The gun policy you have suggested is similar to those in a lot of other countries that have proven successful.
UK law is similar to what you proposed; handguns are banned by banning guns below two feet long, but instead of restricting ammunition capacity, we just ban all semi-automatic rifles outright.
You have to do something other than pulling the trigger again to reload. That means that a bolt-action rifle can have a magazine with no legal limit as to size. However, you have to get a licence (a firearms certificate) for each gun, and if you tried to get a licence for a bolt-action with a large-capacity magazine, you'd get refused. If you already own a gun, then applying for a second one will get "why do you need two guns, won't one be enough?", which does a good job of limiting large gun collections.
Shotguns are different; you get a personal licence to own a shotgun (note: pump-action is not a shotgun, this is only for break-open weapons). You can then own an unlimited number of shotguns on one licence. In addition, shotgun licences are much easier to get.
But you need an FAC (a full gun licence) to buy slug ammo for a shotgun; birdshot only on an SGC (which will hurt rather than kill most humans).
Note that we don't have deer in the UK outside of a few protected national forests and so on, so no-one goes out shooting deer.
May 30, 2022·edited May 30, 2022Liked by Jeff Maurer
One lesson from the evidence-based paradigm is to focus on systematic reviews and meta-analyses of a research question instead of individual studies, since one can always cherry pick studies that support preferred policy outcomes. (Even narrative reviews are problematic because it is difficult for the reader to assess author bias; there is also problem of "vote counting" in narrative reviews so every study counts the same as opposed to giving more weight to higher quality studies.)
For gun policy impact evaluations, there is only up to date one systematic review of which I am aware: Smart, Rosanna, et al. 2020. The Science of Gun Policy: A Critical Synthesis of Research Evidence on the Effects of Gun Policies in the United States (2nd ed.). Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. The RAND study used the following inclusion criteria: "we required, at a minimum, that studies include time-series data and use such data to establish that policies preceded their apparent effects (a requirement for a causal effect) and that studies include a control group or comparison group (to demonstrate that the purported causal effect was not found among those who were not exposed to the policy). Experimental designs provide the gold standard for establishing causal effects, but we identified none in our literature reviews (p. 26)."
The RAND team's overall conclusion is consistent with Jeff's take: "Of more than 200 combinations of policies and outcomes, we found that surprisingly few were the subject of methodologically rigorous investigation. …[I]t is apparent that research into five outcomes is either unavailable or almost entirely inconclusive” (p. xxiii). Table 21.1 (pp. 332–335) of the report includes a nice summary of the evidence for 18 types of gun policy and 8 outcomes (e.g., suicide, mass shootings, etc.). The only areas where there was moderate or supportive evidence for (criminal) violence reduction—meaning at least two rigorous studies showing effects—were as follows: (1) Prohibitions associated with domestic violence restraining orders (moderate evidence of decreased intimate partner homicides); (2) Dealer background checks (moderate evidence of decreased firearm homicides); (3) Waiting periods (moderate evidence of decreased total homicides); and (4) Stand-your-ground laws (supportive evidence of increased firearm homicides). For prevention of mass shootings, the evidence was deemed "inconclusive" across the board. (This is partly because it is such a rare event that it is incredibly hard to study).
Of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and some will infer that "gun control does not work" when it is more correct to say, "inconclusive evidence." Still, the evidence to date is pretty underwhelming. My preferred response is to let states continue to experiment with different gun policies (at the margin, since large changes are not feasible) and rigorously evaluate these experiments. Maybe we will discover that something actually works. But we should have realistic expectations.
May 30, 2022·edited May 30, 2022Liked by Jeff Maurer
FWIW, here is how it goes in France.
You can buy small weapons if you register them at a police station. Police officers can veto the purchase/order you to return the weapons, which they always do if the buyer is a felon. This comes with heavy restrictions on the type of weapons you can use - they can only have up to 3 shots without reloading, for example.
Or you can apply for a broader, five-years licence that includes semi-automatic rifles with larger magazines, but the owner has to be registered in a shooting range (which triggers its own background check) and physically go there a number of times per year. You need to re-apply after five years, and if the licence isn't renewed, you need to surrender the relevant guns or the police will come and take them. You can also sell the guns before the licence expires, which most people do.
