On Guns and Tyranny

Arming everyone to the teeth as a solution to the problem of crime and violence is quite possibly the worst idea anyone has ever had

In response to the gun massacre in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017, I penned an Opinion Editorial for The New York Times, solicited and edited by the estimable Bari Weiss, addressing the argument by pro-gun advocates that guns are a deterrent against tyranny. What follows is an expanded version of that OpEd that includes the problem of copycat mass murders, in which perpetrators seek fame through their murderous acts, and a simple solution to it. In the wake of Buffalo, Uvalde, Tulsa, and who knows what city will host the next mass murder by the time this goes out, I thought I would reprint it here as, unfortunately, it is still relevant. Images included are from my PowerPoint presentation on guns, gun violence, and gun control.

In the wake of the Las Vegas massacre—the worst in modern American history, with 59 dead and 527 wounded—the onus falls once again to those against gun control to make their case. The two most common arguments made in defense of broad gun ownership are a) self protection and b) as a bulwark against tyranny. Let’s consider each one.

Stories about the use of guns in self-defense—a good guy with a gun dispensing with a bad guy with a gun—are legion among gun enthusiasts and conservative talk radio hosts. But a 1998 study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, to take one of many examples, found that “every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.” That means a gun is 22 times more likely to be used in a criminal assault, an accidental death or injury, a suicide attempt, or a homicide than it is for self-defense. A 2003 study published in the journal Annals of Emergency Medicine examined gun ownership levels among thousands of murder and suicide victims and nonvictims and found that having guns in the home was associated with a 41 percent increase in homicide and 244 percent increase in suicide. The Second Amendment protects your right to own a gun, but having one in your home involves a risk-benefit calculation you should seriously consider.  

Note: A new study issued in April of 2022 by Stanford University researchers corroborated these findings in which the authors concluded:

Stanford researchers and their colleagues have found that Californians who didn’t own handguns but lived with handgun owners were more than twice as likely to die by homicide compared with those living in gun-free homes.

Most strikingly, they found in a recent study that people who lived with a handgun owner were seven times as likely to be shot and killed by a spouse or intimate partner. Eighty-four percent of those victims were women.

Despite widespread perceptions that a gun in the home provides security benefits, nearly all credible studies to date suggest that people who live in homes with guns are at higher — not lower — risk of homicide.      

The Second Amendment guarantees your right to own a gun for self-protection in your home, but understand the risks involved if you choose to do so. Naturally, no one thinks their own gun will be used against them, or by a family member to take their own life or shoot themselves accidentally, but statistically the odds are stacked against you if you make that choice.

The wording of the Second Amendment explicitly evokes the idea that guns stand as a deterrent against tyrannical governments. The proclamation that “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” made sense in the 1770s, when breech-loading flintlock muskets were the primary weapons tyrants used to conquer other peoples and subdue their own citizens who could, in turn, equalize the power equation by arming themselves with equivalent firepower.

That is no longer true. If you think stock piling firearms from the local Guns & Guitars store, where the Las Vegas shooter purchased some of his many weapons, and dressing up in camouflage and body armor is going to protect you from the U.S. military’s tanks delivering Navy SEALs to your door, you’re delusional.

The tragic outcomes of Ruby Ridge and Waco in the 1990s, in which citizens armed to the teeth collided with government agencies and lost badly, is a microcosm of what would happen were the citizenry to rise up in violence against the state today.

If you’re having trouble with the government, a lawyer is a much more potent weapon than a gun. Bureaucrats, politicians, and police fear citizens armed with lawyers more than they do a public fortified with guns. The latter they can just shoot. The former means they have to appear before a judge.

A civil society based on the rule of law with a professional military to protect its citizens from external threats; a police force to protect civilians from internal dangers; a criminal justice system to peacefully settle disputes between the state and its citizenry; and a civil court system to enable individuals to resolve conflicts nonviolently, have been the primary drivers in the dramatic decline of violence over the past several centuries.

States reduce violence by asserting a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, thereby replacing what criminologists call “self-help justice,” in which individuals settle their own scores, often violently, such as drug gangs and the Mafia. Homicide rates, for example, have plummeted a hundredfold since 14th century England, in which there were 110 homicides per 100,000 people per year, compared to less than 1 per 100,000 today. Similar declines in murder rates have been documented in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. (U.S. homicide rates are around five times higher than in Europe, owing primarily to the deadly combination of guns and gangs.)      

There’s no question that tyrannical states have abused the freedom of their citizens. But it is no longer realistic to think that arming citizens to the teeth is going to stop tyranny should it arise. Far superior are nonviolent democratic checks and balances on power, constitutional guardians of civil rights, and legal protections of liberties.

What else can we do to reduce the carnage of mass murders? First, we must recognize the impossibility of ever bringing the number down to zero—as it is in most countries where guns are unavailable—because there are more guns in America than there are people, and ownership of most of them is perfectly legal, and there’s a black market for guns for those who could not get them otherwise. That fact isn’t going to change any time soon, so our goal should be to attenuate gun violence, not eliminate it. What can we do?

Of the many proposals on the table for discussion there is one that can be implemented today by the media: don’t name or show the mass murderers. A September, 2017 article in American Behavioral Scientist by Adam Lankford and Eric Madfis reported that as many as 24 mass murderers admitted that they went on their killing rampage in order to gain fame. The 1999 Columbine shooters, for example, fantasized about movies that would be made about them, which happened. The 2007 Virginia Tech assassin made a martyrdom video and sent it to NBC News, which aired clips from it. The 2011 Tucson murderer proclaimed online “I’ll see you on National T.V.!” and sure enough, there he was. The 2012 Sandy Hook school shooter wrote about “my catalog of mass murderers” that he wanted to best on his killing spree, which he did. The 2014 Isla Vista, California gunman wrote in his manifesto that “infamy is better than total obscurity…I never knew how to gain positive attention, only negative.” That he got in spades. The 2015 Roanoke shooter mailed his suicide note to ABC News. During his rampage the 2016 Orlando nightclub killer called the local News 13 to report his own actions, then checked his social media to see if he had “gone viral” yet. “These fame-seeking offenders are particularly dangerous because they kill and wound significantly more victims than other active shooters,” the authors conclude, “they often compete for attention by attempting to maximize victim fatalities, and they can inspire contagion and copycat effects.”

The media already has a moratorium on naming or showing victims of sex crimes, so expanding the ban on publicity to include mass murderers is surely a step in the right direction. Don’t give these guys what they want.

Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University, and the host of The Michael Shermer Show podcast. He is the author of Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc, Heavens on Earth, and Giving the Devil His Due. His next book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, which you can pre-order before it’s October 25, 2022 release.