Heller: High Water?
Let’s see who is how stupid about Heller and gun laws, shall we?
Eugenue Robinson: stupid about the latter but not the former. All in all, a credible performance by the guy who has become my favorite newspaper columnist over the last year. On gun control itself, he writes
I realize that the now-defunct D.C. law was unusually comprehensive and restrictive and thus, in the legal sense, offered a bull’s-eye for the pro-gun lobby. I also know that the law was easy to attack on grounds of efficacy: Given all the handgun killings in the city, was the ban really having any beneficial impact?
But come on, it’s not as if the law was making gun violence in the city any worse — and it’s not as if striking down the law, and perhaps adding hundreds or thousands of weapons to the city, will make things any better. The law was flawed, but it was a lot better than nothing.
In other words, Robinson acknowledges that gun laws appear to have no real effect on crime one way or the other, but regards it as something like legal comfort food. But if gun ownership is an individual right and Heller vindicates that right, then striking down the District’s law does make “things any better.” It won’t affect crime rates one way or the other, but law-abiding citizens will be more free. Note that Robinson also is pretty smart about the Second Amendment itself:
The traditional argument in favor of gun control has been that this is a collective right, accorded to state militias. This has always struck me as a real stretch, if not a total dodge.
I’ve never been able to understand why the Founders would stick a collective right into the middle of the greatest charter of individual rights and freedoms ever written — and give it such pride of place — the No. 2 position, right behind such bedrock freedoms as speech and religion.
Exactly. Meanwhile, Publius at Obsidian Wings twists himself around the same problem:
Even if you’re not persuaded by Stevens’ dissent, he at least notes several powerful challenges to Scalia’s historical analysis. Just off the top of my head – (1) the original draft of the Second Amendment was more military-related;
So the framers revised the Second-Amendment to be less textually militia-focused and Pub takes this as evidence that we should regard it as more militia-focused? That makes . . . no sense.
Colbert King can’t decide whether to be smart or stupid in his column. It’s mostly stupid – he imagines that “the dudes who have been blowing away their fellow citizens with abandon since the law was put on the books 32 years ago” were merely RKBA enthusiasts in a hurry, as opposed to people completely indifferent to the law. For instance, as King notes without self-awareness, they shoot people dead even though it’s a crime. But he does find some spare outrage for the District government itself, making a point I haven’t seen elsewhere:
It didn’t have to turn out this way. City leaders had options.
In light of last year’s appellate decision, they could have tried to fashion new gun-control regulations to address issues of registration, licensing of gun ownership, and waiting periods for background checks. Instead, the city went for the whole enchilada, hoping against hope that the a Supreme Court led by John Roberts and dominated by Antonin Scalia would agree that an individual does not have a right to own a gun.
Hah!
EJ Dionne, probably my least-favorite liberal columnist year in and year out, blathers on about Heller’s supposed disrespect for precedent. “Respect for precedent,” aka stare decisis, is the last refuge of court-watching scoundrels. It’s the complaint you make when you sense none of your real arguments are going to carry the day. Don’t tell me Dionne regrets that the Supreme Court failed to respect the precedents of Lochner, Plessy vs. Ferguson or Betts vs. Brady. There have been Supreme Court decisions within the last two years upholding claimed Bush-era GWOT powers that I would happily see struck down next year. Besides, there isn’t much high-court precedent on Amendment II anyway.
Dahlia Lithwick was on the radio last night bemoaning the thirty years worth of laws invalidated by the Court’s “disrespect.” But if thirty years – or three hundred years – worth of laws flout individual rights, then they must go. That’s what it means to take individual rights seriously.
Not that they’re going. Radley Balko very smartly writes
Today’s ruling gave the right a rhetorical victory (remember, elections are “all about the judges!”), but I’m not sure what it accomplished in actually protecting Second Amendment rights. To be fair, Scalia explains that Heller was basically a case of first impression, and there’s much to still work out through litigation. But given the narrow reach of his opinion, I guess I’d just caution against too much optimism that any new litigation will come out the right way.
And Arthur Silber reminds us just how little “individual rights” are worth against the contemporary surveillance state anyway:
The Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures is an individual right. And we know what that’s worth. Yeah, baby.
Comment by jkc —
June 27, 2008 @ 9:23 am
How did I know that I was going to find original, unorthodox, fresh mixture of common sense and sharp insight on Heller at this website? Either I’m a genius, or a clairvoyant, or y’all just make it a pattern around here. (I think it’s the last.)
