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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
26:46
The Truth About Gun Control
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope you're doing very well.
This is a brief, hopefully not wind sprint, through the issues and facts around gun control as the result of the recent shooting.
This has been a very hot topic.
And the logic, of course, seems to make sense.
Guns are used to shoot people.
If you eliminate guns, you will eliminate the shootings.
If you reduce the number of guns, if you can control for certain guns, you will control for certain shootings.
But it's really important to unpack the premises and look at the actual data and the moral arguments in particular behind these kinds of situations.
So if you say, well, if guns are harder to get, there will be fewer murders.
And a lot of people will compare the US to the UK, and the US has like 11 or 12 times the amount of homicides there.
But that's because there are so many guns around, and so where guns are banned in Europe and so on, gun murder rates tend to be lower.
And so the idea is, of course, that if you ban guns, you will achieve those lower murder rates.
But again, this is the tricky thing with this kind of data.
I think you'll see through this presentation that's not really the case.
So, where are we in the U.S.
as far as gun ownership?
Well, almost half of U.S.
households reported owning guns.
I assume there's some under-reporting, so it's probably in the mid-50s.
There are over 320 million guns in the U.S.
36% of those are handguns.
Gun ownership was relatively low.
It was about the same, in some cases a little bit higher, even in the 18th century, but it rose enormously in the mid-1960s to the early 2000s.
Now, fewer than 100,000 guns are used in violent crimes yearly.
And one thing that's interesting about the US is that the ownership tends to be highest In those areas of society where violence is the lowest.
So, whites own more guns than blacks.
Middle-aged own more than the young.
Rich own more than poor.
Rural own more than urban.
And that's the result, the opposite of actual violent behavior.
Right?
Blacks are more violent statistically than whites.
The young are more violent than the middle-aged.
The poor are more violent than the rich.
And urban areas are more violent than the rural.
So gun ownership tends to concentrate where violence is the least.
And this is because there's kind of a cultural divide in the US, right?
There's two major areas of gun ownership.
Now the first is the recreational sports group and the second is those who are mostly using them for defense.
So, most gun ownership is in this rural hunting subculture.
So, southern, white, rural, Christian.
They have a long, of course, history of rural hunting and so on, and this was the frontier.
Very, very different from Europe, because in Europe you had a feudal history where weapon ownership was heavily restricted, in fact, outright banned throughout most of Western history because the aristocrats wanted to have the monopoly on weaponry.
But in the West, in America, because of the frontier and expansionist mentality and reality, There were more guns used to defend yourself against people and animals out in the bush and so on.
And in that rural southern subculture, not really a subculture, it's quite a big culture, gun ownership is an important rite of passage, particularly for boys, and you're trained in it, and it's just the way that the culture is.
And that's a significant amount of gun ownership.
Now, interestingly enough, the gun ownership that is self-defense, people, about half of the people buy guns for self-defense, not cultural, right?
So you get into gun ownership if it's cultural, when you're young, and through your family, and through your church, and so on.
In fact, there are some churches that will offer gun training as part of the get the congregation into the pews kind of thing.
But if you're into it for self-defense, then you do it as an adult, not culturally transmitted, and because you are in a dangerous or perceivably dangerous environment, that's why you get a gun.
Widespread gun ownership predated any gun controls.
Now, one of the things that's interesting is that gun ownership really shot up in the mid-60s through the 2000s And in the US, crime rates shot up in 1964, particularly to 1974.
Kind of leveled off, fluctuated through 1992 and then declined through 2000.
And they've done some particular statistical studies which show that gun ownership is increasing as a result of crime increasing.
Gun ownership increasing does not cause crime to increase.
Crime increases and then gun ownership tends to increase to protect oneself against a real or perceived increase in violent crime.
So, what are the facts about crime?
Well, there are 350,000 gun crimes in 2009.
24% of robberies and 5% of assaults involve a gun and two-thirds of homicides.
Now, this means a gun is involved.
A gun is present.
It doesn't mean that somebody's, you know, pulling the trigger or even waving it in someone's face.
It's just there as a threat.
Now, of course, this is what is visible because this is what leads to a criminal prosecution, possibly conviction.
But guns are used in defense in the United States about 2.5 million times a year.
You know, six or seven times more than they're used for attacks.
Now, statistics show quite clearly that those who defend themselves from property of violent crimes with guns are less likely to either lose that property or be injured by a criminal, compared to if they use another defensive strategy or merely comply.
