Like so many others right now, I’m numb with sadness and rage about the murder today of at least fifteen people (14 of whom were elementary school children) in Texas, following on the heels of the murder a week and a half ago of one in a California church, following the racist murder of ten in Buffalo. And that’s not to mention the mass shooting that killed two in Chicago (in fact, a block north of my office) last week, or countless other acts of gun violence and murder we and our neighbors endure on a far-too-regular basis.
So what can we, as Latter-day Saints and as U.S. citizens and residents[fn1] do?
We should advocate for better laws, laws that will make these deadly shooting less likely. And I use “should” deliberately; the church encourages us to “play a role as responsible citizens in their communities, including becoming informed about issues and voting in elections” and to otherwise engage in the political process. And while the church has taken no formal stand on gun regulation, Pres. Nelson said, in the wake of the Parkland shooting, that “men have passed laws that allow guns to go to people who shouldn’t have them.” As Saints and as humans, we should recoil at the idea that someone can march in and murder elementary school children, or Black Buffalo residents doing their grocery shopping, or a physician worshiping at church.
Before I go too far, though, it’s important to acknowledge a real impediment to gun regulation in the United States. In 2008, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Heller. Prior to Heller, it was an open question whether the Second Amendment right to bear arms was an individual right or a collective right. Scalia came down on the side of an individual right. His analysis of 18th-century usage of the phrase “bear arms,” it turns out, was almost certainly wrong—the phrase was almost always understood in a military context.
But honestly, it doesn’t matter if he was wrong on the law: the Supreme Court is “not final because [it is] infallible, but [it is] infallible only because [it is] final.” For all sorts of reasons, Heller is not likely to be overturned in the foreseeable future.
But that doesn’t mean nothing can be done. Scalia concedes that the “Constitution leaves the District of Columbia a variety of tools for combating that problem, including some measures regulating handguns.” Straight-up banning guns is off the constitutional table, but some type of regulation meets the constitutional muster.
What type of regulation? Well, there’s the rub—we don’t know.
Or, at least, we mostly don’t know. But I want to propose a couple ideas, one of which clearly does not violate the Second Amendment and the second of which likely does not.
One significant problem with guns in the U.S. is economic. Guns are too cheap. And I don’t mean that they should cost a bajillion dollars: the economics-speak would be that they impose negative externalities. Basically, negative externalities are situations where a person gets to internalize the benefits of something, but imposes a portion of the cost on society. The quintessential example is pollution. If I own a factory that makes stuff, I get the benefit of selling that stuff. And I pay some of the costs. But if I dump pollution in the water, I don’t have to pay for safe disposal of the pollution. And I’ll bear a portion of the cost of polluted water, but so will everybody else who has to drink that water. So why do I do it? Because it’s cheaper—I’ve spread the cost around.
Similarly, guns impose costs on society, costs that include property damage (for instance, the shooting in Chicago that I referenced broke a McDonalds window), physical harm and death, and the costs of first responders. Those are all costs borne by people who did not own the gun in question. Because they don’t internalize the costs, gun owners have an incentive to overconsume (that is, buy more guns than they would if they faced the full costs of gun ownership) and underinvest in safety (because of something bad happens as a result of their gun, they don’t have to pay the full price).
So how do we solve this externality problem? There are at least a couple possibilities. In Paying for Gun Violence, an article I wrote a handful of years ago, I propose one idea: a property tax on guns. For various reasons, it’s more elegant at the state level, but it could also possibly be federal. The tax rate would be set by determining the average amount of externalities in the relevant jurisdiction over the prior three years,[fn2] and divide that by the number of firearms in the jurisdiction. That would be the tax. Tax dollars would be earmarked specifically to reimburse victims of gun violence for their costs. That way, gun owners would internalize the costs of gun ownership and society would be reimbursed for (some of) the costs they suffered.[fn3]
In the article I offer a lot more nuance and explanation. And it’s admittedly a blunt instrument: everybody in the jurisdiction pays the same amount, whether they’re a careful gun owner who keeps their guns in a locked safe and doesn’t share the combination with their teenage children or whether they leave their gun in their car, loaded and in plain sight. And that’s a fair criticism. But, for reasons I go into in the article, it is almost definitely constitutional (because taxes, even where they impinge slightly on other constitutional rights, are almost always constitutional), at least if it’s designed to compensate and not set so high as to effectively be a ban on gun ownership. And it would have at least some positive incentives: gun owners who wanted to lower their taxes would have every incentive to support other regulation that would reduce the likelihood of gun violence.
If you want a more elegant and targeted solution, we could also require gun owners to have liability insurance. The insurance route is better than the tax one in that it would be responsive to the likelihood that any given gun owner would commit violence. Insurance companies are, in most cases, really good at evaluating and pricing risk. So if you keep your gun unloaded in a gun safe, chances are that you’ll pay a lower premium. If you’re an 18-year-old boy, by contrast, you’ll likely pay much higher premiums. Again, an insurance requirement would force gun owners to bear something approaching the cost of their gun ownership while compensating society for the harms the guns impose on them. I’m not an insurance lawyer, though, and I don’t know what the constitutionality analysis would be.
Those aren’t, of course, the only possible solutions to the scourge of violence we’re facing. And they won’t entirely solve the problem of gun violence. But there are things we can do—even in the face of an individual right to bear arms—to reduce the likelihood and frequency of gun violence. Those things may not be intuitive. They may not be perfect. But throwing up our hands isn’t enough. Praying for the victims isn’t enough. We have a responsibility to actually be creative and find and support solutions within the context of our current constitutional protections for gun ownership.
[fn1] Our non-U.S. readers probably aren’t dealing with constant deadly shootings; even if you are, though, for constitutional reasons, you’re likely to have solutions unavailable to us.
[fn2] I chose a rolling three-year average to try to even out spikes. Any given year may have more or less gun violence, but the average over several years should arrive at a fair amount.
[fn3] I get that this is an imperfect solution: no amount will reimburse for the death of a child or a grandparent.
Photo by Veit Hammer on Unsplash