Here’s my attempt to say something vaguely new: The practical effect of this in terms of facts on the ground will be small and long-delayed.
Thugs don’t read SCOTUS decisions. And you can bet by the time DC comes up with new regulations, they will not be, ahem, customer-friendly. So it will be quite some time before someone legally defends home and hearth from invaders in DC with a legal firearm. Longer still before the word gets out to criminal-types. On the upside, this may make it much easier to appeal to juries for quasi-nullification.
Other Big Cities will be the same. They’ll gamely go on and figure out how to inconvenience the people who try to comply with the laws that impede their right to self-defense. Meanwhile, any availability of guns in any jurisdiction abutting the Big Cities with crime problems provides a convenient excuse for their inability to protect residents from crime.
Finally, crimes happen in a free society. It’s not something we should be complacent about. But we must recognize that a crime-free society is no more an option than a drug-free society. The national media market, which reports every crime as if it happened in your own goddamn back yard, is well-nigh criminal itself in conditioning people to think like hysterics, as if they were literally under constant siege.
If I had a prohibitionist mentality, I’d seek to ban regulate the sensationalist content of the news.
Comment by jkc —
June 27, 2008 @ 9:25 am
The last line should read:
Comment by Barry —
June 27, 2008 @ 9:47 am
Arthur’s post sums up my frustration with anarchism. He makes some really good points, and then follows up with:
“Dream of a stateless world. Don’t vote.”
Linking to a post which, frankly is stupid. If that were the first post by Arthur that I had ever read, I’d have written him off as a dumbf*ck.
We saw a president elected by a few hundred votes, and that based on bad ballots, bad counting, and the deliberate disenfranchisement of 10’s of thousands of African-Americans. The end result was that he was as powerful as if he had won in a landslide – even before 9/11 (IMHO, the fact that Bush was a supporter of the wealthy elites was critical here, but there will always be such supporters).
Comment by publius —
June 27, 2008 @ 10:02 am
A couple of quick responses:
1 – on the quote from me above, the idea is that there’s no need to express the individual rights aspect if the regular langauge already included it. otherwise, it makes the initial language redundant. in addition, you could argue that if people wanted to express it that way, there were ways of doing it. thus, it could well be an argument that they meant to exclude the individual-rights aspect (but to be honest, they probably weren’t thinking of it in 2008 terms)
2 – On Robinson’s point (and this I’ll probably write about this), it misses a key point about the Bill of Rights. People like Akhil Amar have argued that the Bill of Rights (or at least the early ones) werent libertarian provisions, but STATE protections.
In other words, they are more about federalism than individual rights. That’s why they say “Congress”. The establishment clause only makes sense as carving out a protection for states as to the central government.
In this sense, the 2nd amendement placement makes perfect sense — it was protecting the rights of states against standing armies, which motivated the amendment in the first place. Look too at Madison’s original draft.
(On other matters, I liked your comment on keeping the surge in perspective).
Comment by publius —
June 27, 2008 @ 10:05 am
sorry – i read too quickly. i thought you were talking about my #2 (state constitutions mentioning it). so scratch #1 above.
On this point though, I think the idea is that the external history (including drafting history) gives a sense of how the words were understood. thus, it provides some evidence that the military context was on people’s mind. also, the state provisions on this were usually included in sections on standing armies.
but again, even if you disagree with these examples, the larger point i was trying to make is that the history isn’t clear,a nd judges should stay out of this game
Comment by abb1 —
June 27, 2008 @ 11:12 am
But if gun ownership is an individual right and Heller vindicates that right, then striking down the District’s law does make “things any better.â€
Sounds like you believe that it’s a god-given right or something. And so, if it’s taken away, God is going get mad, start a flooding and drown everybody. That must be the reason why ’striking down’ (appropriate terminology!) this law make things better.
That it makes law-abiding citizens “more free” is not obvious at all. As the guy says in the first quote “adding hundreds or thousands of weapons to the city” is likely to make things worse; and libertarian for “worse” is “less free”.
Comment by Jim Henley —
June 27, 2008 @ 11:14 am
Except that’s the part where Robinson is full of shit. There’s no reason to believe that striking down the District law will add any particular number of weapons to the city, or that whatever weapons get added is likely to make “things” worse.
