Tech Paladin

Can anyone explain to me what this is? Whenever I read anything about gays and the political battles surrounding them, there are always a few dudes who come out of the woodwork and start yelling about, “THE RADICAL HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA!” I would love for anyone to explain to me just what this is or means, because I’ve known and am friends with a whole bunch of gay people, and none of them had an “agenda” beyond simply wanting to be recognized as fellow human beings, entitled to all the rights and privileges as any other one, regardless of what who they prefer to share their plumbing with.

Ultimately it usually comes down to the fact that there are a lot of people who are scared of gays and don’t relish the thought of living in a world where homosexuality is considered acceptable or (shudder) normal. But their mistake is in thinking that their perceived right to inhabit such a world trumps the actual right of the people in question to peacefully live their own lives free from government persecution and discrimination. This is what the civil rights movement was fought about: blacks were legally and socially second-class citizens, with the local governments complicit in their repression. Such repression can’t happen without a government allowing or at least turning a blind eye to it, and the keys to ending it were normalizing blacks in society, and having a bigger government force the smaller ones to acknowledge and protect black people’s freedom just like they did for white people.

And that’s really what this is all about: anti-gay people basically admit that they want the government to discriminate against gay people and treat them like second-class citizens and allow them to do so as well, in the same way that blacks and women were treated for much of the last century.

Sadly, the bigotry engendered by the belief that you have the right to live in a country whose government represses groups you disapprove of doesn’t end with the modern right; I find about as many examples of the left doing it too. One I’d like to draw attention to is (surprise!) the Brady Campaign’s Doug Pennington. Buried in his latest post is a telling sentence:

An aside: isn’t it ironic how some libertarians want government to stay out of their lives, yet have no problem with forcing other people to live with loaded, concealed weapons everywhere they turn? The grocery store; the park; the school; the airport. Apparently, we have the “freedom” to live with what these so-called libertarians tell us to live with. After all, they have the guns, right?

Try replacing the words “loaded, concealed weapons” with “gays” or “negroes”. Looks a lot more bigoted now, huh? The truth is, we have to live with a lot of things that we might find distasteful. The Bill of Rights in fact ensures it!

For example, the First Amendment forces us to live with inflammatory newspaper articles that insult our beliefs, and fringe religions that blaspheme against all that we consider holy; it does this because each individual’s freedom to believe, express, and worship what he wishes trumps everybody else’s sense of offense and umbrage against same. Similarly, the Second Amendment forces us to live with our neighbors’ right to own and carry weapons, and the Fourteenth Amendment forces us to accept black people and other racial minorities as legally equal to white people.

No government can force freedom onto anyone; it can only force bigots to recognize others’ existing freedoms. That’s the whole point of the Bill of Rights, and that was the genius behind the American form of government — the idea that the government would act as a guarantor of liberty rather than its chief infringer, as was the case under theocracy and monarchy. Our history is a rollercoaster ride of coming closer and backing away from that ideal, as exemplified by highs like the civil rights movement or the decriminalization of sodomy, and lows like the Japanese-American internment during World War II or the normalization of the income tax in 1913.

But let no one believe that any one political party has a monopoly on this bigotry. It was beloved Democrat FDR who interned the Japanese-Americans by executive order as much as it was was racist Republicans who opposed civil rights. In this vein, I’ll end with one of my favorite Reason.tv videos:

I finally got around to firing my shotgun for the first time over the weekend. It’s pretty embarrassing, but for about four months I owned it, the thing had just been sitting in my closet. For all I knew it wouldn’t even fire! The story of why involves a legal interlude. Skip the next section if you don’t care about New York and California’s oppressive gun laws and just want to hear about what it’s like to shoot a shotgun.

That’s some real public safety for ya there

I bought this shotgun in New York sort of on a whim while I was sending my other guns across the country for my move to California. The reason is because these states, among a few others, require that you send your guns from gun store to gun store rather than just through the mail.

In any event, I had known for a while that I wanted a nice 12 gauge shotgun, and when I got to the store, there was an unbelievable combo deal for a beautiful Mossberg 500, so I bought it then and there. The side effect of this was that I only got to fondle it for about five minutes before I added it to the other stuff being sent across the country, and I didn’t see it until I arrived in California.

On maybe the second day I was here, I went to the gun store in California to pick up my guns. But they wouldn’t let me because state law required that I show ID, and my New York ID wasn’t valid for some reason. Balls. I couldn’t get a new one because I didn’t have a permanent address yet, so I waited a month, got a California ID (which cost me three times what it did in New York), waited two weeks for it to arrive (I got a valid temporary one instantly in New York), headed back to the gun store. I showed them my ID, and paid another $125 (WTF?), but California makes you wait, and so I left again and came back ten days later.¹ I finally got the guns home about three months after I arrived, and the whole process made me about $300 poorer for no good reason.

I can’t think of a single aspect of public safety that was increased by making me go through such a rigamarole. But of course, public safety isn’t really the point. The aim is to make gun ownership difficult, costly, bureaucracy-laden, and filled with legal minefields in the hope that more and more people will lack the motivation to do it, so that eventually the shrinking and demoralized gun-owning population can just be crushed entirely with a blanket ban or something as close to that as possible (see: Chicago, New York City, San Francisco). Well, I’m not gonna let that be me, so screw you New York and screw you California.

Just about the one thing these laws accomplished was to force me to spend several hundred dollars at gun stores, rather than the maybe 15 or 20 it would have been if I could have just boxed them up and sent ‘em through the mail. Thanks a lot, New York and California, for subsidizing gun stores’ profits. Boy, I bet that was what these states’ cockamamie legislatures had in mind!

</rant>

After I got the gun home, I played around with it for a little while, loading and unloading some 12 gauge snap caps and practicing working the action to get the feel of how it operated. But I just didn’t have time to go to the range, and so there it sat in my closet for another month or so, loaded with five rounds of buckshot but without my even knowing if the darn thing would even go bang!

I rectified this last weekend. Unlike rifle or pistol shooting, you can’t really fire a shotgun with marksmanship in mind since it throws a cloud of pellets rather than a single bullet. Before this, only other shooting experience I’d really had was a .22 at pieces of paper, while shotgun games are all about hitting moving targets.

I paid for a round of trap, one of the more basic games. After receiving some instruction, I got into position, chambered a round, brought the stock to my cheek, pulled the trigger, and…

1. I was not knocked on my butt
2. I was not deafened
3. A 50-foot area I was pointing the gun at did not break into fragments

Well, so much for what I was taught by online folklore, video games, and Hollywood! After being told that shotguns were the ultimate death cannons, that a 12 gauge will break your shoulder or knock you backwards a foot and blow out your eardrums and annihilate the target area all at the same time!, it was actually pretty moderate. I was even so focused on the target that I barely heard the bang, and the recoil was more of a hard push than a kick. Not at all what I was expecting.

The one thing that video games and Hollywood actually did correctly teach me about shotguns is that they sound totally badass when you rack the slide. That schikk-chikk sound is every bit as awesome and intimidating in real life as it is in the movies.

Of course, I didn’t hit the orange clay sailing through the air either, but I wasn’t really expecting to. But I did break the second one, and man oh man was it satisfying! A big shit-eating grin spread across my face as I thought Man, I hit that flying object 60 feet away! Out of the 25 shots I took, I hit 8 clays, which is generally a pretty miserable score, but not terrible for a beginner. And in the next round I hit 11 — progress!

All in all, it was a great deal of fun, and it makes me want to practice and improve so I’m not such an obvious n00b!

1. Then I discovered that my car was locked in a parking lot, but that’s another story. Some higher power really didn’t want to see my reunited with my firearms! [↩]

Yeah, pretty much:

Video:

I just read about an art exhibit in New York City created by a shooting enthusiast trying to bring a fresh perspective to a city that seems dominated by the meme that someone else will protect you so you don’t have to. Alas, it was only open for one day a week ago, but I highly encourage you to visit this site whereupon you can see some images from the exhibit and where a particularly poignant paragraph was reproduced:

Guns.

It is a recent additive to our cultural mores that responsibility for our safety is safely protected by the bastions of governed police stations, fire departments, city town and state officials, our president. Whether or not to be responsible for our own safety seems optional. Someone gets paid to save us. It is not just a matter of whether you have armed yourself with a gun or kung fu or Self Defense for Dummies. It is that there is an imagined provision of harmless living that is upheld by these mores and the presence of a gun piques the subconscious fear that this may not indeed be true; that our responsibility is more than what we are agreeing to take on, and that makes us complicit and vulnerable.

I was at the shooting range and an unbelievably cute asian couple set up in the booth next to mine. The husband noticed that I had a 10/22, the same gun he had, and he started up a conversation. I looked over at his, and noticed it had a folding stock. And a pistol grip…

My eyes widened. This man owned an assault weapon! Didn’t he know that those ergonomic additions made his weapon 100% illegal!?! He probably noticed my dinner-plate-sized eyes and quickly said, “don’t worry, it’s pre-ban,” referring to the fact that any weapon branded an “assault weapon” that was purchased before the law was written was “grandfathered” in so as not to upset existing owners by making their weapons illegal.

“Did you actually buy it before the ban, or buy a marked-up one that was?”, I asked.

“Oh, it’s totally before the ban. I got this in 1987, and it collected dust for a while, but I decided to take up target shooting again.”

And that was it. His “assault weapon” was 100% legal because it was purchased before 1994. His gun had the otherwise illegal combination of folding stock + pistol grip, but it was legal simply because it was bought before some arbitrary date.

But then I got to thinking. How would a police officer determine whether his weapon was legal? It sure looks like an illegal weapon. Visually, there’s no way to tell this legal ‘87 gun from an illegal ‘95 one; in fact I can’t even be sure his was legal since for all I knew the guy was lying about it being bought in ‘87 — there’s no easy way to tell. Sure, a police officer could check the serial number, but that would only tell him when the receiver was purchased; the stock is a detachable part that could have been manufactured yesterday.

What if this guy’s receiver was manufactured in ‘87 but the folding stock actually was added yesterday? And if this is indeed illegal, what method on planet Earth exists to determine it? Moreover, what public safety is gained through this byzantine web of laws that one must scrupulously understand? How exactly is New York State any safer?

Yet more silly gun laws that just inconvenience those who pose no danger yet do nothing whatsoever to address crime.

1. The drug war has failed.

We all know about the social problems, but fundamentally, drugs pose an economic problem because selling and transporting them is a relatively easy way to net hundreds or thousands of dollars that requires no special skills or large time commitments. For people who live in poverty and hold down dead-end jobs, entering the drug trade seems like (and often is) the quick and easy route to big money. As a neoclassical economist might put it, these people are making rational decisions to maximize their wealth given their assets and circumstances. An anthropologist would perhaps phrase it to say that these people are so disadvantaged that trafficking drugs are the only way they see out of their predicaments. However you slice it, drugs are big money for people who are used to working for pocket change and want a quick fix to their problems.

But something is rotten in the state of Denmark. It turns out that trafficking drugs isn’t as simple as it looks. Rival gangs spring up to compete for pieces of the pie; junkies rob and steal for cash to fuel their high-priced habits; addiction pulls apart families; law enforcement devotes more and more time to busting druggies and those who supply them; and all the while, affected neighborhoods deteriorate under the strain of these conflicts and the violence they spawn.

