(Note: I will reference the argument mapped above by the assigned numbers. So the first premise (that there is some amount gun deaths which is acceptably low) will be 1.1, the second premise (“When the amount of gun deaths is…”) will be 1.2, etc.)

Again, this is just one example of how a gun control argument might go. Regardless of exactly what contention we are trying to support (an “assault weapons ban” or magazine size restrictions or universal background checks) the first three premises (1.1 through 1.3) will likely be an important feature in any gun control argument.

I think everyone who doesn’t want an all-out gun ban would agree with the first two premises. The controversy is in the last two premises (1.3 and 1.4). While there are many things one might want to address in these two premises (e.g., the difficulty of agreeing upon what would be an acceptably low amount of gun deaths), we’ll focus only on that which is relevant to the car analogy.

In order to see how motor vehicle deaths (MVDs) come into play, let’s take a closer look at 1.3. Two premises could be given in support of it:

How MVDs might come into play in the anti-gun control response at this point should be obvious. Sometimes the car analogy is presented in a very strong form as an a fortiori argument (that is, from the lesser to the greater):

(Note that the objection is not really to 1.3 or its supporting premises per se, it is to how the conjunction of 1.3 and 1.4 are being used to support the contention. There was no way to preserve this in the full map (below), so I chose to attach the objections to 1.3 in the end.)

Plugging this a fortiori into the overall argument, we should arrive at the conclusion that we need to significantly restrict access to motor vehicles, even more than we need to restrict access to guns.

Before getting to the gun control responses to this argument, what exactly is the pay-off of this a foritori supposed to be? The goal might be to expose hypocrisy on the part of the GCA or, better, to expose a flaw in the method of reasoning being employed by the GCA. If this line of reasoning, when applied to cars, seems unreasonable then so too is the line of reasoning applied to guns.

In response, the gun control advocate could challenge 3.1, though I’ve not seen any do that. They could argue that there is no reason to assume that the acceptable amount of MVDs is the same as the acceptable amount of gun deaths. Car deaths are more acceptable, because cars provide more benefits to society. More precisely:

While I think 5.1 and 5.2 are perfectly reasonable, it would be hard to establish the truth of 5.3. Of course cars are used by more people on a daily basis and this use provides many benefits. But while guns are used less often, the type of benefit they provide is of greater value (protection of life and property) than the types of benefits provided by cars (which are often a matter of convenience, related to the ability to get from point A to point B relatively quickly). In other words, it’s not just the number of benefits that are relevant, but the weight of the benefits themselves. At any rate, this line of attack enters into issues that are less empirical and less clear than the more common objection, which is to 3.2.

The objection to 3.2 is that the amount of car deaths does not exceed the number of gun deaths. Let’s call this the empirical objection. One gun control advocate, Daniel Brezenoff, cites this source to support the claim that “As of 2015, more Americans are killed by a gun than are killed in car crashes.” That source doesn’t cite any statistics on 2015 but it does cite this source and this source to support the claim that gun deaths exceeded MVDs in 2013. (I’m not sure why two different sources were used for running the numbers, since both can be done on the CDC website.)

It is, perhaps, worth noting that one can run the same query themselves here.*** When I’ve done that I’ve arrived at slightly different numbers than the sources given in support of Brezenoff’s claim. The number of MVDs for 2013 come out to 33,804 and the number of gun deaths for the same year are 33,636. On the same sheets one will note that in 2015 there were 36,161 MVDs and 36,252 gun deaths. Thus, Brezenoff’s claim would be correct for 2015, though the PolitiFact source doesn’t support it.

I’m not sure where the different numbers for motor vehicle deaths in 2013 are coming from, but we can ignore that point since Brezenoff seems to be correct about 2015. However, one will note that for 2016 MVDs again exceeded gun deaths (38,748 and 38,658 respectively).

Nevertheless, while there may be some uncertainty in my numbers, it is at least obvious that MVDs and gun deaths are sufficiently close such that, in any given year, gun deaths may exceed car deaths. This leaves the a fortiori argument in a tenuous position. One could abandon it for another argument that I’ll mention below, but before we do that I think there is more to say on behalf of it.

The idea that gun deaths are equal to or greater than car deaths relies upon a combined gun-death statistic. By far, the majority of gun deaths are suicides (about 2/3). Many in the anti-gun control community think it is illegitimate to lump all sorts of gun deaths together, while virtually everyone that is a GCA will conflate the numbers when talking about gun violence. Thus, one AGC response to the empirical objection would be that if we compare gun homicides to car deaths, it is an empirical fact that car deaths far exceed gun homicides.

Our argument map would now look like this:

4.2 would be the empirical objection and 5.4 is the anti-gun control response.

The problem, from the GCA side, is why we should think 6.2 is true. There is, in fact, an easy answer. Distinguishing suicide and accidents from homicide is valid because gun control policies targeted at reducing gun violence would only be effective in regard to homicides, not suicides, with the possible exception of Gun-violence Restraining Orders (GVROs). And, when it comes to GVROs, there is wide-spread support even among those considered anti-gun control.

So, for instance, suppose that our GCA wants to argue that we should ban all assault-style weapons. In support of their contention, they rely on premises similar to 1.1–1.3, the AGC person responds with a car analogy similar to 2.3, and the debate proceeds up to the point of our GCA pointing out that the number of gun deaths either exceed or are significantly close to car deaths.

It seems clear that, in this scenario, it’s perfectly legitimate for our AGC person to object to conflating gun suicides and gun accidents with gun homicides, since banning assault-style weapons will do virtually nothing to reduce the number of gun suicides or accidents. In other words, relying on a statistic that won’t be effected by your policy is illegitimate.

Whether or not 8.1 and, thus, 6.2 holds true will depend upon the specific policy proposal by the gun control advocate. As suggested above, it may not hold true in the case of GVROs, but it is also the case that many people who are otherwise pro-gun are in support of GVROs.

So far the car analogy holds up to scrutiny. But as I mentioned above, it is conceivable that as AI and self-driving technology progress we will see MVDs drop dramatically, possibly down to a few hundred deaths a year. If gun homicides remain the same, they will far exceed MVDs.

In that scenario, which seems likely to me, the a fortiori argument will no longer be useful except, perhaps, as a thought experiment. That thought experiment would be something like this: Suppose that programmers run into a recalcitrant AI bug that makes self-driving cars even more dangerous than human operated cars have ever been. Subsequently, the DMV decides to outlaw self-driving cars. Is it plausible that people would willingly return to a pre-AI MVD state with around 35,000 deaths per year? I think the answer is obviously yes. The fact that we exist so comfortably in that state of affairs right now supports that answer.

However, one need not rely on the a fortiori argument. It’s possible to make the car analogy simply based on the relatively close number of deaths: