Guns & Poses

I do not like guns.  Frankly, I am afraid of them.  Neither, however, am I offended by them.  I have many friends who are hunters and I wish them luck; though, in the case of two of my colleagues, when I know they are at large with rifles I am tempted to stay home and clean up the basement.  In the interests of full disclosure, I will confess that I once accepted money from the National Rifle Association to travel to New Orleans for a small conference on gun laws. 

As a political scientist, I find the gun control vs. gun rights controversy very interesting for two reasons.  One is the simple policy question.  What kind of policies, if any, would make a significant dent in the rate of gun fatalities in the United States?  The other is the controversy itself.  What moves each side to defend its positions (or go on offense) so tenaciously? 

As to the first question, I am very doubtful that there are any such policies.  The argument for gun control (as opposed to the emotional case for it) rests on the large fact that gun violence is much more common in the United States than in similar nations.  Measured by gun deaths per 100,000 in population, Australia, Austria, and Sweden have rates of 0.2.  The U.S. has a rate of 3.6.  These are 2010 numbers.  Assuming that these numbers are correct, the US rate is 18 times the rate of the other countries. 

It is not unreasonable to view this as a public health problem, analogous to, say, the supposed opioid epidemic.  Here is where my skepticism is aroused.  It is also true that deaths in traffic accidents are much higher in the U.S. than in similar nations.  The rate per 100,000 here is 10.6.  In Sweden, the rate is 2.8.  In Austria and Australia, it is 5.4.  Is this a public health problem?  To be sure.  That doesn’t mean that we have any idea what to do about it.  If we did, wouldn’t we be doing it?  There is no National Reckless Driving Association, with its claws in the Republican Party, preventing reform. 

Interestingly, but probably not revealingly, the number of Americans who died last year by gun fire is about the same as the number who died on the roads: 33,000.  Of the gun fatalities, two-thirds were suicides.  That is certainly a health care problem.  Do we know what policies would bring the numbers down?  No, and it’s not because the National Suicide Association is lobbying Congress.  We just don’t know how to fix the problem. 

If we can’t solve the highway fatality health crisis and we can’t solve the suicide crisis problem, what makes us think that we can solve the gun violence problem?  The answer is obvious.  We can’t or don’t want to take away automobiles and we can’t take away all the means of suicide but we can take away guns. 

Except that we can’t.  There are about as many guns in circulation as there are people in the United States.  Confiscation of those guns is both politically impossible (here you can blame the NRA but also the voters in South Dakota) and practically impossible.  The same neighborhoods that are awash with guns, frequently barking, are also awash with heroin and meth.  Do you really believe it would be easier to get the one than the other? 

I am not saying that we should not attempt any reform.  I am saying that no reform anyone is proposing will make a significant difference.  I wish it were otherwise.  It is not. 

The answer to the second question posed above is that human beings are political animals and politics is always about friends and enemies.  Those who are in favor of gun control do not like guns.  Those who are in favor of gun rights do like guns, for the most part.  What really puts the powder in each of their shells is that they do not like each other.  This leads each side to read any event or information in whatever way gratifies themselves and annoys their opponents. 

Gun control, like abortion and gay marriage, is a cultural marker.  If you are in favor of all three, then you are on one side.  If you oppose all three or any one of the three, you are outside the fold.  A friend and colleague of mine responded to such reflections above in this way:

The tax code, licensing, and insurance requirements provide all the tools necessary. Just look at the effects of pricing on tobacco use, which (God help us) I assume you're not going to make some libertarian argument that people have the 'right' to kill themselves (ignoring second-hand smoke). All that's needed is licensing fees proportional to fire-power (just like automobiles, where in sane states, high-performance vehicles cost more to plate), rigorous training requirements, insurance rates commensurate with the risks, safer guns (owner ID grips, etc.) taxes on guns commensurate to offset the costs inflicted on society, stricter control of getting a gun so that perpetrators of domestic violence, people convicted on a felony, and people who are nuts. It's what we do with drivers' licenses, pilot's licenses, and many other things. Why is this a problem?