Comment by abb1 —
June 27, 2008 @ 11:37 am
You may be right, I don’t know, but “no reason to believe” seems to a bit too strong. I like the contrarian angle, but seriously, when something gets banned there is at least a superficial reason to believe that there is going to be less of it.
Comment by joe —
June 27, 2008 @ 11:49 am
The only correlation I can see between gun control laws and crime rates is that high crime rates are often followed by the adoption of broad gun control laws.
Like minimum wage hikes and unemployment, there is an internally logical argumen to be made that changing law X will lead to outcome Y, but the data from the real world doesn’t seem to make the case very strongly one way or another.
If gun control laws really worked, then we’d have a conundrum on our hands.
Comment by Jim Henley —
June 27, 2008 @ 11:58 am
In the spirit of comity, I will add to joe’s comment that relaxing gun laws seems to have no real effect on crime rates either. The strenuous efforts of John Lott in the US and Janet Malcolm in England to show the “more guns less crime” phenomenon turned out to be slipshod work or outright flimflam.
I think it was Mark Kleiman a few years ago who argued that, Hey, these laws don’t seem to make a difference one way or the other, so we might as well err on the side of the individual right.
Comment by Thoreau —
June 27, 2008 @ 12:17 pm
I agree with Jim and joe.
Regarding the ruling, I don’t see it as having much practical effect in the immediate future. What it does is set a legal floor, ruling out court rulings or gun control laws based on militia readings of the second amendment. Anything beyond that will have to be legislated and then no doubt litigated.
The biggest practical effect of this is probably to set the stage for more litigation. My understanding is that gun owner organizations have been reluctant to fight gun control laws in court precisely because they didn’t know how it would turn out, so they stuck to electoral and legislative processes. Say what you will for or against that approach and for or against the litigation route, but now that a floor has been established I think we’ll see more gun owners bringing suits.
I fear that gun control will turn out to be the next abortion, as far as Supreme Court appointments and Presidential elections. I hope I’m wrong.
Comment by Kevin J. Maroney —
June 27, 2008 @ 12:36 pm
I fear that gun control will turn out to be the next abortion…
I know people who claim that they would vote for Democrats for president except that the party is run by the gun-grabbers–specifically said that they voted against Gore and Kerry because of this issue and no other. This, despite the fact that the Democratic party platform has (IIRC) explicitly endorsed an individual-rights interpretation of the 2nd A at least since the late 1990s.
I, personally, think those people are lying–that they will always find a reason not to vote Democrat.
Comment by abb1 —
June 27, 2008 @ 12:38 pm
…high crime rates are often followed by the adoption of broad gun control laws.
Even if we accept this as a fact (for the sake of argument), the word ‘often‘ here strongly implies that this is specific to the content of these laws and other circumstances. I don’t think sweeping generalizations work in this case.
Comment by Thoreau —
June 27, 2008 @ 12:49 pm
BTW, I like Bruce Baugh’s comment over at Obsidian Wings.
Trackback by Unpartisan.com Political News and Blog Aggregator —
June 27, 2008 @ 2:02 pm
Supreme Court strikes down D.C. gun ban…
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Washington D.C.’s sweeping ban on handguns is unconstitut…
Comment by joe —
June 27, 2008 @ 2:06 pm
abb1,
It’s beyond dispute that the heydays of gun control laws were during prohibition, and from about 1968-the mi90s. The correlation with dramatic increases in gun crime is pretty apparent; and what’s more, there are very plausible causes (ie, the growth of black markets in illegal substances) to explain those increases.
Comment by abb1 —
June 27, 2008 @ 2:20 pm
So, you are saying that the prohibition and the drug war were the main reasons for crime spikes and that gun control laws were, in turn, a consequence of these spikes. Sounds about right to me.
This, however, doesn’t seem to tell us anything about effectiveness of gun control.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
June 27, 2008 @ 2:40 pm
Thanks, Thoreau.
Research request: has anyone looked at gun control laws and crime rates with attention to polling about the local popularity of the laws? I suspect that gun control laws work when they are backed by a broad popular local consensus, and seen as one part of what “we the people” do about “them, the assholes using guns to hurt and rob the rest of us”. This would put them in the tradition of early popular temperance efforts, and such. But I went poking for data and didn’t find much, so I toss out the hypothesis and wonder if it holds up at all.
