Saturday, December 15, 2012

Guns Kill People

I try to stay away from political subjects. I find that, when discussing politics, people tend to reduce complex issues into narrow soundbites, and quickly become angry. I prefer to avoid the subject all together, to avoid discord. (I'm a lawyer who dislikes conflict--I know how strange that sounds). I also tend to think that people overestimate the degree to which politics impacts one's everyday life.

Still, I feel compelled to collect my thoughts around one narrow part of the tragic school shooting in Connecticut. (I can barely stand to refer to the events in all but the most oblique terms). Various individuals--pundits, and social media users--immediately began to incorporate political arguments into discussion of the tragedy. Gun control and religion in schools seemed the two most popular angles. Some handled this better than others.

My initial impulse was to scream, "shut up and mourn!" However, I retreated from this view. Politics are important, despite the extent to which they are debased by pundits and practitioners. Many political issues may not truly matter, but some do. And, here, I think, we have a situation in which real policies (i.e., meaningful gun control) might have prevented a tragedy. I do not, ultimately, think it is disrespectful to the victims or the tragedy itself to examine how such tragedies may be prevented in the future. One might even argue that earnest efforts to prevent future tragedies gives their deaths some measure of meaning, while ignoring difficult questions about causation and prevention only renders their deaths more senseless. (I say "one might even argue" because, to me, the murder of kindergartners is so horrific as to remove it from platitudes about "meaning.").

My own feelings about gun control are pragmatic. I have no moral beliefs either way. A gun is a tool that people use to enhance their coercive force. Coercion is necessary in both the public and private spheres, however much an idealistic pacifist may wish otherwise. A gun can be a force for justice in the hands of someone trying to protect his or her family, or a force for evil in the hands of a different individual, such as Adam Lanza. The gun does, however, increase the destructive capabilities of anyone who takes the gun in hand. In the end, I put my faith in probability and statistics. If reducing access to guns (moderately to severely) would, ultimately, save lives, then I favor strict gun control. If more people are saved by the deterrent of owning a gun, then I think more law-abiding citizens should buy one. I'm not here to debate the statistics, at the moment.

That brings me to an anti-gun control argument--more a talisman or motto, though people take it seriously--that is bereft of logical or persuasive force. Yet, despite its intellectual bankruptcy, the argument is advanced by fairly reasonable people on a regular basis: "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." Garbage.

Let's first look at this argument from a strictly causative perspective. The argument is false. When a perpetrator murders a victim using a gun, both the gun (and the bullet) are causative agents, as well as the perpetrator who pulled the trigger. But-for the gun, and the bullet, the victim would still be alive.

Now, a more sophisticated anti-gun control advocate might suggest that the perpetrator might find another tool. That might be true. Still, in the strict sense, we're talking about a counterfactual. The perpetrator did not use some other weapon. The perpetrator chose a gun. Thus, you can't dissociate the gun from the murder when arguing causality

Next, to wrap up the other major defense of the "guns-don't-kill-people" mantra, we come to volition. I would agree with this position in the limited sense that a gun is not morally blameworthy. But, then, neither are all sorts of items that we do not hesitate to ban (crack cocaine isn't morally blameworthy for ruining the lives of those who abuse it, either). However, acknowledging that a gun is not morally blameworthy just begs the question: can one separate the object of the perpetrator (the murder) from the modality of the murder (the gun)?

Perpetrators choose guns for an obvious reason. Adam Lanza, specifically, didn't bring a samurai sword (or a bow, club, or knife) to that elementary school. He chose a gun. Adam Lanza had a reason for wanting a gun to accomplish his vile purpose: guns are more effective weapons and make killing easier and faster. And, he didn't stop with just any old gun. No, he (legally) procured an assault rifle, knowing that its capacity for mass killing outstripped that of an ordinary gun. In fact, guns are used in more than 60% of all homicides, demonstrating empirically that guns are the preferred choice of murderers in the United States. (http://www.nij.gov/topics/crime/gun-violence/welcome.htm).

I'm sure that, in some undetermined percentage of gun-caused homicides, the perpetrator wanted badly enough to kill his victim that the attainability of a gun was ultimately inconsequential. The perpetrator would have killed using a different tool. I'm also sure that, at other times, the availability of the gun is a but-for cause of the death or, in a mass-murder, some of the deaths. (The reasons are obvious: it's easier to escape or disarm an individual using a less potent weapon; guns make violence easier). Again, I'm a pragmatist, and I don't pretend to know definitively how many murders making guns harder to obtain would prevent. My objection here is simply the bad argument that so many people seem to embrace.

Guns kill people. A gun is a causative agent of death in the strict sense that the bullet fired from the gun results in a victim's death. More broadly, a gun can be a but-for cause of the death because not all gun-caused murders would occur if guns were more difficult to obtain. Twenty kindergartners died, yesterday, after being shot by a person wielding a gun. I think it's time to dispense with hollow, illogical assertions that have value only as soundbites.