The Only Winning Move

This study - summarized at Cognitive Daily - seems tailor-made for the gun control crowd.

It goes like this. Participants were told that they were taking part in a taste sensitivity study. This enabled researchers to take a pre-experiment saliva sample (to get the participant’s “resting” testosterone level). Participants were then divided into two groups. Members of one group were given a game of “Mousetrap” and asked to write instructions on how to assemble it; members of the other group were instead asked to write instructions on how to assemble a pellet gun that happens to be a pretty realistic model of an actual model of for-self-defense-and-insurrection handgun.

Any old boob can see where this is going.

Next phase: after completing the instructions, participants gave another saliva sample, and were given a drink of water mixed with hotsauce and asked some dummy questions about how it tastes, or some such. Then they were invited to make a mixture for the next guy.

Here are the shocking results. The people who wrote the assembly instructions for the (model) weapon had MUCH HIGHER TESTOSTERONE LEVELS in their second saliva sample than the other dudes. NOT ONLY THAT - but they put over THREE TIMES AS MUCH hotsauce in the mixture “for the next guy” as the dudes who wrote the Mousetrap instructions.

So it’s an open-and-shut case folks. Handling gunz - even fake onez - turns men into aggressive killing machines.

Where to begin? Um - I think first and foremost we should point out what’s scientifically lacking here. Pellet guns are not real guns, but unfortunately no control seems to have been done for experience handling firearms. Presumably, people who know what’s what won’t get much of a testosterone rush from building a fake gun. In fact, there’s reason to expect that people who handle real guns all the time won’t get much rush from building even a real gun. That is, I’m willing to bet that the real operative variable here is “weapon-of-any-kind + novelty” rather than “gun + boy.” And indeed, it doesn’t seem to bother anyone in the comments section at Cognitive Daily that the only people asked to participate were men. The study seems to want to conclude that this is an effect “in men,” but of course we don’t know that at all without including women. More to the point, there are any number of other testosterone-inducing situations that could’ve been tested for here. For example, I guess that playing football, watching UFC, or looking at Playboy would’ve done just as nicely as building a model gun. For that matter, they could’ve put the different groups into driving simulators - one of which is smooth sailing, one of which is full of simulated jackasses who cut you off, slam on the brakes just in time to keep you from making the light, go way below the speed limit - in general drive like Hoosiers. But of course, no one is testing for that. They decided that they wanted to focus on putting gunz together, and just pulled Mousetrap (of all things!) right out of their asses as a barely-plausible comparison. They haven’t even gone to the trouble of having a third group build a model tank or set up a battlefield of miniatures to make sure they’re really onto something.

It’s not that I don’t think this kind of social psychology research is useful, it’s more that I disapprove of experiments that are designed, out-of-the-bag, to stoke people’s political prejudices. I don’t think anyone will consider it a leap if I say we can expect to see this one show up in the Brady Campaign’s talking points by the end of the month.

Of all the objections I raised above, what people in particular need to test before citing this as evidence that the mere presence of a gun in their hands turns men into slobbering cavemen is whether people who have real experience with guns exhibit the same reaction. I have little experience with guns, for example, and so they scare me to death, and that’s why I enjoy shooting them so much: because it’s the same kind of thrill you get from a roller coaster. But to someone who shoots regularly as a kind of hobby, it’s hard to imagine that the same sort of reaction will obtain. These people get comfortable with guns and focus more on the target-shooting aspect than the “make loud noise go BOOM!” part. If in fact experience with guns mitigates the testosterone effect, then obviously the policy consequences will be quite different. It would be a good argument for, to cite one example, a program that I support: required “gun education” classes in public high school.

The main thing that I take away from this, though, is that it’s a nice example of the well-documented bias against guns. Though it seems plausible that handling any kind of weapon would increase a participant’s testosterone levels, there doesn’t seem to be much motivation to design analogous experiements involving, say, handling swords, knives, or even darts. Beating a punching bag with a face on it might have more of an effect than beating a plain punching bag, or a bag of salt. Playing whack-a-mole with illustrated poles more than plain-colored poles.  ET CETERA. Point being, it’s pretty sketchy to pick on guns exclusively. I don’t think I go too far in speculating that the person who designed this experiment is interested neither in what associations trigger aggressive behavior nor in public safety per se. He’s just a Michael Moore fan finding a way to work his hobby into his job.

