CDC stats say about 95,000 excess deaths each year can be attributed to alcohol abuse, of which about 10,000 are drunk driving fatalities. So looked at one way, booze is deadlier than guns. Looked at another way, gun murder is a more serious problem than drunk driving. Either way, to the extent that you’re inclined to see the gun situation as worth major legislative action, I think it’s certainly worth looking at alcohol as well. Indeed, scholars think that something like 40% of murders involves the use of alcohol, so the issues really are fairly comparable.
It’s a great piece, probably paywalled.
To place this in context for the U.S. (using rough numbers).
The annual fatalities associated with firearms is roughly 30,000. Of these, roughly 50% are related to suicides, leaving roughly 15,000 from other causes.
The AR-15, the left’s primary boogeyman for reform, accounted for <500 of the 30,000. That’s right, <500.
Banning the AR-15 is the most irrational, mood affiliated argument that I’ve ever seen from the left. I’m sure the right has similar irrational takes on other issues, but we are focused on guns in this post.
Not just the AR-15: the number of murders caused by shooters using rifles of all types is generally <500.
Here’s a fun stat I found recently. Murder isn’t really that significant a problem for most of the U.S.:
In 2014, the worst 2 percent of counties accounted for 52 percent of the murders. Five percent of counties accounted for 68 percent of the murders. Even within these counties, there are large regions without any murders.
Paging Steve Sailer for a possible explanation.
That’s a misleading stat because it’s not per capita, which is what you need to assess the risk of getting murdered in any particular place. Countries vary in size a lot and according to a power law. E.g., LA County is 10 Million people. There are about 3,000 countries, but 50% of the entire US population lives in just 140, less than 5% of them.
That being said, I think if you did the analysis in equal-population geographic units like Congressional Districts – but fairly drawn and ten times smaller – the variance in average murder risk would still be shockingly wide.
Point well taken, but it’s the best I could find. And, you obviously understood where I’m headed.
How about this for alcohol related fatalities (bac >.08)
Drinking drivers have always played a major role in making motor vehicle traffic crashes a serious public health problem and a leading cause of death. The higher percentages of drinking drivers for Native Americans and Hispanics correlate with the increased likelihood of roadway deaths for these groups. Asian and Pacific Islanders exhibited the lowest percentages of driver alcohol, but non-Hispanic White and Black groups were approximately in between the other groups and nearly coequal. As a corollary to these metrics, chronic liver disease was the sixth most frequent cause of death for both Native Americans and Hispanics. Chronic liver disease was not among the top 10 causes for other groups in 2002.
Are we? I thought we were focused on alcohol?
Alcohol! The cause of, yet the solution to, so many problems.
Come on Mr. Cow. Give me an interesting counter argument here to play with vs. debating the nature of the post. I expect MOOre from you than this.
Intended for the Moo Cow obviously. Sorry.
Well, there hasn’t been any significant gun legislation in years. In fact, most activity is on the other side – making guns more accessible…more ubiquitous. Despite what Wayne the Vayne says, nobody coming to take ur precious.
The inlaws complain about the WA litre tax. I say “who cares. What can ot cost you, 10 bucks a month?”
Crickets
I havent been a drinker for many years. My observation is like the person below who said the only way to decrease consumption is to make it like smoking. Taxing it wont do much.
“Well, there hasn’t been any significant gun legislation in years. In fact, most activity is on the other side – making guns more accessible…more ubiquitous.”
True, but we will have to wait and see. Thanks to the George Floyd riots which the left dismissed as “mostly peaceful”, there are more new gun owners than ever before. Excellent work by the progressive left…lol!
Texas just joined 20+ other states and passed constitutional carry down here (i.e. no permit required). So, good for us. My wife and I actually oppose it.
More importantly, Texas is now a 2A sanctuary state…enforce those federal gun laws with your own funds and enforcement efforts.
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2021/05/30/permitless-carry-of-handguns-is-on-the-verge-of-becoming-law-in-texas-six-things-you-need-to-know/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/state-senate-approves-legislation-to-make-texas-a-2nd-amendment-sanctuary-state/ar-BB1g8GLs
To what extent does a relative dearth of alcohol consumption play in Utah’s success?
Everyone has known all this for a long time, which is why the same argument gets kicked around every few years looking for ‘its moment’, whether it can actually gain any traction, this time around. For example, Reihan Salam made the same argument in Slate seven years ago for ‘Prohibition Lite’: a tripling of alcohol taxes. Even then, he was just signal boosting the decade-old proposal from Kleiman, Caulkins, and Hawken in Drugs and Drug Policy, What Everyone Needs to Know.
