Debate: Does America Need Stricter Gun Control Laws?

afternoon my name is Matt Smolinski and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's debate on behalf of the universities of San Diego's Center for Ethics economics and public policy this is the first of two debates that the center will be holding during the 2018-2019 academic year and I'd encourage all of you who are interested to sign up for our mailing list at the URL indicated on the PowerPoint there if you're interested in keeping informed about future events by the center we hold two debates a year we also hold a number of small panel discussions on topics such as Trump's international trade policy and tax reform there's also a link on the PowerPoint for to a survey where you can tell us what you thought about today's events give us any suggestions for future events or ways to improve each of our debates here at the Center is driven by a belief in the vital importance of conversation especially conversation with people with whom you strongly disagree in a time of increasing political polarization it's all too easy to write off one's political opponents as ignorant or even evil without ever taking the time to actually listen to what they have to say but without conversation our minds remain a closed system and the possibility of intellectual growth is for stalled through conversation we open the possibility of learning may be the learning that our position was mistaken and that we should change our mind but at the very least learning what the other side has to say and how to rethink our own position for the better in light of that insight the topic of today's debate is gun control it has been just over a year since Steven paddock opened fire at the harvest music festival in Las Vegas killing 58 people in the deadliest mass shooting in US history so it's been a little over eight months since the shooting at a high school in parkland Florida took the lives of 17 more people six of the 10 deadliest shootings in US history have occurred during the last 10 years and thousands of other as you lost each year to firearms through suicide accidents and criminal assault does America need stricter gun control laws that is the topic of tonight's debate would stricter gun laws save innocent lives or would such restrictions infringe upon the rights of gun owners the vast majority of whom after all are not criminal thereby depriving them not only of a useful tool for hunting and recreation but more significantly for defending their lives and their property against criminal aggression these are difficult and challenging questions that are too often buried in ideological and partisan politics to help us think clearly about them and to begin the process of open honest and respectful dialogue that our democracy so desperately needs we have two eminently qualified scholars with us tonight Michael humor is professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado he is the author of more than 60 academic articles in epistemology ethics met ethics metaphysics and political philosophy as well as six books including the problem of political authority approaching infinity and most recently paradox lost several these books are on sale in the lobby if you are interested Michael Shermer is presidential fellow at Chapman University the publisher of skeptic magazine and the New York Times bestselling author of five books including why people believe weird things the moral arc and most recently heavens on earth the scientific search for the afterlife immortality and utopia and dr. schirmer's books are also available for us outside before we begin tonight's debate I want to thank the Institute for Humane studies for sponsoring tonight's debate I want to thank the University of San Diego for its support of the center in our activities and I want to give special thanks to Malin Burnham one of the founding supporters of the Center for all his great work in in supporting the city of San Diego in general and our institution in particular thank you meal and so without any further ado let's begin tonight's conversation with michael humor alright testing okay good thanks thanks for your generous introduction alright so i'm going to talk about gun control laws and the right to bear arms now so Michael Shermer and I have not seen each other's presentations so I don't know exactly what he's going to say so I'm gonna just give sort of a generic discussion of problems with gun control and the right to own a gun okay so I'm going to talk about two main things there are two main kinds of problems that apply to most gun control laws that people are talking about so the first thing I'm going to talk about is gun rights that is the problem that restrictions on gun ownership might be violating the rights of individual gun owners and particularly their right to defend themselves and it makes the state something like an accomplice to crime and the second main problem is the non-compliance problem this is a problem that gun control laws are frequently ineffective because the people that they're aimed at restricting will not follow them so the laws will simply fail to have their intended effect okay um and now of course the picture there in the corner is to show you how cute gun ownership can be all right what about this gun rights issue alright so I'm gonna start with hypothetical examples so these are hypothetical examples I discussed in a published article back in 2003 so imagine there are there are three people in this example there's a person who we will call the victim and another person called the killer and another person called the accomplice the victim is sitting in his house at night when the killer breaks into the house and is going to kill the victim the accomplice is somebody who's in the house for whatever reason and for whatever reason the accomplice holds the victim down well the killer comes and then stabs the victim to death alright question what is the correct moral assessment of this action by the accomplice though obviously the killer committed one of the most serious crimes or maybe the most serious crime that we have but what about the accomplice and I want you to have the intuitive reaction that well the accomplice performed an action that was comparable to that of the killer accomplished performed as serious wrong which is about as wrong as actually killing the victim it might be slightly less bad but it's comparable all right here's a second example like the previous example except this time the victim has a gun which the victim would use to defend himself against the killer except that the accomplice grabs it and runs away just before the victim is able to do that so and the result is that the victim is then killed by the killer question what is the moral status of the accomplices action in this case and you're supposed to have the intuitive reaction that that is like the previous case right it's another case in which the accomplice prevent the victim from defending himself and that is morally comparable to actually being the killer it's maybe slightly less bad than actually being the killer but you know it's kind of on a par all right here's a third example there's a citizen who wants to own a gun for self-defense purposes and if able to would use a gun to defend himself against crimes but the government either stops the citizen from getting the gun in the first place or takes the gun away from the citizen with the result of that the system is unable to defend himself on some actual occasion when a criminal comes and then is victimized by the crime what would we think of the state's action in this case and the intuitive reaction that you're supposed to have is well that's similar to the previous two examples actually the state prevented the person from defending themselves and thereby became something like an accomplice to the criminal the state's action there is maybe slightly less bad than actually killing citizens but it's not a lot less bad right and so the argument here is going to be that the state by enacting gun control laws makes itself unaccomplished a crime that is it does something that's more comparable to actually committing multiple robberies rapes assaults and murders so this is my argument a nice graphic in the corner there is from king of the hill the hilarious cartoon okay so my argument first premise gun control laws coercively prevents some individuals from defending themselves against crimes as there are some people who if able would use a gun to defend themselves against crimes and gun control laws will typically result in some people not doing so who would have done so and coercively preventing someone from defending themselves against a crime is seriously wrong specifically it's morally on a par with actually committing the crime so the conclusion is that gun control laws typically are seriously wrong specifically that they're morally comparable to the state committing multiple murders robberies rapes and assaults right now does that mean that they could never be justified well so the claim there is that the government is violating people's right if it prevents them from defending themselves with a gun and these are further hypothetical examples that are supposed to illustrate points about the nature of Rights in the way rights work so this is to illustrate a point about violating people's rights in order to help somebody else so this is a well-known hypothetical example in the ethics literature say that there's there's a town in which a crime has been committed that caused a lot of public outrage and the judge so oh sorry it's a sheriff the sheriff of the town can't find the actual criminal but he believes that unless somebody is punished for this crime there are going to be riots in which multiple innocent people are going to be injured unjustly of course so the sheriff comes up with a plan he can frame an innocent person and get that person to be punished for the crime and that