Which Cause of Avoidable Deaths Is Bigger?

U.S. drunk-driving fatalities, 2010:     13,365


U.S. suicides using firearms, 2010:     19,392 


Yes, but if people who want to commit suicide don't have access to guns, won't they just use something else? No.       

How to Influence a Senator

What does a member of Congress want? Money? Yes, absolutely. But it's important to remember that members of Congress, aside from the few who are outright corrupt, don't want money for its own sake. They want it as a means to an end, and the end is reelection.

If you assume that politicians act in whatever way will help their chances of reelection, you will almost always be right. This need not be cynical self-interest on their part. Perhaps they're playing a long game, and reason that reelection is a precondition for getting anything done in the future. Or perhaps they convince themselves that that's what they're doing. In any case, you'll rarely go wrong by assuming politicians will choose the course that maximizes their chances of reelection.

This brings us to the defeat of universal background checks in the Senate. Given that support for this proposal was around 90%, how can voting against it possibly help senators' chances of reelection?

We have some evidence on that. Here's one of the Democratic defectors, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota:

“I think I always had a reputation as somebody who will listen, somebody who is pretty independent-minded but also believes that at the end of the day, you got to listen to your constituents,” Heitkamp told Politico. “In this office, the calls literally were before the last day at least 7 to 1 against that bill. This was after a series of very extensive ad campaigns done in my state saying call me and tell me to support it."

Then we have Republican Jeff Flake of Arizona. He announced that he would vote for cloture on the background-checks amendment, meaning voting to allow it to come to the floor for a vote. This was in opposition to the NRA position, which was to keep it bottled up forever. You can go to his Facebook page and scroll down to April 10 to read about it. Here are the first ten comments on the screen I was looking at (sorry about the HTML problems):

Jimmy Young we need you defeat this attack on our 2nd amendment right's if not you don't have to worry about us ever supporting you again we will be supporting your challenger.
April 15 at 3:00pm · Like · 2

Gordon Jones Vote NO on more gun control, criminals don't follow laws by definition. "Universal background check" will only apply to law abiding citizens, not criminals. 

Abolish the "Gun free zone" law, it only disarms law abiding people, not madmen intent on mayhem. All celebrities and politicians have armed guards and send their kids to schools with armed security, the average American deserves the same protection.
April 15 at 6:25pm · Like · 1

Jeff -Oliver Madly- Clark You'll never have a chance to even read it.

April 15 at 8:26pm · Like

Joe Hannis Harry Reid cannot be trusted. He has an agenda and will stop at nothing to achieve it. BEWARE.

April 16 at 12:14am · Like · 1

Tim Musa Thanks for letting us down with that douche McCain. I am in AZ and I vote.'I will be happy to vote against you next time around if you go down this path.

April 16 at 12:18am via mobile · Like · 2

Scott Shepherd Jeff Flake, you are a traitor to the American people. You swore to UPHOLD the unites states constitution, not destroy it. I will remember how you vote when it's my turn to vote.

April 16 at 12:46am via mobile · Like · 4

John Crook I am very disappointed in the fact that I supported you by voting for you. NOT one single notch should be made in the second amendment!! I feel that both you and John Mccain have betrayed us!!

April 16 at 12:57am via mobile · Like · 1

David Fischer another rhino...no more votes for you, you should jump the isle, hell the dems probably wont have you either.

April 16 at 1:38am · Like

Steve Eacret I did not vote for you to be another of the sheep. I will not make that mistake again...

April 16 at 2:04am via mobile · Like · 3

Jake Box Vote No on s649! Vote No on Manchin-Toomey! Vote No to Amnesty or a path to Citizenship! Secure the Border!

April 16 at 9:37am ·

Flake ended up voting for cloture but against the background-checks amendment.

Now, are phone calls and Facebook comments a random sample, and thus representative of constituent opinions? Obviously not. So why pay attention to them?

One possibility is that senators are too dumb to realize that these comments are unrepresentative. Here's Heitkamp:

When asked about polling that has consistently shown upwards of 90 percent of Americans supporting an expansion of background checks on gun purchasers, Heitkamp said she doubted that they really reflected public opinion....

