How Fear and Social Pressure Are 'Overarming' the U.S.
home.dartmouth.edu> we find that a socially optimal level of ownership is often greater than zero
I suppose one could model this in some way. But as a pacifist, vegan and never owner of firearms, I’m genuinely clueless as to how this could be. Is the social optimality here a function possessing weapons for hunting, which can be a social activity?
My guess would be hunting and also the possible presence of a firearm in certain situations acting as a deterrent as well as a potential social equalizer.
When you're a physically vulnerable person and there are zero firearms in a community (and it's known there are zero), then there's no physical deterrent to attacking you. Of course in theory there are social consequences, but if you're in a society that includes things like alcohol or other substances, teenagers/people with poorly developed senses of long term consequences, or mental illnesses, then the thought 'oh shit, she/he might be strapped' might do more than 'you might go to jail'.
I don't own a gun, but I live in a very rural area. It might take police 20 minutes to reach us in an emergency, even if we managed to make a call (as we might not in a home invasion, for example). From this point of view I can see the utility of owning a gun, at least in principal.
Also, imagine a scenario where a foreign power attempted to occupy a country? There is probably an optimal number of armed citizens to deter that kind of activity. As we have seen in recent years, foreign powers often do want to capture and hold foreign territory. The chance of this is small, but clearly non-zero.
We have a real-life example of the second point playing out in modern times. The relevant observation is that it's important for armed citizens to be able start a conflict in order to put other forces in play. During Bangladesh's war of independence from Pakistan, civilians captured weapons from military depots to fight against the Pakistani Army. Those civilians formed the core of a resistance movement that was then quickly joined by defectors from the Pakistani military and, eventually, India. The civilians could not possibly have won a war against the Pakistani military. But it's doubtful that India would have jumped into the war if there wasn't already an armed resistance movement for India to support.
We have learned from Iraq and Afghanistan that it's very difficult even for the world's most powerful military to hold cities and countryside against people armed with handheld automatic weapons.
In the absence of firearms, the person who has the next most dangerous weapon can easily dominate everyone else. The country where I'm from was disarmed by the British to keep us from fighting them. But armed gangs still terrorize people with knives and machetes and whatnot.
Some fraction of the population in any society is antisocial. A non-zero rate of firearms ownership allows the people who aren't antisocial to suppress those who are antisocial and maintain peace.
> A non-zero rate of firearms ownership allows the people who aren't antisocial to suppress those who are antisocial and maintain peace.
Do you have an example of such a place? What you're describing is called vigilantism, and usually creates more issues than it solves.
Is this theory working in the US? Do we see the social people with weapons suppressing the antisocial gangs with weapons? If you see proof for this, good. But I don't see it. Also, one downside of firearms is collateral victims.
The U.S. has lots of social people with guns: police, guards, military, etc. We have a system where we draw a line around certain social people with guns and call them “the government.” But governments didn’t spring out of thin air. They reflect a broader social principle that the optimal level of social piece involves a non-zero number of people capable of exercising violence.
>But I don't see it.
Do you really see armed gangs terrorizing citizens somewhere in the US then? You not seeing people in the process of suppressing gangs is fine, it just means the suppression is very effective. If suppression did not exist as you imply then you'd be seeing armed gangs collecting protection money from you every week.
No, because the state owns a monopoly on violence and cracks down hard on vigilantism.
>"Is this theory working in the US?"
Yes. It's the country with the most gun ownership metrics from almost every dataset, and there's not nearly as much gun violence as you'd THINK despite that.
In some parts of the USA like the interior of Alaska, hunting is a big part of actually getting food to eat, not just for sport.
I can describe myself in the same way as you, and yet, if I lived in a country where ownership is allowed, I'd always vote to keep it so, even without having the intention of owning a weapon myself, because otherwise the balance of power shifts too much in the favour of the State/ruling class.
I disagree with the sibling comments about defending the country against an invader (if your country is facing invasion, weapons will be readily available) and defending yourself against crime (it's a non-issue in any non-failed state, and in a failed state weapons are readily available anyway and rarely make any difference).