will prevent the riots and just accept that that's true yes except for the purpose of the example that that would prevent the riots what should the sheriff do should he frame the innocent person most people have the intuitive reaction which I think you should have that no he should not do that that would be unjust why because it's a violation of the right to the of the innocent individual and what this illustrates is that it's not morally permissible to violate an individual's rights even if doing so prevents a greater harm to other individuals right I could be preventing a harm to several other individuals it would be comparable to the harm that you would commit but it would still be wrong because that's the way Rights work because your moral responsibility is to not violate other people's rights well your moral responsibility is not to fix every problem in the world its first of all to make sure that you yourself do not violate other people's rights okay no that doesn't mean that it's never permissible to violate an individual's right so there are hypothetical examples people like to talk about in which somehow killing an innocent person prevents world war three in which case you should kill the innocent person there are some possible conditions right but what these examples illustrate is that at the very least it has to be that violating the individual's rights prevents a much greater harm it can't just be preventing a slightly greater harm or just a few times right you can't it can't just be that you're saving a few people it would have to be very large harm okay so conclusions here it's wrong to violate an individual's rights even to prevent a greater but comparable benefit even to produce a greater comparable benefit for others it might be justified to do it to produce a benefit that's many times greater so gun control laws are wrong even if they would prevent greater but comparable harm to others they might be justified but only if they prevented many times as much harms as they caused okay so now we have to consider sort of the costs and benefits of private gun ownership in the empirical literature on this one of the main things people talk about is the frequency of defensive gun uses so how often do people use a gun for self-defense in the United States there's a wide range of estimates so you can get estimates between fifty five thousand times per year and 4.7 million times per right number of times that a person used a gun to defend themselves against a crime it's weird that the estimates are so widely varying so we don't know you know with with much accuracy at all the most cited estimate is by Gary clack of around 2.5 million per year and you know the average estimate is somewhere around 3 million or something the low estimates are by the National Crime Victimization survey this is a non anonymous survey which is conducted by the Justice Department so there could be a bias a downward bias because you may not want to talk to the chief law enforcement agency of the government about something that you might that you did that could even conceivably be considered to be illegal when they have your contact information they have your name and your address you may not want to tell them the OK the high estimates of defensive gun ownership of defensive gun users per year imply that they're significantly more common than actual gun crimes right so it's quite possible that private gun ownership prevents more crime than it causes another thing that people commonly talked about is concealed weapons so there studies of this the effect of allowing people to carry concealed weapons there was a famous study by John Lott which suggested that having more permissive laws for carrying concealed weapons reduced crime now that was subsequently disputed by a bunch of people so it's under debate whether it actually reduces crime it might have no effect it depends upon sort of assumptions that you make there is a review of the evidence by the National Research Council part of the National Academy of Sciences in 2005 which is by the way not a partisan report at all their report is very even-handed and basically says well the results are kind of sensitive to what assumptions you make and there's no clear consensus on the effect of these laws right basically you can have more and less restrictive laws for whether you're allowed to carry concealed weapons or what you have to do to be allowed okay so the conclusion is well it's not exactly known right there is evidence on both sides for both of these kinds of laws that means that it really does not satisfy the requirement of preventing much greater harm than it causes right it's quite possible that gun laws cause greater harm than they prevent okay I'm going on to the second major problem with most gun control laws it's the non-compliance problem and as you can see the graphic in the corner there makes non-compliance look really cute but in many cases in reality it's not so cute right so you have to distinguish between debating guns and debating gun laws the topic for us isn't our guns good or bad the topic is about gun laws and you have to separate those two things because laws frequently do not have their intended effects and they also frequently have additional unintended effects which could be harmful having a law that says nobody is allowed to do X doesn't mean that actually nobody does X right now this is a point that most people are able to understand if you you know pick the right examples so most people on the political left can see my point if I talk about the drug laws the question about whether the drug laws are a good idea is quite different from the question of whether drugs are good whether drugs are good doesn't tell us whether the drug laws are good and in fact largely because of the non-compliance problem because a huge number of people don't follow the laws there are very large cost to those laws and they don't really achieve their intended effect so if you see that point and that it's important to sort of distinguish our drugs good from are the laws good then you should also be able to see this point it's really important to distinguish our guns good or bad for us from our the gun laws good or bad okay reasons why there might be a significant compliance problem with with gun laws in particular though obviously this isn't a reason for not having any laws like obviously there are plenty of laws that there's substantial compliance we and they have much greater benefits than costs so you know you should ask well what about the gun laws in particular are there special reasons why there would be a big non-compliance problem yes there are so one is that in the United States there's a very large gun culture which if you're not part of it you probably don't quite appreciate but there's a very large number of Americans who have guns a large number who love them and have no intention of ever giving them up right and you know a large number of people for whom this is a major part of their lifestyle is like going out shooting or hunting or whatever there are somewhere around 300 million guns in the United States which is approaching to be approaching the number of actual people in the United States and there's larger than the number of adults guns are very durable objects which means that even if production completely stopped right now 50 years from now there would still be 300 million guns in the United States right so all of this makes it like really problematic to try to get rid of them if you wanted to and then the final problem is gun laws are specifically aimed at criminals and as this is not true of most laws as most laws prohibit something that is intrinsically bad the gun laws are aimed specifically at restricting the behavior of people who would already independently be criminals that is you want to you want to take the guns away from criminals you don't want to take them away from just ordinary people roughly speaking there are two kinds of reasons that you might want a gun there are criminal reasons and non criminal reasons the criminal reasons are you want a gun so you can go and kill somebody or rob somebody or whatever you wanted so that you can commit some other crime not a gun crime something that's already illegal even if you didn't have a gun and then there are non criminal reasons like you want to defend yourself or you want to go out shooting on the weekends or you're a hunter or whatever or you just think they're cool right okay which are basically innocent reasons and the purpose of having the gun laws is specifically to get guns away from the criminals in order to make it harder for them to commit other crimes and you don't want to take them away from the ordinary law-abiding citizens right the problem though is it's really hard to it's hard to get criminals to follow laws so and the thing is like most of the gun restrictions that people talk about if enacted they would be misdemeanors right so like buying a kind of gun that you're not allowed to buy or if you're a person who's not allowed to buy the gun right it would be a misdemeanor and the crimes that we're trying to stop the people from committing would be felonies people who are likely to commit a felony to begin with are also not likely to be they're not likely to stop at committing a misdemeanor gun law violation right so like if I was gonna go commit a murder I'm probably not gonna think oh no wait but then I would be violating a gun law so right now you might think oh yeah well but it will slightly increase the punishment right because you know you'll get a couple more years because you commit the crime with a gun yeah but if that was your point just increase the punishment for the original crime right but the laws are likely to affect the behavior of ordinary non criminal citizens all right so if you want the gun for a non criminal purpose it's likely that you will obey gun restriction laws if you want a gun for a criminal purpose