Guns Kinda Do Kill People
Bob Runs the Numbers, Episode 5
We Americans love our guns. There is about one gun per American — by far the highest per capita gun ownership in the world! Some high-conflict countries have one gun for every couple of people, and the next highest per capita gun ownership for a peaceful country would probably be Finland’s one gun per three people.
It shouldn’t be surprising that a sea of firearms results in a high death count. (When this episode was originally authored, there were about 33,000 firearm deaths annually. Subsequently, that annual death count has risen a bit: about 45,000 firearm deaths were recorded in 2020.)
This episode has no coherent narrative arc. In fact, imposing a narrative arc would end up being misleading, because each of these numbered sections is a mostly-independent stream-of-consciousness point. Some sections may contradict others. The only connecting tissue is that I try to stay true to the actuarial math.
1. Let’s Do The Math
The actuarial cost of America’s fascination with guns is about:
45,000 / 300,000,000 * 80 * 40 * 365
which works out to 175 days or over five months of lifespan. (This only counts firearm mortality; injuries are ignored for this episode’s actuarial analyses.)
Whatever it is we get from our love of guns, is it worth that price? (I don’t have an answer, but it would be intellectually dishonest not to ask the question.)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 🤷♀️ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 🤷♂️ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
2. America’s Gun Fetish vs. America’s Car Fetish
What else has a similar actuarial cost?
An example in Appendix 2 is the actuarial cost of motor vehicles. We Americans also love our cars; motor vehicle accidents have an actuarial cost of about four months of lifespan for each American — so not as many deaths as firearm-related deaths, but let’s squint and say it’s in the same ballpark. An interesting thought experiment might be whether it would be easier to give up guns or cars. At least that’s a way to focus and simplify and rank our priorities.
Would you rather give up guns or cars?
The interesting coincidence that the actuarial cost of motor vehicles and the actuarial cost of firearms are roughly equivalent hasn’t always been true! Motor vehicles’ actuarial cost has been steadily declining from about ten months of lifespan per American in 1970 down to its current four months, while firearms’ actuarial cost has been slightly increasing since 2000.
Motor vehicle safety studies and regulations have clearly improved motor vehicle safety, but the Dickey Amendment prevents analogous studies of firearms by the CDC. (It’s almost as if scientifically analyzing safety can improve safety. And that’s something that Jay Dickey now agrees with.)
(Update: since this episode was published, the CDC has resumed studying firearm risks.)
3. Counterfactual Conditionals and Gun Control
What might have been? Counterfactuals are rarely considered rigorously enough.
An awkward reality in the gun control debate is that if someone’s life has been saved because of tighter gun regulations, that person is probably not even aware of it. A domestic abuser without a handgun within reach, or a mentally ill student without an AR-15 to take to class, or a depressed person whose momentary suicidal impulse does not coincide with access to a firearm, could each end the day with their would-be victims ignorant about the peril they avoided.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 🤷♀️ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 🤷♂️ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A friend of a friend was on campus during Seattle Pacific University’s 2014 shooting. Is she alive because the shooter had no access to legal automatic weapons? It is epistemically unknowable!
Counterfactual conditionals are epistemically unknowable
The only way around this dilemma is to rely on is large-population statistical analyses – which is why gun fatality rates of different countries (chart 5) and different states (chart 6) can be helpful when trying to gain some understanding.
(Of course, comparing different countries can be tough when the circumstances of each country are so different. The upheaval and chaotic violence of Colombia or Venezuela doesn’t match the overall peacefulness of industrialized nations like Great Britain or the US.)
Other counterfactuals (often highlighted by guns-rights activists) include the possibility that sometimes lives are saved because dangerous people were prevented from harming or killing other people because “the bad guy” was threatened with a firearm. How many lives were saved? I know it happens — it’s happened to a personal friend of mine — but how to quantify it? All we have is anecdotes. And again, we’re stuck confronting the awkward reality that counterfactual conditionals are epistemically unknowable!
4. Mass Shootings Are Mediagenic; Small Frequent Tragedies Aren’t
Mass shootings are uncommon and dramatic and bloody. Partly because of that, they get extra media attention. You just have to mention a school name (Columbine; Virginia Tech) or even a city (Las Vegas; Orlando; Uvalde) and everyone knows which gun massacre you’re talking about. But if a road rage incident escalates into a fatal shooting, it’s just a local story; and plenty of domestic violence shootings or suicides won’t even make it into the back pages of the hometown newspaper.
That information imbalance is part of the tragedy: the rare mass shootings are mediagenic and everyone hears about them, but the tens of thousands of accidents and deadly arguments and suicides enabled by America's sea of firearms each year just quietly happen.
(And this information imbalance is dangerous! Implementing any broad “solution” to a very rare problem runs the risk of having the cure be worse than the disease.)
5. As If Anyone Cares About My Opinion
I’m not as anti-gun as many of my liberal brethren. In fact, I’ll stake out a position that’s never heard, from the right or from the left. I’m OK with gun laws about where they’re at now. I don’t think they should move too far in either direction.
... well ... OK, fine ... maybe a couple of nickel-and-dime refinements ...
It’s not gun control, but learning more is always useful: repealing the Dickey Amendment to allow studying guns’ effect on health (alongside existing research of motor vehicle safety, pandemic diseases, and bicycling safety) seems like a braindead-easy change that nobody could possibly disagree with.
(Update: as of the 2020 federal budget, the Dickey Amendment’s language has been “clarified” and CDC studies of firearms risks has resumed.)
