Amendment II

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

I’ve been following what’s going on in Lebanon at a few places, notably Michael Totten along with Google News.  What I find interesting about this situation is less the geopolitical effects of Hezbollah successfully making their point regarding their strength in relation to the strength of the Lebanese government - this is neither the first, nor, I am sure, will it be the last time that Lebanon is completely and totally screwed - but how a situation like this might be handled in our own society.

Many hard-core Libertarians and gun rights advocates will be more than happy to tell you that, yes, indeed, American citizens have the right to purchase any weapon they want (nuclear, biological, whatever), a right that’s protected by the 2nd Amendment.  According to this argument, the 2nd amendment isn’t about maintaining a militia, recreational hunting, or anything of that sort - it’s about providing people with the means they need to defend themselves against an unjust government.  To a point, I agree with this - I believe that American citizens have the right to self-defense, albeit not necessarily the right to mutually assured destruction (guns=okay, nuclear/biological/missile weapons=nyet).  It’s true that, with our military’s current hardware, it would be nearly impossible to fight it without using something more powerful than an automatic rifle, but, at the same time, I’m not exactly comfortable with the idea of my neighbor being able to wipe out an entire neighborhood with a careless push of a button.  The government is at least halfway accountable; my neighbor isn’t.  Besides, if our government was truly that unjust, I doubt it would matter what the 2nd Amendment said or what is considered an acceptable exercise of that right; the government would undoubtedly pretend it didn’t exist and the people would hopefully drive home the point that they have other ideas.

That said, think about Lebanon in this context.  It is living the Libertarian gun control dream - non-government agents have the right (whether de facto or de jure) to whatever weapons they can afford, and they’re using them against, for various reasons, they believe to be an unjust government.  Granted, “unjust” in this instance relates to “not letting us kill the Jews and turn Lebanon into an Iranian-Syrian proxy state”, but the point still stands - Hezbollah is, for better or worse, exercising its right to bear arms quite effectively against the Lebanese government.

Here’s the question, then:  How do we balance our right to bear arms with the right to not have an exceedingly well armed minority effectively take over our country against the consent of the majority?

There are a number of possible answers to this question, of course:

1. Arm the majority.  Sounds great on paper until you’re dealing with a minority, like Hezbollah or the old CSA, that thinks they have a realistic chance of attaining their goals through force of arms.  Generally speaking, any solution where plan A is “Wait for the country to devolve into civil war and hope everybody’s ready” is not a viable solution.
2. Seize the guns!  Sounds great on paper until you remember that Hezbollah isn’t supposed to have any of the weapons it has.  They’re a very nice and powerful example illustrating the fact that a government can ban whatever it wants, but there always people willing to break the law.
3. Realize it’s not a policy problem, it’s a philosophy problem.

What many people forget is that our rights are predicated on a single assumption - that a vast majority of American citizens will all share some basic common values (liberty and justice for all), and the rest will either learn to deal with that or leave.  If that ever fails, it won’t matter what’s on paper - if a large, well-armed political minority chooses to seize control of the government through force of arms, we’re not going to handle it much better than Lebanon.  The best we could do is hope our opponents haven’t completely corrupted the military and make a go of it.  That said, because the vast majority of our citizens believe in the basic principles on which the United States is founded (or, at least, enough of the basic principles to get along - one nation under God or otherwise), it will hopefully be a long, long time before we even have to think seriously about something like this happening to us.

Ah, the joys of zero-tolerance in the schools, as illustrated by the latest in the Reno Gazette-Journal:

A third-grader who was shot Thursday with a pellet gun at Grace Warner Elementary School underscores the danger of the nonlethal guns among teens and adolescents, officials said.

Two students were taken into custody after the incident between 8:30 and 9 a.m. before classes at the northwest Reno campus, Washoe County School District spokesman Steve Mulvenon said.

A boy brought the Airsoft pistol to school and he and a female classmate were playing with it on the school grounds, Mulvenon said. The girl accidentally pulled the trigger, and the round pellet struck a third-grader, Mulvenon said.

“Fortunately, she was not injured,” Mulvenon said. “It raised a welt, as those things do.”

The girl’s mother came to school, looked at the injury, decided the girl was fine and the student was returned to the classroom, Mulvenon said.