Peter Layde’s study on the effectiveness of background checks in preventing gun homicide and suicide deaths has been getting some attention from the press recently. Probably that’s because they like its findings: states that use local background checks in addition to the mandated federal and optional state-level checks for handgun purchases show significantly lower overall rates of firearm homicide and suicide. In short, performing background checks at the local level seems to be effective - which one might expect, considering that local agencies tend to have access to more information about individuals than federal and state-level agencies do.

OK - here comes my parade of objections. First, the study itself fails to find a significant effect on the gun homicide rate. The trend is still there, but it isn’t larger than the confidence intervals, meaning that it could be a coincidence for all we know. By contrast, it’s pretty clear that local background checks are effective at reducing the gun suicide rate. Why the disparity?

The greater reduction observed in firearm suicide rates compared to firearm homicide rates is consistent with the belief that more people who commit homicide obtain their guns from nonfederally licensed dealers compared to those who commit suicide.

That certainly makes sense - and it’s one of bases for my objection to gun control schemes in the first place. People who are going to use guns to murder aren’t likely to jump through the government’s hoops to get them and so slip out of our controls anyway. Gun control schemes don’t actually prevent gun crime. What they mostly do is give the government license to harass those gunowners who were never going to be a danger to anyone.

Now - what about the reduction in the gun suicide rate? Isn’t that a plus? Well, maybe. But it’s relevant to ask (and the paper does not ask) whether there is an accompanying reduction in the overall suicide rate. After all, there is really nothing gained if a person a background check prevents killing himself with a gun turns around and accomplishes the feat with pills instead. Or is there? Here’s where the paper gets a bit silly:

Individuals who attempt suicide with a firearm are far more successful than individuals who attempt suicide by other means. Suicide attempted by firearm is also associated with markedly increased financial burdens on patients and healthcare systems compared to suicide attempted by other means.

The first point is silly because, as noted, the paper doesn’t bother to assess whether the overall suicide success rate in the states that do local background checks is lower. It might simply be that guns are the weapon of choice for people who are serious about killing themselves, and people who merely want attention take pills instead and intentionally botch the job. Obviously, keeping people who are serious about killing themselves away from guns isn’t going to do any good: such people will find a way to accomplish their goal with the tools at hand one way or another. The study could have tested this pretty easily by (a) first comparing the suicide rates between states that do local-level background checks for gun purchases and those that use state- or federal-level checks, and then, if the rates were found to be the same, (b) checking to see whether other methods were “more effective” in these states to a degree comensurate with the discrepancy in the gun suicide rate. I strongly suspect they would find that sleeping pills are mysteriously more effective as a suicide method in places like North Carolina and Michigan than they are in Louisiana and Texas. The second point about the expense of (presumably failed) firearm suicide attempts seems unlikely to be very persuasive when we take a more global view of the problem. No doubt it’s true that a botched job with a firearm is more expensive than a botched job with pills - but I suspect that what’s even more expensive overall than that are the cases of people who <i>repeatedly</i> attempt and “fail” at suicide by taking pills. If guns are really more effective, as this study claims, then taking them away from people who are bent on killing themselves in any event is only going to run up higher bills as they botch successive jobs with less-effective tools and have to spend the time between attempts in institutions at taxpayer expense. That’s not an argument against intervention in such cases, by the way, it’s merely my way of pointing out that “expense” is something the authors of this study are almost certainly only concerned with if it feeds arguments for gun control.

The line that brings the whole house of cards down, though, is this one:

It would have been ideal to conduct a longitudinal analysis in which the states that experienced changes in the level of their background checks were compared to themselves, pre- and post-change. However, since 1999, only Arizona, Vermont and South Carolina have switched bacground-check levels in the time periods for which data are available.

