The Disanalogy of Mutually Assured Destruction

When I have discussions with people who are against, say, comprehensive bans on private possession of firearms, or just who are basically anti-gun control in some way, they have a fairly predictable and simple response to my natural allegation that more guns = more deaths. It's basically the idea which is soundbitten in the phrase "if guns are outlaws, only outlaws will have guns." In more depth (and boy does it need more depth), the argument is that the way to reduce gun violence is for something approximating everyone to have a gun, so that a) they will be able to defend themselves if an armed assailant comes along, and b) potential armed assailants will know that their victims will be almost certain to have guns themselves. The result, I am told, will be something akin to the mutually-assured-destruction deterrence that seems to work well enough so far in the field of nuclear weapons. But I think that this is a tremendous disanalogy. Almost all of the factors that make deterrence work with nuclear weaponry strike me as being wholly absent from the personal firearms scenario.
The logic of mutually assured destruction works like this. At least two countries acquire large numbers of nuclear weapons, enough to have "second strike capability." These nations then make known to the whole world that any other nation which uses a nuclear weapon will have the s#@t bombed out of it. Then no nations will dare use a nuke, because the consequences for them would be devastating. But think about what is required to make this work, as it has seemed to work for the last sixty years. The policing countries, originally just the United States and the Soviet Union, both have the capacity to drop a practically unlimited number of nuclear bombs anywhere in the world on short notice. Moreover, given second strike capacity, it is impossible for someone who attacks one of the policing nations to immunize themselves from retaliation with a sufficiently strong attack. And the use of a nuclear weapon is a flagrantly public act: the act itself will never go unnoticed, and I can't imagine that it would be hard for the policing nations to accurately discover the identity of the attacking nation quickly. And moreover, nuclear weapons are yielded only by a small, countable number of states, each of which uses a reasonable thoughtful, rational decision-making process, and none of whom are likely to make suicidal attacks. Or, as the Wikipedia article on the subject describes it, the logic of mutually assured destruction requires second-strike capability, perfect detection, perfect rationality, and the impossibility of defense.

Now let's consider the gun-rights-advocates' proposal to have a wholly armed citizenry. How many of the conditions that seem to make MAD work in the geopolitical forum apply here? Well, no one person is able to shoot anyone in the world at short notice. Second strike capacity does not exist, because if someone has been shot they cannot subsequently shoot back (usually). The use of a gun is only visible to those within a small radius of the act itself, not everyone in the world, and if no one witnesses a shooting directly it is often difficult to discern who the shooter was. Another condition for MAD to work is the detectability of a "launch" well before detonation. But it would be perfectly possible for a shooter to walk into a room and whip out their gun, start shooting too quickly for anyone around them to react, and kill everyone in the room before they have a chance to shoot him. Defense isn't possible, either: there's such a thing as bullet-proof vests, and I bet that in our everyone-has-a-gun world, those who wanted to go around shooting people would get their hands on a suit of bullet-proof armor. That can't be any harder, theoretically, than for those same outlaws to get their hands on guns were society to outlaw them all.

But there's another problem, of course: the assumption of perfect rationality. There are 310 million people in this nation. That's a lot of people. If all of them have guns, that's a reasonably large number of crazy people with guns. Moreover, I think that most random human beings have less developed risk assessment about things like their own mortality than the governments of major military nation-states do about their military vulnerability. And as my psychiatrist mother mentioned to me, the amygdala hijack is a neurological phenomenon whereby in states of anger, the risk-assessment faculty just shuts down altogether. Do we want a whole lot of people walking around with guns, some of them thinking they might be able to get away with it, some of them prone to getting angry and shooting, consequences be damned, some of them outright suicidal, and some of them just plain nuts? Sounds like a recipe for trouble to me. Note that one of the chief worries about Iran, or North Korea, is that we might be dealing with a lunatic state, a country whose leaders wouldn't actually really give a damn if their populace were bombed to smithereens. There are lots of "rogue state" actors among the general populace.

That doesn't even mention the fact that guns sometimes just decide to blow up and kill someone, even without any human intent, unlike nuclear weapons. And if we put guns in the hands of millions of well-meaning, untrained people, then they are just as likely to kill more innocent people rather than the armed assailant in the event of an attack. So are we talking about training 310,000,000 people to be competent marksmen? How about the pacifists and/or wimps in society? How about those who freeze when a guy with a gun jumps into the room?

It just doesn't work. Mutually assured destruction works because a discrete number of rational players are all playing the same game, in plain sight of one another, under certain well-known rules that mean there is no escape from the assurance of the destruction. The proposal to arm the entire populace would involve an unknown number of players, some totally irrational, playing various games with no idea what the rules are and with limited information. There is no analogy. The logic of mutually assured destruction simply does not hold. Therefore, given that all a gun does is destroy things, the obvious thought is in fact the correct one: more guns means more destruction, more violence, more death.