The United States has tried various methods over the past several decades to curb gun purchases. Despite those efforts, hundreds of millions of firearms have flooded the market. The gun homicide rate stands at 4.7 per 100,000 people. Perhaps we have been misdiagnosing the problem. Instead of raising the barrier to gun purchases, a more radical paradigm shift is needed. That means helping people buy long guns instead of handguns. This is also the argument of a paper published by three economists: Bradley Shapiro, Sara Drango and Sarah Moshary.
The authors of the paper presented a simple yet precise premise. First, handguns cause far greater harm than long guns. Handguns are used in 90 percent of all gun violence incidents and serve as the instrument in numerous suicides. People own handguns most often because they are easy to carry and conceal.
Second, the main purpose of gun buyers is home safety. This can be sufficiently achieved with a long gun. Therefore, if long guns, which are inconvenient to carry, replace handguns, the probability of irreversible tragedies occurring when gun owners fall into momentary anger or despair can be significantly reduced.
So what if the government provided subsidies for first-time gun buyers to choose a long gun instead of a handgun? This is closer to a kind of "thought experiment" than a concrete policy proposal. The authors of the paper estimated that under the most ideal (unrealistic) conditions, such an approach could prevent 275 deaths annually with a budget of up to $1.5 billion. Of course, under realistic conditions, the preventive effect could be lower or nonexistent. Moreover, substantial costs would be required, and the hurdles in implementation would be considerable.
Still, the reason we should pay attention to this paper is that it offers a "productive perspective" on gun policy. U.S. gun policy is a tense tug-of-war between regulation supporters and gun owners. Extreme confrontation does nothing to help solve the problem. Gun violence is a disaster that erodes society as a whole. People avoid going out for fear of shootings or choose expensive alternatives such as taking taxis instead of walking, which worsens urban functions. Police, too, opt for preemptive and aggressive suppression to escape shooting risks, making it more difficult to maintain public safety. Above all, countless innocent lives are sacrificed. Society has a rightful responsibility and stake in reducing such harm.
Until now, we have been preoccupied with making gun ownership itself difficult, but we have hit clear limits. The reality is that legislation to seamlessly block those determined to commit crimes is difficult to craft and sometimes raises constitutional concerns. There is also a political dilemma. Gun owners who bear the cost of regulatory policies tend strongly to vote based solely on "gun rights." In contrast, for supporters of gun regulation, the issue is often just one of many agendas on the progressive side, not the top priority. That is why, despite a majority of Americans supporting strong regulation, policies to restrict access to guns repeatedly fail to clear the political threshold.
The aforementioned paper approached the issue from the practical perspective of "harm reduction," escaping such exhausting debates. This is similar to the concept of "safe injection sites" for drug addicts. Since pressuring addicts until they quit drugs is ineffective, the aim is rather to make their "dangerous hobby" as less dangerous as possible. However, supporters of safe drug injection sites are likely to find such an approach abhorrent, and so are opponents. The public holds firm moral yardsticks on drugs and guns. Instead of compromise policies that make objects of loathing less dangerous, they want fundamental policies that eliminate them from the world altogether.
If drugs decreased and guns disappeared as the public wishes, the United States would clearly become a better place to live. However, no specific solution is in sight for reaching that goal without enormous sacrifice of individual liberty. In that regard, the idea of cooperating with, rather than confronting, those who advocate gun ownership is very fresh. The paper's title, "Firearm policy buyers would accept," captures the heart of the matter.
In reality, the government will not hand out tax money to citizens telling them to buy long guns instead of handguns. But if many people embrace such a "paradigm shift," might not more practical policies emerge?