But in a world where wealth inequality is increasing, where surveillance is ever more present, the tiny probability of the population being able to resist when it finally rises up justifies the very tangible downsides of an armed population.
I am aware that there are many arguments against this view, but I think the downsides of an authoritarian state with a monopoly on violence are too dire to be brushed aside.
This is the first use case for firearms I can understand. I hate it, I hate even that we have to have this discussion in a so-called civilized world, but here we are, and I understand it.
The world first becomes civilized when groups and bodies of people have tensioned, proportional leverage against one another - lest there's low incentive for the naturally more leveraging group to engage in virtuous action. Of course, we see it time and time again where both governments AND people use the leverages vested upon them in functionally incorrect or anti-social ways, but it is the closest to an equilibrium between two perpetually-unwieldy groups (governments, the governed)
In a nutshell, the tension of existential leverage that the government has on you through their monopoly on violence is thereby "equally" leveraged by your right to own firearms - and the implicit extralegal right to use it against them - in an unjust event. And a government SHOULD be perpetually worried for when you'd eventually consider something "unjust" enough for you to exercise that right - as it creates a chilling effect for them to even attempt it.
Except the people with guns are often aligned with regressive/authoritarian regimes. Which makes the problem much worse.
Is there any country where guns are politically neutral? Switzerland, maybe? Certainly not the US.
Even in states like Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama, etc, there are non-GOP registered voters and plenty of them have firearms.
It's probably far more than you think.
It's interesting that your first guess is hunting, and not self-defense. As a pacifist, do you believe in letting violent people do whatever they want to you without resisting or fighting back?
The whole concept of optimal levels of firearms ownership should have been expanded upon, as this premise is probably new to the audience and a cornerstone of their entire research.
Agreed, there's not a lot of substance here. I read the article more than once and still don't know if "overarming" means too many individuals own guns or too many guns per individual. I assume the former based on context. Also interesting is that they focus on the US but two out of three groups studied are not in the US.
Their cohort studies are across three completely different populations. I would be willing to listen to an argument that for some specific population there’s a firearm ownership level above which there are diminishing safety returns, but I find the idea that this same level would hold across wildly different populations absurd
Well obviously arming babies would not increase safety.
I suspect the optimal proportion would be similar to the optimal proportion of the vaccinated to stop disease spread.
I'm willing to bet this is defined by some base levels in their equations as a default utility. So they aren't trying to say what the optimal level for the various uses of guns are, they are using math to prove that people are being driven to purchase more guns than that level, whatever that level is.
This is why it’s sometimes hard to take the soft sciences seriously.
I have no idea why you be dismissive of using an unspecified variable as a baseline. People do it in every subject.
people with a lot of guns aren't buying them for self defense. you only need one or two for that. any more and it's a hobby just like any other. "Overarming" is a loaded word with no real relevance to US gun culture.
In some ways, it's just the four boxes of liberty at work.
The theory goes, there are four routes to "solving" social disputes/obtaining justice in modern societies: the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box. They are to be used in that order, because the consequences for society and human life get worse with each one. I put "solving" in quotes because you could argue that the last box doesn't really solve anything.
Right now, at least, you have a large number of people in American society feeling as if social conflicts/injustices are going unaddressed in meaningful ways. I'll let you fill in the blanks as to what those are, but it's not always people who want the US to be like it was in 1955 who are arming themselves. An increasing number of people who are liberal or otherwise practice left-of-center politics, and people who are of historically-oppressed groups, are also starting to arm themselves.
Ultimately, if you start meaningfully solving social conflicts and injustices with the first three boxes, you can avoid the fourth and you'll probably see firearm ownership growth begin to drop. I don't think you'll ever see it meaningfully go away in the US without an effort that few people would consider wise to attempt.
It's kind of amazing how many comments even here seem to implicitly or explicitly agree that the "optimal" number is more than zero.
