If I wasn’t an economist, I’d almost certainly be a graphic designer; of course, for every Karim Rashid, there are a dozen guys doing work for hack, tasteless clients. So I settle, then, for making my graphs of lagged cross-correlations between GDP and a constructed measure of speculative housing starts as attractive as possible. Not quite the same, I know. In any case, there’s a film coming out this week about typography called “Helvetica”, and a preview has this fantastic quote from a German designer:  “Like people look at bottles of wine or, whatever, girls’ bottoms, I get kicks from looking at type.  It’s a little worrying, I admit.”  Gold.

Now, aesthetics haven’t really been on the mind of many people out here in Virginia this week after what happened down at V Tech.  You know, people are wondering now what should be done in response.  I don’t know that anything should be done: one very disturbed young man committed a once-in-a-decade crime.  But you certainly have heard a lot (particularly in the foreign press) about gun control in America, which is an area about which I’m conflicted.

First, any discussion of gun control ought begin with the Constitution, which I see as an absolutely inalienable force guiding American laws.  “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” is not particularly vague; it clearly means that the government, without changing the Constitution, is very constricted as to what level of gun control they can adopt.  Keeping the 2nd Amendment in mind, but assuming the Constitution could be amended, what ought be the gun law in America?

Certainly, the reason to bad guns is that there is an enormous amount of gun crime, including suicide and murder, that conceivably would be rarer and more difficult to carry out if guns were illegal.   I’m unconvinced that serious criminals would find themselves unable to carry guns of some kind, but perhaps crimes of passion, or spur-of-the-moment rash gun play could be curtailed, and that’s not a small amount of violence.

The tradeoff, though, is threefold.  One, in principle, I’m not enthusiastic about the government being able to arbitrarily ban private citizens from owning things in their own home, whether the “thing” in question is a gun, a tagless mattress, a bag of pot, or whatever.  Individuals obtain enjoyment from shooting skeet, or going to the range, or going hunting.  Firing a gun is, well, pretty cool.  So we oughtn’t entirely discount the utility people get from using firearms in legal ways.  Two, the original intent of the Second Amendment, that armed private citizens provide a check against a tyrannical government, is perhaps less relevant today when armies have nuclear bombs and fighter jets, but I don’t discount this entirely.  Though it seems that dictatorship is impossible in America, the cyclical nature of history is abundantly clear.    Last, firearms certainly do provide a deterrent for some types of crime.  As far as I know, the number of burglaries that occur while occupants are home is much, much higher in the handgun-free UK than in the US.

Now does a reduction in gun crime unquestionably outweigh those three benefits?  I’m not so sure that it does.  I’m also not really convinced that banning handguns would reduce crime that much anyway; look at the low crime rates in Switzerland and Canada, which are as heavily armed as America, or the high suicide rates in more-or-less gun-free East Asia.  Just something to think about…