Increased Gun Control Only Hurts Law-Abiding Citizens
CNSNews.com reported today that Representatives Michael Castle (R-Del.) and Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.) announced the introduction of a bill that would require a criminal background check in every weapons purchase. Currently, when a gun is sold privately from one individual to another, such as at a gun show, no background check is required by law. Other lawmakers, like Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), believe further regulation would be invasive and ineffective.
I agree with Rep. Tiahrt. When guns are more difficult to legally acquire, law abiding citizens are more deterred from purchasing a gun than criminals.
A person’s willingness to pay for a gun is a function of two key variables:
- Their desire to control a violent confrontation.
- Their likelihood that they will find themselves in a violent confrontation.
I make the assumption that all people want to be in control of a hostile situation, so variable 1 is effectively constant for both criminals and potential victims. As a criminal, I want to control the situation, so I can rob someone. As a victim, I want to control the situation, to prevent my property from being stolen, and to protect myself from bodily harm.
That being the case, the variable to consider when evaluating a person’s desire to acquire a gun is their relative likelihood of being in a hostile encounter. I argue that a criminal is more likely to be in a hostile encounter — they seek it out, in fact. A potential victim is only as likely to find themselves in a hostile encounter as their local crime rate.
So if a criminal is more likely to be in a hostile encounter, then a gun is more valuable to a criminal. The more value a person places on a gun, the higher price they are willing to pay to acquire one, and the greater hassle they are willing to endure.
Whenever the government imposes regulations, they inhibit that particular market from operating at optimal efficiency, which generally increases the cost of the end product. More specifically, a mandatory 7-day waiting period to buy a gun, concealed weapons permit fees, and trigger lock laws increase the hassle that a law-abiding citizen must endure and the price they must pay in order to purchase, own, and carry a gun. This causes less law-abiding citizens to be willing to go through the hassle, so less law-abiding citizens carry.
Criminals on the other hand place a higher value on the gun, so they are already more willing to endure higher prices and greater hassles. Add to this that a criminal is less likely to buy their gun from a licensed seller, less likely to have a concealed weapons permit, and in general less likely to care about following gun control laws, and the result is that criminals are less likely to be impacted by government regulation, and will be impacted to a lesser degree than law-abiding citizens.
What this means is that increased government regulation of guns means that the scales are tipped further in favor of criminals. The phrase “if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns” is to say that outlawing guns only stops people who follow the law from having them, so all that is accomplished is that the people who are armed are already predisposed to breaking the law.
Rather than trying to make us safer by making it harder for responsible people to have guns, I propose that we would be safer with less or no government regulation. Specifically, consider the effect of repealing the law requiring citizens to carry a concealed weapons permit in order to carry a gun on their person. If it is easier to carry a gun without breaking the law, more people will carry guns. This means that when a criminal is selecting a victim, he is less certain that the would-be victim is unarmed, which makes the criminal less likely to engage the would-be victim.
Also when something happens like the Virginia Tech shootings, if students were allowed to carry their guns on campus, perhaps someone could have stopped the gunman before he had killed so many (or any) people. There is a reason most criminals won’t try to rob a gun store full of customers in the same way that they’ll rob a bank while it’s full of people. (by the way, in most states, it’s illegal to carry a gun into a bank, so it’s an easy target for a criminal) Maybe I’m biased, but it seems to me that a room full of gun-toting people is a more effective deterrent to criminals than a room full of security cameras.
That’s one example of how decreased government regulation can make us safer, but anything that makes it easier to lawfully buy and carry a gun helps even the odds between criminals and potential victims. If everyone is carrying, then everyone is on even footing, and no criminal in his right mind would try to attack someone.
That still leaves room for criminals that are crazy, but I’d prefer crazy criminals (who will exist regardless) to insane gun control policies.
