A libertarian moment, after all ?

A broader view from the left, 2008: Policing Dissent by Luis A. Fernandez.

I’ll wait to see what actual official action gets proposed or supported by libertarians. Anyone can talk; we’ll see what those who can legislate choose to do.

Libertarians united against overreach? Droll. In so many ways.

US rightwing libertarianism looks indistinguishable from the Tea Party in regard to destroying the unity of the Republicans.

While libertarians stretch from right to left, left libertarians are not as likely to decry Social Security, Medicare, and environmental protections. Also the Democratic Party has a longer history of opposition to police brutality, since Chicago ’68. So it will be easy for today’s Democratic politicians to game this, and left libertarians are more likely to continue to vote Democratic.

The condition is not symmetrical on the right. Right libertarians introduce a split into the GOP electorate on issues of law and order, and on issues of social conservatism, as John Quiggin noted in the previous post on this subject.

It is hard to escape the feeling that what we are seeing is that, far from being a new “moment” for libertarians to shine in the sun, the Republican Party is so fractured and fractious that its longtime fringes are able to boost themselves into the tawdry limelight, for a round of fundraising.

And find that they immediately have too many squares to circle, in order to gain wider acceptance.

Consider the case of Rand Paul, who is already running away from any unscripted, uncontrolled encounters with the voters or the press, as if he were already President, and not a true libertarian. His libertarianism appears to be a convenient and perhaps quite temporary slogan, in order to gain recognition. I would think the easiest way for other Republican candidates to challenge him is to say to the Republican voters, “Why not just vote Democratic?”

@Peter K-
Thanks for the link-

Regarding the article itself, I keep seeing disparaging references to the Broken Windows theory mostly from those on the left.

While I understand and agree how the theory can be made to fit neatly with the authoritarian mindset, I also think there is much there for liberals to appreciate.

The concept that there are subtle signals sent in even minor lawbreaking shouldn’t be controversial, but I haven’t seen much discussion about how Broken Windows can stand as a challenge to market fundamentalism.

Market fundamentalism, the idea that free markets can produce a good outcome for society, rests on the idea of creative destruction, of the anarchic aspect of competition.

Yet this anarchy itself (“Move fast and break things”) is a form of the strong individualism that Broken Windows criticises.

If a broken window sends a signal about lawlessness and insecurity, doesn’t also a boarded up window of a bankrupt business send a similar signal?

How do we cheer for economic insecurity while criticising physical insecurity? How do we criticise the street hustler playing 3 card monte, while applauding the sellers of impossibly low mortgages?

There’s certainly some room for common ground here, and perhaps even some actual progress. But I still think there are some pretty big obstacles. Most obviously, there’s the militarization of the far-right, represented by “open carry” and the heavily armed mobs that have been seen backing Cliven Bundy and threatening immigrant children, with the enthusiastic support of Fox News.

This is a key observation. Propertarians aren’t sticking their necks out at all by coming down hard on the government. To them, the government is the source of all evil, and many even say the only power that can “coerce.” We will have found some common ground once they extend the idea of force and coercion into the private sector, and fight against ALEC and the Koch brothers and laws like Stand Your Ground. But that taint happenin’.

One of the clearest lines of demarcation for propertarians appeared when Rand Paul was corned by Rachel Maddow on his views regarding the Civil Rights Act. Present day right-libertarians — most of them, anyway — say they are against the government discriminating against people based on race, gender, age, etc. etc. And they can craft their speech in such a way that it makes it sound like they’re against all discrimination. But we need to read the fine print. Cuz if it inv0lves the private sector and “property rights,” then all of that goes out of the window.

If the killer in Ferguson had been a store owner, and not a police officer, I doubt there would be any “libertarian moment” to speak of.

….Moreover, for a substantial portion of the gun rights movement, what they seem to be aiming for isn’t so much a change in the law as a change in the culture. They want people to carry more guns. Some of them think people who aren’t prepared to defend themselves in public with lethal force should be ashamed of themselves.

The problem is that if that if some of these gun advocates got their way, militarized police become a good idea. The police have to be equipped in proportion to the threats they’re likely to face.

I want to imagine a society that worked in a libertarian-sort of way.

Everybody goes armed, except maybe some people have armbands that say they don’t. Some people have armbands that say they are police. But people don’t use their guns much at all, being normal people.

Ideally the laws should be simple enough that anybody can understand them. You mostly shouldn’t need a lawyer to tell whether you are breaking a law.

If there’s a question whether somebody has broken a law, he should come to court and say his side of it. He should get told that he needs to come in and explain. If he doesn’t show up on time, then he should come to court later and say why he didn’t do it before, and present whatever evidence he has.

If somebody refuses to come to court, or if he is a criminal who refuses to accept the court’s judgement, then he is probably an armed criminal. Everybody who meets him should advise him to surrender himself. They might possibly choose to advise him at gunpoint. People who wear police armbands are not really necessary for that. But if it does come to a gunfight, everybody ought to usually assume that the guys with the police armbands are on the right side and the people who’re shooting at them are on the wrong side. When they’re asking somebody to come to court and tell the truth, and that somebody is shooting at them, who’s right?

Shooting at people with police armbands would be a serious crime in itself and an admission of guilt, and using the prestige of the police armband for anything other than court business would also be a serious crime.

We wouldn’t need much of a police force. If somebody with a police armband asks someone to come to court or go into custody, and they refuse, it might make sense for him to back off the first time. Sure, he can ask everybody nearby to assist, but maybe better to give the perp a chance to think it over. So if you are the victim of some gross injustice you might get a chance to find journalists and bloggers and tell them about it, get some publicity before you turn yourself in. Or if you feel strongly enough, become an outlaw. Tell everybody who will listen why you’re doing it, and they can confront you if they choose to. If you strongly believe the law is wrong, or that it is commonly misapplied, this is probably an effective way to get publicity for your view. But you might get shot. You have to really believe it.

What kind of police would we need? We’d need science types to study evidence. We’d need internet experts to find internet secrets and business fraud experts to deal with fraud. Etc. We probably wouldn’t need many who are professional at violence.

I find the idea pleasing. Why can’t it work for us?

1. Our laws are complicated, expensive, and unfair. They don’t get sufficient respect from the public to let that system work.

2. In practice, we might wind up with a sort of arms race. People who expect to be involved in legal issues might wear body armor. People who expect confrontations with body armor might wear special guns with special ammo, leading to better body armor, etc. That would be expensive and wasteful.

3. We already have professional police who need to have considerable crime to justify their income. They create criminals, probably more than an amateur system could handle in the beginning.

There might be other problems too.

A lot of this comes down to a rather dangerous expansion in the idea of property rights. The Second Amendment is not about consumer choice. It is not an amendment that guarantees unlimited consumer choice. It just says “keep and bear arms.” It doesn’t say keep and bear any arms, without limits on lethality, capacity, firepower, number, size, etc. etc. etc. If the amendment read “keep and bear suits,” and we banned polyester suits — as we should — the right to keep and bear suits would not be infringed.

So, first we move from 200 years of precedent that says the “right” is a collective one, tied to the state, to it being an individual right after Heller, to yet a further expansion under the auspices of the NRA and right-libertarians more generally. Now the right is to match or exceed the firepower of government, and the ostensible support for this right is that government is “tyrannical” . . . . which it certainly is in Ferguson at the moment, or when it bashed OWS heads in, or at Kent State, or overseas in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Indonesia, Central and South America, etc. etc.

The problem being, of course, is that a bunch of atomized individuals, albeit armed to the teeth, are no match for the world’s lone super power, and the idea that we all have some sort of “natural right” to AR-15s is self-evidently bizarre. Aside from police brutality, the right’s idea of “tyranny” doesn’t match up with the majority’s. The majority doesn’t see taxation as tyranny. The majority doesn’t see the ACA as tyranny. The majority doesn’t see asking Cliven Bundy to pay his taxes and his fees for grazing on public lands as tyranny. But the folks who do have militarized themselves and are zealous enough to believe they have “the right” to be judge, jury and executioner (of their fellow Americans), which, obviously, makes them “tyrannical.”

This is a war, and the right is in it to win it. I think the left, in general, doesn’t even acknowledge that it exists.

just to expand on @16, any sort of common cause between left and right libertarians on police militarization that does not address the broader issue of the general militarization of American life/culture will not last. Specifically, a situation where the firearms of our police are controlled nearly as tightly as those of our citizens is flat out unsustainable. It only takes one flashy news story where the assailant is armed to the teeth, and you’ve got the surplus from operation desert storm back in Kansas again.

Plus, the ‘militarized police’ angle only scratches the surface (& I am surprised that Konczal did not address this in the essay linked above). The issue is neoliberalism writ large. The scaling back of the welfare state, public goods, and social protections has intensified the need for security services. Over the last generation or so, concurrent with the militarization of the police, we see a swell in private security services.

