When a gun is produced and sold, there is an externality: a chance that the gun

Question

When a gun is produced and sold, there is an externality: a chance that the gun will be shot at someone other than its owner. Use the analysis of externalities to determine a government policy that would likely improve social efficiency by decreasing the number of injuries and deaths from gun violence. Try to find the most socially efficient policy you can that the US Supreme Court would probably judge to be constitutional (not in violation of the Second Amendment, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" or any other part of the US Constitution.) Explain why the policy you describe is unlikely to be found to violate the Second Amendment and why it is likely to be more socially efficient than other policies that would be found constitutional.

Hint: Consider the claims of R. Coase and/or the government interventions for dealing with externalities.

Explanation / Answer

The United States has a lot of gun violence. In 2014, there were 3.43 gun-related
homicides per 100,000 people, a much higher rate than any other country in the Organisation for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) except Mexico. The U.S. is also awash in
guns: the country has more privately-owned firearms than people, along with over 40% of the
world’s total guns.1
There is good reason to believe that firearm possession by other members of
the community, even law-abiding members, increases the risk of gun crimes to others. Privately-
owned firearms in the U.S. are significantly more likely to be used in a violent crime than to
deter the commission of one, and most gun crimes are committed either with a gun the assailant
legally owns, one borrowed from a family member, or one stolen from a legal gun owner.2
Though widespread gun ownership imposes significant costs on some through greater
risks of violent crimes involving firearms, efforts to regulate gun ownership or to abolish it for
some or all classes of weapons faces significant political and legal hurdles. The Second
Amendment, as interpreted by the Supreme Court in its 2008 decision in District of Columbia v.
Heller, enshrines private gun ownership as a basic legal right. Many people own guns for their
own safety, in order to deter potential assailants. Many gun owners also believe that gun control
proponents are insufficiently attentive to the importance having guns plays in their culture or
their conceptions of what constitutes a good life.One way to think about how gun policy could be better would be to try to weigh the
competing claims of members of both sides of the debate and to try to work out which are based
on incorrect factual assumptions. Whether or not guns really make gun owners or anyone else
safer is (at least partially) an empirical question, one we might eventually answer if we do the
right studies and correctly interpret the data. If we do careful moral philosophy, maybe we will
decide that even if we could promote the public good by restricting or abolishing private gun
ownership, gun owners have a basic moral right to own guns that should not be violated for the
good of others. Or maybe we’ll decide that the interests that gun owners have in owning guns are
not basic interests, and weigh little in comparison with the interests others have against being
subjected to a greater risk of violent assault.
This paper pursues a different strategy. The question I address here is: assuming that gun
ownership in the United States imposes costs on some and realizes benefits for others, what is a
fair way to distribute those costs and benefits? Suppose that gun owners have a morally
significant interest in owning guns. What sorts of burdens may the state place on those interests
in order to promote public safety? Here, I defend a plausible moral principle that individuals
should, all things being equal, be required to pay the morally significant costs that they impose
on others. This principle favors policies aimed at redistributing the costs of gun ownership to
those who choose to own guns. I discuss three forms of policy responses that may satisfy this
principle: making gun owners financially liable for the damage their weapons do to others even
when they are lost or stolen; product liability for gun manufacturers, the costs of which would
make guns more expensive to own; and a state-run scheme that imposes taxes or licensing fees
on gun owners. Though I think these are plausible responses to the problem of making gun
owners internalize the costs their choices impose on others, the argument here falls short of a full defense of these policies. Rather, the costs such policies would impose on gun owners constitutes
a morally acceptable minimum of burdens that state should be able to impose on gun owners
with policies plausibly aimed at reducing gun violence.
2. Gun ownership imposes costs on others
The impact widespread gun ownership has on public safety is controversial not only
among the public, but among academics researching the topic as well. Often, researchers are
trying to answer a very general question: do guns make society more or less safe overall? For
instance, John Lott has popularized the “more guns, less crime” thesis, which claims that
increased access to guns and fewer gun-related legal restrictions lowers crime by deterring
criminals from committing crimes.
3 David Hemenway has argued that the public safety debate
should be construed even broader, to include the overall effects that guns have on public health,
including increasing suicides and accidents along with overall social violence. According to
