Guns and Civilization: An Economist's Viewpoint
by
Pierre Lemieux
by
Pierre Lemieux
My purpose in this paper is to cast an economist's eye on the question of whether the right to keep and bear arms is efficient in a civilized society. From a narrow economic point of view, the question amounts to asking whether or not the advantages gained by individuals who choose to exercise this right outweigh the cost born by individuals who would suffer from the wider availability of arms. From a broader economic point of view, the question is whether the right to keep and bear arms as a social institution is consistent or not with the set or rules and institutions that makes up what we call civilization.
I will first inquire about the concept of civilization (Section 1). This will help me to have a first crack at the broad question (Section 2). I will then revert to the first, narrower question, and analyze the right to keep and bear arms with a simpler economic model (Section 3).
1. The Idea of Civilization
1.1. The anthropological concept
The anthropological concept of civilization it stresses social complexity in terms of social stratification, differentiation, specialization, and the role of elites and of political power, as defining characteristics of civilization.[1] In civilized society, one cannot, to use Marx's terms, "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, raise cattle in the evening and do literary criticism after dinner".[2] One cannot be both an ordinary citizen and an armed protector of social order. The right to keep and bear arms is defined out of civilization.
I think that this concept of civilization is not very useful in general, for it does not distinguish between what we, in the West, value as civilization, which has much to do with generalized individual opportunities in a spontaneous social order, as opposed to authoritarian social stratification. In other words, if "civilization" is to have any meaning different from the broader concept of society, we may want to define it in a way to exclude societies like, say, the Maya, the Inca or the Aztec, where individual opportunities are severely restricted by the social class one is born in. Indeed, in the anthropological conception, it is not clear why complex insect societies[3] could not be called "civilizations."
1.2. The Economic Concept
Let's start, then, with the simple, soft, concept of civilization, as we find in Webster's definitions, i.e., "refinement of thought, manners, or taste," and "a situation of urban comfort".[4] These definitions call to our attention two characteristics of civilization, that is, non-violence and general prosperity. These two elements are closely related to the economic model of civilization.
It is probably Thomas Hobbes who first formulated the economic model of civilization. In order to have prosperity, men need peace; in order to have peace, they need violence to be mediated, i.e., to substitute institutionalized threats of violence to open interindividual conflicts. Violence does not disappear in civilized society, but its forms and locus are shifted. Individuals give up their arms and submit to a sovereign in order to promote general peace and prosperity among them.[5] It would seem that, in this model too, a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for civilization lies in the disarming of the general population.[6]
The contemporary economist who studied most carefully the phenomenon of civilization, Friedrich Hayek, tried to explain by which process, and under which conditions, complex societies evolve into something similar to Western civilization. Hayek's concept of civilization adds "individualization, increasing wealth, and great expansion of mankind" to the anthropologists' "differentiation".[7]
It is not immediately clear that the Hayekian "Great Society" is consistent with such an apparently primitive idea of the right of common people to keep and bear arms. For Hayekian civilization depends on two sets of conditions. First, there must develop "rules of just conduct," which encompass the "rule of law", i.e., general, abstract, and impersonal laws; these rules distinguish a spontaneous social order from an organization.[8] Second, the freedom allowed by this framework will lead to the division of labor whereby everybody will specialize in the production of these goods and services in which he is more efficient. Now, both the rule of law and the division of labor may be thought as the antithesis of each armed citizen "taking the law in his own hands." It is remarkable that apparently nowhere does Hayek mention the right to keep and bear arms - even when he talks about the U.S. Bill of Rights.[9]
2. The Right to Keep and Bear Arms and Civilized Society
The rule of law and the division of labor would appear to provide - at least in a Hayekian conception of civilization - two arguments against the right to keep and bear arms in civilized society .
2.1. Division of Labor and Self Defense
It is certainly true that civilization is based on the division of labor, and that this institution is as much applicable to public protection (against common criminals or against criminals called "nations" when they come from other countries in gangs) as to production of tires, music or cigarettes. But this does not imply that the division of labor has to be enforced by law. The division of labor does not imply prohibiting a citizen to try his hand at law enforcement any more than it implies prohibiting a mason to repair shoes. Indeed, the efficiency of the division of labor depends on a free labor and capital market and on each individual deciding for himself what he will produce and what he will purchase. And even if an individual chooses not to pursue a given activity now, the efficiency of the division of labor requires that he be not forbidden to pursue it later if his preferences or the outside conditions change. In other words, the division of labor means that one will normally prefer to have his shoes repaired by a shoemaker and his protection assured by a professional policeman; but it does not imply that one is forbidden to repair one's own shoes or to protect oneself if the hired professional is not available. The division of labor explains why arms might be less immediately useful in a civilized society than in a primitive tribe, but it is not an argument for prohibiting them.