it's most likely that you will not obey them which means that the actual effect of the gun laws is likely to be the opposite of the intended effect what you want is for the criminals to not have guns but everybody else should be allowed to have them but what will actually happen is the reverse the criminals will continue to have guns or you know the kind of gun that they're not supposed to have and then ordinary citizens will give them up right okay that was the main non-compliance problem okay this is just some further reading as you can see you know there are many hilarious variants on the the NRA slogan there are guns don't kill people george RR martin kills people if you're a Game of Thrones fan then you understood that okay anyway this is some further reading that I recommend there's an article that I had from 2003 from the journal social theory and practice is there a right to own a gun and then there was a shorter more popular essay called gun and non-compliance both of these are available on my website so and if you just go to the website you can see links to a bunch of papers and things that that third item is the National Research Council study that I refer to earlier and I want to say so I like generally if you form an opinion on a controversial issue you really do kind of have to read from both sides you need to listen to both sides and you need to listen to not like I don't mean popular sources I don't mean blog posts or like op-eds in newspapers or whatever usually the best things are sort of academic which means also that they're less entertaining okay which is why most people don't read them anyway the National Research Council survey is very even-handed it's not like a pro-gun thing they're not a pro/con organization by any stretch nor are they an anti-gun organization right and they just did a you know they just have this survey of the research that's been done which is why I recommend that okay that's all I have [Applause] okay I can have my slides up clicker welcome and thanks for having me and really appreciate this is an important debate obviously I'm the publisher of weather bringing my slides up here the skeptic magazine I brought enough hopefully I sipped down a couple cases for everybody we did a issue of skeptic on gun control after the Sandy Hook massacre just to kind of look at the science behind what we know about guns and gun control and you know we're a science-based organization devoted to investigating any and all kinds of controversial claims so and should I send out my telepathic psychic powers to bring my slides up normally I could just give a talk off the top of my head but it's kind of a data heavy presentation here and so just just to kind of put it put it put it on the on the table here I'm not an anti-gun either in either Michael or I or you know couple of right-wing gun nuts nor are we far left tree-hugging wishy-washy namby-pamby bedwetting liberals afraid of guns I grew up with BB guns and pellet guns and a 20 gauge shotgun and a 12-gauge shotgun my my stepfather was a hunter so I I spent years hunting birds and we ate we ate the birds so I guess that makes it sort of okay and and then as an adult I had let's see that went to I hope I didn't turn it off oh there we go okay let's get that yeah and I had a handgun a Ruger for 20 years as an adult and basically when my daughter got to be a teenager and had friends coming over I thought it wasn't such a good idea even with lock boxes and all that so I got rid of it I've shotguns they're very visceral if you've never shot a gun it's no laughing matter it's not just an intellectual exercise and talking about statistics I mean you can really series the harm and kill people with guns so from my perspective I want to treat guns and gun laws as a problem to be solved that is the problem is is there's more people die by guns than die by cars every year 2016 is the last year we have 37,000 people died by gun this is primarily homicide and suicide more suicides than homicides as a little sidebar most people who kill themselves are themselves not really sure why they do it and so oftentimes they don't really mean it it's just sort of a cry for help which pills can allow you to recover from guns not so much so and if we compare these figures to the number of Americans who died by terrorism since 2004 the terrorism numbers are on the bottom there they're just miniscule and if you look at like just since 9/11 or going all the way back if you just think about the comparison of people that are pro-gun that want to defend gun rights to those same people mostly conservatives who are obsessed about growing the government to protect us from terrorism right these are the numbers that are in the statistical noise compared to gun deaths conservatives think of nothing of suspending civil rights and ramping up big government intrusion into our private lives of the name of homeland security over numbers are not even in the statistical noise compared to gun deaths if over 30,000 people died annually from terrorism in the United States equivalent over 10 911s every year conservatives would declare a national emergency quadruple the national defense budget and suspend the Constitution except for the Second Amendment of course Michael wrote in his 2003 paper which I highly recommend you read it's quite good and it's quite fair and there are also some good and fair critiques of it as well because he gets into the the weeds of the statistics on gun control rights function to guard individuals autonomy that is their ability to pursue their plans for their own lives rather than to protect their interests as assessed from a third person point of view I thought I would just throw in this as a sidebar therefore if you're pro-gun you must also be pro-choice on the abortion issue because of the prima facie right of a woman's autonomy to pursue their plans for their own lives rather than to protect their interests in their bodies as assess from a third person point of view in other words Bluenose and story as conservatives okay I'm just getting a little extra dig in there we've got to be consistent about our moral philosophy if we're gonna do this so I'm a skeptic skeptics debunk myths where the original Mythbusters let's take a look at some myths about guns myth number one the Second Amendment to the Constitution protects us against tyranny as the famous wording is a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State the right of the people to keep bear arms shall not be infringed well in 1776 that made a lot of choice ence because the military weapon of choice was the same as the private weapon of choice today it's not quite the same you cannot own your own private tank or land surface-to-air missile or a drone that can strike with missiles not to mention nuclear weapons you're already restricted by the government your rights to own these weapons to defend yourself are already restricted so we're not talking about you know just everybody should have everything that they want if the Special Forces came to your home and you think you're gonna stop them with your handgun or rifle you're delusional do you know these guys these are bad dudes to quote our president Special Forces Navy SEALs you know if the feds come to your house you're not gonna protect yourself with your guns you're not now I'm not suggesting again I agree with Michael that you know we just confiscate every gun in America it would be Waco and Ruby Ridge every weekend okay that's not gonna happen but we already agree to restricting certain weapons myth number two the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with the gun as famously said by Wayne peer of the NRA in other words the NRA solution to crime and violence is to arm everyone to the teeth and hope the good guys out gun the bad guys in essence it's saying America is a lawless society in which criminals run the show so everyone is on their own armed Amal and let God sort it out later as the country western Texas song says if the good guys are well armed and professionally trained military and police who routinely practice at shooting ranges then yes this is one of the many factors in the decline of violence if good guy means armed private citizens like these wing nuts with little or no gun training this could not be more wrong 2009 American Journal of Public Health study epidemiologist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that on average guns did not protect those who possess them from being shot in an assault in fact the estimated that people with a gun were four and a half times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not possessing a gun there's a risk you take of having a gun in your house there are several risks that the burglar may take your gun and shoot you with it unless you're out there in the range practicing all the time and you know exactly where it's stored and how to get it out of your safe lock box and remember that you use the fingerprint thing or maybe it's the face recognition wound or maybe it's the code you forgot and so forth are mean every one of the teeth as a solution to the problem of crime and violence is quite possibly the worst idea anyone has ever had on timescales ranging from years to centuries that a client of violence has been the result of disarming citizens and of civil society Steven Pinker's book the battle angel my book the moral arc tracks this long-term trend over the centuries a civil state with a monopoly and the legitimate use of force this is the famous definition of what we mean by a government or a state decreases incentives for exploitative attack reduces the need for deterrence and vengeance replaces self-help justice with criminal justice and replaces a culture of honor with a culture of justice in other words we evolved a propensity to want justice to want wrongs to be made this is why we created a criminal justice system but if the criminal justice system is broken or it doesn't work