Arguments for handgun ownership typically appeal to handguns’ value as an effective means of self-protection. Against this, critics argue that private ownership of handguns leads to more social harm than it prevents. Both sides make powerful arguments, and in the absence of a reasonable consensus regarding the merits of gun ownership, David DeGrazia proposes two gun control policies that ‘reasonable disputants on both sides of the issue have principled reasons to accept.’ These policies hinge on his claim that ‘an even-handed (...) examination of the available evidence casts considerable doubt on the thesis that handgun ownership enables more adequate self-defense and physical security in the home.’ We challenge DeGrazia’s ‘moderate gun control’ policies on both philosophical and empirical grounds. Philosophically, we show that the arguments he gives in support of his proposed gun-control measures are too narrow and incomplete to warrant his conclusions about what kind of gun control there ought to be, even if he is right about the empirical evidence. Empirically, we argue that a truly even-handed examination of the evidence makes DeGrazia’s claim that gun ownership is on average self-defeating much less plausible than he supposes. Our conclusion is that DeGrazia has failed to establish his claim that gun ownership is self-defeating and therefore has no case for the gun-control policies he suggests. (shrink)

I offer a new proposal to prevent some of the harms of gun violence in the United States. First, I argue that gun violence is a negative externality of gun production, on an analogy with industrial pollution. Second, I outline a law that the United States might use to internalize the violent costs of gun production. This law would provide a financial incentive for gun manufacturers to reduce gun violence in whatever legally permissible way they can, not necessarily by reducing (...) the prevalence of gun ownership. Thus, strictly speaking, my proposal would be a form of gun violence control, not gun control per se. Third, I show that this approach to controlling gun violence avoids the three main pro-gun-rights arguments: the Consequentialistic Argument, the Moral Rights Argument, and the Legal Rights Argument. I conclude by explaining why even libertarians should have few principled objections to my proposal. (shrink)