Freakonomics on guns

As everyone can probably tell, I just caught up on my Freakonomics podcasts.  With the beautiful weather we are having here in SF today, the walk and listen during lunch was sublime.

This podcast they did on guns is, in my opinion, very well thought out and very informative.  I am sure there are vast areas where more discussion and more studies could lead to different conclusions, but the throught process that these guys apply (the economist "hat") really works well in presenting arguments that I find compelling.  It's sure a helluva lot better than all of the emotion-based arguments we hear constantly on issues like this.

So with very few exceptions, I think I probably am in the same camp as Levitt in concluding that most of the gun control proposals really won't do much good, as the genie is already out of the bottle (hundreds of millions of guns already in circulation).

The one point of disagreement I apparently do have with him is in regards to background checks.  I do see value in those, even though they would only apply to new sales.  The reality is, not everyone has a gun right now, and, absent buying one legally, it's not necessarily easy to obtain a gun.  Yes, people can steal guns or get them on the black market, but that's still a significant hurdle to overcome.  For example, if I wanted to murder somebody with a gun tomorrow (don't worry, I don't), I would have no idea where to buy a gun on the black market.  I also wouldn't even know where to start in terms of stealing a gun.  So for me, my only option would be to buy the gun through legal channels.  If I happened to be a felon or have some other black mark on my record that would preclude me from buying a gun legally after a mandatory background check, I'd have to come up with some less efficient way of commiting my murder (which would reduce the chances that I'd murder somebody, as they note in the podcast).

So I do think that universal background checks are a good idea and would be effective in limiting some of the crimes gun crimes committed by those people who would make "the list" (mentally troubled people, felons, etc.).

That said, as Levitt concludes, no new laws are really going to make a huge impact on the levels of gun violence in our country.  And, in an interesting discussion that doesn't get enough play, it's arguable that it's not as big of a problem as we may think, in the grander scheme of things.  Yes, any innocent life lost is a horrible thing, but looking at the number of innocent people murdered with guns each year, reducing it by the number of people who would have been murdered even without a gun involved, and then divide that by the total number of people in our country, and we reach the conclusion that the odds of any of us being harmed by a person with a gun is incredibly small.  So from an economists mindset (looking at the marginal costs vs. the marginal benefits), it would be really hard for most any form of gun control, put in place right now, to be seen as effective in a material way.

All that said, when we step away from that non-emotional, objective way of looking at the issue, it's damn hard to hear stories of gun deaths around the country and then conclude that we simply have to live with that (low) level of risk and accept the senseless deaths that result.  And that's why it's so understandable why this issue is so emotionally charged for so many people.  Unfortunately, there simply are no easy answers.  And in lieu of effective easy answers, we often try to legislate with approaches that give us comfort, but may not necessarily be effective when put up to empirical analysis.