"The Second Amendment is about revolution."

[darxus]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/7/4/881431/-Why-liberals-should-love-the-Second-Amendment

I am the choir. I do not understand liking anti-gun laws.

Comments

One person’s notion of the point of restrictions on gun ownership. (part 1)

[beowabbit]

The constitutionality of gun restrictions is a long and complicated topic, and I could probably write about it for the entire afternoon. The efficacy of gun restrictions is another one. I’m going to lay those aside for the time being and address the point you don’t seem to see to what you call anti-gun laws.

A pocketknife is a tool. It can also be used as a weapon. A pocketknife has lots and lots of nonviolent uses. It can also be used for self defense. In a conflict between a person with a pocketknife and a person without a pocketknife, the pocket knife multiplies the ability of its wielder to use force by something between one and two: all other things being equal, given a fight between one person with a pocketknife and one person without, my money’s on the one with the pocketknife, but given a fight between one person with a pocketknife and two people without, my money’s on the two without.

(9/11 demonstrated that under the right circumstances, even a pocketknife plus a lot of surprise and confusion can be leveraged to do a lot of terrible damage, but even so, I’d be much much more comfortable on a plane if I knew terrorists and innocent people could get pocketknives aboard than if I knew terrorists and innocent people could get guns aboard.)

A pocketknife does not make it a whole lot easier to surprise people with violence, to end a fight before your victim even knows you’ve started it. Yes, you could get stabbed in the back out of the blue. But in order to use a pocket knife against you, somebody has to be within arm’s reach.

A machine gun is a tool. It probably has some uses aside from violence against humans, but its primary purpose is to kill (or at least incapacitate) other humans. It can presumably be used for defense — I suppose if you had a machine gun in your home, you might kill a burglar with it — but given that its kind of bulky and needs to be kept supplied with ammo, it’s probably better suited to uses where the wielder plans to use it in advance, like a battle in a war, or a police raid, or an ambush of the President’s motorcade, or a bank robbery.

A machine gun multiplies the amount of effective force a person can apply by a very large factor. When you add in the fact that very few people are going to be willing to be one of the first dozen or so people who die taking out an attacker, you’d need a really huge crowd of unarmed people against one person with a machine gun in order for me to bet on the crowd rather than the person with the machine gun. Moreover, a machine gun tremendously increases your ability to end a fight (and kill everybody you want to kill) before anybody has a chance to react. This means that in a world where machine guns are common, everybody has to be afraid all the time. Having a machine gun would probably have some sort of deterrrent effect, but that would be muddled and probably negated by the fact that if anybody wonders whether you may be about to use that machine gun, it’s pretty stupid for them not to shoot first (unless the penalty for honestly but mistakenly thinking you needed to defend yourself is death).

One person’s notion of the point of restrictions on gun ownership. (part 2)

[beowabbit]

A nuclear missile (say, an ICBM with a MIRV warhead) is a tool. It presumably has some uses other than violence or the threat of violence against humans (the Soviets are alleged to have used a small nuclear bomb to close an oil leak at one point, and there’s the traditional SF scenario of deflecting an asteroid), but its overwhelming use is as a deterrent, to threaten unimaginable, vast devastation on potential enemies if they cross some sufficiently important line (like launching you at one first).

A nuclear missile multiplies the ability of the person using it to exert force millionsfold; perhaps billionsfold if you take into account long-term effects. And depending on the delivery mechanism, a nuclear warhead can exterminate a city before anybody but the person detonating it knows its there; even on an ICBM, it can exterminate most of a city before there can be any effective reaction.

A world in which a large fraction of the population had, or had control of, nuclear missiles, would be a very very strange world indeed. Actually, it wouldn’t last long enough to get strange, because given the ratio of nutjobs to sane people, just 0.1% penetration of nuclear weapons in the population — one person in a thousand having control of an ICBM with a MIRV on top — would pretty much guarantee the destruction of the world. But assuming such a situation could possibly be stable, it would have some really weird effects on life and politics. Nobody could admit to being pro-choice, for fear that a loony pro-lifer would nuke their entire city. Nobody could admit to being pro-life, for fear that a loony pro-choicer would nuke their entire city. On election night, the executives at the news agencies would have agonized meetings to discuss whether they could report any of the election results, for fear that somebody would shoot the messenger. Realistically, democracy or even public discourse would be utterly impossible.

