Monty91
01-06-2016, 11:23 AM
get all hot and bothered about gun deaths, when we could save tens of thousands of lives by reducing the speed limit, yet choose not to because driving fast is fun and convenient.
"It now seems to me that there are two ways of approaching this discussion that may, in fact, be irreconcilable. The first is to consider the ethical and practical case for guns as a means of self-defense. To make this case—or even to understand it—one must know something about how human violence evolves at close quarters, and one must care about specific examples (e.g. a young mother shoots a knife-wielding intruder). Here, it is easy to establish (and impossible to deny) that guns occasionally save the lives of good people who have every right to defend themselves and their families from malevolent lunatics. The second approach is to consider society as a whole, emphasizing the statistics on gun violence. Here, it is easy to establish (and impossible to deny) that in countries where nearly everyone has a gun, violence tends to be more lethal, and suicides and gun accidents more common.
Many people seem to think that the broader statistical case trumps the ethical case for self-defense. More guns = more murders and suicides. End of argument. From this point of view, anyone arguing for the primacy of self-defense appears to be standing in the way of societal progress. Consequently, many people believe that no civilian, no matter how responsible or vulnerable to violence, should be able to possess a weapon as powerful as gun—because any society that would make guns available to such people will, of necessity, be unable to control the sale of guns to dangerous, negligent, and suicidal people who shouldn’t have them.
I do not accept that argument. I believe that the ethics of self-defense trumps the statistical case, for several reasons. First, we simply do not know what the statistics would be if there were more stringent controls on gun ownership. Most gun deaths in the U.S. are suicides—and while the presence of a gun in the home certainly makes suicide easier to accomplish, and perhaps more tempting, some of these deaths would occur anyway (there were 38,364 suicides in the U.S. in 2010, half of which were committed with firearms). Gun homicide in the U.S. is mostly the work of career criminals—not the result of ordinary gun owners with no history of violence suddenly going berserk. If we could keep the guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally unstable, there is little reason to think that the rates of murder and suicide in the U.S. would be inordinately high. Of course, we have completely failed to do this. But taking guns away from responsible people isn’t a way of doing it either.
An ethical argument for the banning of guns must deal with the hard case: Where a legal owner of a gun—who stores it safely and knows how to use it—winds up protecting herself when only a gun would avail. I don’t see why a responsible person should be prevented from preparing for the rare encounter with violence just because other people are unfit to own guns. As I have said, the prospect of gun accidents does not decide the matter. It isn’t necessarily irrational for a person to incur added risk of injury or death to prepare for certain events that he or she considers worse than mere injury or death. We increase our risk of both every day in far more frivolous ways than by preparing to defend ourselves and our families against the worst possible violence.
Many people seem to think that guns radiate danger, rather like plutonium. Needless to say, if millions of our neighbors began asserting their right to maintain private stockpiles of plutonium for the purposes of recreation and self-defense, we would be outraged. And we would derive little comfort from the precautions that “responsible” plutonium owners took to handle this material “safely.” The mere presence of the stuff on our streets would impose an unacceptable risk on everyone.
But guns are not like plutonium. They are like cars. The number of homicides (11,078), suicides (19,392), and fatal accidents (606) with firearms roughly equals the number of highway deaths (33,687) each year. But when guns kill people, it is almost always because the person who pulled the trigger intended to cause a death (either his own or someone else’s). When cars kill people, it is almost always an accident. This strikes me as a very important difference. People are doing their best to stay alive while driving, and to avoid harming others, and yet they are failing at a rate that exceeds that of intentional killing with guns.
Judging by the rate of accidental death, cars are much more dangerous than guns. More important, we impose much greater risk on our neighbors by driving than we do by keeping a gun in our homes. Many readers will object that this is an unfair comparison—“Guns are for killing people, while cars serve many necessary purposes”—but this objection misses the point. We are talking about the ethics of assuming personal risk of injury or death and of imposing such risk on others. The statistical argument against gun ownership derives all of its ethical weight from the following claim: If we banned guns in the United States, we would save many thousands of lives each year.
