Game Theory and Guns examines the 2022 Uvalde shooting, where 19 children died despite armed officers’ presence, exposing flaws in pro-gun deterrence claims. Game theory’s reliance on rational actors—like prisoners in the dilemma—collapses when facing irrational shooters prioritizing self-sacrifice over incentives. Academic studies on gun control are trapped behind paywalls, allowing selective interpretation by advocates, while high-carriage environments blur distinctions between "good" and "bad" gun owners, risking lethal misidentification. The episode concludes that rational models fail to address the chaos of mass shootings, where even armed intervention becomes futile, undermining the core argument for civilian gun ownership as a deterrent. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
Before we start the show, I need to give the usual preamble.
Today's episode will be a little more directly political than any previous episodes.
As always, please send any thoughts, complaints, objections, or counter-arguments to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
Also, due to the general constraints of life and schedules, this week's episode will again be a solo effort.
This week feels a little different, sadly.
As I record this, four days ago, a young man decided to go to an elementary school in Uvalda, Texas, to shoot a large number of children and teachers.
This week has reminded me that the truth often makes people very uncomfortable.
Everyone wants to be on the side of what is right.
But I need to tell everyone right now in clear language: when what you feel is right fails to align with what is true, then you need to reflect on how exactly it is that you determine what is right.
But first, I would like to talk about game theory.
Game theory is an area of mathematical study whereby logic is used to predict the behavior of individuals.
Wikipedia defines it as the study of mathematical models of strategic interactions among rational agents.
That last part is crucial.
Rational agents.
What the hell even is a rational agent?
We generally consider humans to be rational because we're all self-aware, conscious, self-interested, and we understand cause and effect relationships in our world.
Probably the most well-known game theory scenario is the prisoner's dilemma.
This is probably taught on day one in the game theory course in college.
It's very simple, but it really shows why this is an actual area of mathematics.
Imagine that two people have been arrested for participation in a crime.
The police are sure that these two were the only ones who could have done it, and also are sure that they cooperated equally in the commission of the crime.
There is not enough evidence to arrest them.
The prisoners are separated and questioned.
Both say they have nothing to do with the crime, and nothing they say yields any more clues.
So the police offer each of them a reduced sentence for a confession.
This is where the calculation starts.
Each prisoner will stand to gain complete freedom, but only if both prisoners remain silent about the crime.
Neither prisoner has any way of determining whether their partner is wavering or considering taking the deal.
Each prisoner has to assess their partner and their partner's ability to resist the reward of a reduced sentence.
It all comes down to trust.
How much does prisoner A trust prisoner B?
But that is only the first level of consideration for this.
Prisoner A must also think, how much does prisoner B trust me?
If prisoner A has complete trust in prisoner B, this means nothing if prisoner B does not also trust prisoner A. Most of us have seen this scenario played out on police dramas many times, but this usually isn't given the mathematical treatment.
In the study of game theory, there are a lot of jargon terms that don't mean anything to the layperson.
Things like convex sets, combinatorials, fixed point theorems, perfect equilibria, and incentive compatibility.
This field of math gets complicated very, very quickly.
And yet it's the kind of thing that most people feel they have a strong grasp of once it is explained.
Just think about how easy it was to understand the prisoner's dilemma I just described.
There are many research articles describing the interaction of gun control and game theory.
Most of them are locked behind paywalls.
Most articles in academia are locked behind paywalls, but we can get into that another time.
The fact that it has been examined from a game theory perspective is absolutely true.
The fact that conclusions have been worked out and they are mathematically sound is also absolutely true.
If I said right now that the overall consensus of game theory math is that everyone participating in society would be immensely better off if no guns existed, two things would happen.
First, the anti-gun people would rejoice and begin retelling the tale of how a set of mathematical principles they have never studied and don't really understand prove absolutely that their belief in a gun-free world is justified.
Second, the pro-gun people would begin doubling down on statistics and replaying anecdotes of times when it was actually beneficial for someone to have had a gun in the right place at the right time.
Okay.
Now, if I instead said that the overall consensus of game theory math is that increased gun ownership and a willingness to actively use the gun in a self-interested manner would benefit everyone in every potentially violent scenario, two things would happen.
First, the pro-gun people would rejoice and begin retelling the tale of how a set of mathematical principles they have never studied and don't really understand prove absolutely that their belief in a gun-happy world is justified.
Second, the anti-gun people would begin doubling down on statistics and replaying scenes of horrible mass shootings with lists of dead people in various places and times in the United States.
We don't respond to this by looking for a rational beacon unless we know beforehand that that beacon will support the conclusion we started with.
And if we don't see that as a thing that skews all of society, then I urge you to keep listening to this podcast.
Please.
From the moment that the first proto-human sharpened a stick into a spear, our ancestors have been involved in an arms race.
At first, it was probably a race to get better weapons for hunting and being better able to feed the tribe or the family.
But we know, without having to be there, that someone eventually turned one of those spears into a device to kill other humans.
We don't know the reason for that first breach of protocol, but we know absolutely that it happened because it's still happening now.
The real arms race began when people started using those weapons in a coordinated effort to attack people of other groups.
At that point, every improvement you could make to a weapon would have led to a direct advantage, and members of your tribe would have a better chance to live through an assault, whether or not your group was the aggressor.
And on the arms race has gone.
Spears have given way to arrows, knives, swords, lances, halberds, and axes.
