Thought Experiment: Guns Are a Form of Pollution
The way we classify society’s major problems matters. When the Supreme Court ruled that carbon dioxide could be considered a pollutant in 2007, the federal government gained authority to regulate it under the Clean Air Act. Calling CO2 pollution served as a societal admission that a substance we hadn’t previously thought of as harmful actually is harmful, and the admission helps form the basis for solutions. As America’s problems with gun violence continue with no meaningful solutions in sight and millions more guns streaming into circulation every year, I’ve begun to think of firearms as a kind of pollution, too. I don’t mean we should necessarily classify them legally as pollutants like we’ve done with CO2, but I do believe that thinking of them this way can help us to be more clear-eyed about the nature and scope of America’s gun problem.
Pollution is “the introduction of contaminants into the environment that cause adverse change” (Merriam Webster). What differentiates pollution from other environmental change agents is the amount and negative effects of the contaminants. To count as pollution, there must be enough of something that it interferes substantially with a natural or long-established environmental norm in a way that lessens the quality of life for the living beings in that environment. Smog from industrial emissions can make it difficult for people to see and breathe and causes sickness and death. But pollution typically comes about as a byproduct of something beneficial. Cars and planes have revolutionized travel, but they emit contaminants that contribute to smog and global warming, as do power plants that burn fossil fuels.
We can think of guns as a pollutant in the US for the same reason we can similarly define noise, light, and carbon dioxide: all were once part of a relatively stable, not overly disruptive environment but have increased to a degree that massively changes our lived experience and, in some cases, cause great harm. Each of these features of modern life, including guns, are not necessarily more harmful than beneficial. Other countries have relatively high civilian gun-ownership rates (though nothing approaching American rates) without corresponding problems of mass violence. But in the US, a certain percentage of guns will always cause injury and death, and the more we release into our environment, the more death there will be.
Thinking of guns as a form of pollution can help us understand the problems they cause, and this is especially important because discussions about guns and gun violence are so mired in emotionalized culture-war nonsense. If guns are a form of pollution then we know that once they’ve been released into the environment beyond a certain threshold, negative long-term effects are “locked in,” the way current CO2 emission levels guarantee global temperature increases even if we stopped all emissions today. Once 400 million guns are unleashed into our national landscape, many thousands of gun-related deaths are all but inevitable.
In other words, the American gun crisis is the result of the amount of guns we’ve released into our environment. This is clarifying in a debate that too often focuses on the types of people who wield guns (good guys vs. bad guys, law-abiding citizens vs. criminals, etc.). But the US is not unique in its types of people, or levels of mental illness, or any other individual qualities that distract us from the main problem of too many guns. The US is truly unique in that regard: the astronomical number of civilian-owned firearms as a result of lax regulations. The “guns as pollution” frame helps us focus on what is truly relevant.
These facts result in some well-earned fatalism about the intractability of the American gun violence epidemic, but it can also bring some much-needed realism to the gun debate. We – the current generations of Americans who have political sway – are stuck with this problem. There is essentially nothing we can realistically do to make a significant dent in it at a national level in our lifetimes, because the horse is out of the barn, the toothpaste is out of the tube, etc. etc. The contaminant has been emitted, and as long as it's out there at its current levels, tens of thousands of people are going to be gravely injured or die every year as a direct result. However awful and difficult this realization is to accept, it also tells us something useful: the fight for gun violence solutions, like the fight for climate change mitigation, is a fight for future generations and a fight for our own moral worth. If we can’t begin fixing this problem, we’re no better in this regard than the generations who bequeathed it to us.
So gun rights advocates have a point when they say that passing gun control laws might not move the needle much on current gun violence. We can acknowledge this point, not as a ghoulish cover for doing nothing, but as a realistic nod to why we’re fighting, who we’re fighting for, and what a feasible time-frame for solutions really is.
Thinking of guns as pollution can be clarifying in several other ways, too:
It helps call attention to the fact that guns, like industrial chemicals and other contaminants, disproportionately affect the already vulnerable. The CDC reports that in the COVID-driven gun violence spike of 2020, “counties with the highest poverty level had firearm homicide rates 4.5 times as high … as counties with the lowest poverty level.” Heightened risks of gun violence for economically vulnerable groups persist in non-pandemic times, as well.