Comment by joe —
June 27, 2008 @ 6:52 pm
abb1,
That’s exactly what I’m saying.
Comment by Jesurgislac —
June 27, 2008 @ 7:37 pm
Given that individual gun ownership is ineffective (at best) for personal self-defense (at worst, owning a gun is more likely to get you killed than not), and given that (demonstrably) personal gun ownership is useless in defending civil liberties, what then is the point of clinging to the interpretation of the Second Amendment that ignores the fact that it refers to a well-regulated militia, not to individuals?
(I note that it’s not until the early 20th century – with the advent of cheap, mass-produced handguns and ammunition – that it occurred to governments to legislate gun control, because until then, such legislation wasn’t needed.)
Comment by Hesiod —
June 27, 2008 @ 9:36 pm
Heller isn’t the end. Scalia’s opinion was unclear on whether the 2nd amendment was “incorporated” by the 14th amendment into protecting indvididual rights from the actions and regualtions by state governments.
Footnote 23 implies it wasn’t. [Two post 14 amendment decisions declared that the 2nd amendment only restrained Congress, not the states].
And, more importantly, the opinion still allows the banning of “unusual” weapons (to be defined by the Courts, aparently) and to deny ownership and possession rights to “crminalsÆand the “mentally ill,” etc.
Not to mention it also says that restricting WHERE you can bring that gun outside the home is also permissible (i.e. not in schools or Gvt buildings to name two).
So, congratulations folks! You got the functional equivalent of the Supreme Court ruling that “Civil Unions” are constitutional but not “same sex marriage.”
Comment by Nicholas Weininger —
June 27, 2008 @ 9:41 pm
Yeah, I’m not impressed by this. Scalia is not a principled person and his principle is not on display here. He is instinctually almost incapable of restricting the government’s power to do anything it wants, and goes to great lengths to try and hedge in the scope of his decision.
Anthony Kennedy on the other hand is my new hero– the only one on the pro-liberty side of both this one and Boumedienne, plus he wrote the Lawrence decision. Sadly neither Prez candidate is at all likely to appoint more like him.
Comment by Nicholas Weininger —
June 27, 2008 @ 9:52 pm
Jesurgislac gives in #20 an amusing example of “If 2+2 = 5, what is the point of clinging to 2+2 = 4?” reasoning.
All of her premises are of course arguable at best, but more than that they reflect the grotesque evil of the collectivist fallacy of overgeneralization. Suppose for example it were well established that, as a matter of statistical averages, people who owned guns were more likely to get killed than others. To any decent, moral person, that wouldn’t argue at all against the individual right of self-defense.
Why not? Because individuals are different. In some circumstances, in some places, for some people, guns are extremely effective for self-defense– as indeed thousands of successful instances of such self-defense show. And the right of those people to choose how to defend themselves is infinitely more important than achieving the best statistical outcome over the whole population. It may be that most of their fellows would choose badly, but so what? In blunter language still: you may not rightly restrain the intelligent minority’s liberty in order to protect the mass of mediocrities from their own mistakes.
This of course has implications far beyond the gun issue, which are left as an exercise for the reader.
Comment by Avram —
June 28, 2008 @ 6:12 pm
Kevin, I’ve just now looked over the Democratic Party platforms for 1996, 2000, 2004. They all boil down to more or less the same position on guns — basically trying to reassure hunters that they can keep their rifles while also assuring soccer moms that handguns will be kept away from bad men — but in the earlier two documents the emphasis is very different. They’re full of fnord-words. The ‘96 platform goes on about protecting our neighborhoods, out children, about felons and stalkers, about “military-style guns” that are designed to kill people. The 2000 platform mentions the Columbine shootings. And they go on at several paragraphs’ length.
The 2004 platform devotes only a single sentence to guns, and starts right off with “We will protect Americans’ Second Amendment right to own firearms”.
Comment by Jesurgislac —
July 1, 2008 @ 12:54 pm
Nicholas: as indeed thousands of successful instances of such self-defense show
Ah. It’s your contention, then, that because “thousands” of people in the US say they are alive today because they owned a gun, we can ignore completely the millions killed in the US because they owned a gun?
Interesting arithmetic.
And the right of those people to choose how to defend themselves is infinitely more important than achieving the best statistical outcome over the whole population.
