The idea that guns are a risk factor – for homicide, suicide, accidental death, and injury – was a central idea at the gun violence prevention writers workshop I attended in Hartford earlier this month (see Light Over Heat #15 and Light Over Heat #16). This week I reflect more broadly on the role of risk in our lives.
I am risk-averse in certain ways, but in other ways, I take risks all the time. Notably, drinking alcohol which has many well-documented short-term and long-term health risks. Rather than always trying to avoid risk, perhaps we should, in gun trainer Will Petty’s terms, think of risk as a currency that we get to choose how to spend?
In spending our risk wisely, we need to be thoughtful risk analysts and wise risk managers. In bringing firearms into their homes and lives, gun owners are assuming a certain amount of risk for themselves and their loved ones.
This raises the question: Are gun owners thoughtful risk analysts for their own lives?
Mentioned in this week’s video are Jonathan Metzl’s book Dying of Whiteness, John Farnam’s “rules of stupid,” the Center for Disease Control’s page on alcohol use and your health, and San Francisco’s last gun store, High Bridge Arms, that was forced to close in 2015.
New “Light Over Heat” videos are released on YouTube every Wednesday, so please surf over to my YouTube channel and SUBSCRIBE to follow, RING THE BELL to receive notifications, and SHARE so others can learn about this work.
Gun Culture 2.0 
We need to understand the risks and benefits of the choices we make and practice risk management. If something does not have a benefit to you, avoid its risks. I never enjoyed rock climbing, so I don’t worry about the risk of falling off a cliff face since I don’t do it.
I spent a career working with Plutonium, other actinides, high voltage systems, pressurized systems, concentrated mineral acids including hydrofluoric and perchloric, and Category I chemicals in a university laboratory and then a government nuclear facility. All those things entailed risk but part of the job was risk management and risk minimization. The benefit to me was working in some of the most fascinating laboratory environments I could imagine working in as a Ph.D. scientist. As the lead scientist in those labs, it was also my job to manage the risks for all the folks working with me by mentoring them. That was also a leadership challenge, which I enjoyed.
I ride motorcycles. My wife thinks they are death machines. I’ve always enjoyed the adrenaline rush of a good motorcycle ride. I don’t do stupid things with my motorcycle such as ride drunk, do “hold my beer” stunts in traffic, or ride at high risk times or in high risk places. I love an all out mountain road descent on a racing bicycle. That’s probably one of the riskiest things I do, as anyone familiar with Fabio Casartelli’s death would know. I long ago learned to keep that adrenaline rush within what I call the 80th percent margin, i.e., don’t push the envelope until it pushes back. In my case, the change the shorts moment was barely avoiding an oncoming pickup truck on a high speed twisty descent at close to 50 mph on a 20 lb bike with a little bit of lycra and styrofoam between me and my maker.
I don’t even consider my firearms to be up in the higher risk echelons with the other stuff. Guns, like my chop saw and other power tools can be hazardous, but are well understood and depend only on me rather than all the intangibles those other categories involve (other people’s choices, possible failure in laboratory safety systems, legacy accidents waiting to happen, etc.). Maybe familiarity breeds contempt, but familiarity also breeds a knowledge of failure modes (drinking, mind altering drugs, fatigue, anger, etc). My post doc, Floyd, asked my wife if I was going to be on Ambien after a surgery as he was well aware of the accident potential with the guns. He and my wife discussed it with me and rather than remove the firearms from the house, I refused to fill the prescription.
David, you hit the nail on the head. Risk is a currency and we need to understand how to spend it, not overdraw the account, and be mindful of the balance just as we need to understand balancing the checkbook. Running the checkbook in the red is bad enough. Running the bike, motorcycle, or gun into the…um…red…can be fatal.
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Okay – my position is that eliminating risk is much like the Eloi in H.G.Wells Time Machine. They eliminated all risk and became pampered slaves and dinner. To many on the gun control side just owning a gun puts you and everyone in your household at risk. But from what? If I am a basically law abiding person in good mental health where is the risk? The firearm is not going to get up and shoot me, it does not have magical properties that will influence me to do bad things. Recently, a young woman I know slightly went to a fun night at the range with a bunch of friends. She got to shoot 5 different guns after a safety orientation. She told me that her parents feel that anyone outside of the police and the military who owned a gun was crazy and likely to snap and kill people.
To me that is where most of the researchers on the left are starting from. They want to show that guns are dangerous and somehow just being in their presence puts you at risk.
I have been a gun owner for over 55 years and starting shooting around 8yo. It was all normal and accidents happened when stupid behavior became involved (drinking being the big one). Researchers, from the publications that I have read seem to be more interested in proving their biases that doing real research. Anyway thanks for listening to my rant.
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[…] my “Light Over Heat” YouTube channel, guns are tools that are by design dangerous, so gun owners assume a certain amount of risk for themselves and their loved ones when they bring firearms into their homes and lives. The key is […]
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[…] of biases (h/t Daniel Kahneman), but Shapira sees his fellow students as worse risk analysts than I see in my wandering around gun culture. In this, he is working within what I have called The Standard Model of Explaining the […]
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