It helps us get beyond unhelpful discussions of gun injuries and deaths being the result of “misuse” of firearms. This is a common gun-rights talking point that has gone mainstream: that criminal uses of guns are a “misuse” of a tool whose real purpose is legitimate self-defense. But a gun operates in the same way regardless of whether a shooting is unlawful or legally justified. A gun is a tool created for the purpose of shooting bullets into living beings, and when it is used for that purpose it is fulfilling its intended use. “Misuse” would be, say, using the butt-end of a pistol to hammer a nail into a board. Guns released into the world kill and maim, the way that sulfur dioxide released from the burning of fossil fuels inflames human respiratory systems. And while this isn’t a perfect analogy – a gun requires a human to fire it, while a sulfur dioxide molecule needs no such activation – above certain levels of environmental concentration, each inevitably has certain harmful effects not because of “misuse,” but because that is what these things do.
It helps us think of guns in terms of costs and benefits – again short-circuiting the culture-war mythologizing that can obscure more rational analysis of guns and their effects. Pollution is usually a cost of some beneficial process like mining, manufacturing, and other forms of production. The costs of having the most heavily armed civilian population on earth, as the US does, are well documented: upwards of 40,000 deaths per year, with guns recently becoming the leading cause of children’s deaths, and more than 100,000 non-fatal injuries annually, exacting a cost measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars every year (more than $493 billion in 2020, most of which is driven by the hospitalization costs of shooting victims). The benefits, on the other hand, are private rather than societal, much less tangible, and by any honest measure simply much less: hobbyists’ personal enjoyment, a sense of responsibility, and other abstractions. The most tangible benefits of firearms in the hands of civilians – aside from profits earned by the gun industry – might be those that accrue from hunting, which include habitat conservation on a large scale. And while some would include “self-defense” as a benefit, this is often “self-defense against other guns” that would simply not be necessary were there not so many guns around, which mostly cancels this one out.
It helps us blame the right people for gun-related problems. Pollution is emitted by someone and, to continue the above point, for some kind of material benefit. Gun manufacturers emit this particular pollutant, and they and their hangers-on, like the NRA and the lawyers and public relations firms they employ, reap massive financial gains. As they do so, they are insulated from the costs of the damages their products cause, because in 2005 the US passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which protects gun manufacturers from liability when crimes are committed with their products, and because Congress has explicitly taken firearms out of the jurisdiction of the Consumer Product Safety Administration (which regulates the safety of, for example, toy guns). The direct emitters of gun pollution, then, are gun manufacturers, who are greatly enabled by their congressional benefactors. Thinking of these things in terms of pollution can help us see just how radical and lacking in common sense it is to allow a manufacturer to reap all the profits from its products while paying none of their massive societal costs. (How’s that for “personal responsibility”?)
It brings home the absurdity (and marketing genius) of, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” The idea that only more guns can solve the gun problem is already absurd on its face. But when we see firearms as a form of pollution, it becomes even more so, as if the only defense against smog is more carbon emissions. But there’s another insight buried here, too: so effective is the gun marketing campaign, so ideal is the gun as a consumer product, that absurdities like this are taken seriously by millions of people. Why? More reasons than we can count, but one underappreciated one: in a society that has fully embraced a capitalist morality, the gun is the ultimate consumer product, because it creates a set of problems to which it is the only marketable solution. The game of gun manufacturers has always been to flood the US with guns and then market guns as the solution to all the scary people running around with guns.
As I was researching for this post, I found one journal article suggesting we think of gun violence, but not guns themselves, as industrial pollution. I think this argument does not go far enough and that it’s odd to classify an action (violence) rather than the industrial product itself (the gun) as a pollutant. But the author, Thomas Metcalf, makes a persuasive case particularly for the moral and legal liability of gun manufacturers as the principal drivers and beneficiaries of gun violence. That they benefit from gun violence is one of the darker realities of modern America: news of mass shootings or increased violent crime drive fear of victimization, as well as unfounded fears cultivated by the NRA and other gun groups that firearms will soon be restricted, both of which drive up sales. Metcalf argues that these companies’ enrichment from gun sales and gun violence contributes to their moral responsibility to bear some of the costs of that violence. Also contributing is the fact that they know, or should know, that certain and predictable percentages of their products will be used to commit violent crimes, or be carelessly stored and/or handled resulting in devastating injuries. Given this knowledge and the additional fact that gun manufacturers make no significant effort to make their products safer – in part because guns have been carved out of the jurisdiction of the CPSA – it is more than reasonable to say they bear moral responsibility for a significant portion of American gun violence.
When researchers identify a pollutant, they try to calculate “acceptable levels” of that substance that can be present in the environment without causing harm. Those levels are often expressed as “parts per million,” or ppm. If you have a million gallons of water and one gallon’s worth of mercury in that water, mercury is present at 1 ppm.
What is the “acceptable level” of guns in American society? What is the ideal ppm? Or, the ideal gpp (guns per person)? Currently, we are well over 1 gpp. That is, guns are present in America at a higher concentration than human beings. Until we bring these levels down, we’ll be living in a contaminated environment.