I own one gun. If another own guns, that's none of my business. The question, how many guns are "optimal" introduces a surface for regulation that is none of the government's business to be regulating.
> we find that a socially optimal level of ownership is often greater than zero
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?
The whole concept of optimal levels of firearms ownership should have been expanded upon, as this premise is probably new to the audience and a cornerstone of their entire research.
Agreed, there's not a lot of substance here. I read the article more than once and still don't know if "overarming" means too many individuals own guns or too many guns per individual. I assume the former based on context. Also interesting is that they focus on the US but two out of three groups studied are not in the US.
Their cohort studies are across three completely different populations. I would be willing to listen to an argument that for some specific population there’s a firearm ownership level above which there are diminishing safety returns, but I find the idea that this same level would hold across wildly different populations absurd
Do they ever state the social optimum level of fun ownership? I can take them at their word they it’s non-zero, but I’d guess it’s orders of magnitude less than the current rate.
I think the optimum level changes based on whether or not citizens are being actively brutalized by an authoritarian government and their police forces en masse. When that happens, the optimum level is a lot and when it's not happening, the optimum level is probably orders of magnitude less. Unfortunately, we can't accurately predict when these things will happen.
In the US, the average gun owner has something like 3-5. An actual enthusiast will have tens or hundreds. It's the people who own exactly one that you need to watch out for the most.
It's worth remembering that the American founders considered an armed population an essential part of a free society capable of standing up against federal overreach. James Madison, Federalist 46:
>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.
It’s worth noting that these guys also considered women and black people not to be actual people, and made no distinction between nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and a rifle, whenever we get the idea that they had great ideas that we should apply to society today.
It's worth remembering that the American founders did not have to contend with British tanks, helicopters, jets, drones, and missiles. Maybe some words from 250 years ago aren't holy religious doctrine but rather some guy's ideal from another time and place that has little reason to be mindlessly adhered to in the current age.
(To pre-empt the inevitable "B-b-b-b-but Vietnam!": Unless you're proposing an RPG-7 in every American household and suggesting that a 60% obese population is prepared to fight a war from the tunnels, come off it.)
However, the Second Amendment begins with a qualifying clause which many including notable national gun-rights organizations choose to ignore. In any case, I’m not sure that has worked out as well as Madison thought. A sizeable percentage of the armed populace may actually be cheering the feared Federal overreach.
The US gun culture resembles nothing like "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 also 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.
Isn’t there a massive body of research that indicates gun ownership is less safe on average that non-ownership? Ie the chance of accidental shooting of family/friends is high enough to offset any benefit (on average across the US)?
Teen suicide in households with a gun is a very interesting stat to bring up for this. Suicide in general is higher for gun owners, which can be handwaved away as “that’s my right”. But suicide is higher for children of gun owners? That seems like a tough risk to justify.
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).
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).
The non-paranoid sportsman is a shrinking demographic, I fear, mostly due to decades of propaganda within the sportsman culture (magazines, organizations).
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.)
The attempted (failed) fascist takeover of Minneapolis by ICE motivated plenty of new and existing gun owners. It is not reasonable to call that fear paranoia, and it's not about the sport. The fact that it failed doesn't mean that chapter of history is over, just that lessons will be learned and it will be a more difficult situation next time unless there are some really substantial changes we see no evidence of yet.
I got my hunter's safety card back just before covid. Prior to the actual course starting, our instructors spent a good 15 minutes "encouraging" us to join the NRA because "they're really trying to take our guns, blah blah". This was in "liberal" California. When I had last taken the course as a kid in my home state of Oregon, in a conservative majority town, there was never any kind of propaganda that I can recall of this level.
In some ways, it's just the four boxes of liberty at work.
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.
Anecdotally, a lot of politically far left people I know have gone quiet on the firearms issue. It seems like the state of the country has 2A suddenly making more sense to a lot of people.
YMMV but out of the people I know, the lefties are less likely to be hardcore pro-gun-control than the people who lean center-liberal, and this has been true for a long time. John Brown Gun Club, etc.
Not to anyone who is hoping to avoid catastrophic civil disorder and mass murder (revolution/civil war/government crackdowns, however you want to label it), but I think some people have stopped hoping for that.
Sure, jack boot thugs killing a fee people in broad daylight with a government sanction tends to do that. But I’d rather we not have the brown shirts in the first place…
Boy, the game of telephone on the way to HN is really amazing.
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.
It's baffling how almost no one here ever speaks out against it. Everybody just puts up with it even though we all know what a sign of arrogance and incompetence it is to attempt to alter post titles in this clumsy, embarrassingly broken way. Everyone is just silently looking at their feet in second hand embarrassment and doesn't want to speak up. And the funniest thing is: there is an official rule that says not to edit the original titles. Amazingly bizarre.
I own one gun. If another own guns, that's none of my business. The question, how many guns are "optimal" introduces a surface for regulation that is none of the government's business to be regulating.
> we find that a socially optimal level of ownership is often greater than zero
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?
The whole concept of optimal levels of firearms ownership should have been expanded upon, as this premise is probably new to the audience and a cornerstone of their entire research.