Infinitely more important, I see. Well, that certainly puts the difference between thousands who claim they lived because they owned a gun and millions definitely dead because they owned a gun into perspective. The difference between a thousand and a million is considerable, but the difference between infinity and a million is always more than that.
Comment by Leonard —
July 1, 2008 @ 1:38 pm
Actually, Jesurgislac, the number of defensive uses of guns is at least hundreds of thousands, and probably on the order of a million events per year. The biggest survey conducted suggested 2.45 million. (Here’s a wiki page on this.)
By contrast, on killings using guns, La Wik offers this:
Thus, homocides using guns made up roughly 12400 deaths per year. 930 accidents, also a negative. I would not count suicides at all — people have the right to kill themselves if they want, and guns, like Dr. Kevorkian, make that easier for them. The 620 legal killings are a net plus, mostly criminals stopped in the act of victimizing someone.
So, we are paying some 13000-14000 deaths per year, to allow some 1 million to 2 million defensive uses of guns. Many of these, had there been no resistance, would have ended up with the victim being killed by the aggressor. Even using extremely blinkered utilitarian calculus, this is a huge net gain for us collectively.
Of course, for libertarians, it’s not really about utility. If you want to understand how many of us think about gun rights, I refer you to the essay A Nation of Cowards:
Before I read that I was proRKBA on Constitutional grounds, where the meaning is clear. And I was also convinced by the hard data that utility-wise guns in the hands of the people was a good idea. But I did not really feel it as an important part of liberty. Now I feel it.
Comment by Leonard —
July 1, 2008 @ 2:03 pm
Incidentally, there’s one other thing you might want to consider re: the people, armed. That is, that historically speaking, gun control seems to be necessary before genocide. I’d conjecture that the people, armed, can and will fight back if the state tries to kill them all; the state knows this, and thus does not try.
As I once wrote on my blog:
I should think this bears some thinking on, for a utilitarian.
Comment by Jesurgislac —
July 2, 2008 @ 3:27 am
Even using extremely blinkered utilitarian calculus, this is a huge net gain for us collectively.
First of all, I apologize for getting my stats wrong, and thank you for correcting me.
Nevertheless, I’m not sure why you feel that 31 000 people dead each year are a net gain. Your faithful belief that the numbers killed would have been even greater if the US, like most developed countries, regulated the sale and ownership of firearms, is nonsense: the US has higher rates of firearm-related homicides, suicides, and accidents than any other developed country. See
Rates of Homicide, Suicide, and Firearm-Related Death Among Children — 26 Industrialized Countries .
That is, that historically speaking, gun control seems to be necessary before genocide.
Wow. That’s a reach. I mean, beyond astonishing flight of fancy. Example of recent genocide: Rwanda.
A common tool found in most Rwandan households, Hutu and Tutsi alike, is the machete. This was also the main weapon used to slaughter Hutu. Were your notion true – that being armed prevents genocide – the Tutsi would not have attacked the Hutu.
If you were thinking of Germany, the first gun control laws passed in Germany were legislated by the Weimar Republic to disarm the Nazis and other small private-army type groups. Late 1920s, I think. The notion that Hitler would never have set out to exterminate the Jews, gays, gypsies, and other groups if he’d faced a generally armed population is just criminally stupid – I’m aware this is a popular myth among gun nuts, but it betrays a real lack of historical awareness about how Hitler came to power and how the concentration camps began and when the death camps were built.
Comment by Leonard —
July 2, 2008 @ 1:58 pm
J, I do not feel that the 31000 are a gain. Nor did I say that. They are a loss. Only the 620 justifiable killings are a gain.
(Although, parenthetically, I must point out, again, that the majority of those 30000 deaths are suicides. And that as a good liberal, I view suicide as the right of everyone, inasmuch as we own ourselves absolutely. I do believe that there are some suicides who know what they are doing, and who have made a rational choice to kill themselves rather than face awful suffering only to die, anyway. Thus you cannot say what the net utility of all those suicides is.)
That said, let me accept your implicit reasoning and simply count every suicide with a gun as equal to a murder (repugnant though this claim is). You still have not really grasped my argument. We have, in the negative column (yes, I’m agreeing with you), 30000 bad deaths. Bad, bad deaths! But, in the positive column, we have some 1 to 2 million defensive uses of guns. All of these stopped a crime, or what appeared to be a crime developing. If even 1 to 3% of those crimes would have ended up as murders, which I do not think unlikely, we have your 30000 lives and the columns balance.