Now, an ICBM is expensive, and in the real world if there were no legal constraints on the ownership of ICBMs, it wouldn’t be you or ItsJustJosh who had ICBMs, it would be Archer Daniels Midland and Citibank and Mitsubishi and Wal Mart. Do you really want to think about cutting agricultural subsidies when Archer Daniels Midland has the bomb? Sure, the WTO found against Mitsubishi in that dumping claim and you have the legal right to impose retaliatory sanctions, but is this issue worth losing San Francisco over? How is that company that would otherwise be happy to give you a better job than bagging at Wal Mart going to feel about taking an employee from a company that could take out their corporate headquarters and a three-county radius? And you think Citibank is “Too Big to Fail?” We’ll show you too big to fail!

Anyway my point here is that tools can be more or less dangerous, and more or less unpredictably dangerous. And I think most Libertarians would agree that part of the point of government (even just of a civil tort system, which I think most of you agree is worthwhile) is to decrease the unpredictable danger of life, especially to innocent bystanders.

I think only the looniest of fringe Libertarians would think that there should be no limits whatsoever on private ownership of nuclear missiles. If so, then the rest agree that there’s some point on the danger scale (and the unpredictability scale) where the risk to bystanders of an unregulated dangerous tool outweighs the good done by leaving that tool unregulated. Leaving aside constitututional issues and enforceability, if you think that it is good policy to prevent private individuals from having usable nuclear missiles, but you think that it is bad policy to prevent private individuals from having usable handguns, you’ve made a determination about where those risk and reward lines cross, and about how much risk is enough to justify impinging on people’s freedom. (For that matter, you’ve also made a similar judgement if you think it’s OK for a government to enforce basic traffic laws like which side of the road people drive on, or stoplights at busy intersections. I don’t know if you think that’s OK or not, but it’s the same sort of principle.)

One person’s notion of the point of restrictions on gun ownership. (part 3)

[beowabbit]

(Sorry, this was too long for a single LJ comment, and I really wanted it here rather than in my journal.)


I think it would be bad policy to ban all pocketknives (and in fact I think it’s bad policy to stop people taking small pocketknives onto airplanes), but I think it would be good policy (assuming enforceability) to prevent people bringing handguns into densely-populated urban centers without any sort of oversight, recordkeeping, or traceability. That means that I’ve looked at the situation, made my own judgements, and come up with (perhaps) a different answer than you have. But in principle it is the same judgement you would be making if you said it was OK to prevent people from driving 200mph along the cobblestone streets of the old section of downtown Boston, or if you said it was OK to prevent people from having ICBMs they could launch at the country their team lost to in the World Cup, or suitcase nukes in case that rush-hour traffic just pushes them over the edge.

PS — I would have a lot to say about the Second Amendment protecting the right of the people to violently overthrow their government, but I’ve already seriously cut into my plans for this afternoon. Two points (1) in the 18th century, firearms were a credible deterrent to a despotic government. In the 21st, they aren’t, so we’re back to everybody’s right to defend themselves with an ICBM. And (2) I bet there are (at least proportionally to the prevalence of these beliefs in the overall population) vastly more people who feel that the violent overthrow of the present US government is utterly essential because it doesn’t exterminate sodomites than who feel that the violent overthrow of the present US government is utterly essential because it has exceeded its constitutional authority. The successor government is unlikely to be a place you like better.

PPS — I will point out that the people arguing on the less-gun-restriction side caricature their opponents as uniformly opposed to any access to any kind of firearms for any private citizen. The people arguing on the more-gun-restriction side caricature their opponents as uniformly opposed to any restrictions whatsoever on any individual’s access to firearms (except maybe convicted felons, who in the caricature they think probably just should have been shot anyway to save hassle). I don’t know which caricature is closer to the truth, but in my experience neither one seems very accurate.