Much more likely, though, senators do know that the comments are unrepresentative. But just as politicians care about money as a means to an end, they care about representing constituent opinion as a means to that same end: reelection.

From the standpoint of reelection, politicians have to worry not only about their constituents' preferences, but also about the intensity of those preferences.  A lot of people will have an opinion on issue A, but most of them will decide whether to vote for a politician based on issues A through H. A minority will be single-issue voters, whose entire voting decision will be based on issue A. On that issue pleasing those people is a lot more important than pleasing most people.

Calls and letters are a pretty good way of identifying those people-- if people are willing to go to that trouble, they may feel intensely enough about it to be single-issue voters. I doubt Heitkamp really thinks that all the polls are wrong, but it's pretty unseemly to say in public, "I don't care what my constituents want; I just care what the fanatical minority wants." Note that Heitkamp was just elected this past November and won't be up for reelection for another five and a half years, but she's already worried about it.

You might say, "There's nothing really wrong with this; legislation should reflect intensity of preferences. People who care a lot about an issue should carry more weight than people who don't much one way or the other." Indeed, this is the point of view of one of the best-known theories of political philosophy, utilitarianism.

But in applying that philosophy here there's a problem, one of the biggest problems with representative democracy. We could call it "threshold effects." There are costs to organizing and lobbying. So people with less at stake may choose not to bother, and so may not get represented at all. Their preferences may be not just weighted less, but ignored altogether. It's the same reason there's a milk-producers' lobby, but no milk-drinkers' lobby.

There is a silver lining, though, for believers in democracy. Apparently, you  don't need huge amounts of money to influence a senator.  If you can get a good phone list organized, you may be able to have a significant impact on policy. Of course, it helps if your phone list is made up of paranoid nut cases, but it's time for normal people to step up.

Note: Sometimes you guess wrong about how much the silent majority cares about an issue, as Jeff Flake has found out, to his cost.

You Saw It Here First

The two-month Claritas edge:

http://nocera.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/the-gun-report-march-25-2013/?hp

http://howardfrant.blogspot.com/2013/01/meme-busters-on-hammers-and-guns.html

If you're Slate reader, the Claritas edge is only two weeks.

Meme-Busters: On Hammers and Guns

There's a new meme floating around on the right-wing hemiblogosphere: that according to the FBI more people are killed with hammers than guns. This seems to be the last stop in the game of telephone that began with a claim that more people are killed with hammers and clubs than with rifles. The implication, of course, is that it's silly for those liberals to claim that assault weapons are dangerous and should be banned; why don't we ban hammers and clubs while we're at it?

OK, here's the FBI report. These are the relevant points:

• All blunt instruments combined-- rocks, bricks, concrete blocks, baseball bats, hammers, steel pipes, tire irons, golf clubs, frying pans, snow globes, and so on-- kill more people than rifles. This doesn't strike me as surprising.
• On the other hand, rifles plus shotguns kill more people than all blunt instruments combined.
• Guns (mostly handguns, of course) kill seventeen times as many people as all blunt instruments combined.

And you can look it up.

A Gun Speech for Obama

"It has become painfully obvious that we have a problem with gun violence in this country. Guns are a very divisive and polarized issue, with strong opinions on both sides. That's OK. In a democracy, what we do is talk to people on the other side, and try to find areas of agreement.

"And in fact, I think there are substantial areas of agreement between the two sides. Unfortunately, it's been difficult to find those areas of agreement, because some people benefit from polarization. Foremost among them is the National Rifle Association.

"The NRA gets its power because many gun-owning voters assume that someone who gets an "A" rating from the NRA must be better than someone who gets a "B"  rating. They assume this because they think the NRA must be serving the interests of its members.

"Actually, it's the other way around: the members are serving the interests of the NRA. The NRA is an extremist organization, and its opinions are far more extreme than those of most of its members.