2.2. The Rule of Law and Self Defense
A somewhat different argument would be that the rule of law, by its very nature, forbids individuals to exercise self-defense. Although this idea seems to have become the basis of many appeals to gun control, it seems to involve a confusion between judgement and punishment of crime on the one hand, and the defensive use of force in case of clear and imminent danger on the other hand. Before this confusion took hold, the right of self-defense was recognized and thought consistent with the rule of law in most, if not all, Western countries.
Whether the right of self-defense also applies to tyrannical government (especially democratic government) is a more difficult question which has been difficult for traditional legal theory to deal with, but even William Blackstone seems to have been sympathetic to a positive answer.[10] In other words, it would seem that once the rule of law has been destroyed by a tyrannical government, there is no rule-of-law argument that could be used to argue against the right to keep and bear arms.
2.3. Subjective Preferences and Extensions
If the arguments I have just sketched are correct, they mean that neither the division of labor nor the rule of law (both of which are conditions of civilization) can be invoked to coercively deny peaceful individuals the liberty to keep and bear arms.[11] Against the first point (the division of labor), though, it may be argued that guns are not useful for self-defense in a civilized society. Against the second point (the rule of law), it might be argued that, even if self-defense is not against the rule of law, there is no need for it because the rule of law protects individuals against common criminals and the democratic protects individuals against tyranny. Consequently, in a civilized society, no individual would want guns and, perhaps, no one would want to keep his options open in the form of a right to keep and bear arms.
The first problem with this argument is that individual preferences are subjective. So, even if there are individuals who find that keeping or bearing guns is not useful in a civilized context (as, obviously, many individuals would think unnecessary to carry a gun in the ordinary course of their life), there are certainly some individuals (if only one of them) who would feel that guns, or at least the right to have access to them in the future, provide a useful insurance policy. Consequently, there is no justification for negating the right to keep and bear arms except if it can be shown that, in some sense, the costs of this right are higher than its benefits. This amounts to saying that the criminal use of guns causes more harm than self-defense prevents, and that the benefits of the state monopoly on firearms outweigh its cost.
3. Usefulness of Guns in Civilized Society
This leads us to our second line of inquiry: Is the social cost of the right to keep and bear arms in civilized society higher than its social benefits? This question is very tricky as it appears to involve interpersonal comparisons of utility, which would have no scientific basis. Economically, though, it can be reformulated in a narrower but safer way: Would the individuals who benefit from the right to keep and bear arms be willing to pay more to keep it than the amount the individuals who are harmed would be willing to pay to bribe the former into not having guns? This suggests a standard, neoclassical, analysis of the right to keep and bear arms.[12]
3.1. The Model
Let us, then, consider a simple economic model of criminal
behavior.[13] We assume that individuals behave
rationally in the sense that each maximizes the difference between
his perceived benefits and his perceived costs. Although the
right to keep and bear arms is not the obligation to do so, we
also assume that the recognition of this right will lead to a
larger number
of individuals owning and carrying arms. We define crime as the
forcible taking of somebody else's property without his consent.
Although property can be material goods or the person's own body,
or income flows from either, and although goods can be real goods
or the claims to goods which are called money, we are here focussing
on theft of material goods or money.
Consider the figure on the right which represents a sort of supply and demand analysis of theft. The horizontal axis shows the number of hours of theft per year, and the vertical axis shows the number of dollars stolen per hour. The AR curve gives the average revenue of theft: as the numbers of hours of theft increases, its average revenue decreases because the best opportunities have already been exploited. The SS' curve gives quantity of theft forthcoming at different "wages": the higher the wage, the more criminal acts will be committed, the reason being that higher wages will bring in the business individuals with a higher opportunity cost of their time. Alternatively, the SS' curve gives marginal cost of theft and includes not only the opportunity cost of thieves but also other costs involved in theft. An equilibrium will be established where acts of theft are committed and an average return of is earned.
What is important to see here is that the number of crimes will be reduced either by decreasing revenue from crime (less to be stolen) or by increasing its marginal cost (including through higher resource cost, higher risk or higher expected penalty).
3.2. Economic Analysis of Self Defense
The economic argument for the right to keep and bear arms for the purpose of self-defense against criminal aggression by common criminals is easy to understand. If more potential crime victims carry guns, the marginal cost of crime (the SS' curve) shifts upwards. This means that some crimes that were previously profitable for criminals cease to be so (including perhaps stealing a few dollars from little old ladies). Consequently crime rates decrease.
