Personally, I rather enjoy not having my kids shot at school.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
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'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.
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.
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).
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.)
What should we do about it?
Outlaw swimming pools, clearly.
Shit. I have a pool. My kids like it. And I have guns! How about instead, we do nothing. We have more than enough to worry about already just with the sentient hazards in homes.
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.
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
good luck with that!
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.
>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.
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.
>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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.