It is exactly the defensive uses of guns which we would lose the vast majority of, with the sort of victim disarmament that, say, Britain has. Because law-abiding people follow gun control laws; criminals do not respect them as such.
As for Rwanda, once again you are flat out, dead wrong. And not only about who the victims were (the victims were the Tutsis, fyi). You’re wrong on the main point in question: was there gun control in place? There was. Did it prevent the victims from getting arms? Yes, it did. The Hutu militias mainly had machetes (as did the victims), but the aggressors also had some guns. Note what wiki says about that: Some militia members were able to acquire AK-47 assault rifles by completing requisition forms. The militias who did the genocides had a least a sprinkling of guns; the victims did not. (Regular Hutu Army units also took part in the genocide; they had guns.)
Could the Tutsis have defended themselves with arms? Well, in fact, they did. It was armed Tutsis who overthrew the genocidal state, which finally put an end to the genocide. Even more Tutsis would have been killed had they not fought back with guns.
So, the case you’ve specificially selected as your disproving counterexample is in fact a perfect example — for my argument! I’m sorry, but your ideology is making you look like a fool. It would have taken only a short googling to find out that there was gun control in Rwanda. A brief stop at wiki would have made clear why the genocide stopped.
As for the Nazis, first, it does not matter who passes a gun control regime. Once it is in place, whatever regime gets into control of the state gets the genocidal benefits of it. I am sure, if the Weimar leaders would have known what was to come, they would have acted differently. But, they didn’t know, did they? I am sure they had the best of motives, as you do. Can you guarantee me that America will never be run by a genocidal regime? You cannot.
As for whether or not having arms amonst the people would have prevented the Nazi genocide, I tend to agree with you that it would not have. The people they went after were too easily made “other”, and not numerous enough to make effective resistance. So what difference does it make? Well, genocide, even from crazy fascists, doesn’t just pop up fully planned. It is preceded by other measures. (In fact it is always preceded by gun control!) Thus gun control should be a warning to us. As soon as a government attempts to withhold arms from its people (or a select subgroup, even more), they are potentially in danger from it. When a government both disarms a group and talks openly about killing them (another factor preceding many genocides), then warning bells should be going off bloody murder.
But to answer your unspoken question: no, I was not thinking of any specific genocide when I wrote that: that’s because all of the better-known 20th century genocides happened after gun controls. The reason I wrote “seems” as versus “is”, is that (a) you can never prove anything definitively from history, and (b) it seems possible to me that there was no gun control preceding some of the lesser genocides; there are a lot of them, and I certainly do not know anything about the legal regimes in a most of those places. Just the big and famous ones.
So, just to summarize: the downside of guns is up to 30000 excess deaths. And lots of injuries, rapes, etc., committed w/ gun. The upside is first, 2 million defensive uses. Some unknown fraction of these might have ended up as deaths, injuries, rapes, etc. But we just don’t know. And second, that guns insure us against genocide. Genocide, as I pointed out above, has historically in the 20th century been about 100 times as deadly as private criminals. And that’s a rough computation using world population: if you look only at populations subject to effective gun control, the rate is going to be considerably higher.
Comment by Jesurgislac —
July 3, 2008 @ 6:19 pm
So, the case you’ve specificially selected as your disproving counterexample is in fact a perfect example — for my argument!
Oh right, so your contention is now that the 500,000 Tutsis slaughtered by Hutus with machetes are an argument that both sides should have had guns? Because if the Hutus had had guns instead of machetes, somehow this would have meant fewer Tutsis got killed? Your “perfect example”? Huh.
The upside is first, 2 million defensive uses.
Gosh, you are lucky to know about all these crimes that never happened.
Look, you can fantasise all you like that somehow or other, 2 million people didn’t die because they had guns. The facts are that people die by the tens of thousand every year in the US because the US neither regulates nor controls firearms.
The people they went after were too easily made “otherâ€, and not numerous enough to make effective resistance. So what difference does it make? Well, genocide, even from crazy fascists, doesn’t just pop up fully planned. It is preceded by other measures. (In fact it is always preceded by gun control!)
No, not always. There’s a big exception you’re not thinking of: neither genocide nor ethnic cleansing in the United States was preceded by gun control.
