If our goal is to reduce gun violence, we must re-conceptualize the discourse around guns and focus more on the risks and responsibilities that go along with gun-owning.

As of 2 October 2015,
The Firearm Insurance Requirement Act
is the subject of a White House petition.
Sign the petition by clicking here.

We seldom talk about the responsibilities that positively accompany owning a gun. “Gun control,” the issue we argue about instead, quickly organizes itself around several fixed and immutable nodes, in which the same few phrases—”individual rights,” “2nd Amendment,” and “semi-automatic weapons”—invariably feature. If people from opposing camps talk about the issue at all, conversation quickly becomes so dichotomized it stalls. We need new ideas to get beyond the strategic and ideological stalemate. We need to stop focusing on inanimate objects (guns) and start talking about people.

We can’t even come to the point of agreeing that gun violence is a problem. People who have seen gun violence up close understandably want to rein in irresponsible use, but they too often fall into the trap of assuming that if gun ownership were limited, the problem of gun violence would go away. On the other side of the issue are law-abiding and responsible gun-owners (who make up a majority), who bridle at proposals that essentially criminalize and stigmatize their activities.

The huge population of Americans who own and use guns responsibly is not the problem. Gun violence results when guns are used irresponsibly: when a person is careless, criminal, crazy, or enraged. A gun is a tool. How guns are used in our society is a function of our culture as much as our laws.

While the Second Amendment makes it difficult to regulate gun ownership, we can hope to change how guns are used and treated in our culture. As Clarence Page has pointed out on the McLaughlin Group, some countries with high rates of gun ownership have low rates of gun violence. Becoming such a society should be our goal.

Is there something to be gained from “normalizing” gun ownership, while at the same time expecting at least as much from a gun owner as from a person who owns a car? The parallel is useful, because car ownership offers a positive instance of incorporating a potentially lethal instrument into our culture in a way that minimizes risk and maximizes safety.

Like guns, cars, though useful, can be dangers to their owners and to other people. Which is why we, as a society, require that cars be registered, and that their drivers be educated and licensed. Moreover, to ensure that those who wish to own and drive cars do so without cost to others, we require that owners buy auto insurance. Auto insurance companies ply a flourishing trade, because they have discovered just how to assess all the various risks and costs associated with a particular individual owning a particular car.

No one questions our “right” to own an automobile. There are millions and millions of vehicles and drivers on American streets. Meanwhile, however, a structure has evolved around car-owning intended to ensure that, to the greatest extent possible, we do it safely.

Get the insurance industry involved

Treating guns like cars, and insuring them, could have many benefits. Some of the benefits would accrue to gun-owners; others to society collectively. In particular, insurers could place an actuarial value on the specific hazards involved in the ownership of a specific gun. Individuals wishing to buy semi-automatic weapons would be free to do so, but the insurance costs would provide an incentive to think twice and go easy.

Individual gun owners would have an incentive to see that guns insured in their name were not used in the commission of crime. They would have a stronger incentive to report the loss or theft of a gun promptly. Nearly half of all firearms used in the commission of felonies are lost, stolen, or borrowed. Drawing a sharper line between criminal gun use and legal gun ownership would in itself encourage more personal responsibility.

A more market-oriented approach to reducing gun violence would open up a whole new field for the insurance industry, and might gain more support among lawmakers than does the state-heavy approach that most liberals tout now. This approach might also foster an alliance between legal gun owners and other law-abiding citizens, an alliance that is essential if we hope to minimize gun violence in our time.

REMEMBER: As of 2 October 2015,
The Firearm Insurance Requirement Act
is the subject of a White House petition.
Sign the petition by clicking here.

Top Image: Where felons get their guns, from this source.
(If you know of a more recent version of this figure, please contact me.)
Bottom image: World map of countries by number of guns per capita, from this source.

RELATED:
Nicholas Kristoff, A New Way to Tackle Gun Deaths, NYT, October 3, 2015.
House Bill Would Require Gun Owners to Have Liability Insurance, The Hill, May 29, 2015.
Nicholas Kristoff, Our Blind Spot About Guns, NYT, July 2014.
Gun Deaths Exceed in Motor Vehicle Deaths in Ten States, Huffington Post, May 2012.
Suburban Shops Main Source of Guns in Chicago Crimes, Chicago Tribune, August 2012.
Alvarez: Law Could Discourage “Straw Buyers” of Guns, Chicago Sun-Times, September 2012.

This article was featured on the #Gun Crisis: Philadelphia website.

Is American greatness based on extravagant decisions that make no economic sense? I’m pretty sure the answer is yes.

Our history is littered with “go-for-broke” projects that were hailed as sure-fire disasters at the time. They would never have had a chance if our ancestors had had to defend themselves against the hand-wringers and economic rationalists who control American decision-making today.

Here is a short list of things that would never have happened because they entailed excessive risk, uncertain returns, irrevocable loss, or extravagant outlays. In some cases, the day of exoneration for these decisions didn’t arrive for decades. In the meantime, the country and its leaders endured ridicule as well as some terrifying liabilities.

1. The Revolution. It should have been a doomed undertaking. The rebellion was impulsive and deepened into a pitched struggle that lasted eight years. During that time, the colonies held it together with a more or less powerless committee that they tried to dignify with the name of the Continental Congress. The war was fueled largely by reckless borrowing and the issuing of funny money. The country organized under the Constitution largely because the new structure promised impecunious states debt relief. Burdened from the outset with staggering debts, we became the US because there was no other way.

2. The Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson’s famous 1803 purchase was another patent error we wouldn’t think of committing today. True, he acquired all that land west of the Mississippi, out of which 14 or 15 perfectly good states were made, —but he agreed to pay France an amount of money that was two times our entire federal budget at that time. How could that be wise?

3. The founding of Washington, DC. Another ghastly boo-boo. Instead of putting the capital near one of the existing states or cities, our frivolous forefathers insisted on mapping out a whole new city, and on a ridiculously grandiose scale, too. Ignoring the fiscal realities, they threw away dollar after dollar building up an unduly magnificent city—it was all too European. Yet, lo and behold, the iconic city they built is a global symbol, anchoring a metropolitan region of some 5 million people that is one of the most dynamic in the US today.

4. Seward’s Folly. The Alaskan Purchase. Another instance of classic fiscal adventurism. Another expenditure the US didn’t need, especially not in 1867, when the government was laden with debt from the Civil War. Critics argued that Alaska was inconvenient, and unnecessary; its only asset was a population of fur-bearing animals, whose value was declining. That was before the gold was discovered, or the oil. Purchased for 7.2 million dollars, Alaska today has a $49-billion GDP.

5. Ending slavery. This, surely, was the most economically reckless action in American history. For in putting an end to slavery, the US deprived one class of white Americans of millions of dollars of “property” and put an end to a convenient labor system they were accustomed to. The gradual recognition that the slaves in our midst had a moral and political claim to be treated differently—that, in fact, Americans of all races are entitled to full civil and political equality—is one of the costliest convictions at which we’ve ever arrived. Yet like many of our other decisions that “made no sense,” this one was essential to our national integrity. And it highlights, in a way that the other items on my list do not, why economic rationality alone has never been, and should never be, the transcendent value in a republic like ours.

So, to my contemporaries I say—yes, cut away the waste and the unnecessary—but never disavow that go-for-broke mentality. It’s part of the folly that made us great.

Image: The U.S. Capitol in 1830s Washington, D.C.
from this source.
For a photograph of the Capitol from this period, click here.

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Was American Greatness Built on Fiscal Folly?