Your Hobby is Not Worth Thousands of People Unnecessarily Dying

Recent posts on mass shootings and regulating guns compelled me to revisit a classic essay from Matt Yglesias. A supporter of strict gun control, Yglesias argues that Pro Gun Control Democrats consistently fail to deliver meaningful gun control legislation such that "the juice isn't worth the squeeze": https://www.slowboring.com/p/nationa...ded-re-embrace

It's long, and the first three-quarters cover the failed politics, but, near the end, he makes a comparison to drive the point home:

Quote:

If you’re feeling moralistic about [electing ineffective gun control politicians because it's "the right thing to do"], I’d point to the case of alcohol. There were over 70,000 alcohol-related deaths in the United States in 2017 [compared with 40,000 gun deaths]... Alcohol is involved in a majority of intimate partner assaults, and over a third of murders and sexual assaults. It’s addictive, obviously, as well as being bad for your liver. But critically the impaired judgment induced by alcohol can lead to very serious problem behavior even on the part of people who are not alcoholics. But while there are plenty of people calling for higher taxes on alcohol, nobody is mystified or indignant that few politicians back this. Drinking alcohol is a widely enjoyed hobby in the United States and people would prefer not to pay more for it... But in terms of moral urgency, alcohol kills more people than guns. If you’re comfortable saying that it’s fine for politicians to be politically pragmatic in their approach to alcohol regulation, but that guns are such a transcendent question of conscience that you can’t stomach it, I think you should examine where that’s coming from. I suspect that you drink alcohol yourself and that alcohol consumption is common in your social circle and in fact it’s woven into the rituals of communal life. And I can relate! That’s me too. Indeed a lot of people like me don’t realize that drinking is much less common among working class people. The point is that guns are just like this for a lot of other people. And while the centrality of booze and guns to people’s social and communal lives is not great for public health, basically everyone understands that with regard to alcohol you have to work within the confines of political reality. And guns fundamentally are just not different from that.

It's a forceful comparison for his center-left audience because he plays up the class politics angle. It also reminds me of the article, "The Only Good Abortion is My Own Abortion," which shares stories from nurses at abortion clinics providing care for the activists who harass them. As with guns, the vast majority of people who consume alcohol are law-abiding citizens. Like OJ, they would predictably insist you go after the real criminals.

Importantly, when it comes to alcohol, the proposed solution is a tax increase, but effective gun control legislation goes well beyond universal background checks and stricter regulations on the really scary-looking weapons. Moreover, a small tax increase may sound nice because it will (probably) not have much of an impact on you, but that's because it's supposed to alter problematic behavior in the underclass. And I'm sure the resident libertarians are itching to argue that an increase in the price of alcohol will lead scores of people to experiment with methed up substitutes.

From Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (2011), Mark Kleiman et al. write:

Quote:

Economist Philip Cook of Duke University, who has studied the matter carefully and with methodological creativity over three decades, estimates that tripling the alcohol tax would reduce homicide and motor vehicle fatalities by about 6 percent each. That’s about 3,000 deaths per year that could be prevented with the stroke of a pen.

One objection to the comparison is that the government should focus on third-party effects. If someone drinks himself to death, then that's on him. We're not terribly worried about a threat posed by states with lax regulations on swimming pools. A pool in Nevada is not going to come over and drown me. What also matters is how people die. Homicide is just generally more traumatic than someone succumbing to cirrhosis. Homicide also probably deprives people of more life years. However, gun control activists have had some rhetorical success casting firearms as a public health problem, and alcohol is the third leading cause of preventable death. Also, more than half of gun-related deaths are due to suicide. A strong argument for the strict regulation of firearms is that it will almost certainly reduce the suicide rate.

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/3AlpHAz