"A recent survey showed, for example, that 74 percent of current and former NRA members support background checks for anyone buying a gun, and 79 percent favor background checks for employees of gun retailers. Not the NRA. What about denying guns to people on the terrorist watch list? Seems like a no-brainer, right?  If you think that, then 71 percent of current and former NRA members agree with you. Not the NRA.

"The NRA has in fact been doing it best to scare gun owners into thinking that any politician who disagrees with any of their extreme positions is "anti-gun," "anti-Second-Amendment," and waiting for the opportunity to take away all guns. Here's the fact: Guns are dangerous. Like all dangerous things, they need to be regulated to make sure they don't fall into the wrong hands. Most gun owners know that.

"I haven't seen a poll on the attitude of NRA members toward a ban on assault weapons, but the NRA's attitude toward it borders on hysteria. Yet until 2004 we were getting along fine without assault weapons. These are weapons for which there is no plausible need other than killing large numbers of people. You don't need an assault weapon to defend your home, except in some some adolescent fantasy involving black helicopters or zombies. But it's proven to be very popular among mass murderers. I know that, now these weapons have been legal for a while, people have tried them and find that shooting them is fun. Sorry. If you're going to live among other people, you can't do everything that might be fun.

"Finally, aside from keeping guns out of the hands of dangerously unstable people, we have to try to reduce the number of dangerously unstable people. That means we have to do something to make sure mental health services are available, particularly for adolescent boys and young men. That means-- let's be clear about this-- spending more. Can we do that, with our deficit problems ? Of course we can. Here's the first thing we owe our children and grandchildren: to keep them safe."

Note: I didn't start out intending to say so much about the NRA. But as I was writing, it became apparent that the politics of this issue does not work without confronting head-on the belief of many gun owners that the NRA speaks for them.

The Gun-Owners' Fantasy

If you ever saw the old play "Charley's Aunt, " you may recall the title character's line, "I'm from Brazil, where the nuts come from." It doesn't sound as good with "Arizona",  but it applies to me.

Yes, another nut has gone into the wholesale murder business in Arizona. This time, a man shot and killed five people and then himself in Yuma. The victims included his ex-wife and her lawyer.

I'm not going to go on and on about how violent America is. Indeed the mass-shooting meme (that's the first time I've ever used that word-- I hope it was correct) has now reached northern Europe as well.

No, what always strikes me in these cases is what they reveal about gun owners' fantasy. I'm not talking about a fantasy of killing people, but about a fantasy of security.  Gun owners believe that lax gun-ownership laws will allow them to protect themselves. Yet these massacres keep taking places in states with lax gun-ownership laws. Two years ago a man in Alabama killed ten people with an assault rifle before killing himself. Despite Alabama's permissive gun laws, not one of his victims was able to put up any resistance.

After the Gabby Giffords shootings, I suggested to some gun nuts at the Volokh Conspiracy blog  that a ban on sale of ammo clips that let you shoot twenty people without reloading would easily pass Supreme Court scrutiny. Predictably, they were outraged. What if, one of them asked, he had to protect his family against a home invasion by several armed people? You or I might think that a Glock with a standard 15-round magazine would offer adequate protection for the run-of-the-mill home invasion, but hey, you never know.

And once you start down the road of being Constitutionally entitled to protection from every conceivable threat, there's no logical stopping place. What if you're being attacked by criminals in an armored car? You clearly need an RPG for self-defense. What about strafing from a Beechcraft? The Colt shoulder-launched missile, the SAM that won the West (I'm making that up). I will survive!

To some extent, of course, this whole fantasy is just the public rationalization  of the real fantasy, which is single-handedly defending yourself against the entire U.S. government. But have you ever noticed, when you read about some man-made or natural tragedy, a tendency to find reasons why it would never have happened to you? I think guns serve that role for gun owners. I would never have been killed if I'd  been at Virginia Tech, because I would've been armed.

The gun-owners' fantasy looks like another facet of the American belief in the possibility of complete security, the same belief that leads us to buy cars that can survive collisions rather than cars that can avoid collisions, and to ban shampoo from airplanes. Maybe Americans need just a dash of fatalism.