One counter-argument is the escalation-of-violence argument: criminals will get more heavily armed as ordinary citizens become better equipped to defend themselves, and more victims will get injured or killed. The first proposition (that criminals will get more heavily armed) still means that the marginal cost of crime has increased - the very reason for which criminals want to get even with armed victims - and still means that the number of criminal aggression will drop. Whether, in the remaining confrontations, there will be more or less injuries and deaths than there would otherwise have been with more crimes but less firefights is mainly an empirical question to which I will come back shortly.[14]
Another counter-argument is that the recognition of the right to keep and bear arms will decrease the cost of guns for the criminals - i.e., shift back the SS' curve - and, therefore, partially, or even more than totally, compensate for their increased risks and other resource costs. This kind of compensatory effect is certainly true, other things being equal, even if its size is unknown. This question of size is an empirical question but theory would suggest that the compensatory effect is not such as to produce a net decrease in the marginal cost of crime. The reason is that firearm controls increase the total cost (monetary plus non-monetary) of carrying guns more for the honest citizen than for the habitual criminal; therefore, the recognition of right to keep and bear arms will have the reverse effect and will probably get more guns in the pockets of honest citizens than in the hands of previously unarmed criminals. Moreover, one must not forget that there are legal ways to compensate for the diminished cost of guns for criminals, namely increasing the penalties for them to own guns or, better, by increasing the penalties for using guns in the commission of crimes.
What is, empirically, the net effect of private citizens being allowed to own and carry guns? Most, if not all, scientific evidence points to a net reduction in violent crimes when private citizens are allowed to own and carry guns, as shown by the works of James Wright, Peter Rossi, Kathleen Daly, Gary Kleck, Brandon Centerwall, John Lott, and others.[15]
3.3. Economic Analysis of Resistance to Tyranny
The economic argument for the right to keep and bear arms as a barrier against tyranny, i.e., as a protection against crime by governments, is more complicated. We may still assume that the marginal revenue from aggressive acts by a political gang decreases as the number of aggressions (i.e., the degree of tyranny) increases;[16] and that the marginal cost to the tyrant increases as more extorsion will generate more potential for violent resistance or revolt from his subjects.[17] Then, it follows, as in the case of common criminals, that the more the people is armed, the higher will be the marginal cost of aggression by the tyrant, and the lower will be the number of tyrannical aggressions (or the less likely tyranny will be). This is indeed why tyrannical regimes disarm their populace.
The only serious counter-argument would claim, not that an armed populace does not increase the cost of tyranny to the actual or potential tyrant; but that the right to procure weapons decreases the cost of seizing power by a potential tyrant and his acolytes, thereby making the net change in the tyrant's marginal cost uncertain. Indeed, the fear of anarchist and communist activists was apparently instrumental in justifying firearm controls in European countries from the end of the 19th century into the first quarter of this century. It seems to me, though, that potential tyrants have better access to illegal supplies of arms than ordinary, honest citizens, so that firearm control increases the cost of resistance to tyranny more than it raises the cost of seizing power for tyrants.
It should be noted that the above argument does not depend on the effectiveness of civilian resistance to a tyrannical government backed by the armed forces (effectiveness in the sense that armed citizens could defeat the tyrant and force him out of power). To ward off tyranny, it is not necessary to be able to defeat the tyrant, any more than it is necessary to have an unbreakable door to keep thieves away. It is only necessary to increase the expected cost of a potential tyrant and his acolytes above their expected benefits in order to prevent tyrants from pursuing their projects. Consequently (and assuming, again, that the right to keep and bear arms does not decrease the tyrant's cost by allowing him to arm his troops more cheaply, more than it increases his cost in terms of armed resistance from the populace), one would expect the right to keep and bear arms to prevent, at the margin, the rise of some tyrants or some oppressive actions by actual tyrants.
Thus far, I have neglected the collective action problem in resisting tyranny.[18] In short, the problem is that if you are armed, you'd better not be the first to shoot at the tyrant, but instead wait until your neighbor shoots, for then you don't have to support the expected cost of fighting tyranny and, should your neighbor be successful, you will reap the benefits of resistance anyway. In other words, resistance to tyranny is a public good, and it will be under-produced by free individual action.
