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About the author: Clifford Winston is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
The new gun-safety legislation passed by Congress matters, President Biden said Monday. “But it’s not enough. And we all know that.” He’s right.
More Americans than ever before are looking to government policy makers to curb the nation’s alarming frequency of mass shootings like those on July 4 in Highland Park, Ill., or before that in Uvalde, Texas, and too many others to list. However, when policies are proposed, such as the Senate’s recent plan to increase background checks and funding for security, they tend to be incremental and insufficient.
A more effective response starts with acknowledging that gun violence is the kind of problem the U.S. has made progress solving before. Gun violence is a social cost created by individuals’ inappropriate use of the industry’s products that harm others. Economists call that a negative externality. The proper role of government regarding negative externalities is to incentivize firms in an industry to take constructive steps to reduce those social costs, or if firms have an incentive to respond constructively, to facilitate that response.
That’s what is steadily happening in the automobile industry. For decades, automobile companies resisted making certain safety improvements to their vehicles because they were convinced that safety does not sell. However, they changed their behavior when they were convinced that consumers were willing to pay the cost of safety improvements. For example, Fred Mannering and I found that automakers offered airbags because consumers were willing to pay for the cost of production and installation.
Yet, despite government and industry efforts, the U.S. still experiences some 40,000 fatalities and millions of injuries every year from automobile accidents. Fortunately, firms have a financial incentive to develop autonomous vehicles, a technology that has the potential to greatly reduce automobile accidents and their associated externalities. The adoption of the technology began incrementally, when firms started to install collision avoidance-technologies that give drivers and other vehicle driver-assistance features, such as automatic braking systems, time to act if another vehicle is dangerously close. Importantly, consumers value those technologies.
Technologies are evolving to allow vehicle-to-vehicle communications and to enable fully autonomous vehicles to “see” their environment so they can eventually detect and respond quickly to all possible hazards and avoid collisions. Chris Urmson, the former director of self-driving cars at Google, argues that the private sector has an incentive to expedite widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles because they will increase industry revenue as shared vehicles. Government actions can facilitate this incentive.
The importance of responding to proximate dangers in auto travel has a clear parallel to firearms. The approach to increasing gun safety is to use radio frequency identification technology and passive RFID tags to detect the presence of guns over distances ranging from several yards to about 100 feet. RFID is not a theoretical abstraction. Tags of various types can be used on metal and nonmetal objects, and some RFID-on-metal tags are currently used for tool tracking, vehicle tracking and identification, and for armory management by the military.
Those responsible for protecting people in public spaces, schools, entertainment and shopping venues, and restaurants and bars could use RFID-based sensing equipment to detect the presence of individuals with tagged guns, so they have adequate time to track the armed person’s movements, assess the individual’s threat, and intervene if necessary. If autonomous vehicles are evolving to reveal their location, guns should not be exempted from revealing their presence and location when the revelation does not curtail the right to bear arms. Such revelations also may be useful for private businesses and other entities that prohibit firearms on their premises.
New technology would be required to design the tagging and sensing equipment that is used to identify the presence of tagged guns, which are the sensing system’s target. The private sector would have a strong incentive to develop and commercialize the technology if it were convinced that the technology would sell.
The remaining obstacle to reduce the externalities from guns would then be a device that enables guns to be tagged. Unfortunately, the gun industry does not have an economic incentive to install such a device, because gun owners would not perceive a benefit that would induce them to pay the costs of installation. Government must therefore incentivize the gun industry to install a tagging device so that sensors could target guns.
Congress has intervened in the gun market by passing the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. It protects firearm manufacturers and dealers from liability when their products are used to commit crimes. Accordingly, Congress could amend the act to apply only to firearm manufacturers and dealers that put tagging devices on guns that enabled them to be targeted by sensors. Thus, gun companies would be incentivized to take action that would improve their bottom line by shielding them from costly liability litigation. Companies also would be incentivized to expedite the transition from a gun stock that is not detectable by sensors to one that is tagged and targetable.
By taking constructive action for continued liability protection, the gun industry, like the automobile industry, may learn that reducing a negative externality—in this case mass gun violence—“sells.” In the process, it would be incentivized to help rid the nation of a horrifying problem.
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