But here’s the thing, alcohol taxes are extremely low, such that I suspect that the estimated elasticities in KCH are way too optimistic. Consider that the taxes on cigarettes had to go up over an order of magnitude in combination with making it obnoxiously hard to light up anywhere and an intense public-shaming campaigns lasting generations.
Some state tax a lot more than others but consumption per capita doesn’t seem to be much affected, e.g., Alaska’s beer tax is *60* times Wisconsin’s, but they’ve always drunk more beer in Wisconsin than in Alaska, even when it was cheaper in Alaska. North Dakota and New Hampshire are the champions.
The current federal tax on a fifth of 80 proof liquor is only $2.14. (Note, this is still 20 times more expensive than the cost of domestic industrial production of the cheapest kind of ethanol, which is only about a penny per shot.
That’s trivial – 14 cents extra per shot. Ok, that’s still 14x cheaper than the industrial production cost of a shot for the cheapest form of consumable ethanol, which is about a penny per shot.
Tripling the tax to 42 cents just isn’t likely to do anything much. You can still get to alcohol poisoning at three or four dollars of tax. If you raised it 20x or 40x, you would probably have a major impact on public drunkenness, but that’s what it would take to even get to ‘Prohibition Lite’, not any measly tripling.
“Prohibition lite” sounds like an idea the new progressives should take up. Tax alcohol and use the proceeds to pay for healthcare.
In my circle, I see more and more people discovering the pleasures (and they are many) of not drinking. The whole culture may be moving in the direction of abstinence, and we may yet see that day when public alcohol use becomes a serious barrier to upward social mobility, the way smoking is now.
When I began working for Time Incorporated many years ago, the three-martini lunch was still a thing, and it was not unacceptable to have alcohol on your breath late in the workday. Over my work life, I’ve seen alcohol breath become a career killer, and watched acceptable drinking at work-related parties and other events go from multiple straight whiskies to one-or-two, shyly taken beers. (Compare to this 60-second office party scene from the 1950s movie, “The Apartment”.)
The government is welcome to pile on the taxes, but what will really put abstinence over will be when it becomes fashionable for beautiful women express disgust at alcohol and men who drink it.
Where I work, it’s not so much the “pleasures of non-drinking” as a grudging resignation to a new normal, and nostalgia for a freer past. That’s what happened in the military too. Most people under a certain age may not be too upset because they don’t know what they’re missing.
These days, no one can afford to get even mildly tipsy because 1. “How are you getting home?”, 2. It is hard enough to avoid “firing offense” and saying the wrong thing to the wrong person even when totally dry. The veritas from vino is just going to get people into trouble, 3. bold sexual advances are bad for you and for the organization. At some places there is also a 4, which is, even if you want to get drunk with other coworkers who want to get drunk, and want to exclude people with thin skins when enjoying your own time off the clock, now you will get accused of favoritism, exclusion, or worse.
Many office buildings or organizations also have introduced strict rules about bringing any alcohol on the premises. Since people live all over the place, and have all kinds of other activities to tend to, it’s herding cats and a logistical nightmare to get everybody to show up to anything.
As a result, happy hours and holiday parties have become complete bores and jokes, dominated by the kind of people who like to gossip sober. Smartphones and the 24/7 incessant email-hivemind have also played their part in ruining everything. It also doesn’t help that the price of a cocktail in a downtown bar has gone totally through the roof.
Drunkenness is an evolved response to encourage deeper social connections and often mating, so this stance can be viewed as yet another modern attack on the perpetuation of the species.
Didn’t read behind the paywall. Does he mention anywhere that both gun murder — indeed murder with any weapon — and drunk driving are already illegal? Yet, he doesn’t seem to be arguing for better enforcement or even some sort of pre-emptive enforcement, e.g., through surveillance. I don’t favor more intrusive surveillance either, but I have trouble following the argument, “Use of X to commit Y is illegal, but Y still occurs. Therefore, let’s tax or restrict legal use of X.”
“gun murder is a more serious problem than drunk driving”
And, murder generally carries stiffer penalties than drunk driving. So, we got that one right.
“booze is deadlier than guns….to the extent that you’re inclined to see the gun situation as worth major legislative action, I think it’s certainly worth looking at alcohol as well.”
The converse seems like a pretty good argument against more gun legislation. Yglesias is basically arguing that consistency requires that passing additional gun legislation also implies passing measures to address any X that is deadlier than guns, e.g., X=alcohol. Therefore, the *aggregate* opposition to legislation concerning all such X should be understood as opposition to gun legislation in assessing the democratic mandate for such gun legislation. If one supports gun legislation, then one is also implicitly supporting legislation against all the other X because one is opening the door to Yglesias’s follow-up argument: “Now that we passed the gun legislation, we should pass anti-X legislation too because X is deadlier.” Gun legislation sets the precedent for all anti-X legislation.