While it is nice to know that the libertarian right can properly identify jack-booted thugs as such, I am not convinced that they are ready with a workable solution, at least not for the long term. I also worry that there is a certain logical path that starts with |less toys and guns for police, and ends with |heavily armed citizen militias patrolling local areas.

Libertarianism is just the Tracy emin of. American politics, whole lot of hullabaloo but at the end of the day it’s just a bed full of ••••

Insight into why they disagree with me isn’t denial that they disagree.

Well, if the NRA were just a front for the gun companies, I can’t believe it would be all that hard to reach some kind of mutually beneficial detente with the Democrats. I don’t think the Dems, at this point, are even proposing anything that would cut into industry profits all that much.

I’m not convinced the NRA is libertarian, it’s much much bigger than libertarianism and gets support from plenty of other areas, most members are only committed to gun rights.

“I also worry that there is a certain logical path that starts with |less toys and guns for police, and ends with |heavily armed citizen militias patrolling local areas.”

But the actual history of NRA support for gun rights is the complete reverse of this, it’s a response to police/atf militarisation not a cause. It supported gun control though the political assassinations and 60s and early 70s, taking the opposite side to the black panthers who did support gun rights. Then it’s become progressively more extreme with the succession of botched gun control incidents by militarised law enforcement which was kicked off with the Ken Ballew raid in 1971 and was followed by all the familiar names (Waco, Ruby Ridge etc). The reason gun rights are so important is many minds is otherwise suspicion of possession can get you shot dead for no good reason.

@13
Really, – those – are the problems? As opposed to, say, people organising in groups to wage violence on other people?

A large part of the NRA’s silence concerning Ferguson is attributable to the lack of clear facts. Like most large organizations, the NRA is rather risk averse, (Which is why it wasn’t the NRA that won the Heller case.) and unlike the other side in this fight, does not benefit from a media willing to shove anything embarrassing they say down the memory hole.

So they’re not going to issue any statements about Ferguson until the facts are clear. Which, let us admit, they are not yet.

“I thought that everybody knew the hard core of the NRA are the people who want to be ready for when the race war breaks out. ”

Yes, everybody who knows nothing about the NRA knows this. Like Mark Twain said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

It’s always tempting to assume the worst of people you oppose.

Personal gun ownership is perfectly consistent with emphasis on individual rights, individual pursuit of happiness being the main focus and a fundamental human right. As opposed to illiberal ideologies with the highest priority given to, say, greatness of the nation, class struggle, or religious devotion. If I want to buy a nuclear-armed submarine, and I can’t be accused of conspiring to commit any crimes, then how is it any of your business? The most you could demand from me is getting a liability insurance.

And if you advocate something like ‘yes, individualism, but be reasonable, and better safe than sorry’, then understand that ‘reasonable’ may vary, so here you’re at the mercy of a ballot box, and that the arms manufacturers only do their best to pursue their happiness.

If I want to buy a nuclear-armed submarine, and I can’t be accused of conspiring to commit any crimes, then how is it any of your business? The most you could demand from me is getting a liability insurance.

That works for me. If you want to buy a nuclear-armed submarine, and you can find a reputable insurer who will issue you liability insurance for the maximum damage you can do, then go right ahead.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Safety-and-Security/Safety-of-Plants/Liability-for-Nuclear-Damage/

Oops!

If you want to insure a nuclear power plant, you get something like $12.5 billion insurance of which a little is provided by a pool of 60 insurance companies, more is provided by a pool of all the nuclear power plant operators, and then the government chips in the rest at no cost.

If you have an accident and your nuke accidentally damages a US city, what do you suppose the maximum damage might be?

I doubt you can get insurance at all for the case that you do it on purpose. But if you can get private insurance to cover the maximum damage if your nuke goes off for any reason, from insurers who can actually pay and who will be held responsible, then I won’t stand in your way.

Hey! What an idea! Maybe we should get gun-owners’ insurance, like automobile insurance! The insurance company notes the average financial loss from gunshot wounds and deaths, and offers insurance that becomes mandatory in some states. The rates could vary depending on risk factors. Like, if you promise to keep all your guns locked up in an industry-approved gun safe and take them out only to go to a shooting range on Thursdays, you might get a rate as low as $5/year, but if you shoot somebody and it isn’t Thursday then you are 100% personally liable….

“What irks me about a lot of libertarian arguments is that they’re essentially complaints about things that came into existence precisely because the world libertarians aspire to already existed, and people didn’t want it.”

What’s more, there are places in the world that are still like that – where a minimalist state maximizes personal freedom and self-sufficiency – yet they refuse to go live there. Perhaps because they’re uniformly awful places.

“If I want to buy a nuclear-armed submarine, and I can’t be accused of conspiring to commit any crimes, then how is it any of your business?”

Because we’re capable of reason, and understand the only purpose to a nuclear-armed submarine is to cause indiscriminate death and destruction to far away people and places; and that the sort of people who want one can’t be trusted to possess one?

“Which is as true of governments as individuals…”

Yes and no. You can argue the deterrent power of nuclear-armed submarines at the level of nation states, but it’s hard to come up with a similar argument which reasonably applies to individuals. And, some forms of government are better at constraining government power than others, while pretty much all are better at constraining the behavior of individuals with power than is anarchy.

Brett @ 40

Do you support/advocate demilitarization?

J Thomas if you shoot somebody and it isn’t Thursday then you are 100% personally liable….

A policy that protects the insurance company! You may have a future as a neoliberal yet.

JThomas: “It sounds silly said like that, but something like it could work in some circumstances. Imagine that everybody is armed all the time, and also that there are plenty of good jobs available. The mafia tries to coerce people but when they do, 10% of the victims are brave and kill on average one enforcer before they themselves are killed. It might not take long before most of the enforcers choose to go into less dangerous work.”

What is this ‘mafia’ you speak of? It must be something new, since if we go back not that far in time, lots of people *were* armed.

Is it some Post-WWII/New Deal thing?

J Thomas: The mafia tries to coerce people but when they do, 10% of the victims are brave and kill on average one enforcer before they themselves are killed. It might not take long before most of the enforcers choose to go into less dangerous work.

What’s the Darwinian process — the competitive equilibrium? An arms race in which enforcers improve their skills, and the brave enforcees are winnowed from the population?

A responsible gun owner’s syllogism:

The Crips know the Bloods are heavily armed.
The Bloods know the Crips are heavily armed.
A violent criminal will be deterred by a firearm in the possession of his potential victim.

Therefore, there is very little violence between the Crips and the Bloods.

(Pay no attention to the empirical data.)

It’s probably my liberal prejudices talking, but it seems to me that it comes down to a contest to see who will organize the government, for what purposes, by what means, and according to what design.

It might be a warrior elite, heavily armed and adolescent in its ideas, which dominates the countryside, in the feudal manner of William the Conqueror. It might be the descendants of that warrior elite, transmuted by time and peace, into a guild of lawyers working for a aristocracy of landlords, arguing over legitimating fictions like property law. It might be a secret society, like the Camorra, acting variously as champions of the community, patrons of corrupt politicians, and self-serving bastards. It might be a fanatical band of ideologues like the Communists, determined to revolutionize government and human nature both, in some Plume-like idealization of naïveté. It might be the Praetorian Guard of the Deep State, empowered by technology to know everything and understand nothing, convinced by its own incompetence and the fears of the terminally and fantastically greedy to rule and ruin.

So many choices!

The libertarians, as I understand it, want to reason from first principles, with as little reference to practical experience as possible, how to constitute the state and government by the state. Whether it is the restructuring of the political economy in syndicalism of left-libertarianism or the high constitutionalism of right-libertarianism, it is the restructuring according to reasoned, abstract principles that distinguishes the outlook.

If this is, indeed, the libertarian moment, it is because the inherited system of government institutions, such as they are, have become, in the course of political and economic evolution or anacyclosis, sclerotic and dysfunctional. We are at an endpoint, and have to re-invent government, and some people are re-inventing it, in fact, despite a general reluctance to let go of the past and recognize the full horror of the usurpation.

Imagining that libertarians might occasionally be useful allies in a piecemeal attempt by liberals to bargain for feature modifications in the design of the rapidly emerging New State is typical of liberal preservationism: looking to slow the deterioration with “incremental improvement” reforms, backing lesser evil — in general focusing on one tree or another, to avoid seeing the full horror of the forest taking shape.

We are in, or approaching a revolutionary moment — a moment when there is a real danger of collapse, and strong reasons to welcome collapse despite the acute costs. I think many libertarians, though hopelessly simplistic in their vision for what might work as replacement, at least dimly recognize that what exists is no longer working well, and to extend and pretend, preserving dysfunction, is to invite a dark and stagnant future.