Restricting bump stocks and tightening up some background check requirements would be good ways to calibrate our current gun laws.
(Update: in December 2018 the Trump administration banned the use of bump stocks.)(Update: in June 2024 the Supreme Court struck down the Trump administration ban.)
On the flip side, the expansion of firearm carry rights to allow guns in national parks was a sensible expansion. (If the analysis is based upon acreage, this Obama-era change could be considered one of the greatest expansions of carry rights in American history!)
But big-picture I think that we’re at about the right spot. We law-abiding citizens can generally get our hands on firearms, but not easily on automatic weapons or bazookas or mortars or tanks or nukes. I’m fine with that.
This particular episode of Bob Runs the Numbers is more incongruous than most. I’m acknowledging that America’s idiosyncratic love of firearms is actuarially very expensive, but I’m not really advocating any substantial changes. Maybe this proves that I’m not as logical as I like to think I am.
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.) – Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
6. Lazy Potshots Are Easy In Gun Control Arguments
For people more interested in bellowing out an opinion than analyzing data, each gun-related tragedy can offer ammunition for their side of the argument. Each Sutherland Springs or Aurora or San Bernardino or Santa Fe or Virginia Tech or San Jose or Buffalo or Uvalde lets us start another whole “If the perpetrator had no gun this terrible thing wouldn’t have happened” vs. “If the victims and bystanders had guns this terrible thing wouldn’t have been as bad” cycle.
Every school shooting seems to fertilize an infestation of arguments proposing that if only guns – or teams of armed guards – had been deployed at each of the 125,000 elementary and high schools in America it would have prevented that particular school shooting.
There were even people who suggested, earnestly! and seriously!, that more weapons floating around Las Vegas would have prevented that terrible tragedy.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 🤷♀️ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 🤷♂️ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And speaking of Las Vegas...
7. Lessons from Las Vegas
A boolean hypothetical (“a complete firearm prohibition would have prevented the Las Vegas massacre”) isn’t very interesting, partly because it’s not realistic, and partly because most of the (vocal, at least) opinions have used boolean hypotheticals – or at least set up their opponents as boolean straw men.
But it can be useful to contemplate turning the dial just a little.
The massacre in Las Vegas didn’t rely on marksmanship or really any skill by the shooter: it was devastating simply because of the amount of gunfire.
Slightly stricter gun control (restricting bump stocks so the murderer would be limited to manual trigger pulls at, what, a couple or three rounds per second? instead of the nine rounds per second enabled by bump stocks) would have reduced the number of people who died.
Contrariwise, looser gun control (legal automatic weapons firing, let’s say, 14 rounds per second) would have increased the number of people who died.
So ... again, avoiding the omnipresent partisan bickering and trying to find an evidence-supported conclusion ... I think it’s fair to say that Las Vegas could have been even worse (had fully-automatic firearms been legally available) or it could have been not quite as bad (had bump stocks not been legally available).
8. Some People Can Really Mess Things Up For Other People
In a country that aspires to freedom, terrible tragedies can not be truly ruled out. This is a lesson we’ve re-learned many times, including at Sandy Hook and in Orlando and at Columbine and in Las Vegas and at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and in Oklahoma City and back on September 11, 2001.
If twenty conspirators decide to trade their lives for as much disruption to America as possible, then (in a free society) they will accomplish one hell of a lot of disruption.
And if one man loses his handle on sanity and wants to wreak as much havoc as possible, then (in a free society) he will wreak one hell of a lot of havoc.
9. “The Constitution Isn’t A Suicide Pact” Is What Chickenshit Politicians Say
Remember that our current gun-friendly environment costs, actuarially speaking, about four months of lifespan for each American. This four-month cost makes the Second Amendment, surely, our most expensive amendment. (I’m not going to iterate through each amendment in the Bill of Rights to estimate its actuarial cost, but let’s pick one: the Third Amendment. Insisting upon not quartering troops in our houses costs each American an average of zero nanoseconds of lifespan.)
But then I don’t know how Second Amendment absolutists have ended up concluding that, say, bump stocks are constitutionally protected but automatic weapons aren’t. There’s a lot of daylight between “let’s rethink bump stocks’ easy availability” and “lets give the Second Amendment the ol’ Twenty-First Amendment heave-ho.”
The next time fear-mongering politicians say “the Constitution isn’t a suicide pact,” check which amendment they’re thinking about weakening. These fear-mongerers, in my experience, are typically talking about the Fourth Amendment or the Eighth Amendment or sometimes the First Amendment. I haven’t heard that phrase used for the Second Amendment even though the Second Amendment costs more actuarial lifespan than the rest of the Bill of Rights put together. America has let the market set the price of a Bill of Rights amendment: four months of lifespan per person. As long as everyone’s cool with that there’s no reason to weaken less-costly amendments.
10. There Is No Conclusion
If this episode has anything approaching a conclusion it might be that our de facto prohibition on CDC firearm studies is a terrible idea and we ought to invest in solid facts on which to build opinion and policy by repealing the Dickey Amendment, as its own author recommends.
But let’s be honest between each other. There are solutions to gun violence that have worked for other countries but America will never try them. I haven’t even persuaded myself that an Australian-style approach or a British-style approach would be good for Americans, overall, although those approaches have pretty clearly reduced Australia’s and Great Britain’s firearm-related actuarial costs.
A four-month subtraction from each American’s lifespan is just part of the price Americans pay for being Americans.
And every few months another school full of dead kids is just something we will continue to cry about
then bicker about
then shrug about.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(Actuarial assumptions are discussed in Appendix 2.)