Personally, I rather enjoy not having my kids shot at school.
It's kind of amazing how we can find countries with more than zero but still don't have kids shot at school.
How peculiar.
Do they ever state the social optimum level of fun ownership? I can take them at their word they it’s non-zero, but I’d guess it’s orders of magnitude less than the current rate.
I think the optimum level changes based on whether or not citizens are being actively brutalized by an authoritarian government and their police forces en masse. When that happens, the optimum level is a lot and when it's not happening, the optimum level is probably orders of magnitude less. Unfortunately, we can't accurately predict when these things will happen.
I hear this argument repeated a lot, and I think it is legit the reason for the 2nd amendment - but it doesn't make sense with modern technology. That authoritarian government is going to come at you with Bearcats, helicopters, and drones. Firing a gun at them is just going to make you cannon fodder. If you want to actually challenge the authoritarian government, you need MANPADS, RPGs, cruise missiles, and drones of your own - which is probably why MANPADS, RPGs, cruise missiles, and soon drones are heavily regulated, with stiff penalties for just ownership, and guns themselves are free to possess.
what you have said, is exactly why the 2A legitimates bearing arms, not only firearms.
the origin of the US is about being able to resist unreasonable force, and thats the root of the 2A, being able to resist, due to an uninfringed right to bear arms, to the end of checking the force of a militia having strayed out of its rights.
I'd agree with that on a philosophical level, but no court has actually interpreted the 2A as legitimating the right to build a cruise missile, MANPADS, or nuke. Try it and I suspect you're looking at a very long prison term. Usually people look at me like I'm insane when I suggest that "Well logically, the right to bear arms should include the right to bear nukes, so all this stuff about 'born secret' and classified information is unconstitutional."
> That authoritarian government is going to come at you with Bearcats, helicopters, and drones
> Bearcats
Solution: drone
> helicopters
Solution: drone
> and drones
Solution: drone like P1-SUN
In the US, the average gun owner has something like 3-5. An actual enthusiast will have tens or hundreds. It's the people who own exactly one that you need to watch out for the most.
Rounds fired per gun owner per month would be an interesting statistic. The vast majority of people who buy a gun out of fear go to the range once and then put the gun in the top of the closet never to be seen again. I don't think they contribute anything in the cost/benefit equation to gun ownership for a society.
> The vast majority of people who buy a gun out of fear go to the range once and then put the gun in the top of the closet never to be seen again.
I'm close to that, but I put its potential benefits similar to that of my fire extinguishers, and with no kids around the cost/risk is low. I am happy to be part of the statistics that raise the costs for intruders, and I like being ready to defend my dogs from the local coyotes, wolves and cougars. My guns and fire extinguishers are downstream of the same kind of fear.
Are people who are armed because they enjoy shooting or hunting supposed to exist in this research model or not?
Yes. In fact, the ‘Results’ section in the paper linked from the article (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aed3904) says, in its first sentence:
Any analysis of individual arming decisions must account for purely individual reasons to own guns (e.g., for use in hunting) and the cost of possible confrontations that are ubiquitous in society and, depending on others’ arming decisions, can involve guns (e.g., fear of a confrontation with an armed neighbor).
The non-paranoid sportsman is a shrinking demographic, I fear, mostly due to decades of propaganda within the sportsman culture (magazines, organizations).
They still exist within academic and reservationist circles, but the grand majority of gun owners I know in my rural backcountry speak pretty matter-of-factly about racist and anti-social ideas (source: friends, family, and going to bars called things like Rusty’s, Bill’s, etc.)
I got my hunter's safety card back just before covid. Prior to the actual course starting, our instructors spent a good 15 minutes "encouraging" us to join the NRA because "they're really trying to take our guns, blah blah". This was in "liberal" California. When I had last taken the course as a kid in my home state of Oregon, in a conservative majority town, there was never any kind of propaganda that I can recall of this level.