people then take the law into their own hands because they still have the strong urge to make wrongs right if there's guns available that's what makes it deadly here's the decline of homicide rates since the 14th century in Europe from anywhere from 35 to 40 per hundred thousand as criminologist study it down to less than one per hundred thousand in Europe today it's about five and a half per hundred thousand in America today we're about five times higher than Europe I'll show you why in just a moment by the way busting another cowboy myth most Western towns employ gun controls to reduce violence in order to bring business and civilization out west here's a famous sign and Wichita Kansas in 1873 leave your revolvers at police headquarters and get a check the gunfight at the OK Corral was over gun control and the enforcement of the law here's a Dodge City Kansas 1879 sign the carrying of firearms is strictly prohibited any persons or persons found carrying concealed weapons in the city of Dodge or violating the laws of the state shall be dealt with according to the law the result of these Wild West gun control laws in a 10-year period total murders were 15 or one and a half homicides per year a dramatic decline from the rate before in other words more gun control less crime Michael made reference to John Lodz famous book more guns less crime I'm saying more gun control less crime number three more guns equals less crime John Lutz book the u.s. crime rates are comparable to other Western countries who have few guns in other words compare our non gun related crimes car theft burglary robbery sexual assault aggravated assault and adolescent fighting rates are similar to those of other high-income countries but our homicide rates are off the charts higher why guns here's a guns per hundred people in different countries and as you can see we're almost 1 per per person some people have no guns like me I have no guns but other people have lots of guns that makes it close to one per person here's the gun murder rates in the developed world and there we are on the far right again these numbers are just off the charts higher this particular chart here is important first look at the blue this is average non gun homicides per hundred thousand people the rate in America is comparable to other European and Western industrialized nations it's the green the average gun homicides that serves as a kind of experimental control to see what variable it is that's causing the carnage it's the guns here's gun deaths by gun ownership of another study guns per hundred people and the number of homicides per hundred thousand people we're number one America we rule yeah sure here's another study homicide suicide and unintentional gun deaths among five to fourteen year olds this is the United States versus 25 other high-income countries so they're gonna give us a mortality rate ratio these are none done homicides so us compared to the average of 25 other Western industrialized nations one point seven to one gun homicides thirteen point two to one non gun suicides one point three to one gun suicides seven point eight to one and unintentional gun deaths ten point three to one in other words it's the guns that's the problem here's gun ownership versus gun deaths by state again you see a nice linear relationship there between the number of guns and the number of people that die by gun number four when guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns gun control does not mean we're gonna ban or outlaw are all guns gun control does not mean you're anti-gun or you're an opponent of gun hand guns are protected by the Second Amendment the famous 2008 Supreme Court decision in Heller there's been two actually in the 2000s that would make it virtually impossible for that to be reversed now so we have to face that facts but this is not a slippery slope argument for example the licensing and regulation of cars does not mean only outlaws will drive cars police and courts need gun regulation to bar high-risk people from guns or else what's the point of having a civil society based in the rule of law by the way conservatives are always saying we're free of the rule of law yeah okay why don't you apply it to all areas 1934 National Firearms Act regulating the manufacturer sale the machine guns did this result in only outlaws having machine guns no where our today's machine gun Kelly's by the way this was backed by the NRA this is when the NRA was a gun safety organization rather than a political lobbyists organization number five criminals avoid armed citizens criminals routinely engage armed citizens drug dealers armed gang members gun deterrents doesn't work street gang members are eight point eight times more likely to own handguns and other youths and 19 times more likely to be homicide victims drug dealers are three point seven times more likely to own a handgun and six times more likely to be homicide victims it's the guns myth number six America's culture of violence that must be it if you saw michael moore's film Bowling for Columbine he kind of went through all these arguments this was one of them that he leaned heavily on which i think is is busted by the fact that other Western countries watch just as many violent videos films and TV shows and yet they don't have the rates even remotely close to our gun homicide rates I wonder why let's put our thinking caps on oh yeah they don't have guns number seven guns in the home stop crime the Journal of trauma and acute care surgery on injuries and deaths due to firearms in the home nineteen ninety eight every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting there were four unintentional shootings seven criminal assaults are homicides and eleven attempted or completed suicides in other words a gun is 22 times more likely to be used by a good guy against another good guy than it is by a good guy against a bad guy notice Adam Lanza the Sandy Hook shooter first shot his mom his mother was shot by her own gun by her own family member that's not that uncommon that's not a good guy shooting a bad guy so we can run through all the thought experiments you want the victim comes in this person does that and isn't it his right to defend himself yeah go ahead have a gun in your house go for it but you're 11 times more likely to be shot with your own gun just keep that in mind before you buy a gun the same day as a Sandy Hook shooting a Chinese man stabbed with a knife 22 children one adult outside a primary school in Henan Province China number of fatalities zero April 8 2013 lone star college knife attack injury and 14 people by 20 year old student dylan quick number of fatalities zero yes you can kill somebody with a knife but it takes a lot more effort than it does with a gun number 8 the high-capacity ammunition feeding device won't work prohibits magazines that hold more than 10 bullets the maximum is now a hundred Adam Lanza purposely took only the high-capacity magazines with him to the elementary school why because he wanted to kill as many kids as possible in a short of time as possible one hundred and fifty four rounds in under 10 minutes resulting in 26 dead you don't need a cartridge that holds a hundred bullets if you're a hunter you can just reload the animals may not wait around for you but that's part of the sport right if you're that into that Tucson shooting of Gabby Giffords Jared Lauper used a 33 round clip in a nine-millimeter Glock 19 semi-automatic pistol that he dropped when reloading and was stopped by 74 year old bill Badger who was almost shot by a ban by standard by the way you know you have like one and a half seconds to decide what to do and often times people react inappropriately and people get shot number 9 background checks and mental health monitoring won't work busted 60% of crime guns originated with only 1% of licensed gun dealers 85% of gun dealers sell no crimes trace guns traced to a crime the ATF says the most important single source of firearms for the illegal market is still illegal traffickers who are acquiring firearms from retail outlets so tighten up laws enforce the laws if we live in a society of laws intimate-partner homicides account for half of all women killed in 2010 1080 two women and two hundred sixty seven men were killed by their intimate partners fifty-four percent were by guns over the past 25 years guns were involved in more intimate partner homicides than all other causes combined when a woman is murdered it is most likely by her intimate partner with a gun not a stranger as in the famous case of Oscar Pistorius who killed his girlfriend as an alternative to arming women against violent men legislation can help data shows that in states that prohibit gun ownership by men who have received a domestic violence restraining order gun caused homicides of intimate female partners were reduced by 25 percent again I'm not a woman I don't know what it's like to be confronted by somebody who has twice your physical power if you want a gun have a gun but just understand that there are huge risks with that and you may get shot by your own gun the more that you have those kinds of weapons around the higher the risks go when tempers flare and so forth he may know where your gun is just as well as you do mounted illness and mass murders more than half were committed by individuals with mental health problems who had exhibited signs noticed by family friends or colleagues indicative that something was wrong and that violence of some kind was possible James Holmes amassed an arsenal of 6,000 295 rounds of ammunition two handguns a shotgun an assault rifle ballistic gear laser sights and holsters and tare gun canisters all delivered to his doorstep by UPS thanks no one noticed okay or song Cho killed 32 and wounded 17 at Virginia Tech the Brady Act would have stopped him from buying his guns in 2005 a Virginia judge found him to be mentally ill and a danger to himself but the record disqualifying