I don't think the public good argument changes the conclusion I have reached thus far. Because there is a problem as to who will shoot first, the likelihood of resistance is indeed lower than it would be in ideal situation where no public good is involved. But it is not clear why the public-good dimension of resistance would decrease the probability of resistance compared to a situation where resisters did not have guns. The contrary appears more likely. For being armed is likely to decrease the cost of resistance for a resister (it's easier to get Ceasar by shooting at him in a public place than to knife him on his throne). Moreover, the fact that other potential resisters are armed probably increases the probability that others will rapidly join in and shoot, thereby increasing the likely benefits of resistance to the first shooter (i.e., the probability that the outcome will have been made different by his own actions) and decreasing his cost (i.e., the risk that he is immediately singled out and shot).
The cost that an armed populace imposes on a would-be tyrant, or on the contemplated actions of an actual one, is not merely what the tyrant would loose from organized resistance leading to a take-over of his palace. The cost of an armed populace to a tyrannical regime also expresses itself in the probability that individual victims of oppressive acts will draw their guns when goons come to arrest them. Consider, for example, the "rafles" that the French police, under pressure from the German occupant, operated among thousands of Paris Jews on July 16, 1942. Assume that the 19th-century firearm controls had not been established, and that the 1934, 1935 and 1939 legislations had not been enacted; assume consequently a significant probability (instead of a probability close to zero) that a Frenchman (including a Jew) taken at random would be armed. Wouldn't the risk that some French policemen get shot have restrained the French police?[19]
Evidence on either the contribution of an armed populace to successful resistance to tyranny or on the deterrence function of the right to keep and bear arms on tyrannical activity is, by the very nature of the case, difficult to gather. We do not have a large sample of armed and unarmed civilized societies over time - not to mention the difficulty of measuring tyranny. We even do not have many examples of widespread armed resistance to tyranny - if only because, indeed, tyrants usually reign on populations which have already been disarmed.[20]
Yet, we do have indirect evidence of both the deterrence effect of an armed populace and of the possible effectiveness of armed resistance to occupation armies. The deterrent effect of an armed populace on tyrants is shown by the very fact, just mentioned, that would-be tyrants usually dominate unarmed populations instead of armed ones (say, the French instead of the Swiss). On the effectiveness of armed resistance to powerfully armed states, we do have a few examples of successful local guerillas against occupation armies, whether it be in Vietnam or in Afghanistan.
In other words, both economic theory and whatever evidence we can gather from history, argue for the effectiveness of private arms both in deterring, and resisting to, common criminals, and in preventing tyranny or fighting tyrants. To the extent that certain individuals attach value to fighting crime and tyranny, some of them would actually exercise their right to keep and bear arms. The conclusion is that the recognition of the right to keep and bear arms decreases both common criminality and the likelihood of tyranny.
Conclusion
Before definitive conclusions can be drawn on the relations between guns and civilization, we would also need to analyze the consistency of the values related to civilization on the one hand, and to guns, on the other hand. We may find inconsistencies between civilized values and what we may call "redneck values"[21] (tribal instincts or intolerance, for example), but then we may find some congruence too (self-reliance, voluntary contribution to the public good). At any rate, the right to keep and bear arms has a long tradition in the West, which goes far beyond the so-called "gun culture."[22] Moreover, the social engineering approach of gun controllers is quite probably more antithetical to civilization than redneck values.
The tentative conclusions to be derived from our analysis
would therefore be (1) neither the rule of law nor the division
of labor - two features of civilization - is inconsistent with
the right to keep and bear arms; can still be derived from the
analysis above; (2) from a narrower economic viewpoint, it is
theoretically provable and empirically supported - or, at least,
not empirically falsified -, that the right to keep and bear
arms offers some deterrence from both common law crime and tyrannical
enterprises.
1. Cf. René Millon, "Early Civilizations of the New World",International Enclyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 16 (New York: Macmillan and Free Press, 1968), p. 208: "A city has many of the qualities of a civilization. For example, the social structure of a city is markedly stratified, the occupational hierarchy is highly differentiated, and the political structure is that of a state. By various means, a city's elite tends to exercise power over a significant portion of the society's labor and production of goods and services."
2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, L'idéologie allemande (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1974), p. 68.
3. Many examples of complex insect societies can be found in Richard Dawkins' classic, The Selfish Gene, New Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
4. Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 1973, p. 204.
5. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651.
6. In Hobbes, individuals give up their arms against the sovereign, but it is not clear that they they are forbidden to keep arms to resist common criminals: "It may seem strange to some man that has not well weighed these things that Nature should thus dissociate and render men apt to invade and destroy one another: and he may therefore, not trusting to this inference, made from the passions, desire perhaps to have the same confirmed by experience. Let him therefore consider with himself: when taking a journey, he arms himself and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his doors; when even in his house he locks his chests; and this when he knows there be laws and public officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall be done him; what opinion he has of his fellow subjects, when he rides armed; of his fellow citizens, when he locks his doors; and of his children, and servants, when he locks his chests. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions as I do by my words? But neither of us accuse man's nature in it. The desires, and other passions of man, are in themselves no sin. No more are the actions that proceed from those passions till they know a law that forbids them; which till laws be made they cannot know, nor can any law be made till they have agreed upon the person that shall make it." (Leviathan [1651]).
7. Cf. Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 17: "Although cultural evolution, and the civilisation that it created, brought differentiation, individualisation, increasing wealth, and great expansion to mankind, its gradual advent has been far from smooth."
8. See also Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, 3 volumes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973-1979), and especially vol. 2: Rules and Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).
9. See Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960 -- Gateway Edition: Henry Regnery, 1972).
10. "And, lastly, to vindicate these rights, when actually violated or attacked, the subjects of England are entitled, in the first place, to the regular administration and free course of justice in the courts of law; next to the right of petitioning the king and parliament for redress of grievances; and lastly to the right of having and using arms for self-preservation and defence." (William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book I, Ch. 1, p. 77) "The supposition of law therefore is, that neither the king nor either house of parliament (collectively taken) is capable of doing any wrong; since in such cases the law feels itself incapable of furnishing any adequate remedy. For which reason all oppressions, which may happen to spring from any branch of the sovereign power, must necessarily be out of the reach of any stated rule, or express legal provision: but, if ever they unfortunately happen, the prudence of the times must provide new remedies upon new emergencies." (Ibid., Book 1. Ch. 7, pp. 100-101)
11. Whether regulating civilian possession and use of firearms is required in a civilized society, and what is the difference between regulation and prohibition, are questions which this paper does not deal with.
12. On these economic-methodological issues, see David Friedman, Price Theory: An Intermediate Text, Second Edition (Cincinnati, South-Western Publishing, 1990); a less technical discussion can be found in David Friedman, Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life (New York: Harper, 1996).
13. David Friedman, Price Theory: An Intermediate Text, pp. 558-569; and Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life, pp. 298 ff.
14. The question is also partly related to the dynamics of aggression and defense, a question not examined here.
15. James D. Wright, Peter H. Rossi, and Kathleen Daly, Under the Gun: Weapons, Crime, and Violence in America (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1983; Gary Kleck, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America (New York: A. de Gruyter, 1991); Brandon Centerwall, "Homicide and the Prevalence of Handguns: Canada and the United States", American Journal of Epidemiology, Vol. 134, No. 11 (December 1991), pp. 1245-1260; Don B. Kates, Henry E. Schaffer, John K. Lattimer, George B. Murray, and Edwin H. Cassem, "Guns and Public Health: Epidemic of Violence or Pandemic of Propaganda", Tennessee Law Review, Vol. 62, No. 3 (Spring 1995), pp. 513-596; Jeffrey R. Snyder, "Fighting Back: Crime, Self-Defense, and the Right to Carry a Handgun", Policy Analysis, No. 284, October 22, 1997.
16. We should note that, in this case, we need a marginal, and not average, revenue curve. This is the same as saying that a "sedentary" bandit (i.e., a government) will steal less and bands of "roving bandits". Cf. Mancur Olson, "Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development", American Political Science Review, Vol. 87, No. 3 (September 1993), pp. 567-576.
17. In the case where the marginal cost of tyranny would be decreasing - say, because a more powerful tyrant can crush resistance better -, the dynamics of the system may be different. This whole issue of the dynamics of violence as related to the right to keep and bear arms requires more analysis and research.
18. On the collective action problem in general, see Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966); for a glimpse at the application of collective action to resistance to tyranny, see Pierre Lemieux, "Chaos et anarchie," in Alain Albert (Ed.), Chaos and Society (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 1995), pp. 212-238.
19. I take this hypothetical example from my Le droit de porter des armes (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1993).
20. Jay Simkin, Aaron Zelman and Alan M. Rice, Lethal Laws: "Gun Control" is the Key to Genocide (Milwaukee: Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, 1995); David Kopel's review in New York Law School of International and Comparative Law, Vol. 15 (1995), pp. 355-398; Daniel Dan Polsby and Don B. Kates, "Of Holocausts and Gun Control", Washington University Law Quarterly, vol. 75 (1997), p. 1237 sq.
21. See Jim Goad, The Redneck Manifesto (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).
22. Cf. for instance Joyce Lee Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo American Right (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).