As if the recent mass shootings did not do enough to bring gun control back to the news cycle, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) added fuel to the fire. Back in 2007, SCOTUS ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment established a right to bear arms in the name of self-defense within the home.
However, state governments that wanted to find workarounds with the Heller case did so. This is where the state of New York comes in. New York state created a law in which those who wanted to carry a concealed handgun in public need to show a special need ("proper cause") to defend themselves. This past week, SCOTUS ruled in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen (see ruling here) that this New York state-level handgun law is unconstitutional. According to this ruling, the Second Amendment protects a broad right "to carry a handgun outside the home for self-defense." This ruling is the first major case for gun rights that SCOTUS has heard in over a decade.
This ruling might be limited in its scope. It may very well be restricted to concealed-carry licenses, as opposed to any and all public possession. Even so, it is a win for gun rights. The first point I would bring up is that this case affirms freedom. If the right to life is meant to be an inherent one, then the right to self-defense is part of that inherent right. Not only does my religion of Judaism allow for self-defense, but our modern-day, secular concept of self-defense was influenced by such political philosophers as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. The Second Amendment was meant to protect the right to self-defense, and it is nice to see SCOTUS confirm the protection of that right more broadly.
But let's look at this from a consequentialist point and see what the public policy implications are. The justification of defensive gun usage (DGU) is not something that is merely a concoction of the imagination of the Far Right. As I covered last November after the Kyle Rittenhouse case, DGU is quite common. The exact number of DGUs is in dispute. A 2013 study commissioned by the CDC put the range between 500,000 and 3 million. Another study from Georgetown University put the number at around 1.67 million instances of DGU (English, 2021). Even if you assume that 10 percent of DGU saved a life, that number would still exceed the 39,707 U.S. firearm deaths.
There are those out there who would argue that concealed carry in the public sphere would have terrible public policy implications. For those who are against it, allowing for trigger-happy, impulsive individuals would make it akin to the lawlessness of the Wild West. Does that conception play out in reality based on the evidence?
There are some empirical aspects of the gun control/gun rights debate that are more clear-cut. For example, I can tell you that we have tried assault weapon bans on the federal and state levels. Assault weapons bans do not work in lowering homicide rates. A similar argument can be made for high-capacity magazine bans and the bump stock ban. Waiting periods are shown to be effective for lowering gun suicides (not for gun homicides), which goes to show that I do not oppose actual common-sense gun laws. It is that I would be more inclined to some common-sense regulations if you can at least show they are effective in what they are meant to do without significant erosion to the right to self-defense.
As for concealed carry laws, what makes the concealed carry debate interesting is that the evidence base is mixed. I am not going to go through the entire academic literature on this topic, but pick some representative studies to show you how mixed it is. One study from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that right-to-carry laws (RTC) increases violent crime (Donohue et al., 2017). A study from the Journal of the American College of Surgeons found that "there was no significant association between shifts from restrictive to nonrestrictive carry legislation on violent crime and public health indicators" (Hamill et al., 2019). Although it is more dated of a study, the National Academies of Science could not find a causal link between RTC laws and crime rates (Wellford et al., 2004).
To get through the ambiguity, I would go with an organization such as Rand Corporation both because of its reputation and because it is one of the few think-tanks that does not have an explicit ideological leaning. What did Rand come up with? Rand Corporation found that the evidence is limited in terms of proving that concealed-carry laws might increase violent crime. This is more telling because, as Rand Corporation points out, we have more evidence on RTC laws than we do on any other gun policy. If we have a large enough evidence base but it is still inconclusive about whether RTC laws lower crime, it would suggest that RTC does not have a major impact on violent crime.
There is some intuition as to why those who are carrying would not be a major driver of crime. Those carrying concealed carry licenses are less likely to commit crimes since these licenses in most states require a background check and fingerprinting. This intuition bolsters what I brought up in 2018, which is that there is a lack of correlation between gun ownership and homicide. It very well could be that this lack of correlation is due to the deaths caused by the trigger-happy are neutralized by the ones using guns for legitimate DGU, thereby creating a more net neutral effect on homicide rates.
I have a couple of additional points to make on the previously mentioned intuition. One, the number of concealed-carry licensees has increased 304 percent between 2007 and 2019 (Lott, 2019) while violent crime has decreased from 1993 to 2019 (Pew Research). If RTC were that terrible, you would see a rise in gun homicides or violent crime as a result of more people carrying handguns vis-à-vis RTC laws. Two, as the Heritage Foundation illustrated in 2019, concealed-carry licensees accounted for 0.7 percent of firearm homicides while accounting for 5.5 percent of the overall population, thereby indicating that they are not a major contributor to gun homicides.
As the Supreme Court reaffirmed in the Bruen case, we are talking about a right as inalienable as the right to self-defense. To quote Justice Clarence Thomas from the Bruen ruling, "We know of no other constitutional rights that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need." At the same time, I do not believe that the Second Amendment should be a free-for-all in owning whatever sort of weapons you want. After the Charlottesville attack, I made the point that a violation of the "fighting words doctrine" to incite violence with one's speech is an exception and curtailing of freedom of speech. Yes, I very much believe in freedom of speech, but there are some notable and exigent exceptions.
I believe the same goes for the Second Amendment. The right of self-defense to be paramount to the ideals of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. I also think there are some limits on what one should own. For example, I think most people would think that we do not need nuclear weapons for self-defense. As for fully automatic weapons, it is more debatable than nuclear weapons, but most people would agree that fully automatic weapons are not necessary.
My point is that there can be some actual common-sense gun regulations that could help minimize violent crime while still preserving the right to self-defense. Calling a policy "common-sense" while it is not shown to keep the public safer is not common sense at all. Given the evidence we have for RTC laws, that would seem to be the case here. If the government is going to pass a gun law that is actually common sense, the burden of proof goes to the government to show that RTC increases crime, not to a subset of gun owners that are shown to overall be law-abiding.
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