Australia, Gun Control and Near Insurmountable Obstacles

The horrific Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting has reignited America’s gun control debate. As usually happens in the aftermath of these events, people tend to bring up Australia’s experience. In the aftermath of the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre, the Australian government instituted strict gun control. Since then there have been no mass shootings in Australia. The implication being that if only the US would impose Australian style gun control then the scourge of mass shootings would be solved.

While this may be a nice idea, there is, disappointingly, reason to be skeptical.

Mother Jones maintains a list of mass shootings, defined as a single attack in a public place in which four or more victims were killed, in the US since 1982 (updated to three or more since 2012). According to this list there are 16 states with a combined population of ~35 million which have not had a mass shooting in the last 35 years, despite a distinct lack of gun control.

In other words, the fact Australia, with a population of ~24 million, hasn’t had a mass shooting in the last 21 years is perhaps less significant than it first appears.

This is especially true when you consider that, despite its undoubtedly strict gun control, Australia remains a relatively heavily armed society with an estimated 24.1 guns per 100 residents. While this is substantially less than the 101 guns per 100 residents estimated for the United States, it is still a lot firearms.

We should also keep in mind just how close Australia has come to breaking it’s mass shooting free streak. In 2002, heavily armed Monash University student Huan Yun “Allen” Xiang opened fire in a classroom killing two and wounding five others. If it weren’t for the courageous actions of lecturer Lee Gordon-Brown and student Alastair Boast who tackled the shooter as he switched weapons, Australia’s record would not be unblemished.

To put it another way, luck, and the courage and quick thinking of a couple of potential victims, have at least as much to do with Australia’s recent lack of mass shootings as its gun control regime.

Even if you believe that strict gun control has been effective in Australia, and while it hasn’t eliminated the threat of mass shootings, gun control does seem to have reduced gun violence overall, it is important to understand that Australia is different from the United States in several important ways.

Australia’s constitution does not include a bill of rights and absolutely doesn’t protect any right to bear arms. In other words, the Australian government has the unquestioned authority to regulate firearms in any way it sees fit.

You can make an argument that the Second Amendment doesn’t imply an individual right to bear arms (the Supreme Court would disagree — see District of Columbia v. Heller), however this somewhat beside the point. The mere existence of the Second Amendment ensures that imposition of stringent gun controls would be subject to serious legal challenges that couldn’t happen in Australia.

Perhaps because of the Second Amendment, the United States also has a gun rights lobby that wields considerable political influence. You can choose to believe that this is the unholy result of the NRA’s organizing, fundraising, lobbying and political donations, all of which are completely legal and in fact constitutionally protected. Alternatively, you can accept that gun control is perhaps not quite the sure fire political winner that we might like it to be.

It is often argued that gun control measures generally poll well, so the failure to legislate strict controls is evidence of the moral failure by our elected officials, or even an indictment of the integrity of our political system. While moral failure and systematic corruption can’t be ruled out, the lack of effective gun control is hardly evidence that they exist.

Gun control measures do generally poll well. However, this tells us little to nothing about their political viability. An opinion poll reveals what, when considered in isolation, voters feel about a specific issue. This is certainly useful to know, but it is very far from being the whole story. We learn little to nothing about the relative priority people attach to their preference, making it difficult to account for the fact that real political issues are never decided in isolation.

The American electorate appears to consist of a significant majority who generally favor tighter gun control, but don’t consider it a determining issue, and a rather more motivated minority that is very much opposed to gun control and will decide who to vote for based on this one issue. In a representative democracy, the intensity with which people hold an opinion is at least as important as their number. This explains why recent decades have seen a significant loosening of gun control laws across the US, even though gun control as a concept has consistently polled well.

There is also an economic aspect to gun control opposition in the US. The manufacture, distribution and sale of civilian firearms is a non-trivial industry, which employs tens of thousands of people and generates tens of billions of dollars in economic output. Any attempt to implement meaningful gun control int he US must reckon with the fact that there are a materially large group of people (employees, owners and shareholders), who have an economic stake in the continuing absence of gun control. To quote Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”.

Finally the shear scale of gun ownership in the US represents, by itself, a formidable challenge. As previously mentioned, it is estimated that there are 101 guns per 100 residents in the United States. This implies that there are roughly 326m guns in circulation. Even if the political will could be mustered to impose controls on the sale of new guns, the horse has well and truly bolted. Barring an absolutely massive buyback and/or confiscation effort the US will remain a heavily armed country. History suggests that such an effort is highly unlikely. Americans are, for example, still allowed to own, sell and buy fully automatic weapons provided they were originally purchased prior to 1986.

If we are to accept Australia as a model, then we would envision a future where Federal and State governments legislate and enforce strict gun controls including severe limitations on the types of weapons available (for example, neither pistols nor semi-automatic rifles are obtainable without a verifiable professional need), registration and licensing of all gun owners, registration of all firearms, and massive gun buyback campaigns backed up by criminal prosecution of those that fail to surrender banned weapons.

Consider what would need to happen for this to occur:

1. Voters would need to be convinced to not just support these reforms, but prioritize them over other concerns. Furthermore, this would need to happen nationwide. If Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign taught us anything it’s that landslides in California and New York mean little if you can’t win over the people in between.
2. There would need to be a substantial shift in the composition of the Supreme Court, such that it would be willing to bless radically more restrictive gun laws.
3. Federal and State governments would need to be both willing and able to expend considerable resources on enforcement, which is likely to be vigorously resisted by a significant subset of often heavily armed citizens.

This would seem to be, to put it mildly, a heavy lift.

Perhaps more importantly, the opportunity cost would be enormous. Politics, like all human endeavors, inherently involves trade offs. Devoting more energy and resources to gun control inevitably means less energy and fewer resources for other issues. For example, if the choice was between effective gun control and say tackling climate change, or addressing opioid abuse, or any other issue you care about, would you choose gun control?

Let’s imagine for a moment that a large enough percentage of voters could be convinced to both support and prioritize gun control, that sufficient political will could be marshaled to legislate strict gun control, that the inevitable legal challenges could be overcome, and the massive resources necessary to enforce these new laws could be successfully applied. What would we have?

We’d have what Australia has. A society where guns are significantly scarcer and more tightly controlled. But also one where, on any given day, a gunman can walk into a school and start shooting.

Even in a country with gun control so strict as to be almost inconceivable in the United States, ultimate safety remains elusive.

Coda

To the extent that there is any good news about gun control it is this. Even in the absence of effective gun control you, and the people you care about, are unlikely to die in a mass shooting.

Gun homicides, and particularly mass shootings, loom large in our imaginations because they are newsworthy. However, almost all of us will meet our ends in far more prosaic ways. According to the CDC there were 2,626,418 deaths in the US in 2014 of which 33,590 (1.3%) were caused by firearms. Note this is all gun deaths, including accidents and suicides, as well as homicides. Based on the Mother Jones list, 2014 was a relatively quiet year with only 18 of those 33,590 gun fatalities being the result of mass shootings.

If we look at 2017, the worst year on record, the mass shooting death toll was still only 117. Cold comfort perhaps, but in a country of 324 million people, where more than 7000 people die in an average day, 117 in a year is a small number.