Freakonomics Radio - 114. How to Think About Guns

Episode Date: February 13, 2013

No one wants mass shootings. Unfortunately, no one has a workable plan to stop them either.

Steve Levitt is my Freakonomics friend and co-author. He's an economist at the University of Chicago. One topic that he's studied for years from a lot of angles is crime. He's tried to figure out which of many potential factors have a big impact on crime rates. More police and more prisons? That's a yes. The economy? Mostly a no. Did the legalization of abortion help crime fall a generation later? That is a yes. He's also studied guns, gun laws, gun buybacks, gun crime. Levitt and I were working together in Texas on the day back in December that a 20-year-old

guy in Connecticut named Adam Lanza killed his mother and shot up an elementary school, killing 20 little kids and six adults, and finally shot himself. As horrific as that was, as incomprehensibly sad, Steve Levitt, given everything he knows about crime, he wasn't all that surprised. You know, I think my reaction was probably different than other people's reactions because the thing that I'm always shocked by is how few insane people are out there doing mass murders, not how many are out there doing mass murders.

And so I have sort of a sense of foreboding. I always expect there to be crazy people out there doing murders. And so I guess I probably wasn't as surprised as a lot of other people were. So you're more surprised when there isn't as much mayhem in the world as there is the opportunity for mayhem to occur. Yeah, the way I think about it, when there's one or two people out there a year who just go completely nuts and kill a bunch of people, then you think, well, why is it only one or two?

Why is it not eight or 10 or 15 or 20? Once you get that far in the tail, it seems striking that we know there are lots of people who are insane. We certainly know there are lots of guns. And that's a lethal combination. From WNYC and APM American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything.

Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. On today's show, a conversation with my Freakonomics co-author Steve Levitt about guns. Now, the U.S. has a lot of guns. By most estimates, at least one gun for every adult. And we have a lot of gun violence. In a given year, there are roughly 11,000 gun murders and nearly 20,000 gun suicides. And then there are the mass killings, like the one in Newtown, Connecticut, that makes everyone rethink everything they ever thought about guns. Now, how many such killings are there and are they on the rise? Well, it depends on how you count and whom you ask.

Mother Jones magazine recently built a database of mass shootings, four or more fatalities over the past 30 years. Not everyone likes this database. It excludes, for instance, all gang shootings and armed robberies. But here are those numbers. Since 1982, there have been 62 mass shootings with a total of 513 fatalities, or an average of about two mass shootings and 16 and a half fatalities a year. Now, remember, keep in mind, there are about 11,000 gun murders each year in total. Over the past 10 years, those numbers

are a bit higher, about three shootings a year with 26 fatalities. But 2012 was a very bad year, seven shootings with 72 fatalities, more than four times the average number of victims in a year from mass shootings. So you can see why this topic has got everyone's attention. But here's how Steve Levitt makes sense of these numbers. Yeah, it certainly appears to be the case that these isolated incidents of mass violence against strangers is going up. But I think you also need to put it in the context of the amazing gains we've had in the reductions of crime since the peak of homicide, that homicides are way down. They're down, you know, almost 50 percent, maybe even more than 50 percent from the peak. It's come down

year after year after year. The number of people who are killed by guns is in the thousands. But the number of people who are killed in these sort of new town type of events is really, really a small piece of the overall gun violence. So much more gun violence is either drug dealers shooting one another, spouses are killing each other, friends and family killing each other more generally, or indeed killing yourself. I mean, of all the gun violence, which really is at the top of the list, suicides, gun suicides. The fact is, though, that while gun violence isn't necessarily increasing overall, it's been relatively flat for the past 10 or 15 years after having fallen a good bit before that.