This works fairly well: buying a weapon draws enough attention to force criminals into the black market, and if you say you will use a more powerful weapon for sports, you have to prove it and face background checks.
As with so many other issues, a fundamental problem infecting the gun control debate is a complete lack of trust or good faith. On the conservative side of the ledger, there is plenty of willingness to consider at least modest reforms, like magazine capacity restrictions, in isolation, but there is also a profound (and frankly, well-founded) belief that such reforms are merely table-setting for more severe restrictions if not outright mass confiscation.
Take universal background checks as an example. Right now, background checks are already required under most circumstances, with the only meaningful exception (inaccurately referred to as the "gun show loophole") being for intra-state transfers between private persons who are not otherwise in the business of dealing firearms. The steelman case for this exception is someone who inherited their grandfather's hunting equipment and wants to offload it without jumping through a bunch of hoops, because they would otherwise have to involve a licensed federal firearms dealer to run the background check. Now, there's good-faith arguments for and against this exception in a vacuum (how effectively its limits are policed is a separate debate), but in practice, many of the same democrats who push for universal background checks *also* advocate for other restrictions on dealers that would inhibit a private person's ability to loop the dealer in for purposes of conducting the background check, where the sum effect would be to functionally prohibit private firearm sales without ever having to admit that's what they're up to.
Until the democrats can credibly claim that there is no design on ultimately taking away everyone's guns--something they can't do when self-promoting grifters like Beto are treated as serious figures--there's simply not a lot of progress to be made.
Ukraine 1932/33-Stalin seizes all the grain and 3 million people starve to death. Being caught with a gun=instant execution. Being caught with a bullet=5 years in Siberia.
Ukraine mid-late 1930s-Stalin has “elections”. Everyone has to bring their firearms to the polling place on pain of death. After that, everyone has to wear a pair of government provided shoes to “vote””, b/c Stalin saw a picture of hillbillies voting barefoot in Alabama and said that would never happen in the USSR. Once you “voted”, the candidates were A-commie stooge, and Write in Candidate-Death in Siberia
Ukraine 1988-My uncle visits us in the USA for the first time and A-has his mind blown like a kid seeing his first Penthouse simply by visiting a very average Kroger grocery store and B-tells my dad he needs to check in with the local cops to check his papers.
Ukraine 2022-Same thugs, different name
We can crackdown on background checks and get serious about dealing with loonies, but the fact remains that guns in the hands of law abiding citizens (that means not you Mr. Crip or Mr. Aryan Nation or Mr. Face Tattoo)is a fundamental bulwark against government tyranny and any move to prevent their acquisition by law abiding citizens or seize legally owned weapons is an unconstitutional move towards state repression.
I think that an overlooked aspect of our gun violence problem is how it erodes our moral standing to the rest of the world. To the extent we care, and we should care, about how the rest of the world perceives us, perhaps that can speed up a bit the long slog towards a solution.
I pointed this out in a short post i wrote below on Let Me Challenge Your Thinking
Our Domestic Gun Violence Problem and American Power
“Politicians in Washington are in no position to talk about human rights worldwide before getting their own house in order. Hope that the day Americans can live free from gun violence and fear will come sooner rather than later.”
The above is from today’s Twitter feed of Hua Chunying 华春莹, the spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry.
I follow her because she is very adept at pouncing on every American weakness. In fact, if our country ever did an analysis of our Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (a “SWOT” in business school/consulting speak,) her Twitter account would be a good place to start for the Ws and Ts.
As we look inward once again on America’s ugly exceptionalism in gun violence, perhaps it would be helpful to look outward as well. When a massacre occurs, especially one that kills young children, what does the rest of the world think?
They think that for all our wealth, for all our strengths in commerce and technology, for all our freedoms, we cannot keep our children safe. Our inability to address gun control makes us look weak and unserious. And barbaric.
And, as much as I hate to say it, when so many American children die every year from gun violence and we do nothing about it, we look like the worst type of hypocrites when we lecture other countries about human rights violations.
