I find at work that people often get really worried about the super uncommon scenarios and how we'll address those. While it's fine to think about those things, they should not supplant addressing the common scenarios. Let's apply this same approach to a topic at the top of mind for many: gun violence.
For the purposes of this discussion, I'll look just at gun deaths (somewhat arbitrary: easier to get stats, and let's assume it's a reasonable proxy for injuries as well). In a given year,
roughly 30-35,000 people are killed by a gun in the USA. This breaks down in some perhaps unexpected ways:
More than
20,000 are suicides.
Around
9-11,000 of those are murders.
There are about
500 accidental deaths.
And of the murders,
between 100 and 200 are the result of mass shooting.
While it's understandable that mass shootings get all the press (especially when the gun debate is so prominent in popular culture and mass shootings will generate media clicks), they make up the absolute edge-case of the gun scenarios. However, it seems to be used as the basis for the "good guys with guns" and "more guns" narrative. We should first solve the bigger buckets before we worry about the mass shootings. While no one wants to be a statistic, at a population level we must focus on statistics to drive broader policy.
The biggest bucket, by a factor of two, is suicides. It's also a hard one to address. Guns account for right about half of all suicides. Would removing guns actually eliminate those suicides, or would people just find other ways? The two next most common methods are suffocation (~25%) and poisoning (~15%). I don't know the mentality of someone who is considering taking their life, but I suspect that a meaningful subset of suicide by gun are people making rash decisions in desperate situations. In other words, I'd expect that eliminating guns would cut down on this number, but certainly would not eliminate all the suicides that are currently committed using guns. Anecdotally, we should not expect to see a major difference by simply eliminating guns since other comparable countries (ex: European) with heavily restricted guns have
similar suicide rates per population. However, even a moderate drop of, say, 1-2 per 100,000 (out of ~13 now) would eliminate 3-6000 deaths. I use this number as an example because a number of "similar" countries are about that much lower. It appears that mental health support and cultural changes would be the best candidates here, though again, I'm not an expert other than to say access to guns is likely not the biggest way to address this.
The next largest bucket, of course, is murders. I've
speculated at the effect of the presence of lots of guns (that it leads to lots of murders), and absolutely believe that removing them from the equation will have a profound downward effect in murder rate. The short of it is that, using Australia and UK as controls, removing guns from the population does not lead to murders being replaced with other implements, it simply leads to those murders not happening. Since roughly 3 out of every 4 murders in the USA are committed with a firearm, that's roughly 3 out of 4 murders that could be eliminated.
Eliminating guns from the general population would also lead to a sharp decline (realistically not complete, but pretty close) in accidental gun deaths. Pretty simple.
And last, come the mass shootings. We're now down to a cause of death whose frequency is within a factor of two of
lightning strike deaths. We're having a national policy debate centered around a scenario that's, as far as people conceive, an absolute rarity. This does not make sense. The argument tends to go something like "The bad people will get guns. They know to go to places where guns aren't allowed. Easy targets. Let's take away those targets by adding more guns!". Again, let's add guns EVERYWHERE because lightning strikes.
I would also suggest that eliminating general access to guns would serve to reduce the number of guns in clearly unstable people's hands, simply because not all of them will be capable of navigating a black market for a weapon (they're usually mentally off, remember). But sure, some (maybe most) will still get a weapon. In a world where a citizen can't openly own a gun, they also can't effectively train with that gun. Their proficiency in killing people can only go down for when they do snap and attack a school. Making guns illegal gives law enforcement more time to catch up to illegal weapons because simply owning one is now illegal. It could be discovered in some other way before it's put to bad use, and removed from the system. While guns are so broadly legal, the only place where law enforcement can interject is in the last stage when the mass shooter starts actually shooting. In other words, it is currently totally legal to perform all the preparations for a mass shooting. In my opinion, there's absolutely no way more damage could be done by mass shooters if guns were broadly illegal. I'd even suggest that the simple act of holding the gun and firing it at the range could fuel the mass shooting fantasy for someone who'd be prone to actually going through with it. If we remove some of those factors, a shooter may never even develop the clear desire to go on a shooting rampage.
In other words, the main scenarios clearly point to reducing guns. And as icing, even the edge-case justifies no other choice than reducing access to guns.
