From: [g--bs--n] at [bmrl.med.uiuc.edu] (T. Mark Gibson)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
Subject: Prof. Polsby makes Pimlet look even more foolish
Date: 29 Apr 1994 23:40:50 GMT


In a recent message (which I couldn't reply to when I first read it, because
I was at work) the following comments by the Pimlet were found:

>You seem to be assuming that criminals are in some way over motivated and 
>that no matter the circumstances they will try to obtain a gun. A gun ban is 
>quite effective in addressing both supply and demand issues, effectively 
>reducing gun availability.

Pimlet, you must be one of the few people on t.p.g who don't realize
that criminals are "over motivated" to obtain guns.  In his article,
"The False Promise of Gun Control", which appeared in the March 1994 issue
of _The Atlantic Monthly_, Daniel D. Polsby (Kirkland & Ellis Professor
of Law at Northwestern University) writes:

"  Handguns, so often the subject of gun-control laws, are desirable
for one purpose--to allow a person tactically to dominate a hostile
transaction with another person.  The value of a weapon to a given person
is a function of two factors: how much he or she wants to dominate a
confrontation if one occurs, and how likely it is that he or she will
actually be in a situation calling for a gun.

"  Dominating a transaction simply means getting what one wants without
being hurt.  Where people differ is how likely it is that they will be
involved in a situation in which a gun will be valuable.  Someone who _intends_
to engage in a transaction involving a gun-- a criminal, for example--is
obviously in the best possible position to predict that likelyhood.  Criminals
should therefore be willing to pay more for a weapon than most other people
would.  Professors, politicians, and newspaper editors are, as a group, at
very low risk of being involved in such transactions, and they thus
systematically underrate the value of defensive handguns.  (Correlative,
perhaps, is their uncritical readiness to accept studies that debunk the
utility of firearms for defense.)  The class of people we wish to deprive
of guns, then, is the very class with the most inelastic demand for them--
criminals--whereas the people most likely to comply with gun-control laws
don't value guns in the first place.
[....]

"  If firearms increased violence and crime, programs of induced scarcity
would suppress violence and crime.  But--another anomaly--they don't.  Why
not?  A theorem, which we could call the futility theorem, explains why
gun-control laws must either be ineffectual or in the long term actually
provoke more violence and crime.  Any theorem depends on both observable
fact and assumption.  An assumption that can be made with confidence is that
the higher the number of victims a criminal assumes to be armed, the higher
will be the risk--the price--of assaulting them.  By definition, gun-control
laws should make weapons scarcer and thus more expensive.  By our prior
reasoning about demand among various types of consumers, after the laws
are enacted criminals should be better armed.  But even if many noncriminals
will pay as high a price as criminals will to obtain firearms, a larger number
will not.

"  Criminals will thus still take the same gamble they already take in
assaulting a victim who might or might not be armed.  But they may appreciate
that the laws have given them a freer field, and that crime still pays--pays
even better, in fact, than before.  What will happen to the rate of violence?
Only a relatively few gun-mediated transactions--currently, five percent of
armed robberies committed with firearms--result in someone's actually being
shot (the statistics are not broken down into encounters between armed
assailants and unarmed victims, and encounters in which both parties are
armed).  It seems reasonable to fear that if the number of such transactions
were to increase because criminals thought they faced fewer deterrents, there
would be a corresponding increase in shootings.  Conversely, if gun-mediated
transactions declined--if criminals initiated fewer of them because they
feared encountering an armed victim or an armed good Samaritan--the number of
shootings would go down.  The magnitude of these effects is, admittedly,
uncertain.  Yet it is hard to doubt the general tendency of a change in the
law that imposes legal burdens on buying guns.  The futility theorem suggests
that gun-control laws, if effective at all, would unfavorably affect the
rate of violent crime."

Polsby is using the terminology of the field of law and economics to show
why gun-control laws (which include gun bans) serve only to reduce the
availability of guns among people who don't want them very much, not among
criminals who consider them necessary tools of their trade; and that such
bans will likely cause an increase in violence as criminals realize their
victims have been disarmed.

Way to go, Pimlet--keep protecting those rapists, muggers, and murderers!

--
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Mark Gibson               |  The meek shall inherit the dearth.
[g--bs--n] at [bmrl.med.uiuc.edu]  |  Politicians prefer unarmed peasants.
1:233/16 (Politzania)     |  The Bill of Rights: Void Where Prohibited By Law.
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