And so the inner cities become more and more unsafe and unstable. The middle classes flee for safer environs, while the poor, unable to afford to move (and often compounded by difficulty imagining life any other way), remain there to continue the cycle. Businesses take flight, resulting in higher unemployment and even more incentives to make a living trafficking drugs.

As one can imagine, a host of social problems result. Drug addiction levels in inner cities skyrocket. Families collapse under the strain of supporting or dealing with addicted members or addicted friends. Men father children and then leave. Boys grow up without fathers and never learn how to be men. Fatherless boys join gangs to feel masculine and shoot each other over minor slights and perceived disrespect. Emotions rule; responsibility becomes non-existent. The resulting gang violence, much of it taking the form of shootings, wracks the affected areas. The homeboys and thugz who survive to grow up father children and then leave just like their own fathers did. And the ugly cycle continues as long as the drugs keep flowing.

2. Drug-related violence and homicide does not affect all demographic groups equally.

After being illegally imported (usually from Mexico), drugs start their path in big cities. This is for purely practical reasons; though it’s true that poor people of all stripes are particularly drawn to drugs for various reasons, the drugs themselves enter cities first because of the volume and concentration of potential users pose a particularly attractive proposition. It helps that cities serve as useful distribution hubs for surrounding areas. So there’s nothing inherent about city-dwelling poor people that draws them to drugs more then other poor people; they just happen to live in locations that drug traders find lucrative.

So the drug problem is focused in poor inner cities for reasons of simple economics. These areas are populated mostly by black people for myriad reasons including past racism in housing policies, “white flight”, strong community ties, difficulty making enough money to afford to relocate, and a failure to imagine life anywhere else. It would then stand to reason that since drug-related problems are centered in poor inner cities which happen to be populated by black people, they would be most affected by the fallout. And sadly, this fallout often consists of homicide and other violence that results from drug trafficking and addiction. The U.S. Department of Justice arrived at the same conclusions.

As we can see, blacks commit much, much more homicide than white people do per capita:

(http://www.ojp.gov/bjs/homicide/race.htm)

But blacks are also the victims of much, much more homicide than whites are per capita:

(http://www.ojp.gov/bjs/homicide/race.htm)

What does this tell us? That black people are killing each other at alarming rates. And what would cause them to do that? Inner-city gang violence. If we look at statistics from the CDC, we can find that 61% of black homicide victims are between the ages of 15 and 29 — prime gang member ages; among whites, it’s only 45%. It is dismaying how often this senseless murder happens — 39 million black Americans commit 1.1 times as many homicides as the remaining 267 million white, hispanic, Asian, and indian Americans combined. That’s right, the 16% of the population that’s black commits more murder than the 84% that’s not black.

This figure is staggering. Black gang members are practically killing each other off in America’s poorest inner cities, and they’re doing it because of a lack of male role models and the lure of high profits in drug trafficking. Again, thank you drug war. On the other hand, this reveals another curious truth:

3. Gun violence in America is mostly an urban black phenomenon.

More black people are actually killed using guns each year than white people, and 94% of them are killed by other black people. Again, this is because many of the perpetrators are gang members who are shooting each other over drugs and a lack of props. The use of guns in homicide, like many things violence-related, is heavily skewed toward the typical gang ages:

(http://www.ojp.gov/bjs/homicide/weapons.htm)

Black people commit four times as many drug-related homicides as white people per capita and 2.56 times as many gang-related homicides per capita. Coincidence? No, it’s just the fallout from the drug war destroying communities and teaching children that violence is the right way to live.

This also explains why most forms of gun control fail to do much. The vast majority of laws restrict the ability of people to walk into retail stores and buy certain types of guns (often so-called “military-style” rifles and semi-automatic handguns), but gang members and other criminals don’t buy their guns in stores. Then there are laws that require licenses to buy certain weapons, but those don’t work because gang members acquire their guns illegally, giving them no incentive whatsoever to become licensed and register their guns. Finally, there are laws that restrict whether or not people can carry guns in public and where they can carry them, except that gang members carry their guns wherever they want irrespective of the law.

This country doesn’t have a gun problem. It has a gang problem which is caused by a drug problem. There are between 238 and 276 million legally-owned guns in this country. The extremely miniscule minority of Americans who are gang members or criminals will manage to acquire, carry, and use guns. The bottom line is this: no amount of gun control will ever stop a very, very small number of black teenaged gang members from shooting each other over drugs because they grew up without fathers or morals. No morals? you ask. How can that be true? Isn’t that just closet racism? Here’s how:

4. Decades of violence have destroyed and perverted urban black families and culture

First, let me say that I in no way mean to denigrate black people in general here. I have personally known many, many middle-class African-Americans and many Africans as well; in fact, I have lived in a small African village, and I have tutored African immigrants in English. Without fail, all these people have been generous, kind, and hardworking. But there’s something toxic about urban black culture that so often leads kids down the path of vice and violence, the that’s what I’m talking about here.

As I’ve already shown, drugs, their trafficking, and the addiction they cause have resulted in a noxious combination of unemployment, depression, violence, and misery in predominantly black inner cities. This battlefield environment has sadly all but annihilated urban black families. Entire generations of black kids have grown up around drugs, gangs, crime, and violence, and as a result, the urban black family has all but collapsed under the weight. 70% of black children now grow up fatherless. Absent a father or any good male role models, young black boys never learn what manhood is truly about, and so they fall in with gangs, mistaking the feeling of toughness for masculinity. When they grow older, they father children of their own and quickly leave the mothers, just like their own fathers did, perpetuating and exacerbating the cycle.

Absent any real positive male role models, black boys find inspiration among thugs, gangbangers, and criminals. A culture of violence slowly began to develop over the years, with kids actively disdaining education and scholastic achievement in favor of robbery, shooting, and fathering even more children by even more young women. This is why more forms of birth control and sex education being made available don’t curb the flow of babies; so many of the young mothers want to have many children as early as possible. It’s also why better education in inner cities so often fails; many of the kids simply don’t care about learning.