Hemenway, we should think of guns the way we think of tobacco, as a public health risk, and
take public policy steps to mitigate the harms of firearm possession.4 Other public health
researchers have presented evidence that gun owners are more likely to be shot with their own
gun than they are to successfully use it for self-defense or to deter a crime.5
For purposes of this paper, to ask whether or not guns make society safer overall is to ask
the wrong question. It misses the morally significant fact that the decision to own a gun imposes
costs on others by putting them at risk. First, even if it turns out that guns promote public safety,
it would still matter how the public safety benefits of gun ownership are distributed. Suppose that your owning a gun makes you 5% less likely to be the victim of a violent crime because you
might use it defensively in some future case. But suppose that it also makes me 3% more likely
to be shot because someone might steal your gun and use it in a violent crime against me. If, for
the sake of the example, we hold fixed everyone else’s chances of being shot or being the victim
of a crime, then your owning a gun is in some sense an overall improvement to public safety. But
it does this by making you safer at my expense. Who the policy benefits and who it burdens is
morally relevant for assessing gun policy. The fact that your decision makes you safer does not
compensate me for the risks it imposes on me, as would be implied if we thought that the only
thing that matters is the overall effect guns have on public safety. Second, not all of the costs
guns impose are harms to others. Over 60% of gun deaths are suicides. Suicide is often tragic,
but it is importantly morally different from homicide. I suspect that suicide is not always tragic
or harmful, since it may be the case that the best response a person has to the reasons available to
them is to end their own life: if, e.g., continuing to live would require them to live in great pain,
or to live inauthentically, or to give up important life projects that they have. But even when
suicide committed with a firearm is harmful, it is generally a harm to the person whose decision
it is to own a gun. If it turns out that gun owners are significantly more at risk of suicide because
they own a gun, then a public health campaign to convince people not to own guns might be a
good idea, in the same way that it is a good idea to institute a public health campaign that
encourages people not to use tobacco. But the fact that your buying a gun makes you more likely
to commit suicide is not a harm to others, the sorts of harms this paper aims to address.
The question relevant to my argument is: does owning a gun impose morally significant
costs on others? I argue that it does. To show this, I defend four claims: (1) the prevalence of gun
ownership predicts a greater incidence of gun homicide and injury; (2) the correlation between gun ownership and gun homicide can be plausibly explained by the contribution increased gun
ownership makes to increase violent homicide; (3) it is not the case that violent crimes
committed using guns would be displaced by crimes of the same severity committed with other
weapons if guns were less available; and (4) it is not the case that gun ownership deters more
crimes than it contributes to—and that even if it does, this should not be deducted from the costs
gun ownership imposes on others.
First, the prevalence of gun ownership contributes to a greater incidence of injury and
death resulting from violent crimes committed with guns. It is generally accepted that there is a
strong correlation between levels of firearm ownership and homicides committed by firearms. A
wide-ranging study of levels of gun ownership and homicides of each state in the U.S. from
1981-2010 found that, when controlling for other major predictors of homicide, a 1% increase in
the proportion of households that own at least one gun predicts an almost equivalent increase—
0.9%—in the rate of firearm homicides.
6 Of course, the fact that gun ownership predicts
increased violence does not definitively establish that increased gun ownership causes violence.
The causal relationship could be the reverse: it could turn out to be the case that a higher gun
homicide rate encourages people to buy guns. These behaviors might also be mutually
reinforcing: it may be the case both that an increase in homicides leads more people to buy guns
and that increased gun ownership leads to increased homicides. However, the authors of the
study also found that a strong correlation was present even when gun ownership data was lagged
by one or two years. In other words, gun homicides were predicted by the gun ownership rate of
the past one or two years.7
This is consistent with the hypothesis that increased rates of gun
ownership cause more gun homicides, or that some third factor causes both, but it shows that there is not a one-way causal relationship from increased gun homicides to increased rates of
household gun ownership. Additionally, there is reason to believe that the overall decline in the
homicide rate in the U.S. is significantly influenced by advances in medical care. The fact that
doctors are better at preventing patients from dying of gun injuries suggests that the national gun
homicide rate, which has been flat for several years and is much lower than the 1980s and early
90s, masks a significant increase in shootings that today result in injury instead of death.
On the above conclusion we get the gun is partially fair for society to stop crime.

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