Agreed, there's not a lot of substance here. I read the article more than once and still don't know if "overarming" means too many individuals own guns or too many guns per individual. I assume the former based on context. Also interesting is that they focus on the US but two out of three groups studied are not in the US.
Their cohort studies are across three completely different populations. I would be willing to listen to an argument that for some specific population there’s a firearm ownership level above which there are diminishing safety returns, but I find the idea that this same level would hold across wildly different populations absurd
Do they ever state the social optimum level of fun ownership? I can take them at their word they it’s non-zero, but I’d guess it’s orders of magnitude less than the current rate.
I think the optimum level changes based on whether or not citizens are being actively brutalized by an authoritarian government and their police forces en masse. When that happens, the optimum level is a lot and when it's not happening, the optimum level is probably orders of magnitude less. Unfortunately, we can't accurately predict when these things will happen.
In the US, the average gun owner has something like 3-5. An actual enthusiast will have tens or hundreds. It's the people who own exactly one that you need to watch out for the most.
It's worth remembering that the American founders considered an armed population an essential part of a free society capable of standing up against federal overreach. James Madison, Federalist 46:
>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.
It’s worth noting that these guys also considered women and black people not to be actual people, and made no distinction between nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and a rifle, whenever we get the idea that they had great ideas that we should apply to society today.
It's worth remembering that the American founders did not have to contend with British tanks, helicopters, jets, drones, and missiles. Maybe some words from 250 years ago aren't holy religious doctrine but rather some guy's ideal from another time and place that has little reason to be mindlessly adhered to in the current age.
(To pre-empt the inevitable "B-b-b-b-but Vietnam!": Unless you're proposing an RPG-7 in every American household and suggesting that a 60% obese population is prepared to fight a war from the tunnels, come off it.)
It's actually not worth remembering that, even in the context of this study.
However, the Second Amendment begins with a qualifying clause which many including notable national gun-rights organizations choose to ignore. In any case, I’m not sure that has worked out as well as Madison thought. A sizeable percentage of the armed populace may actually be cheering the feared Federal overreach.
The US gun culture resembles nothing like "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 also 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.
Are people who are armed because they enjoy shooting or hunting supposed to exist in this research model or not?
Does it matter? Control of you life is your basic human right. Firearms are the great equalizer.
The problem is the baseline you get equalized to.
Isn’t there a massive body of research that indicates gun ownership is less safe on average that non-ownership? Ie the chance of accidental shooting of family/friends is high enough to offset any benefit (on average across the US)?
Teen suicide in households with a gun is a very interesting stat to bring up for this. Suicide in general is higher for gun owners, which can be handwaved away as “that’s my right”. But suicide is higher for children of gun owners? That seems like a tough risk to justify.
Sure but some people own like 30 guns. There’s more going on with gun ownership than just basic self defense.
"Might makes right," you know?
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
Yes. In fact, the ‘Results’ section in the paper linked from the article (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aed3904) says, in its first sentence:
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).
The US is a country with lower hunting participation than many other western countries and yet an order of magnitude more gun owning households.
The non-paranoid sportsman is a shrinking demographic, I fear, mostly due to decades of propaganda within the sportsman culture (magazines, organizations).
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.)
The attempted (failed) fascist takeover of Minneapolis by ICE motivated plenty of new and existing gun owners. It is not reasonable to call that fear paranoia, and it's not about the sport. The fact that it failed doesn't mean that chapter of history is over, just that lessons will be learned and it will be a more difficult situation next time unless there are some really substantial changes we see no evidence of yet.
I got my hunter's safety card back just before covid. Prior to the actual course starting, our instructors spent a good 15 minutes "encouraging" us to join the NRA because "they're really trying to take our guns, blah blah". This was in "liberal" California. When I had last taken the course as a kid in my home state of Oregon, in a conservative majority town, there was never any kind of propaganda that I can recall of this level.
In some ways, it's just the four boxes of liberty at work.
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.
Anecdotally, a lot of politically far left people I know have gone quiet on the firearms issue. It seems like the state of the country has 2A suddenly making more sense to a lot of people.
YMMV but out of the people I know, the lefties are less likely to be hardcore pro-gun-control than the people who lean center-liberal, and this has been true for a long time. John Brown Gun Club, etc.
Not to anyone who is hoping to avoid catastrophic civil disorder and mass murder (revolution/civil war/government crackdowns, however you want to label it), but I think some people have stopped hoping for that.
Sure, jack boot thugs killing a fee people in broad daylight with a government sanction tends to do that. But I’d rather we not have the brown shirts in the first place…
Of course, and so would those same people.
define far left
Boy, the game of telephone on the way to HN is really amazing.
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.
>PR title: How Fear and Social Pressure Are ‘Overarming’ the U.S.
>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.
Which is usually reasonable, because if you are describing “how x happens” you are claiming that x happens. It doesn’t make a real difference here.
It's baffling how almost no one here ever speaks out against it. Everybody just puts up with it even though we all know what a sign of arrogance and incompetence it is to attempt to alter post titles in this clumsy, embarrassingly broken way. Everyone is just silently looking at their feet in second hand embarrassment and doesn't want to speak up. And the funniest thing is: there is an official rule that says not to edit the original titles. Amazingly bizarre.
Comic: "The Science News Cycle"
https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174