The bottom line is that the mostly Republican fetish for the Second Amendment decreases American power because it decreases our moral standing.
Hua Chunying’s words sting, so I’ll repeat them.
“Politicians in Washington are in no position to talk about human rights worldwide before getting their own house in order. Hope that the day Americans can live free from gun violence and fear will come sooner rather than later.”
Jeff--I've recently become a fan despite being generally conservative. I think your writing is thoughtful and very funny.
A thought for you: the Left's go-to logic on why there should be no "right to revolution" cavalierly dismisses the whole point of the 2nd amendment to many ideological 2A supporters. But it rests on one giant, puzzlingly-never-questioned assumption about a hypothetical American revolution--that the whole military would break on the side of the government “the people” are trying to overthrow. What about America makes you so sure this would be the case? There is no precedent to what a contemporary American revolution would like and, if anything, the safer assumption is that the military would fragment. We have no idea how that would look and the idea that some 300+ well-armed footsoldiers for one side or the other couldn’t make a decisive difference is illogical.
An article explaining the ignorance of guns/gun laws in this article would be longer than this article. This is why democrats will never win the debate.
I think the only way to “solve” the gun violence problem is to first go “whole hog in” on who and where anyone can take a gun. Let anyone and everyone be able to carry a gun anywhere they want. Including but not limited to all Federal buildings, airplanes, casinos, board meetings etc… Take away the security of all the judges and elected officials who constantly talk about gun rights and let them wonder and worry about getting shot and I think most would soon be for anything even repealing the 2nd Amendment.
"Canada has major restrictions that include mostly forbidding carrying a handgun outside the home."
If gun control will lead to us being more like Canada, I'll vote against any gun safety measure anybody proposes! It's not a vote for gun rights, it's a vote against being more like Canada. There's already a country for people who want that. It's called Canada.
That being said, I have never personally known a person outside of active law enforcement who carried a weapon around everywhere that wasn't also an asshole. I'm sure they exist but I haven't run into them.
But I’d add that, putting aside hobbyists and sportsmen, and, of course, criminals, I suspect that most people who own guns do so because they see that the police are of little use in controlling violent crime in anything other than an immediate sense, if they get there in time - in large part due to our apparent societal reluctance to lock violent criminals up for very long, if at all.
Every time some criminal gets shot while invading a home or assaulting someone, I think to myself, “That’s another criminal out of commission for a while. Forever if we’re lucky..”
I'll mention three more sea changes in the US, at least in *my* lifetime: race relations, gay rights, and reduction of sexism.
The latter first: married women couldn't get a credit card in their own names until 1972. And you can read RBG's autobiography to get an idea of what it was like to try to find work as a Columbia Law graduate in 1969. Also, the percent of women working outside the home doubled from 1950 to today (30% --> 60%)
The former: Sorry, but I'm going to start with Obama. There's just no way a Black man would have been elected President in 1970. There's absolutely no way that he would have won NC and VA. For that matter, we elected a Black and Indian VP less than two years ago, and it was Democrats that made most of the noise about her ethnic background.
Support for interracial marriage went from 20% in 1968 to 87% in 2013, and 94% in 2021.
Gay rights -- well, you'd have to be brain dead to not see the difference between the Stonewall era and Obergefell.
My point is that more things change than you think, although none of these changes happened quickly.
Totally agree with this post and, unfortunately, like an article I read recently in the Atlantic said, we got to learn to live with what we have because nothing is going to happen. Hope that you or your loved ones are not in the wrong place at the wrong time. Don't lose your cool in the highway.
The Heller decision was a very narrow decision and anyone that reads Scalia's majority opinion, tip toing through the preamble, can see the precariousness of the 2nd amend. Those that think this is set in stone should notice how Roe is currently being dismantled.
But I agree that there won't be any meaningful change until Heller is reversed. Everyone that owns a gun thinks that They are responsible but restrictions are not made for responsible people.
The gun policy you have suggested is similar to those in a lot of other countries that have proven successful.
UK law is similar to what you proposed; handguns are banned by banning guns below two feet long, but instead of restricting ammunition capacity, we just ban all semi-automatic rifles outright.