The race got a big boost when humans got busy with chemistry and worked out the magic of gunpowder.
Muskets and cannons, and eventually rifles, pistols, and artillery, all were created, each one attempting to outperform the previous.
Other areas of science contributed to provide more unique ways of allowing one political entity to emasculate another.
Engines allowed for armored vehicles to move troops faster so as to rapidly overwhelm an opponent.
Radios allowed for better coordination.
Airplanes provided a threat from above.
All of this changed in 1945 on August 6th when an American airplane dropped a single atomic device called Little Boy over Hiroshima that devastated the entire city in one shot.
While other horrific acts were committed during World War II that had higher death counts, everyone could agree that this single device changed the game entirely.
Three days later, the Americans, having not yet heard about Japanese intentions to surrender, dropped another single device called Fat Man on Nagasaki.
This finally ended the most horrific set of serial mass killings in human history, a time we generally refer to as World War II.
Since that day, the potential of these devices has increased by several orders of magnitude.
Also, several other national governments have developed nuclear weapons.
None have ever been used on people since we learned of their amazing destructive power.
The nuclear age has given us a unique experience in the human arms race, a weapon so powerful that even its wielder hesitates to use it.
With the advent of nuclear arsenals has come a new set of game theory scenarios.
We call it deterrence, as though it's a new concept, as though that wasn't what we've been up to all along with our longer spears.
The threat of nuclear winter will only be prevented by the willingness of powerful people to become slightly less powerful.
And the availability of guns in the United States will only be reduced by the willingness of gun owners to also become slightly less powerful.
Getting back to game theory, this is what I want everyone to do.
Take out a blank piece of paper, something to write with.
This is a game theory scenario involving two people.
Let's call them gunslingers in an old West saloon.
In game theory terms, this is a non-cooperative, symmetric, non-zero-sum, simultaneous game with perfect information.
Put two dots on either side of the page and label them A and B.
These are the two gunslingers.
Below the two dots, you're going to draw a two square by two square grid.
The rows of the grid will be labeled A and B from top to bottom.
The columns of the grid will be labeled A and B from left to right.
If both gunslingers fail to draw, then both walk away uninjured.
We pose this scenario with the assumption that both gunslingers have a primary goal of walking away from the potential confrontation uninjured.
The four squares will have numbers in them representing a likelihood of each gunslinger to leave uninjured.
Now, I want you to crumple up that piece of paper and throw it out.
Game theory scenarios are structured around rational agents.
We assume that humans in these scenarios will act rationally, that they will act in a manner consistent with continuing their own life unimpeded by injury and with as much gain as possible.
But as soon as they are irrational, everything about the mathematics is worthless.
Just as worthless as any time you spent attempting to work out the results of a fictional gunfight on a piece of paper with two dots on a two by two grid.
A person who decides one day to obtain a rifle, walk into a public building, and take out as many people as possible with the ultimate goal of being killed themselves in some kind of blaze of glory scenario is only stopped by their inability to obtain the weapons and ammunition necessary for the task.
The pro-gun lobby has a response for this, or at least they always have up until now.
They said that having guns in the hands of good people was a useful counter to the guns that were in the hands of bad people.
From a game theory perspective, this sort of makes sense.
But game theory just doesn't apply to situations where the actual goal of the offenders is to die themselves.
The only way to stop those people is to kill them before they've killed anyone else.
Usually, we call that murder.
The argument from the pro-gun side at this point usually says something like that it's self-defense, not murder.
But it can only be self-defense if the irrational person involved has drawn their weapon and has displayed a full intent to use it.
In a social setting where no one ever has a gun, it will be easy to spot a person who means to commit an atrocity by the mere fact that they have a weapon at all.
In a social space where guns are openly carried and on display constantly, the act of carrying a gun with intent to commit mass murder is indistinguishable from a regular citizen who happens to like guns.
In the act of obtaining a weapon and carrying it to the intended target area, these kinds of rules tend to give irrational armed gunmen cover.
After all, isn't open carry the ultimate goal of the pro-gun crowd?
And picture, if you will, another scenario.
An armed person has become irrational and has decided that they want to kill a large number of children at a school.
Several citizens nearby are armed and have gone to the school to respond.
You are one of those citizens.
When you get there, how do you tell the irrational person from the other people who have gone there to save the children?
All will be armed and preparing to kill a target.
Unless you happen to find the one who is irrational, perhaps you know by some other means what they look like, which in these scenarios is usually impossible.
Unless all that is true, you might very easily shoot one of the other armed defenders who is just there to help save the children.
In this scenario, uniforms make all the difference.
But in Uvalde, Texas, the presence of uniforms was not enough.
We can criticize the police officers for delaying their rush into the classroom all we like, but most of that delay wouldn't have mattered.
This man had already killed many children before they ever had a chance to start delaying a response.
To imagine a set of uniformed officers who rush the irrational agent in this case is to maybe change only a few numbers.
The number of children killed might have been slightly smaller, and the number of officers killed might have been slightly larger.
And I already know what the next argument is.
Those officers should have sacrificed themselves to save more children.
Each additional child saved would be worth their sacrifice.
But I want all the pro-gun people who are probably wishing they were on my podcast right now to make their arguments directly to me.
I want them all to think first about my response.
You ask for those officers to give their lives to prevent more death, but you aren't even willing to give your guns for the same thing.