We could make driving much safer than it is, at very little cost, and yet we haven’t done so for reasons that parallel the concerns of gun owners, while being far less compelling. We could, for instance, limit the speed of all automobiles in the United States, including Ferraris and other high-performance vehicles, to 65 mph. And we could reduce their powers of acceleration, so that it took over a minute to achieve top speed. How many lives would this save? Surely many thousands. Why haven’t we passed an “assault weapons ban” of this sort on cars? Probably because it would make driving less fun. Most of us want the freedom to drive faster than a performance ban would permit—faster, even, than the legal speed limit. We seem to be asserting our freedom to break the law at the cost of thousands of lives each year. This seems ethically indefensible.
Despite what many readers will think, this is not a comparison of apples to oranges, or a rhetorical trick designed to obfuscate the problem of gun violence. As I have said, I believe gun regulation should be much stricter than it is—stricter, in fact, than anyone can reasonably hope for in the United States, even in the aftermath of Newtown. But here, I am addressing the claim (generally made by readers living outside the U.S.) that guns should be banned altogether, based on the statistics. Never mind that no one can envision doing this in the U.S., I believe that the case is flawed even if the path to a gun ban were clear.
A gun makes it relatively easy for a person to kill other people and himself, whether intentionally or by accident. A fast car confers the same power. But it is easy to argue that a sane, law-abiding person could find himself in a situation where he needs a gun to save his life—and that he should be able to have one despite the attendant risks of gun ownership. It seems grotesque to argue that a person who finds himself endangered by violence in this way should be made to pay (perhaps with his life) for the irresponsibility and criminality of others. I cannot as easily make the same argument about a car that drives faster than the maximum speed limit or that accelerates from 0-60 mph in 4 seconds. And what if most highway fatalities were the result of criminals and suicidal people intentionally crashing their cars? Who would then advocate that we ban all cars or limit their speed for everyone else?"
"It now seems to me that there are two ways of approaching this discussion that may, in fact, be irreconcilable. The first is to consider the ethical and practical case for guns as a means of self-defense. To make this case—or even to understand it—one must know something about how human violence evolves at close quarters, and one must care about specific examples (e.g. a young mother shoots a knife-wielding intruder). Here, it is easy to establish (and impossible to deny) that guns occasionally save the lives of good people who have every right to defend themselves and their families from malevolent lunatics. The second approach is to consider society as a whole, emphasizing the statistics on gun violence. Here, it is easy to establish (and impossible to deny) that in countries where nearly everyone has a gun, violence tends to be more lethal, and suicides and gun accidents more common.
Many people seem to think that the broader statistical case trumps the ethical case for self-defense. More guns = more murders and suicides. End of argument. From this point of view, anyone arguing for the primacy of self-defense appears to be standing in the way of societal progress. Consequently, many people believe that no civilian, no matter how responsible or vulnerable to violence, should be able to possess a weapon as powerful as gun—because any society that would make guns available to such people will, of necessity, be unable to control the sale of guns to dangerous, negligent, and suicidal people who shouldn’t have them.
I do not accept that argument. I believe that the ethics of self-defense trumps the statistical case, for several reasons. First, we simply do not know what the statistics would be if there were more stringent controls on gun ownership. Most gun deaths in the U.S. are suicides—and while the presence of a gun in the home certainly makes suicide easier to accomplish, and perhaps more tempting, some of these deaths would occur anyway (there were 38,364 suicides in the U.S. in 2010, half of which were committed with firearms). Gun homicide in the U.S. is mostly the work of career criminals—not the result of ordinary gun owners with no history of violence suddenly going berserk. If we could keep the guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally unstable, there is little reason to think that the rates of murder and suicide in the U.S. would be inordinately high. Of course, we have completely failed to do this. But taking guns away from responsible people isn’t a way of doing it either.