I think with younger shooters there are many people who enjoy 3 gun and other modern match style sort of tactical shooting or cowboy action without obsessively carrying or planning for defensive use. But I don't think these folks overlap with the hunter-type sportsman. And do overlap with the "tacticool" folks. Don't know if that translates to rural though.
The attempted (failed) fascist takeover of Minneapolis by ICE motivated plenty of new and existing gun owners. It is not reasonable to call that fear paranoia, and it's not about the sport. The fact that it failed doesn't mean that chapter of history is over, just that lessons will be learned and it will be a more difficult situation next time unless there are some really substantial changes we see no evidence of yet.
The US is a country with lower hunting participation than many other western countries and yet an order of magnitude more gun owning households.
Does it matter? Control of you life is your basic human right. Firearms are the great equalizer.
Isn’t there a massive body of research that indicates gun ownership is less safe on average that non-ownership? Ie the chance of accidental shooting of family/friends is high enough to offset any benefit (on average across the US)?
Teen suicide in households with a gun is a very interesting stat to bring up for this. Suicide in general is higher for gun owners, which can be handwaved away as “that’s my right”. But suicide is higher for children of gun owners? That seems like a tough risk to justify.
The thing is there's such a breadth of circumstances and behaviors involved that pigeonholing it under one giant banner is questionable. Like the people who leave loaded guns in random drawers around their houses are doing something very different with a different risk profile. Whereas once you get to teens in households that have guns and generally practice some level of safe storage it's a much more complex issue IMO. Because as a society we want teens to become responsible enough to handle things like cars, or power tools, or guns. But we also know that they're not adults yet. And we know that infantilization of teens isn't going to do anyone favors in the long run. So it's probably not as simple as ban cars and ban guns or whatever else.
There's a problem with statistics for this and many other things.
Guns attract idiots, idiots have idiot gun problems, it does not follow that if you get a gun, you'll have the same problems.
Similar statistics are easy to fool people with. Doing $expensive_thing is associated with health/wealth/success so if everybody did it everybody would be better off! But in reality there's just a selection bias and whatever the thing is just attracts rich people and the thing has no actual effect. For example: do a study of people who wear sunglasses to find the association between mortality and the price of the sunglasses you wear.
How many people are actually studying gun ownership without intentionally looking for one result or the other? It attracts a tremendous about of bias in both directions and not a lot of genuine curiousity.
Motorcycles are somewhat like this - they're both more dangerous than cars in terms of whether you might get into an accident of any sort. But however bad they are in that sense is amplified by how many people use them like utter idiots: I've lost count of the people I've seen on them in shorts and flip-flops, let alone without a helmet, not to mention people racing them and popping wheelies at racing speeds on 35mph streets.
The problem I have with "safetyism" is it comes across as something you can say about cars, knives, power tools, skis, hang gliders, and so many other things. Like do I buy that even though ski deaths are lower in non-skiing households, just like gun deaths are in non shooting ones, that it's less impactful and important than the same effect with guns? Sure. But it's also a conversation that is soooo patronizing in a ridiculous way that it really seems like a double standard. And so much of it seems disingenuous. Like do we focus on enabling safe storage and mental health safety with guns or making it harder? On making kids and families more knowledgeable and safer around guns or just amping up the anxiety and fear?
> Like do we focus on enabling safe storage and mental health safety with guns or making it harder? On making kids and families more knowledgeable and safer around guns or just amping up the anxiety and fear?
The only way to move forward is through good faith efforts of the former and stopping the lobby groups from doing the latter.
Power tools are intentionally dangerous too. A reasonable person wouldn't take anyone who talks about how a household with power tools is less safe on average seriously either. Or one who moves the goalpost to battleships.
The big difference in my mind is guns are intentionally dangerous. They were made to kill first, sporting applications are all secondary.
Or, to flip your argument, if guns are fine, why not grenades or bazookas or battleships?
The problem is the baseline you get equalized to.
"Might makes right," you know?
