I don’t write about John Lott or guns much because I’m no expert on either and I don’t much like the email that results from such discussions. But the Volokh conspiracy has a very interesting post from John Lott about the lastest development in the “More Guns, Less Crime” debate — a report from the National Academy of Sciences. I don’t take sides in the technical arguments in this debate because they are way, way too technical for me. But as a matter of philosophy I tend to agree with Lott (strange cat though he may be). And I find many of his anecdotal points fairly persuasive. What’s particularly interesting to me is the item in Lott’s post about James Q. Wilson’s dissent from the NAS study. Why? Well because I think Wilson is among the most impressive, decent and honest scholars of the twentieth century. That doesn’t mean I automatically think he’s right here, but it makes me lean that way.

I would, however, quibble with this statement from an earlier post by Stuart Benjamin about the Lott controversies. He says: ” I don’t have any particular precommitments regarding guns (and I shot many a gun while hunting as a youth), so I am guided by the empirical evidence. If more guns produces net benefits to society, then let’s have more guns; if it doesn’t, then let’s not.”

Of course Benjamin’s free to have any position he wants. But it seems to me that if you are going to let the “empirical evidence” decide whether we should have more or less guns, you’ve already expressed a precommitment on the constitutional status of guns, i.e. you don’t think they have any. In other words, someone who believes we have a constitutional right to bear arms would argue that even if the data showed they caused net losses for society that wouldn’t automatically mean the state has the authority to reduce the number of legally held guns in this country. Gun ownership can be “bad” for society and still be constitutionally protected from the whims of policymakers. Just as all sorts of speech is indisputably bad for society but we wouldn’t — or at least don’t — apply a cost-benefit analysis to it.