An ethical argument for the banning of guns must deal with the hard case: Where a legal owner of a gun—who stores it safely and knows how to use it—winds up protecting herself when only a gun would avail. I don’t see why a responsible person should be prevented from preparing for the rare encounter with violence just because other people are unfit to own guns. As I have said, the prospect of gun accidents does not decide the matter. It isn’t necessarily irrational for a person to incur added risk of injury or death to prepare for certain events that he or she considers worse than mere injury or death. We increase our risk of both every day in far more frivolous ways than by preparing to defend ourselves and our families against the worst possible violence.
Many people seem to think that guns radiate danger, rather like plutonium. Needless to say, if millions of our neighbors began asserting their right to maintain private stockpiles of plutonium for the purposes of recreation and self-defense, we would be outraged. And we would derive little comfort from the precautions that “responsible” plutonium owners took to handle this material “safely.” The mere presence of the stuff on our streets would impose an unacceptable risk on everyone.
But guns are not like plutonium. They are like cars. The number of homicides (11,078), suicides (19,392), and fatal accidents (606) with firearms roughly equals the number of highway deaths (33,687) each year. But when guns kill people, it is almost always because the person who pulled the trigger intended to cause a death (either his own or someone else’s). When cars kill people, it is almost always an accident. This strikes me as a very important difference. People are doing their best to stay alive while driving, and to avoid harming others, and yet they are failing at a rate that exceeds that of intentional killing with guns.
Judging by the rate of accidental death, cars are much more dangerous than guns. More important, we impose much greater risk on our neighbors by driving than we do by keeping a gun in our homes. Many readers will object that this is an unfair comparison—“Guns are for killing people, while cars serve many necessary purposes”—but this objection misses the point. We are talking about the ethics of assuming personal risk of injury or death and of imposing such risk on others. The statistical argument against gun ownership derives all of its ethical weight from the following claim: If we banned guns in the United States, we would save many thousands of lives each year.
We could make driving much safer than it is, at very little cost, and yet we haven’t done so for reasons that parallel the concerns of gun owners, while being far less compelling. We could, for instance, limit the speed of all automobiles in the United States, including Ferraris and other high-performance vehicles, to 65 mph. And we could reduce their powers of acceleration, so that it took over a minute to achieve top speed. How many lives would this save? Surely many thousands. Why haven’t we passed an “assault weapons ban” of this sort on cars? Probably because it would make driving less fun. Most of us want the freedom to drive faster than a performance ban would permit—faster, even, than the legal speed limit. We seem to be asserting our freedom to break the law at the cost of thousands of lives each year. This seems ethically indefensible.
Despite what many readers will think, this is not a comparison of apples to oranges, or a rhetorical trick designed to obfuscate the problem of gun violence. As I have said, I believe gun regulation should be much stricter than it is—stricter, in fact, than anyone can reasonably hope for in the United States, even in the aftermath of Newtown. But here, I am addressing the claim (generally made by readers living outside the U.S.) that guns should be banned altogether, based on the statistics. Never mind that no one can envision doing this in the U.S., I believe that the case is flawed even if the path to a gun ban were clear.
A gun makes it relatively easy for a person to kill other people and himself, whether intentionally or by accident. A fast car confers the same power. But it is easy to argue that a sane, law-abiding person could find himself in a situation where he needs a gun to save his life—and that he should be able to have one despite the attendant risks of gun ownership. It seems grotesque to argue that a person who finds himself endangered by violence in this way should be made to pay (perhaps with his life) for the irresponsibility and criminality of others. I cannot as easily make the same argument about a car that drives faster than the maximum speed limit or that accelerates from 0-60 mph in 4 seconds. And what if most highway fatalities were the result of criminals and suicidal people intentionally crashing their cars? Who would then advocate that we ban all cars or limit their speed for everyone else?"