Gun control
April 19, 2007
Ramesh “Party of Death” Ponnuru writes at the Corner:
Least Persuasive Gun Control Argument Ever [Ramesh Ponnuru]
Timothy Noah says that the reason we don’t ban the civilian ownership of handguns is that we just don’t care enough about the victims of gun crime.
Far from being the “least persuasive argument ever”, it seems incontrovertible to me. Roughly 30,000 people are killed by a gun every year in the United States (a majority are suicides). Roughly 12,000 of them are murder victims. And we don’t care about them enough to ban handguns.
The argument may or may not be persuasive (I’m not convinced), but it’s really the only gun control argument there is. We haven’t banned handguns because we care about other things — the freedom to own a gun, the desire for a well-regulated militia, the right to self-defense — more than we care about the victims of gun crime.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with that. 43,000 Americans die in car accidents every year, but we consider it an appropriate price to pay for quick and easy travel. We could reduce the number to zero by banning cars, but no one thinks we should do so, because we all agree that the benefits of having a car outweigh the odds of being killed by one.
So instead, we try to come up with ways to reduce the number of traffic fatalities. Seat belt laws, air bags, better automobile construction, driver’s licenses, speed limits, and so on.
By heavily regulating cars, both during their manufacture and during their lifecycle, we achive some kind of balance between safety and freedom. And while there’s no doubt that the cost/benefit ratio of a pistol is different from the cost/benefit ratio of a Buick, both for an individual, and for society as a whole, the principle is the same.