I would go a bit further than that and say that a longitudinal study is crucial to this conclusion. A quick look at their data map shows why:

There are a lot of “outlier” states that concern me. For example, look at Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, all of which have unusually low homicide rates. It’s probably no coincidence that they’re all next to each other in the same region of the country. No doubt there is a demographic explanation for the low homicide rates. By not controlling for this by looking at longitudinal data, we’re introducing this demographic variable, whatever it is, into the national data and obscuring our conclusion. More importantly, there is no way to decisively establish causation with apparent-time data. We can note that states that do local background checks tend to have lower gun homicide rates, but until we actually see the homicide rate consistently drop in states that add local background checks (or consistently rise in states that cease doing local background checks), we have absolutely no basis for saying that there is any kind of causal relationship between the local checks and the lower homicide rates.

I’m actually not a priori hostile to the study’s conclusions. Quite the contrary - while it’s pretty clear to me that the aim of the study is to provide an excuse for the well-documented failure of the Brady federally-mandated background check scheme for handgun purchases, I think this study is likely to backfire on the authors’ overall political agenda. That’s because, if true, its findings provide strong support for the idea of getting the federal government out of the regulation process as much as possible - since this would become a well-documented instance of local governments being up to a task that the federal government was not. The inherent danger for libertarian values comes in the form of the reason the authors offer for the success of local background checks: namely that local authorities have access to more information than federal authorities. So there is a real danger here that this kind of a result could be used for pushing through more sweeping PATRIOT-type legislation mandating information-sharing between the local and federal levels of government. NOT COOL. Granted, such information-sharing would, if this study is to be believed, prevent a handful of homicides and suicides every year. But is that really worth the price we’d pay in civil liberties in terms of letting the entire national government structure have access to all of our private records? Pretty obviously, it is not.

Indeed, I think a lot of arguments for gun control schemes are flawed on exaclty this ground. Gun control advocates are in general pretty good at demonstrating that their programs will result in immediate narrow benefits on the gun homicide rate. What they’re not so good at doing is allaying fears that they’ve addressed the possible side-effects of such programs as well. Consdier, for example, the present case. Supposedly, local background checks actually do have an effect on the homicide and suicide rates. Ok, for the sake of argument, let’s pretend that this is true (though, as the preceding discussion should make clear, I’m not actually convinced). No doubt the next step would be to claim that if background checks were effective, then surely a ban would also be effective. After all, some studies have shown that government bans on handguns drastically increase their prices on the black market (as would be expected in a situation where there aren’t gun shops around to conveniently rob for your supply, etc.), leading to a lower overall possession rate even among the criminal classes. Fine - no doubt that’s true. But equally true is that an unarmed population is much more likely to fall victim to other violent crimes. So great - gun control will reduce the overall gun homicide rate, and that looks really good on paper for the crime statistics. But it’s all totally pointless if the reduction in the gun homicide rate is accompanied by a much larger rise in assaults, muggings, robberies and rapes! The trouble with a lot of gun control advocates is that they look at numbers only for the gun-associated crime rates and assume that if they can get those to go down, they’ve done the world a service. But obviously the rest of us are worried about the crime rate in general. We’re not fetishistic about guns: we’re only interested in crime-prevention programs that work and that don’t unduly violate our rights and liberties. Gun homicide is exceedingly rare. Your chances of being shot are basically nonexistent, even in the crime centers of the country like Miami and Detroit. Your chances of being mugged, raped, or having your house broken into are considerably higher. So the tradeoff is clear. A handful of gun homicides each year are preferable to a drastic increase in the rates of these other already-too-common-but-no-less-violent crimes. Notice that this is the essential problem with this survey as well. It’s reported a lot on reductions in the number of gun-related homicides and gun-related suicides, but it’s give us no evidence whatever that reducing the rates of gun-homicides and suicides results in an overall reduction in homicides and suicides. I, for one, am completely unwilling to give up my constitutional right to bear arms to achieve a reduction in the homicide rate that no one has bothered to check actually exists! So give these people an E for effort, but a D on the actual assignment for failure to conclusively prove the point.

Well, well. You know all those arguments that legalizing prostitution would lead to some kind of explosion in the rates? Not true in New Zealand, where “a comparison between the number of sex workers in Christchurch in 1999, before decriminalisation, and 2006 - after the act was passed - showed the total had stayed about the same.”

More goodies:

Before the act, the illicit status of the industry meant workers were open to coercion and exploitation by managers, pimps and clients. Research indicated there had been “some improvement” in employment conditions “but this is by no means universal”.

