 This is Mises Weekends with your host, Jeff Deist. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to Mises Weekends. Our guest, as you can see, is the editor-in-chief of Mises.org, Ryan McMakin. And our subject this week is gun violence and what the marketplace, rather than the state, might do to alleviate it. Ryan, you know, reading all the stuff we've seen over the last couple days with the shooting at the school in Florida, two things really sort of stick out to me. First of all, is that we're talking about utopian ideas that somehow either the government or the private sector can completely eliminate deep cultural problems, problems of mental health, that we can create a perfect utopian society with no gun violence. So first and foremost, this sort of utopian delusion. But second of all, is that people don't seem to be thinking or speaking in terms of trade-offs, as economists do. In other words, sure, we could create a gun-free environment. For the most part, maximum security prisons, we manage to keep guns out of them. We don't keep drugs out of them, but they don't really have inmates killing each other with guns. But at what cost? What's the trade-off? How far do we want to go? So I guess first of all, it's irritating to us as Austrians to see how the debate is being framed. Well, if you read the research on Latin American homicides, researchers often remark how remarkably low the homicide rate is in Cuba, especially compared to all the surrounding countries. And Cuba, of course, the most authoritarian state in the region. So, yes, if you turn your island into a prison state, you can drastically reduce your homicide rate, for sure. You had an article recently on Mises.org talking about how security works in private settings. We bring up prisons as a gun-free zone, but there are gun-free zones that are not prison-like. For example, a theme park like Disneyland operates in a way that they do check your backpack or purse on the way in. But once you're inside, it's more or less a gun-free zone, and we don't seem to be able to achieve this in a public school setting. Well, a lot of people don't even realize when they're in what's essentially a locked-down facility, because it doesn't feel particularly onerous. Simply because the security there, like at theme parks, but other places as well, they don't treat you like garbage. They want to get you in the door, and they want to keep patrons safe, and they're motivated to do so for a variety of reasons. Public schools, things are different there. For one, as has been pointed out, they're government institutions, and so when they do try to institute broad-based source of checks on what people are bringing in and stuff, they sometimes will encounter complaints about the Bill of Rights and how people's freedoms are being limited in that way. You don't encounter that, of course, in a private sector place. And then, of course, it's just the issue of schools just don't place a big priority on that. When we look at what schools want to spend money on, it's a lot of extra staff and administration. And I note in one of those articles I wrote that the student population in the 70s has increased 8% at public schools, but non-teaching staff has increased 130% during that period. But then we're told, oh, gee, how can we ever find the resources to spend more on security at public schools? And I think we could probably come up with it. Yeah, they never want to cut a penny, you notice. But here's the interesting thing to me is even as Americans, we think of ourselves as more independent minded, we still have this mentality that when the state is involved, there's a level of trust. We drop our kids off at government schools every morning, knowing nothing about the people who run those schools, basically. And we pick them up seven hours later or whatever. And we don't really give much thought to the quality of those people, what kind of security will be provided, what kind of violence might take place there. It's astonishing, if you think about it, that we are willing to subject our kids to an environment we know so little about, just because it's run by the state. Well, yeah, how many people really do their homework and what the details are for security at their school? Most people don't do their homework, of course, anywhere that they go in terms of security. Part of that is mitigated, though, later by the fact that those private institutions could be held accountable, if they're totally negligent in terms of security. And I suggested this in terms of the movie theater in Aurora, which had a mass shooting there, suggesting that maybe the private owners should have kept tabs on their back door and noticed that a guy was casually bringing a bunch of guns in the back from his car. But I was shouted out as being told, well, that's outrageous. You can't foresee that sort of thing. It's too hard to keep track of exits and so on. And now I'm encountering the same thing. When I'm suggesting that for public schools, we're being told, oh, it's going to make it a prison. It's going to make it a fortress. Nobody's going to want to go. Never mind the fact that similar measures are employed other places that aren't public schools. And part of that just comes back to what you're saying. It's the level of rigor with which people look into their schools and how things are done. Are they looking into how students