A modest proposal on gun control

A modest proposal for gun control.

There are very few consumer products that, when used as designed and intended, shorten or terminate human life.  Cigarettes are one.  There is a societal cost to cigarettes; every time a person inhales from one, society pays a price—the price is very diffuse, in minute fractions of years lived by inhalers of secondhand smoke.  This cost is very hard to measure, but real.  Society also pays by dealing with the expenses incurred by the diseases associated with long-term cigarette use.  Society gets some compensation for these costs from cigarette users, in the form of heavy taxes imposed on the sale of cigarettes.  Society also discourages further cigarette use with various advertising campaigns, and more recently, unofficial forces such as scorn and inconvenience.

Two more products that, when used as designed and intended, shorten or terminate human life are handguns and semiautomatic rifles (“assault rifles”).  The societal cost of these consumer products is far more obvious than the cost of cigarettes, and per unit sold, these products do far more damage.  Despite what the gun-makers’ lobby says about good guys with guns, there are numerous studies that indicate that more guns has the societal effect of more deaths and injuries from guns.  The coefficient of the relationship has not been exactly defined, and varies regionally, but the relationship can’t really be honestly challenged.  And, while cigarettes harm society at large but most severely harm their users, guns—especially assault rifles—cause far more harm to society at large (though the numbers are inexact, gun suicides account for something like half of gun fatalities).

The use of cigarettes harms society; society exacts some compensation from cigarette users.  The use of handguns and assault rifles harms society; yet there is no equivalent penalty on the purchase of these guns.  The price, as noted is gory, agonizing, traumatizing, and can upend lives in a way that cigarettes cannot.

There are various estimates for the number of excess deaths caused each year by handguns and assault rifles.  Let us take the lowest of these estimates.  There are a certain number of handguns and assault rifles purchased each year.  Let us divide one by the other, to figure out the fractional number of deaths caused per year, on average, by such a weapon.  Let us convert that into a probability—a probability of drawing a ticket in a lottery by which society claws something back.  On purchasing such a weapon, the buyer is automatically entered into this lottery.  If the buyer’s number comes up—such an unlikely thing!, the gun advocate says—but inevitable, the gun control advocate says—then, at some time that year, seemingly at random, someone near and dear to the gun purchaser, a child, a spouse, a favorite uncle, will be shot and maimed or killed.

“This is so unfair!  The dear person did nothing wrong!  You are a monster for suggesting such a thing!” I hear you say.  Granted, it imposes some punishment on an innocent, but so does the gun purchaser anyway; the 17 who died this week in Florida, the concert goers in Vegas, the students just over the hill from me at Umpqua Community College, were equally innocent and undeserving.  But, I didn’t mention the other price that the handguns and assault rifles impose on society—the tearing of societal fabric, the lasting trauma, the anger and hurt and pain that reverberates through a community for years afterwards.  It’s hard to put a dollar valuation on that cost to society, and hard to extract that from the person buying the weapon.  So, payment in kind.  It may, have some deterrent effect on such purchases as well.

We are in a state where it is increasingly difficult to deny that the violent, terrorized deaths of children are the price that society pays for the freedom to have guns.  I have even seen words to that effect from those that advocate for unrestricted access to guns.  So, fine; they can maintain that right.  All I ask is that those who want to exercise that right pay their fair share of the price.