What’s frightening to me is that so many were surprised by Ferguson — just like so many were surprised by Katrina or the GFC — to see what their government is becoming.

We are repeatedly surprised by these “shocks to the system” large and small to discover what is happening to change the system fundamentally — whether it is the GFC of 2007-8 or the Snowden revelations or Trayvon Martin’s death and how it showed up Stand Your Ground and ALEC. One could make a long varied list — Bush v Gore, the timely repeal of cramdown for mortgages in federal bankruptcy, the Obama Administration’s policy of prosecuting whistleblowers but not banksters, soaring inequality — everyone can make her own list, according to her own perspective.

Europeans might want to consider the craziness of the Euro, which is still accepted as a kind of progress, by vast numbers of people, despite the devastation and some quite sound arguments for why its design is fatally flawed.

Libertarians at least see that the overall system appears to be failing into something else, and that design principles matter. Liberals and social democrats might look to their own blindness and lack of architecture.

“Okay, here’s an argument–a private individual should not be able to outgun the police. ”

So, if police are limited to the same weapons as private individuals, how exactly are the police (Which, note, is a plural.) not going to be able to outgun a private individual? Perhaps what you meant is that no combination of private individuals should be able to outgun the police?

That’s a coherent position. It’s a coherent position which was rejected in the founding of this nation by people who banded together to outgun the police, and who wrote into the Bill of Rights an amendment intended to assure the opposite, but it IS coherent.

“It’s a coherent position which was rejected in the founding of this nation by people who banded together to outgun the police, and who wrote into the Bill of Rights an amendment intended to assure the opposite…”

‘A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’

Not one word about police. I guess one must infer that part?

Deification and demonization are both mistakes, Plume. Sounds like you’ve chosen the latter.

Plume @ 58

Your potted history is far from accurately interpreted. The American ruling class did have to make egalitarianism part of the ideology of the American Revolution to get mass support for overthrowing the British Crown, and the franchise was significantly extended after 1775, as state governments were constituted to replace colonial governments.

The Second Amendment — an amendment! — was proposed and adopted because people did fear the power of the proposed new government and wanted protections. The historical record on the Second Amendment actually does provide a lot of support to the interpretations offered by those, who say that the amendment reflected the fears of people, who could imagine a tyrannical government disarming the people. I think Brett is on sounder ground, historically, than you are.

Bruce,

Nonsense. Talk about potted histories, I see you’ve fallen for the origin myths as well. And you seem not to get the difference between rhetoric in order to gain support for revolution and actions to back that up. What is “egalitarian” about limiting the vote to wealthy white males? What is “egalitarian” about the support for slavery, the Senate as constructed, and who voted for senators? And please show how “the franchise” was significantly extended. How, exactly?

And it’s just silly talk to suggest that “the people” had some say in the matter. The founders took very little input from the vast majority of the population. It was a very select boys club of rich white males — no women, no non-rich whites and no minorities allowed. Jill Lepore has done some good work on the history, and she’s far from free from the overly generous interpretation of the motives of the founders. She disagrees with your take, as do most historians. Digby does a good job here of collecting some of the recent scholarship on the subject.

I

Bruce Wilder @ 61

The historical record on the Second Amendment actually does provide a lot of support to the interpretations offered by those who say that the 2nd amendment reflected the fears of people, or at least the fears of state legislatures, who were haunted by the specter of a tyrannical government which might disarm the people as a prelude to enslaving them.

And if the anti-Brett Bellmore faction doesn’t want to take the time to study and digest in detail what the fears of the people were between 1787 and 1791, a brief look at the reported comments of Alexander Hamilton at the Constitutional Convention, quoted today in Brad DeLong’s blog, should be sufficient to understand what at least some the anti-Federalists of 1787 were concerned about.

All water over the dam now, of course. The arguments on both sides were legitimate enough at the time. Who could be certain that reserving certain powers to the states, and arms to the people, innocent enough in principle, would devolve so inexorably into the Civil War of 1860-1865, or that Appomattox would fail to settle much of anything in either the short or the long run? Unfortunately for us, the tragedy of our first go-round has not returned as farce in the second, except, I suppose, in the shallowness of the thinking of some of those who believe themselves to be going to war under the old banners.

Even counting up all that’s transpired since, I think Bruce is right about where we are now, even for those who believe that the fault lines in our original Constitution to be a relatively minor influence on our present unhappinesses. It would be nice, though, if our decisions about how to apply ourselves to what comes next weren’t governed by mythology and self-righteousness alone.

“And if the anti-Brett Bellmore faction doesn’t want to take the time to study and digest in detail what the fears of the people were between 1787 and 1791,”

Given that Brett Bellmore has in the past expressed disdain for adding interpretation to the plain language of the Constitution, the fears of the people between 1787 and 1791 ought to in his view be irrelevant to the question.

anti-Brett Bellmore faction

Really?

Bruce Wilder @ 69

Never, ever make a casual, hyperbolic reference without thinking of the consequences. Such things tend to take on a life of their own. Thanks for reminding me.

Mark @72,

Well said.

Its purpose was to make sure militias were well staffed and stocked, so the states could protect private property — slave property, especially. For the aristocracy, as you mentioned. The ruling class, etc. Protect them as well.

The point of view here is important. Just as the Roman aristocracy feared a standing army, and wanted to keep it outside of Rome, so, too, did the South’s aristocracy fear a standing, federal army, and hoped that the militia system would make it unnecessary.

Somehow, over time, the point of view thing shifted via historical revisionism. The “fear” moved from its actual subject, the ruling class, to its mythological subject, “the people.” Again, this is most obvious on the right, but it holds some sway on the center-left as well. The rest of us know better than to drink the koolaid.

Mark Field @ 72

Utter nonsense.

Bruce @75,

The way you back your assertions is truly impressive. All of those links to the supporting evidence has my head spinning. It’s simply overwhelming!!

As I remember, he said that the police shouldn’t be armed more heavily than the populace, which is, or at least can be, an entirely different matter. Then again, I was once introduced to a retired airline pilot who had a gun safe stuffed with, among other things, a .50 caliber sniper rifle, a couple of Laws rocket launchers, and a dismounted 20 mm. anti-aircraft gun (without ammunition.) He was also an unabashed libertarian. Coincidence? Probably, but reading the news these days makes you wonder what else is brewing in our cultural soup.

This article says the second amendment provided for arms bearing for specifically militia use, but civilian militias did not prove successful militias. It also says that it couldn’t have been to overthrow a government, that this interpretation is a late innaccuracy, because that would mean overthrowing the constitution also and the constitution would be odd to put in a clause allowing the overthrow of itself :

“Any so-called right of insurrection or revolution is carried out against the government, which means against that government’s Constitution as well; including the Bill of Rights and the Second Amendment. One cannot carry out a right of revolution against the government while at the same time claiming protections within it.62 Even though the truth of this conclusion is clear enough, Akhil Amar and Alan Hirsch do not accept it, arguing that “the Framers did envision the militia playing precisely this double role ’63 of both suppressing revolt and fomenting it. They offer this argument without providing any sources or documentation to support the claim that the framers endorsed this insurrectionist purpose of the militias.
…
The idea that vigilantism and armed insurrection are as constitutionally sanctioned as voting is a proposition of such absurdity that one is struck more by its boldness than by its pretensions to seriousness. Yet it appears repeatedly in the individualist literature.
…
Discussing the broader principle of the meaning of the Second Amendment, the article [from 1912] stated that
[t]he many decisions which have already been made as to statutes against carrying concealed weapons or weapons of a certain character show two general lines of reasoning; first, that such provisions should be construed in the light of the origin of the constitutional declarations and the necessity for an efficient militia or for the common defense; second, that they should be construed in connection with the general police power of the state and as subject to legislative regulation thereunder.
…
the first full-blown treatment of the Second Amendment appeared in the Harvard Law Review.m Authored by noted constitutional scholar Lucilius Emery, the article discusses the
British tradition behind the Second Amendment, pertinent American history, and various comparable state constitutional provisions. Emery quotes Presser,and concludes that “[o]nly persons of military capacity to bear arms in military organizations are within the spirit of the guaranty [i.e., the Second Amendment].”8’5 Emery ends by saying that “the carrying of weapons by individuals may be regulated, restricted, and even prohibited according as conditions and circumstances may make it necessary for the protection of the people. ‘”
http://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3294&context=cklawreview

This constitutional law article looks at the second amendment in relation to using guns against Indigenous people :

“The Article first examines evidence that the historical meaning of self-defense in America (including that of the Second Amendment) was predicated largely on the premise that European, especially Eng- lish, colonists needed to defend themselves against “savage” Indians. The Article then argues that this cultural myth2 of white America’s need to defend itself against Indians obscures the fact that Indians who engaged in armed conflicts with the United States or the colo- nies were, in many instances, actually defending themselves and their homelands from white aggression and encroachment.”
http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1086&context=jcl

