Philosophical Vegan Forum

An issue I have been thinking a lot about lately is gun control. I was wondering what you guys here think about it. While I am quite sure prisons are not a sensible policy, I am not so sure about gun control. I can think of some rather compelling arguments both for and against gun control, from the purely consequentialist perspective (so, not appealing to rights and similar concepts).

AGAINST:
1) How could it work given what gun control laws actually say? Gun control laws in most countries make automatic and semi-automatic weapons illegal, while leaving non-automatic weapons legal. But automatic and semi-automatic weapons are precisely those weapons that can come useful in self-defence, when every second counts. Criminals generally do not use automatic or semi-automatic weapons. Why would they? An attacker has all the time in the world to set up his or her weapon for the attack. It is the defender that needs to respond immediately, for whom automatic weapons may come useful. How could such gun control laws be anything but counter-productive?
CONTRA: This is argument from incredulity.

2) Self-defense use of guns seems to greatly outnumber the number of deaths caused by guns. It is hard to tell how often self-defense using guns happens, but it can be anywhere between 100'000 times per year to more than a million times per year. For comparisons, guns only cause around 50'000 deaths per year.
CONTRA: Many of those self-defense uses of guns would not be necessary if there were no guns to begin with.

FOR:
1) There appears to be a really strong consensus among social scientists that gun control helps.
CONTRA: That consensus may be based on political bias, since social scientists tend to be very left-wing.

2) There seems to be a strong correlation between gun ownership and violent crime within the US.
CONTRA: There does not seem to be such a strong correlation elsewhere, such as in Europe. The UK has among the lowest gun ownership rates in Europe, yet it is the highest in violent crime. Croatia and Serbia have the highest gun ownership rate in Europe, yet they are very low in violent crime.

Like I have said, I was wondering what you think.

Happy to not live in a society with guns. People are way too crazy and irrational to own these responsibly

The tricky part is what you do once there's already a metric fuckton of guns in your society (USA). I'm not too sure to do in such a case. For starters, you could probably raise the minimum buying age. There seems to have been an uptick in 18 year old mass-shooters recently. I don't see why anyone who doesn't even have a fully developed brain yet should be able to buy guns legally.

Avskum wrote:There seems to have been an uptick in 18 year old mass-shooters recently

You know what Bryan Caplan (an anarcho-capitalist economist and philosopher) said: "It may sound heartless, but when I hear about a mass shooting, I think 'How many more people could have been saved had Jews been armed in the Third Reich?'."?

Avskum wrote:I don't see why anyone who doesn't even have a fully developed brain yet should be able to buy guns legally.

For self-defense, obviously. USA is a dangerous place to live in, and it is not very unlikely that an 18-year-old there would find themselves in a situation where a gun would help.

teo123 wrote: You know what Bryan Caplan (an anarcho-capitalist economist and philosopher) said: "It may sound heartless, but when I hear about a mass shooting, I think 'How many more people could have been saved had Jews been armed in the Third Reich?'."

Most likely 0 as they were against an overwhelming force in form of the state and most of the country's population. The Jews would have been able to kill some number of Nazis, but nothing that would really change anything. Three Arrows has an interesting video on this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfHXJRqq-qo

teo123 wrote: For self-defense, obviously. USA is a dangerous place to live in, and it is not very unlikely that an 18-year-old there would find themselves in a situation where a gun would help.

It seems much more likely they'd do something really stupid with a gun instead of performing some heroic selfdefense act, but it might be hard to find data that usable for some comparisons.

Avskum wrote:Most likely 0

Seriously? That's as ridiculous as saying that millions people could be saved. Thousands of people could almost certainly be saved.

teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Jun 01, 2022 10:02 am

Avskum wrote:Most likely 0

Seriously? That's as ridiculous as saying that millions people could be saved. Thousands of people could almost certainly be saved.

Fiiiiiine, a non-zero amount of Jews would have been saved . In any case, I don't see how it would have resulted meaningful resistance to the Nazis or why this hypothetical is very relevant to today.

Avskum wrote: ↑Mon Jun 06, 2022 2:46 am

teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Jun 01, 2022 10:02 am

Avskum wrote:Most likely 0

Seriously? That's as ridiculous as saying that millions people could be saved. Thousands of people could almost certainly be saved.

Fiiiiiine, a non-zero amount of Jews would have been saved . In any case, I don't see how it would have resulted meaningful resistance to the Nazis or why this hypothetical is very relevant to today.

When somebody is alleged to have died from a COVID-19 vaccine, aren't you thinking "That's horrible! But how many more people would have been saved if more people were vaccinated?"?

teo123 wrote: ↑Tue Jun 07, 2022 11:37 am

Avskum wrote: ↑Mon Jun 06, 2022 2:46 am

teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Jun 01, 2022 10:02 am Seriously? That's as ridiculous as saying that millions people could be saved. Thousands of people could almost certainly be saved.

Fiiiiiine, a non-zero amount of Jews would have been saved . In any case, I don't see how it would have resulted meaningful resistance to the Nazis or why this hypothetical is very relevant to today.

When somebody is alleged to have died from a COVID-19 vaccine, aren't you thinking "That's horrible! But how many more people would have been saved if more people were vaccinated?"?

Hmm, not a big fan on this analogy (if I understood it right) Vaccine side-effects are negligible, whereas the side-effects are very high when you fill society with guns to fight back against some hypothetical low probability fascist takeover.

Avskum wrote: ↑Wed Jun 08, 2022 7:54 am

teo123 wrote: ↑Tue Jun 07, 2022 11:37 am

Avskum wrote: ↑Mon Jun 06, 2022 2:46 am

Fiiiiiine, a non-zero amount of Jews would have been saved . In any case, I don't see how it would have resulted meaningful resistance to the Nazis or why this hypothetical is very relevant to today.

When somebody is alleged to have died from a COVID-19 vaccine, aren't you thinking "That's horrible! But how many more people would have been saved if more people were vaccinated?"?

Hmm, not a big fan on this analogy (if I understood it right) Vaccine side-effects are negligible, whereas the side-effects are very high when you fill society with guns to fight back against some hypothetical low probability fascist takeover.

I am not sure what those side-effects are. Arming everybody probably has a positive effect on violent crime: estimates of how many people are saved by guns each year are by orders of magnitude greater than the estimates of how many people are killed by guns each year.
I am also not sure that a fascist takeover is that unlikely these days. If Jews were proclaimed to be spreaders of typhus in the Third Reich, then the unvaccinated are claimed to be spreaders of COVID these days. While vaccines do lower transmission, it is only by around 45% (and the protection they provide against infection is hard to measure and probably not significant), and that is easily outweighed by changes in behaviour. Unvaccinated are claimed to be spreaders of COVID, but who really attends superspreader events? Obviously, it is the vaccinated who attend superspreader events. Which is why highly-vaccinated countries tend to have more cases per capita, rather than fewer. Governments are also spreading the myth that COVID-19 will mutate into an HIV-like virus thanks to the unvaccinated, and that is even worse nonsense. Maybe it is intended to get more people vaccinated, but maybe there is another goal.

I am not saying a fascist takeover is bound to happen. After all, homosexuals were similarly proclaimed to be the spreaders of an infectious disease during the Reagan administration in the HIV pandemic, and it did not lead to a fascist takeover. But I think it is possible.