This is my assessment of the gun/alcohol comparison as well. Society (correctly, imo) sees the value of the enjoyment people get from alcohol as worth the cost of some people abusing it. But many people who share that assessment utterly discount the utility of gun ownership (whether from peace of mind or the joy of skeet shooting) and thus don’t see the tradeoff. It seems with guns as well as alcohol or food, paternalists, once they have an inclination to proscribe something, habitually more or less totally discount the the utility the vast majority of consumers get from it without issue.
Matt is mistaken, the gun death statistic you hear most of the time includes suicides (about 3/4 of gun deaths – this I did not check, but it is not way off). Gun murders may be around the same or slightly less than drunk driving deaths.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in-the-us-by-weapon-used/
–“Either way, to the extent that you’re inclined to see the gun situation as worth major legislative action, I think it’s certainly worth looking at alcohol as well. Indeed, scholars think that something like 40% of murders involves the use of alcohol, so the issues really are fairly comparable.”–
That second sentence above is suspect, and generally speaking is correlation rather than causation. While perhaps alcohol is a necessary ingredient in the occasional murder, we can be fairly certain that murders won’t fall by anything close to 40% if alcohol suddenly disappeared.
I suppose I’m not the target audience as I don’t see the gun situation as worthy of any legislative action, but I will point out that obesity has a much higher body count than alcohol, yet the same people worried about guns often also worry about things like fat shaming.
As I see it, my odds of dying are 100%. I don’t see the point in over regulating everything to slightly increase the expected amount of time until my death occurs. If someone feels he is drinking too much and wants to cut back, I fully support him doing so via individual initiative or treatment programs. If someone has proven to be a danger to the community through threats (or actual use) of violence, then that person should be locked away for a very long time. But the vast majority of drinkers aren’t going to kill themselves with it, and the vast majority of gun owners aren’t going to use them for murder.
More than 49,000 deaths due to opioids in 2019 (CDC) with 760,000 thus dead since 1999 (HHS).
It’s difficult for me to see alcohol getting a bad rap at the same time people are falling over themselves to legalize pot and other drugs. Prohibition had its chance, and even if I broadly agree it’s still not going to happen.
Fundamentally, I’m just not seeing a metaphysical case being put out there for abstinence in the zeitgeist. So maybe you can outlaw one vice, but people will just seek another.
“So maybe you can outlaw one vice, but people will just seek another.”
They can try to pry my 32 oz. cola from my cold dead hand.
More drone caste officiousness. Something like what Texas has with precinct by precinct alcohol sales determination might not be too bad but that would never do for our drone caste overlords.
Note center-left self-described libertarian Tyler Cowen has been preaching against demon rum assiduously for a while now. So the natural alliance between hard left extremist authoritarians and self-described libertarians is blossoming on another front.
The great complaint against the USA and democracy by drone caste libertarians has been that it has enabled the worker caste to achieve earnings levels relative to global subsistence level wages. That makes them a darling of certain business tycoons but business tycoons now embrace the hard left authoritarianism agenda so no real conflict there..
The second major complaint is that the worker caste has built wealth through home ownership. And of course the drone caste abhors this so both the hard left authoritarian extremists and self-described libertarians have a lengthy agenda of policies to prevent this from happening and to destroy existing home equity.
Now the drone caste is uniting around the desire to dictate worker caste food and drink consumption. Make no mistake, the same “logic” applied to alcohol will be applied to obesity inducing fats and carbohydrates in the round of policy priorities. The drone caste will never tire of impoverishing and denigrating the worker caste.
Populism. Needed now more than ever.
This may be the most bizarre take on libertarians yet.
Libertarians have this strange notion that their yammering ought be taken at face value and not judged by the results their policies produce. But even at face value, Cowen has been campaigning against not just alcohol but meat as well. And in the libertarian nirvana EU, Brussels is pushing insects as feed for people. And prominent libertarians have books ought whose titles demand less democracy. If this is bizarre to you, you might wonder how capable of critical self reflection you actually are.
Cowen is in favor of voluntary choices not to consume alcohol or meat, not government prohibitions. Viewing advocating voluntary choices as anti-libertarian is indeed a bizarre take on libertarianism. And how many libertarians have ever described the E.U. as a “libertarian nirvana.”? That is also a bizarre take on this.
You are correct in all that. However, there is a subtle but importance issue with libertarian advocacy of this nature.
This is easier to understand if one views coercion at a spectrum and which can be applied by all kinds of other individuals and entities, instead of a binary matter which only comes from The State.