You have to do something other than pulling the trigger again to reload. That means that a bolt-action rifle can have a magazine with no legal limit as to size. However, you have to get a licence (a firearms certificate) for each gun, and if you tried to get a licence for a bolt-action with a large-capacity magazine, you'd get refused. If you already own a gun, then applying for a second one will get "why do you need two guns, won't one be enough?", which does a good job of limiting large gun collections.
Shotguns are different; you get a personal licence to own a shotgun (note: pump-action is not a shotgun, this is only for break-open weapons). You can then own an unlimited number of shotguns on one licence. In addition, shotgun licences are much easier to get.
But you need an FAC (a full gun licence) to buy slug ammo for a shotgun; birdshot only on an SGC (which will hurt rather than kill most humans).
Note that we don't have deer in the UK outside of a few protected national forests and so on, so no-one goes out shooting deer.
One lesson from the evidence-based paradigm is to focus on systematic reviews and meta-analyses of a research question instead of individual studies, since one can always cherry pick studies that support preferred policy outcomes. (Even narrative reviews are problematic because it is difficult for the reader to assess author bias; there is also problem of "vote counting" in narrative reviews so every study counts the same as opposed to giving more weight to higher quality studies.)
For gun policy impact evaluations, there is only up to date one systematic review of which I am aware: Smart, Rosanna, et al. 2020. The Science of Gun Policy: A Critical Synthesis of Research Evidence on the Effects of Gun Policies in the United States (2nd ed.). Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. The RAND study used the following inclusion criteria: "we required, at a minimum, that studies include time-series data and use such data to establish that policies preceded their apparent effects (a requirement for a causal effect) and that studies include a control group or comparison group (to demonstrate that the purported causal effect was not found among those who were not exposed to the policy). Experimental designs provide the gold standard for establishing causal effects, but we identified none in our literature reviews (p. 26)."
The RAND team's overall conclusion is consistent with Jeff's take: "Of more than 200 combinations of policies and outcomes, we found that surprisingly few were the subject of methodologically rigorous investigation. …[I]t is apparent that research into five outcomes is either unavailable or almost entirely inconclusive” (p. xxiii). Table 21.1 (pp. 332–335) of the report includes a nice summary of the evidence for 18 types of gun policy and 8 outcomes (e.g., suicide, mass shootings, etc.). The only areas where there was moderate or supportive evidence for (criminal) violence reduction—meaning at least two rigorous studies showing effects—were as follows: (1) Prohibitions associated with domestic violence restraining orders (moderate evidence of decreased intimate partner homicides); (2) Dealer background checks (moderate evidence of decreased firearm homicides); (3) Waiting periods (moderate evidence of decreased total homicides); and (4) Stand-your-ground laws (supportive evidence of increased firearm homicides). For prevention of mass shootings, the evidence was deemed "inconclusive" across the board. (This is partly because it is such a rare event that it is incredibly hard to study).
Of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and some will infer that "gun control does not work" when it is more correct to say, "inconclusive evidence." Still, the evidence to date is pretty underwhelming. My preferred response is to let states continue to experiment with different gun policies (at the margin, since large changes are not feasible) and rigorously evaluate these experiments. Maybe we will discover that something actually works. But we should have realistic expectations.
No one — no one, I say! — has greater admiration than I for your ability to find the most hideously embarrassing and hilarious facts about any person. So I was surprised that you passed by John “the dog ate my research” Lott with only a passing mention. There exists enough material on Mary Rosh to fill more than one Substack article. I hope this oversight will be remedied. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2003/02/01/scholar-invents-fan-to-answer-his-critics/f3ae3f46-68d6-4eee-a65e-1775d45e2133/
This post is nothing more than to say happy Memorial Day Jeff! I look forward to everything you publish, so thanks for that.
FWIW, here is how it goes in France.
You can buy small weapons if you register them at a police station. Police officers can veto the purchase/order you to return the weapons, which they always do if the buyer is a felon. This comes with heavy restrictions on the type of weapons you can use - they can only have up to 3 shots without reloading, for example.
