John Davenport has a piece on gun violence and gun regulation in Salon, “An endless arms race: How to fight the NRA’s absurd solution to mass shootings.”
As we celebrated Independence Day, there was no independence from the scourge of gun violence and the toll it is taking on the American psyche. The shooter who attacked a parade in Highland Park, Illinois, killing six people and wounding at least 38 others, used a “high-powered rifle,” according to authorities. Survivors report a rain of bullets at the height of the attack.
This attack is bound to renew calls for more “red flag” laws that would help identify and disarm emotionally or mentally unstable persons who are making threats of gun violence or praising mass murderers. But would the Highland Park shooter’s online record of participating in “death fetish” culture sites and making art featuring mass killing have been enough for a judge to order seizure of his guns?
Policy of Truth 
I agree with 99% of that, except the tactical strategy at the very end:
In general, I don’t think public campaigns based on the appeal to scorn are a good idea, or a winning strategy. There’s too much of a danger there of poisoning the well, and consequently, of making rational discourse on the subject impossible.
I think political philosophers and social scientists could set themselves a more constructive task: to contest the age-old idea, expressed in Aristotle but more adamantly by Machiavelli, that an armed populace is the key to civil security. I don’t know whether or not the American Founders got this idea from him, but the affinity is there. There may be special circumstances in which the thesis is true, but it’s not obviously true in low-trust societies, like ours. Nor is it likely to be true if the sale and purchase of weapons is unregulated or loosely regulated. Even Machiavelli, who spends dozens of pages defending it, abruptly dials back the idea near the end of his Discourses. (I don’t have it here but can get the citation if anyone wants it.)
It’s worth noting that enthusiasts for gun rights have “taken the offensive” by noting that the very people who defend gun control (like John) have been enthusiastic about arming the Ukrainian population against the Russian invasion (presumably like John). Wouldn’t the Russians have been ever more deterred if all Ukrainians were armed? This is supposed to draw attention to an inconsistency in the case for gun control, and to some extent, it does.
But I think it’s worth posing a question to both sides about this interestingly instructive case study: what real evidence is there that arming the Ukrainian general population has had any deterrent effect on the Russians whatsoever? What strategic gains have made as a result giving ordinary people small arms in Ukraine? I think the answer is: close to none. If anything, arming Ukrainian ordinary civilians has induced the Russians to attack more ordinary Ukrainian civilians than they otherwise might have done. It has done nothing to drive the Russians out. Nor would arming more of the general population do much more. It is very far from clear that Ukraine is Exhibit A for either side here. It neither helps those in favor of “arming the population” generally, nor those who think that specifically arming the Ukrainian population has been a stroke of tactical genius. I think it’s highly likely that the Ukrainian case shows that they’re both wrong, and that a pox might legitimately be declared on both houses–the House of “Let’s Arm Everyone!” as well as the House of the “Let’s Not Arm Everyone–Except the Ukrainians.” In many, many cases, arming everyone just seems a recipe for making everyone a threat to everyone.
Second, we have to start asking questions about the risks that we expect police officers and the like to incur in situations of lethal danger. This issue arose both in Uvalde and in Parkland. Long-time readers of this blog know that I’ve championed the cause of Scot Peterson, the sheriff’s deputy widely accused of “cowardice” and eventually arrested for “child abuse” for his failure to rush into the building where the Parkland shooting was taking place. I happen to believe that Peterson did not in fact know that the shooter was in that building, and in any case, could not have prevented the shooting from taking place even if he had rushed in at the moment when he got to the vicinity of the building. I also think that the charges of “cowardice” made against him are cheap demagoguery, and the charge of “child abuse” an act of prosecutorial malfeasance.
