More on Gun Control
Darwin writes:
The fact is as long as guns are all the hell over the place, any crazy person can get one, and as long as guns are legal they can carry it down the street to their target without fear of interference.
I take issue with your argument that as long as there is large quantity of guns crazy people will get a hold of them and fire away. If one were to ban all guns there would still be a black market for guns which would allow crazy people access to firearms. Crazy people using guns for mass shooting has very little to do with the availability of weapons and everything to do with the nature of guns. Guns enable someone to wreak massive harm in a short period of time. That’s their intended purpose.
Often times, crazy people will use this to their advantage by selecting targets in which gun bans are enforced. This enables them to do the most amount of harm without having to worry about someone else doing the same kind of harm back to them. It is worth noting that the recent attempt at a mass killing in Colorado was stopped by the lawful use of a firearm by a citizen, illustrating that the capacity to do harm with a gun is indirectly proportional to the amount of armed citizens in the collection of would be victims.
A plethora of guns is not even close to the controlling factor in mass killings. I would also argue that preventing people from going crazy is probably the controlling factor, but would be impossible to control. Would you suggest placing draconian laws to detect and control potential crazy people from executing mass shootings? You are already up in arms with the expanded powers of our intelligence gathering agencies.
This reminds me of the war drugs. Given your liberal disposition I suspect you would take issue with this kind of rhetoric. First you probably object to the state telling people what they can and can’t do with their bodies. But given your reasonableness, you probably realize that the state must have some laws on drug usage, but that the state, particularly the federal has no business vigorously prosecuting the illegal drug industry. You probably view the draconian drug laws as begin fundamentally illiberal and largely ineffective because people are going to drugs no matter what.
Assuming I have characterized your position on the war on drugs then l ask you how a ‘war on guns’ would fair any better? Crazy people are going to go on mass shootings no matter what laws there are in place restricting gun ownership.
That being the case, why in your view is it desirable to take the guns out of the hands of law abiding citizens knowing that this will leave them completely vulnerable to the whims of crazy people that, given crazy people’s desire to conduct mass killings, have already indicate a disinclination to follow the law?
The Sentiment Informing Libertarians and Liberals
I really think this issue highlights nicely the difference between liberals and libertarians. The problem of mass shooting can be handled in a variety of different ways. The liberal solution is to interfere with an explicit constitutional right in an attempt to completely eliminate access to guns. They argue that protection should not be handled by the citizen, but by the state in the form of the police. The libertarian solution is to embrace the constitutional right that citizens should have access to the firearms need to protect themselves. During a mass shooting protection should be handled by the citizen until it is clear the state has control of the scene.
Putting aside the feasibility of the two different solutions lets examine the sentiment that informs them. The libertarian sentiment is pretty simple. Citizens should be responsible for their own protection. While the state can assist, at the end of the day, the citizen should have the maximum amount of freedom to protect themselves. The liberal sentiment is that citizen can’t be trusted with the freedom of protecting themselves, and therefore to protect all citizens, the state should be responsible for citizen protection. While the citizen can assist in their own protection, at the end of the day, the citizen should only have a minimum amount of freedom to protect themselves since this freedom could be used irresponsibly to harm others.
We can see then that libertarians have a fundamental trust in the citizenry while the liberal position rests firmly on a distrust of the citizenry. The liberal distrust of his fellow man translates into policy that uses the state to remove certain freedoms to allay his concern that citizens may exercise that freedom in a disapproving fashion. This is no different then the conservative putting in place laws against sodomy because he doesn’t trust his fellow citizen to use his right to privacy in a proper fashion. Meanwhile the libertarian works hard to keep both the rights of self protection and privacy free of state interference motivated by a healthy distrust of the state.
After all, the state does have a monopoly on coercion. Something liberals and conservatives tend to forget anytime they want to force their values on the citizenry.
December 12th, 2007 at 3:18 am
First of all, I’ve stated many times that I don’t buy the ‘enforcement is impossible, so why bother making a law?’ argument. I believe that we looked into this before and found that the rates of both gun fatalities in general and mass shootings specifically were drastically decreased in countries where guns were illegal and those bans were enforced, such as England.
Certainly there is a black market for guns in those countries, but a few things are true:
1. Finding and obtaining a gun (or many guns, as are usual in theese mass shooting cases) on the black market is much harder and requires more social skills and a cooler head than grabbing a gun from your dad’s basement or buying a bunch at a gun show. People who sell things on black markets have to be cautious, and they don’t want to do business with people who are clearly unstable and dangerous. I definitely believe that even with a black mrket in place, forcing these crazy, deranged people to go through that black market if they want a gun will stop most of them before they hurt anyone.
2. If any of these people had prior run0ins with the law before they did their shootings, for instance if they were threatening co-workers/ other students or whatever, then the police might look into them, find a gun in their home, and arrest them right there. As things currently stand, if teh police find that a clearly dangerous, psycopathic person who’s been making threats against people has also beeen stockpiling a bunch of guns, they can’t do anything about it.