Or you can apply for a broader, five-years licence that includes semi-automatic rifles with larger magazines, but the owner has to be registered in a shooting range (which triggers its own background check) and physically go there a number of times per year. You need to re-apply after five years, and if the licence isn't renewed, you need to surrender the relevant guns or the police will come and take them. You can also sell the guns before the licence expires, which most people do.
This works fairly well: buying a weapon draws enough attention to force criminals into the black market, and if you say you will use a more powerful weapon for sports, you have to prove it and face background checks.
As with so many other issues, a fundamental problem infecting the gun control debate is a complete lack of trust or good faith. On the conservative side of the ledger, there is plenty of willingness to consider at least modest reforms, like magazine capacity restrictions, in isolation, but there is also a profound (and frankly, well-founded) belief that such reforms are merely table-setting for more severe restrictions if not outright mass confiscation.
Take universal background checks as an example. Right now, background checks are already required under most circumstances, with the only meaningful exception (inaccurately referred to as the "gun show loophole") being for intra-state transfers between private persons who are not otherwise in the business of dealing firearms. The steelman case for this exception is someone who inherited their grandfather's hunting equipment and wants to offload it without jumping through a bunch of hoops, because they would otherwise have to involve a licensed federal firearms dealer to run the background check. Now, there's good-faith arguments for and against this exception in a vacuum (how effectively its limits are policed is a separate debate), but in practice, many of the same democrats who push for universal background checks *also* advocate for other restrictions on dealers that would inhibit a private person's ability to loop the dealer in for purposes of conducting the background check, where the sum effect would be to functionally prohibit private firearm sales without ever having to admit that's what they're up to.
Until the democrats can credibly claim that there is no design on ultimately taking away everyone's guns--something they can't do when self-promoting grifters like Beto are treated as serious figures--there's simply not a lot of progress to be made.
Why the 2nd Amendment is necessary
Ukraine 1932/33-Stalin seizes all the grain and 3 million people starve to death. Being caught with a gun=instant execution. Being caught with a bullet=5 years in Siberia.
Ukraine mid-late 1930s-Stalin has “elections”. Everyone has to bring their firearms to the polling place on pain of death. After that, everyone has to wear a pair of government provided shoes to “vote””, b/c Stalin saw a picture of hillbillies voting barefoot in Alabama and said that would never happen in the USSR. Once you “voted”, the candidates were A-commie stooge, and Write in Candidate-Death in Siberia
Ukraine 1988-My uncle visits us in the USA for the first time and A-has his mind blown like a kid seeing his first Penthouse simply by visiting a very average Kroger grocery store and B-tells my dad he needs to check in with the local cops to check his papers.
Ukraine 2022-Same thugs, different name
We can crackdown on background checks and get serious about dealing with loonies, but the fact remains that guns in the hands of law abiding citizens (that means not you Mr. Crip or Mr. Aryan Nation or Mr. Face Tattoo)is a fundamental bulwark against government tyranny and any move to prevent their acquisition by law abiding citizens or seize legally owned weapons is an unconstitutional move towards state repression.
I agree with your post.
I think that an overlooked aspect of our gun violence problem is how it erodes our moral standing to the rest of the world. To the extent we care, and we should care, about how the rest of the world perceives us, perhaps that can speed up a bit the long slog towards a solution.
I pointed this out in a short post i wrote below on Let Me Challenge Your Thinking
Our Domestic Gun Violence Problem and American Power
“Politicians in Washington are in no position to talk about human rights worldwide before getting their own house in order. Hope that the day Americans can live free from gun violence and fear will come sooner rather than later.”
The above is from today’s Twitter feed of Hua Chunying 华春莹, the spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry.
I follow her because she is very adept at pouncing on every American weakness. In fact, if our country ever did an analysis of our Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (a “SWOT” in business school/consulting speak,) her Twitter account would be a good place to start for the Ws and Ts.
As we look inward once again on America’s ugly exceptionalism in gun violence, perhaps it would be helpful to look outward as well. When a massacre occurs, especially one that kills young children, what does the rest of the world think?
They think that for all our wealth, for all our strengths in commerce and technology, for all our freedoms, we cannot keep our children safe. Our inability to address gun control makes us look weak and unserious. And barbaric.