are treated at this place? What is the social atmosphere? What happens when you have a student who is maybe problematic, was making threats to other students? Nobody looks at that stuff. They look at maybe what similar the test scores are. And those official measures of school academic achievement. But the level of investigation on those other factors basically zero. What could schools do realistically? Obviously, it muddies the issue when it's a state school. Because then you're bringing in the Fourth Amendment. You're bringing in taxpayer budgets. You're bringing in all kinds of elements that are not market driven. But nonetheless, here we are. We've got thousands and thousands of public schools so-called in the United States. What could they do? What kind of market approaches or mechanisms could they use right here and now to try to prevent or minimize these things in the future? Well, I can only go off of what entrepreneurs from the security industry have said on this. And this looks at the way you construct the building. Of course, then that applies to the future. But you could do renovations now to change the way the building is set up to minimize these sorts of problems. You, of course, would have a staff who's trained, profiling students, trained to dealing with security. These are all entrepreneurial problems, of course, that would need to be addressed with experts and people who understand it well. But yeah, it's going to require some expenditure of money. It's going to require bringing in people who actually know what they're doing and actually probably having people on site. After this latest shooting and some people suggested security, what was pointed out, well, schools have put cameras in. Schools have already been increasing spending. But the question is, as you hint at in your questions, well, what are the proper strategies? What should they be spending them on? And when you look at places that engage in other types of security where the stakes are high, such as, say, a theme park situation, where it would just imagine how damaging that would be on the market if you had a bunch of people mown down at the entrance of Disneyland or something like that. It would be a disaster. And they might even be held accountable. Well, what sort of strategies are they using? Well, they're not using the, oh, just slap a few cameras up strategy. They're using something that more engages the people who are there. The problem with public schools, of course, is we have this idea that since the public owns it, really the government owns it, that we all own it. And so no one's liable monetarily or otherwise when these shootings occur. Generally speaking, under the idea of sovereign immunity, oftentimes there are limits on whether you can even attempt to sue a political subdivision in state court in whatever jurisdiction. So let's contrast this for a little bit with the kind of premises liability that would apply to a private sector owner of a theater or a theme park or something like that. There is generally a duty to provide a safe environment for people who visit your property. Whether you would owe that duty and could be held liable in a tort suit for a shooting depends on whether that shooting is foreseeable. It seems like now, given the precedent of what's happened in, it hasn't happened in a lot of schools. There's still a very rare occurrence. But it has happened in very public ways with social media and 24-hour news now. Does that make a shooting foreseeable in a certain sense and thus create some liability for school owners? Well, in the case where you've actually had a student who's been making threats to other students and things online, is that totally then unforeseeable? Gee, we only had this student who was threatening to shoot people, but there's no way we could have foreseen that he might actually do it. I mean, that would seem to be the argument the school would end up making. And in all cases, is it unforeseeable? Yeah, the question is how many times does it have to happen before it becomes totally unforeseeable? Now, it's rare, right? Obviously rare. You're more likely to be mauled to death by a dog. But can you say, oh, yeah, it's like a satellite falling out of the sky and hitting the building? Well, I'm not sure that's really a good comparison. That sort of thing. Right. And it's not just vague and generalized. This kid went on social media and said, I want to shoot up a school. And he lives in a certain town. He's talking about a certain school. So it's not quite as abstract as a plane crash, let's say. But speaking about plane crashes, I mean, here we have, I think, a role for insurance. Plane crashes, commercial plane crashes in the West are exceedingly rare. But when they do happen, they're so devastating that generally the airlines pay off the families right away with millions and millions of dollars to avoid all the bad publicity of extended lawsuits or having to defend against their own negligence. Oftentimes, plane crashes occur without negligence. So there is a similarity here in that school shootings or mass shootings at all are very, very rare. But they're so devastating that I think insurance companies could help provide a mechanism, not necessarily for preventing them, but for rapidly compensating people when they occurred. The other thing about insurance, Ryan, is that, as you know, insurance companies exist