We need a new strategy on guns

We need a new strategy on guns

Ten years of failure is enough to admit this isn’t working

Matthew Yglesias

Social media has blurred the lines between formerly distinct spheres of activity — emotional venting, public mourning, political organizing — and it is essential, especially in the wake of a tragedy that deserves a policy response, to make an effort to reconstruct those boundaries.

The massacre in Uvalde has left most of us feeling angry and frustrated and with a sincere need to express those feelings.

And because people express themselves in part through the content they click on and share, this expressive activity starts to drive the media agenda, which in part drives the political conversation. This means that a mass shooting immediately creates a high-profile content escalator:

Something horrifying happened.

Things like this tend not to happen in other rich countries with no guns.

Things like this would not happen if there were no guns in the United States.

In fact, tens of thousands of lives per year are lost to guns, and all those people could be saved if there were no guns.

Why won’t Congress pass a simple background check bill?

And I want to make the observation in today’s post not that any of these statements are incorrect or that people should not express their rage or frustration, but that this cycle of expressive behavior has not spurred the kind of policy change that would meaningfully reduce the incidence of gun violence in the U.S.

After the 2004 election, Democrats decided that gun control wasn’t a winning issue and did their best to keep guns off the policy agenda. That changed after Sandy Hook, which was especially horrifying but also happened right after Barack Obama’s re-election when Democrats were feeling more confident.

The cycle we now find ourselves caught in, of posting and clicking and sharing and venting, was a deliberate political strategy created in the wake of Sandy Hook. Liberals were outraged by events and frustrated by eight long years of swallowing their sincere view that widespread gun ownership is really bad; they posited a mass public that yearned for tougher gun action, but that needed to be mobilized in order to defeat narrow special interest opposition. I think that was a plausible ex-ante theory of the political situation, but we now know that it’s wrong. The NRA has been completely wrecked as an institution, but the gun rights movement lives on.

We’re now 10 years into this new dynamic and it’s not just that it’s failing — things are actually getting worse. Gun laws are significantly looser than they were in 2012, gun sales have skyrocketed, and the murder rate is drastically higher.

When a strategy fails, you need to change course.

Guns and the progressive narrative

Progressives’ broadest theory of political change, the one they seem to apply to every issue, is that their favored public interest reform is both obviously good and widely recognized to be good. But powerful special interests — especially, though not exclusively, through the Republican Party — are acting to block reform, in part through their financial clout. So the path to victory is to mobilize large numbers of people, raise the salience of the issue in the media, and try to neutralize the corrupt special interests’ financial advantage.

And on some issues, this narrative is correct. It’s why raising the minimum wage tends to win ballot initiatives, even in pretty solidly conservative states.

But what about gun control? Take a relatively small measure like universal background checks. Back in 2017, a background checks initiative passed in Nevada by 0.8 percentage points, and in 2016 one in Maine lost by 3.6 points. In both cases the anti-gun side outspent the pro-gun side, and in both cases the anti-gun initiatives performed worse than Hillary Clinton. Minimum wage does better at the ballot box than the partisan fundamentals, but anti-gun policies do worse.

Why is that? I think it’s because most Americans are not criminals, they’re not deranged spree killers, and they believe that the country is safer if law-abiding people are allowed to purchase firearms. I also think that this belief reflects some significant misconceptions about gun ownership. But it is sincerely held. Just as voters’ authentic preference for cheap gasoline drives the politics of gas prices, gun politics is driven by Americans’ genuine preference that law-abiding citizens be allowed to obtain firearms.

Failure to acknowledge this leaves progressives bashing our heads against the wall rather than making what progress we can on guns or spending time and attention and money on other issues where it may be possible to do more good.

What gun control can and cannot do

Acknowledging public opinion on guns means acknowledging the limits of what is politically feasible on gun control; some of the policies proposed as part of the effort to mobilize outraged voters are just not possible in the U.S.

For example, a large-scale national mandatory buyback would create exactly the scenario described in the NRA’s old saw about how “when guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns.” We know that plenty of people carry guns right now in liberal cities located in blue states, even though it’s generally not legal to carry guns in those cities and most of the people carrying the guns don’t have permits, a point conservatives often raise to argue that gun control doesn’t work. That’s simplistic; it clearly has some effect relative to what the situation would be otherwise. But it is a reminder that enforcing gun laws is a non-trivial problem. If you made the gun laws much more sweeping and severe, the enforcement challenge would be larger – many people who are currently law-abiding citizens might refuse to comply with such a law.

So while a sweeping national gun ban would surely reduce firearms deaths, it would have to be paired with a tremendous expansion of police powers and incarceration. And (in a point we will return to) to the extent that progressives want to endorse a tremendous expansion of police powers and incarceration, we could instead be enforcing the current gun laws more strictly and more severely.

Disaggregating gun deaths

It’s worth unpacking the aggregate gun deaths box a little bit, because it tends to rear its head in non-typical situations like a school massacre perpetrated with a long gun.

When you hear people citing “gun deaths” in the United States, they are actually talking, primarily, about suicides.

If people who kill themselves were being fully rational, then eliminating guns would make no difference to the suicide aggregate since there are plenty of ways to kill yourself. But in reality, that’s not how suicide works, and spur-of-the-moment availability of lethal weapons is in fact a significant driver of suicides. When Australia enacted strict gun curbs, that reduced the number of firearm-owning households by half and generated a large decline in suicides.