The U.S. is more violent than most other rich countries, at least. There's more gun damage here than most other rich countries. Why do you think that is? Any thoughts? Well, we have more crime in general across the board than many other rich countries. And more specifically, though, we have a lot more guns than other countries. So it's not the slightest bit surprised that when you have as many guns as people in a country, that your gun violence will be much higher than a place like the UK where guns are incredibly sparse. All right. So when you say that, one might immediately say, well, OK, if you want to get rid of the violence, you need to obviously get rid of guns. But there are some issues with that. Right. I mean, first of all, guns are not perishable. Unlike Coca-Cola or a car, it doesn't deteriorate in any way. So a gun that exists 10 years ago will still exist today.

So how do you start to think about if your goal is to lessen the amount of guns, lessen the fact that guns are a durable good that will stick around and if taken care of well, will work for 50 or 100 years, then the first obvious thing you need to think about is that you can't have policies that only affect new guns, right? If you have a stock of 300 million guns, it doesn't really matter what you do with the new guns if you don't do anything with the guns that are already out there. Okay. So what are the kinds of things that are typically done with the guns that are out there? I'm thinking gun buybacks. What's your view on the efficacy or lack thereof of a gun buyback? Gun buybacks are one of the most ineffectual public policies that have ever been invented in the history of mankind.

So the typical gun buyback will offer, you know, $25 or $50 for a gun, or maybe they'll offer some, you know, there was one where they offered some therapy. You could get therapy. Right, that was California. California therapy if you turned in a gun. But the fact is maybe 1,000 guns will be turned in an incredibly successful gun buyback program. And it's successful in the sense that there's a really big pile of guns, and the mayor or the governor gets to set that pile of guns on fire, and it's a great media opportunity. But there's two fundamental problems. The first one is that the only people who bring

back these guns and gun buybacks are people who don't want the guns in the first place. Most of the guns are inoperable. They're guns people inherited. They've just been not sure what to do with them. These are not the guns that are being used to kill people, right? Anyone who has a gun and wants to put it to a real purpose doesn't bring their gun back for the buyback. So you get exactly the wrong kinds of guns. But more fundamentally, I think people are confused with respect to how dangerous a particular gun is. If I've done my calculations

right, any particular handgun in the United States will kill a person about once every 10,000 years. Okay, so in order to prevent one homicide in a year, you would need to get 10,000 guns brought back in a gun buyback. But the thing is, you don't get 10,000 guns, and they're not the guns that are used to kill people. So the typical gun buyback program, I would guess, saves approximately maybe.0001 lives. And I think that's being optimistic about the size of young children, what's more dangerous, a house with a gun in it or a house with a swimming pool in the backyard? What's the answer to that question? Yeah, the answer to that question is incredibly easy. And the swimming pool is far, far more dangerous than the gun when it comes to young children.

So what we did is we looked at the number of child deaths that were due to swimming pools, the number of child deaths that were due to guns, and then we put it in terms of how often will giving a swimming pool kill a child versus how often will a particular gun kill a child. And it turns out that the swimming pool is far more lethal than the gun, that a given swimming pool is 100 times more likely to lead to the death of a child than a particular gun is to lead to the death of a child. And so I know a lot of parents who would say, I would never let my child go over to the house of someone who has a gun in the house.

But I've actually never heard anyone say, I will never let my child go over to the house of someone who has a swimming pool, when in fact, that's completely reversed when it comes to the risks that the two products actually have. All right. As we've discussed a lot on this program and elsewhere, people are terrible at risk assessment generally. And we understand why. Sometimes the math is hard, but also some things are scarier than others. And a gun is inherently frightening to a lot of people, especially the kind of people who don't interact with guns at all. So let me ask you this. In regards to guns, do you think then that reducing gun violence is a goal that should be put front and center on, let's say, the political agenda? Or do you think it's really not as threatening as it's being felt to be and made out to be? I think that gun violence is clearly an important problem. You look at the thousands of people who die each year from it.

But the simple fact is that there are no viable political answers to it. So in regard to your precise question, I think no. I don't think gun violence should be on the political agenda at all. I think it's so hopelessly convoluted and the kinds of policies that people suggest are so obviously not going to fundamentally affect the problem that while there is a big problem, I don't think there's any way out given the kind of minimalist suggestions we're making. And so therefore, I think we should spend our time on other problems where I think we might have a chance to really make a difference. I mean, I think about motor vehicle fatalities, and we've had an enormous impact on motor vehicle fatalities.

