Reply #74: and of course moi (reply to all)

[iverglas]

That having been the thesis of my post #49, "I'm still just not getting this line of argument". (I started my career doing statistical analysis of criminal justice data, and even had something published while I was in law school, and do have a little background in economics.)

The problem is that criminals tend not to factor in those costs -- they tend either (a) not to be able to assess risks the way an ordinarily reasonable person does, or (b) not to care.

That why they break the law. Well, actually, they break the law because they want to do something that happens to involve breaking a law. But that's why they don't not do it simply because it's against the law.

And that's why so much law-making, and so much of the punishment handed down for law-breaking, is so completely pointless. The potential offenders at whom the laws are aimed just are not deterred by the things that would deter the nice, reasonable people making the laws. As we hear so often around here.

There is still another problem with FeebMaster's thesis. He says:

If an unregistered Sten gun can be purchased for $300, I would guess, and it is only a guess, that legislation regarding machine guns has not significantly reduced the availability of illegal machine guns.

He is asserting that the fact that the price of illegally owned machine guns is evidently so low is evidence that there are masses of them in circulation. If they were scarce, the people who have them would be charging higher prices for them. Like the (artificially scarce) diamond rings in jewelry stores.

Well, a stolen diamond ring down at my local bar is also a whole lot cheaper than a legit diamond ring at the jewelry store in the mall - generally, it would be a fraction of the price. Is this because there are far more stolen diamond rings in circulation than there are diamond rings in jewelry stores? I don't think so.

It's because

- the person in possession of the stolen diamond ring paid little to no cash price for it, so has no cash investment to make back and can set the price according to his/her other needs, e.g. a quick fix; and

- the market for stolen diamond rings is in fact far smaller than the market for the jewelry store's diamond rings, and so there is no demand competition to put upward pressure on prices, and support high prices.

In fact, the market for stolen diamond rings is pretty small. The "producers" may be criminals, but the ultimate consumers have to be mainly us "law-abiding" people. And a lot of us aren't willing to take the risks of buying stolen property -- the total price of the diamond ring really is too high for us, and the cash price would have to be low enough to persuade potential buyers that the risk is worth it. "What the market will bear" has a very low ceiling.

So I don't think that the low price of illegal machine guns is proof that they're plentiful (i.e. that any old criminal who wanted one could get one). I think it's evidence that there isn't much demand for them -- because the demand, in this case, is from criminals: people who don't regard risk as a significant component of the total cost, and so would be willing to pay higher cash prices.

Maybe I don't have any better hard evidence for my thesis than FeebMaster does. But I'd think that if there really were that many illegal machine guns kicking around the market, there would be a little more actual evidence of that than there seems to be, and we wouldn't need to be inferring it from the fact that prices are low.

Now, if people like buddy in the story reported here really could just wander into the local gummint office, fill out the paperwork, and buy a machine gun legally, that would indeed put downward pressure on the price of illegal machine guns and cast some doubt on my thesis. Even criminals aren't going to take the risks involved in an illegal purchase if they can do the same thing legally, for the same price, generally.

But would it reduce the price of illegal machine guns to a fraction of the price of getting one legally? Well, criminals (and insane loons) might well have good reason for not wanting to do the paperwork -- i.e., not wanting to have their possession of a machine gun on record. The "price" of the legal machine gun to the criminal has just gone up -- that in fact is one actual purpose of requirements like registration. So sellers of illegal machine guns would again have a considerable advantage over sellers of legal machine guns, since the "price" of their product to their customers would not include "the government knowing that I have a machine gun". And they could charge higher prices accordingly.

All in all, I'm just not persuaded that there are masses of machine guns in illegal circulation and that the law in question has not had at least some effect in reducing criminals' (and insane loons') access to machine guns.