show from buying guns was not in the database checked by Virginia authorities okay so again the laws are already there we should just employ them more actively in conclusion what should we do okay again our goal here is this what can we do to reduce the carnage again if it was 37,000 people dead every year from terrorism they would be a national panic this is all anybody would talk about all day every day on every talk show okay so what we want to know is how can we you know reduce the carnage from guns one ban military-style assault weapons to ban high-capacity magazines above ten three universal background check system foreclosed the gun show loophole five penalties for illegal gun trafficking six ban high-risk individuals from guns convicted of violent crime drugs stalking restraining orders banned sales to dangerously mentally ill people and research funding on gun violence it's not a it's not a trivial piece of information that the NRA does not want research organizations collecting data like this why what's wrong with having knowledge because then people may not buy as many guns and the NRA is a lobbyist group for the gun manufacturing industry so in conclusion I say we can do something we can't do everything but as dr. King said even though we can't do everything we can do something to reduce the carnage of gun violence and further bend the arc of the moral universe to justice peace and freedom thank you [Applause] okay so at this point in the in the session we're now going to have a short period of moderate conversation I would like to give Mike I'll call you Mike and Michael just to kind of keep things straight give each of these people a chance to respond to what the other has said and I'll start things off with the question addressed to you Mike so the crux of your argument for the moral right to gun ownership seems to be based on the idea of self-defense and a lot of what Michael said seemed intended to cast doubt on the value of firearms for self-defense I think statistics that guns were often used against the person who owned them or people who trying to defend themselves by guns were more likely to be injured by doing so so I want to give you a chance to respond to some of those statistics and and make the case that guns are in fact valuable to self-defense yes so well I'm gonna comment on the statistic about the gun being 22 more times more likely to be used against you or something so first note that that study is about shooting someone in self-defense versus being shot it's not about using the gun in self-defense is that an important difference actually yes right Gary CLECs work on self-defense uses suggest that hardly ever do you actually fire the gun there's almost none of the self-defense uses require actually firing the gun if you think about it that makes sense because most criminals like they're they're not just you know out to have a big fight they want your stuff or whatever if they find out you have a gun you usually do not make you shoot them they usually leave as soon as they know you have a gun the other thing is actually most of the most of the cases in which you get shot by your own gun or suicides if you're suicidal then you know maybe you shouldn't have a gun or maybe should because you know if you want to kill yourself you you might actually consider this a reason to buy a gun okay but if you're not suicidal you probably know that you're not suicidal so I mean it's not like you're going to accidentally commit suicide one day right you probably know if you're not going to commit suicide in which case then you're not really at risk so you can go ahead and buy the gun right Michael would you like to respond to that yeah oh that's true I think we should tag for further the fact that the numbers are sometimes disputed because they're self-report data you just ask people it's like these diet studies you just ask people how much did you eat yesterday like they really know carefully ok asking people how many times did you brandish your gun you know this is not a statistic that's guaranteed that we can count on a video monitor you're just asking somebody so you know did he did he just sort of hold it up like that and the criminal ran away did he point did he shoot in the air did he just have a sign out front that says this house is armed you know and so on so that's why the numbers vary so much he had between fifty five thousand and and four and a half million that's quite a that's quite a standard deviation for a statistic that tells us that there's something wrong with the data collection technique either way we can't draw a conclusion from that I would say that Michael on your original thought experiment again the way you present it it's like well yeah of course the person should have a right to defend themselves and again practically speaking we're not going to change the Supreme Court decisions anytime soon where all handguns are banned and as I said if we did and the feds went out to collect all 300 million guns it would be Waco every weekend you know and no one's proposing that but you know what can we do as a just again to reduce the carnage that for every thought experiment like what you presented I could just say well there's another one where the person's kids friends came over got that you've seen this all the time in the news people kids accidentally shoot themselves or just if you want to have an entertaining afternoon instead of watching cat videos on YouTube well just Google people that accidentally shoot themselves I mean there's a certain element of tragic comedy or comedy tragic Greek comedy tragic to this because these guys they and they're all guys you know they're all wanting to win Darwin Awards take themselves out of the gene pool early before reproducing that's how you get a Darwin Award you know you've seen you know there's Twitter accounts now you could follow you know hold my beer while I jump off this roof kind of thing and it's all guys and they all think they're Dirty Harry you know that this I'm gonna I'm gonna kill this money I'm just gonna BAM he shoots himself mommy and they go running off it's just hilarious okay there's a lot of that that goes on there's a lot of people that shouldn't be anywhere near a gun which is what hopefully the gun control restrictions and licensing and so forth just treat them like cars at least as car like cars I think I'm gonna be sticking with the cat videos but uh Mike I wonder so how much distance is there between your position and the position that Michael articulated towards the end of his his presentation because if the value of guns if the moral value of guns is primarily based in their utility for self-defense well maybe people can defend themselves without assault rifles without high-capacity magazines with the kind of background checks that Michael is proposing what do you think yeah I don't know I mean the last slide in which you said what you're proposing sort of went by too fast for me to think about um I mean I want to say that so I mean you said nobody was calling for getting rid of handguns no that's not true all right there are people who are calling for that you know so Nicolas Dixon thinks we should ban all handguns and Jeff McMahan and actually there's a reason for that which is the overwhelming majority of gun deaths are with handguns so and I mean a lot of love way you talked about was a sort of relatively small cases right the majority of of gun deaths are handguns they're actually more suicides than homicides and you know it's a lot of drug-related and gang related deaths mass shootings are a tiny fraction we shouldn't really be paying attention to that so much and also by the way gun accidents are a tiny fraction of deaths they're really guns are not that well they're very dangerous if you want to kill someone that's not dangerous if you don't there's only one way to hurt yourself with a gun you have to be really stupid to do it it's got to be pointing at you it's got to be load and you have to pull the trigger but there's a lot of people that are really dumb I'm sorry but I mean they're like swimming pools for example are much more dangerous than guns and you know which sounds counterintuitive but the accident rate is significantly higher anyway so um you know I'm not against all laws restricting guns so I think yeah criminals should not be allowed to have them we stopped that from how and you know people who are insane shouldn't have guns I agree with that so I would have to think more about some more specifics no I guess I don't have much of a problem with that I mean I think what what what's the purpose you're having that other than to kill as many people as you possibly can which is what the military has a problem with restrictions on those I'm done the problem with owning yeah I don't have problem with the 100 round magazines but I wanted to address another thing you said earlier which was oh you can't defend yourself against the government no that's not true I mean there are multiple times in if you just look at the history of the last century there were multiple times in which a government military was defeated by individuals carrying handheld rifles you know like in Cuba so so the United States was defeated in Vietnam by individual rifles Soviet Union was defeated in Afghanistan the French were kicked out of Algeria and so I mean the the function of the more high powered weapons it would be to defend yourself against the government it was necessary there's a lot a lot that Mike said hear and feel free to respond to it as you see fit but one thing that I'm interested in particularly hearing you respond to is this point about mass shootings and the relative rarity of death due to mass shootings compared to the relatively commonplace nature of deaths from handguns if the proposal is simply to ban assault rifles but to leave the handgun market and tagged it seems like you're only going to be putting a drop our conclusion of our story