I WASN'T sure what to expect from the Porcupine Freedom Festival, but I was delighted by what I found. At this annual gathering of libertarians, anarchists and jovial “freedom-lovers”, the conversations were thoughtful, the atmosphere festive and the bonhomie infectious. Sure, there was plenty of hyperbole about the “inevitable collapse of the state” (in the words of Jeffrey Tucker, Chief Liberty Officer of Liberty.me). But I also met plenty of people running for local office with some good ideas for removing silly regulations and reducing official corruption. Many of these revellers have already pledged to move to New Hampshire in the hopes of making it the “most free” state in the union. “To have so many extremely thoughtful people moving to our state is really positive,” observed Jim Rubens, a New Hampshire Republican who was busily shaking hands and wooing voters for his run for US Senate. “I’m not an anarchist, though,” he swiftly added. There are many arguments to be made in favour of this live-free-and-let-live attitude, which extends to all sorts of personal decisions too many politicians see fit to meddle with, such as whom one marries and how people educate their children. Indeed, the most festive evening saw nearly everyone dressed in rainbows and glitter dancing in a bedazzled tent for something called Buzz’s Big Gay Dance Party, hosted by a charismatic lesbian libertarian named Buzz Webb.

But I found myself questioning some of the received gospel about the state’s needless, heedless paternalising. Most libertarians view government interference as an inept and often costly encroachment on personal liberty. For example, many “free staters” enjoy the fact that New Hampshire doesn’t force adults to wear seatbelts in cars or helmets on motorcycles. And no one had anything nice to say about former-mayor Michael Bloomberg’s crusade to fight obesity by banning big, caloric fizzy drinks in New York. Yet a number of these seemingly personal choices have negative externalities—ie, they come at a cost to others. Bikers without helmets tend to be the most damaged and pricey patients in hospitals; fewer than a third ever work again. A study of helmet-shunning bikers admitted to one large hospital, cited by the Centres for Disease Control (CDC), found that taxpayers paid for 63% of their care (something we’ve written about here). Obesity also comes at a high price for others, by lowering workers’ productivity and raising health-care costs. In America, obesity-related illness accounted for one-fifth of total health-care spending in 2005 (something we’ve written about here).

But such cost-benefit analyses are tricky, and nowhere are they more fraught than when it comes to guns. Guns were indeed everywhere at PorcFest—casually tucked in holsters, jauntily slung across bare backs and boldly decorating T-shirts (a personal favourite featured a woman with a gun and the line “My rape whistle is louder than yours”). Libertarians believe that law-abiding, responsible citizens should be allowed to own guns and wear them openly—a constitutionally-protected right that helps some people feel safer and ostensibly hurts no one else. Frankly, I was unnerved by the sight of them. A gun on one’s hip poses an odd, primal asymmetry in conversation; suddenly there’s a fickle, testy elephant in the room with fatal powers. (Indeed, many companies are politely asking customers to put these elephants away.) Gun rights seem like a plain case of negative externalities. The news over the weekend that no fewer than 82 people were shot in Chicago, 14 of them fatally, added a bit of icing to this bitter cake.

But what is the relationship between gun ownership and gun crime? And what impact does gun control have on curbing the bad effects of guns? In light of reports of a “new gun-control fight brewing in the Senate", these questions loom large. Unfortunately, answers are not so easy to come by. America’s homicide rate is certainly far higher than that of any country where guns are largely prohibited, such as Britain, France, Germany and Japan. Yet this rate is in decline, with firearm-related homicides falling 39% from 1993 to 2011, even as gun ownership remains widespread. And in New Hampshire, where guns are flaunted proudly, the rate of violent crime is among the lowest in the country, behind only Maine and Vermont, according to FBI figures.

There are several reasons for New Hampshire’s particularly low rate of firearms-related crime. The mostly rural state has relatively high levels of education, income and employment, explains Charles Putnam, a “justice studies” professor at the University of New Hampshire. The state is also fairly ethnically and racially homogenous—something one can’t help but notice amid all the pasty-faced computer programmers at PorcFest.

The question then becomes what to do about places where gun violence is more common, such as Chicago, where urban poverty, poor schools, higher unemployment and racial friction create an often toxic mix. Jeffrey Miron, a libertarian economist at Harvard, has argued that stricter laws would be counter-productive, keeping guns out of the hands of law-abiding people (who might otherwise use them to defend themselves) while doing nothing to reduce bloodshed among law-breakers. And because Americans are rather attached to their guns—unlike Australians, who seemingly had little trouble binning them after a massacre in Port Arthur killed 36 people in 1996—a strict prohibition would only lead to a black market in weapons, with all the nasty consequences of similar prohibitions on booze or drugs.

But a comprehensive study of the social costs of gun ownership by Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig, published in the Journal of Public Economics, offers a more nuanced take on the problem. These researchers found that more guns empirically lead to more gun-related violence, largely because legally purchased guns somehow end up in the hands of criminals via theft or the secondary market (ie, gun shows and online sales, which are largely unregulated). And attacks with guns are more likely to be lethal, because they are much more effective at killing people than other weapons. This might not be a big problem in New Hampshire, but it is certainly one in Chicago, where data from 2008 show that 81% of homicides were committed with guns, 91% of them by people who had a prior arrest record. (More guns also lead to more suicides, which is a serious problem, though rarely one for headlines.)

So what should be done? Messrs Cook and Ludwig suggest a combination of solutions: make it costlier to get guns in high-crime areas; improve the records available for screening gun buyers (with more information on possible mental-health problems); keep a paper trail to help connect legal gun owners to illegal gun-use; and offer better law enforcement against illicit gun use. For example, a crackdown on gun violence that has proved effective in Boston involves police informing gang members that a crime involving one member would have consequences for everyone.

Sensible stuff, though we probably won’t be seeing much of it any time soon. This is a shame. But I wonder if some of the talk about gun control is a bit of a red herring. The places in America where gun violence is a serious problem are cities with bad schools, few low-skilled jobs, powerful gangs and large groups of segregated poor minorities. The violence that Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal rather vilely blames on “black pathology” might otherwise be seen as a by-product of insidiously few opportunities and a rather corruptcriminal-justice system. Access to guns does not in itself explain why folks in New Hampshire can sing karaoke with pistols on their hips while kids in Chicago are getting shot. Given the fruitlessness of any debate over regulating guns, perhaps we could talk a little more specifically about why some gun-owners are dancing while others are dying.

(Photo credit: JOE KLAMAR / AFP)