guns and causation

[mindstalk]

I'm reading Judea Pearl's _The Book of Why_ (Caltech book club), about causal inference and types of causation. Just got through necessary vs. sufficient causation. It seems to me that captures part of the gun debate: widespread gun ownership is necessary for frequent mass shootings (no guns, no shootings) but not sufficient (we can imagine lots of guns without shootings... like most of the US's own history).

Gun control advocates point out that taking the guns away will stop the shootings; gun rights advocates argue guns aren't really to blame.

Pearl's own illustrative example is a house fire: a match (or some other ignition) is both necessary and sufficient, oxygen in the air is necessary (no oxygen no fire) but not sufficient (just adding oxygen doesn't start a fire). That includes an assumption that oxygen is 'normal', present whether or not the match is (thus enabling the match to be sufficient, because we can assume the oxygen is there).

Are guns like oxygen? For a lot of the US, yes, in being ubiquitous, considered normal, and mostly not killing people. Removing oxygen to prevent fires is usually overkill, and they would say removing guns is too.

Other modern crises:

* greenhouse gases are reasonably necessary and sufficient for global warming. (No gases, no warming; adding greenhouses gases to an 1800 AD background suffices to cause warming.) (As a side note, Pearl points out that climate models allow climate scientists to generate counterfactual 'data' quite easily, by tweaking model parameters.)

* cars and deaths: cars are necessary for 40,000 dead Americans a year (no cars, no such deaths... alternative transport modes aren't nearly so dangerous) and sufficient (adding cars, or rather a car-oriented and -dependent culture[1] is the main reason we have the deaths).

[1] Japan actually has 3/4 as many cars per capita as the US, but 1/3 as many road fatalities per capita; the cars are used less, as well as being smaller and slower in common use. Many fewer deaths per vehicle too, but similar deaths per vehicle-km.

Comments

[elusiveat]

Guns are like oxygen in an absolute sense, in that you can't have mass shootings without guns being available. Some gun rights advocates argue that mass stabbings are also a thing. I think it takes some serious willful obtuseness to pretend there isn't an obvious difference there.

On the other hand, "guns" covers more than just legally purchased firearms. Gun rights advocates point out the existence of a black market, which I think is a much more valid (if not *obviously* correct) critique.

To the extent that a black market exists, I doubt that it's just some magical product of the invisible hand of supply and demand, though. I've heard (but haven't confirmed with personal research) that the black market for weapons seems to be closely related to the relationship between militaries (particularly the U.S. military, but also others) and the weapons industries. When the U.S. provides "weapons and training" to rebels in a foreign country, where do those guns end up when the fighting is over? The claim was that this is a major source of the weapons used by gangs and gunrunners in places like Brazil. I do not know if there is a corresponding claim that they also come back here.

There are also complicated questions to be raised about militarization of police forces. Is this phenomenon fueling escalation of violence (both state and civil)? Is it a rational response of governments and police departments to the increasing availability of powerful weapons to violent criminals? I believe I've heard claims in both directions.

[mindstalk]

I suspect the black market in civilian firearms would be much smaller if the USA wasn't making them. Mexico gets its guns from US.

[kgbooklog]

I'd like to point out that removing oxygen is the primary way we put out fires once they've started. Likewise, many shootings are stopped not by a "good guy with a gun" but by a "good guy without gun" disarming the shooter.

[heron61]

Are guns like oxygen? For a lot of the US, yes, in being ubiquitous, considered normal, and mostly not killing people. Removing oxygen to prevent fires is usually overkill, and they would say removing guns is too.

Except that not only are murder rates far lower in nations with strict gun control, but from Australia's example, we know of an absolute fact that strict gun control drastically reduces the numbers of mass shootings. Of course, there's also the fact that removing oxygen tends to have negative consequences, and other than annoying people, removing guns simply does not

From the stats we have, they are largely useless as personal protection, and other than hunting weapons (I have no objection to the sale of pump action shotguns and bolt action rifles), absolutely nothing else is lost on any sort of practical level, and hurt feelings seem vastly less important than dead people.

[mindstalk]

Your first sentence is consistent with guns being necessary for shootings; it says nothing about whether they're sufficient. The existence of other countries with high gun ownership and whether they have high shooting rates would be more apropos. A recent article said "yes" but a friend noted that the graph included was not very convincing. Part of the problem is that there aren't any countries with similar levels of gun ownership, so there are few international data points. Also the independent variable is usually "guns per capita", when "capita who own any guns" might be more relevant.

[l33tminion]

I think your reasoning in this post is pretty inconsistent, since I'd say "adding [guns], or rather a [particular sort of] gun-oriented [...] culture" is the main reason we have mass shooting deaths, too.

Sure, guns are not sufficient to produce mass killings without the context of a certain attitude towards homicide. (Justifiable homicide in particular, but that isn't complete without the question of "justifiable to who?" and its relation to attitudes about homicide in general.) But that division in attitudes is the crux of the conflict!

[mindstalk]

Heh, I don't want to get sucked into playing devil's advocacy because I found a shiny new mental tools. But whether or not you agree that guns are insufficient, it might be a way of labeling clearly how gun advocates think about it, and what you might have to do to change their minds. Vs. debating "guns cause shootings" when there are two definitions of 'cause' at play.

There's probably more than one gun culture in the US. "Handguns for self-defense" vs. "long guns for hunting" vs. "guns for recreational target shooting" vs. "cool assault weapons to fight against THEM".

[l33tminion]

I don't think that hunting or the aspects of target shooting that are disconnected from the use of guns against human beings really have much impact on the conflict over gun regulation.

The notion of sufficiency has to do with the probable (or inevitable) effects of something. So it doesn't map well onto thinking about the contingent effect of specific choices. While it's possible to have a system of ethics that's more about probable effects in aggregate than the contingent effects of specific choices, conservatives generally favor individualism over collectivism. Since the ethics of justifiable homicide are at the root of this conflict and the opposition to gun regulation is generally conservative, notions of sufficiency seem likely to miss the mark here.