This is an intractable problem. Most of the reason why the government has failed to really make a dent in it is because it’s trying to address the symptoms rather than the true cause: the drug war. Increasing law enforcement results in more arrests and convictions, but it doesn’t address why people deal drugs. Enacting gun control measures disarms people who aren’t at risk and does nothing to stem the flow of gang violence, and furthermore, it doesn’t address why young black men want to kill each other. Piling on more social programs does little because they don’t address why those they target fail to fix their lives on their own.

5. Legalize drugs and these problems will slowly disappear.

It’s simple supply and demand. People want drugs (high demand) but the DEA does its damnedest to curtail the flow (low supply). High demand with a low supply equals high price. This is ECON 101 here. As long as the price remains high, poor people will traffic it to make money — big money. Our policies for the last few decades have all been centered around reducing the supply by intercepting drugs at the border, confiscating stashes, arresting dealers and the like, and yet more people then ever get high. Somehow, our supply-side policies have failed. If anything, coming down hard on the supply has only increased demand, and it’s raised prices, too, which is good for the Mexican suppliers and bad for those who live around inner city addicts and drug gangs.

Addressing demand is tough, though. It’s anyone’s guess how to reduce addiction. Drug users are poor, rich, white, black, privileged, and disadvantaged. School programs? Heavy legal consequences? Extensive rehabilitation? Better parenting? Less stress? Better coping mechanisms? Reducing the culture of escapism and abdication of responsibility? These are truly difficult questions.

But until we arrive at answers for them, there’s an easy thing we can do: legalize the drugs. Now, I don’t advocate this because I’m a big fan of getting high. I have never once used illegal drugs, and I never intend to. I’m in fact strongly against the use of drugs; it’s just that I feel that far, far more social problems are created by illegalizing drugs than are solved by it.

What will happen once we legalize drugs? Prices will fall and the underground industry will lose its advantage as legal companies spring up. Gangs will wane as it becomes easier and cheaper to buy the goods legally. Illegal demand will collapse, legal demand will stabilize. The government will be able to regulate and tax the substances in question, leading to new revenue streams and new ways to combat addiction and abuse.

None of this should sound unfamiliar; it’s exactly what happened when alcohol was re-legalized following our experiment with prohibition in the 1920s and early 30s. Big surprise: it failed miserably in exactly the same way that the drug war is failing now. Despite supply falling, demand actually rose, prices skyrocketed, millions of citizens became criminals, and ugly underground organizations fought each other and the law for the precious liquor.

As soon as it was legalized, many of these problems simply vanished. It’s unlikely a recovery of the same speed will happen with drugs because it’s been a looooong time since they were legal, but over time, things will stabilize. They did with alcohol, and they can with drugs. And until we legalize and regulate drugs just like we do with alcohol and cigarettes, street prices and addiction levels will continue to rise. It is inevitable.

Any time I read the writings of a member of the Judicial branch, I cannot help but feel terribly outclassed. Everything is meticulously reasoned and supported using the most sophisticated language, and the justices themselves often inject a usually acerbic wit into their arguments; consider the following reasoning from a minority opinion in K-mart v. Carter:

The statute excludes only merchandise “of foreign manufacture,” which the majority says might mean “manufactured by a foreigner” rather than “manufactured in a foreign country.” I think not. Words, like syllables, acquire meaning not in isolation but within their context. While looking up the separate word “foreign” in a dictionary might produce the reading the majority suggests, that approach would also interpret the phrase “I have a foreign object in my eye” as referring, perhaps, to something from Italy.

Perhaps it’s just the image of an octogenarian Supreme Court Justice saying something like this out loud, followed by official-sounding murmurs of assent, but I find humor like this hilarious!

Okay, okay, so anyway, I somehow managed to come across an article written by a J. Harvie Wilkinson III on a subject of great interest to me: the Heller v. D.C. decision which ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own and carry weapons for self-defense. Wilkinson argues that Heller v. D.C. threatens to become this judicial generation’s Roe v. Wade, overreaching by creating a constitutional right where none previously existed. Now before I go any further, let me say that my disapproval of Roe v. Wade should not be taken to mean opposition to abortion. To the contrary, I believe that it should be generally legal (and would remain so if left up to the states).

It’s just that Wilkinson’s piece has further convinced me that Roe was an incredibly dubious and slipshod piece of judicial work, and was a totally inappropriate way to protect abortion. It’s argued fairly convincingly, and, reading through it, I couldn’t help but realize that Wilkinson is blindingly intelligent. Nevertheless, his comparison of Heller to Roe stumbles.

Wilkinson’s fault lies in discounting the Second Amendment itself. The core of his arguments stem from what he views as the arbitrariness of manufacturing a new constitutional right without legislative approval. He makes an extremely convincing case for this being true of Roe, but he errs in applying the critique to Heller; the right in question already existed, and was merely being clarified in purpose, not created from whole cloth.

While the constitution says nothing whatsoever about abortion or trimesters of pregnancy as Wilkinson correctly observes, it does indeed discuss the civilian possession of weapons — a fact that Wilkinson seems to overlook. The primary debate revolves around what purpose this possession serves, with advocates of gun control typically asserting that the “well-regulated milita” clause indicates that the arms must be possessed with military service in mind, while the pro-gun focus on the “shall not be infringed” part.

There is a lively debate in the Heller decision, and this question is settled fairly decisively. The “collective rights” theory pushed by gun control advocates was immediately discounted by all nine justices! In addition to getting tossed out by the majority, the minority opinion (authored by Justice Stevens) arrives at the same conclusion, and does so in the first sentence: “The question presented by this case is not whether the Second Amendment protects a ‘collective right’ or an ‘individual right.’ Surely it protects a right that can be enforced by individuals” (he then goes on to say that the real issue is the scope of the right).