to never pay claims. So the whole point of insurance is that the insured and the insurance company have similar interests. They're aligned in that they never want to have something happen. So insurance companies go out of their way to help you if they're insuring your house, preventing against house fires, preventing against other kind of water leaks, other kinds of damages. It seems to me that if private insurance companies were insuring either schools or movie theaters, theme parks, et cetera, against shootings, which I think they could do because they're so rare, that they would also be involved in coming up with novel approaches to preventing them in the first place. So in the private sector where insurance rains, we have a process of incentives between the purchaser of the insurance and the provider of the insurance. We don't have that in a school setting where no one's responsible monetarily for a shooting. Well, and that's true not just in a public sector setting like a public school where there can't be held accountable because of sovereign immunity laws and similar issues, but even in a private sector situation, we've got issues related to where the police provide a certain amount of moral hazard, if you will. I'm not sure if that's the right term that I would use in this case, but a situation where, well, we don't have to provide security because we'll just call the government police. Whereas if you had a more direct relationship between accountability and a payout, so yet an insurance company that's worried about actually having to pay out in case of a shooting, they'd probably take a much more active approach and probably, oh, we'll call the police and wait till they show up. That seems a little bit kind of, we'll just hope for the best sort of approach which insurance companies, of course, generally don't take. Ryan, looking at some of the stats, there's apparently more than 300 million guns in private hands in the United States whether they're legally or illegally owned. I do not know. The point being that as a practical matter, we're talking about gun control. We're not going to round up 300 million guns. We're not a gun buyback of 300 million guns. We're not Australia. We're not Western Europe. What are we really talking about here pragmatically in the United States with that many firearms and our own unique history, our Second Amendment, which is unique in the world? What should we be talking about instead of this gun control debate which is so divisive? Well, certainly the experience in the Americas of having gun buybacks and making people give them up has been just to drive them underground. So the question is what would really happen here? That's part of the reason why we're looking at directly confronting the issue with security instead of talking about vague notions of disarming everybody because we can see that if you address very specific security issues, that's fairly low cost and also has a high payoff. So if you're looking at keeping guns out of a certain location like a school, like a courthouse, like a state capitol, like a theme park, then it can be shown that that's been done with a fair degree of success. Well, I don't know about the public school situation or if it's even been tried really comprehensively at that level, but it certainly meant in these other locations it's been tried and it's been done. And so it's odd that there's so much resistance to this idea of using school security and it comes back to this idea that you talked about at the beginning of. I think people have this notion that you can just slap down a few laws and it's therefore everybody's going to give up their guns and everyone's going to agree to live in peace. It's not this matter of, hey, let's pass some laws and nobody'll do that anymore. Plus, even if you did ban guns today, does that mean then you don't need school security? That's one of the oddest elements of it. At least understand taking kind of a both and approach. Let's do some more gun control, but we also need school security because it would seem a reasonable person to recognize that even if you implement gun control there's still going to be a lot of them out there and people still be using them, especially the criminal elements, since you'd still need security, but weirdly the people who are calling in many cases, not all of them, but in many cases calling for gun control and saying, no, no security. We don't want that, that won't work. And so it's very odd. It makes me even kind of question their motives a little bit. Well, the question also is, because this issue is so divisive, should we be looking at it more locally? Why do we have it in our heads that the same gun laws have to apply across 320 million people, a vast country, vast geographies? Obviously, if you live in a rural part of the country, your need for guns, your attitude towards guns, the danger posed by guns may be different than in a crowded subway in Manhattan. Unfortunately, the Second Amendment seems to have poured concrete between our ears and made us all imagine that gun laws have to be federalized. And I don't think that's true and I don't think that's a libertarian position either. No, well, and there's, of course, the Second Amendment applies specifically to the federal government and that it was always perceived in the 19th century that gun control would be a state and local issue and it has