There are assuredly other policies, say, related to drunk driving and seatbelt wearing that could have a big effect on that. And I think for the number of lives you could save per word out of a politician's mouth or dollars spent by politicians is probably a hundred times greater if we think about motor vehicle fatalities than if we be about gun legislation? Anyone with any sense looks at the current political climate, thinks about the kinds of proposals that are being made, and accepts the fact that none of proposals that are being made, and accepts the fact that none of these proposals are going to have any real impact.

It's coming up on Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. On today's show, we're talking with Steve Levitt about guns and the new spate of gun control ideas that are being raised since the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. Levitt says that many of the gun control ideas that are being proposed simply will not work. Well, I think the policies that can work are ones that tie heavy punishments to uses of guns that we don't like. So, for instance, laws that say if you commit a crime and you have a gun with you, regardless of whether the gun was used, then without any sort of other consideration, we add five years or 10 years or 20 years or 50 years to the sentence that you get. Those kind of laws, I guarantee you, will work. If the incentives are strong and they tell you don't use guns, then I guarantee you we will see the number of gun homicides fall

and the number of knife homicides rise, but not one for one. That people will substitute away from using guns to kill people to using knives to kill people, but it won't be one for one because knives just aren't as good of a tool for killing people as guns are. That will work. I have no doubt that will work. It's worked in California in the past when California put mandatory sentence enhancements on for felonies that were committed with guns. But I think the policy has to be one of that nature where you're not tying it to the gun itself. You're tying it to the use of guns that you don't want. David, let me ask you this. So we've talked before about the hidden cost of things,

something as simple as free parking, let's say, which in fact generates a lot of hidden costs in terms of pollution and congestion, real estate value and so on. Talk to me for a moment about the fact that modern America is perhaps the freest society in the history of the world, in which just about anybody has the right to go just about anywhere and do just about anything within some set of boundaries. And that in this very, very free society that perhaps gun violence is simply one of the hidden costs of that freedom. And perhaps, A, we shouldn't be so surprised by it.

And B, it's a tradeoff that if we want a society like we've got, it will continue to exist. What do you think of that? Well, I actually don't completely – I agree with the part about the freedom, but I think the fact that there are all the guns around is really accidental. It's – you know, if guns were just being invented today, the treatment of guns would be completely different than the treatment we have in this country. So, you know, it's part of the Constitution. It's been interpreted in various ways. But I think that there are all sorts of things that you're not allowed to do. You're not allowed to drive really fast in your car and you're not supposed to litter.

I mean, there are many, many things you're not supposed to do. And I think it's really accident. I mean, I'll give you another example of accident. If you think about why is it that alcohol and cigarettes are legal and marijuana is not, I think that, again, is mostly accident. marijuana regularly for the last 300 years and alcohol had just kind of come along and been on the fringes, there's no way we'd say, you know, alcohol should be freely consumed by everyone all the time. So I'm not after making this country into a police state. But I think that people are kind of whacked when they act like there's something fundamental about, you know, how guns should be part of society.

I think it's kind of a historical accident that you live with, but I don't think it was deterministic in any way. What about from the other side, not people who are defending the right to have guns, but the other side, people who are defending their right to live in a society where other people don't have guns? I wonder how much you think that that's a kind of a repugnance issue, you know, that people who don't like guns don't just not like them. They find them repugnant and so much so that they not only do they not want to engage with them, but they feel that no one should

and that people who do are by association repugnant. Do you think that's an issue? Yeah, I agree with you. Because the people who don't have guns themselves, they tend not to hang out with other people who have guns. guns themselves, they tend not to hang out with other people who have guns. And consequently, they really are at extremely low risk for being the victim of accidental gun shooting or gun violence. Because such a trivial, trivial share of the gun deaths are of pure innocents who are being slaughtered by people with guns. And so it just gets back to what you said, which is that there's something else, that either they're misinformed about the risks that gun pose to them, or they feel the repugnance. But for people who don't hang around guns, guns are almost certainly one of the least

