Responsible Gun Ownership Can Mean Heavily Restricted Gun Ownership

I've been floating the idea with fellow firearm owners that maybe gun control is justified as a means to restrict suicide.  The number one response I get is, "that's interesting, but I don't feel like responsible gun owners should have to suffer here.  There have to be better ways to curb suicide."

The problem with that thinking is we have a dumb definition of "responsible gun owner."  When they teach you how to be a "responsible" firearm owner pretty much every lesson is about how to shoot people.  Don't point your weapon at people you don't want shot because you might accidentally shoot them.  Treat your weapon as loaded or you'll accidentally shoot the wrong people.  This stance is good for when you need to shoot people.  This is how you mantain your weapon for shooting.  Don't point your firearm at anyone you don't want to instantly respect you.  Etc.

The problem is, again, in the majority of tragic firearm deaths in this country the shooter correctly identifies and fires on  his target.  I'm talking 'bout suicide. Suicides don't need lessons on how to not accidentally hit the wrong target and how to cleanly hit the target they are aiming for, the target they are aiming for is, like, half an inch away from the firearm.  "Responsible gun ownership," as it is now conceptualized, does nothing for suicides, positive or negative.

But that's crazy, because the single biggest risk we impose on the community when we own firearms is that someone will kill themselves with them.  Again, for American citizens this isn't just the biggest category of firearm death, it is the majority of firearm deaths. It dwarfs accidents and self defense and murder and war.  Responsible firearm owners who aren't thinking about how to prevent suicides from using their firearms aren't responsible.

That said, it's *hard* to keep people from killing themselves with your firearm.  It imposes big restrictions on where you can keep it.  Pretty much the only way to stop fire arm suicide is to keep firearms out of the hands of people at risk for suicide, or at least to impose barriers between them getting their crazy impulse and them acting on it.  But just targeting at risk people isn't enough, because it is hard to identify who is "at risk for suicide."  So you have to cast an even wider net than that.

So here are some "responsible gun ownership" tips I follow:

1. No gun in the home if teenagers live there.
2. No guns in the home if anyone who has ever experienced suicidal ideation lives there.
3. No guns in the home if anyone who suffers from depression or a related disorder lives there.  Not even diagnosed, just "seems to get sad sometimes."
4. Sure as hell no guns in the home if anyone who has tried to kill themselves lives there.
5. No guns in the home if anyone is now depressed.
6. No guns in the home if a close family member of anyone living there recently died (especially a spouse or child).
7. No guns in the home if anyone recently lost a job.
8. No guns in the home if people you don't know well live there.
9. No guns in the home if anyone has a substance abuse problem.
10. If you fit one of these categories, no guns in the home.

This doesn't mean no firearm ownership.  Keep 'em at a friends house.  But it does mean that about half of the people I know who own firearms are, by my lights, irresponsible owners, and don't have a leg to stand on when they protest gun control.

Restricting Guns to Prevent Mass Shootings is Dumb

The majority of gun deaths in America are suicides.  Suicides are also the type of death most easily deterred by restricting access to guns: Israel has had success curbing military suicides by not letting soldiers access guns on their downtime and Australia saw a sharp drop in suicide rates when it instituted its gun buyback program, with states with more aggressive buyback programs seeing a bigger drop faster.  These are not the only studies that indicate this, and the result has "microfoundations" in psychological literature: restricting the means by which someone can kill themselves is a key step in treating patients, having a gun in the home is a risk factor for suicide, etc.

Meanwhile, mass shooting deaths are a fraction of a fraction of America's 31,000 plus annual gun deaths, and the relationship between gun control and crime is harder to suss out.

So gun control is about suicides.  This is good, because it gets us to a core reason we might need state paternalism -- to protect the mentally ill from their crazy decisions.  It has the added benefit of being less condescending to gun owners: "we know you are responsible, we know you can handle your weapon safely, but we are worried that some depressed member of your household is going to use that gun to off themselves when they aren't thinking straight."

And it gets the numbers into a world where severely restricting gun rights makes sense: the economic impact of the firearms industry was about 31 billion dollars last year (by their trade group's estimates), meaning, if we value lives at about $7,000,000 (a standard figure in public policy planning, I think), we only need to save just under 4,500 lives a year to make the complete death of the gun sales industry worthwhile.  Not only do I think that is a realistic figure (there are 17,000 plus firearm suicides a year; deterring just a quarter of them from killing themselves would get us there), I think we can stop short of completely ruining all the utility people get out of gun ownership and completely bankrupting the industry (licensing guns to people when need can be shown (security guards, cops, etc), allowing rentals for firing ranges and hunting, perhaps still allowing a tightly regulated collecting hobby, etc).

So passing a restriction on big magazines or assault rifles to prevent mass shootings might be a marginally good idea, but it is going after a really small problem.  The problem is suicide.  The solution is heavy gun restriction.

If you think that people have an individual right to bear arms in the constitution, the solution is repeal of that right and heavy gun restriction.