3. Police, security guards, and various members of the armed forces are all trained to spot concealed weapons. If one of them noticed someone walking around with a concelaeed weapon, they could immediately stop and arrest them right there, before any crime is committed. As things stand now, the police can’t do anything to stop a crime from being committed until a gun has actually been drawn and pointed at somebody, and by then it’s generally too late.
So, I really do belive that these incidents would be drastically reduced if guns were illegal, and I think that statistical evidence from countries where this is true will back me up.
The war on drugs is a commonly-used analogy; and while I do pretty much think that drugs should be legal (but regulated by the FDA), the distinction between drugs and guns is that drugs kill YOU, and guns kill OTHER PEOPLE. As a libertarian, I know that you agree with me when I say I’m fine with you oing anything you want to yourself, but not to anyone else. In keeping with this, I might still want to outlaw specific drugs that hurt others, such as date-rape drugs, or any drugs that very commonly lead to violent psychotic episodes.
The factor that is completely missing from your account of the liberal position is the fact that liberals believe in DEMOCRACY. Of course I would be against the state declaring that guns were illegal if the vast majority of citizens were against such a law; that’s why I talk to fellow voters to try to get these laws passed, instead of lobbying/bribing congressmen. I also think that citizens should be in charge of their own protection; specifically, I think it’s wise for them to decide to protect themselves by empowering a small subset of the citizenry (ie the police) with the power to enforce laws and arrest criminals, and to further use their votes to bring about laws that will allow the police to maximize their protection (such as a gun ban).
You say that the liberal position doesn’t trust people to be smart enough to take care of themselves, but in reality, the liberal position trusts people enough to use their votes and their voices to shape a government that will take care of all the things you think everyone should do for themselves.
The liberal position trusts people to be smart enough to realize that’s it’s just not practical for every single individual independantly to protect themselves and their family, become an expert on the safety and nutrition of every food and and product and drug they buy, to be an expert in every field of medicine so they know that their doctors are competent, to monitor every factory in their state for dangerous emmisions and form boycott networks when a factory is poisoning their rivers or their air, to build roads and research charities and understand what scientific research should be funded and help hurricane survivors and etc and etc and etc. The liberal position believes that people are smart enough to relize that centralizing many of these functions is much more efficient and effective than leaving them to individuals, and it trusts those people to vote for a government that will give them those things that they want.
December 16th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
Lets think about this for a second. A shooter is so mad at the world that he has decided to acquire a massive amount of weapons to kill off a large clump of people. However his plan for mass murdered is stymied by a social awkwardness to talk to a black market vendor. You would also have to maintain that same social awkwardness would not be applicable to a legal gun vendor. You can’t possibly be making this argument.
Secondly you seem to think that black market vendors are going to be more discerning who they sell their weapons to then legal vendors. People that have already shown a reluctance to go along with societal norms by selling weapons illegally are going to be more concerned with their clientèle then vendors that play by the rules. You can’t possibly be making this argument please clarify.
According to you, how many years should one that is possession of a gun be sent to jail once the state bans firearms? You would advocate that the state be allowed to break into a house and arrest people if there is good reason to believe they possess firearms. You must currently support the state going in and arresting people that are in poession of illegal drugs. Wow, you are comfortable with expanding the state’s power as a means to control this problem but throw a hissy fit whenever I deny non-citizen rights for those at Gitmo. Odd.
More expansion of state power. Jesus were the hell did this Darwin come from. You are already pissed off at police departments that pull minorities putatively for minor traffic but mostly cause of race. Can you imagine if the police could stop a person and demand they be allowed to search the person for ‘firearms’. Yeah that won’t be abused. Brilliant.
Besides its worth noting expand the state power in this way won’t even come close to actually stop mass shootings. Where all mass shooting took place there were no armed police nearby to detect and stop the shooter. If you are looking to kill a bunch of people i’m willing to bet you would choose locations where there are no armed police.
Would you agree that if the state stopped the press from covering these stories that the shootings would also be reduced? Instead of expanding state power significantly on citizens why not expand state power on the press? This approach is similar to your justification for raising car standards. By regulating the press you are only restricting a small group of people as opposed to expanded state power to stop the citizenry from owning guns. People can own guns but the press is no longer allowed to cover mass shootings.
You miss the point of the War on Drugs analogy. Here I only aim to show that another lofty federal policy that substantially expanded the state’s power has never come close to accomplishing its stated goal. People that want drugs can still acquire them. Just like people that want firearms will acquire them even when they are made illegal. This is similar to expanding state rights to protect against terrorism. I’m sure one of the reasons you would argue against this is because no amount of increase in state rights will completely eliminate terrorist acts. Yet when it comes to guns, you are all about increasing state power to eliminate all guns. Good luck with that.
Its kind of disappointing to see you fall back on this lame argument you used to give. As a libertarian I believe in democracy, in fact your insinuation is a little insulting. Nobody disputes the democratic process. To be perfectly frank i don’t understand how it’s relevant to what I’m saying.
December 17th, 2007 at 2:14 am
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