But the deeper underlying issue here is whether we expect police officers and other security officials to incur suicidal risks in confronting gunmen. There is a widespread belief to the effect that doing so is “part of their job.” I don’t believe so. Police officers have a moral responsibility to protect those under threat, but they also properly have the discretion to act in such a way as to protect themselves, even in cases where doing so means that the innocent might go harmed. They have no obligation to commit suicide or even approximate that for anyone, including innocent victims of violent aggression. There are moral limits on what can be asked of anyone, including an armed security guard or police officer. That fact, if it is one, bolsters the claims you (John) make in the article. The point is not simply that armed guards cannot be everywhere to protect everyone, but that one can’t expect the ones that are on the scene to incur literally any risk to protect the innocent. If so, the cliche that “good guys with guns” can stop “bad guys with guns” is even more dubious than your article suggests. Sometimes they do, but mostly they can’t.
Third, I think it’s time to tie the case for regulating guns more explicitly to the case for regulating large motor vehicles, e.g., SUVs, pickups, and the like. I take a dim view of the enthusiasm that people in this country feel for firearms, but I feel more outrage at the enthusiasm they have for large vehicles, and the vehicular arms race that’s arisen as a result. Though gun violence is more spectacular than motor vehicle accidents, the more ubiquitously dangerous arms race we face comes from the insane proliferation of larger and larger vehicles on the road, less so from guns. People drive these vehicles not because they have large objects to haul (that necessitate large vehicles), but simply because they can afford them and feel safer in them. The explicit rationale is that the more steel there is between you and everyone else, the higher the likelihood that you will survive a crash with the modal vehicle. The unspoken implication is: the higher the likelihood that others will die.
The social costs of traffic accidents far exceed those of gun violence (bad as the latter is). The case for regulating guns is related to the case for regulating vehicles. That, it seems to me, is the right way to convince those on the fence about the need for increased weapons regulation. People generally accept the need to regulate the purchase and use of motor vehicles. That’s the template for arguments in favor of regulations on weapons, and also the template for more regulations on motor vehicles to the extent that they’ve come to resemble weapons.
The locus classicus of the case against SUVs is this paper by Douglas Husak:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23562447?seq=1
I don’t agree with all the details of Husak’s argument, but I agree with the basic gist.
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In fact, this has already happened for firearms. Gun owners are already the targets of hostile propaganda campaigns of the type Mr. Davenport advocates – he’s asking for gasoline to be thrown on a raging fire. As a result any attempts to restrict the possession and legitimate use of firearms, however innocuous they seem to you, are rejected out of hand and treated as proof of malign intent.
Ours is, in fact, a high-trust society in general; there are places within it that aren’t, but these are rare exceptions. Remember that the main way to distinguish high- from low-trust societies is assumptions their members make about strangers. In the USA, and Western nations generally, people assume that a random stranger will deal honestly with them and give help when asked for it, and will do so themselves. In a low-trust society the exact contrary is assumed – there a random stranger is presumptively a liar and cheat. Only those one is already related to are expected to be honest or generous, and only they will receive such treatment.
Aristotle (probably) and Machiavelli (certainly) were thinking of security against foreign invasions, not internal disputes turning violent. The American Founders did think of internal disputes, but the the danger they feared was the State being taken over by one among several factions for the purpose of using violence against the others – and against that, an armed populace is an effective deterrent.
We will never know the answer to this, because the Ukrainians were not an armed population at the time when Putin could have been deterred – which was when he decided to start his “special operation”. Deterrence occurs, after all, when a commander decides not to do something for fear of the enemy’s response.
As for whether arming the population has had any tactical effect: as far as I can tell, the Ukrainian population’s effective hostility towards the Russian invaders was a major reason why the Russians switched from their initial tactics of eliminating Ukraine’s political cadre by blitzkrieg attacks to their current (and traditional) methods of advancing by inches behind massed artillery barrages. Bombarding the land one wants to take until it’s reduced to rubble is incredibly destructive, but it does have the advantage of being nearly immune to partisans with only small arms.
Thing is, to protect a disarmed population, you practically must demand that police officers risk their lives to protect the people, because those people are explicitly not allowed to protect themselves. A policy that the ordinary person must tamely allow himself to be assaulted, even to the point of murder, because the police who alone can defend him chose not to risk themselves, is intolerable (and will not be long tolerated.) Either the police must be compelled to incur suicidal risks to defend the innocent, or the innocent must be allowed to defend themselves: take your choice and accept the consequences.
