How Well Would a Gun Ban Work, Anyway?

Today I was having a debate with somebody on the Internet about gun control, and it led me to do some research that I found interesting enough to share.

I brought up the fact that Chicago had banned handguns for decades and was still swimming in them, to which he replied that making handguns illegal doesn't mean anything if people are allowed to bring them in from outside. "There are no police checkpoints where they check for handguns," and so on.

I said that it was illegal to possess an unregistered handgun and that Chicago didn't allow anyone to register handguns, so people weren't actually allowed to bring them into the city legally. I also pointed out that he had just conceded that a handgun ban is ineffective without some serious police-state apparatus, to which he replied that you could just ban them nationwide and not have to worry about police checkpoints in your cities. You could have checkpoints at the border, and pretend that we can't just make handguns with our huge stockpile of machine tools.

But how well does that approach work, really? He insists it would work, I say it wouldn't, nobody has any evidence to present against his hypothetical scenario. At least, that's how it would play out if I weren't totally freaking awesome. I finally found a productive use for the War on Drugs: providing a quantitative measure of just how much the government sucks at stopping contraband.
Here's where the research comes in. I picked 2012 as the year for grabbing my data, because it's pretty recent but no so recent that the various public agencies haven't gotten around to publishing their annual reports (which often show up halfway through the next year, or later).

The Federal government commissioned the RAND corporation, a research institute, to estimate the size of the illegal drug market in the United States. Well, part of it, since they just focused on four major drugs: marijuana, cocaine (including crack), heroin, and meth. They came up with (paraphrasing here) "About $108 billion, give or take we-don't-know-how-much, in 2010 dollars."

Unfortunately their data didn't go to 2012. Two years shouldn't make that much difference, and the tendency is for markets to grow with time rather than shrink, so this is gives the DEA two years worth of wiggle room. I couldn't find 2010 data on DEA drug seizures because the DEA website is worthless (more on that in a bit).

So now that we have a ballpark figure for the street value of the illegal drug trade in the US (part of it, anyway), we can check with the DEA and see what the street value of all the drugs they confiscated in 2012 is, thus giving us a reasonable estimate of what percentage of illegal drugs make it to market vs getting found and confiscated by various police forces reporting their statistics to the DEA.

It turns out that the answer to this question is: basically nothing. In 2012 the DEA reported to Congress that they confiscated $2.8 billion (in 2012 dollars, natch) related to drug busts, of which $750 million was cash. So, with some generous rounding (what's $50 million in government figures, anyway?), they snagged $2.1 billion worth of drugs and non-cash property in 2012. This figure includes cars, homes, ships, airplanes, pretty much anything owned by drug dealers or smugglers (they actually bagged a submarine back in 2006, one out of apparently many). But since the DEA didn't say how much of the loot was actually drugs, and how much of the drugs were the type of drugs that we were including in our estimate of the total size of the drug market, we'll have to just give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that the whole non-cash take was drugs, specifically of the type that we were including before. At every step we are giving the DEA the benefit of the doubt because even with all of those unrealistically favorable estimates, they still only confiscate about 2% of the drugs. In reality, it's probably half that or less, but it really doesn't matter since we've got so much room to overestimate their effectiveness without actually making them seem like they are making a difference.

I tried pulling up the data from the DEA website, but it is a useless pit of spin and back-patting that didn't even have data on the street value of the drugs they confiscated. I suppose that the DEA providing this data alongside estimates of how large the drug trade is would show people just how ineffective the DEA is at actually reducing the illegal drug trade. Instead, they are busy doing things like trumpeting the decline in cocaine use over the last few years and ignoring the data that suggests that crackheads have just moved on to other drugs instead. Government websites are usually pretty good about disseminating useful data, but the DEA website seems less focused on dissemination and more interested on dissimulation. Specifically, trying to show that the DEA isn't ridiculously ineffective. If I could make comparisons to the street value of the drugs they seized, I would. They list some kind of vague quantities (how much is a "hallucinogenic dose" exactly?) but don't really go into detail about how much it's all worth. The difficulty in comparing data isn't entirely their fault; the RAND study should have listed quantities instead of just street value, but since their reporting doesn't reek of disingenuous attempts at obfuscation I'm willing to give them a pass on the inconvenience.

So then, now that we have established that the odds of the DEA intercepting drugs before they are consumed are, at best, about 50 to 1 against, even with their casual disregard for civil liberties (they'll send a SWAT team to kick in your door based on nothing more than an anonymous tip, which has led to the practice of Swatting people you don't like, or just for jollies) we can start making guesses about how effective they would be at intercepting smuggled weapons.

My guess is: not very. Guns are usually made of commonly used polymers and steel, so new guns tend to smell like the things you would smuggle them in. Dogs can sniff out gunpowder, allowing them to find a gun that has been fired, but new guns (and properly cleaned guns) don't smell like that. Drugs are produced in conditions that serve no other purpose; a meth lab is obviously used for producing meth, an underground hydroponics farm is obviously used for growing pot, and so on. Guns are produced with machine tools that have a huge variety of legal uses, so finding out that somebody has a machine shop in his garage isn't proof that he's a black market gunsmith. Even low-explosives like gunpowder have legal uses; fireworks and such. If 3D printing advances to the point where we can make guns that don't suck (because we can already 3D print crappy guns), the source of guns will only get harder to contain.

All of this adds up to guns, particularly handguns, being a lot harder to deal with as contraband, but even if by some miracle the government was able to increase the effectiveness of a "War on Guns" by a factor of ten compared to its War on Drugs, it'd still only be getting about one out of five. Chicago's decades-long effort to ban handguns was ineffective (until it was put out of its misery by the Supreme Court in 2010, on 2nd Amendment grounds), and expanding that policy nationwide, even if it weren't a blatant violation of the 2nd Amendment, would likely be no more effective than the War on Drugs has been.

A ban on guns would serve much the same purpose as the ban on drugs: to make a fretful populace feel like politicians are "doing something" about the situation, no matter how futile those efforts may be.

Neopolitan Libertarianism

I've noticed that libertarians come in three flavors. There is some overlap on the boundaries, but it works for a hastily kludged together metaphor.

The first kind is the Practical group. They're the ones who support a smaller government because the government doesn't do a very good job at most of the things that it tries to do, and we'd be better off if they didn't try to do so much. They criticize the government as an inefficient solution to society's problems.

The second kind is the Ethical group. They're the ones who talk about how many government programs are unconstitutional, equate taxation with theft, and generally decry the government as having far exceeded its proper role as narrowly defined in the Constitution.

The third kind is the Crazy group. They're the ones who think that the government is mind controlling people with fluoride, that the moon landings were fake, and that a secret conspiracy of The Federal Reserve/Freemasons/Illuminati/Lizardmen is running the world from behind the scenes. Some people just fixate on one conspiracy, while others go all-in and believe everything.

The first and second kind get along fine, and a lot of libertarians use arguments from both camps. They're the mainstream libertarians, as much as the term can be applied to a somewhat fringe group, anyway. The problem, and where almost all of the intralibertarian conflict comes from, is the third group. The Crazies regularly cling to the notion that a small circle of elites could effectively run the world in secret, which is strictly antithetical to the Practical notion that it's just not possible for a few politicians to micromanage a large and complex society. The Crazies make the Ethical group uncomfortable because they both agree that the government is evil and doing things that it shouldn't, but the Ethicals think that the list includes things like the income tax and covert surveillance, while the Crazies think the list includes vaccinating children and pasteurizing milk.

My deepest wish, at least so far as this topic goes, is for the Crazies to just shut up. Seriously, guys, you are not helping. Every time some other group attacks libertarians, they go after you because you're the easiest targets and you make us all look bad. Every time there is a debate between the sane libertarians and someone else, you jump in and start lobbing your Crazy softball arguments that the other side just knocks out of the park because Lizardmen aren't real, fluoride doesn't allow mind control, Obama wasn't born in Kenya, and vaccination is settled science, you idiots. You make the rest of us look like fools because we have you rabid nutjobs on our side, screwing up the signal to noise ratio with your incoherent nonsense.

Listen, Crazies; if you really want to have any chance of the libertarian movement making any progress in the political arena, you need to stop making yourselves the insane poster-children of the libertarian movement. Just take your medication—I promise they aren't trying to contaminate your precious bodily fluids—and never talk about politics again.

A Hat, Piano, and Skyrim

This post contains exactly what it says on the tin.

To answer the obvious question: "Why are you wearing a crocheted Skyrim helmet? Were you burned by dragons or something like that?"

Oh no, it's just they're terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future.

Since I already had my camera set up, I recorded a few other songs as well.

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni - Dear You
Castlevania SotN: The Lost Painting
Legend of Grimrock: Main Theme

Fill in the Blanks!

My parents really did raise me better than this, but sometimes you just need to express yourself in crude terms, and to the tune of the Gilligan's Island theme song:

Now if I had a **** to give
and this I swear is true
I'd take that **** I had to give
and give that **** to you

But since I lack a **** to give
and can't give you your due
Why don't you just go **** yourself
and get a ****ing clue?

