I am sure the law enforcement officers and other public servants who had to enter the Sikh temple near Milwaukee or the theater in Aurora to investigate the crime scenes and clean up the gore have been psychologically changed for some time if not forever. It is not every day that one experiences the sanguinary places of mass horror. Having a few cop friends, I stay close to and hearing their stories of the grim reality of opening doors to rooms of death. I listen and, all the while, build them higher in my esteem. We don't pay them enough to do what they do.
Regardless, in our relatively antiseptic lives insulated from what police might have to do every day, we do have the opportunity to write or speak our opinions on gun ownership in America and the prevalence of firearms in our homes, in our cars or on the streets. We are permitted by our Constitution to freely chat about guns whether they are legally held by the population or illegally employed by the relative few.
We sometimes forget that only about 12,000 people in America are killed each year by someone else with a gun. About double that number are actually killed by guns but the other half do it by their own hand. Most suicides, too, are by handgun. That's not a small number, of course but I point it out because, as you may not be aware, the body count on the nation's highways annually is about the same as total gun deaths. That distressing figure has stayed relatively stable at that level for a number of years even with airbags and nice straight highways and the introduction of other safety factors. People like to drive fast, talk on cell phones or text while doing it. So, they die or kill others consistently, it seems, as a result.
There are myriad legal reasons one could argue for individual ownership of guns. The are myriad observational reasons one could argue against individual ownership of guns. Two, Aurora and Milwaukee, come to mind. However, I tend to move away from emotion when discussing the matter and look at it from the perspective of economics. Economics, among other things, tries to rationalize behavior. Why do we do what we do?
If, theoretically, we could ban all guns tomorrow, I propose to you that the market demand for them would stay the same. Because of that, it would be filled by the illegal supply chain whether that chain comes from a domestic source or across our porous borders. As we saw with the prohibition on manufacture and sale of alcohol in the early 20th Century and with illegal drugs today, if there is a demand for something it will be filled readily by an eager supplier through legal or illegal means. Further, as with products sold on the black market, guns are deemed to provide a benefit to society. Users of guns value those benefits over the lives of thousands taken by them. While that may sound cold and callous, it's the way, frankly, we all make choices even though we may not know we are doing it.
Here's an example of what I mean. A lot of us smoke, drink or eat fatty foods. We know, at least those of us that do not reside under rocks, that an overabundance of any of those vices will be detrimental to our health now or at some point in the future. In fact, excessive use may result in death. Nevertheless, we continue to smoke, drink and eat fat. Why? Well, we enjoy the practice. We get value or a benefit from it and, in some cases, we grow addicted to the item we consume. But, consciously or not, we rationalize the future costs of ingesting junk - poor health or death later - by putting those costs up against the benefits they provide us today - a feeling of happiness or fullness after having consumed the product. Taking all of us as individuals in the aggregate, one could draw the conclusion that society gets a bigger value out of the availability of smokes, booze and fatty foods than it costs society in terms of ill health or deaths. There are many other factors that economists like to place into the calculation but that's the logic in a simple nutshell. You, most of the time, only passingly realize you are making that economic choice.
Harsh as it may sound, we make the same societal calculation with cars and guns. We like to drive cars fast. They seem to be of no practical use if we can only drive them 5 MPH. Nevertheless, when we drive at highway speeds and do things other than paying attention to driving while behind the wheel, we kill people at an alarmingly frequent rate. Nevertheless, as in the previous example, society weighs the benefits of driving cars fast versus the death of 30,000 or so people a year. Again, there are myriad other factors involved like the industrial benefit of the manufacture and sale of cars but, generally, we have decided that 30,000 deaths on the roads every year is not enough of a body count to change our behavior.
That brings me to guns. The first argument one hears when I lay out the economic argument for gun ownership as it is is that no one "needs" a semi-automatic rifle or large capacity magazine to feed it. Well, to counter that I could say that you don't "need" sugary sodas which, it has been proven, make us fat and unhealthy. Further, we tend to spread the negative consequences of someone's soda consumption to all of society in terms of higher health care costs for all of us. Regardless, telling us what we each individually need or don't need seems to me to be more appropriate as a decision of the collective. Thus, when cities decide to ban large sodas or handguns, it makes sense since that is done with the consent of the governed through the democratic process.
But, the key component to the economic argument that guns remain available to Americans is that despite the rather sickening scenes played out recently in a theater and a temple, most gun owning Americans don't engage in mass murder, shoot each other or do anything else with their guns except provide for personal security, hunt, shoot at a target range or other safe and enjoyable practices that are peculiar to their tastes. Again, when taken in the aggregate, the benefits of gun ownership to all of us, outweigh the costs associated with homicides and suicides. But what is that cost? The short answer is no one really knows. Generally, economists and insurance specialists put the value of a human life, on average, at about $1.5 million. That doesn't sound like much but they do it by spreading earning potential over remaining years and it ends up being right around that number. In using that figure, homicide costs, in real dollars, cost us about $18 billion per year. The gun industry reports that sale of guns and ammunition in America brings in about $25 billion per year and that doesn't even include placing a value people get when they feel secure carrying a gun or when they are hunting or doing any other legal activity with a firearm.
We will surely experience another Aurora or Milwaukee in our lives. There is no explaining what goes through the minds of those so psychotically disturbed that they are capable of this sickening behavior. But, the next time something like this happens and the chorus of voices rises urging state or federal officials to further restrict the rights of law abiding Americans to use firearms, I hope you consider what I say here as a unique way of looking at the issue.
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