Kieran Healy

Well, here’s my Answer

In my post about the shootings this morning at my University, I asked “What am I supposed to do, buy a gun myself or something?” Well, Clayton Cramer thinks I should do just that:

Unfortunately, mass murderers don’t pay attention to those signs [The U of A is supposed to be a “Weapon Free Zone”—KH] Only their victims do.

I’m not saying that for sure repealing this policy would have prevented this crime. But it’s certainly the case that the situation could not have been any worse. If a student or a professor with a concealed weapon permit had shot this guy in the first five seconds of this spree, at least one or two of the dead would still be alive.

(Thanks to the Volokhs for the link.) The logic here is weird. It’s true that “If a student or a professor with a concealed weapon permit had shot this guy in the first five seconds of this spree, at least one or two of the dead would still be alive.” But how, exactly, do we get from there to “it’s certainly the case that the situation could not have been any worse”? The John Wayne fantasy of drawing your gun and heroically killing the bad guy is one possibility—- but there are many other worse ones that are equally, if not more, likely. Especially at Cramer University, where many students and faculty cheerfully carry concealed weapons. What if you don’t hit the guy first time, for instance? Maybe you get a confused firefight up and down the corridors. Perhaps there are now more than two people involved (a bunch of us have concealed weapons, remember?), and who knows what the hell’s going on or who, exactly, the bad guy is. The fog of war meets the ivory tower: great.

When I started teaching here at the U of A, I remember noticing the “Gun Free Building” sticker on the main entrance to my building. I was telling my parents about it, and remarked that while it was supposed to make me feel safe, it implied some facts about the wider world that really just made me nervous. Of course your common or garden maniac isn’t going to pay attention to signs like this. But do we really think the solution is to have everyone who wants to carry a concealed weapon in class? Christ almighty.

Many of my students are great, but the fact is that a good number of them can’t deal responsibly with a half-slab of Miller Lite, let alone a 9mm Glock. As a coincidental illustration, the other news on the campus this morning was that a small riot broke out at the Basketball Stadium ticket kiosk. This season’s tickets went on sale, a bunch of people queued all night waiting for the kiosk to open, and had quite a lot to drink, too. Result: a crush and then a brawl began as the kiosk was opening, and the Riot Squad had to be called. Concealed weapons, anyone?

It’s not just the students I worry about, either. I mean, think of the faculty. Terrifically smart people and all, but some of them have a hard time remembering where they left their jacket 10 minutes ago. You know, the brown tweed one with the .38 snub in the inside pocket. I could have sworn…

Most of your undergraduates aren’t going to qualify for a concealed weapon permit because they are under 21. Relatively few are likely
to get a permit, even though lawful. The members of the campus community most likely to get a permit, and to carry a gun, are the returning or adult students who are, in my experience, GENERALLY a lot more responsible. (Obviously, this guy Flores is not an example.)

Do you know what stopped the mass murder at the law school back East earlier this year? One of the students (a non-traditional age student) went to his car, retrieved his pistol, and ordered
the killer to put down his gun. It worked.

Professor Healy doesn’t think much of the rationality of the students and it seems, his fellow faculty. Are they really that much more
irrational than the general population? See this Tennessee Law Review paper by Dave Kopel and myself from several years ago, demonstrating
that, shockingly enough, people that qualify for concealed weapon permits under laws like Arizona’s, are really surprisingly civilized:
http://www.claytoncramer.com/shall-issue.html.

There is a state, by the way, where concealed weapon permit holders are allowed to carry on campus, but you probably won’t guess it. Texas? Idaho? Wyoming? No. California. See Cal. Penal Code sec. 626.9 and 12027.

Professor Healy doesn’t think much of the rationality of the students and it seems, his fellow faculty.

I think people—- my students, fellow faculty, the general population, and myself—- are pretty rational most of the time. But they’re not perfectly rational. Sometimes they are drunk. Sometimes they are forgetful. Sometimes they are very, very angry. In all of these cases, I would rather they not have a gun in their pocket than otherwise.