So I don’t bring this up to suggest that guns are irrelevant to the suicide issue.

What I do think is important to acknowledge, however, is that if you feel that it is morally urgent to reduce suicides, I don’t think talking about gun control is a very effective way to pursue that goal. For starters, high levels of media coverage of gun regulation tend to produce looser rather than stricter gun laws in practice. It also leads to surging gun sales. So all the agitation for gun control in the wake of mass shootings is increasing the number of people who will shoot themselves over the next 10 years.

Meanwhile, most suicides are not committed with guns. And there are clearly things we can do in the suicide prevention space that are not sharply polarized and politically impossible. If you want to reduce suicides, focusing on gun control seems perverse.

Last but not least, according to Pew and the FBI, it is extremely rare for a person to be killed by an assault rifle:

In 2020, handguns were involved in 59% of the 13,620 U.S. gun murders and non-negligent manslaughters for which data is available, according to the FBI. Rifles – the category that includes guns sometimes referred to as “assault weapons” – were involved in 3% of firearm murders. Shotguns were involved in 1%. The remainder of gun homicides and non-negligent manslaughters (36%) involved other kinds of firearms or those classified as “type not stated.”

So, again, the shock and horror of the Texas shooting are very real and very understandable. But if your goal is to stop people from being shot and killed, preventing people from buying semi-automatic long guns is a very low-efficacy way to do that. And if your goal is to reduce the genuinely very large number of people who are shot and killed in routine crime involving small, easily concealed handguns, then highly emotional, highly moralistic outbursts following edge case spree killings seem unnecessary.

We could punish illegal gun carrying more harshly

In the 1990s, it was in vogue to be tough on crime. We hired more cops, we built more prisons, we made sentences longer, and we enacted new gun regulations.

The majority of murders in the United States are “normal” crime. Members of gangs kill each other, they kill people outside of the gang system who cross them, and they kill innocent bystanders. People try to commit robberies and end up killing their victims. One possible response is to have the police fan out in high-crime areas, arrest lots of people for low-level offenses, search them, and then prosecute the ones who are found with guns. And this was a typical response in the 1990s when it was trendy to be tough on crime — we hired more cops, we built more prisons, we made sentences longer, and we enacted new gun regulations.

The political climate is different today, though. Larry Krasner says this type of gun possession prosecutions are bad because it drives racial disparities. And many progressives who are not as progressive as Krasner have become leery of this kind of aggressive police tactic, feeling that, as the 2020 Democratic Platform states, “instead of making evidence-based investments in education, jobs, health care, and housing that are proven to keep communities safe and prevent crime from occurring in the first place, our system has criminalized poverty, overpoliced and underserved Black and Latino communities, and cut public services.”

There is a gaping chasm between this progressive view of law enforcement and mass incarceration and the progressive view of the gun issue. The means through which gun regulations reduce gun crime is that gun laws are enforced and the perpetrators punished. Criminal justice reformers are right to observe that the “tough on crime” posture the ‘90s generated significant costs, and perhaps some will argue that the large increase in murders since 2015 has been worth it for the sake of reducing the scale of overpolicing. I disagree, but it’s not a crazy argument.

What is crazy, I think, is to adopt the view that instead of blue cities in blue states stepping up the enforcement of their existing gun regimes, we could reduce murder by enacting federal gun control regulation. The federal gun control push is a much heavier lift politically. Precisely because it’s a heavier lift politically, it is overwhelmingly likely, even if successful, to yield low-impact measures like background checks. And even if high-impact measures were to be enacted, they would still need to be enforced.

If we want to reduce suicides, we should invest in treating depression. If we want to reduce gun crime, we should use aggressive policing to deter illegal gun carrying.

If we decide to ignore 99 percent of the gun deaths and instead focus specifically on rare acts of terrorism, that’s fine, but it’s much harder to invoke the moral weight of the tens of thousands of gun deaths.

Outrage isn’t a strategy

The large minority of Americans who don’t drink alcohol and the policy wonks and public health professionals who want to reduce alcohol consumption both manage to work in a restrained way. The overwhelming majority of vegans are extremely calm and polite about their view that the rest of us are complicit in the unspeakable torture of billions of domestic animals because they correctly think that being in high-dudgeon mode about this all the time would be unproductive. And this chill approach is not ineffective. Last year, Nevada and Utah joined the list of states that are banning cruel battery cages.

About a quarter of Americans do not identify with any religious group, and they are joined by exactly one member of Congress (Kyrsten Sinema, oddly). Now my suspicion is that some of these members of Congress are fibbing a bit. But the fact that they fib shows people recognize the wisdom of discretion in this manner. And non-religious America does not loudly demand descriptive representation. Mainstream political columnists don’t write tracts denouncing religion. You don’t see MSNBC monologues about this. There was a Bush-era fad for “New Atheism” (i.e., atheism but you act like a jerk about it), but it went out of style because people saw it as counterproductive.

There is a genuine grassroots outrage element to the reaction to these shootings.

People don’t like being told they ought to practice preference falsification, but as you see from the religion point, they certainly all do it from time to time.

Giving voice to progressives yearning for a gun-free America is counterproductive, and people ought to be urged to shut up about it. What’s needed instead is a calmer approach to these tragedies, and an effort to do intra-coalition negotiations about how to approach illegal gun carrying in liberal cities.