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As I say, I don’t agree with John’s idea that we should heap scorn on gun owners. But I’m also unsympathetic to the whining of gun owners themselves about the reception they’re getting from defenders of gun control. They’re getting scorn; their victims are getting bullets and being put in the grave. Gun owners are also directing their fair share of scorn at us. A rhetorical arms race isn’t much more edifying than a literal one, but neither side is innocent in that respect.
As for trust, the pockets of low trust whose existence you admit are more than enough to be a generalized problem. If there are enough of them, and easy enough to get firearms to them, they become chronic pockets of low-level civil war. But there are many other measures of low trust in a society besides how it treats strangers. Motor vehicle crashes and deaths are on the rise, as are pedestrian collisions and deaths. That suggests that people can’t be trusted to drive with any care, even when lives are on the line. Crime rates are a mixed bag, but are going up along some dimensions in many places, and though generally on the decline, were always at a high baseline. Political polarization is an acknowledged problem, and indicative of mistrust, both of government and among citizens themselves. Low vaccination rates are indicative of a different kind of mistrust: Americans don’t trust the public health authorities, even when millions of lives are at stake. The proliferation of COVID-19 fraud is hardly indicative of a high trust society. Almost everyone I know has been on the receiving end of one. Virtually every unknown phone call one receives on one’s cell phone is presumptively regarded (by prudent people) as an act of fraud. That doesn’t seem like the hallmark of a high trust society.
And the hostility to immigrants hardly suggests that strangers are widely trusted. The common (and ridiculous) equation of “undocumented alien” with “criminal” flies in the face of.your suggestion.
On Machiavelli:
There’s no effective way to make this distinction in Machiavelli. Machiavelli draws no sharp distinction between one territory and another; everything is always up for grabs. Since any territory can be annexed to one’s existing territory, there’s no sharp distinction to be drawn between “foreign invasions” and “internal disputes.” If I annex a place, X, and arm its population, I am simultaneously arming that population against territories outside of X as well as for internal disputes within X. Since Machiavelli regards the “acquire and annex” endeavor as a game without end, the blurring of your distinction is an essential feature of his thought.
But even if we could draw it, what difference would it make? Suppose I rule a single, well-defined territory. I arm my subjects or citizens to ward off foreign attack. The fact remains that if they are all armed, they can still use those arms against one another (or me). Suppose they do. Now I have a different problem on my hands. The more intensely violent the problem, the less relevant the original reason for arming them. I may originally have armed them to ward off a hypothetical foreign invader, but if they now decide to unleash a violent crime wave, or foment a civil war, or engage in a string of assassinations, I’ve warded off a hypothetical threat by creating an actual one. After going on and on about arming the population, and criticizing the ruler who fails to do it, it finally dawns on Machiavelli at the tail-end of Discourses III.30 that, well, it can in fact be dangerous to arm the people in an indiscriminate manner. In other words, the ardent defender of “arming the people” ends up being the advocate of a highly selective policy of domestic arms control. Yet Machiavelli is famous not for his advocacy of arms control, but for his advocacy of arming the population. He’s smart enough to see that the one won’t work without the other, but that hasn’t persuaded his latter-day followers.
On Ukraine: if “we will never know” the answer to the question I posed, we obviously cannot use Ukraine as Exhibit A of the necessity of arming the general population to ward off an invasion. So my point stands. In fact, the United States has been arming the Ukrainians (including its militias–including its neo-Nazi militias) since 2014. So it’s not true that Ukraine was “not an armed population” before February 2022.
As for the Russians’ supposed “switch,” it’s purely a speculation on your part, and typical of virtually all speculations about Russian military strategy in Ukraine. The assumption is that the Russians wanted to do what the speaker would have done if he were a Russian commander. Since the Russians “failed” at this would-be task, they “switched” to some other strategy. I so far have no seen a single credible argument of this form, and the reason is simple: no one actually knows what the Russians were trying to do. They didn’t take Kyiv. Did they actually want to take Kyiv and fail? Or did they never want to take it at all? Many people pretend to know, but no one actually knows. If you claim to know, it becomes easy to say that Ukrainian resistance deterred the Russians from taking Kyiv. You could just as easily say that Ukrainian resistance induced the Russians to kill a lot of Ukrainian civilians just for the fun of it without ever having an intention of taking Kyiv.
