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Gun policy still has to be rational

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There is a joke we economists who play golf love to tell: An economist, a lawyer, a doctor and the club pro are playing in a foursome. The foursome ahead of them is really slow. After a few frustrating holes, the club pro explains it's made up of firemen who were all tragically blinded saving the historic clubhouse during a fire some years ago. To make a long joke short, the doctor and the lawyer make sympathetic observations appropriate to their professional training. Then the economist strokes his chin and asks: "Why don't they play at night?"

Economists are trained to ask the gauche but logical question everyone's thinking but no one's willing to give voice to. Pay people to be unemployed and won't there be more unemployed people? Make sure single mothers don't fail financially and won't there be more single mothers? Compensate regions for their low income and doesn't that encourage them to continue to have low income?

Stephen Harper has been heading up the "new Canadian government" for nine months now, but he's been an economist a lot longer than he's been Prime Minister. His reaction to last week's shooting in Montreal was a classic economist's response. He says the shooting doesn't justify stopping his party's plan to scrap the long-gun registry. Quite the opposite: Because the guns the deranged killer used were all duly registered, it only proves the long-gun registry doesn't work.

Unfortunately, more Canadians aren't economists than are. To non-economists, the shooting indicates that guns can do terrible damage. Anyone who would suggest doing away with a program whose goal is to reduce such terrible damage somehow doesn't understand that.

I don't want to make light of last week's events. My 13-year-old goes to a school 500 metres from Dawson College. When I heard about the shooting, I got an awful feeling in the pit of my stomach that didn't go away until I knew he was safe. But should we really continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year registering long guns simply for fear that if we reduce our spending, people will think we actually favour gun crime? No one favours gun crime. The problem we face is finding the most effective way to reduce it. What's the best way to spend our money -- Registering guns? Hiring more cops? Building more jails? Doing more interventions? Quarantining young anti-social males?

The PM is obviously right that the gun registry didn't stop last week's tragedy. But, good economist that he is, he must also understand no system can be perfect. It might well make sense to register guns even if, once in a while, someone gets through the system. The test of the policy is not that there be no gun crime ever again, but that there be less gun crime -- substantially less gun crime, given the cost. How many registrations have been refused? How many of those refused would have used their guns to harmful effect? What would be the payoff per dollar of other ways of attacking gun crime? That's how to judge the registry.

While we're asking hard questions, why the insistence, other than political inertia, that we keep the laws regarding handguns exactly as they are? What is it in the cost-benefit analysis that says making people register handguns makes sense when making them register long guns doesn't? Are we truly confident that existing handgun arrangements provide effective protection at acceptable cost?

As for those who argue last week's shooting means we can't possibly do away with the gun registry, aren't they at least having doubts? Last week's killer had registered his guns with all the i's dotted and t's crossed. Yet he got through. Maybe to be more effective, the registry has to be more stringent. Maybe would-be gun owners need to pass psychological evaluations. But if that's the case, what would be the cost, both in dollars and nuisance value for law-abiding, non-wacko gun owners? And would the cost be worth the gain?

"No cost is too high. If it saves just one life, it would be worth it" is a standard but unacceptable answer to that question. We have many different ways to spend money to save lives -- whether in bridge and road construction, cancer screening, emergency-room and ambulance services, or better equipment for our military. We can't spend it all on just one way of protecting human life. "If it saves just one life," if may condemn lots of other lives elsewhere. Basic economics says you spend until you get the same reduction in deaths for the last dollar spent on every one of these activities.

The Prime Minister may lose points politically for taking the rational view at a time when emotions understandably reign. And there is plenty of room for argument about the facts of just what the trade-offs are in terms of lives saved per dollar spent. But that's exactly the kind of discussion we need to have.

Not now, while victims are still in intensive care, but later.