Deltoid

Eugene Volokh writes:

FYI, thought I'd mention that I have a couple of fairly detailed items today about handgun bans, substitution effects, enforcement need slippery slopes, rhetoric, and Mary McGrory (of the Washington Post). See here and here.

You argue that long guns are "much more lethal" than handguns because their projectiles have much more kinetic energy. However, it is not at all clear that lethality should be strongly related to kinetic energy (for example, consider what happens when a bullet passes completely through the victim).

It is surely better to look at empirical evidence on how serious the different sorts of gunshot wounds are.

The only study I have found to cast light on this is [J of Trauma 38:2 p291-298]. The authors measured the cost of treatment for patients hospitalized in a Los Angeles medical centre for different sorts of firearm injuries. The mean cost for handgun injuries was $6,400, for rifle injuries was $8,443 and for shotgun injuries was $3,385. Rifle wounds are somewhat more serious than handgun wounds but not that much, while shotgun wounds less so.

We should also consider the possibility that long guns might be more (or less) likely to be fired or to hit. A study that sheds some light here is by Kleck and McElrath [Social Forces 69:669-92] who did a multivariate analysis on NCS and SHR data. The analysis implied that whether the attacker was armed with a handgun or long gun made little diference to the probability that the victim would end up dead. I write "the analysis implied" rather than "they found" because Kleck, who argues that substitution from hand guns to long guns would result in more deaths, failed to notice this fact.