Norway, Texas, and Guns

OK, I have a confession to make up front - this blog posting is really not too much about economics, but having just been on a short visit to Finland I was shocked about what has gone on in Norway in the last 4 days. The Nordic countries are close neighbors ( - as anyone will know who watches the Eurovision Song Contest!) and a tragedy in one Nordic country is keenly felt in others. And I confess that although I have met some Norwegians on my travels around the Nordic countries, I haven't been there since a trip I made to Oslo many years ago. The big shock for most people from Northern Europe is where it happened - Norway is a conservative social democracy, and like most other Nordic countries has a very generous welfare system, and of course is the most oil-rich country in Europe.

What is perhaps not so shocking is that this crime took place, given the rhetoric of the right and the "bubble" a lot of the right-wing pundits appear to live in. I think it is noteworthy that most successful politically-motivated violent attacks come from right-wing or anarchist groups and they are nearly always aimed at government or prominent left-wing figures. You very rarely hear of a left-wing attack on a right-wing politician (ok I guess Reagan and Pim Fortuyn of the Netherlands are the most obvious exceptions), and I think there is good reason for this. The main reason is that the left wing are by definition a more community-oriented social party, whereas the right wing tends to believe in more individual autonomy and freedom. Most-definitely-right-of-centre Mrs. Thatcher once famously said "And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families." which I think encapsulates the way in which many on the right think. So when society doesn't go their way, they sometimes seek to change it by attacking the guts of how societies operate - that is the system of government and the politics that comprise it. History is littered with examples of anarchists and righ-wingers who have done this - from Timothy McVeigh to the Unibomber, to now the Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik.

What I find stunning in all this is the reaction of some on the right - I read in the Christian Post that the attacks have exposed "European Immigration Issues", in a way trying to find a silver lining in the fact that a man killed nearly over 70 people. Surely the issue is that one man killed 76 people in a clear attempt to strike out at government and eliminate the next generation of leftist politicians who he thought of as the Labor party youth wing who had convened for a summer camp west of Oslo.

As most people who read this blog know, I live in Texas.  Texas is a state where gun ownership is very much embedded into state law and the culture of the place, and many people own guns and have concealed weapon permits so that they can carry guns pretty much anywhere if desired. The State nearly passed a law which would permit students and professors to carry guns on campus, and so I have decided that in my own interest, I should at least know how to use a gun and now have a concealed weapon license. Explaining this to Europeans is not easy - the reaction is usually extremely negative, as most Europeans are emphatically anti-gun, even though ownership of guns is quite usual in the rural areas of Europe and particularly in the Nordic countries. The justification for introducing the carrying of guns into Universities in Texas was the argument that if students or professors had been allowed to carry firearms at Virginia Tech and on other campuses where shootings have occurred, many lives could have been saved. But although this argument is in principle correct, it ignores the "unintended consequences" that may occur as perhaps student suicide rates would rise and it might lead to much higher fatalities than if guns were not allowed on campus. Gun advocates have noted that since 2007  guns are allowed on campuses in Utah, and there doesn't seem to have been any uptick in incidents. But that might have to do with the fact that many students in Utah go to Utah universities as often there is a religious affiliation, and therefore many of the students might have grown up with guns already. Also as an economist, I would argue that perhaps not enough time has passed to really evaluate the Utah campus gun laws.

We all want to be proactive to prevent the kinds of massacres that have been witnessed in Norway. But i) there are unintended consequences of allowing all students and professors to hold guns on campuses or elsewhere for that matter; ii) once a law is passed allowing people to do something it is very difficult to remove that "right", so this basically becomes a one-way street. The real question is, is  there another (better) way to allow better regulation of guns so that more of these isolated incidents can be prevented, while at the same time mitigating the unintended consequences of more widespread carrying of guns? I am not sure I know the answer to this question, but of course I have some ideas!

I would suspect that in a country like Norway, and likely now other Nordic countries, more gun controls will be put in place as despite the isolated nature of this incident, the authorities will take steps to ensure that this never happens again.  And I would also suspect that in Texas someone will have another go at introducing legislation to allow concealed weapons on campuses - this time it failed, but it only needs to pass once and then it will be the norm and we'll be experiencing any "unintended consequences"!