here which was really triggered by the Sandy Hook massacre was that we can't do anything about it if there's too much of a random element to mass public shootings which is for more people killed in one element in one event in in as much as the the decision by the person to do it there's a certain element of randomness plus mental illness to it and the fact that there's 300 million guns and we're not going to solve that problem I have to say you know I'm a I made my arguments and I think they're good but you know really if you want a gun you want to kill somebody anybody can do it it's just I don't know what to do about that other than you know enforce the law what's the point of having laws even if you can't always enforce them perfectly at least we should have laws we live in a society based on laws we should have those but if somebody wants to go shoot up a school it's gonna happen there's really almost even the idea of you know arming every school is armed with armed guards out front we already know that that's their easy to bypass you just shoot the guy you know you can't be alert eight hours a day all the time so I don't know I don't know how to stop that alright well that this point we've got about a half an hour left for the debate and I'd like to open up the conversation to include the audience as much as possible so if you have a question that you'd like to ask either or both of our debaters I'll just indicate that by raising your hand and I'll run out to you with a microphone you might feel Donahue impersonation I think I'd like to get up at ten thousand feet elevation and kind of look down I was shocked about two and a half years ago when I read for the first time that America has 5% of the world's population we all know that we also have 25% of the incarcerated people of the world in our jails in this country something is wrong and I believe our treatment of society and criminals and guns and all these things need revamping just because of what I said at 10,000 feet I have tried to tell people that obviously the the NRA is that wants to defend the use of any gun since the since the Constitution amendment number two says we can arm ourselves as you pointed out it doesn't say how we should arm ourselves or could arm ourselves so it seems to me that maybe a compromise here between all the parties could be that we would issue handguns I'm I'm talking about handguns now versus rifles let the nra have their rifles they're macho outside type people and want to shoot guns and birds and animals and all that fine so we'll keep keep rifles but we only allow licensed security type people employees whatever they have a handgun so we're still we're still adhering to the Constitution or we can arm ourselves and we I believe we can defeat the NRA let them have their rifles because they have mostly rifles that as opposed to hand you so why isn't that a solution so well the main the main thing for self-defense is handguns and especially if you're outside the home so like if you live in a dangerous neighborhood and you want to carry a weapon outside the home it would be handgun nobody would walk around with a rifle well but so maybe I didn't understand the question about I mean this is a question like Oh what's wrong with I'm taking handguns away from almost everyone what's wrong is that that would prevent people who want to defend themselves and the criminals will probably violate that law and the non criminals will mostly follow it so it will actually just help the criminals except again it's just this argument in a narrow case this one that the criminals will then do whatever they want this would be true in any part of life you know bank fraud well why I have laws against bank fraud because the criminals aren't going to pay those laws well we have to have laws that we can have some kind of regulation and control these industries so that the criminals don't take over so again that's the the 10,000 foot foot elevation of what we've been doing for the last five centuries is civilizing people by having a set of laws that everybody gets a copy of and there is a set of punishments for violating them and so forth that's the whole point of having that the fact that it's not perfect we have you know so many criminals locked up that that's not really related to gun so much I think as it is to bad drug laws but even those were implemented so for five seven five six seven centuries we've had this kind of steady decline in the rate of homicides in European countries and then America and then in the 60s it kicked back up and and and just roared along climbing until about 1993 and then it's been going down ever since 1993 until 2015 there was a little uptick because of certain cities like Chicago where they saw an increase in homicides but the overall trend has been a decline of violence across the board in all kinds of crimes and assaults and violence and so forth mainly because of the fact that people have become more civilized now in parts of the country where democracy was slow to come the rule of law was slow to get there and or in parts of say the South where say the african-american community doesn't trust the law and for good reason they take the law into their own hands because people want justice and so when you take the law in your own hands violence goes back up so again just you know tweaking the incentive matrix by having better laws that's what we have to keep doing okay can I comment on the bank fraud example okay I mean the difference between the gun laws and bank fraud laws is bank fraud is something that you don't want anyone did you but with a gun laws it's specifically you want to take the guns away from certain people like you want ordinary people to have them but you want theirs especially dangerous people who are prone to commit other crimes to not have them so my question is for you specifically what about your thoughts on the CDC studying this or kind of to your point you're making right now you know you look at like car you know car dust and then we put seat belts in and we have we have speed limits and all that kind of stuff just educating and training and having licensing what are your thoughts on I'm just kind of improving our knowledge and the experience of those gun owners sounds good to me I mean so I mean the NRA has actually done a lot to sort of educate its their members about gun safety which is why gun accidents are much less common now than they used to be obviously there's no problem with people learning but I think if you think that that's going to make a big difference you're probably overly optimistic there's already been quite a lot of study and you just get you know people with different orientations coming to different conclusions when they when they study the issue right so I mean it's probably it's not going to be resolved by just having more people doing more studies well a bit more knowledge data that's what science is all about that's what propels civilization forward is by understanding the cause of things then we can decide what to do from there I want to come back to something you said about people who buy a gun because they want to kill themselves 20 2006 IDEs you say well no they just want to kill themselves so let them have a gun so when you think about the fact that suicide is a temporary condition and shooting yourself is a gun is a permanent solution when you think about 22,000 lives that are full of promises on that gone so suddenly and without a new remedy when you think about 22,000 families that are shattered by something that was entirely preventable can you speak a little more about this 22,000 does it are preventable so I think there are two kinds of they basically are two kinds of people who attempt suicide there are the people who really want to be dead and then there are the people for whom it's a kind of cry for help or something now people who really want to be dead are more likely to take more deadly methods like a gun and those people probably have a worse problem which is not going to be solved by taking the gun away from them okay now and you know probably they need psychological care right which they're not not going to get by gun control laws or whatever okay but I don't think that it's the job of the government to restrict people's freedom in order to prevent some people from harming themselves like restrict the freedom of everyone because some people might harm themselves I think that's sort of overstepping the government's authority the job of the government I think is to prevent people from violating each other's rights not to you know stop stop you from harming yourself and certainly not to violate other people's rights in order to stop you from harming yourself so you would be in favor of legalizing most or not if not all drugs yeah yeah I'm a libertarian not a concern yeah so I have strong libertarian leanings too although I've taken to calling myself a classical liberal cuz it sounds better although as I get older and I become a little more I guess sensitive to human nature in the dark side the inner demons and the bad things people do we really need laws we really do people I mean let me address the suicide thing though if it did before I lose that thought so I there's a new book came out this week by Jesse Bering he's a psychologist Jesse Bering BER ing it's called suicidal so he summarizes all the research on suicide of what we know now from a cognitive science perspective and the hard answer is we don't know why people killed themselves we really don't he said well depression most depressed people don't kill themselves okay so but but a lot of people who do kill themselves we're depressed yes that's right but but it's it's just one of many variables it looks like a lot of people go through ups and downs and then they have a crisis moment and they don't even know that it's coming they may wake up that morning and by the afternoon they've decided I'm gonna do it they don't even know