Those with guns are less likely to be injured.
And this doesn't mean that you have to use the gun.
When you're using a gun for defense, less than a quarter of people even fire the gun.
16% only fired at the criminal and only 8% injure the perpetrator.
So this is quite an important thing.
Again, the tricky part about thinking about society is not seeing the obvious, but the unseen.
And most of these may never be reported, but they are able to be determined statistically.
So criminals who are interviewed in prison say that they refrain from attacking people who might be armed.
Criminals aren't stupid.
They obviously don't want to get shot.
And so the great thing about gun ownership is you don't actually have to own the gun to get the umbrella protection from people who do.
So if only half the households have weapons, the thief does not know ahead of time who has the weapon and who doesn't.
And so this is kind of important.
You don't actually have to own the gun to gain the protection of it.
Crime rates have also dropped substantially after highly publicized instances of victims arming themselves or defending themselves.
So there is a fear of self-defense on the part of the criminals.
In the UK, where guns are virtually banned, 43% of burglaries occur when people are home.
Less than 10% of U.S.
burglaries occur when people are home because, of course, of the gun ownership.
The best research on gun use is very consistent, and the links for this will all be below or in the notes of the podcast.
It reduces the likelihood of harm.
So, a third of legal gun owners get their guns privately.
The government can't track and doesn't track and doesn't trace, you know, I sell you or I buy from you a gun.
A third of legal owners get their guns privately.
Out of 943 felon handgun owners, 44% bought the gun privately, 32% stole it, 9% rented or borrowed it, 16% bought it from a retailer.
This is the only part that gun legislation would actually affect.
In fact, it would probably switch people to these other areas.
Like you push one side of a balloon and the other side goes out.
So if you're trying to control the retailing of guns, you're not going to have much of an effect on how the criminals acquire them.
Now, fewer than 3% of felons talked about getting it from a black market or gun dealers.
Gun dealerships, like sort of black market gun dealers, are very, very rare in the US.
I mean, for a number of reasons.
A, there are 320 million guns anyway, so they're really easy to get.
And B, you never know if you're going to buy a gun if it's been used in some prior crime that you're then going to get nailed for.
So people don't want to take that risk if they're criminals.
Now, 600,000 guns are stolen every single year.
So there are millions and millions of them circulating among criminals way outside of the reach of the government.
So even if you eliminated all new handgun purchases and all new handgun sales to everyone, within a year, actually within about six months, all of the guns would be then available to the criminals, even if everything else remained constant.
So it's really not going to do anything.
Now there's been a lot of studies on, there's about 19 different major ways of gun controls and none of them have been proven statistically to limit ownership.
The common gun controls have no effect on reducing violence and reducing gun crime.
General gun ownership has no net positive effect on total violence rates.
So if you reduce general gun ownership, it will have no effect on the violence rates.
And as far as safety goes, there are about 200,000 concealed permit holders in Florida.
Eight a year of these permits were revoked due to gun crimes.
So the concealed permit holders are not criminals.
Okay, so let's do the US-UK comparison.
So the US versus the UK say, well, it's much lower now, but before 1920, when the UK had almost no gun controls as the US did as well, let's look at it.
So in 1919, homicide rates in the UK and Wales were 0.08 per 100,000 people.
In the US it was 9.5 for 100,000, which was almost 12 times the UK rate prior to gun controls.
I mean, you can look at it now and there's a disparity, but it goes back deep in history long before gun controls.
It's something else that's causing that.
1983 to 1986, the UK was 0.67 per 100,000, the US was 7.59.
So actually after 60 years of increasing gun controls, the UK murder rates actually got worse.
That's kind of important to understand.
Now, there's another interesting thing about criminals having guns.
When criminals have guns, they're actually less likely to attack and injure their victims, because there's this big intimidation factor.
You're waving this gun around, people are more likely to comply if they're not armed.
And so you actually have lower attack and injury rates with gun-related crimes.
To be fair, of course, if the gun is used, it's much more likely to kill the victims.
So, to return to the, of course, recent terrible, terrible incidents with the mass shootings, Despite the media, the number of mass shootings has not increased over the past few decades.
The most mass killings in the U.S.
were in 1929.
Mass murder incidents declined from 42 in the 1990s to 26 from 2000 to 2012.
