Category: The Dish

[Megan] Virginia’s governor calls for a cease fire in the gun control wars:

Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine said he wasn’t interested in arguments about gun control.

"People who want to take this within 24 hours of the event and make it their political hobby horse to ride, I’ve got nothing but loathing for them," Kaine said at a Tuesday evening news conference.

"To those who want to try to make this into some little crusade, I say: Take that elsewhere. Let this community deal with grieving individuals and be sensitive to those needs."

[Megan]  Greg Mankiw suggests that perhaps we should tax height:

Should the income tax system include a tax credit for short taxpayers and a tax surcharge for tall ones? This paper shows that the standard utilitarian framework for tax policy analysis answers this question in the affirmative. This result has two possible interpretations. One interpretation is that individual attributes correlated with wages, such as height, should be considered more widely for determining tax liabilities.

 

Alternatively, if policies such as a tax on height are rejected, then the standard utilitarian framework must in some way fail to capture our intuitive notions of distributive justice.

Obviously, we need to reconsider the standard utilitarian framework.

[Megan] Shockingly, the television is chock full of politicians and advocates of various stripes claiming that the disaster at Virginia Tech is a vindication of . . . whatever they already believed.  If only we had had [more gun control/less gun control/better mental health treatments/tougher law enforcement/colleges that acted more like parents/tighter immigration rules/whatever] then this never would have happened.

Personally, I think that the only thing this really illustrates is that we need some stiff legal enforcement against people who think that large numbers of bodies were delivered by the Almighty for the express purpose of providing publicity for their pet cause.  And I’ll say so, publicly, if only CNN will ask me . . .

At any rate, I guess it’s time to revisit the gun control issue, though with the express caveat that I have no idea what modifications to our existing gun laws, if any, in either direction, would actually have prevented this tragedy (rather, than, say, encouraging him to use a rifle).

Does gun control result in more or less crime?  I wrote a long post on this, years ago, in which I attempted to provide a theoretical framework for evaluating whether gun laws resulted in more, or less, violence.   Caveat:  my empirical assessment depended on the work of John Lott, whose reputation has been pretty thoroughly tarnished by some questionable data, plus an unfortunate habit of sock-puppetry. But the theoretical point is still valid:  the obvious intuition that if we could just get rid of guns, we’d have less violence, is far too simplistic. 

Gun control arguments make a logical progression from a false premise. They start with an imaginary world in which there are no guns. Yes, in that world, there would probably be fewer homicides. (There would probably not be fewer suicides — the data’s awfully bad)  It’s hard to kill someone with a knife or some such.

So gun control advocates imagine a straight line trend: more guns, more crime. If we imagine it as a graph, it would be a straight, upward sloping line.

This is based on a logical fallacy, which is that the population of those who would own guns if they were rare is a representative sample of the population who would own guns if they were plentiful. In other words, that if there are 1 million gun owners in the US, this group will be composed of the same percentages of different types of people as if there were 100 million gun owners. So that if there is a percentage of gun crime in the larger group, say one per thousand, the same percentage of crime will be found in the smaller group. Gun control thus cuts the number of crimes by whatever factor it by which it cuts the number of guns. This produces that straight line we graphed. However, this is demonstrably untrue.

There are three ways, in America, that we can imagine that guns would become rare: first, that they became very expensive for some reason; second, that they became illegal; and third, that they became extremely stigmatised.

In that case, assuming that the number of guns in the country will still be non-zero (and if you think it wouldn’t, go take a look at Great Britain, with its near-total ban and relatively non-porous borders), who will own guns if they are expensive, illegal, or stigmatized? The answer in all three cases is the same: criminals. Criminals have a very high value for guns, because of their extreme usefulness in committing crimes. They have a demonstrated willingness to break the law. And they are (clearly) relatively immune to the kind of middle-class social stigma that would make guns unpopular.

Thus, there would be a very high initial rate of crime. However, as price, illegality, or stigma decreased, the population would change. Mixed in with the criminals would be non-criminals. So we would actually expect to see a curve that looks more like this:

But that’s not the entire story either, because guns have both a crime-increasing and crime-decreasing effect. The possibility that their victims might be armed demonstrably has some effect on the propensity of criminals to commit violent crime (those who argue it doesn’t are simply being stupid. If you were a criminal, would you respond to the probability that your victims might be armed? Of course you would. Criminals may not be the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree, but they aren’t immune to threat. For example, they avoid the police. The extent of the deterrance is a different question. But there is a deterrant effect.).  This countervailing effect would put downward pressure on the curve. 

Imagine the scenario. The criminals arm themselves early in the process, resulting in a crime spree. But as guns become more widely owned, the number of law-abiding citizens who have guns is increasing, while the number of criminals who have them is remaining fairly stable. As the curve moves to the right (increasing numbers of guns in the population), there is downward effect on the curve from the law-abiding citizens, whose guns criminals fear, while the upward effect is flat. So the curve starts moving downwards again. In other words, the curve will peak near the point where the majority of criminals who want guns have them, and the majority of law-abiding citizens do not.  It will therefore look more like this:

So the question of whether gun control will decrease gun deaths relies on where we are in the curve: to the left of the peak, or to the right of it? If we’re to the left, making guns harder to get will decrease homicides and other violent crime. If we’re to the right, we’ll largely take guns out of the hands of the law-abiding, and gun deaths will go up.