I personally control my life by spending almost all of my income, after bills, towards expanding the elaborate tower-defense-like automated weaponry on my plot of land. If I must leave my fort, I always drive my T-34 into town (I'm saving up for a Sherman).
If anyone is interested in their own tank, this is a fun little listicle of what is possible: https://militarymachine.com/military-tanks-for-sale
I'm kind of curious as to how you justify this. I personally think its ok for people to have arms, but I don't personally believe in basic human rights. Where would such things even come from? Rights are just conventions which ought to serve whatever goods you are interested in. Unless you believe in god or some other thing like that, there really is no way to justify rights except relative to some other stated goal.
Sure but some people own like 30 guns. There’s more going on with gun ownership than just basic self defense.
I will point to two items. One, an interview I had. Two, a footnote in history.
1: I own a gun because a disarmed populace is required for genocide and should it come around again, I’m not going to be that guy. I’m not going to be standing on the side.
Ry Jones
https://www.amazon.com/Armed-America-Portraits-Owners-Their/... page 186
2: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/warsaw-ghe...
I own one gun. If another own guns, that's none of my business. The question, how many guns are "optimal" introduces a surface for regulation that is none of the government's business to be regulating.
Anecdotally, a lot of politically far left people I know have gone quiet on the firearms issue. It seems like the state of the country has 2A suddenly making more sense to a lot of people.
YMMV but out of the people I know, the lefties are less likely to be hardcore pro-gun-control than the people who lean center-liberal, and this has been true for a long time. John Brown Gun Club, etc.
I’m a progressive voter and my waning interest in gun control is that it’s a political nonstarter. But I’m sure there are fellow progressives that are reasoning in the way you suggest.
In any case, if the majority of the “prevent Federal overreach” 2A crowd truly believed in that principle, then I would have expected thousands of armed citizens in Minnesota repelling the extrajudicial abuses taking place there.
Not to anyone who is hoping to avoid catastrophic civil disorder and mass murder (revolution/civil war/government crackdowns, however you want to label it), but I think some people have stopped hoping for that.
> Not to anyone who is hoping to avoid catastrophic civil disorder and mass murder
They are still hoping, but just being more realistic about firearms.
I think there's bigger fish to fry and it's hard to talk about when nothing matters to the people you're trying to convince.
I don't think that's it. Armed resistance is not realistic, and is probably actively counterproductive compared even to unarmed but violent resistance to occupation. This is because you're not going to "win" in a military sense, it's a battle for hearts and minds, and optically protestors firing at State forces is really really bad.
I've stopped talking about it because it's been relegated to a marginal safety issue. Reducing the number of firearms in circulation is a generational project to reduce a bad statistic. It pales in comparison with much more pressing and foundational issues that need to be resolved before anything can even be attempted to improve stats like that. We can't even manage to repair failing bridges[0], enforce basic laws meant to protect the legitimacy of our institutions (see every political scandal since Iran contra), or meaningfully oppose genocides or home grown fascism. When the "opposition" party argues against mass deportations they frame it as though their colleagues across the aisle are merely making an economic miscalculation, like submitting the fact the immigrants are disproportionately hard workers and prop up our economy might be convincing to people who respond to "they're killing and eating your pets." There's a deep rot that needs to be addressed before I can again muster the energy to care about reducing the suicide and homicide rate by 50% of an already pretty-low number (relative to car deaths or heart disease or whatever). No need to muddle the message by tagging it with correct but contentious positions.
0: https://www.permits.performance.gov/permitting-project/dot-p...
In planning for 20 years, 13 billion dollars stolen and absorbed by the construction industry and its infinitely fractal subcontracting web. at least it created jobs, I guess. No work has begun.
Not sure why you seem to think people would need to resist the government rather than, more simply, the relatively small number of billionaires who purchase and pervert it.
I don't know what you're suggesting. How would widespread gun ownership help with the government being subverted by oligarchs? Vigilante justice? Wouldn't change anything for the better. More paranoid billionaires would just start running things from private compounds and transit between in private jets and armored convoys. That's not a far step from what many do now, and would be extremely powerful social pretext for authoritarian crackdown.