And at least until the recent Connecticut shooting, the three worst K-12 school shootings took place in either Britain or Germany.
And the murder rate now in the U.S.
is less than half of what it was two decades ago.
There's a wide variety of reasons for this.
I don't know if anyone's really nailed them down.
There's far less lead in things that children are exposed to.
And you've actually found that violence declines substantially later when the state government's ban lead additives to various things that children have exposure to.
There's a few less lead.
The baby boomers aged, which means that the young youth male demographic in particular was smaller.
Violent video games or just video games in general have been statistically shown to have a strong effect on reducing crime by basically keeping kids indoors and off the streets and so on.
And of course, incarceration rates went up.
There's a controversial thesis about The fact that when Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1974, 20 years later, you had less than 20 years later, you had a reduction in crime because there were fewer unwanted pregnancies, which, you know, even now a fifth of women don't want to have the babies they're having before abortions were legal.
It was higher.
So there's a lot of reasons, possibly a crack has been reduced.
There's some better policing methods and so on.
Cell phones make it, cell phone cameras and so on, make it more dangerous for people to commit crimes because they don't know if they can be filmed everywhere.
So there's a lot of reasons why.
Nobody knows for sure.
All of them together, who knows, right?
But violence is declining significantly in the United States.
Violent crime is down even more than the murder rate.
So since there are so many private firearms in the US, it's really, really important to understand that the criminals are going to have access to guns no matter what the government does.
The desire for the criminal to have a gun will go up, will go up when the population as a whole is disarmed.
And so you know that the mall shootings, theater shootings, school shootings, why do they always occur there?
Because they're gun-free zones.
And of course, what you don't hear reported of as much, a murder is stopped, a mass murder is stopped when confronted by an armed citizen.
So Holmes, the Aurora shooter, the Batman guy, he had seven theories to choose from.
The only one he chose was not the one that was the closest, but the only one that posted signs banning concealed handguns.
If he had a couple hundred people in the theater, odds are a couple of them would have had concealed handguns, and so he actually chose the one where people were not going to be armed.
Concealed handguns were banned, and that's the one he chose, even though it wasn't the closest or the most convenient.
This is important to understand, right?
The lion goes for the weakest antelope, and a violent murderer Sorry, redundant.
A murderer is going to go for where people are the least armed so he can do his wicked business without interference.
And all the other theatres around that he didn't choose did not ban concealed handguns.
So here's a quote.
With just one single exception, the attack on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in 2011.
Every public shooting since at least 1950 in the US, in which more than three people have been killed, has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry guns.
That's from economist John Lott.
Let's just pause on that for a moment.
That's very, very important.
When you legally disarm people, you create an invitation for attack, for those who wish to do their evil work.
So, are we worried about private people having guns, and do we believe that the police are going to be competent, just, righteous, and moral in taking them away?
Remember, if you are for gun control, then you're not against guns, because the guns will be needed to disarm people.
You'll need to go around, pass laws, and shoot people who resist, kick in doors, and throw people in jail, and so on, rip up families, just to take away guns.
So it's not that you're anti-gun.
Because you'll need the guns to take away other people's guns.
You'll need the police's guns to take away other people's guns.
So you're very pro-gun, you just believe that only the government, which is of course so reliable, honest, moral and virtuous and forward-thinking and all that.
That only the government should be allowed to have guns.
So there's no such thing as gun control.
There's only centralizing gun ownership in the hands of a small political elite and their minions.
Gun control is a misnomer.
You're talking about a centralization of gun control in the hands of a political elite and their minions.
Private owners of guns are convicted of firearms violations at the same rate as the police.
At the same rate as the police.
And again, just to reiterate, this is the study by criminologist Gary Gleck at Florida State.
Two and a half million cases of people using firearms for self-defense in America every year.
One of the things I think is true is that people who are a little bit more on the left, who tend to be a little bit more for gun control, obviously don't grow up in rural Tennessee and are taught how to use guns at the age of 12 by their grandpappy or whatever.
And they usually live in gated communities.
They're usually a little more wealthy.
They usually live in areas where crime is not such an issue.
And so since they don't have the cultural history and the cultural drives for gun ownership and they don't live in high crime areas, they're like, why would anyone need a gun?
But it's a little bit racist and certainly sexist, right?
I mean, if you eliminate guns, you eliminate one of the best ways that women have to equalize things in a fight.