The gun-control debate in the U.S. is irretrievably polluted by the fact that the country is swimming in firearms already. Events like this morning’s shooting are vastly more likely to happen in the U.S. than any other advanced capitalist democracy, simply because of the sheer number of guns in the country. Sure, any number of scenarios are possible when some wacko starts shooting people. Sometimes we get Columbine. Sometimes the Appalachian School of Law. Sometimes we get the North Hollywood Bank Robbery. Only in the U.S. is it possible to forget that these events only happen at all because the criminals are able to easily get hold of weapons.

The reason they can, of course, is the successful efforts of the NRA to kill any kind of reasonable gun control laws. Gun lobbyists have helped create the conditions where secondary arguments for concealed weapons permits are plausible, because you’d prefer you win the race to the bottom, rather than the criminals.

I suppose it depends how you define “reasonable gun control laws.” As the laws now stand, the only person who can be punished for failing to register a firearm is a law-abiding adult. The U.S. Supreme Court in Haynes v. U.S. (1968) has ruled that convicted felons may not be punished for failing to register, because it would violate their Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.

You also overlook the fact that most other advanced capitalist nations are monochromatic. The reasons are complex, and not entirely understood yet, but white non-Hispanic murder rates in the U.S. are comparable to those rates in Canada and most Western European countries. The city I live had three murders and non-negligent manslaughters in 1999 and 2000—a murder rate of 0.9 per 100,000 people per year. That’s better than a comparable population in England & Wales (1.1/100,000 per year) and far better than Scotland (1.9/100,000 per year). Yet, we have some of the most relaxed gun control laws in the U.S.

There are some serious social problems that aren’t being addressed. Gun control is a way for our society to avoid addressing those problems, because we are so divided as to what social policy to pursue. The one policy that does seem to have worked to reduce violent crime rates, the one we adopted with considerable success in the 1990s—long prison sentences for violent crime, and serious effort at discouraging drug trafficking (with its attendant violence)—seems to have worked, reducing murder rates nearly identically for guns and non-guns. See http://www.claytoncramer.com/DroppingCrime.PDF.

You also overlook the fact that most other advanced capitalist nations are monochromatic. The reasons are complex, and not entirely understood yet, but white non-Hispanic murder rates in the U.S. are comparable to those rates in Canada and most Western European countries.

Woah. So now we’re not talking about crime and criminals, but racial predispositions to shoot people? You don’t think, say, family income, urban location, poverty rate, or any number of other variables, might be more likely explanatory factors than the race linked itchy-trigger gene?

There are some serious social problems that aren’t being addressed. Gun control is a way for our society to avoid addressing those problems,

That’s exactly backwards. Advocating concealed weapons permits is a terrific way of avoiding social problems. We don’t need a crime or poverty policy, because we can just rely on our citizens to shoot people for us.

The one policy that does seem to have worked to reduce violent crime rates, the one we adopted with considerable success in the 1990s—long prison sentences for violent crime, and serious effort at discouraging drug trafficking (with its attendant violence)—seems to have worked,

That story isn’t nearly so simple. See here, here and here.

Race is a marker for problems that are still being argued. I happen to think that the problems associated with the absence of positive father figures probably plays a significant part in the high rates of black violent crime rates. I understand that Brendan Centerwall tried to figure out why poor blacks and poor whites have such different violent crime rates, and concluded it is because poor black live in much more urban settings, with much more crowded housing.

I don’t pretend that every rise and fall of homicide rates can be tied to prison incarceration, but there is a clear causal connection. Crimes like rape, where there tend to a high number of offenses per offender, are especially treatable by locking up the criminal. At least while a rapist is in prison, the general population is safe.

You argue that concealed weapon permits are an attempt at avoiding the problem. They are certainly a short-term solution. So is banning handguns—an attempt to avoid confronting why the violence level is so high. The difference is that banning handguns has NOT been found to be a solution (because of weapon substitution) while concealed weapon permits do work to reduce violent crime rates—largely by deterring those criminals capable of rational analysis.

Some significant fraction of murders and rapes are committed in the course of economic crimes, such as robbery. These rational economic actors are the ones that concealed weapon permit issuance largely deters. Complete raving sorts who don’t plan to survive to trial—such as Flores, yesterday—aren’t deterrable. You can only hope that someone stop their killing spree before they kill too many others.