> Wouldn't change anything for the better.
You need to read more history my friend
Sure, jack boot thugs killing a fee people in broad daylight with a government sanction tends to do that. But I’d rather we not have the brown shirts in the first place…
Of course, and so would those same people.
define far left
I guess you don’t really get to choose how to die but the idea of dying to gun violence sounds really shitty.
> "Our hope is that our model can play a role in a thoughtful data-driven conversation about one of the most societally and personally important decisions any person can make,” he says.
good luck with that!
Boy, the game of telephone on the way to HN is really amazing.
Paper: We make a stylized model that uses observed social networks in Honduran gangs and varies some parameters to match the US to see and it aligns with some things regarding how we exceed the socially optimal balance (based on the params).
PR release: The researchers describe in Science Advances how individual incentives to buy firearms can lead to a phenomenon they call “overarming.”
PR title: How Fear and Social Pressure Are ‘Overarming’ the U.S.
HN title: Fear and Social Pressure Are ‘Overarming’ the U.S.
Come on, guys.
>PR title: How Fear and Social Pressure Are ‘Overarming’ the U.S.
>HN title: Fear and Social Pressure Are ‘Overarming’ the U.S
the discrepancy between these two is because HN automatically strips "how" from the beginning of titles.
It's baffling how almost no one here ever speaks out against it. Everybody just puts up with it even though we all know what a sign of arrogance and incompetence it is to attempt to alter post titles in this clumsy, embarrassingly broken way. Everyone is just silently looking at their feet in second hand embarrassment and doesn't want to speak up. And the funniest thing is: there is an official rule that says not to edit the original titles. Amazingly bizarre.
i have mentioned that i dont like it. dang said i was wrong.
however, the submitter is able to edit the title for a short window after posting to add the 'how' back in for cases where removing it materially alters the meaning.
People have. The mods have made it clear they consider it necessary to maintain the quality of conversation and they have no intention of changing it.
The mods are obviously wrong and there should be way more pushback from the users. It's embarrassing.
You can try, but the only thing "pushback" will likely achieve is getting your account filtered for posting "unsubstantive content."
Which is usually reasonable, because if you are describing “how x happens” you are claiming that x happens. It doesn’t make a real difference here.
Comic: "The Science News Cycle"
It's worth remembering that the American founders considered an armed population an essential part of a free society capable of standing up against federal overreach. James Madison, Federalist 46:
>Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence.
It’s worth noting that these guys also considered women and black people not to be actual people, and made no distinction between nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and a rifle, whenever we get the idea that they had great ideas that we should apply to society today.
It's actually not worth remembering that, even in the context of this study.
It's also worth remembering their other views, and contrasting.
Women and non-white, non-landholders didn't get a vote. Some of them owned slaves. They believed a standing army or navy were unnecessary, because a militia could just be mobilised on a case by case basis. (Yes, even for a navy, they thought random boats would be enough). They didn't have an opinion on an air force.
So either accept that the opinions of a bunch of men from a few centuries ago aren't the words of deities to be adhered to under threat of their wrath, or start being consistent and arguing you want slavery back, women suffrage rolled back, and no voting rights for men without land. Oh, and for disbanding all armed forces
The US gun culture resembles nothing like "a militia officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence."
This was also before modern military with armored vehicles, aircraft, missiles and drones. I wonder what ratio of untrained handgun touting joe sixpacks would be needed against that.
If you want to get an idea what was meant with the militias at the time, look at maybe Switzerland. Or perhaps even countries with conscript armies.
However, the Second Amendment begins with a qualifying clause which many including notable national gun-rights organizations choose to ignore. In any case, I’m not sure that has worked out as well as Madison thought. A sizeable percentage of the armed populace may actually be cheering the feared Federal overreach.
That was a time when the latest arms technology could be obtained both by normal citizens and the government. Do you think that today an armed population could repel a determined federal government?