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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35390 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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Obviously every policy only acts on the margins. I'm not arguing it will make police shootings go to zero, or even that it's a good policy. Only that I think your original claim

Oh no, they've been trying to do only the first part - the disarming. It doesn't decrease violent crime any (as it is obvious from the fact the places with the strictest gun laws still feature a ton of violent crime) and it doesn't make interaction with the police any safer as the police still has guns.

is wrong.

To be honest I don't like focusing on police shootings. The fact that people whose job is to apprehend dangerous criminals shoot people 20 times more than the national average doesn't strike me as obviously reprehensible, especially since 89% of the time they (the police) were being threatened, attacked, or having a gun pointed at them.

But I absolutely believe reducing gun ownership would reduce fatal police shootings.

You're welcome to make conjectures like

In most interactions with the police, they happen in circumstances where a knife is as deadly (or more deadly) than a gun. So if the police are trained to shoot you for twitching wrong, they'd shoot you in any case

I don't really have an RCT to solidly refute you, but so long as the only data I've seen supports the idea that greater gun accessibility correlates strongly with more fatal police shootings, I'm going to go with the data over your personal beliefs on how policies affect police interactions.

But I absolutely believe reducing gun ownership would reduce fatal police shootings.

If you mean "reducing it to the levels of Japan" - yes, it probably would. Except that's not happening. As I said, US is not Japan, and no amount of magic thinking will turn US into Japan. You just can't do that. What you can do however, is to make gun ownership much more expensive and cumbersome - they'd been trying in California for years - so that for the lawful citizen, it would be almost un-attainable, while for a criminal, whose very life frequently depends on it, it still would be worth it, despite the costs. Which would still require the police to carry guns, since the criminals still have them. Thus, you would keep the problem around, while hurting the very people you have set out to protect - the lawful citizens (since the criminals, being the only people carrying guns, would seek to recover the costs of having them by imposing those costs on the lawful citizens with impunity). You see, you can't just wave a magic wand and transform the society wholesale. It moves in certain ways responding to the certain incentives, and has to move gradually. And any move directed at reducing gun ownership per se, now in US, would make the lawful citizens strictly worse without improving anything. It won't turn US into Japan.

I am disputing the concrete claim that you made that

[reducing gun ownership] doesn't make interaction with the police any safer as the police still has guns.

You still have provided no evidence that that claim is true.

If you don't want to talk about that claim any more that's fine, but please stop implying that I've ever said

  1. That reducing gun ownership will turn the US into Japan

  2. That reducing gun ownership will drop fatal police shootings to zero

  3. That reducing gun ownership will make life better for US citizens

Well, it would be hard to provide empirical evidence, beyond what is already observed (that places with very strict legal ownership laws still get a lot of police shootings). Since the data set is very multi-parametrical and diverse, we can not establish a clear experiment by isolating, say, San Francisco, reducing (legal) gun ownership to zero, and seeing what would happen. We only can observe that SF government has been doing all it can to bring it all close to zero as it practically possible, and police still carries guns and shoots people there. Moreover, the evidence that knives at short distances are as dangerous as guns is widely available and known: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tueller_Drill

My prior is that gun ownership by right with proper firearm education increases politeness, and that owning a gun as a flex increases shootings. Make guns less legal, they’ll be owned as a flex more.

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