In other words, laws banning prostitution actually work against prostitutes by making them complicit in the “crime.” They are reluctant to go to the police with abuses for fear of arrest. Who knew?

Not to mention - sex work isn’t all (or even mostly, or even at all in many cases) about exploitation.

Around 93 per cent of sex workers cited money as the reason for getting into and staying in the sex industry.

“The most significant barriers to exiting are loss of income, reluctance to lose the flexible working hours available in the sex industry and the camaraderie and sense of belonging that some sex workers describe.”

So sex work is a good part-time job, actually. That’s backed up by this UChicago working paper, which reports that prostitutes in Chicago work an average of 13 hours a week for $26-31/hour. Better money than most of these women can earn anywhere, with flexible hours. One of the women in the study, in fact (the one with a pimp) was earning more like $50/hour for about 12 hours a week.

Is there any reason at all why this should be illegal? Oh, right, the danger of violence. Certainly that comes with the territory, but making anything against the law guarantees it will be more dangerous. Again from the New Zealand article:

More than 60 per cent felt they were more able to refuse to provide commercial sexual services to a particular client since the enactment of the law.

Other findings included that the majority of sex workers felt the act could do little about violence that occurred, although a significant majority felt there had been an improvement since the passing of the act.

So violence remains a problem, but sex workers now feel more in control of the situation. A step in the right direction rather than a panacea, in other words - exactly what one might expect.

I realize that New Zealand is a demographic outlier in the world and that its experiences with policy implementation can’t be taken as definitive for that reason. But these results are just intuitive; there is no reason to believe the situation after decriminalization or (better still) legalization in the US would be any different. Let’s legalize it already.

Today’s example of government bullying gun owners comes from Toronto, where the mayor is on a mission from God to ban guns everywhere. In this case, he’s managed to seize a law-abiding citizen’s gun stash on the premise that the guns were “improperly stored.”

Now how, one wonders, do the police know that guns being kept in a private home were “improperly stored?” The article doesn’t say, but let me hazzard a guess. The article notes that the man in question is a licensed gun collector, and the police seized 125 legal guns in the raid. Probably they used the country’s national gun registry - which is routinely available to local police through an online interface, identified all the people in Toronto who own more guns than the mayor thinks they should have, and have started systematically harassing them. This is, of course, a testable hypothesis that will be confirmed if and when we see an upsurge in news reports from Toronto of similar types of raids.

Now check out some of the quotes from the article:

“This area is a very good neighbourhood. We don’t normally come across guns or drugs or violence in this area. It’s just overwhelming to hear about this,” a local resident named Stephan said.

Why is it “overwhelming” to learn that someone in an affluent neighborhood with no history of crime or violence is a (organ blast) gun collector? I would have thought that was a perfectly ordinary rich-guy hobby, even in Canada. Note the automatic assumption that any gun ownership will invariably be tied to drugs or gang violence. It just ain’t the case, kiddo, so you can leave your prejudice at the door. Quite the contrary, most owners of legal guns are responsible citizens, likely to be your best friends in any emergency where the police don’t arrive in time.

“I can’t believe this is going on in our area,” another neighbour, Lianne Ottaway said. “This is such an incredible area and it’s where we choose to live, and I don’t like to hear this kind of thing.”

What, exactly, is “going on” in your area that you “can’t believe?” Gun collection? Gee, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say someone in your neighborhood has a knife collection too. Wanna panic for me a second time, then?

Nowhere in the article is it mentioned that the neighbors have ever had a problem with this “shocking” man down the street. No one is quoted as having been in an altercation with him, been threatened by him, or in any way having been made uncomfortable by him. This is a classic example of the magic word “gun” turning otherwise rational humans into community standards vigilantes.

If there’s anything that’s “overwhelming” here, it’s the irrationality of the prejudice against guns and gun owners. We’re talking about what is almost certainly an abuse of police power by a mayor who is overstepping his authority in conducting a public crusade to enforce his personal preferences (as opposed to the actual law). Rather than worry about that clear threat to their safety, civil liberties and well-being by this kind of abuse, residents choose to vilify a man they have no reason to believe is involved in any criminal activity at all, let alone gang and drug violence.