been used at the state and local issue. If you look at gun control on the frontier, it existed, but as you know, it varied from place to place depending on the local conditions. So we do know that gun control was implemented in a variety of cases where hundreds, maybe thousands, I mean, we're talking about a pretty small population, but where the whole region would come together during cattle drives and do a single place, like, say, dodge setting. And so they would implement some restrictions in those cases because they knew you get a bunch of drunk men together. And of course, you could point to alcohol and alcoholism actually is more of an indicator of gun violence in the 19th century. Nevertheless, they knew that guns were an important part of that. I guess they figured it was easier to take away guns than alcohol and that's probably true for a lot of those guys. But that was only in those crowded urban settings. Obviously, if you went back to your homestead, taking away those people's guns would have been insane and suicidal for a lot of those people because that was their only defense. There was no patrol, no police patrolling the region or anything like that. So it depended upon the local conditions very much. And then we just see that today. This is the great conundrum that gun control people never mentioned. They like to talk about the gun problem America has, but America doesn't have a gun control problem. Certain cities have it, certain locations have it, certain states maybe even have it. But then when we look at states that have climates and demographic similar to Canada, gee, they have homicide rates similar to Canada. When we look at states that have totally different geography in that sense, they have very different rates. Now I'm not saying you can chalk it up all to that, but when you look at the fact that New Hampshire has about a 1 per 100,000 homicide rate and the fact that Louisiana has an 11 per 100,000 homicide rate saying that America has a gun problem or homicide problem is kind of silly, especially since we look at some of those states like Idaho and northern New England, so Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, the Dakotas, Minnesota. These are not big gun control states and yet they have amazingly small homicide rates. And so you have to answer that question then is if more guns equals more crime everywhere or if you need gun control in order to keep homicide rates down, how come it's not true in many of these states? Now when you look at certain particular states, that's an issue, but even in those states then, right? If we look at it, we've carried articles like this on Mises.org too. When you break it down to say like the census tract level or to the neighborhood level, it's very specific places where your homicide rates are high. If you're living out in the suburbs, there's not homicide out there. And so when you're trying to impose a single nationwide policy to address all of that, the question is, well, are you really addressing the core issue at hand? Well, because it's so complex and because this is such a multifaceted problem, albeit a small problem, it's a much hyped problem, it just seems that it cries out for the clarity of the marketplace, which means private property and entrepreneurial decision making by people with actual skin in the game from a liability perspective or a profit perspective. So there is a marketplace for safe public areas, for safe schools. People want this. There is a market demand for this. Entrepreneurs can provide this, but the laboratory, the place to experiment has to be private property, it seems to me, because that's where you can apply different market approaches and see what actually works. And that's where you can have people with their own capital at risk if there is a shooting and people who are rewarded if there is not by increased business or increased profit. And it seems like one of the factors that makes this so complex is that a lot of these shootings for whatever reason are happening in schools and a lot of these schools are public schools. And so it's very, very tough to approach this entrepreneurially with a market perspective when we've got public school boards involved. Right, that adds a whole other element and the public school boards aren't directly responsible for what sort of violence takes place in the schools. And so what's the motivation? It comes back to discussion on insurance, it comes back to liability. And as long as you're stuck in this situation where, well, when you're politically motivated and just kind of shrug and say, well, we need more money in order to address the issue, well, it's not going to get addressed quickly and there's just simply not a motivation also to do an excellent job when you do start to address it because there aren't stockholders, there aren't private owners, there aren't people who might be held liable legally speaking. Ryan, so one last area I'd like to delve into. We mentioned earlier, which is the divisiveness of the gun control debate. There's an article today in National Review by David French talking about how yet this is another cultural divide which yields a political divide. As libertarians generally we would say, hey, look, we don't want any restrictions on people's ability to defend themselves or against gun control. But a point I'd like to make is the incrementalism argument. In other