This article looks at the right and duty to bear arms as inherited from the English tradition and in relation to race (it does seem to claim Madison thought a civilian militia would be a counterweight to an excessive government, but doesn’t quote him directly on the matter and is in a compilation of the journal of firearms and public policy which overall seems pro popular gun ownership)

“If the English tradition involved a right and duty to bear arms qualified by class and later religion, both the right and the duty were strengthened in the earliest American settlements. From the beginning, English settlement in North America had a quasi-military character, an obvious response to harsh frontier conditions. Governors of settlements often also held the title of militia captain, reflecting both the civil and military nature of their office. Special effort was made to ensure that white men, capable of bearing arms, were imported into the colonies.
…
For the settlers of British North America, an armed and universally deputized white population was necessary not only to ward off dangers from the armies of other European powers, but also to ward off attacks from the indigenous population which feared the encroachment of English settlers on their lands. An armed white population was also essential to maintain social control over blacks and Indians who toiled unwillingly as slaves and servants in English settlements
…
The statutes of many colonies specified that white men be armed at public expense.20 In most colonies, all white men between the ages of sixteen and sixty, usually with the exception of clergy and religious objectors, were considered part of the militia and required to be armed.”
http://67.205.9.148/wp-content/uploads/journals/JFPP07.pdf

@79

As I remember, he said that the police shouldn’t be armed more heavily than the populace, which is, or at least can be, an entirely different matter

Well, he’s backing up that position with the Second Amendment, so it seems like it should apply to the military as well as the police. After, it’s not literally the case that our nation was founded by “people who banded together to outgun the police” as he said, no, they banded together to fight the British military. That suggests that he’s using “police” as a stand-in for government arms in general.

(And, heck, I don’t even object to “people who banded together”, I object to any small faction that happens to slightly outnumber the police in a given conflict being able to win the day. By all means, let the people collectively outgun the police, but not per capita.)

” They offer this argument without providing any sources or documentation to support the claim that the framers endorsed this insurrectionist purpose of the militias.”

There is, of course, always Joseph Story, who had actually met some of the founders. Or Tenche Coxe, a contemporary of them. Some would consider them sources.

Brett Bellmore,
“There is, of course, always Joseph Story, who had actually met some of the founders. Or Tenche Coxe, a contemporary of them. Some would consider them sources.”

That might be true – if you don’t mind me saying so I don’t really think the founders seem to be of very good character so they may have made all sorts of contradictory arguments to different people, who knows what rhetoricians’ true reasons are for anything.

When Iwas young I thought they were sincere and must have just accidentally ended up owning slaves, but then I found they didn’t include women as being men (even though women are included in the term man historically), that they didn’t include Africans or indigenous people or people without much property either even though these people are all included in the meanng of the word man too. So now I think they were rhetoricians and not sincere because I donot think they were so stupid as to not know the meanings of the word man. And also rhetoricians after the sophists not Aristotle, because I have heard there is some distinction.

Having said that, I guess it would be pretty hard to have such founders birthing your laws for you.

“As far a statues go, so far there’s not
Much choice: they’re either Washington’s
Or Indians, a whitewashed stubby lot,
His country’s Father, or His foster sons.”

JThomas: “It sounds silly said like that, but something like it could work in some circumstances. Imagine that everybody is armed all the time, and also that there are plenty of good jobs available. The mafia tries to coerce people but when they do, 10% of the victims are brave and kill on average one enforcer before they themselves are killed. It might not take long before most of the enforcers choose to go into less dangerous work.”

What is this ‘mafia’ you speak of? It must be something new, since if we go back not that far in time, lots of people *were* armed.

In Sicily, there were not lots of good jobs available.

When Italian came to the USA in large numbers there were not lots of good jobs available for wops. It took a couple of generations for them to get integrated into the society well enough that there were usually better opportunities that were legal.

Meanwhile the mafia got the reputation, and cultivated it. And so rich mafia families tended to put their money into legal businesses that brought in a lot, leaving the illegal stuff to the losers.

And newer immigrants tended to move into those niches. So the chinese tongs get displaced by the korean mafia and then the vietnamese mafia etc. (I am not actually an expert in this stuff, I read about it some and then John Barnes laid it out so clearly in a science fiction novel that I believed him. Maybe I’m wrong.)

So, you believe that lots of people were armed. But the enforcers did not have better choices than to risk their lives being enforcers, and maybe the sometimes-armed people they threatened tended not to pick fights with them but instead usually gave in. My hypothetical situation where the mafia might stop coercing people had three conditions, and you claim in reality one of them used to be satisfied.

Just something I happened to have saved here. Seemed a bit of a waste.

@88, it may not be the job of the police to put down full-scale rebellions, but what about organized crime? I suppose you could just call the national guard every time the police want to take down a drug kingpin (or whatever-kingpin after you decriminalize drugs), but I’m not sure that’s what we have in mind when we talk about demilitarizing the police. (It’s probably not what Brett has in mind either. If you want to overthrow the federal government, it probably doesn’t make sense to let the feds keep their guns but disarm all the state and local cops. Some of the states would be on the side of the rebels, right?) I know there are countries where the military ends up doing police work that’s too big for the police, but I didn’t think that civil libertarians would consider that an improvement.

I’m not talking about heavy machine guns, tanks, etc. I’m talking about are submachine guns, assault rifles, stun grenades, etc. I’m saying no one outside the law enforcement and the military should be allowed to buy SWAT toys.

Should the police be allowed to have SWAT toys? Obviously, they’re overused now (e.g. flashbang in the crib). Maybe there shouldn’t be as many SWAT teams–maybe only states and larger metropolitan areas should have them? That would mean that in the rare instances when they’re needed (e.g. North Hollywood) you have to wait longer for them to show up, but if SWAT is misused more frequently than properly used, maybe that’s a trade worth making.

This thread is a good demonstration of why skepticism about libertarian moments is in order. Libertarianism is not fundamentally an approach to doing things in the real world – it’s a set of tools for thinking about the world so as to justify a) one’s own lack of triumph over the damn masses and b) whatever it is the commercial elites wish to do. What is distinctive in it is pretty much all detrimental, when it comes to dealing with real people’s real needs, and above all, it’s good for endless argument that need never get anywhere.

For my part, I donated to the ACLU this evening, and will be seeing how much I can budget for donation to them and other groups in the next few months.

“There is, of course, always Joseph Story, who had actually met some of the founders. Or Tenche Coxe, a contemporary of them. Some would consider them sources.”

Perhaps even some justices will consider them sources, and go on to legislate from the bench. Pfui.

Brett,

I hold forth Plume as evidence that neither is socialism.

You should stop digging.

First off, yes, I’m a socialist, and I’ve proposed some variants on traditional socialist arrangements. But I’m not the socialist. If you have issues with my proposals, then it’s with my proposals. One can not reasonably draw further conclusions from that that “socialism” itself has some problem dealing with the real world.

Personally, I think what I’ve suggested works far better in the real world than our current system, but that’s another kettle of fish. Suffice it to say, however, that I don’t claim to speak for all socialists or for socialism proper. Just as it would be wrong for us to base our views of libertarianism on you, or any other individual adherent, it makes no sense to base one’s opinion of socialism on one example — mine, for instance. While both are minority political philosophies, they have millions of “followers.” You need to zoom out on the google map of life.

And, the fear that having “everyone” armed — which means in practice a lot of neurotic people acting out fantasies with their death penises (to use Atrios’ phrase) and a steady stream of tragedies — just undermines the trust and solidarity a democratic politics requires seems a more reasonable assessment.

As usual, it depends. If we had a whole lot of sane people who just wore their guns the way a lot of guys wear neckties, it mostly wouldn’t mean much of anything at all. There’s the fear that there are a lot of crazy people who would be armed and you don’t know what they’ll do. But then there’s also the fear that if you drive somebody crazy you don’t know what they’ll do.

If we all went to more effort not to drive each other crazy, that might be worth some overhead.

But if it turned into an arms race with people spending more and putting up with more inconvenience for the thought that they might get into a shootout and they want to buy an advantage, that could turn into a great big waste. If we were going to do something like that, better that people accept that it’s a standard ritual handgun they carry, and no armor, and it’s not worth trying for an advantage except by training your marksmanship.

And if people were ready to accept that, then they might as well carry ritual swords instead. That reduces the chance of innocent bystanders getting shot.

It all starts to seem kind of arbitrary and silly, but then other people’s cultural norms often seem that way. It isn’t as silly as the stock market which people take dead serious.