So I think that's, you just have to put yourself in the position of people who are culturally acclimatized to gun ownership and people who are in dangerous areas.
If you're not in either of those areas, you just have to recognize that that's the reality and adjust your understandings accordingly.
So, according to the Department of Justice in the US, states with the right to carry laws, you can carry a gun anywhere, have a 30% lower homicide rate as well as a 46% lower robbery rate.
So, for instance, Boston has about the strictest gun control and also has the most school shootings.
Again, this correlation seems to be very clear.
There was a federal ban on assault weapons from 1994 to 2004.
It did not impact the number and severity of school shootings.
The one of the worst ones that actually happened, and in fact the worst one, in Bath, Michigan on May 18th, 1927, this disgruntled janitor, I think he was, killed 38 children.
Sorry, school district official and farmer.
He also murdered seven adults that day, including his wife and himself.
He did it with bombs, not with guns, and bombs were already illegal, right?
In Clackamas Town Centre there was a shooting recently where this guy came in and started shooting everyone, his gun jammed, his AR-15 jammed, and then he got it working again but Nick Melly, a concealed carry permit holder, claims that he drew his Glock 22, took aim at the shooter, did not fire because there was an innocent person behind him, and that Robert saw him and he claims Who knows for sure, but the guy decided to stop shooting everyone and kill himself.
And so the fact that he was confronted with an armed person resisting seems to have limited the casualty count.
According to a 2003 Center for Disease Control report, there's no conclusive evidence that gun control laws reduce gun violence.
And there was a National Academy of Sciences study a year later which reproduced this.
Okay, so let's look at a big picture.
I've said enough of the details and I know this is quite a race through, but let's look at the reality.
So, first of all, the rise in gun ownership coincided with the war on drugs and the war on poverty, right?
So the welfare state combined with the war on drugs started in the 60s, which is when the rise in gun ownership and the rise in crime started.
Let's look at another thing.
We had the Vietnam War, we've had a variety of other wars and interventions.
There was the first Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan and so on.
So there are now almost 24 million military veterans living in the United States.
A UK study, probably some similarities, that war veterans make up the largest group of people in prisons.
War veterans commit a disproportionately large amount and number of crimes.
Veterans are almost twice as likely to be convicted of sex offenses and more likely to commit violent offenses.
In the U.S., Vietnam veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder had higher rates of childhood physical abuse than Vietnam veterans without PTSD.
So I'm mentioning this because if you have had child abuse and then you go to war, you are much more likely to suffer from PTSD, which in turn will cause you to abuse alcohol, abuse your children, abuse your families, much more likely.
So we have a generational cycle of violence.
The war always comes home.
As William Golding said in Lord of the Flies, a spear is a stick sharpened at both ends.
You put it into others, it goes into you.
The war, the violence, is a scything boomerang.
It comes back.
The war always comes home.
Two decades after the Vietnam War, a study concludes that male veterans who spent time in combat were more than four times as likely as other men to engage in domestic violence.
You go and kill millions of Vietnamese, you come home, and you're much more likely to commit domestic violence.
Combat vets were 4.4 times more likely to have abused a spouse or partners than other men, and were 6.4 times more likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Two to three times more likely to suffer from depression, substance abuse, unemployment, divorce, and separation.
And just in the wars that have started in this century from the United States, Iraq and Afghanistan vets are 75% more likely to die in car crashes than comparable civilians.
Sex crimes by active-duty soldiers have tripled since 2003.
In 2007, 700,000 children had a parent in one of the war zones.
In 2007, 700,000 children had a parent in one of the war zones.
A July 2010 report found the child abuse in Army families is three times higher in homes from which a parent was deployed.
Three times higher.
Child abuse leads to criminality.
War leads to child abuse.
An increase in war leads to an increase in criminality in the next generation.
It's not a one-to-one correlation, but it's statistically very significant.
From 2001 to 2011, alcohol use associated with physical domestic violence in army families increased by 54% and child abuse Increased in army families by 40% in one decade.
Do you not think this is going to have an effect on dysfunctional behavior in the next generation?
Of course it is.
So, what else has happened since the 1960s?
Well, family breakdown.
Also strongly correlated with rises in violence.
Single parents strongly correlated with offspring violence.
Single parenthood is correlated with offspring violence.
In 1965, 93% of all American births were to women with marriage licenses.
Today, 41% of all births are to unmarried women, and for mothers under 30, the rate is 53%.