I’ll repeat that: all nine Supreme Court Justices agreed that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own weapons. The dissenting minority opinion does not contradict this, it merely attempts unsuccessfully and unconvincingly to add some additional baggage, which explains why it remains the minority opinion.

As an example, Stevens proposes the idea that while the Second Amendment undoubtedly protects an individual right, the right in question can only be exercised in a collective fashion, a curious notion that is exposed as nonsense when Stevens attempts to describe the right to petition as such a right. Scalia artfully blows this unsubstantiated moonshine out of the water, and Stevens has no rebuttal.

So Wilkinson is dead wrong in his estimation that the true purpose of the Second Amendment remains shrouded in mystery, a cosmic puzzle for congress to sort out. Rather, it is convincingly laid out in the majority opinion, unchallenged by the minority.

Wilkinson then tries to claim that self-defense being the core of that individual right is what has been invented on the spot, similar to Roe’s right to abortion. But this too is an enormous stretch, because while the right to abortion was indeed spontaneously created, the right to self-defense is merely an interpretation of what was already written. Remarkably, Wilkinson contradicts his own analysis, saying elsewhere that there “is a big difference between when the text says something (whatever that something may be), and when it says absolutely nothing.” Wilkinson should practice what he preaches!

No, Heller is more subtle; it did not invent a new constitutional right, it merely clarified a pre-existing one. The fact that this clarification has led to so many legal challenges of existing gun laws speaks more to the burdensome nature of these laws than the controversiality of the decision.

Washington, D.C., for instance, still maintains a law that defines autoloading handguns as “machine guns” if they are even capable of accepting magazines that can hold more than 12 rounds of ammunition — a ridiculous and arbitrary distinction, especially since Federal law already adequately defines what a “machine gun” is! Wilkinson does not place enough faith in the ability of American jurors when he asserts that this case would require the introduction of complicated technical data to decide. Nothing of the sort is required — justices trying this case will merely have to examine the federal law and force D.C. to comply with it.

Wilkinson claims that Heller will force justices to rule on exactly which features make or do not make a weapon “suitable for self-defense”, but this attitude displays his bias against guns; he takes the gun-controllers’ position that arbitrary cosmetic features can render a weapon more or less useful for the purpose of murder.((Any gun can be misused by one with malice in his heart. The only attributes shared by the crude single-shot derringer that killed Lincoln, the ancient and slow-to fire bolt-action rifle used to kill Kennedy, and the inaccurate high-capacity pistols wielded by the columbine killers were that their users disregarded the law and desired to commit murder. Regulating certain features does nothing to address the mindset that would incline one to kill — a mindset that can still and often does result in violence and death completely absent firearms.))

I suspect Wilkinson himself would be unable to decide whether a folding stock, for example, would make a gun unsuitable for self-defense. But why would it? In such a case, testimony would be heard describing just what a folding stock is good for: making a long gun handier, less bulky, and more comfortable for users of differing arm lengths. It would be plain then that none of these goals substantively alter any more than a weapon’s ergonomics, so therefore, the presence or absence of a folding stock would be obviously irrelevant to the core of self-defense. Again, Wilkinson doesn’t put enough faith in his peers when he asserts they they would struggle with basic questions like these.

The truth is, weapons that cannot easily be used for self-defense are fairly easy to imagine. Think about bombs and explosives for a moment. At extremely short distances, they would probably cause as much damage to the user who wishes to protect his life as they would to the aggressor. At longer distances, they would be all but impossible to aim properly so as to avoid causing tremendous collateral damage or loss of innocent life. Clearly the indiscriminate nature of explosives makes them unsuitable for targeting an individual aggressor and avoiding unwanted damage to bystanders, property, or self. I don’t believe that an extraordinary amount of judicial talent would be required to deduce that explosives would fail to receive the protection of the Second Amendment.

No, all Heller will ultimately do is force legislatures to avoid introducing nonsensical regulations, or throw out such laws if they manage to pass. And that is exactly what Heller is supposed to do: protect the citizenry’s ability to buy, own, and carry weapons that can be used for lawful self-defense, which is most of them.

That said, Wilkinson correctly identifies a crucial flaw in Heller that threatens to undo its legitimacy. The following passage in Scalia’s majority opinion is exactly the kind of judicial overreaching that Scalia himself constantly observes is damaging to Roe:

The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.

As Wilkinson observes, “The Constitution’s text, at least, has as little to say about restrictions on firearm ownership by felons as it does about the trimesters of pregnancy.” He’s right, of course. The above passage appears to be little more than judicial ass-covering by Scalia, who presumably did not want to be branded as a radical gun nut. As Wilkinson says, “the Heller majority seems to want to have its cake and eat it, too — to recognize a right to bear arms without having to deal with any of the more unpleasant consequences of such a right.”

Questions of whether felons should be permanently denied their Second Amendment rights, where self-defense can legally take place, and how or if the sale of firearms should be taxed are indeed questions best left to legislatures, to be later tested against the Second Amendment. By what logic does Scalia attempt to explain how handguns should be protected as tools of lawful self-defense, yet barred from being carried in schools or government buildings; would he argue that those locations are, in effect, “self-defense free zones”? Because that is the logical effect of protecting laws that limit the carrying of arms there, given that he has defined the carrying of arms as a legitimate activity for self-defense. There is absolutely nothing in the constitution on this subject, nor is there even any real attempt at justification at all in Scalia’s opinion.

And furthermore, there is a glaring logical flaw in the passage: the “in common use” clause makes no sense; why should handguns be protected simply because they are popular? If for some reason people start equipping their houses with .50 cal machine gun turrets, should those be protected as legitimate tools of self-defense? Popularity seems to me to be an extremely poor determinant of suitability for self-defense.

