Guns and Double Standards

America's gun laws have become a pretty hot topic in the UK recently.  And rightly so.

After Trayvon Martin, who was unarmed except for a bag of Skittles and an iced tea, was murdered by George Zimmerman, a racist vigilante neighborhood watchdog, activists staged a protest outside the US Embassy in London.  Then there's the case of two British tourists who were shot dead last year in Florida after getting lost in the wrong neighborhood.  It's tragic and embarrassing that even today, in the self-proclaimed greatest country on earth, people still have to be afraid of gun violence in every city and town in the United States.

Do you want to know why I've never felt unsafe walking alone at night through the streets of London or Shanghai?  Because no one around me has a gun.  Maybe a knife, but my chances of beating someone with a knife are a lot higher than trying to punch someone who's aiming a pistol at me.  Let's think about how these stories would play out in different contexts. 

Imagine Trayvon Martin not as a young man walking back to his dad's fiancée's home in suburban Florida, but instead as a young man walking back to his hotel room in a Tunisian resort.  If a local resident had followed him around the neighborhood in a big SUV, pulled over, aggressively asked what he was doing there, then shot him, we'd be outraged.  We'd call them uncivilized.  We'd call them anti-American and racist.  We'd call them lawless and irresponsible.  We'd berate their government for not protecting Americans, and presumably its own citizens, from every crackpot on the street with access to a gun.  Why aren't we asking the same questions now? Why aren't we raising the same issues in America?

Now let's imagine that the two British tourists were not in the US, but in Italy when they were shot.  In Florida, their deaths were linked to a gang initiation.  In Italy, maybe it would have been a mafia shooting.  We'd be outraged that such senseless violence was still possible in the developed world.  Why do these mobsters have access to guns in the first place?  Why has the Italian government not cracked down on this sort of thing? 

It's time for people in the US to look at the Second Amendment objectively and to get our priorities straight.  A society that values one citizen's "right to bear arms" over another citizen's right to life is backwards and dangerous.  It's 2012.  We don't need private militias to keep the government in check.  We aren't threatened by a British invasion - or any invasion, for that matter - that the US armed forces can't easily handle. Why on earth does anyone need a handgun if not to shoot another person?

I'd never be comfortable raising kids in a country where they can be shot dead on the street, Skittles in hand.  And I'm not sure I'm even comfortable living in that kind of country, especially after experiencing the alternative.

Empty Ideas

Jim Hansen, a well-respected and obviously very intelligent NASA climatologist, has apparently called for a global carbon tax to cut CO2 emissions to acceptable levels. A few problems, though:

First, taxes have been a favorite topic among economists because of their theoretical efficiency.  If (and this is a very big if) regulators know both the marginal damages of a pollutant and the marginal costs of abating it, then they can set the tax at a level that will encourage polluters to reduce their emissions to the socially optimal level.  Taxes also raise revenue, which can be used to finance clean energy projects or offset the costs imposed on polluters.  Unfortunately, the theory of taxation also restrictively assumes perfect information and efficient markets, neither of which are attainable in real life.  If they were, we wouldn't have a problem in the first place.

Second, emissions taxes don't guarantee the success of abatement goals.  One possible outcome is that polluters will just pay the tax and shift part or all of the burden onto the consumers without reducing their emissions, which would have distributional implications that I won't go into right now.  Cap-and-trade - which puts a socially optimal "cap" on emissions, distributes emission permits and allows polluters to figure out the cheapest way to abate and trade permits among themselves - has been more effective in practice, and economists like Nathaniel Keohane have argued in favor of cap-and-trade over taxes from both theoretical and empirical perspectives.

Third and finally, Hansen calls for a global tax, but he dismisses the idea of a government being effective enough to implement it: "We can't simply say that there's a climate problem, and leave it to the politicians. They're so clearly under the influence of the fossil fuel industry that they're coming up with cockamamie solutions which aren't solutions. That is the bottom line."

Well, maybe that's true.  But who, exactly, is supposed to administer the tax if governments are ineffective, incompetent, or both?  Even if we ignore the theoretical challenges of taxes, it's irresponsible to ignore the political infeasibility of its implementation.  This is the most significant roadblock to a global carbon tax.

Yes, politicians are coming up with plenty of "cockamamie solutions", but we should expect more from our top scientists.

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Side note: Climate change is not on the same level as slavery at all.  What a silly comparison.