So we compare, of course, American gun violence to European gun violence or European violence.
By the age 30, one third of American women have spent time as single mothers.
In European countries like France, Sweden, the western part of Germany, the comparable percentages are half as large, or even less.
Right, so far fewer European women are going through single parenthood compared to American women, and single parenthood, particularly single motherhood, not to single out women, but they tend to be the majority of single parents, is strongly correlated with criminal activity and other forms of dysfunction.
Family poverty.
Since the war on poverty, basically, we've had a stagnation of wages, a drop in work opportunities for the poor, an entrenchment of the poor, a sort of permanent underclass of poverty, a catastrophic decline in the quality of education available to the poor, and so on.
And family breakdown contributes to this as well.
So less than 9% of married couples are poor, but more than 40% of single-parent families are poor.
Almost all the increase in child poverty in the United States since the 1970s would vanish if parents still married at the same rate that they did in 1970.
And of course men suffer too.
If men don't need to be present to raise families or there's this belief the state will take over, which it does, Men have less incentive to work hard.
Married men work harder, work longer, get paid more, and so on.
And as worker productivity has declined because the need to be a breadwinner and provide for a family has declined, worker productivity has declined, which is one of the reasons why jobs have gone offshore.
American workers are just that much less productive because the state has taken over the role of providing for a significant percentage of poor families.
So this has a huge effect on criminal activity as well.
So 85% of all youths in prisons grew up in a fatherless home.
Ah, drug enforcement.
In the 1960s, the drug war began, which of course created massive waves of crime, drew the Mafia in just as Prohibition had drawn the Mafia in in the 1930s, and has diverted resources from dealing with violent crimes to dealing with non-violent crimes.
Non-violent, actual non-crimes.
So did you know more people are arrested for cannabis in the U.S.
than all violent crimes combined, and that there is a drug arrest every 19 seconds in the United States?
Again, this disrupts and destroys families and ambitions, it marks people for life, it chains them to having a bad resume and bad references and so on.
Of the more than 1.6 million drug arrests in 2009, 82%—more than four-fifths—were for possession alone.
And let's look at the cost to society.
The Department of Justice, illegal drug market in the U.S.
is dominated by almost a million criminally active gang members affiliated with 20,000 street gangs in more than 2,500 cities.
Mexican drug cartels now directly control illegal drug markets in at least 230 American cities.
These are all people who might otherwise be working in some sort of productive occupation, but instead they're mired in life of crime and dysfunction.
National drug control spending on harsh enforcement strategies grew by almost 70% over the past nine years.
And because the criminal justice system is burdened by all of this nonsense, 4 out of 10 murders, 6 out of 10 rapes, and 9 out of 10 burglaries go unsolved.
And even the ones that are solved, 90% of quote convictions in the U.S.
are the result of plea bargains, so who even knows if they've got the right person.
Only 8.5% of federal prisoners have committed violent offenses.
And 75% of Detroit's state budget can be traced back to the war on drugs.
Unbelievably costly at every conceivable level and produces a vast amount of violence and dysfunction and, of course, gun violence.
So listen, this has been a very, very quick overview.
I hope it's been helpful, but the idea that a government program can solve this, I think the case can be very strongly made, that the violence that occurs is the result of government programs.
We haven't even talked about massive subsidies for Pretty brain-destroying drugs that go into kids as early as three or four years old.
These SSRIs, these psychotropic drugs untested on children, have been known to produce violence, paranoia, hallucinations, psychotic episodes, homicidal rages and so on.
And of course a significant portion of the shooters have been on these terrible drugs when they performed their crimes.
Of course, the war on drugs is only the war on people who buy drugs from people who don't lobby the government.
So that's an important thing to understand.
The war on poverty has created poverty.
Poverty associated with single parenthood has increased the amount of violent crime.
Now, violent crime as a whole is decreasing.
Let's be very clear about that.
There's a lot that the government does to contribute to violence and to not combat the violence that is out there by using its resources to chase after people with Unpopular pieces of vegetation in their pockets.
So I hope that this helps.
I hope this has been of use to you.
I hope that this gives you some where to look for more nuance than deep ideas or facts about gun control.
If you'd like to check out Freedom Aid Radio, it is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web.
Almost 50 million downloads.
I hope that you will come and check us out at freedomaidradio.com.
And thank you so much as always for watching.
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