Further, your argument makes no sense. Gun control happens because in sane countries, when guns become cheap and readily available, it makes sense to regulate the buying and selling of guns: otherwise you end up like the US with tens of thousands of people killed by firearms each year.
Most countries with gun control laws have never had genocidal attacks or ethnic cleansing. At least one country where serious political attempts have been made to prevent gun control laws has had both genocide and ethnic cleansing. Ergo, your correlation makes no sense.
(But I am extremely embarrassed about mixing up Hutu and Tutsi, though – that’ll teach me not to look it up in wikipedia before I type, but, still…)
Comment by Leonard —
July 3, 2008 @ 11:40 pm
Anyone can make a mistake. Most people don’t know the groups involved off the top of their head, much less who killed who.
Yes. Exactly. Though I think the number is more like 700000, and another 70000 or so Hutu “moderates”.
Note that preventing only that one genocide, just a wafer-thin 770000 human lives, would make up for America’s yearly gun homocide total for 55 years! And that’s if you believe that every single one of those homocides would have been prevented but for guns, which is quite a stupid idea.
Yes, exactly.
Here’s your problem, Jes. You are thinking in strictly one-variable terms. We go back into history, we change one thing, but we do not let anyone notice it or act differently upon it. (Until we do.) So, you are imagining that the Hutu state organizes a mass killing, exactly as it did, and starts carrying it out, and all of a sudden the Tutsis have guns. Then both sides kill like crazy, and I suppose in your mind it’s even worse because guns are baad, and just make things worse, but can never, ever deter anyone. So in this scenario, not only do the 770000 die, but also a bunch of the Hutu aggressors, so it’s even worse.
This is a possible counterfactual, I suppose, but it’s not very interesting, because it assumes the Hutu were stupid. They kept guns out of Tutsi hands with their gun control laws for a very good reason: it’s far easier, and much safer, to attack disarmed victims. This is not hard to understand.
Try to wrap your brain around the idea that if the Tutsi had been armed, the Hutu state would not have tried genocide. Further, even if the Hutu state miscalculated and tried it, fewer Tutsis would have died, far fewer, and far more Hutus would have, especially the most aggressive (that is, guilty) ones. And the event which finally stopped the genocide — the overthrow of the state by armed Tutsis — would have happened sooner. Many of the dead Tutsis would have been saved, 100s of thousands at least. Perhaps even a majority.
As for the Indians, sure, count them if you want. Then I need only add a caveat that a gun control always precedes genocide except when a state wants to kill off people that are racially, ethnically, and spacially separate, and also technologically, organizationally and numerically inferior. Then it just kills them; it doesn’t need the finesse of taking their arms first. OK? Now, you go hunting again and we can go around the merry-go-round, yet again, until you are willing to face the historical facts. Gun control precedes genocide.
(Incidentally, there were some legislative attempts to keep arms from Indians; they just were not successful, because the Indian tribes in their own lands were not subject to Federal or state law. Most of the early gun control law in America were crafted to disarm blacks, for obvious reasons.)
Yes, the idea that gun control has preceded all the major genocides is surprising. That’s why you feel so horrified as you read my posts. I seem rational. I don’t make lots of spelling errors. I’ve got all my teeth. It’s unsettling. Could it be that a progressive idea, a veritable mainstay of the movement, is outright dangerous? Could gun control in the USA even be racist? Heaven save us!
Well, now you are just as lucky, since I’m telling you about them for your edification. Again, you are not taking self-defense seriously. It’s deadly serious.
And you may fantasize all you like that somehow or other, I think that. But I don’t. I merely think that a small fraction, perhaps five percent, of attempted criminal attacks that are deterred by guns would have ended up in murders, or the other really bad stuff that criminals do. Rape, injury, etc. These thoughts of mine are based on data: what are your fantasies based on?
Again, you are refusing to really grapple with a very important aspect of this debate. Don’t stick your head in the sand. People are out there, right now, fending off criminals with guns. Not only does it work, but it is the safest method of defending yourself in a robbery or assault. It’s safer than non-resistance. It’s safer than trying to run away.
(Incidentally, as you may know, most police use guns. Police use guns for the same reason that they work for civilians: they are the safest tools for handling confrontations with criminals.)
As for your facts, you cannot know how many people would die in a gun-controlled USA. Neither do I. But it is not zero. And it is quite possible it wouldn’t even be fewer people.