likely sources of death for them. So President Obama, inspired by the really horrible killings in Newtown, Connecticut, came forward with a plan called Now is the Time, which is meant to curtail gun violence. And it's full of the kind of stuff that we've been talking about here that, according to you, pretty much won't accomplish much. Let's say that the Obama administration invited you to become its anti-violence czar for the next few years, asked you for ideas on how to cut down on gun homicides in particular. Where would you start? What would you tell them and how would you think about breaking the impasse? Well, I'd start by saying no thanks. I've got much more productive things to do than to try to lead a committee like that. I mean, I think from the perspective of having either a big impact on the number of homicides or being cost effective, I think it's a really difficult

problem to make any headway on. I mean, I think there are very expensive ways to try to have a small impact. Expensive in terms of dollars, you mean, or in terms of law? Expensive in terms of dollars and time and everything, but really dollars. So, I mean, let me give you one example. So, it used to be that we locked up enormous numbers of people into mental institutions. And I don't know if that was right or wrong. And it turned out, though, that we weren't so good at treating those patients. And there's a lot of bad publicity. And it is really remarkable. We used to have more people in mental institutions in this country than we do prisoners. And that number has now swung, you know, I don't know whether it's 10 to 1 ratio or 20 to 1 ratio of more prisoners than people in mental institutions.

And, you know, I think it's probably true that most of the people who carry out these tragic mass shootings are probably at least ex post described as being mentally ill. And I'm not sure these are people who would have been institutionalized before they committed their act or not. I think maybe not always. But just in terms of a glimmer of hope, and I'm not saying this would be at all cost effective, I think you could revisit the policy of are there people who are so mentally ill that they cannot function in open society? And should those people be institutionalized? Because right now, very few of them are institutionalized. Many of them are in the streets. Many of them are living with their parents. And again, I don't think it's a great policy, but at least it would have some hope of reducing this kind of gun violence.

Well, let me ask you this. In New York State, where Governor Andrew Cuomo jumped out very quickly and passed a new gun law or set of gun law called the Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act, one component of that is mental health reporting. It requires therapists and social workers to report dangerous patients to the county, the definition of dangerous being, quote, likely to engage in conduct that will cause serious harm to him or herself or others. And then the county would help to build a database that cross-checks those people with gun ownership so that if someone seems to be a threat and has access to a gun, then the state would get to know about it. What do you think of this idea? How do you see that playing out, Levitt? Well, in principle, it doesn't seem like such a terrible idea, but it certainly seems like it's one of these things

that could have unanticipated consequences. So, for instance, let's just say I'm one of these crazy people who has guns and is thinking about committing a mass murder. Well, I sure as heck am not going to tell my therapist about it now, because if I tell my therapist, they're going to take my guns away, they're going to lock me up, whatever. So to the extent that you think that this sort of therapy is at all effective in solving people's problems and making them less likely to carry out these acts,

this actually could have exactly the opposite effect you want, which is it closes off the ability of that mental health system to have any influence on these people's lives because they're going to withhold the information that might have been exactly the information that a therapist not charged with telling the state about the problems would have worked through with the client. I remember when you and I first started working together and we started talking about – we knew we were going to be writing about crime and therefore violence and therefore guns. And we started talking about Jeff Canada's book, Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun. And it led to this conversation where we wrote – here, I'm going to read you a couple sentences that we ended up writing.