School police took the two arrested to the Jan Evans Juvenile Justice Center. Mulvenon did not know what charges they might be facing.

That’s right - a child brings a pellet gun, accidentally shoots another child, leaves a welt that doesn’t even concern the parent, and the two children involved get arrested.  Why?  Well, it’s a pellet gun, after all, so it’s vitally important that we suspend all reason and thought, ignore the true severity of the issue, and call the police, who, in turn, shall similarly suspend all reason and thought and lock the children up.  Why?  Oh, that’s easy - two words:

Zero tolerance.

I remember when a “zero tolerance” platform was put into my high school - this was around 1996, I believe, which seems to coincide with when most other school districts jumped on this bandwagon.  The idea, as most everyone is aware by now, was that, since drugs, violence, and weapons were serious problems in some schools, it was vitally important that all schools escalate these issues to law enforcement so that they could be nipped in the bud.  Since the “zero tolerance” policies were written by educators and politicians, two groups that are well-versed in the needs of children in a school environment and how to meet them through legislation, the resulting policies were both fair and flexible, providing school administrators with the support they needed to reclaim their schools.

Who am I kidding?

Like any “zero tolerance” policy in any other school district, the end result was neither fair nor flexible - more than anything, it gave administrators and teachers the legal cover they needed to abdicate all responsibility and thought from their jobs.  Suddenly, instead of taking into account things like context and circumstance, it was far more important to make sure that teenage girls were locked up for bringing ibuprofen to school (it’s a drug!), teenage boys were locked up for getting in fights (violence!), and so on.  Then, someone got the bright idea that these policies should apply across the entire school district - after all, everybody knows that rules designed to scare the living shit out of high school kids are completely and totally appropriate in an elementary school setting.  In short, in the name of security, we’ve effectively banished our children to prison from the ages of 5 to 18… but, at least we’ll feel safe, knowing that, so long as these policies are in place, we’ll never have to worry about pellet guns or OTC painkillers getting near our precious little snowflakes.

(NOTE: This post fell off the rails at the end, but I spent way too much time on it to just toss it. I apologize in advance.)

I have a coworker who I have immense respect for - he knows more about technology than I’ll probably ever want to, he knows tons of random facts about all kinds of interesting topics, and he’s generally a well-spoken guy… but, once in a while, he comes up with something that really makes me wonder.

Today’s statement?
“Gun owners are twenty-seven times more likely to get shot.”

Yep, that’s right - according to my coworker, by sheer virtue of having a gun in your house, you are 27 times more likely to get shot. Naturally, this set off my innate BS detector, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything - I needed to find proof, one way or another. Perhaps now would be a good time to hit the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms? Makes sense, right?

That’s when I discovered this gem:

(B17) How do I obtain a classification from ATF for my “potato gun?” [Back]

Any person desiring a classification of a “potato gun,” “spud gun” or similar device must submit a written request (not e-mail) to the Director and include a complete and accurate description of the device, the name and address of the manufacturer or importer, the purpose for which it is intended, and such photographs, diagrams, or drawings as may be necessary to make a classification. A final determination may require physical examination of the device. Such requests for classification should be submitted to: Bureau of ATF, Firearms Technology Branch.

Okay, that didn’t really answer my question, but it did peak my curiosity about what the rate of injury and fatality is in potato-owning households compared to those where spuds are forbidden. That, unfortunately, is a train of thought I’ll have to ride another time.

It was around this time that I decided it might be time to nail down some basics, notably:

1. How many people own guns?
2. How many gun-related homicides are there?
3. How many gun-related assaults are there?
4. How many gun-related suicides are there?
5. How many gun-related accidents are there?
6. How many of 2-5 happen to those in 1, and how many happen to those not in 1?

Figuring out how many Americans had guns was surprisingly difficult - one source that I found indicated that 42 million American households had guns in 2004. Most statistics I was seeing indicated that gun ownership was in the 40% range for American households, so that made some sense. The NRA says:

Numerous surveys over the last 40+ years have found that almost half of all households have at least one gun owner

Of course, it’s in their best interest to make that number as big as possible, so, for balance, I figured I’d see what some gun control people had to say about it. Thankfully, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence has a web site. According to them:

Currently, an estimated 34.5% of households have a gun, while 24% have a handgun.