There are plenty of examples of high gun ownership low crime societies, Switzerland or pre-war Iraq, for instance. Much of the trouble with the US is its own very unique problem with the cultural role of guns.

It’s hard to imagine how anyone willing to wear an automatic pistol to Walmart, or Mickey D’s, or his kid’s primary school pageant can be considered sane.

It’s hard to imagine how anybody willing to take two tons of metal containing twenty gallons of highly-flammable sort-of-explosive hydrocarbons to the nearby convenience store to pick up a gallon of milk could be considered sane. But we mostly don’t think about it.

People could carry guns without thinking about them much because it was just what people did, if that was the custom. I don’t know what it would take to develop a custom like that in the USA where we have so many crazy people who think about guns so much….

“whatever it is the commercial elites wish to do.”

But the elites will use whatever philosophy may come handy. Iraqi oil fields will be occupied in order to liberate women, Social Security privatized because it’s unfair to the minorities, Christian teachings justify the crusades, marxism the gulag. The powerful use various ideas to justify their actions and advance their interests, but it doesn’t necessarily discredit the ideas themselves. It is, I think, a falacy to argue that it does.

“Where is it written that culturally well-adapted and sane have to be synonymous?”

Not actually responsive. Triggered by, but not shaped by.

It may be written somewhere that culturally well-adapted and sane are synonymous. It probably is. But it’s wrong. They don’t have to be.

And yet, sane people can follow cultural norms without much trouble provided those norms don’t actually cause them trouble with other people.

In a society where groups of married couples do naked sauna together and it does not imply wife-swapping etc, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just something people do. In a society where it does mean something, it can lead to complications.

Apropos perhaps: last year the entire British police force fired their weapons fewer times than Darren Wilson did.

#110 William Timberman

The threat that universal gun-toting poses to civilized interaction was recognized and dealt with in the U.S. more than a hundred years ago — not always peacefully, but in the end pretty thoroughly.

So what’s changed? [….] More to the point, are the reasons for their fears as rational as the fear of being killed in an auto accident, or being overwhelmed by global warming? Obviously they think so.

Here’s an idea. You think of yourself as part of a society with civilized interaction. Maybe they think of themselves as belonging to a civilized society which is being dominated by something outside itself, something bad.

First, consider a little history. It’s less than 200 years ago that the Irish starved while the English exported food from Ireland. Less than 300 years ago that the Scots had their last rebellion against the British empire. If you think of yourself as basicly English then it makes sense to think the government is working in favor of civilized society. If you think of yourself as Irish or Scottish then you have a tradition that the government was imposed on you to oppress you. And if you’re Southern that tradition was reinforced more recently.

If you think of yourself as not a member of mass consumer culture but as part of a tradition with roots, then things which threaten that, also threaten you. Mass consumer culture is a threat. Multiculturalism is a threat. Ideally all these other cultures should go away and leave you in your own country, with laws that fit your traditions. (But of course that’s impractical.)

There are already too many people with foreign cultures in the USA to suppress them. So the government will inevitably be a foreign government that will if anything suppress the wrong people. Particularly when there are so many liberal traitors.

In that context doesn’t it make sense to try to weaken the government into something that can mediate disputes when that’s tactically useful, but that cannot suppress good people? And when mediation fails, each society will be supported by the individuals who choose to be loyal to it. Maybe not so different from the clans of Scotland which were destroyed around 1746, largely by the enclosures which confiscated their land and forced them to scatter.

It doesn’t make economic sense. Totally impractical. But it might resonate with a lot of people’s souls. Throw off the oppression, be more than a mass consumer, stand up yourself for what is right. It’s different from joining the army and taking orders and fighting in third world countries to support the American empire. Just as standing up for Ireland or Scotland was different from joining the British army.

I can’t say it’s rational. But while rationality gives my life meaning, to a lot of people it isn’t so. The meanings which enthrall them might lead to a lot of suffering, but we have a long tradition of suffering for the important things.

“And, the fear that having “everyone” armed — which means in practice a lot of neurotic people acting out fantasies with their death penises”

Which means in practice, a lot of people who are neurotic about guns displacing their mental pathology to the sane people who just own them. Seriously, I think Freud is a bit of a joke, but if you’re going to get all Freudian, you might want to look up what he had to say on the topic. You’ve got it backwards.

“So what’s changed? Is not wearing a gun now more threatening to an increasing number of people than wearing one? If so, what exactly are they afraid of?”

It’s a kind of over-reaction/backlash, like the excessive drinking right after Prohibition was repealed. We’ve just come off a long period where the forces hostile to this civil liberty looked like they were going to win. Then we finally beat them back. Though they’re still fighting a rearguard action, and fantasize about victory, clearly it IS fantasy.

Now the people who value that civil liberty want to revel in it. You walk around with a gun in your pocket, it’s a bit inconvenient, you’re unlikely to need it. But each time it bumps your hip, you notice it’s there, and think, “Yeah! Take them apples, Chuck Schumer!”

You buy a so-called “assault weapon”, with as many formerly banned features as possible, and use it for pig hunting. Maybe it isn’t the best gun you could have choses for the purpose, but it pisses off people who deserve to be pissed off.

THAT is what it’s about. And why shouldn’t we have our in your face fun? We’re exercising a civil liberty, which remains a civil liberty no matter how much you dislike it. And the statistics say we’re not causing problems doing it. CCW permit holders have a remarkably good record. “Assault weapons” hardly ever get used in crimes.

They’re a non-issue, crime wise, you just deny this because you want an excuse to take away a civil liberty you don’t like. Well, screw you, I’m going to go to my closet right now, and gaze upon my Calico carbine, and revel in the fact that you can’t do anything about it.

And the statistics say we’re not causing problems doing it.

This is true. The majority of deaths that are ruled suicide are by guns, but people who are intent on suicide can always find some way. If nothing else, initiate a tense moment with a policeman and then pull out a water pistol.

In 2005 there were only about 10,000 officially-counted homicides using firearms, well under a quarter of the number of automobile deaths. Some of those would have happened anyway. If you really want to kill somebody, you can wrestle them into submission and then strangle them with your bare hands. Or if you have several plastic spoons you can stick one into his brain through the eyesocket. (But flimsy plastic spoons might break if you get the angle wrong; you might need several attempts.)

10,000 is an insignificant number anyway, hardly 3 times our losses on 9/11.

It isn’t as easy to get statistics about gun injuries, but in 2010 there were about 73,000 nonfatal gun injuries treated in emergency rooms, compared to 31,000 deaths. (Ruled suicide, homicide or accident, all combined.)

So if you are an average American, your chance of getting shot in 2010 was only about 3 in 10,000. Well under one in a thousand. Nothing to worry about.

Plus, your chances are better than average. Drug dealers get shot more. Blacks get shot more. People who’ve been arrested for a felony get shot more. If you have never been arrested, you probably have a lifestyle that makes it improbable you will get shot.

This is turning into a better deconstruction than I expected. Looking at the firearms-related crime statistics, I say to myself, well, maybe most crimes aren’t committed with assault rifles, but one Newtown is quite enough, and there’ve been lots of Newtowns. So by my reckoning, score one for the nanny state.

Looking at the history of armed struggle, I say don’t expect it to come from libertarians. The remind me of a train trip I took through northern Italy years ago, where there seemed to be a ruined fortress on every pissant hilltop, some of them no more than five miles apart. One gunfight and we’re done with our contribution to the Revolution seems to be the libertarian’s creed, a great consolation, I’m sure, when, after the smoke clears and they’re being attended by their weeping widow and children, while some impassive working stiff with a shovel throws dirt in their face. Even the Molly MaGuires and Black Panthers were better focused and better organized than your average libertarian, despite all the current yapping about their Second Amendment rights.

I’m not myself a liberal in the sense of my previous post, in that I don’t think that all that ails us can be fixed at the polls. I do think, though, that armed insurrection in a country as divided as ours is more likely to lead to civil war — as it did already once — than to a revolution which sorts out some of the irrationalities both Left and Right are coming to see as a harbinger of End Times. In any event, it might be instructive to gather Cliven Bundy’s gun-toting, don’t-tread-on-me folks together in a church basement somewhere, and let one of the old Stalinists I used to know — if any are still left — fgive them a long, boring lecture on how to recognize pre-revolutionary conditions.

“not to mention that the government can’t actually get rid of guns”

What an odd thing to say. The police destroy seized guns all the time.

@115 is definitely the best defense of weaponized police I’ve ever seen. If the time to arrest Brett ever comes, use of SWAT would be justified.

J, not to mention that the government can’t actually get rid of guns. All it can do is make them illegal.

So, who is making them illegal going to disarm?

I don’t advocate trying to get rid of guns. But your argument that we can’t, is silly.