But why believe me, since I’m just some classical liberal wack-job?  Don’t take my word for it; listen to impeccably liberal, pro-government intervention public policy professor Mark Kleiman:

Nothing we discover about Lott can take away the fact that years of experience with liberalized concealed carry have provided little or no evidence of increased firearms-using crime as a result.  The Violence Policy Center’s report License to Kill, which details every single recorded crime committed by anyone who obtained a concealed-carry permit in Texas from 1996 to 2001 in an attempt to show that the policy had bad results, in fact demonstrates the contrary. (Someone ought to tell the VPC that it’s not necessary to have a concealed weapon, or even a permit for a concealed weapon, in order to drive drunk, so that the finding that some permit holders were arrested for DUI tells you precisely nothing about the merits of the policy.)

That finding seems to me to be a very strong argument for "shall-issue" laws: they give some people a right they value, at very little apparent cost to anyone else. Not everyone will be convinced by that argument; for example, it’s at least conceivable that concealed-carry laws increase the level of fear without increasing the actual rate of armed assault. If I were writing a law about concealed carry, I’d like to tighten up a little on who gets to have a gun, and I’d like a law against possessing a loaded firearm (concealed or not) while under the influence of alcohol or other intoxicants. Still, the case seems like a strong one even without the Lott claim to back it up.

And again here:

Lots of my liberal friends are like me:  they may not disapprove of target-shooting, but they really don’t get hunting on an emotional level (I suspect that much hunting is actually a "guy" form of nature-meditation). They (we) think having guns for self-protection is sort of weird and primitive, and regard the "armed citizenry against tyranny" stuff as utterly nuts. Having guns around makes them (us) very uncomfortable. (I’ve asked gun-carrying houseguests to leave their guns in their cars.)

OK, fine. I don’t like having guns around me, and try to arrange my own environment accordingly. The problem is that lots of liberals are willing to write that prejudice into law, using largely spurious claims about crime control as a justification.

Keeping guns out of the hands of criminals — meaning those who have been convicted of crime — is demonstrably valuable in reducing crime. There is no adequate evidence that keeping guns out of the hands — or the shoulder holsters — of non-criminals has any such benefit. And yes, that includes the famous "assault weapons."

Requiring everyone who wants to have a gun to apply for a discretionary permit, making that person subject to the whim of local legislatures or officials about whether he may have a gun, serves no good purpose that I can see. The same is true of making a national registry of firearms and their owners. Those are just nasty versions of identity politics, making gun-owners jump through hoops just to show how little regard we have for the weapons culture.

The NRA slogan that we need, not more gun laws, but enforcement of the laws we have is substantially correct. We don’t need individual permits for gun ownership. We can, without increasing crime noticeably, allow any individual not disqualified by prior criminal record to obtain a permit to carry concealed weapons. (Forget the silly "More guns, less crime" stuff; as long as "More guns, no more crime" is true, which it is, then there’s no substantial basis for trying to reduce the number of guns in law-abiding hands.)

A reader writes:

I just read your post comparing the tragedy at VT and the daily terror in the lives of ordinary Iraqis. This kind of observation seems to summarize a lot of my anxiety over the future of our involvement in Iraq.  Along with many Americans I wish that we could extracate ourselves from Iraq and get our men out of the way of an inevitable civil war. At the same time I hear the words of men like John McCain and am forced to remember that the cost of leaving Iraq would be an increase in the chaos within Iraq. I also know that our absence from Iraq wouldn’t remove our responsibility for the violence that we helped seed in 2003.

What if a Shia vs. Sunni civil war were to progress unchecked in our absence were to progress into genocide? One of America’s great sins is its blind eye to the kind of terror that is occuring in Darfur today. Thoughts like these often lead me to think that the only morally right move in Iraq is to commit ourselves totally to the future peace of that nation. I want so much to wash my hands of Bush’s war, but in a democracy all the people must take responsibility for the actions of our government. It is our responsibility to restore the peace that we stole from the children of Iraq, even if it costs us even more than it already has.

(Photo: An Iraqi girl gets embarrassed after offering flowers to a US female soldier from Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment during a joint house-by-house search operation between Iraqi and US forces, in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, 16 April 2007. Insurgent gunmen attacked an Iraqi army checkpoint and killed 13 soldiers on a road in northern Iraq, in an area where Iraqi security forces often clash with Sunni insurgents linked to the Al-Qaeda network. By Mauricio Lima/AFP/Getty.)

[Ross] It’s the press’s fault. (But then, what isn’t?)

[Ross] Niall Ferguson suggests that John McCain is the only candidate "battle-hardened" enough to understand the importance of sea power. Isaac Chotiner points out that Ferguson isn’t exactly a neutral observer – like James Carville with Hillary and Samantha Power with Obama, he’s both a pundit and part of the kitchen cabinet of the candidate he’s boosting. (See also Matt Yglesias on this topic.)

[Megan] (Enters, stage centre-right, looks around)  Wow, it sure is big in here, isn’t it?

In my normal life, I’m an economics blogger.  And since it seems to be obligatory to post on the tragedy at Virginia Tech, I thought I’d start by talking about the decision errors I see in the commentary.  Daniel Drezner, one of my favourite bloggers, has been blogging on the coverage a bit:

According to the Washington Post, there were some warning signs from Cho Seung Hui before he killed more than 30 people at Virginia Tech: "Cho was an English major whose creative writing was so disturbing that he was referred to the school’s counseling service, the Associated Press reported."

This fact prompted an e-mail from a colleague that raises a disturbing question: 

In 8 years, I’ve taught hundreds of students. 2 of them so alarmed me by their behavior, I contacted the Dean of Students office to see what could be done. The answer: nothing. The best I got was a half-baked assurance that voluntary counseling would be suggested to one of them (he was an undergraduate who had insisted on taking my graduate seminar, showed up and refused to leave on the first day of class, and then sent me increasingly enraged emails filled with expletives and threats to bring charges against me to the Dean of Students). I ended up having to have a staff member escort me to class in case the student showed up again. He didn’t, fortunately. But I didn’t follow up and I bet nobody else did, either.

When a faculty or staff member reports disturbing student activity, what is the appropriate response? Can any actions be mandatory? What feedback loops should be regularly instituted? I don’t have any answers, but I do have an acute sense of vulnerability — universities, esp. public ones, are wide open.

All professors have encountered or will encounter this problem in their careers — the student who seems way too intense for their own good.

That said, I’m also concerned about overreaction. What happened at Blacksburg is a rare event, and red-flagging students just for being intense and weird can create problems as well.

This strikes me as a classic example of hindsight bias.  The teacher flagged two students; one of them happened to turn out to be a mass murderer.  But how many other college students have written things so creepy their teachers were worried about their sanity?  Say it’s two per sizeable college in the United States; that’s thousands of students who wrote really disturbing stuff, and didn’t shoot anyone.  I recall my college creative writing classes, in which my most notable short story prompted several students and a very well-meaning teacher to approach me with offers of sympathy and help for my tortured issues about class, my father, and the Catholic Church.  I was almost unable to bring myself to tell all those lovely, helpful people, that I had no such issues; in the grand traditions of fiction writers everywhere, I had made it all up. 

All right, I confess; I did allow one particularly cute specimen to console me with a few drinks at the New Deck Tavern.  But that’s a story for another day, and probably, another blog.

The point is that even if all mass-murderers did write scary prose, or make sweeping apocalyptic statements, or otherwise give some signal of their impending meltdown, the signal wouldn’t do us any good, because mass murderers are really, really rare.  You’ll have a thousand false positives for one false negative.  In hindsight, we can always pick out some clue to what was about to happen.  That doesn’t mean that we can, or should, see those things beforehand.

Related is the criticism of administrators for sending students to class after the first murder, or of police for not locking the campus down immediately.  This is a classic problem with recriminations:  we tend to assume that the fact we had a bad outcome means we made a bad decision.  But in an uncertain world, this is ludicrous.  Good decision making concentrates on the most likely events, not the wild outliers.

The overwhelming majority of murders that take place on campus (or anywhere else) are not a prelude to a mass killing.  Should we really act as if they were, because it might prevent the 0.001% that are?  Shutting down campus is not free; if nothing else, it absorbs a huge number of police resources that could otherwise be used to track down the killer in the vast majority of cases where the killer is still at loose, armed, dangerous, and not planning to kill himself.  In this particular case, shutting down campus would have been the right answer.  But in 99.999% of cases, it would have been the wrong answer, and would have placed the public at greater risk, as well as producing mass hysteria on campus.  Castigating the administrators for getting it wrong, or rushing to enact legislation that ensures administrators do the wrong thing in most cases, is bad decision-making.  Not that this will prevent us from doing just that.

[Ross] Two articles in The American Conservative wonder if it might be Chuck Hagel. As a card-carrying Hagel-skeptic, I’m inclined to agree with Jim Pinkerton, who writes that "what remains to be seen is what Hagel would truly do about Iraq that’s different from what has been done and is being done. Even as he was non-announcing, Hagel seemed at pains to reassure his audience that he was not going to offer any starkly divergent choice to Americans—not then, not ever."

As Pinkerton notes, there’s plenty of room for a Republican politician (particularly from the Midwest) to champion what’s become a forgotten tradition in American politics – a sober-minded foreign-policy realism that’s oriented around offshore-balancing rather than the pursuit of hegemony. Becoming the tribune of such a worldview wouldn’t get Hagel the 2008 GOP nomination by any stretch of the imagination, but it would make him a voice worth listening to. Everything I’ve seen, though, suggests that he’s more interested in basking in the media attention that comes with being a Bush-basher than articulating a serious alternative to the interventionist consensus that got us into the Iraq War in the first place.

[Andrew] A palpable shift in the past four months in the polls.

[Ross] His suicide note, and his plays.