It might be worthwhile to take a step back and ask a rudimentary question. What is a gun? It's a tool that can be used to kill someone, of course, but more significantly, a gun is a great disruptor of the natural order. I wonder if you could just talk about that for a minute. When you think of a gun disrupting, changing the equation of the way that people interact with and fight each other the way they did hundreds or thousands of years ago, at least. How does the gun as a kind of intervening instrument just change the whole dynamic of the way that people relate to each other or against each other? Yeah, you might think that having a lot of guns around would be great for reducing violence. It's the same theory that works with nuclear deterrence. When you have a weapon that's incredibly powerful, no one wants

to fight because the costs of fighting are so high. But why is it in the context of guns, we don't think about guns as deterrence, we think about guns as causing the violence. And the idea here comes out of Canada's book, Fist Stick, Knife, Gun, which honestly, I'll say is one of the best books I've ever read in my life. If it's still in print, I would just encourage people to go find it. It's fantastically insightful. And what Canada talks about is that in the old days, in the 50s and 60s, when there weren't that many guns around, disputes would be solved with fistfights or maybe with knives. And the thing is, look, when you fight someone who's much bigger and stronger than you, you know who's going to win.

And if you already know who's going to win, you don't need to fight because if you know you're going to lose, why bother? And so actually in that setting, when disputes are decided by fighting with your fists, you don't have to have many fights because there's not a lot of uncertainty. But guns, okay, and this is Canada's point, guns really destroy that order because anybody with a gun can beat anybody without a gun, right? It doesn't matter how strong you are, whether you're popular or unpopular. The gun basically makes it so that uncertainty of the outcome of the fight is immense. And then that actually has the opposite effect of deterrence because now if anybody can win the fight, there can be more fights. Because it's not like you've got a certain winner and a certain loser, which means that you don't have to fight in the first place. And I think that that's a really powerful idea. It's a subtle idea. But one that is really at the heart of why guns are related to violence,

but nuclear weapons have not been ever used, since we did it the first time when no one had them on the other side to scare us off from using them. I'd like to hear you leave people with a thought about gun violence generally for whether they are gun owners and gun lovers or whether they think that guns are the most abominable thing that was ever invented. No matter what camp you're in, when you look at the shooting at an elementary school where these five and six year old kids are killed, you know, no one can be unaffected by that. It's the kind of problem that's got all kinds of tiers and levels and incentives and all different kinds of people with all kinds of agendas. What's the way that you would encourage people to think about violence and guns when something like that happens without resorting to the knee-jerk positions that gun people on all sides of the aisle typically resort to?

I would just say that anyone with any sense looks at the current political climate, thinks about the kinds of proposals that are being made, and accepts the fact that none of these proposals are going to have any real impact at all. So if you want to have an impact, I think you have to go back deeper and you have to look at the fact that if we're not going to get rid of guns, but you want to get rid of gun violence,

you got to get rid of the people who are doing violence with guns. And by get rid of, I don't mean, you know, there are a lot of different ways to get rid of the people who are doing violence with guns. And by get rid of, I don't mean, you know, a lot of different ways to get rid of them. I mean, one is to parent better, to have society indoctrinate people into more empathy and whatnot. I think those are the ultimate solutions. I'm not saying any of them are easy, but fundamentally, that's where the answer lies, right? If you don't have people who have the desire to go kill large numbers of other people, then you don't have a problem with gun violence. And so consequently, I think that's the dimension. If I were forced

to start thinking about it, I would be operating on, given the fact that we have 300 million guns in this country today. And my guess is we're going to have more than 300 million guns in this country 100 years from now. And so you just got to live with that and, and subject to that constraint, find some other way to get at the problem. On the next episode of Freakonomics Radio, we ask, who pays for our highways and bridges? The nation relies extremely heavily on gas taxes for transportation funding. So alternative fuel vehicles and advancements in fuel efficiency pose some real problems for transportation funding. So alternative fuel vehicles and advancements in fuel efficiency pose some real problems for transportation budgets. That's right. When miles per gallon go up, gas tax revenues go down. So what happens next?

How do we pay for the roads? That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC, APM, American Public Media, and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes Susie Lechtenberg, Catherine Wells, David Herman, Beret Lam, and Chris Bannon. Colin Campbell is our executive producer. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more. Thank you.