Okay, so 42 million households with guns sounds like a reasonable number in a country of nearly 300 million.

Points 2 and 3 were easily found via the DoJ - there were 1,325,290 violent crimes, such as homicides, assaults, and robberies, of which 29.3% involved a firearm, which means that 388,310 violent crimes involved a firearm. Of course, a crime can involve a firearm without somebody getting shot, but I had a sneaking suspicion this statistic was going to need all the help it could get. Of course, it also meant that, regardless of my coworker’s statistic, even if we were able to enforce a 100% ban on guns, we’d only reduce violent crime by at most 30% - not an inconsequential number, mind you, but certainly not the kind of Utopian fantasy that people dream of when they discuss gun control.

Point 4 was a little tricky. The Brady Campaign had this:

From 1999 through 2005, an average of over 1,000 children and teenagers took their own lives with guns each year.

Of course, the trouble here is that adults commit suicide, too… which is where things get a little messy. As those closer to the NRA’s position like to point out, Japan has a rather high suicide rate and extremely low gun ownership rates. But, then again, Japan’s culture is different, so I decided to go ahead and keep it in. With a little more love and work with Google, I found the American Association of Suicidology, which had a handy report on suicides in 2005. The part I cared about, of course, was this:

Firearm Suicides - 17,002 - 52.1% of all suicides

That still left gun accidents. Naturally, many of the statics I found dealt with politicians and children. In order to figure this out, I needed to find how many people total, each year, are involved in gun accidents. The best I could come up with were numbers in the 0.2 per 100,000 to 0.5 per 100,000, and I wasn’t entirely sure about either source. But, they were the only ones I could find that actually dealt with adults, so I ran with them. A little multiplication revealed that, assuming the 0.5/100,000 rate, we should be sitting at around 1500 accidents a year. This seemed in line with the juvenile figures of 214 unintentional injuries to children listed in the University of Michigan study I found earlier.

At this point, I decided it was time to break things down into two categories:

1. Things that would almost certainly require gun ownership (suicide with a firearm, accidents with a firearm),
2. Things that would not require gun ownership (homicides, assaults, etc.)

Of the first category, we have suicides and accidents, which totaled up to a whopping 18517 incidents out of 42 million households. That works out to 0.04% of all gun owning households a year, and nearly 5% of all gun-related incidents. It was rapidly becoming clear that this “statistic” wasn’t going to be won on this front, even with me being generous and assuming (almost certainly erroneously) that, in order to commit suicide with a gun or to be involved in a gun-related accident, you had to actually own a gun.

This is the part where it’s high time to break down some best case/worst case numbers. Worst case, as far as my coworker is concerned, is that he’s looking at all remaining gun incidents being divided strictly down the middle between gun owners and non-gun owners, with the other 18,000 or so accounting for the increased risk of gun ownership. That would mean that, based on what we’re seeing, 194,155 gun-related incidents would have happened to both gun owning and non-gun owning people, meaning that, at worst, he’s looking at 1.1 times the number of gun owners getting shot or threatened with a gun than those who are not gun owners. Best case is that he’s still right, so let’s define what 27 times means, exactly - it means that, of the 406,827 involved in a gun-related crime, suicide, or accident, only 15,068 of those incidences could happen to someone that didn’t own a gun.

Right about here is where I ran into a brick wall. Simply put, there are no easy to find sources on crime rates against gun owners. The aforementioned Brady Campaign states, “The presence of a gun in the home triples the risk of homicide in the home.” Then again, the Department of Justice notes that only a third of all homicides don’t involve guns, which means that, in order for the Brady Campaign to come up with that number, it would have to declare that all homicides involving firearms happen to gun owners - a rather erroneous assumption at best.

In the end, this is probably all immaterial - even if you’re 27 times more likely to get involved in a firearm-related incident just because you happen to own a firearm, which you’re probably not, you’re more than twice as likely to suffer some other violent crime from something other than a firearm. Of course, why I didn’t just say that about ten paragraphs ago is just going to have to remain a mystery to both you, my loyal readers, and to me, your tired blogger.