None of this is unreasonable and much of it I could endorse.  None of it would have prevented Stephen Paddock from getting all the guns he needed. 

Spinoza was right.  At least about this.  Most of us most of the time and all of us some of the time are governed by passion.  We read atypical events as though they meant something important, which they don’t.  When something like this happens, each side always knows what it means.  That is interesting, at least to a political scientist.  

Diamond Roughed

Jared Diamond has made a big career out of big ideas.  His work displays both the strengths and the weaknesses of this approach.  I am a big fan of his breakthrough work, Guns, Germs, and Steel.  The big idea was that civilization arose where and when it arose because of a basic geographical fact: Eurasia goes mostly from west to east whereas the Americas and Africa go mostly from north to south.  Human beings are dependent on a small set of crops and animals.  These are adapted to climate, so that they can be moved from east to west with relative ease but not so much from north to south.  The result was that a large set of edible crops and critters ended up in the Fertile Crescent rather early.  More food meant more people and a surplus that could support armies, bureaucrats, and royal families.  Thus civilization rises first in that place. 

There is a minor and a major criticism of this theory.  The major one is that Diamond’s view is determinist, materialistic and reductionist.  I think that that is weak.  Human beings may be more than animals but they are at least animals.  They need to eat, go potty, and have babies.  Human history may be more than geography but it is at least geography.  We occupy certain parts of the globe and not others.  If your spot is out of the tropics and has access to the sea, you are probably in a relatively prosperous position.  If your spot is on a major geographic thoroughfare, you are set for growth. 

The minor criticism is that Diamond’s thesis cannot explain the rise of Europe.  This one is stronger.  Europe became the center of global civilization despite being a bit off the beaten path of Diamond’s east/west axis.  I happen to think that this failure actually strengthens Diamond’s thesis.  Diamond’s account is historical and historical accounts cannot be deterministic.  If determinism is true, you don’t need history.  You only need the rules that determine the system and the state of the system at one time in order to determine the state at all other times.  Historical accounts are necessary if you need to know what happened at time X in order to understand what happened at time Y.  Europe had certain advantages that result from its geography.  It also happened to be the place where certain very powerful institutions were developed.  There was nothing necessary about their development there, but once it happened it set the future for several centuries at least. 

Well, now Diamond has another big book and the great good fortune that he has aroused a hornet’s nest of enemies.  I gather that the chief objection to Diamond’s new book is as follows, from the Guardian:

On a book tour of the UK last week, Diamond, 75, was drawn into a dispute with the campaign group [Survival International] after its director, Stephen Corry, condemned Diamond's book as "completely wrong – both factually and morally – and extremely dangerous" for portraying tribal societies as more violent than western ones.

I don’t think that “Western” is the right idea here.  Japan is remarkably placid.  Still, the question whether modern, developed societies are more or less violent than tribal and pre-agricultural societies rubs a raw wound in the culture of anthropology.  

Without entering into the specific question, it seems clear that the opposition to Diamond is motivated more by political passion than by science.  Razib Khan has a piece in Discover that lays out the problem.

Many cultural anthropologists believe that they have deep normative disagreements with Jared Diamond. In reality I think the chasm isn’t quite that large. But the repeated blows ups with Diamond gets to the reality that cultural anthropology has gone down an intellectual black hole, beyond the event horizon of comprehension, never to recover. It has embraced deconstruction, critique, complexity (or more accurately anti-reductionism) and relativism to such a great extent that whereas in many disciplines social dynamics and political power struggles are an unfortunate consequence of academic life, in cultural anthropology the fixation with power dynamics and structures has resulted in its own self-cannibalization, and overwhelming preoccupation with such issues. Everyone is vulnerable to the cannon blast of critique, and the only value left sacred are particular particular ends (social justice, defined by cultural anthropologists) and axioms (white males are oppressive patriarchs, though white male cultural anthropologists may have engaged in enough self interrogation to take upon themselves the mantle of fighting for the rights of the powerless [i.e., not white males]) which all can agree upon.

Well, yes.  Khan informs us that he has plenty of disagreements with Diamond but he finds Diamond’s critics to be down an “intellectual black hole.”  I am sure he is right.