It’s morally right that people should die for my amusement

The BBC website has a reasonably sensible, if not impartial, article by a sports shooter about guns – specifically, on how they’re fun and basically safe, except for the very rare occasions when evil people get hold of them and go massacring.

Unsurprisingly, the ‘have your say’ comments are full of the usual suspects saying things like “aha, you said ‘except sometimes’. How dare you expect even one innocent person to die for your fun?” This argument is generally hard to refute without sounding callous, but it’s wrong.

If something provides sufficient net quantities of fun, it is easy to see that we do rate it as worth the death of one or several innocent people. How’s that? Easy. Such beneficial-only-because-fun activities that kill the innocent and non-consenting as funfairs, fast cars, aviation, skateboarding, allowing men out at night, swimming pools and serving margarine to kids are both legal and socially acceptable.

Hence, society (here meaning “everyone who is capable of even the most basic level of moral debate”) agrees that if enough fun is provided, the deaths for fun trade-off is acceptable. The only moral question left is over the necessary fun-to-killing ratio.

That isn’t quite true, philosophically speaking – there’s also a question over agent-related morality. We can accept a certain level of deaths as a consequence of where we set fun levels (we know some people will have aeroplanes crash into their houses as an inevitable consequence of mass aviation), but we can’t deliberately kill a whole bunch of people for our amusement (hence popular revulsion at Running Man-style scifi concepts). This is a side debate with no relevance to gun policy, however.  

Returning to the main point, the only reason to justify a government-imposed ban on guns would be that they’re not fun enough to outweigh the harm they cause. At this point, things like guns being less dangerous than swimming pools might come into play (and quite possibly be refuted by the fact that they’re also less fun). Either way, at least we’d be dealing with a debate rather than a witless moral panic.