If you imagine some region of coerciveness where the pressure and intimidation start to become “serious”, you could split it up into “Hard Power” of threats of violence, arrest, seizure of property, etc. – which is mostly deployed by The State and violent criminals – and “Soft Power” which is non-violent but can involve mob intimidation, intense social pressure, threats to harm reputation and general esteem, boycotts, career / personal destruction, cancellation, etc.
So, you could say that a Type-1 Libertarian is strongly individualist in being generally against the use of both Hard Power *and* Soft Power with regards to individual choices. That is, they would prefer to live in a society in which the general attitude was “none of my business”, “live and let live”, “different strokes for different folks”, “if that’s what floats his boat” and so forth. ‘Destigmatization’ as being of a piece of ‘Deregulation’.
A Type-2 Libertarian is against Hard Power, but either indifferent to the social terrain of Soft Power or even actively seeking to shape and deploy it to accomplish social ends that, while deemed worthy, ought not be pursued with Hard Power means.
Maybe a Type-3 Libertarian is generally against Hard Power, but willing to deploy it in a limited and selective manner as a countervailing force to mitigate harmful excesses in the Soft Power environment, seeing the harms of which and net diminishment of liberty as being on par with crimes, torts, and trespasses.
There are two issues with Type-2 Libertarian embrace of the deployment of techniques of Soft Power.
The first is an inadvertent and undesired side-effect – but one that is still foreseeable – which is that, because one shares the social space with aggressively paternalistic and politically dominant nanny-staters who have no aversion to using Hard Power, to the extent one is successful in nudging elite then general consensus against a particular kind of activity, one is just paving the way for the implementation of the same Hard Power measures one sought to avoid, which are now politically easier to establish as a result of your own efforts which you *hoped* would remain strictly Soft.
This is like not wanting to use DDT to deal with a mosquito problem, because it would harm other organisms in the ecosystem, and so draining the breeding swamp instead, only to find that you’ve created the perfect environment for some invasive species which will wipe out all those other organisms anyway.
A related example is that in some countries libertarians have supported Pigouvian carbon taxes or emissions trading schemes as the most efficient and de-politicizied way to deal with an issue – so long as it was the exclusive approach to the matter – only to discover after their hard advocacy work got it implemented, the politicians in their country got busy incessantly building a heavily-politicized and corrupt crazy-quilt of additional ad hoc measures on top of it, arguable making things net worse off than if nothing at all had been done. This is also the danger with advocating for UBI but only as a *replacement* for the current mish-mash of welfare programs, which is that those welfare programs exist because of special interest political support, and since there is political hay to be made by paying off those clients, all those programs are likely to pop back into existence *on top of* the UBI, neutralizing a lot of its purported benefits and rationale.
But second, I think we’ve learned that a lot of things about social attitudes and stigma we once thought were safely in the “soft” region have turned out to be much “harder” than they once due to recent changes in communications technology and the general ideological environment. Metaphorically, maybe it was safe to drain the swamp before, but not now, because of the introduction of an invasive species, or changes in the climate, etc.
If formerly soft techniques are now hard, that undermines our established structures which attempt to regulate the use of hard power and the institutions in which the deployment of such powers can be deliberated, rival interests represented, and compromises about their use worked out in a formal, official, and legal way. People can be politically tolerant of allowing wide latitude for soft power advocacy when the stakes are low.
But when the power gets harder and stakes get higher, then social techniques start to look like an attempt to seize some of the power of governance, and we don’t have any institutional way to channel and balance these attempts at power grabs except with socially destructive conflicts.
So, Type-1 Libertarians would like it to remain ‘cool’ in the minds of most people for others to drink, or not drink, so long as they aren’t hurting anybody but themselves. They would oppose Type-2 Libertarians’ extra-governmental attempts to make drinking socially uncool, because Type-1’s would argue that the very attempt by elites to make certain behaviors uncool is both more akin to classic, state-based Hard Power than it was in the past, and also, tends to help open the door to use of actual, state-based Hard Power.
Yes there are quite a variety of positions on this (and many other things) held by self described libertarians. And yes, it is useful to view such things as existing on a spectrum.
But libertarians are not normally opposed to the coercive power of social norms. They normally want more of the work of maintaining order done by social norms and less by government.
Libertarians are like everybody else in that they want exactly the amount of social coercion they think is necessary and not a bit more. It’s not really fair to blame them for the things they are opposed to just because someone else took it much farther. No one is envisioning a society without social norms and social norms always carry some type of coercive power or they wouldn’t be norms at all, just options.
Looking at the human costs of alcohol consumption is just as fallacious as looking at human costs of guns.
In both cases it’s ridiculous because the proper analysis is to look at the costs vs. the benefits. Not the costs vs. the costs of something else entirely.
How is this the 24th comment?