If we actually had a consensus to do it, we could first make it illegal to manufacture them in the USA. Kind of like we do with bootlegging alcohol, but it would work better because gunsmithing is harder to do than distilling alcohol. The legal distillers are allowed such whopping profits by keeping their legal status that they have a great big incentive never to be caught selling untaxed alcohol. We could do something like that with our military munitions manufacturers.

Second, we do not legally sell ammunition anywhere in the country, nor do we sell shell casings or handy-dandy reloading kits.

Isotope-label police ammo, so that stolen police ammunition would give some indication where it was stolen from. But the police wouldn’t usually need to have guns out where they could be stolen anyway.

Confiscate and destroy any guns discovered. Reduce the giant backlog of guns we’re swimming in now.

Great big fines and also jail terms for possession of guns, ammo, ammo-reloading equipment, etc. Also mandatory psychological counseling, at least 5 years of weekly meetings for those who can afford it, something worse for those who can’t.

Make it considerably easier to acquire other weapons, particularly “nonlethal” ones, and decriminalize some of them entirely. Say Mace could be legal, tasers mostly legal, etc.

We could do it if we wanted to, and quickly most criminals would not carry guns. First, the penalties getting caught would be too big to justify. Second, collectors who would never be caught using guns but who want to fondle them in secret would drive the price too high. You wouldn’t carry a gun to commit a crime in the same way you don’t carry a gold-plated dagger with diamonds in the hilt and a ruby the size of a Cadbury egg on the pommel. If you can afford to keep it instead of sell it, you keep it in a safe secret place at home.

We could do it if, say, only one American in 200 had a gun fetish. It wouldn’t be very difficult.

But the way things are, we do have a whole lot of Americans who care deeply about keeping their guns. These are Americans who do not actually ever shoot anybody, not criminals, just fetishists. It isn’t worth riling them up.

If we had that many people who wanted to wear sharp broadswords, then I’d say let them do it.
If we had that many women who wanted to go topless then I’d say let them do as they want.
If we had that many Americans who wanted to publicly burn US flags then I say put wire flag-burning baskets on the streetcorners.

It just isn’t worth poking at them.

#115

The post-Prohibition analogy is a bit laboured, to say the least. Was there widespread fear among drinkers that the government was going to take booze away forever if people didn’t spend the whole day smashed? Were there news networks dedicated to spreading the notion that drinking heavily is the finest and most important expression of freedom? Were people who disagreed with constant drinking everywhere, all the time, denounced as traitors?

I doubt it. In which case the current frenzy of gun fetishism is nothing like the repeal of Prohibition.

And why shouldn’t we have our in your face fun?

Because people die from that stupidity. The tree of liberty seems to like the blood of idiots and anyone in range.

“We could do it if, say, only one American in 200 had a gun fetish. It wouldn’t be very difficult.

But the way things are, we do have a whole lot of Americans who care deeply about keeping their guns. These are Americans who do not actually ever shoot anybody, not criminals, just fetishists. It isn’t worth riling them up.”

Precisely, setting aside the perjorative “fetish”. It could be done, if hardly anybody opposed it. But, even then, you wouldn’t be successfully disarming the criminals, because they have a strong incentive to have arms, and black markets don’t need popular support to thrive. Guns aren’t nearly as hard to manufacture or smuggle as gun control opponents like to think.

But, of course, it isn’t one American in 200. It’s more like one American in 3. Gun “fetishists” aren’t a tiny minority, we’re a plurality of the population.

If anything, it’s gun controllers who are the minority. We got an enhanced RKBA amendment into the Missouri constitution just recently. Where have you repealed any in living memory? Where are you winning, politically?

Gun controllers rave about the NRA being just astroturf, when your own movement imploded the moment a couple of wealthy foundations decided to defund it. Today talk of disarming the country is just the fantasizing of the adherents of a lost cause.

The worst you could manage is to get a temporary majority on the Supreme court, and undo the Heller decision. And that would probably result in a new 2nd amendment being adopted by convention.

Just following Layman’s link, what I found was roughly 50-50 on whether to support stricter gun control as a general proposition, and strong support for some existing measures.

The results are consistently better than 50-50, and it’s hard to reconcile that with the claim that gun fetishists are a plurality. Let’s have some data on that, please, unless it’s truly rectal. Claims that the polls don’t reflect the reality of views are frankly comical.

The percentage of Americans who smoked was once much higher than one in three. Back in the 2006 or so, the anti-gay marriage folks were chalking up quite a few victories, too. Culture changes.

Brett is correct that his side cares more about the issue. There are plenty of competing ways to save lives, but if you feel a need to dominate people and a gun is the only means you have to do that, then guns become your whole life.

Of course, Layman is also correct that doesn’t mean there’s a plurality. It’s a minority with sufficient intensity that they’re able to win the day. For now. There is a majority or plurality for stronger gun laws, but over the long term that it’s growing smaller. Either higher gun homicide rates or continued mass killings could change that. Technology could change the terms of the argument–if smart gun technology becomes viable, it could (and should) be mandatory. If we insist that all cops film everything, then we should insist that all civilians who decide to act like cops should be filming everything (better buy a GoPro or Google Glass along with that gun, I guess.) We should definitely research gun violence as a public health issue, but as a public health issue there are probably ways to alleviate the problem other than banning guns.

“The results are consistently better than 50-50, and it’s hard to reconcile that with the claim that gun fetishists are a plurality. ”

It’s not that difficult. Opinions are vectors, they have both direction and magnitude. Polls do a lousy job of measuring magnitude. A bit over half the population will say, if polled, that they support stricter gun laws. Almost all of them don’t really care about the subject. A bit under half oppose stricter gun laws. Most of them care enough to vote on that basis.

Are “opinions” that are held with zero intensity really opinions? Or just polling artifacts? As I say, elections are the real polls, and how do you do in them?

You get hammered.

“but if you feel a need to dominate people and a gun is the only means you have to do that, then guns become your whole life.”

And if you feel a need to dominate people, and their having guns gets in the way of that, taking them away can become your whole life, too.

The key thing about gun nuts is that they are absolutists. They brook no compromise. Gun safety regulations are compromises between no guns and guns everywhere. The gun nuts think there can only be the latter, or their “rights” have being “infringed.”

Again, the SA never says word one about unlimited purchases of guns with unlimited capacity, firepower, range, etc. etc. It is a very, very basic “right” which just says keep and bear them, and it’s tied to state-run militias which no longer exist. If we actually took it at its word, it would no longer apply at all. The conditions for its implementation are gone. There is no threat from the Brits coming back. No slave revolts to worry about. No frontier. The people who didn’t want a standing army lost the debate long ago. In short, it’s an anachronism. The gun nuts’ entire argument rests on an anachronism, and if we really followed that logic, even if we kept the right, it would be for single load rifles and pistols only. One bullet at a time.

To me, the most sensible compromise is one that no politician has the guts to suggest. And it would save lives:

Ban the manufacture, import, sale, trade, loan or possession of all guns with detachable ammo containers — and those containers. The only legal guns would be those with internal chambers, with six being the max. Bullets must be loaded by hand, only, and one bullet at a time.

Smart technology on all guns, without exception, would be mandatory.

All guns would have to be registered. All purchases would require a license. All sales would require background checks, using that license. No loopholes. No exceptions.

The ban on government studies of gun violence would be lifted and we’d go on offense. It would be illegal to suppress those studies.

A national buyback program would pay for those guns newly illegal to be melted down. Citizens would have two years to sell their illegal guns back or face stiff fines. No gun confiscation would occur, but citizens who owned now illegal guns could no longer claim their “law-abiding” status, and if those guns were used in public, further fines and possible jail time might be on tap.

All the above would conform with the SA. No “rights” would be infringed whatsoever. Again, the SA doesn’t protect consumer choice. It just protects the right to keep and bear arms. The above keeps that intact.

And if you feel a need to dominate people, and their having guns gets in the way of that

The problem with the gun-nut power fantasy is that they’re the victim no matter how many guns they have. The suffering would be enjoyable if it weren’t for the needless dead.

Mass killings happen once every few years, and I imagine that in the future, gun control will be an even bigger topic.

Gun rights advocates are up against an enormous public-relations problem, and they are finally going to start losing: The horrors keep happening to innocents, and the NRA’s solution is for taxpayers to cough up another $20 billion or so (for starters!) to train and arm guards for every school in the US (as if school guards couldn’t be neutralized with a quick diversion). Thus, the NRA is essentially advising us to create a bigger and bigger security state…

“It’s not that difficult. Opinions are vectors, they have both direction and magnitude. Polls do a lousy job of measuring magnitude. A bit over half the population will say, if polled, that they support stricter gun laws. Almost all of them don’t really care about the subject. A bit under half oppose stricter gun laws. Most of them care enough to vote on that basis.”

