Handguns (Reblog)

The tragic shootings at Virginia Tech are kicking up the predictable debate in venues like Slashdot -- which one would hope represents an unusually enlightened segment of the world's English-speaking population due to the affluence and leisure required to indulge in it, but of course turns out to be mostly occupied by unthinking adolescents.

There have been many, many, many assertions that permitting handguns on campus would have prevented the full escalation of this event. Handguns are the great equalizer. When handguns are outlawed, only outlaws will have handguns. Ad nauseam.

Particularly irritating to me are the following specious notions:

1. This disturbed guy, and pretty much everyone who has committed handgun violence, would have found some way to kill even without easy access to a handgun. This completely fails to realize the "barrier to entry" for murder. The easier it is to do something, the less it takes for someone to be provoked into doing it.
2. Outlaws will always have handguns whether they are illegal or not; only law-abiding citizens are denied handguns by handgun laws. I refer one to the aforementioned barrier to entry. As the commitment, effort, and expense involved in acquiring a handgun increases, fewer and fewer people -- yes, even "outlaws" -- will have one. Legislation of all sorts is a mechanism of statistics; just because an inveterate murderer and liar like Dick Cheney will find a way to acquire an illegal handgun doesn't mean well-crafted legislation that is effectively enforced wouldn't reduce handgun violence.
   
3. Handguns let weaker people stand up to stronger people. This seems to presuppose that we should govern our lives by assuming inevitable physical conflict with our fellow citizenry, and moreover conflict that must necessarily escalate to mortal violence. It seems to me that our goal as a society should be to minimize these conflicts, not to make sure we're all well-armed for them.

Now, from the limited information available about this particular shooting, I'd be willing to believe that if one of these students had been carrying a concealed handgun the killing might have ended sooner. Or it might have been the same, or worse. Regardless, such speculation doesn't really address the astounding amount of handgun-related violence in our country on a daily basis.

According to the CDC: 11,250 firearm homicides in 2004, almost 68% of all homicides. That's 0.0038% of our total population. It's not Iraq, but surely better control of handguns wouldn't make it worse.