Fahrenheit 11/9 was a bad movie. It didn’t get anywhere near my list of best anti-capitalist movies or my list of best recent movies. Despite its messiness, Michael Moore almost pulled it together at the end with a thoughtful monologue on the state of American politics in 2018. Almost. He interrupted the monologue for a disastrous non-sequitur: some loud-ass sirens and a message from Emma González on gun control. Whatever point Moore had been making was completely lost.
In its own way, this represents the role gun control plays in American politics. Compared to, say, health care, immigration, or climate change, it’s not an important issue. And hardly anyone bases their vote on it. However, it pops up at strange or suspicious times, such as when Hillary Clinton used it to pretend she’s politically to the left of Bernie Sanders.
But Democrats toss out big ideas on some of those other issues. Could they do the same for gun control? You know, like a ‘Green New Deal’ for gun control? German Lopez advocated for this idea in a recent Vox article. Let’s find out.
Lopez’s Argument for Large-Scale Gun Control
In his Vox argument, Lopez starts from the claim that Democrats are moving to the left on many issues. He argues they should go “left” on gun control, too. Here’s how his argument goes, on my reading.
1. The Democratic Party is moving to the left on lots of issues, from health care to climate change to college education to immigration to reproductive justice.
2. Democratic ideas on gun control have been basically the same for 25 years: background checks, assault weapons bans, and targeted measured to prevent certain groups from accessing guns.
3. Those are good ideas, but they wouldn’t make a major dent in gun violence.
4. To reduce gun violence, we should enact more ambitious gun control proposals, including things like strict gun licensing, mass confiscation of guns from certain groups, and ambitious bans on wide classes of guns, such as all semiautomatic weapons.
5. For major problems reaching levels at or near a national emergency, many voters prefer more ambitious, large-scale ideas. Those ideas energize and motivate voters.
6. Gun violence is a national emergency analogous to health care or climate change.
7. Therefore, the Democratic Party should organize around large-scale, ambitious gun control proposals like the ones in (4).
Quick Evaluation
So that’s the argument as I read it. Lopez doesn’t explicitly argue for (6). But he really needs it for his argument to work, because he needs to claim gun control is a major issue. He could argue Democrats should adopt large-scale proposals for every issue, whether important or not. But that’d be silly, and so I wrote (6) to be maximally charitable to Lopez.
Here’s what I think of the argument. (1) is shaky, but I’ll grant it for the sake of argument. (2) is true. (3) is more or less OK.
After that, things go off the rails. (4) is false, and I’ll say more below. (5) is questionable, and it’s the graveyard of a number of campaigns. (6) is false, even though it’s practically a tenet of religious faith to Democrats. As a result, the conclusion doesn’t follow.
Gun Violence and Gun Control
For Lopez’s argument to work, the strong proposals he lists in (4) must be the best ways to reduce gun violence. I think that’s wrong for several reasons.
One, from a purely practical standpoint, these proposals probably violate the constitution on the current Supreme Court’s interpretation of the law. They’d toss out the proposals even if Democrats got them passed. Of course, ‘current’ might be the key word there. This could change with time, new legal reasoning, and new Justices. But it’d take years, and probably decades.
Two, Democratic proposals tend to focus on the least common forms of gun violence. The ideas in (2) address things like random public mass shootings or school shootings. These are horrific incidents, but they’re a tiny (<1%) slice of gun violence in the US. Even the ideas in (4) mostly address homicides with legally-owned firearms, which are perhaps 20-30% of gun violence deaths. It’s an improvement, but it’s still not hitting the center. I’ll say more about this below in the section called ‘Gun Violence in the US’.
Three, we have good reason to believe there are better ways to address gun violence. There’s evidence, for example, that modestly increasing the Earned Income Tax Cut and the minimum wage would cut suicide rates by about 5%. Combine that with a single-payer health insurance program that includes mental health care, and meaningful unemployment insurance, and we’re talking about very meaningful reductions in gun violence that don’t involve gun regulations at all.
The Limits of Current Gun Control Proposals
And yet, there’s something tempting about Lopez’s argument. One thing I found admirable is his willingness to admit the standard Democratic platform on gun control isn’t very good. He even identifies the reason for this, which is that their ideas don’t actually reduce gun violence. He operates outside of the liberal bubble limiting the Democratic Party imagination to proposals that antagonize rural voters and the GOP base without accomplishing anything.
For my part, I can admit a drastic UK-style proposal likely would reduce gun violence. At least in the longer term. I’d continue to maintain there’s a need to disarm the police, as the police continue to be one of the nation’s leading perpetrators of gun violence. But the proposals Lopez discusses could make a dent, if they were practical and if we could implement them in a non-racist manner. I have serious doubts about both possibilities.