why they decided at that moment and and the we reason we know this is because there's a data set now of people that tried to kill themselves and failed and they told us this like I had no idea I just woke up okay today's a day and boy am I glad I failed because wow I don't know what came over me I lost my mind I'm so glad that so-and-so was there to save me or I didn't take the right pills or whatever and you know get that option with guns so I think I think this is a huge element there for controlling that and then that's why the suicide hotline is super important you just get over that little peak there that little trough maybe that you're in for just an hour or two it made that that may be all it is and then again you have a full life ahead of you the gun prevents that from happening yes this questions for the professor I'm just curious as to your opinion about we see the statistics about the dangers of people owning a firearm and it being used against them themselves shooting themselves or somebody else taking the gun and then using it against the person injuring or killing them and with the statistics showing that that is so much more likely to happen than their potential need to use their weapon for self-defense why do you think people persist in wanting to to keep that that weapon in their home is it just our American gun culture that they're buying into and feel like well everybody's done this for decades in this country well so those statistics don't show that there's that's what anti-gun people say or that's the sort of spin on it but as I mentioned earlier the statistic isn't about how often a gun is used for self-defense it's about how often you shot someone in self-defense and most self defense users don't require shooting someone so you're a lot more likely to use the gun in self-defense than to have it used against you but when you do you probably won't shoot anyone because the criminal will probably leave you alone as soon as he finds out that you have a gun right I mean what what you really asked was sort of a psychological question like oh why do people get guns for self-defense well because you know a lot of people are afraid and it makes you less afraid because it's a lot easier to defend yourself with this weapon right so I and you know it's very easy to use you know like almost anyone can use it you don't have to be strong we're skilled or whatever and you know frequently you're threatened by somebody who is a lot stronger than you right and you figure there's the only way you're gonna defend yourself right that's certainly the case with drug dealers because drugs are illegal there's a black market instead of a free market where there's a black market you can't go to the judge if your dealer code dealer broke the contract that you had and sue them because everything you're doing is illegal so you have to take the law into your own hands so you got to have a gun to defend yourself or settle scores and so on so the the drug laws lead to a big spike in homicides done related homicides because of this self-help justice issue hands again for those who ask a question I'm moving around the room a bit I have a quick question about your sort of libertarian approach to the gun issue especially with negative rights kind of approach so if you have a right to defend yourself and yet since you're worried with the actual facts and statistics presumably if we had the data that said overwhelmingly there are laws that would solve the problem you would accept that numbers matter like it's not just we have inviolable negative rights and anything that actually conflicts with our negative rights to protect our lives our stuff our property our whatever you would accept that there are sort of benefits that could trump rights even if we end up infringing negative rights by taking people's guns away all right yeah so I don't think rights are absolute that is it's possible to be justified in violating a right then my real question is when you talk about self defense is it self defence of your life or anything your property being in being violated in any way such that when you point out the statistics about whether a gun is brandished versus shot or whatever if most the time you wouldn't have been killed but maybe your stuff would have been taken is that included in your justification for not taking guns away from people that's my main question basically yeah so I think if you have a right just in general whatever or right or whatever then you have a right to defend that thing if somebody's threatening it right so I mean obviously like what you can do to defend the right depends upon how how important the right is so you can shoot somebody to prevent yourself from being seriously injured you can't shoot somebody just to stop them from taking your stereo or something like that you can maybe threaten to shoot someone to stop them from taking your stereo but you can't actually do it honey but don't you know don't tell them that you think that [Laughter] don't shoot him in the back many of the discussions I hear talk about these proposals to modify gun control laws and in your slide you had things like ban assault weapons or ban high-capacity magazines and a lot of people might think that's reasonable but people in the past have acted in good faith under this existing set of laws and suppose they have invested in recreational activities or something legal I never hear the other side of the arguments I'd like to hear you address that is that a taking do I have to turn the rifle in to be crushed does the government lower responsibility to buy those from us well that's what they did it was a buyback program but you know Australia much smaller population far fewer guns more willingness of the populace to do it this was after a mass public shooting in 1996 and and I had a whole bunch of slides about the Australian law what happened after that all good news but we're not Australia again really realistically speaking I don't see this happening here I mean I think really the feeling I get talking to pro-gun people is they wouldn't care if it was a million people a year who died by gun I'm on my gun it's my right okay I would agree with that Americans are not giving up their guns okay so you know like if if semi-automatic rifles were banned yeah we're not giving them up do you own a gun you do what do you have you know that's not going to okay all right you're not packing right now are you no okay all right you know I was thinking maybe maybe I should do that to show how perfectly safe it is but no and people would freak out okay Mike hello my question is directed to dr. Shermer something I'd like to point out this is in the D versus Heller case this is a quote we can regulate this is what Justice Scalia said that we can regulate dangerous and unusual weapons but not weapons and common use meaning that doesn't the suggestion isn't that you can own a tank or anything like that but that you can own weapons that are within the common use of citizens which would include semi-automatic rifles handguns and shotguns things like that but aside from that don't you think that this has a lot less to do with guns and a lot more to do with a person's socioeconomic status because this is according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics in America in households struggling with poverty or not struggling with part of a middle to high income families have anywhere between 0.8 to 2.5 firearm homicides per 1000 people households struggling with poverty have 3.5 per one per 1000 people so don't you think there's more of a correlation between things like poverty single motherhood things like that that contribute to violence not just gun violence but violence in general and that you could apply that logic to other countries as well it's not necessarily that more guns equals less crime it's mainly a problem of the culture in people's you know poverty and single motherhood and things like that don't you think that's more of a problem well it's one factor for sure any any complex social issue like guns you're gonna have multivariate analysis where there's lots of factors at play if you're in a country like there's like in Germany for example or Japan you just know guns almost nobody has guns in Germany if you want a gun you know you gotta you're interviewed what do you want it for well I'm a hunter you can leave it and lock it up at the hunting lodge and you can pick it up when you go hunting that's it next you know so there you're not going to see those kinds of socio-economic class differences when there's just no guns here I don't know that particular study and it's per hundred thousand not not thousand I think that it's probably related to lower socioeconomic class neighborhoods have more crime therefore people are more likely to have to take the law into their own hands because the law is not operating effectively or fairly in those neighborhoods here I recommend Heather McDonald's book the war on cops she's the one who coined the term the Ferguson effect which may apply to Chicago that little uptick I talked about in the homicides in Chicago the police stopped getting out of their cars they've stopped doing active policing where you know from these computer programs that the intersection of this street in that street you know it's five times more likely to be a crime they're parked the squad car there get out of the car and talk to people and the crime rates go down because the Ferguson effect that is every time a cop gets out of the car they're being videotaped a lot of these cops just said that's it I'm not getting out of the car I'm not gonna police do active policing anymore because I might get fired so the criminals then are essentially coming back into play in that formula so I suspect that's probably if that's a true statistic probably accounts for that we have time for a couple of more questions I have a an observation to make and then I'd like you to comment I know