And, as much as I hate to say it, when so many American children die every year from gun violence and we do nothing about it, we look like the worst type of hypocrites when we lecture other countries about human rights violations.
The bottom line is that the mostly Republican fetish for the Second Amendment decreases American power because it decreases our moral standing.
Hua Chunying’s words sting, so I’ll repeat them.
“Politicians in Washington are in no position to talk about human rights worldwide before getting their own house in order. Hope that the day Americans can live free from gun violence and fear will come sooner rather than later.”
The activists on both sides of the gun issue are the same breed of cat as the activists on both sides of the abortion issue
Jeff--I've recently become a fan despite being generally conservative. I think your writing is thoughtful and very funny.
A thought for you: the Left's go-to logic on why there should be no "right to revolution" cavalierly dismisses the whole point of the 2nd amendment to many ideological 2A supporters. But it rests on one giant, puzzlingly-never-questioned assumption about a hypothetical American revolution--that the whole military would break on the side of the government “the people” are trying to overthrow. What about America makes you so sure this would be the case? There is no precedent to what a contemporary American revolution would like and, if anything, the safer assumption is that the military would fragment. We have no idea how that would look and the idea that some 300+ well-armed footsoldiers for one side or the other couldn’t make a decisive difference is illogical.
An article explaining the ignorance of guns/gun laws in this article would be longer than this article. This is why democrats will never win the debate.
I think the only way to “solve” the gun violence problem is to first go “whole hog in” on who and where anyone can take a gun. Let anyone and everyone be able to carry a gun anywhere they want. Including but not limited to all Federal buildings, airplanes, casinos, board meetings etc… Take away the security of all the judges and elected officials who constantly talk about gun rights and let them wonder and worry about getting shot and I think most would soon be for anything even repealing the 2nd Amendment.
"Canada has major restrictions that include mostly forbidding carrying a handgun outside the home."
If gun control will lead to us being more like Canada, I'll vote against any gun safety measure anybody proposes! It's not a vote for gun rights, it's a vote against being more like Canada. There's already a country for people who want that. It's called Canada.
That being said, I have never personally known a person outside of active law enforcement who carried a weapon around everywhere that wasn't also an asshole. I'm sure they exist but I haven't run into them.
I cannot see that Jeff is wrong on this.
But I’d add that, putting aside hobbyists and sportsmen, and, of course, criminals, I suspect that most people who own guns do so because they see that the police are of little use in controlling violent crime in anything other than an immediate sense, if they get there in time - in large part due to our apparent societal reluctance to lock violent criminals up for very long, if at all.
Every time some criminal gets shot while invading a home or assaulting someone, I think to myself, “That’s another criminal out of commission for a while. Forever if we’re lucky..”
I'll mention three more sea changes in the US, at least in *my* lifetime: race relations, gay rights, and reduction of sexism.
The latter first: married women couldn't get a credit card in their own names until 1972. And you can read RBG's autobiography to get an idea of what it was like to try to find work as a Columbia Law graduate in 1969. Also, the percent of women working outside the home doubled from 1950 to today (30% --> 60%)
The former: Sorry, but I'm going to start with Obama. There's just no way a Black man would have been elected President in 1970. There's absolutely no way that he would have won NC and VA. For that matter, we elected a Black and Indian VP less than two years ago, and it was Democrats that made most of the noise about her ethnic background.
Support for interracial marriage went from 20% in 1968 to 87% in 2013, and 94% in 2021.
Gay rights -- well, you'd have to be brain dead to not see the difference between the Stonewall era and Obergefell.
My point is that more things change than you think, although none of these changes happened quickly.
Totally agree with this post and, unfortunately, like an article I read recently in the Atlantic said, we got to learn to live with what we have because nothing is going to happen. Hope that you or your loved ones are not in the wrong place at the wrong time. Don't lose your cool in the highway.
The Heller decision was a very narrow decision and anyone that reads Scalia's majority opinion, tip toing through the preamble, can see the precariousness of the 2nd amend. Those that think this is set in stone should notice how Roe is currently being dismantled.
But I agree that there won't be any meaningful change until Heller is reversed. Everyone that owns a gun thinks that They are responsible but restrictions are not made for responsible people.