The lesson for us in these United States is clear: JUST SAY NO to any proposed gun registry this side of the border (and if Obama is president, you can bet there will be such a proposal). If the Canadian experience is any guide, the police WILL abuse such a thing, and your neighbors will turn a blind eye when they come for you.

Telling statistics on the effects of gun control. There are now more guns in Australia than before Port Arthur, at least in Western Australia. There were 270,371 registered guns before the 1996 massacre, now there are 282,853. Possible mitigating factor: they’re owned by a smaller number of people (112,620 in 1996, 77,895 now). Still, gun control advocates are using this as an excuse to claim that the post-1996 policies have failed and need to be toughened.

The lesson they need to take instead, of course, is that such policies are absurd to begin with. What is the possible utility in reducing gun ownership among law-abiding citizens? Martin Bryant (the Port Arthur shooter) was NOT in possession of legal guns as he didn’t have a license for the guns he used - had in fact been denied purchase of a gun earlier on the grounds that he didn’t have one. So one of two things about him is true. Either the existing Australian laws at the time would have prevented him from obtaining his AR-15 and L1A1 SLR he used had they been faithfully enforced, or Bryant would have gotten the guns illegally on the black market and gone on his rampage anyway. Details about the case are guarded (leading to the inevitable spate of conspiracy theories), so we don’t really know. But it’s pretty clear from what we do know that Bryant’s rampage was premeditated. This wasn’t the standard media bogeyman case of someone snapping, buying a gun, and running amok. So the enaction of draconian restrictions in the wake of Port Arthur seems unlikely to have had much of an effect in any case. A more rational response would’ve been a call for stricter enforcement of existing laws.

What do the numbers say? Is Australia safer?

Well, maybe. Certainly the number of violent incidents involving guns are down. But there’s a huge caveat here: they were probably on their way down anyway. Have a look at the government numbers on the subject and you’ll see what I mean. For the period 1991 to 2001 (which the survey covers), there is a notable downward trend of gun violence period. The magical year 1996 doesn’t really stand out. Furthermore, as with anywhere else:

Academics and police agree that the vast majority of gunrelated crime is committed with unregistered firearms by people not licensed to carry guns. They also concede that the black market does not appear to have been affected by the stricter rules on gun ownership. In Victoria alone, thousands of illegal firearms are destroyed each year.

So as usual, law-abiding citizens have their guns registered and regulated to appease the public, even though this isn’t the demographic that’s the problem. No criminal worth his salt uses a legally-purchased firearm to commit a crime.

And of course there’s the usual silliness of mistaking a drop in the gun crimes rate for a drop in the crime rate. From the same source:

Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that despite an overall increase in the number of armed robberies, those committed with a firearm have declined. In 1993, 1983 armed robberies involved firearms, compared with 1328 in 2000.

So even though there are fewer armed robberies with guns, there are more armed robberies. When criminals don’t use guns, they use other kinds of weapons. Who knew?

And the police get to have their fun even though everyone knows there’s no point:

Despite the reduction in gunrelated crime, Victoria Police will begin a new inspection regime from July 1. There will be random checks on 10 per cent of firearm storage locations across the state as a further safety measure.

In ohter words, if there’s a massacre at Port Arthur, the government will use it as an excuse to bully gun owners. And if there isn’t a massacre - if, in fact, there is an overall reduction in gun crime, the government will use it as an excuse to bully gun owners.

So let’s sum this up. In 1996, in the middle of a general downward trend in gun violence, a crazed, unlicensed gun owner walks into Port Arthur, kills 37 people and blows up a building. The public panics, so the government enacts a bunch of gun legislation. The downward trend in gun violence that was already underway continues as if nothing had happened, but the government gets to spend $320million anyway in a  buyback program to separate people hugely unlikely to commit crimes from their mostly legally-obtained guns. Meanwhile, violent crime in general increases in Australia, notably the kind of crime like armed robbery that is likely to be deterred by general gun ownership (criminals don’t generally attack people who will shoot back). And, just like everywhere else in the world, nearly 100% of gun crimes in Australia were then and are now committed with guns that are outside government control in any case because they were purchased on the black market.  10 years pass, and even with the new restrictions in place, gun ownership starts to rise again, rendering the “point,” to the extent there ever was one, moot in any case.

Does anyone see in any of this an effective argument for gun control? Didn’t think so.