the writer from New York City is all right no no I'm Southern California oh you from Southern Cal yeah I know so I live in Denver alright yeah so maybe you aren't aware of the situation all along the southern border where the Border Patrol do their best to avoid conflict with the criminal activity of the cartels bringing people and guns or drugs across the border they face greater firepower with the criminals and they're not all cartel members but criminal gangs now that means that all the people who live across the southern border are in an environment where if their property owners and if their homeowners and they need self-defense they need weapons now you said who needs a cartridge it holds a hundred bullets I think you should do a poll of the ranchers and farmers just along the southern border and they will tell you why they carry high-powered magazines yeah all the time in their trucks yeah their cars and you can leave the southern border and go into other ranching territory where ms-13 has its gangs working and the ranchers and property owners will tell you why they are armed and not with pellet guns no BB guns welcome your common it's a perfectly good example but isn't that the problem of enforcing the laws of immigration and Border Patrol and so on that all countries have for some reason I think it's pretty obvious why America has become the focus of immigration controversies and debates but all countries have restrictions and ours is not even remotely close to the most restrictive immigration policy in the world and so it's just a matter of enforcing the laws that exist now well other countries they are no no I'm saying that if the problem is is enforce the laws that's the problem they're not being enforced okay so now I lost my train of thought could you yelled at me that yeah okay so I mean it's a pretty example but but again is it's almost like you're arguing just armed everybody and the hell with the law everybody just shoot it out and we'll see how it all sorts out this is the exact opposite of what we should be doing in civil society yeah well I mean but that's kind of the if I carry out that thought experiment then you know arm everybody to the okay also if you legalize the drugs and the cartels wouldn't have any economic power because the pharmaceuticals could could sell those drugs at a higher quality a higher quality lower price without the criminal element but that's a separate debate that we probably ought be on the same side yeah yeah I would agree with that but I would say okay that wait until that happens and then you can talk about restricting the guns to me 300 million guns is a failure of government and to me we shouldn't allow another failure of government by allowing assault weapons there's no need for them and it will only make this country more dangerous for everybody your thoughts thank you yeah so you know when people ask me like why would anyone need assault weapons liberals don't like my answer but you know you would need them to defend against the government like that's that's why you would need military-style rifles and and your honor as discussed previously well if there was a tyrannical government yes you could use and held rifles against them because you know the US government has in fact been defeated in that way in Vietnam for example oh and and the other thing I want to say was you know for for people who think that the government would never hurt them and everybody should trust the government you know I should they should remind you that governments change over time remind you that Nazi Germany was a democracy Germany was a democracy just before it became Nazi Germany and I would remind you that's something over a hundred million people were killed by their own governments in the 20th century it's not counting you know government's killing people in other countries right I don't know how many people total were killed by non-government killers right but it was certainly an enormous number of people being killed by their own governments and really you know you should think that this is a very serious threat some liberals have become more receptive to that idea in the last couple of years I think we have time for maybe two more questions so there's been some talk with like defining handguns semi-automatic weapons and military-grade weapons one of the issues our bum stocks so this is open to the both of you do you think there should be a ban on bub stocks yes but I don't think it's gonna happen and even if it did I think there'd be a black market for it sorry what what does the bum stocks but our bumps talks oh the things you can put on a rifle to make it automatic from semi-automatic so you don't have to pull the trigger Madonn line you just you bolt it on to the rifle and instead of having to pull the trigger each time the recoil causes the trigger to be part of automatically I see yeah yeah I wouldn't ban those either but you know I don't I don't think that's a particularly important thing I mean you know like again like the the people who are concerned about murder actually should be focused on handguns right there they sort of exotic type of weapon things that have almost no role like they're hardly ever used and it's just sort of an emotional appeal because when you think about it it sounds scary I think but if you're actually trying to prevent murders actually you have to think about handguns Michael made some comment earlier in his presentation about the number of times guns were used to prevent crimes exceeded he thought the number of times those gun crimes I believe were actually perpetrated now that the first category could include people intending to prevent a crime by using a gun and shooting himself or his spouse etc would you please clarify that comment because I find it rather hard to believe that more crimes were prevented with a gun then that were actually perpetrated with the gun so clarify my comment so there are studies of defensive gun uses the way they go is it's a survey right so they call and ask people questions about whether they used a gun for self defense and you get different estimates from different studies okay but the high estimates imply that there's a very large number of defensive gun uses typically the defensive gun use requires you to have actually seen a person who you thought was committing or attempting to commit a crime against you and to have done something with a gun but not necessarily to have fired it and you know so we don't know how many of these actually occur because they're widely varying estimates and also because it's a rare event it's difficult to get an accurate estimate right so you get like just a very small number of people in the survey saying that they had a defensive gun use and then you have to kind of multiply it to estimate for the whole country right but it might be much larger than the number of gun crimes yes so the when I say that there might be more defensive gun uses than gun crimes for the crimes I would be looking at just like the FBI's crime reports right like the number of crimes that they have recorded yeah no but so so I say you know so I'm taking about crime statistics from the FBI's Uniform Crime Report and so you might think that those are underestimated in fact they might be underestimated be almost certainly underestimated because there are a lot of unreported crimes okay but they're probably a lot more like the FBI doesn't have statistics on defensive gun uses so that's why you have to go to the survey now you'd be right that like both of these are flawed methods of estimating number right when you just call people on the phone like well maybe some people are lying maybe some people have sort of missed remembered when the incident occurred so they're supposed to report for the last year but they might be reporting in earlier episode also you know some of the crimes might be unreported right but by the way I mean it's not the case that you only report a crime if a gun was fired right if you were robbed that's normally in the crime reports right oh well just this is kind of a general reflection on on gun studies it's really complicated I'm a social scientist by training and so when I undertook to read the literature on guns I was amazed at how complex a lot of these studies are on how many variables at work at any one time and you can you can kind of get the numbers come out almost any way you want by controlling for this variable instead of that variable and you know 50 different states we have 50 different kinds of laws about guns and so on plus federal laws and so you can compare you know this state to that state or this region to that region or you know homes that have guns versus homes that don't have guns and so on and it's amazing how different positions come out and they all have numbers and it's really hard to get your your mind around it I think the National Research Council that you cited is pretty reliable and I just think we need more research that's reliable on that but it's a hard hard problem that's a that's a great note on which to end our conversation actually I hope that if if nothing else you walk away from this debate tonight with a good appreciation of just how complicated this issue is and perhaps with more of an appreciation of what the other side whatever the other side might be for you has to say on this topic thank you all for coming out this afternoon I want to remind you about our survey if you could take a few moments to fill that out we'd really appreciate it and I would like to ask you to join me in thanking our debaters who've done a terrific job exploring this issue with us

Channel: Institute for Humane Studies

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Keywords: Institute for Humane Studies, The IHS, Gun Control, Michael Huemer, Michael Shermer, Gun Control Debate, Debate, Philosophy

Id: aC46GU57MwE

Length: 88min 40sec (5320 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 30 2019