimate how much it would have cost antebellum slave owners to hire wageworkers to plant and harvest cotton, but in reality the cotton was planted and harvested with slave labor.  In the same way, the Newtown teachers, administrators, and kindergarteners were not killed in an act of arson – they were mowed down with bullets from legally purchased semi-automatic handguns.  The Aurora victims were not blown up with a fertilizer bomb – a gunman with a semi-automatic rifle gunned them down.  Ultimately, the coroner’s reports for all of these mass-shooting incidents must archive the fact that the cause of death to each victim was the result of a gunshot wound. 

            In a more particular sense, our recent history as a species has shown that divergent means are more practical to achieve the murder of other human beings in certain circumstances than others.  Context here is everything.  It matters who (individually or organizationally) is doing the killing and who is being killed.  Numbers are clearly important.  How many people are going to be killed and in what timeframe?  What technologies are available and practical?  Is collateral damage an issue?  There are certain instances when a firearm is ideal.  There are other circumstances when firearms are vastly inefficient.  When confronted with the need to slaughter millions of geographically dispersed Jews during World War II, the German Nazi leadership faced this conundrum and decided that the most efficient means suited to their needs involved the construction of industrial facilities for mass murder.  When faced in 1945 with the uncertain prospect of tens of thousands of Allied deaths from the invasion of Japan, U.S. leadership decided that the nuclear annihilation of two cities would serve to achieve the goal of bringing an enemy nation to sue for peace without conditions.  The issue here concerns instrumental rationality rather than evaluation of moral implications.   

             Interrogating the mass shooting incidents that are now prompting a reconsideration of gun control, we have to ask the same sorts of questions.  What sorts of killing technologies were available to the murderers in these incidents?  Which ones were the most efficient (i.e. readily available, least costly, most effective) to their needs?  Having fired numerous firearms in military service, I am not unfamiliar with the capabilities inherent in semi-automatic rifles and handguns, particularly in the hands of individuals who have been trained to use them.  At army basic training in the 1990s, I was able to utilize an M-16 to engage pop-up “Ivan” targets effectively at 300 yards.  A semi-automatic 9mm pistol is less effective at these longer ranges and better suited to defend close quarters up to, say, 50 yards.  Having worked for over 23 years with butcher knives, I cannot honestly make the claim that I could kill someone with a knife at 25 yards, let alone 300.  On the other hand, knives have their appropriate place as lethal weapons in close quarter combat for people who are comfortable using them as weapons.  There are clear limitations on the use of any killing technology.  These questions are intensely practical and, in their own way, might be subjected to the same sorts of analyses that mainstream Neoclassical economists deploy in talking about any other production process (e.g. the marginal costs of obtaining additional rounds, the long term capital expenditures necessary to transition between different technical compositions of production factors/weaponry along a growth path in order to secure economies of scale – talk about putting a price on people’s lives!). 

            The point here is not to intentionally venture into macabre territory for the joy of speculating into the possible applications of theoretic tools, but to emphasize the absurdity of arguments in support of gun rights that speculate on the potential to substitute some other killing technology in mass shooting incidents.  When gun owners and the NRA seek to divert attention from the obvious circumstance that a gun has been used as a weapon of mass murder, they invariably open a door to instrumental reasoning on the technical means of killing.  This might be forgiven as the knee-jerk reaction of a gun owner when confronted on the issue of gun control.  When gun rights organizations thoughtfully advance claims in public on the availability of alternative means, they deserve to be ridiculed for taking painfully serious events completely out of their proper context.