So what does this mean for Heller? Is it as bad as Roe? I don’t think so. While both suffer from some judicial overreaching, what is clear to me is that while Roe fabricated a new right out of thin air with no justification, Heller merely refined the meaning of an existing right, which does wonders for its legitimacy. This of course doesn’t excuse those peculiar and hypocritical sentences in the Heller ruling, and I dearly wish they didn’t taint it with their presence. But the fact remains that Heller both starts on much firmer constitutional ground and reaches a much more logical conclusion. In the end, it is a much stronger ruling than Roe.

Not many people realize how entwined the histories of gun control and racial discrimination are. I recently found an eye-opening article, originally published in the Kansas Journal of Law and Public Policy and reproduced online with permission, that exposes the sordid truth. I feel it really pulled together a great deal of disparate facts on the issue to paint a very well-supported picture of gun control as a tool of racial oppression, both in the past as well as today.

It’s pretty astonishing to see just how blatant the racism used to be. Before the Civil War, for example, Southern states had been able to get away with pretty much anything if it deprived blacks of rights, including their rights to bear arms. There are a number of startlingly, overtly, outrageously racist laws that more or less explicitly stated, “negroes cannot own firearms”. The article gives several examples, so I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Many of these laws operated under the tortured logic that blacks (even free blacks!) were not and could never become citizens of the United States, so therefore they could not count on the constitutional rights that whites could. In an attempt to nullify these and other racist laws, the 14th amendment was ratified in 1866 following the end of the Civil War, and codified a very broad definition of citizenship:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

But motivated humans are tricky. The South wasn’t ready to give up its racism, hate, or bitterness just yet, and so Southern lawmakers sought ways to continue to curtail blacks’ rights even in light of the 14th amendment. And one of the most often-curtailed rights was the right to bear arms; after all, it would be terribly bothersome to lynch an black man who was capable of defending himself. In fact, some of the worst laws were written specifically following instances of blacks using guns to protect themselves from klansmen or lynch mobs.

After the War

It was in the period after the war that gun control became less overtly racist and more recognizable from a modern perspective, hiding the racist overtones in legalese and doublespeak. The new laws were written so as to satisfy the technicalities of the 14th amendment; they could no longer explicitly prevent blacks from exercising their rights, but instead a common approach was to specify the necessity of obtaining the consent of a city, county, or state official for the exercise of the right in question, and some of the first ones to be rewritten concerned guns. The South, terrified of the possibility that blacks would take bloody retribution for centuries of forced enslavement, worked hastily to disarm them by mandating that they appeal to white officials for licenses to possess weapons. Not surprisingly, the newly-freed blacks were turned down, while whites somehow had no difficulty obtaining the licenses.

The true racism underlying provisions that mandated the consent of government officials would be shockingly revealed in the following century by the racist Justice Buford of a Florida court, who presided over the 1941 case of white man charged with unlawfully carrying a concealed weapon in the glove box of his car:

“I know something of the history of this legislation. The original Act of 1893 was passed when there was a great influx of negro laborers in this State drawn here for the purpose of working in turpentine and lumber camps. The same condition existed when the Act was amended in 1901 and the Act was passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers and to thereby reduce the unlawful homicides that were prevalent in turpentine and saw-mill camps and to give the white citizens in sparsely settled areas a better feeling of security. The statute was never intended to be applied to the white population and in practice has never been so applied.”

The judge was even only telling half of the truth. The original 1893 law was written in response to a black town using lever-action rifles and revolvers to shoot the daylights out of a bunch of klansmen who were attacking the town; the law cracked down on black ownership of just those weapons. Buford was dead right when he said that it had never been enforced against whites who broke it, though. And back to the present, the white man who ran afoul of this antique law in 1941 was found not guilty, blood-boilingly enough. Today, this sort of predatory and discriminatory system is known as “may issue” licensing and is defended vehemently by advocates of gun control, who claim that the oversight of government officials works to cut down on criminals and madmen wishing to acquire guns.

The transition to modernity

Sadly, the reality today contradicts this assertion. Though racism is slackening with time, it is very much alive in localities with “may issue” systems, which routinely deny licenses to those who have the misfortune not to be white. For example, in 1995, the names of all of Fresno county’s approximately 2500 concealed weapon license holders were published in a local newspaper (article reproduced here); 3% of them had hispanic names; 44% of Fresno residents are hispanic. By contrast, in the 35 states that must issue licenses to anyone applying who meets the legal requirements (”shall issue” states), the racial makeup of licensees closely matches that of the population at large.

As a “may issue” state, the rest of California has similarly racist tendencies in the issuance of concealed carry licenses; the counties that have fewer blacks than the state average (6.7%) have on average five times more license holders than the “blacker” counties. Coincidence? No, just legally-sanctioned racism.

Then there’s New York City, home to 18 million and which requires a license to even possess any type of firearm at all, where only 4450 ordinary citizens are licensed to carry concealed weapons. The “may issue” NYPD is famously discriminatory about the issuance of licenses, leading to the opening of law firms whose sole area of expertise is the navigation of New York City’s gun laws. Does a poor person have any chance to navigate such a restrictive system? Who can afford such a lawyer but the rich? This system goes beyond race to discriminate against the poor as well!

Sure enough, at the same time that ordinary citizens are routinely denied permits, politicians and celebrities make up a large proportion of those so licensed, including Donald Trump, Robert De Niro, and, outrageously enough, the famously anti-gun New York State senator Chuck Schumer. Isn’t it nice to be rich, white, famous, and politically connected?

In practice, allowing local law enforcement to determine who does and who does not get to exercise a right leads to gross abuses against poor people and racial minorities. Even the vocabulary used by modern gun-control advocates is racist in origin. Ever wonder about the origin of “Saturday night special” — the term used to describe cheap, low-quality firearms that were once typically used by urban criminals? I did too. It turns out the term originated among racist police officers of the late 19th century who would ignore cries of help from impoverished black neighborhoods where crime was rampant, sneering, “just another niggertown Saturday night!” I find it totally shocking and coldly ironic that such racially offensive slang is now common parlance among the modern Left’s more anti-gun elements.

I think most of them don’t know the racist history of the laws they’re proposing and defending. I sure as hell didn’t when I was one of them. I think it’s important to know the history of what you advocate, and adding racism to the long list of problems I now find with gun control just makes me more ashamed that I ever supported it.

They’re all nonsensical supply-side arguments to complex problems. Fundamentally, they all argue that demand can be controlled by supply, or, more simply, that “supply finds its own demand.” The corollary to this is that a high demand can be curtailed by controlling the supply. In modern economics, the supply-side school is one that argues that an insufficient demand for a good or service can be raised by producing more of it. This ideology has found its most ardent supporters among Neoliberal economists who push the so-called “trickle-down” theory which states that prosperity will “trickle down” to the rest of the country if we pad the pockets of the rich.

Many accuse this theory’s proponents of greed, but that’s a shallow argument; trickle-down theory is actually a classic supply-side view that has nothing to do with wanting to “reward” the rich simply for being rich. The logic behind this theory goes that since the economy in general is driven by consumer demand, the best way to raise demand is to increase the supply, and since the supply is created by the capitalists, business owners, investors and the like, then money should be given to them so that they may more easily increase their productive output.

The problem with this theory, of course, is that it doesn’t work in practice. It claims that supply drives demand; in fact the reverse is true. There’s no incentive whatsoever for a business to increase its supply during a crisis, for example, because there’s insufficient demand to support such an enterprise. In layman’s terms, when people are too poor or frightened to buy, only foolish businesses spend their money trying to sell more. But that’s exactly what trickle-downers try to encourage: their solution for crises of demand is to encourage businesses to increase their supply by throwing money at them. But businesses are smarter than that. They’re not suicidal; they know that increasing their output when nobody wants to buy is stupid, so they hold onto the money (incidentally enough, this is just what the American people did with their rebate checks; looks like we’re also smarter than the politicians). In this current crisis, the businesses who have had billions thrown at them have mostly used it to buy out smaller, weaker firms that are struggling worse than they are. We gave the banks cash and told them to lend; they kept it for themselves and killed their less-governmentally-favored competitors.

These supply-side arguments were first enumerated by Jean-Baptiste Say, a man whose nonsensical ideas that run contrary to human nature have influenced generations of wrong-headed economists, a group trickle-downers are in my opinion members of.

What does this have to do with prohibitionism or gun control? Simply put, both are also approaches to complex problems that focus naïvely on the supply rather than the demand. Prohibition is a great example; in 1919 congress overrode Wilson’s veto and said “alcohol is bad, but people are getting drunker than ever, so if we can ban alcohol, eventually they’ll stop drinking!” We all know how that turned out. Nobody stopped drinking, they just became criminals when they did it. A whole underground industry of alcohol brewing and smuggling sprung up, and organized crime came into existence to ensure that the booze kept flowing. One could say “demand created its own supply.”

It’s very similar with guns. I just read an interesting article this morning about an enormous cache of drug gang weapons seized by Mexican law enforcement. The haul is huge — more than 400 rifles and pistols, fully-automatic weapons, machine guns, grenades, grenade launchers, and even rocket launchers (pictured to above). I later found another article about it full of hand-wringing about how porous our borders are and how it’s all Arizona’s fault. If only we had tougher gun control laws! The supply could be choked off and then drug dealers would be starved of weapons!

If only it would work, I would fully support this. The problem is that there’s no evidence that it would. Organized crime is notoriously slippery; they’ll get what they want pretty much any way you try to slice it. Mexico has extremely harsh gun laws, so they hire people to get guns in America. If we too do something as silly as Mexico and ban all guns, they’ll simply get their guns somewhere else. Most likely they’ll use their influence at all levels of the Mexican government to steal military weapons. There’s already ample evidence that they’re doing this; the seized arsenal included explosives and machine guns that you can’t get in America. As we see, demand is creating its own supply. Mexican drug cartels can’t get the heaviest weapons north of the border? No problem, a few greased palms and suitcases full of greenbacks and the Mexican national guard armories are wide open.

Needless to say, this would be even worse. Right now, the majority of weapons acquired by these cartels are civilian-legal weapons in America — semi-automatic pistols and rifles. If that supply is choked off, they’ll turn to the military to supply their needs, which uses fully-automatic weapons and explosives. How would you like to see the drug gang’s foot soldiers carrying military-grade weaponry? Me neither.

This is similar to an interesting trend I just uncovered among U.S. street criminals. All the literature and accounts I’ve read from the 70s and 80s indicate that criminals from those decades tended to be armed with pretty pitiful guns: .25s, .32s, and other cheaply made “junk guns” that were as likely to jam as they were to fire. It didn’t matter much, though. Career criminals aren’t stupid; they’re capable of exercising pretty sophisticated logic. In this case, they realized that for street crimes like mugging, robbery, and rape, the capacity to cause injury wasn’t as important as the threat of it; any gun — no matter how crappy — is a credible threat, capable of forcing a victim to capitulate. It doesn’t matter how terrible the ballistics of the .25 ACP round are, nobody wants to be shot with one, and criminals realized that they could get the most “bang for their buck” by buying cheap guns because they rarely needed their guns to work at all — they were mostly for intimidation.

There were a few semi-coherent movements during this time period to ban “junk guns” that never really succeeded, but what really ended the carrying of crappy guns by criminals was the Brady Bill. This bill mandated background checks for all firearm purchasers. And you know what? It was hugely successful! Despite some high-profile failures, the system generally works pretty well to prevent criminals and the insane from buying weapons on the open market.

Criminals realized very quickly that they could no longer safely walk into a store and buy a gun — their supply had dried up. Their demand for guns was unchanged, though — they still wanted to carry ‘em! So what did they do? They found a new supply. They started stealing them from houses, or buying them on the black market or from drug dealers. And guess what? These sources tended to have much, much better guns! As criminal demand for guns was undiminished, it simply found a different — and in this case superior — supply of them. Now street criminals are more likely to own high-quality revolvers or high-capacity pistols, both in calibers more likely to result in death rather than injury when fired at victims or police.

Me? I’m with John Maynard Keynes, the man who orchestrated the New Deal and pulled us out of the depression: “Control demand, not supply.” This means asking some tough questions, like, “Why are there drug cartels that want military weapons?”, “What has caused the explosion of street crime in this nation?” and, “What caused demand to collapse during the Depression?”

We need to address the core reason for the demand, whether it be low or high. In the case of the New Deal, Keynes was able to stimulate demand by correctly divining that a lack of employment had dried up consumer spending, so he put people to work building infrastructure projects that survive to this day. Once employment rose, incomes did as well, and demand gradually eased back up to normal levels.

I have my own theory about what caused the drug cartels: illegalized drugs. Just like during prohibition, the demand for an illegal substance has created the incentive for extra-legal organizations to traffic it from producers to consumers. During prohibition, it was the mafia. Under the drug war, it’s the cartels. We neutered the mafia by legalizing alcohol. We can do the same for the cartels by legalizing drugs. Dry up the demand for guns (which is caused by the supply pinch for drugs) and there will be fewer problems with their supply.

I just got finished with Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes, and it was a fascinating read. The premise is really quite simple: photograph armed American families of all types in their homes with their firearms.

Making up these families are were white people, black people, Asians, Jews, women, children, lesbians, soldiers, hunters, rape victims, target shooters, grandfathers — all united in their appreciation of firearms.

Ultimately, seeing such a diverse panoply of individuals who think the way I do made me feel a bit better about myself. You see, I was raised in an environment where the prevailing wisdom seemed to go that gun owners were backwoods rednecks who shot at tin cans and were so stupid and undereducated that they couldn’t read and didn’t vote.

Though I know logically that this is pure nonsense, it’s still hard for me to shake it at times. When I look at my gun, I sometimes still think, “does this make me paranoid or reactionary or mentally unbalanced?” Since coming out to my parents about being a gun owner, these are charges that have occasionally been leveled at me. It’s been a great comfort to read about all the gun owners out there who are happy, healthy, well-off, responsible, and forward-thinking.

One of the best aspects of the book is its lack of a political agenda. There isn’t even any commentary of any sort; each two page spread displays only the owners with their weapons, a list of said weapons, and a few short sentences told to the photographer on why they own the guns. Here’s an example:

Says Cicily, the wife in the picture:

I grew up in a gun environment, but the only people who had guns were gang members. I thought guns were bad things and only bad people had them. I had no exposure to any positive gun experiences so I didn’t know there were normal people who had guns. Matt took me shooting and I had so much fun. I was really impressed with how responsible everybody was. I felt like I was part of something very serious, fun, but everybody took it so seriously and so responsibly that I felt very safe. Now I want to go small game hunting because I love to cook. I want to learn how to cook pheasant and rabbit. I want to learn how to butcher — I want to do it all. All the stuff that all these old Wisconsin women seem to have been born knowing.

Reactionary, mentally delayed, or ignorant? I think not — that’s about as apolitical as it comes. These are good, rational, normal people, and they populate all 208 pages. The images are rich and human; they display happy, quirky people and their neat, messy, elaborate, and simple homes with their dogs, cats, children, cars, and meals. I really felt transported right into these people’s living rooms.

And yet I almost found myself more entranced by each explanation as to why the owner had a gun. I’m always fascinated to learn about the motivations of gun owners. I start to think back to my own and I realize that my reasons are so heavily individualized, taking into account childhood upbringing, a desire for rationality in political positions, an obsession with the mechanical, the desire for self-reliance, and rebellion against my parents. I suspected that other gun owners had similarly multifaceted reasons, and I was not let down. In fact, I found myself really and truly moved by three answers in particular that I found to be especially thought-provoking. Here they are:

Kevin:

As a Jewish American I am cognizant of the fact that 6 million of my people were turned into air pollution in the ’30s and ’40s. As a civil rights advocate I know that at some point words are not going to be enough when people are kicking down your door to pull you out of your house because you’re Jewish, black or gay. You can’t be pro civil rights without being pro gun. It’s hypocritical to deny someone the most basic of all human rights, which is the right to defend yourself.

Mike:

I am liberal Democrat and many of my friends are surprised to find that I’m a gun owner. They have this idea that gun owners are all a bunch of rednecks out in the woods poaching deer, but we’re all over the spectrum, not this monoculture.

Todd:

I never thought I would need or want a firearm until in 2002 I was told by law enforcement during a community outreach program that in the event of a disaster such as a terrorist attack or a massive hurricane, they will not be able to protect everyone. People will have to fend for themselves. It seems like common sense now after what happened in New Orleans during hurricane Katrina, but I was naïve then and I thought the powers that be would always be there to keep law and order.

The diversity of opinion as well as the eloquence of those expressing them was staggering to me. Since the book makes no effort to push any political message, the only clear goal I can think of that this particular photographer had was the goal of any competent photographer: to capture his subjects as naturally as possible. Through not only warm, inviting images of regular human beings just like you and me but also their profound and thought-provoking responses to the question of gun ownership, that goal is admirably achieved.