Macklemore in Iambic Pentameter, a Response in Kind

A friend sent me this, unsure if I was familiar with Macklemore but confident that I would appreciate the execution. I gave him the following reply:

This "Macklemore" is scarcely known to me,
and so it is for better or for worse;
that while I can not sing the song to thee,
I'll demonstrate my grasp of older verse.
For songs may come and go with passing days,
and people quote them often for a while
until the point where every music craze
is overdone and triggers rising bile.

So if a song is now a major hit
and every music station gives it play,
it won't be long until we're sick of it
from hearing it nonstop throughout the day.
But when you hear those songs after a while,
nostalgia says, http://tinyurl.com/lezn9fw

Every Time Someone Uses a CBO Forecast, a Dead Puppy Returns to Life

I can always tell at a glance when someone has made a projection based on Congressional Budget Office forecasts, since they always involve a picture of doom and gloom that suddenly explodes into prosperity a couple of years after the line between "historical" and "projected." Dead puppies are projected to come back to life and resume playing, based on historical trends for the amount of time those puppies spent playing before they died and subsequently became not much fun.

The CBO produces economic forecasts for Congress. There are two assumptions in CBO forecasts that make them useless for anyone else, one of which might make them useless for Congress itself.

The first of these assumptions is that the forecasts are made "under current law," which means that they do not account for any new laws and new spending that Congress might make in the meantime. That's not a problem for Congress since they use CBO forecasts to guess at how much money they might be able to spend, but for the rest of us, the CBO forecast provides us with a forecast for a world in which Congress meets to discuss new ways to spend money, but goes home after they can't think of any.

The second of these assumptions is that GDP will return to trend, in other words that we'll be back to potential GDP within a few years. Exactly what potential GDP is involves a whole lot of guessing and some extrapolating of historical GDP growth, but the basic idea is that if you have a crappy economy, it's not a permanent setback and it'll grow faster later to make up for it. The latest CBO forecast assumes that we'll be all caught up by 2017.

In 2008, they assumed better than average historical growth for the years after 2009. From 2010-2013 we averaged 1.95% GDP growth, well below the average historical growth of 3.4%. They also guessed in 2008 that GDP would grow by 2.8% in 2009, when it ended up shrinking by 2.6%.

In 2009, they assumed that we'd be back to trend by 2014. We're about a trillion dollars short and 2014 is three months away. Some of us might need to work a couple of extra weekends.

The point I'm making with all of this is that the CBO has an established record of being overly optimistic in its assumptions that GDP will return to trend. Potential GDP is a function of many things: physical and human capital, technology, institutions both private and public, regulation, and so on. Changes in regulation, such as mandating insurance for full time employees, can affect potential GDP in a permanent way. Low labor force participation means that human capital goes unused. Bad government can turn a crappy economy from a temporary setback into the new normal. While the CBO does try to account for losses in human capital due to people retiring or sitting idle for an extended period, it does not, to the best of my knowledge, account for costs of regulatory compliance or people getting priced out of the labor market to due minimum wage increases or insurance mandates.

Stop using CBO forecasts. The puppy is dead.

Time to Get Myself on a Watch List, I Guess

This is not a popular opinion, but I really don't care: I think we overreacted to 9/11.

The 9/11 attacks were terrible, but we've let them define us as a country too much for too long. People have a tendency to consider probabilities according to emotional impact rather than statistical likelihood, and we've been treating terrorism like a much bigger threat than it actually is for more than a decade. In 2001, more than five times as many Americans were murdered by other Americans than were killed in the 9/11 attacks. Americans were 186 times as likely to die from cancer in that year, and 235 times as likely to die from heart attacks. We are not allocating our time, money, and attention in anything close to a rational way when it comes to the threats that face us.

Worse, I think that the fear inspired by 9/11 has been exploited for political purposes, with opportunistic politicians expanding the power of the federal government using terrorism as an excuse. The surveillance state that we're seeing today would never have happened without it. The response of the American public to the 9/11 attacks, which was to throw away our liberty in a desperate bid for security, was absolutely shameful.

Individuals did some brave things during that crisis. I'm not downplaying the firefighters and police officers who lost their lives trying to save others, or the passengers who died trying to take back a plane before it could be used as a weapon for terrorists. Those people showed the best in us and reacted the way that I hope we all would. The rest of us largely reacted like panic-stricken children, desperate to give the government whatever it wanted as long as they said it was necessary to keep us safe. The TSA, Guantanamo Bay, domestic spying—all of this has been justified by appeals to 9/11.

I'm sick of it. If America is so strong and proud, we need to stop letting politicians use 9/11 as an excuse to trample the freedoms that define our country in the first place. We need to stop being a bunch of cowards in the face of terrorism and recognize that a society that is so locked down as to be invulnerable to terrorist attacks is a society that's not worth living in. They killed less than 1/100,000 of our population, and everybody just went nuts like it was the end of the world. That's just pathetic.