In other words, when you say there is a plurality on your side, what you mean is that there isn’t a plurality on your side, but you’ve read the minds of the opposition and determined they don’t really care. Isn’t that right?

“Thus, the NRA is essentially advising us to create a bigger and bigger security state…”

If you think of the NRA as primarily a lobby group representing gun manufacturers, who wish to sell more guns, their actions become quite easy to understand.

Layman #151: “their actions become quite easy to understand…”

Sure. Their proposal to put armed guards at every school is another guaranteed taxpayer subsidy to the gun manufacturers.

Although when I pointed out to a couple of advocates that they are thereby ensuring higher taxes, it suddenly boggled their minds. This goes to the thing about the “low level of motivation to engage in cognitive activity”.

“Most gun rights advocates do NOT want to dominate people (although the mass shooters are sometimes control freaks or want social recognition). Quite the reverse: guns rights advocates mostly express existential fear.”

Isn’t that true for the mass shooters too? Their way of dealing with “existential fear” is to go and kill people. Others are content to “only” intimidate others. A longing to dominate, and fear of losing one’s imagined superior status, are not mutually exclusive emotions.

“open carry is not well-received by a majority of gun rights advocates” – and you determined that how exactly? When the NRA released a statement slightly critical of open carry “enthusiasts”, they took it back in a heart beat.

(http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/nra-backs-off-statement-critical-of-open-carry-supporters/article_cee2f7f6-ec06-11e3-8a94-10604b9f6eda.html)

The last couple years have gone your way Brett but demography is turning the country against you. In 25 years walking around with a gun will be viewed as negatively as opposing gay marriage.

The Onion: No way to prevent this, says only nation where this regularly happens

Brett,

Winning elections doesn’t prove much at all when it comes to the gun issue. It’s usually a matter of incumbency, more money, better organization, and in the case of the GOP, voter suppression and gerrymandering.

The GOP successfully locked in the House via the last Census. Even though more people voted for the Dems in the aggregate, the GOP won the House. One could say the Dems won the “popular vote” but lost more individual elections.

Most Americans live in cities. But cities can be negated by a ton of much smaller, much less populous districts. Theoretically, you could have one district with a million Dem voter being cancelled out by ten districts with 100,000 Republican voters combined. That could bring you 10 House members versus just one Dem, even though the Dems would have a 900,000 voter edge total. Of course, things are much closer to that, even in the aggregate. But this was the rationale behind gerrymandering, and no one has done this more successfully than the GOP.

And they don’t even have to be particular sinister about it. They have a “natural” advantage in the way their base is spread out versus the far more concentrated Dem base. That natural advantage will keep the GOP in the mix for a bit longer until the demographic bomb obliterates it — most likely in the next decade.

And when that happens? Your “side” will start losing these gun issue battles, electorally, along with those opinion polls.

When antitank missiles are outlawed, only outlaws will have antitank missiles.

“Gun ownership is declining in America on a per household basis.”

This is known as “divorce”. You take a household with two people, one owns guns, one doesn’t, you have one “gun owning household”. They divorce, you now have two households, only one gun owning.

The percentage of gun owning households has been cut in half, without one single person having ceased to be a gun owner.

“The percentage of gun owning households has been cut in half, without one single person having ceased to be a gun owner.”

That is an…. Interesting interpretation.

Brett, what about Plume’s point @143, that at least a few partial, targeted gun control measures make sense, aimed at limiting the more high-tech weapons and at licensing and background checking? Would you object? (Apologies if you’ve already explained your position on this upthread.)

Brett,

Wow. It’s all due to divorce? I’ve heard a lot of spin from the gun fetishist crowd, but that’s a first.

Excerpt from NYT article on the decline:

The household gun ownership rate has fallen from an average of 50 percent in the 1970s to 49 percent in the 1980s, 43 percent in the 1990s and 35 percent in the 2000s, according to the survey data, analyzed by The New York Times.

”

I have no doubt that if more people knew that having a gun in the house radically increases the risk of death due to homicide, accident or suicide, the rates would plunge even more. This is also the case with people who carry guns concealed on their person. Their risk of death goes up. The NRA successfully got Congress to suppress gun violence studies with outright bans in the 90s. The CDC and NIH can’t even study this now. Remove the ban on studies and publication, and fewer people are going to buy guns. And the merchants of death will do everything in their power to prevent this.

Of course, another way the gun owning public is reduced is through homicide, accident and suicide. That’s in the neighborhood north of 35,000 people now a year.

“You like to think the public is on your side, because when you ask people if they agree with you, they say they do. I think the public is on my side, because my side wins elections. ”

This is pure projection, Brett. I get that you ‘like to think the public is on your side’, but I don’t have any such motivation. Indeed, I’m aware that some of my views place me in a minority, and am able to bear up under that awareness quite ably.

Coming back to the point, can you provide no data at all to support your plurality claim? Is it just what you feel?

“I have no doubt that if more people knew that having a gun in the house radically increases the risk of death due to homicide, accident or suicide, the rates would plunge even more. ”

I’m not sure that would be terribly relevant even if true; People still own swimming pools even though they increase the risk of drowning. I assume you’re referring to the Kellermann study. I wasn’t impressed with it when it first came out, and it hasn’t aged well.

“The NRA successfully got Congress to suppress gun violence studies with outright bans in the 90s. The CDC and NIH can’t even study this now.”

Why should the Center for Disease Control or the National Institute of Health be doing studies in the area of criminology? Does the Department of Justice do studies of kidney disease? The law in question doesn’t flatly prohibit research in the area, it simply prohibits these two medical bureaucracies from sticking their noses into a subject outside their competency.

Of course, gun controllers prefer to keep their ‘research’ as far from actual criminologists as they can. Since criminologists tend not to arrive at conclusions the gun controllers like.

“Coming back to the point, can you provide no data at all to support your plurality claim? Is it just what you feel?”

Elections constitute data. Politicians understand this, and demanding that they pretend elections aren’t data is, thankfully, going to be futile.

Why should the Center for Disease Control or the National Institute of Health be doing studies in the area of criminology?

People developing holes is a medical concern because people die from them: it’s not criminology.

“Elections constitute data. Politicians understand this, and demanding that they pretend elections aren’t data is, thankfully, going to be futile.”

Indeed they do, but guns don’t appear on the ballot. If you want to believe that people vote for the politicians they do solely on the basis of guns, you’re free to do that. Freedom includes the right to be wrong, after all.

#180

People developing holes due to bacteria or such isn’t criminology. People developing holes because other people put holes in them darned well IS criminology. Just precisely criminology.

Sure, but so what? CDC and NIH tend to be pretty good at doing competent statistics. They’re good at analyzing data.

Isn’t it better to get the data analyzed by people who’re good at it, than by people who aren’t good at it?

A lot of people who publish gun statistics appear to have gotten into that work precisely because they are bad at statistics and much better at getting results people want them to get. So I’d tend to trust people whose core competence is OR or epidemiology a lot more than those whose experience is mostly at reviewing previous bad research and not noticing how bad it is.

“But the democrats all but dropped their anti-gun advocacy. It was hurting their electoral chances too much. At least this is my impression. Is it not true?”

No, I don’t think it is true. Democrats who have to compete in pro-gun districts or states certainly have dropped it, while Democrats who can run in pro-control districts or states haven’t. Nationally, gun control legislation continued to get done even under Reagan (see the Brady bill) but Republican control of one or both houses pretty much ended that. So you see proposals from Dems, but they don’t go anywhere. Why do Republicans control one or both houses? Lots of reasons other than guns.

People developing holes because other people put holes in them darned well IS criminology.

Sure there’s crime – which you’re scared of enough that you might be the cause of one – but there’s plenty of mishap and suicide to work with. Does you doctor tell you to cut out the smokes? Good idea! Should he tell you to lay off the guns? Yup. It’s a health issue.

Is there any element of criminology that isn’t part of public health? Think on it from a mental-health perspective, maladaptive behaviour and what-have-you.

I will point out that BB has proven himself (once again) to be a dishonest hack by refusing to respond to questions surrounding his divorce claim. BB you are a lying liar who is telling lies.

After that why should we listen to anything you say?

#144

Did all of those guns brought to ACA protests change anything?

Yes. Compare police treatment of the armed ACA protests and the unarmed Occupy protests.

Brett,

Guns are a major health and safety issue in America. The CDC and NIH should study it. So should any federal agency tasked with any aspect of public health and safety. Guns in the hands of Americans are a far greater threat to our health and safety than Al Queda, as they cause more than 35,000 deaths a year, and hundreds of thousands of injuries. And in the hands of right wing extremists, they’re an even bigger threat.

The threat of right-wing violence in America

Here’s an interesting and sobering fact: that when it comes to domestic terrorism, you are far more likely to be murdered by a far Right-wing American than a Muslim American, but the term “terrorist” remains reserved exclusively for acts of political violence carried out by Muslims.

