Why Guns are not like Motorcycles

 

I.

Whenever I see the above bumper sticker or yard sign, I get irrationally angry. 

I'll explain.

Motorcycle ownership comes with costs and benefits. The benefit is that they are very fun to ride. The cost is that they are very dangerous; if you are in an accident your chance of dying is very high. (My dad told me about a friend who was in the Navy with him who had to hide his motorcycle from his own father, who was a trauma surgeon. He referred to motorcyclists as "organ donors.")

The reason I hate the messaging of the sign is that it is an attempt for motorcyclists to pass the costs (ie increased risk or injury and death) on to everyone else by making them drive more cautiously. 

If you want me to share the costs, let me share the benefits. I want access to your motorcycle one week every summer. In exchange, I will be extra observant of the speed limit.

In the absence of this campaign, what I like about motorcycle ownership is that the benefits and costs of owning a motorcycle are symmetric, the rider receives and bears both. This brings me to gun ownership, which is very much not like owning a motorcycle.

II.

There are benefits that come with owning a gun. You get to go hunting. You can protect your home and family. You enjoy firing off rounds at the gun range or at beer cans in your backyard. It's a hedge against tyranny, zombies, or a real-life Purge scenario. I'm sure there are many others I cannot think of because I do not own a gun.

There are also costs to gun ownership, costs that are unique to our country. Think of a spectrum with a total gun ban on one end and total gun freedom on the other. We live in a country that is optimized toward the gun freedom side, as compared to other countries. 

The way our optimization settings are tuned means we have easy access to guns, which leads to a lot of guns in circulation. We have more guns than any other country. We have more guns than we have people. 

There are a lot of studies that attempt to find a cause of gun violence. They control for things like strict gun laws, poverty, mental health access, voting patterns, etc. The only really reliable variable is that the presence of guns in a community increases the amount of gun violence. Therefore, the cost of our country's gun optimization setting is that we have a lot more guns, which means lot more gun violence.

And unlike our motorcycle friend, the law-abiding hunter or NRA member gets to enjoy the benefits of his gun without paying the costs. The cost is paid by the number of police officers annually killed in the line of duty. The cost is paid by the families who cannot afford to move out of their high-crime neighborhood and become victims of stray drive-by bullets. The cost is paid by people like Daniel Shaver who was executed while pulling up his pants because the cop thought he was reaching for a gun. Why? Because cops are terrified of being shot due to the high presence of guns in circulation.

I don't know what the solution to gun violence is, but I think it has to address this assymetry. The closest solution I can think of is treating gun ownership like cars; everyone has to get insurance that pays out if the gun is used to kill someone. Insurance companies will assess risk when assigning premiums. The higher the risk--no gun safe, AR-15, kids in the house, etc.--the higher the premium.