Gun Rights Don’t Depend on Statistics

It’s nice when statistics are on your side. When it comes to guns, I think the best statistical evidence shows that guns are, in fact, a force for good. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if it turned out that the statistics showed that permissive gun ownership actually does more harm than good?

Nothing of significance would follow. As valuable as they are, statistics aren’t all that matters. Nor are they even the most important thing we should take into account when making public policy decisions—especially decisions that involve natural rights.

Problems With the Utilitarian Model

When statistics are invoked in public policy discussions, it is almost always done as part of a cost-benefit analysis. This involves taking a given policy and weighing its positives and negatives. If there are more positives than negatives, then it’s implied that adopting the policy is a good idea. If there are more negatives than positives, then it’s implied that adopting the policy is a bad idea.
Seems simple enough, right?

Many think that all of our decisions about the policies we adopt should follow this model. The technical term for this way of thinking is utilitarianism. The virtue of utilitarianism is that it’s a pretty easy, natural, and straightforward way of making decisions. While it does sometimes require familiarity with the relevant data and research methods (which means we have to frequently trust the “experts”), the underlying principle is intuitive: it’s about the numbers.