The Porn Theory of Guns

Conservatives have long rampaged against pornography, claiming that it causes "unnatural" urges in those who view it, warps young minds and forces them to commit unspeakable acts. The Duggar family claims sexual predator Josh Duggar was a porn addict, and porn caused him to molest his sisters and have an affair. In the minds of conservatives, it's not the suffocating and repressive conservative attitude that made sex a totally seductive taboo that caused Josh Duggar to obsess about it; it was porn.

Conservatives generally subscribe to the video game theory of mass shootings. In their minds, kids who play violent first-person-shooter video games are training to be mass murderers. They also claim that watching violent movies and TV shows are creating killers in droves. Despite the fact that the violence in most video games and movies is very unrealistic.

If that's the case, then simply owning a gun predisposes a person to committing gun violence. Gun owners regularly practice shooting targets with human figures depicted on them. They constantly think about killing people with guns. A person who buys a gun has already decided that they will kill someone. Many people say they feel a rush of power when they handle guns; some wax rhapsodic about how it feels to cut loose with a machine gun, spraying bullets across a target. (Watch most any episode of Mythbusters to watch the joyous fascination some people have with shooting up the scenery. Are endorphins being released in the brains of these people, in the same way that drugs release endorphins?)

One cannot deny that there's a connection between having a gun and shooting someone with it: no gunless person has ever shot someone. People are shot by people with guns 100% of the time. There's no question that having a gun makes you much more likely to shoot someone. The question is, does having a gun make a person more likely to want to shoot someone?

It certainly increases a person's bravado, if what people say on social media is any indication. How many times have you seen people respond to insults or threats on Twitter with something to the effect of, "Oh yeah? Say that to my face when I've got my .45" or "I'm not afraid of him, I'm a Second Amendment guy."

The statistics indicate it's likely the mere presence of guns increases the number of shootings, as was demonstrated when Australia passed stringent gun laws and the number of gun deaths plummeted. Corroborating data also comes from the United States:

Republican presidential candidates should look at the natural experiment that occurred when Missouri eased restrictions on buying handguns. The result was a 25 percent rise in the firearm homicide rate, according to a study in the Journal of Urban Health.

In contrast, Connecticut tightened regulations on buying handguns, and gun homicides there fell by 40 percent, according to the American Journal of Public Health.

This is something that scientists could research. Statistical studies could be first and easiest, looking into whether people who own guns commit more non-gun acts of aggression (though one could argue that this would merely prove that people who want guns are more violent in the first place). Behavioral studies could create social experiments to measure whether possession of gun increases aggression. Functional MRI brain scans could see whether guns activate the parts of the brain associated with aggression. Blood samples could be take from people who handle guns to test whether hormone levels associated with aggression have increased.

Many conservatives have long demanded we throw out the First Amendment and ban certain movies, video games and porn because they rot people's minds or induce them violence. If guns have the same effect, will they want to ban them too?

Nah. That's why they passed a law banning government research on guns. Because they already know what the data will show.