Hardwired Behavior: What Neuroscience Reveals About Morality

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

As to Hogeye's post of the article supposedly proving the value of "self-defense with a firearm" - how nice of Weber to bang on the door, hollar at the resident, bang on the door some more, and then try to climb in the window. That gave the resident of the "home on Diamond Road" plenty of time to go get his gun, load (if necessary), cock, aim (at a target restricted to a windowframe), and fire. It might even have been enough time for the police to get there if the homeowner had called 911 the minute the banging on the doors started. (Admittedly, it might not, if the home was rural.) The resident might have done a better job of scaring Weber away (homeowner's claimed intent), if said resident had used shot instead of a slug in the shotgun - which is the best weapon for self defense (not the handgun) - but that's immaterial to the point. Belligerent drunks may not have the smarts to reap the rewards of ambush (including free handguns), but muggers and other criminals do.

[Dardedar]

Claims of massive "defensive gun uses" is a whole other area of American gun mythology passed around by the NRA folks. I have debated this issue extensively. If that one gets trotted out I'll roast it too.

A good source on this:

http://timlambert.org/guns/lott/

This anecdote of a NWA man being shot is unfortunate but not typical. Here are some numbers:

***
"In 1997, there were only 197 justifiable handgun homicides (7) by private citizens in the United States. (8.)LINK

footnotes:
(7) A justifiable homicide is defined as and limited to the killing of a felon by a law enforcement officer in the line of duty, or the killing of a felon by a private citizen during the commission of a felony.
(8.)FBI Uniform Crime Report, 1998, table 2.17, p.24

197 doesn't seem very significant when you consider the 12,942 murdered (representing 40% of the 32,436 killed) by guns in the US, in 1997*
(*Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Unpublished Data from the National Vital statistics System, 1997)

[Hogeye]

Since I haven't cited John Lott, I really don't need to defend him. But I must say that the cited article by Tim Lambert seems weak from the getgo. His initial claim is that all three of ( 1 that there were more guns; 2 that there was less crime; 3 that more guns caused less crime ) must hold for the proposition (places that have a higher rate of firearms ownership tend to have a lower crime rate) to be true. That is of course a total non-sequitur. Lambert seems to be attacking a strawman.

Whether more guns less crime is generally true is still an open question, in that there are results going both ways. Criticizing specific claims by Lott doesn't change this (and smack of ad hom); only more studies can determine this. I'd love to see England and Australia re-liberalize and get the classic baseline-experiment-stopexperiment thing. And similar experiments in provinces of the US.

One more comment about the Lambert article - he asks "where's the mechanism?" but immediately forgets the question and gets off on an irrelevant tangent about who buys guns. The mechanism is obvious (at least to economists) and an unassailable praxeological fact: people prefer more to less of good things (and conversely prefer less to more of bads.) Speaking on a macro level, i.e. probabilistically: A mugger will prefer to mug a little old lady than a burley football player. Obviously. The expected cost is less. Similarly, for the same reason, a robber/rapist prefers to victimize an unarmed person to an armed person. In places with a high rate of firearms ownership, we can expect a marginal criminal to move away or switch to his formerly second-best occupation. When the cost of any occupation goes up, ceterus paribus, people "on the margin" will switch to another occupation. This mechanism is no mystery; it is well known and hopefully will make Darrel a successful electric vehicle tycoon. I.e. as the price of using gas-powered vehicles go up, those on the margin will switch to alternate-powered vehicles.

Darrel is right that anecdotal evidence means little. I intended merely to counter Barbara's resistence is futile; the bad guy wins no matter what; self-defense is useless attitude. Darrel's stat on number of justifiable homicides by citizens is equally useless. It doesn't tell us a thing about successful defense incidents. Most incidents, one would expect, don't end in a fatal shooting. Anecdotally, most successful defenses consist of a potential victim brandishing a gun, the attacker running away, and the incident never reported. That's why it's so difficult to gauge the effectiveness of self-defense with firearms. It's kind of like getting solid stats on, e.g. infidelity or cheating on exams or cocaine use. I.e. notoriously difficult. Perhaps the best we can do is look at crime rates in various legal regimes.