Violence carried out by far Right groups or individuals, which have racism as a central component of their ideology, is of similar magnitude to that of Jihadist violence. In the years 1990 to 2010, there were 145 acts of political violence committed by the American far Right, resulting in 348 deaths. By comparison, 20 Americans were killed over the same period in acts of political violence carried out by Muslim-American civilians.

Brett Bellmore 08.19.14 at 7:34 pm:

This is known as “divorce”.

I think I see an anti-gun-ownership campaign in this. (Note: I am amazed at how often Bellmore sets up a premise for a left-wing position.)

I normally would think we need to start with some statistics on divorce rates in gun-owning vs. non-owning households, and which party initiates the divorce, and maybe some other stuff…but then I realize that data has a bad reputation among the target audience. Plus, it might not prove that Bellmore is correct in his assertion.

Sloganeering it must be, then. We need some catchy way to say that buying guns will leave men alone and lonely.

Re: the CDC and the NIH. Criminology and epidemiology often overlap. (See heroin overdose morbidity and morality. See workplace deaths due to criminal negligence. See morbidity and morality deriving from counterfeit medications. See homicide deaths in populations by age, race, gender and gun ownership.)

Like most arguments for guns in the home as a way of protecting yourself, it’s both stupid and meretricious to suggest otherwise. (One thing American politics continually proves: you don’t have to be choose between stupid and dishonest.) If the NRA and its minions hadn’t put the brakes on it, the science would be uncontrovertibly by now. Instead it’s just highly suggestive. That’s what they bought those legislators to do, and that’s what they did.

Remember Bob Dole? The guy who, when he ran for president in 1996, said that he didn’t think cigarettes were addictive? As with the tobacco industry, so the gun sellers.

…“rape tents”…parade permits, public sanitation, frequency of violent assaults… Maybe it’s a cultural thing.

And if evolution is real, then why are there still monkeys?

Having identified a flaw or inconsistency, you may now excuse yourself from considering any other factors or complexities of the topic, because god knows the only reason that a massive, spontaneous rally on the streets of a metropolis might attract more crime than a gathering of middle-class white people organised by the Republican Party is because leftist types just love rape.

In regard to police violence, though, the cultural “thing” is worth examining.

The Occupy protests specifically represented the 99% of people being excluded from economic growth, of which the poor and homeless are the most obvious mascots, and who attended in large numbers. Increased crime isn’t surprising in that context, nor is police brutality – the powerless are always the ripest targets.

The ACA and Tea Party protests were somewhat less…eclectic. That is, entirely white and right-wing. Truly surprising that they didn’t fall victim to America’s notorious habit of brutally repressing conservative WASPs who merely want to defend the rich and powerful.

And, of course, some of them carried guns, and a whole lot more promised to bring guns if their demands weren’t met.

To be fair, police tolerance of right-wing protests is less to do with guns than with the fact that conservatives want the same things cops want. After all, who is Officer Friendly going to attack with the tank – the people protesting in favour of more authoritarianism and militarisation, or the people protesting against police having tanks?

At least some gun-rights advocates have decided that CDC research isn’t so bad

http://www.gunsandammo.com/politics/cdc-gun-research-backfires-on-obama/

Their spin on an early research priority document looks a bit dubious, but you would think that if the CDC were producing the kind of anti-gun propaganda that Brett is hyperventilating over then Guns and Ammo wouldn’t find so much to like.

As to examples, 27% of those polled in 2007 opposed expanding hate crime legislation to include crimes motivated by gender, sexual orientation, or gender identification; yet Congress enacted, and the President signed into law, a bill which does precisely that in 2009.

Keeping in mind that it’s a lot more than 3%, I think this highlights a serious problem with the Democratic approach to government, as demonstrated by the ACA.

You’ve got this notion that democracy means that any time you can get 51% to apathetically acquiese to whatever you want to do, the 49% who are adamantly opposed to it don’t matter. And that really doesn’t work, not in the long run.

Yeah, you ask people if they like rye bread, and swiss cheese, and they love it. You hand them a fecal sandwich with swiss, on rye, and they refuse to eat it.

Sure, elements of the ACA are popular. Too bad they’re yoked to the parts that people hate.

“The right, OTOH, tends to be driven by fear, paranoia and authoritarianism, doubles down when confronted with contrary evidence, and doesn’t really do “empathy” so well. ”

Which I guess explains why the same research shows people on the right give more to charity…

It’s not so much a matter of not doing empathy well, as it not being the only thing we do.

Of course, then there’s the breakdown of what groups people give to. Churches or humanitarian causes.

Romney, for example, gave most of his “charitable” donations to the Mormon church, and the Mormon church spends that money on things like fighting marriage equality.

While there is no concrete data regarding this, it seems non-controversial to say that conservatives probably give more to their churches. Those on the left likely give more to humanitarian causes. Again, we lack the concrete data for this, so it’s largely conjecture.

Churches tend to spend 75% to 90% of their donations on non-humanitarian issues. If a person wants to give charity to help the poor in general, churches are not efficient vehicles for this.

Trader Joe,

The problem is this has to be based on surveys of the givers themselves, which is never going to yield much accuracy, given the baggage of not giving to charities. The sense of shame or guilt possibly in the mix. The inflation of one’s own giving, etc. etc.

Until these organizations collect the data for “the politics of giving,” I think we’re stuck in guestimate-land. But as you and I point out, that secret sauce is key here. How much of it goes to churches, and what do those churches do with those donations?

Spending millions fighting against marriage equality could hardly be called “charity,” for example. Nor it is “charity” when a church buys itself fancy new digs, etc. etc.

“Its not perfectly indicative, and the approach has plenty of holes in it, but the Journal of Philanthropy takes a stab at this question and reaches an answer similar to Brett’s.”

‘Plenty of holes’ is an understatement. States are not people, and tithing is religious, not partisan.

No response from BB to 168.

Re the CDC ban. It’s worth noting that the ban on gun research was even more perfidious than just a ban. The CDC was never explicitly banned from researching gun violence but the budget that had been used for that research was eliminated (and – contra BB – not moved to some other agency, like the DOJ, to allow some research to continue). In addition, the the Republicans in 1996 explicitly wrote into law that gun research was prohibited to come to *conclusions* that the Reps disapproved of – namely, conclusions that would support gun control “in whole or in part”. So it was really the possible *outcome* of any such research that was politically predetermined (e. g. http://abcnews.go.com/Health/cdc-ban-gun-research-caused-lasting-damage/story?id=18909347). This event is AFAIK unique in the history of US science. I’m not aware of any other case in which politicians so blatantly and explicitly interfered with scientific research.

Interesting to note that BB’s version of libertarianism approves of direct political manipulation of scientific research. I’d like to see how BB and his ilk would respond should liberals ever try anything remotely like it, shutting down a branch of science because they don’t like the results. Imagine the outrage.

“Or maybe it was just a poll.”

Or maybe you’re not worth responding to? I told myself not to bother, and will know better next time.

J Thomas 186:
“Give examples? Things getting outlawed recently that more than 3% want, not things outlawed more than 20 years ago that have not been repealed yet.”

I am shocked by your short memories. Have you forgotten the dozens of states outlawing gay marriage in just the last 10-15 years? Have you forgotten the many state level restrictions on abortion enacted in recent years (http://www.guttmacher.org/statecenter/updates/2013/statetrends42013.html)? Many of these, while not outright bans, have effectively taken access to abortion services away from millions of women (*). The American Right has no qualms whatsoever, and never had, to use state power to prohibit others from doing things that they disapprove of. To claim that “outlawing things many people want” is somehow unusual in America is unbelievably ignorant – the fact is that many aspects of life in the US are highly regulated and visitors from Europe never fail to notice that (for example the absurd level of alcohol regulation). American rightwingers imagine to live in the “Land of the Free” because it’s usually their side that decides what others cannot do. But woe if they imagine their own precious liberty to be even remotely diminished! (**)

(*) Recently, a judge in Alabama explicitly compared restrictions on abortion providers with closing down gun dealerships. I don’t think any gun rights advocate would say that

(**) The only real counterexample I can think of are smoking bans. Anti-smoking isn’t strictly a partisan issue but initially had probably more support among liberals (although there were some very vocal opponents on the left).

“Did I overstate my original thing? ”

Do bears bare? Do bees be?

I think most smokers nowadays are full aware that they risk ruining their health. Some even support smoking bans as a means to get away from the habit. Others have stuck to the argument that their cancer is nobody’s business and nonsmokers who like a smoke-free environment can go elsewhere. They have been overruled, have mostly resigned to the new status quo – and the sky hasn’t fallen.

But then, the Founders forgot to enshrine a constitutional right to bear tobacco.