The gun control that works: no guns

Suppose a woman in an isolated place avoids a rape via one of these methods: - credibly yelling "go away - I've got a gun!" - brandishing a gun - aiming a gun at the attacker - firing a "warning shot" - firing at the attacker, but missing

...and the attacker runs away.

She's not likely to report this to the authorities. The attacker certainly isn't going to report it. So a study of "shooting incidents" won't include it. A study that starts by looking at cases where somebody was actually shot is counting most of the social costs but only some of the social benefits of gun ownership.

Because no one reports on it. No one reports on the impoverished of India killing each other when someone cuts in line at the water pump in the morning. No one reports on the gang murders in Eastern Europe that happen everyday. Rape goes on all the time. Just because the West has NGOs and charities dedicated to women's issues and run campaigns and just because they have statistics (such as they are) showing that rape incidence might go down, that doesn't mean that rape doesn't happen on a massive scale on a daily basis.

Seriously, how ignorant can a person be?

No, the total will be higher.

From all those cases where right now there is no weapon a weapon, so no incident at least one suddenly becomes available. The number of incidents would go up, but in case of an incident the death toll would go down.

The issue arises when every schmoe off the street can go in and purchase a fully automatic, purpose built people killing machine.

I also don't buy the people vs. the government scenario you allude to. Could you really picture a reality where a group of citizens could overthrow the US government just because they had some AK47s?

In the event of run-away government, a far more rational and realistic scenario would be for mass protests that essentially halt the economy over night. There are countless examples of almost completely bloodless revolutions happening in exactly this manner (Polish Solidarnosc and more recently Egypt during the Arab Spring immediately come to mind). The alternative is a bloody coup which usually ends in civil war or military dictatorship.

  > We do not sell automatic weapons without a whoooole lot
  > of paperwork and money

Erecting barriers isn't sufficient; we need the appropriate type of barrier.

In my original post I described an exaggerated caricature of gun ownership. The point still stands though: that any private citizen (regardless of the amount of paper work they filled out) can choose to sleep with an assault rifle (or shotgun or semi-auto pistol etc.etc.) under their pillow at night is rather .... disturbing.

I based my M16 bought at Walmart caricature on the little I've learned from news media and documentaries like Bowling for Columbine.

You can substitute M16 for shotgun, and Walmart for Corner Gun Store and add in a mandatory 24 hour waiting period, which maybe doesn't make for quite as nice a sound bite, but is just as ridiculous.

Just think, if you'd given the Egyptian's guns that could have been a bloodbath too.

Hypothesis: doing so reduces deaths from A to B.

... assuming there could be a study of the above, and it came up with yes in both cases, and A >> B, would the case for gun control be made?

The question I'm asking is whether there is a study that would be acceptable, and gun control simply depends on whether this can be proven, or whether the question of reducing death is a red herring, and gun ownership is believed worth it regardless?

However, the gun debate has a number of parallels with topics that hackers obviously do care about, irrespective of geography. It wasn't all that long ago that cryptography was considered to be a "weapon" which should be regulated. I would not be surprised to see attempts at classifying some pieces of software as "weapons" at some point in the future - botnets, say, or certain "security" tools. In the fairly near future we can expect debates about synthetic biology, 3D printing and "cyberwarfare", and we'll reach for our existing legal traditions as the means to resolve them.

For hackers to offer meaningful input to these debates, we need to understand how other difficult problems have been resolved. If someone tries to frame "botnet control" as being "like gun control", we really need to understand how and why gun control works, or doesn't work, and how and why the analogy can be applied or refuted.

The future is almost certainly going to involve legal disputes over what we are allowed to do with the technology that we create, own and operate. Some of this technology will be dangerous. In the wrong hands, plenty of technology already is! If you advocate gun control, you need to have a clear understanding of why guns are different from cars, even though cars can kill people too. If you argue against gun control, your arguments may be useful to those who argue against cryptography control, or synbio control. 3D printing could attack some of the fundamental premises of gun control (that it's possible to control the physical flow of weapons and ammunition in a modern society) and the attempt to re-assert control could undermine a number of basic freedoms if done incorrectly. At this moment, I'm not even sure what the 'correct' regulation of 3D printing would look like, but we need to have an answer soon, before someone comes along with a much worse answer and tries to impose it. Sooner or later, someone is going to kill someone with a 3D-printed weapon, and if we don't have good, well-researched and discussed answers to how we deal with this, we'll end up with bad, poorly-researched laws.

But the statistics show that people seem to find that using devices ergonomically designed for maximum killing efficiency much more attractive when they decide to entertain their particular psychopathology.