Is Gun Violence a National Emergency?
The remaining issue is whether gun violence is a national emergency, particularly on the scale of health care or climate change. We reasonably suspect about 45,000 Americans died each year due to lack of health insurance before enactment of the Affordable Care Act. That’s more than die from gun violence. But its status as a national emergency is hardly the only reason people support single-payer health care. It’s also part of a robust social democratic program.
Climate change is an even better contender for national emergency status. It’s already driving temperature and severe weather spikes in many areas. It’s also causing increased wildfires and flooding. And more than a decade or two out, we’re talking about sharp increases in death rates and large-scale transformation of the planet.
To some degree, what we call a national emergency is relative to our expectations. But, by any measure, gun violence isn’t climate change or even health care. While gun violence is a problem in the US, it’s not a problem on that kind of scale. It doesn’t give us much cause to think about gun control analogously to the Green New Deal.
Gun Violence in the US
Liberal political groups often point out data showing the US has higher gun violence rates than comparable nations. That’s correct. What they don’t point out is data showing current gun violence levels in the US compared to gun violence levels in the past.
The homicide rate in the US peaked in the early 1980s and again in the early 1990s. It has dropped for the last 25+ years, and the US homicide rate is now very similar to what it was in the early 1960s. And it’s not just homicide, but violent crime more generally. It’s not that we don’t have homicide or homicides aren’t a problem. It’s just that homicide rates aren’t rising and aren’t higher than they were a decade or two ago. And despite Democratic groups loudly claiming the contrary, death rates from gun violence aren’t increasing in schools, either. Rates are high compared to the world, but no higher than in the US in the past. The main differences today are that media coverage is more widespread and record-keeping is far more thorough.
A second point here is that most gun violence incidents in the US aren’t homicides, anyway. They’re suicides. Suicides make up nearly two-thirds of all gun violence deaths in the US. While strong gun control proposals might address suicide, it’d require drastic, UK-style measures unlikely to pass legal muster. And given these issues with gun control, particularly more ambitious kinds of gun control, why not focus on robust suicide prevention programs addressing deeper causes of suicide rather than just the weapon used?
An Emergency?
This brings us back to the issue of liberal bubbles. Insofar as there’s a gun violence emergency in the US, it’s suicide. Suicide rates are rising, and homicide rates aren’t. But most gun control advocates don’t live in the places where suicide rates are rising. Smart proposals focus on suicide, and the best of the big ideas tackle suicide first.
Why Did Gun Violence Decline in the US?
Once again, despite claims to the contrary, gun violence rates in the US are much lower in 2019 than they were 25-30 years ago. And yet they’re still high when compared to places like Canada, Germany, the UK, et al. If we want our gun violence rates to keep dropping, we might start by asking why they dropped in the past.
So, why are gun violence rates in the US much lower in 2019 than they were in 1991?
Plenty of people have asked this question, and there are lots of answers. We could have an entire post and discussion on just this issue. The Brennan Center has probably done the most thorough work on this question. And they take something of an ‘all of the above’ approach, finding evidence that rising income and falling unemployment explain some of the drop, reductions in the percentage of teenagers in the population (partly due to increased availability of abortion after Roe v. Wade) explain some of it, reductions in poisonous lead in the environment explain some of it, declining alcohol consumption explains some of it, increased immigration explains some of it, and more effective policing methods explain some of it.
Some of these things have thorny political implications. And I don’t necessarily want to endorse them. But what’s not on most lists is things like gun control, more policing, and mass incarceration. There’s some evidence those latter two things may have reduced property crime, but not violent crime.
Conclusion: A Bad Analogy for Gun Control Advocacy
Here’s where I think we are. It makes a certain amount of sense to argue Democrats should go “left” on guns. Why not a large-scale, progressive approach to guns matching the ones on health care and climate change?
Several reasons, as it turns out.
One, it’s far from clear that there’s a settled left-wing position on guns. Gun control isn’t a historical left-wing view, and it’s hardly clear it helps achieve central left-wing goals. Its history is a largely racist one of disarming people of color. Two, gun violence isn’t central to the American system like health care, and it isn’t an emergency on the scale of climate change. And three, the courts would block Lopez’s robust gun control proposals.
If Democrats want to propose a ‘Green New Deal’ to address gun violence, it’s best to think of it in terms of suicide prevention, mental health care, and/or housing and employment security.
.jpg){kind=link}