I am not convinced that the Russians ever wanted to conquer the whole of Ukraine. What they did was encircle Kyiv and give the appearance of wanting to take it. That doesn’t mean they wanted to take it, and doesn’t mean that a bunch of ill-trained, half-armed Ukrainians stopped them from taking it. Nor does it generally mean that if you permit small arms to proliferate in a population of ill-trained, half-assed yahoos, you will somehow deter an invasion of your country. No professional army intent on invading a territory has much to fear from such a “threat.”
If anything, what the Russians are now doing in eastern Ukraine is Exhibit A for the nonsensicality of the idea that an armed general population can do anything against a determined professional military. The Azov Brigade didn’t deter the Russians from trying to take Mariupol, and hasn’t stopped them from taking it, either. No one can say that the Azov Brigade wasn’t armed prior to February 2022. They were armed far more heavily than any “citizen army” equipped with small arms. The Russians wanted Mariupol, and took it. It’s that simple. The deterrent effect of the vaunted “armed population” was zero. The casualties to Ukrainian civilians were high. The suffering of the civilian population is now intense. All of this was predictable to anyone except the partisans of an “armed population against foreign invaders” (as well as the partisans of a proxy war in Ukraine).
Correct. I’ve said from Day 1 that destruction is what the Russians were after. But if they were, where does that leave the partisans of “arming the general population to resist the Russians”?
Finally, as to your point about the police: Neither Davenport nor I are advocating the “disarming” of the population. Or let me just speak for myself: I’m not. That’s a straw man. You’re ignoring what I said in the last part of my comment. I regard the regulation of motor vehicles as the template for the regulation of firearms. No one thinks (or rationally could think) that a system of license, registration, and insurance for motor vehicles is a recipe for abolishing them. Motor vehicles are heavily taxed, as well. But look around you. Does it look like we have, or are imminently about to, abolish motor vehicles in the US? So it is with firearms. The idea of abolishing them is quixotic. But the idea of regulating them is not. Regulation is not abolition. Since it’s not, most of the rest of your argument is also a straw man.
Anyway, my claim is not that police officers ought not to risk their lives on behalf of the innocent. Risk is unavoidable in law enforcement. It comes up at every traffic stop. What I object to is sending police officers into suicide missions, which is the unthinking demand often made of them by people who have zero knowledge of tactics or firearms. Since I’m not advocating disarmament, I’m not suggesting that people should tamely allow themselves to be assaulted. But just as the police cannot be everywhere to protect every innocent victim, “good guys with guns” can’t be, either. So there will always be cases where the police are called to rescue people from “active shooters.” I’m not disputing that they have put themselves at risk, but “putting oneself at risk” does not mean breaching any space under any circumstances simply because innocent victims are inside.
A little realism would go a long way here. You want a society full of guns? Then expect innocents to die. Don’t blame the cops. Don’t blame security. Don’t blame mental health practitioners. Don’t blame the gun manufacturers. Above all, don’t blame the advocates of gun control (who can, at best, minimize the scope of the problem). A society that valorizes firearms as mindlessly as ours does has to expect that those firearms will be used from time to time to kill innocent schoolchildren or shoppers or whatever. There’s no remedy for it, certainly not “arming the population.”
You can induce the police to take suicidal risks, and arm the population, and you still won’t ever solve that problem. The guns are out there. The crazies are out there. The targets are out there. So, alas, are the ICUs and the cemeteries. Sad, as our former president would say, but inescapable.
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First off, social trust is not a general sense of social responsibility, so a rise in careless or selfish behaviors is irrelevant to the question – that eliminates half your suggested measures for it. As for trust in authority, well, social trust is defined as what people believe about others of whom they know nothing. Authorities are not strangers; they have records, their past behavior is known. Trust in authorities can’t be expected to match up with trust in a random person off the street, so it’s no measure for social trust either.