words, what our friends on the left see as just common sense things like tougher background checks to make sure that mentally troubled people can't buy guns so easily. It sounds all well and good in a certain sense. It's a lot harder to execute, I think, than they imagine. But nonetheless, it sounds reasonable, but the issue here is incrementalism. If we look at the 20th century, a lot of progressive victories were won incrementally. So when people on the left and on the right, people who support gun control say, hey, we're just going to have this small measure of sanity. The problem is that history teaches that won't be the last measure and what they're asking for today is just the springboard for what they'll ask for tomorrow. So the pro-gun people get into this defensive posture where they say, no, no, no, you can't touch any of this because what you really want is to confiscate guns and ban guns. And that's true sometimes. There are people who want to confiscate guns and ban guns. But as a result, politics, especially nationalized politics, creates this divide where we can't trust the other side. There seems to be an inherent feature in American politics and this gun control debate is both a symptom of it and something that's exacerbating it. Well, yeah, I think it's an illustration of how politics works overall in the U.S. now. Everything needs to be a big federal solution. Everything's a product of huge national movements of politicians who live thousands of miles away and there's no willingness to actually have a real debate on it and what that produces then is, it's that defensiveness you talk about, right, where I don't even know who my enemy is. I'm just going to grasp for anything that's going to try and shut down this drive, this latest drive for gun control. And so you start to hear a lot of arguments that you just don't find all that plausible such as well. We'll just have, we'll just arm all of the teachers, for example. Now, I have no doubt that maybe you've tried in some places, especially in private school situations, that might work. But division of labor is like a real thing for a reason, right? There are people who know security and there are people who know how to teach math. And this idea then that everybody, whether lawyer, landscaper, teacher, whatever, should just walk around armed all the time and not rely on any sort of security strikes me as demonstrating not a terribly good grasp of how we have efficiently working economies. And now that doesn't mean it has to be government police that provide all the security, which brings us back to the issue of providing real meaningful security in specific places. But the issue of, well, just do nothing. Let's not even talk about security because a lot of the resistance to school security has been from the right as well, not just from left, from people who want gun control. They don't even want any kind of formal security with professional people who are trained specifically in that. It's just, which should all be people who have a gun on their hip. But of course, the Las Vegas shooting showed that that's not realistic because even if you knew where the shooter was in that case, you couldn't return meaningful fire with your handgun. You needed real security measures, planning ahead people who were looking around and saying, well, is the security proper in this sort of place? Is this really a good place to have this music festival and so on? That's the sort of thinking that people should have been doing ahead of time. But when you're really, really defensive about the gun issue, you kind of have a habit of like pushing it aside and saying, well, it's just not something you shouldn't even worry about because the odds are really low and that's true. The odds are really low, but also you should be admitting that there are people out there who will use weapons to perpetrate these sorts of things and you should be addressing this problem meaningfully. And so it seems that the two groups, of course, are just talking past each other and I don't want to use a bunch of braumites about how we're not pulling together to do the people's business and that sort of thing. But there's not a whole lot of facts being brought to it and a willingness to address the specifics of the situation. How could we address specifically a situation like what happened in Las Vegas? How could we address specifically something like what happened in the Florida school and the two responses are, well, just slap gun control on it on the one side and then the other side is, well, you don't really have to do anything except allow everybody to buy more guns and I'm not sure either of those are really realistic specific solutions to what we're talking about. Well, again, the fact that this seems to be an intractable problem is to me evidence that it needs to be addressed and dealt with by the marketplace and I think that increasingly what it means to be a libertarian is to be someone who doesn't necessarily have a political ideology so much as someone who wants to de-politicize society and allow entrepreneurs and the marketplace to address some of these ills that plague. As that said, Ryan McMacon, thanks so much for your time. We'll post to a couple of recent Mises.org articles that relate to some of the broader topics we've discussed today and with that, ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend.