How much does the 2nd Amendment COST?

Now that Rep. Steve Scalise has returned to work, two things come up: (1) Thank God he recovered and (2) How much was his medical bill and the overall response in general to the shooting? We, as taxpayers, covered it.

When I took my Concealed Handgun License class, there were two things that immediately occurred to me: (1) As a form of self-defense, I would have had to screw up on my own security in order for a hostile someone to get within 30 feet of me in order for me to shoot them and hit without needing luck and (2) The safety training as required by Texas was inadequate by an order of magnitude given the severity of an accident. All this aside, I like shooting when the opportunity comes up. My daughter appears to as well, so safety is very high in my priorities. Enter Girl Scouts: among the many fine activities that girls can engage in, riflery using the NRAs certification process, has an extensive safety program. The shooting range includes a safety sign for "Three Rules for Safe Gun Handling" including pictures. I'm going to write them here:

1: Always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction.
2: Always keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot.
3: Always keep the gun unloaded until ready to use.

Common sense advise, yes? There's a famous YouTube video out there of a fellow who accidentally shot himself. What is less well-known is the follow-up that he posted talking about safety. I'm going to link it here, because I recommend that everyone watch it:

While one could spend hours on YouTube finding similar incidents, the point is pretty clear: gun safety is a misunderstood and maligned topic garnering little real respect from the majority of organizations and politicians advocating for carrying firearms. Former Texas Rep. Debbie Riddle was very proud of herself for reducing the CHL classes down to 4-6 hours from 10-15 hours [References 1 & 2]. What do you think that means for the safety of the individuals taking them? How often have you heard of someone being shot and in the same breath it's asserted how safe they were. The gun just went off. With a bullet. It was an accident. In safety, there are close calls that are warnings of a major problem, then there are injuries and to a lesser extent fatalities. Accidents have a predictable pattern that can be disrupted. So far, no real effort has been taken to disrupt the lack of safety for casual gun owners, and every effort to increase the ease for ignorant/irresponsible operators to acquire guns has been facilitated.

For one of my projects in scientific research, I worked in a gun lab. We had strict security and procedures for addressing the risks from accelerating projectiles to speeds hitting 10s of km/sec. (Best day EVER was when they let me hit the firing button on my birthday! And there's also a story about a cockroach getting into the equipment...but I digress.) The general summary of the safety practices in the lab were: (a) Access was restricted to specific personnel, (b) The personnel all were subjected to a background check, (c) Processes and procedures were followed, (d) The lab was frequently audited for its safety, and (e) EVERYONE WAS TRAINED IN SAFETY.

Gun ownership requires a high level of responsibility. With a few notable exceptions, people are not permitted to purchase guns until they're old enough (assuming responsible enough) to drink. So what exactly are politicians doing when they make people who are mentally deficient enough that they cannot manage their own finances legally 'responsible' enough to purchase a gun? [Reference 3] And responsibility is only part of safety.

Two terms in safety practice particularly apply to guns: hazard and risk. "Hazard" is a condition with the potential to cause injury, illness, or death of personnel; damage to or loss of equipment or property; or mission degradation. "Risk" is the change or probability of occurrence of an injury, loss, or a hazard or potential hazard [Reference 4]. We can pretty much all agree (maybe not the political wing of the NRA, despite the organization's excellent safety certification program) that guns are hazardous. For accidents, handguns are more hazardous than rifles. As the number of gun fatalities has met (or possibly exceeded as numbers date to 2014) the number of vehicle fatalities [Reference 5], the hazardous nature of these tools/weapons cannot be emphasized enough. Some will say that of course all weapons are hazardous and crack jokes about a target's lead poisoning, but closer inspection reveals that most of the gun fatalities are suicides [Reference 6]. Will discuss that in more detail later. So if we take two weapons, say a gun and a knife, it's reasonable to argue that the gun is more hazardous than a knife. The potential to cause accidental death is higher.

Now we get to risk, and here is where organizations such as the NRAs political wing and many politicians appear to fail to understand the concept. Every policy that de-emphasizes safe handling, competent handling, responsible handling of guns and increases access to ever more hazardous guns and associated hardware is increasing the RISK. As I pointed out to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott today following the Las Vegas massacre, the entire Capitol complex in Austin is vulnerable to the exact same attack. Anyone with a $40, 4 hour class, CHL that passes a cursory background check can bypass all security controls to enter the complex [Reference 7]. They could fill bags with extremely hazardous weapons, explosives, fully-automatic-modified Kalashnikovs, and Radically Invasive Projectile bullets, and walk right past security. The risk to Texas' lawmakers increased when this policy change passed.

As horrifying it is, Las Vegas is not the larger story of the failure of gun policy to have even a modicum of an understanding of safety. That larger story is dominated by veterans and white-middle-aged men: suicide. The latter group comprises the majority of the gun deaths discussed earlier [Reference 8]. While suicide and safety are two challenging topics to try and merge, wider studies show that the likelihood of suicide increases with access to a means within a critical time frame of a few hours. The role that guns play in this process is revealed across states where restrictions for reducing risk were placed on purchases (lower suicide rate) and those that didn't (higher suicide rate) [References 9 & 10]. Hence, the risk of suicidal emotional disturbances leading to a fatality increases with easier access to guns.

What is the cost of this irresponsible attitude towards gun safety?

The first problem with estimating this is that the information needed for studying gun fatalities is locked up in a policy box. The CDC had its program looking into this phenomenon defunded by politicians [Reference 11]. So now we get estimates. One estimate is that for each shooting, it costs around $400,000 for all the personnel necessary to process and investigate a shooting [Reference 12]. The medical bills can run to millions of dollars per victim, if they live. The victims and perpetrators certainly are not picking up this bill. We are. One estimate is that the bill from our gun violence costs taxpayers in the vicinity of $229,000,000,000 [Reference 13].

So lets look back at Las Vegas. I seriously doubt that the murderer paid less than a car for his weapons, say $30,000. With a collection of extremely hazardous weapons, lets do a few estimates of the costs to taxpayers under the current environment of politically acceptable risks.

1) SWAT team deployment: $100,000
2) Overall police deployment (not including treatment for PTSD): $500,000
3) Emergency personnel deployment (not including treatment for PTSD): $500,000
4) Emergency Room treatment: $10,000,000
5) Criminal Investigation: $500,000
6) Survivor medical expenses: $100,000,000
7) Families of the deceased requiring public assistance due to lost wage earner: $100,000,000
8) Loss in taxes from the injured and deceased: $100,000,000

So just for a ballpark figure on the overall cost of, as a matter of policy, increasing the risk from hazardous weapons, the cost to taxpayers FROM THIS ONE INCIDENT could potentially be as high as: $311,600,000. Is this cost acceptable to you? For some more numbers in order to grasp the size of the industry, it's benefits and costs, see [References 14 and 15].

On a final thought, as we all pray for families of those injured or lost, also consider praying for our politicians to understand risk and be more safe as they react. Of course, they could instead eliminate the Medicaid/Medicare program so we don't have to cover the medical expenses of all the various victims, leaving the economic fallout to land more locally on families and their communities instead. As a Christian, I don't care for that solution. In the meantime, while we all watch the status quo attempt to reassert itself, I'd like to call on all journalists: when you report an accident or a crime, please include an estimate of its cost to taxpayers.

References

[1] "State law shortens concealed-handgun courses, but will students be prepared?", Dallas News, Sept 2013, https://www.dallasnews.com/new...

[2] 2013 SB 864, https://texashistory.unt.edu/a...

[3] "Trump Overturns a Mental Health Regulation on Gun Purchases", Newsweek, by M. Gorman, Feb 2017, http://www.newsweek.com/trump-...

[4] Safety Professional's Reference & Study Guide by W. David Yates

[5] FastStats Mortality, CDC National Center for Health Statistics, 2014, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fasta...

[6] "Suicides account for most gun deaths", Pew Research Center, May 2013, http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...

[7] "Concealed-carry gun permits let holders bypass Texas Capitol's metal detectors", Dallas News, July 2010, https://www.dallasnews.com/new...

[8] "Gun Deaths In America: Suicides Outnumber Homicides 2-to-1", Vocativ, by E. Kulze, Dec 2014, http://www.vocativ.com/usa/gun...

[9] "Suicide Rates and State Laws Regulating Access and Exposure to Handguns", American Public Health Association, by M.D. Anestis and J.C. Anestis, Apr 2015, http://ajph.aphapublications.o...

[10] "Firearm Access is a Risk Factor for Suicide", Harvard School of Public Health, https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/m...

[11] "GOP blocks Dem attempts to allow federal gun research", The Hill, by S. Ferris, July 2016, http://thehill.com/policy/heal...

[12] "The True Cost of Gun Violence in America", Mother Jones, by M. Follman, J. Lurie, J. Lee, and J. West, Apr 2015, http://www.motherjones.com/pol...

[13]

[14] "Fully Loaded: Inside the Shadowy World of America’s 10 Biggest Gunmakers", Mother Jones, by J. Harkinson Jun 2016, http://www.motherjones.com/pol...

[15] "More Profits for the Gun Industry. Good for Them", Fox Business, by G. Marks, Aug 2016, http://www.foxbusiness.com/mar...