For instance, trust in public health authorities has collapsed in the US after the Covid epidemic. Specifically, it happened when those authorities, after announcing that public gatherings must be forbidden to slow the spread of disease, endorsed the Black Lives Matter protests on the grounds that racism among police was a threat to public health more dangerous than Covid. Now much could be said about racism among police, but it certainly is not a question on which a medical degree in any field grants special expertise. So the public health authorities had merely demonstrated that their expert advice could be swayed by irrelevant political concerns – which meant it was untrustworthy and worthless. That people who betrayed their trust are no longer trusted shouldn’t surprise anyone, and it has no bearing on the level of social trust in general.
On Ukraine, the only rational purpose for the Russians to send large numbers of soldiers and war materiel to the vicinity of Kiev was to take Kiev and destroy the government of Ukraine. This is so obvious that the only people I’m aware of who have suggested that wasn’t why Russia did so are Russian propagandists claiming that their failing to take Kiev was not a defeat, but part of a deep-laid plan. The shift in Russian tactics between the first weeks of the war and now is real, and needs explanation – and on the principle that the enemy gets a vote in all military campaigns, the idea that “a bunch of ill-trained, half-armed Ukrainians” forced the change on the professional Russian Army is the best explanation on offer.
If anything, better than if the Russians were really trying to protect the rights of Russophones, or to conquer and rule Ukraine. It’s conceptually possible that the people of Ukraine would be happier under the rule of Russia than under the State of Ukraine, so that yielding to the invasion would be the better course in the long run. I doubt it, in the actual world we live in, but it is possible. But an invading force bent on nothing but pure destruction? Yielding to that buys you nothing but swift death; better to have weapons and use them, so you have a chance of living, and at worst will take some invaders into death with you.
Since replacing cars with mass transit is the stated goal of a host of activists on the Left, this rhetorical question doesn’t have quite the force you want it to. No, it’s nowhere near happening, but there are people seriously working towards making it happen. I estimate it stands roughly where the push for gun control stood in 1934.
And so we circle back to my first point: gun control advocates have already described gun ownership and the culture surrounding it as a moral evil so often that reasonable discussion of regulating guns is now impossible. Any proposal to regulate guns will be taken as a prelude to abolition, because abolition is what you do to moral evils.
I expect innocents to die no matter how many guns there are. In a society without guns, though, the main weapons require physical strength to use well, so the innocents who die will be those who are physically weaker than their assailants. (Incidentally, that means mostly women and children.) It’s by no means obvious that the rate of innocent deaths is lower where guns aren’t available – other social factors in real examples confuse the issue. It’s true that a gunman can easily kill many people at once, which is a lot harder with other weapons. But a strong man can kill many people over time with a knife or bludgeon, and without firearms he’s a lot harder to stop than a gunman.
The problem is the desire to murder, not the weapons. A determined killer can find weapons anywhere, and a person who doesn’t want to kill can be trusted with all weapons. The only effective ways to control crime focus on the criminals; controlling the weapons, for that purpose, is a waste of time.
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Thanks for all these valuable comments and debates. I agree that giving small arms to many people in a population is unlikely to protect them much from external invasion, and could lead to lots of internal problems (witness Libya after 2012; possibly similar problems could occur in Ukraine after the war ends — if anything of Ukraine is left). I’m not moved by the argument that a campaign to tar ownership of large magazines and assault weapons as puerile and juvenile lack of self-conference would simply make owners of these guns more paranoid, because such a campaign is distinct from banning them by law. It is a peer pressure thing, and we have to do it because the gun manufacturers and NRA have already launched a full-scale cultural crusade to make their products indispensable as codpieces apparently were to Venetians in one period of their history.
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I agree also that we cannot expect police officers or private security guards to risk very likely death against extremely steep odds against assailants with armor-piercing weapons and body armor of their own. Which is why the arms race will lead to police and guards being routinely arrayed with expensive equipment exceeding that which we currently reserve only for Swat teams. The costs of this will be enormous.
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