Tech Paladin

I recently had the opportunity to watch Brady Campaign leader Paul Helmke debate John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime. I was struck by two things in the way Helmke argued. First of all, I found him to be an exceedingly normal and reasonable fellow. The second was a certain sad desperation in his style, as though he knew that his positions were indefensible (and indeed, he had a very hard time defending them against the aggressively factual Lott), but there was something within him that still just had to try. He very strongly reminded me of his predecessor Pete Shields in his uncertainty about his own position. Needless to say, Lott destroyed Helmke in the debate, rattling off facts and figures from reputable studies, while all Helmke could do was impugn the habits of college students and call into question the mental stability of gun owners through cherry-picked anecdotal examples. Really, it’s all the Brady Campaign ever does.

All of this is a little strange to me. Regular readers (all two of you!) have certainly noticed the change in subject over the last few months from pure tech rants to include a plurality of gun-related rants as well. I write about guns primarily to explore my newfound non-hatred of them, essentially. You see, I was raised to hate guns. I can still barely believe that I don’t hate them anymore. It’s almost impossible for me to realize that I now actually own a gun because it’s such a radical, 180-degree turnaround from how I was raised to feel.

I actually used to support Helmke’s opinions and organization. When I was in middle school, I participated in the Million Mom March and wrote a violently anti-gun magazine for a school assignment. I interviewed our local Million Mom March media coordinator¹ and nodded vigorously as she talked about how hopelessly inadequate Illinois’s gun laws were (at the time they were some of the toughest in the country), and how we needed more licensing (Illinois is still the only state to actually have universal licensing of gun owners and did at the time). I keep all my school work, and looking back, as I read this ancient thing, I’m struck by how many factual inaccuracies and outright falsehoods and fabrications I wrote. I remember that the assignment was designed to teach us to do independent research and learn about a topic objectively. In retrospect, I seemed to have accidentally picked the perfect one: none of my hyper-liberal anti-gun teachers or parents ever questioned the validity or accuracy of what I was writing, as secure in their own knowledge that Guns Are Bad™ as I was at the time. Needless to say, I received an A. On a piece of work riddled with breathless hyperbole, factual inaccuracies, and blatant misrepresentation of the opposition, I received an A.

Though the whole thing is pretty laughable, there are some bits in it that are real whoppers:

…How could a gun possibly save a life!?! After all, the sole purpose of a gun is to lodge a sleek metal object in a living organism, thereby killing, maiming, wounding or crippling it.

…Another poster showed a woman aiming a shotgun at something. The caption read, “A strong woman, and well armed. Her children are safe.” Just how safe are those children? First, if the woman is pointing the gun at a burglar, what if she fires it? The burglar will be maimed or killed. Either way, the woman will serve a jail sentence for injuring a fellow human being, no matter how good her intent was.

…Gun violence was out of control! There were practically no gun laws. Any old citizen could pay a couple hundred dollars and receive a deadly spewer of death and destruction.

…I’d rather not let my personal opinions get in the way of this article, but usually even the most extreme anti-gun-control fanatics can change their minds when they hear the horrific news that their child has been mercilessly slaughtered in a demonic rain of bullets spewed from illegal weapons that the local madman managed to get his fiendish hands on.

…If you suspect that a certain shady character is following you, instead of a gun, tote around a mace or tazer instead. After all, carrying a gun is an excuse for someone to shoot you. As the haze around this new shooting clears, citizens begin to wonder just how “great” this country is.

I admit it, I was a stupid little kid, okay! But seriously, I actually used to believe these sorts of things! I was, dare I say, even bigoted against guns and their owners. But really, kids believe all kinds of stupid things; the really outrageous aspect of this is that nobody ever corrected me. Nobody stopped and said, “Wait! That doesn’t make any sense! You’re arguing for laws we already have! And no woman who shoots a male burglar would ever go to jail; that assertion is just wrong!” Sadly, this never happened. See, I was taught to understand and respect African-Americans, Hispanics, and poor people, but not Republicans, and certainly not anyone foolish and irresponsible enough to own a gun!

And that’s a real shame. It’s easy to empathize with people you already understand, but it takes time and patience to learn about those who are strange and alien to you. It’s the easiest thing in the world to just dismiss them as stupid, uninformed, or evil, but most people have rational, well-thought-out reasons for doing the things they do, and gun owners are no different. Strange that this is such a revelation to me, huh?

1. A woman who, I might add, was an absolute witch incapable of disciplining her children. I carpooled with her for a year and her two brats were absolutely uncontrollable, stealing my pencils and notebooks, trying to lick me right after eating popsicles, and doing other such nonsense. Every time I got mad and yelled at one of them, their mother would get angry at me! I honestly don’t know how I was able to hold in my disdain for her poor parenting skills during our interview. [↩]

I just finished Guns Don’t Die — People Do by Pete Shields, the founder of the National Council to Control Handguns (NCCP) — what would later be known as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. The book is a manifesto of sorts, and follows the journey taken by Shields as he became more and more perturbed by the presence of Handguns following the slaying of his son in the Zebra Murders.

First of all, I have to mention how human I found the narrator. Shields writes with depth, eloquence, and genuine emotion—a sad passion identifying him as a man who has experienced tremendous loss and wants desperately that nobody else should ever have to suffer what he did. Pete Shields is a good man, an honest man, but his decisions have been clouded by the red haze of grief. As he himself admits, the random, senseless killing of his son made him desperately seek some sort of meaning to the tragedy that befell his family. What he found was the need for tighter gun control, specifically that targeting handguns.

Never having experienced anything even remotely approximating the death of a loved one, I almost don’t feel I deserve to be able to critique the way Shields deals with his loss. I know what such traumatic grief does to people; who are we to judge how they cope? The trauma simply breaks some, transforming them into shadows of their former selves; others it unhinges, never to be the same again. Still more are infused with a zeal to ensure that no others are made to endure what they did. This is simultaneously the most noble and selfless way of coping, but also the most dangerous; after all, what has more potential for harm than a fanatic who’s wrong but can’t possibly see it?

And that is the man who Pete Shields is; honorable, kind, warm, eloquent, passionate, wounded, and very, very wrong.

In the pages following Shields’ description of the act and aftermath of his son’s murder, he outlines the laxity of U.S. gun laws by tracing the path of the gun used to kill his son as it traveled from hand to hand, from law-abiding citizen to friend, to pawnbroker, to customer, to thief, to drug dealer, then finally to murderer. Yet Shields never actually gets around to discussing how any of his proposed legislation would have broken this chain or saved his son’s life; the weapon used to kill him was legally purchased by a man who would not have been prohibited from doing so had the controls we have today existed at the time. The future murder weapon was legally transferred to other law-abiding citizens until it was stolen from one of them by a burglar, at which point it entered the unregulable black market where Shields himself admits that nothing can be done to curb the flow.

Shields himself at times seems unsure of his position; he readily admits that he’s making it all up as he goes along. For example, he can’t seem to figure out his stance on banning handguns: on one page, he’ll assure the reader that neither he nor his organization sees it as remotely appropriate, yet on the next he’s explaining how he supported or campaigned for someone else’s existing or proposed handgun ban. And then there are the times when he almost overflows with emotion, describing guns as “portable death machines”, or “concealable murder machines” “whose only purpose is to kill and maim human beings”.

You see, Pete Shields has been so thoroughly traumatized by the impact of gun violence that he has lost all sight of the handgun as a potentially useful tool; he urges citizens who are violently attacked and are mindful of preserving their own lives to capitulate, to cooperate fully and surrender whatever property is demanded. But he offers no satisfactory answer in response to the question of what to do in the case of an assailant intent on committing murder or rape.

I found it interesting to see Shields take a position that I myself did many years ago: that we should work towards the obsolescence of the handgun. It conjured up a half-finished piece of art I began in 2001, depicting a handgun and some cartridges in a glass case. I intended the display to be a museum piece, and though I never finished it, in my vision for what it would become, I imagined patrons gazing with puzzled looks at the strange conglomeration of metal and plastic, wondering why humans would have voluntarily created devices to murder one another. I, like Shields, was naively focusing on the cold reality of the tool itself rather than trying to understand why such an object came about. The answer is that people created handguns not because they wished to kill each other,¹ but because they wanted protection from others more powerful then themselves who wanted to do them ill. As crazy as it would have seemed to me at the time and as crazy as it evidently seems to Shields, the handgun is an equalizer: no matter the size, strength, toughness, brutality, or hand-to-hand combat prowess of your assailant, you will triumph if you have a gun, often without firing a shot.

A world without handguns is a world in which the physically powerful prey on folks who have devoted their time to more peaceful pursuits. It is a world where those who are elderly, disabled, weak, young, or female are vulnerable to assault, robbery, rape, and murder. The gun gives these people a chance to protect themselves from those who would otherwise have them at their mercy. In order to render the handgun obsolete, we have to eliminate violence itself. And good luck trying to do that.

The best example of Shields’ flawed thinking is embodied in a poster that NCCP disseminated nationwide:

The poster embodies all that’s wrong with NCCP: it’s breathlessly sensationalistic, vaguely fearmongering, and factually wrong, leaving out crucial information. You see, the poster fails to mention that Israel and Switzerland are virtual fortress-states, armed to the teeth with both handguns and assault rifles, and Shields himself misrepresents the laws in those countries in his discussion; he cites Israel’s tough handgun laws for instance but declines to mention that the restrictions are placed on those who carry guns concealed and that those who openly display their weapons in public face virtually no restrictions as all. In switzerland, ownership of fully-automatic weapons is mandatory for men of militia age, and purchase laws are very lax. Great Britain has extremely low levels of gun homicide, but Shields doesn’t reveal that it did before the tough laws were enacted and that violent crime in general has in fact begun to rise since the laws were passed. I could go on and on.

Shields is especially fond of refuting the argument that gun regulation inevitably leads to a slippery slope of registration, banning, and confiscation, and he portrays gun owners as reactionary violence-mongers who selfishly prize their own convenience over others’ safety.

But he misunderstands the nature of their position; their opposition is grounded not in a disrespect for public safety, but on a legitimate fear of abuse down the road. Those pushing a piece of legislation that gives them some power—say, the capacity to wiretap citizens in the name of counter-terrorism, for example—will always claim that they will not misuse the power vested in them. Yet it’s equally true that these people will likely retire or be voted out of office, to be replaced with those of perhaps more dubious moral fiber. Even if we trust existing stewards of these programs, can we trust any and all possible successors? And if we disagree with the program to begin with, the possibility for abuse becomes all the more frightening. This is why Democrats fear President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program and Republicans fear gun registration: the mechanisms put in place by the well-meaning have the potential to be co-opted and abused by those of fewer scruples in the future.² As we have seen, this always comes to pass; Americans have indeed been illegally spied on by the government and guns have indeed been confiscated using registration information.

And we can even see this slippery slope effect in the positions espoused by Shields’ organization. Although in the beginning Shields talks only of handgun control, in the years since the book was written, the organization he leads has pushed for handgun bans, succeeded in regulating the very long guns that he promised would never be touched, gotten a great deal of guns of all types banned entirely, regulated ammunition of handguns as well as long guns, and kept silent when the weapons owned by residents of New Orleans were confiscated by police and National Guardsmen who combed registration documents in the wake of rioting after Hurricane Katrina.

But none of this changes my attitude towards Pete Shields; no matter how much I may disagree with his position, he is the sort man I could imagine myself becoming if pushed hard enough: one who throws logic to the wind and unchains his emotions in trying to heal himself in the aftermath of a horrific personal tragedy. It’s all we could really expect from ourselves; after all, who criticizes the coping mechanisms of the bereaved?

No, the only objectionable action Pete Shields took was generalizing the intensely personal healing process he had to undergo onto the rest of the country. I have no problem with him coming out strongly against handguns, but the issue arises from the fact that he did so in an extremely public and legislatively prescriptive fashion, despite the fact that homicide was actually falling when he started his campaign—a time when handgun ownership was in fact rising. These facts took a backseat to his profound fear of handguns. Again, not necessarily a bad thing, but certainly not strong base for a political movement.

Despite all this, I feel that Pete Shields, in writing this manifesto, has inadvertently created a piece of work that has the potential to bridge the divide between the pro-gun and the anti-gun. You see, Shields wrote this book because of fear. He was afraid for his own life; afraid of a violent death looking down the barrel of a gun; afraid that the murder of his son could be replicated ten thousand times by pistol-packing street punks; afraid of victimhood. He was saying, “I’m so afraid of crime that I want to make every effort to prevent it by seeing that criminals are disarmed.”

But fear is not so very different from the reason why many Americans do not avoid, but in fact purchase guns themselves for their own protection. They say, “I’m so afraid of crime that I want to make every effort to prevent it by arming myself against the possibility of a violent attack.”

Are these positions really so different? Both are based on the fear of crime and a desire to curb its ill effects: a noble intention. It’s in the nuts-and-bolts of the issue that differences of opinion become apparent. But trusting opinion without knowing fact is the surest way to make a mistake, and the facts are not on the side of restrictive gun control. At least we can both agree that something needs to be done about crime, though.

But in order to do anything about it, we have to let ourselves become emotionally detached from the issues we deal with so that we can evaluate the success and failure of public policy with an eye towards facts and evidence and not histrionic appeals to emotion. We are of course free to believe whatever we want, no matter how silly, but when we endeavour to impose our position on others, we owe it to them to carefully consider the issue from all sides, rather than digging up one-sided facts that support our already-held opinions. This, I feel, is the only sin of Pete Shields, an otherwise exemplary human being.

1. Rifles were created for that. [↩]
2. To say nothing of the damage they may do in the present. [↩]

It struck me today that the problem of software, music, and movie piracy is a fairly similar one to gun regulation.

In New York, there exists a law stating that one cannot own two or more handgun permits. Seems harmless enough, until you discover that New York City requires its own permit and does not honor non-NYC ones. Furthermore, acquiring one in NYC is a herculean task that only politicians, and celebrities, and others with a full time legal staff can reasonably accomplish—a form of class discrimination (hear that, Democrats?) in that only the rich and powerful can afford to defend themselves with guns.

But let’s say such a person decides he wants an NYC permit. Let’s also posit that this hypothetical individual commutes into the city every day, living somewhere north of the Bronx—not en entirely unreasonable assumption. Any handgun he’s licensed to carry in upstate New York will never be legally allowed into NYC, and the reverse is also true; if he acquires an NYC permit, he will never be able to take his gun out into the rest of New York State.

This situation is ridiculous. There exists no justification for preventing someone legally allowed to defend himself with a gun from exercising that right in a more dangerous part of the state! It calls to mind the recent incidents in Chicago whereby law-abiding gun-owners who are trying to re-register their guns in order to comply with the law are being turned away because they’ve missed an arbitrary and draconian deadline, essentially preventing them from following the very law they’re trying to be in compliance with!

The New York State Legislature has essentially said, “In response to New York City’s elevated crime rate, we require that law-abiding concealed firearms-carrying citizens give up their ability to protect themselves in that area.” I’m sorry, but that simply doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

There’s an eerie parallel here to the problem of music piracy.

Basically, the music labels have come up with a “solution” to piracy that, so far, people haven’t really taken much of a liking to: DRM. The idea is that digital files are wrapped in a protective barrier that determines what types of uses are authorized; sometimes a server has to be consulted before the song can be played, sometimes it keeps track of the number of times it’s been burned to disc so as to prevent too much copying—those sorts of things. In other words, DRM-equipped songs are intentionally crippled to protect the music industry, the result being that those who follow the law wind up with an inferior product to those who steal it, either out of disrespect for artists or as a protest against DRM.

Those who break the law appear to have more freedoms; in the case of, say, music piracy, the “pirates” are able to transfer their music to whatever device they want, and to edit, alter, or modify their files in any way they see fit; to make as many backups as they want, or to transcode the files to more modern formats. In the case of gun ownership, otherwise legal gun owners who carry their guns with them in circumvention of oppressive laws gain the ability to use their weapons in locations where entirely law-abiding ones do not. Criminals have always done this because they don’t count on getting caught, while the law-abiding citizens who actually respect the law will generally follow it. All this does is increase the ratio of armed criminals to armed bystanders in gun-free zones!

The core of the issue is that these types of restrictions appear to penalize those who follow them because they wind up being able to use their music/guns in fewer instances and places than they should. Meanwhile, those who will always disregard the law like criminals and music pirates wind up with more “rights”—the ability to carry weapons anywhere, or music they can put on any device, respectively.

Sometimes, following the law gets you a worse deal than breaking it. Such laws will inevitably be changed in the interests of sanity and progress. DRM is slowly but surely being abandoned as the computer-literate howl in fury, just as firearms laws are becoming more liberal (as in “permissive”, not “aligned with the Democratic party’s agenda”). But boy what an annoyance it is for the logically-minded man who ever finds himself butting against one such arbitrary restriction.

So it looks like the Brady Campaign is prepared to lose the pending Heller vs. DC court case and will have to deal with the fact that the second amendment will probably be decided to be an individual right. Speaking on the subject, Brady Campaign attorney David Hennigan, explaining the sorts of legislative efforts the group can pursue that will not interfere with the results of the case, recently said, “Universal background checks don’t affect the right of self-defense in the home. Banning a super dangerous class of weapons, like assault weapons, also would not adversely affect the right of self-defense in the home.”

Now I’m all for universal background checks; they’re quick, unintrusive, and actually work to prevent people legally banned from buying guns from doing so. In cases where they’ve failed, loopholes that prevented information from being shared with the database are to blame, and are being closed.¹

But it’s the second part of Hennigan’s argument that puzzles me. He describes assault weapons as a “super dangerous class of weapons.” Now, first of all, can anyone tell me exactly what an “assault weapon” is? Well, it must be big, mean, nasty, and serve no purpose other than to kill massive numbers of innocent people as quickly as possible, right?

Actually, it turns out there’s an interesting legal definition of “assault weapon”. Though the federal ban on so-defined weapons expired in 2004, many states have copied the ban’s wording or instituted similar ones themselves.

Perhaps it’s time to look at the law in question. Here in New York, for example, the law² defines an “assault weapon” as a semiautomatic rifle capable of accepting a detachable magazine and two of the following:

1. Folding or telescoping stock
2. Pistol grip
3. Bayonet mount
4. Flash suppressor or the capacity to accept one
5. A built-in grenade launcher

OR a semiautomatic shotgun with two of the following:

1. Folding or telescoping stock
2. Pistol grip
3. Magazine capacity of six shells or greater
4. Detachable magazine

OR a semiautomatic pistol capable of accepting a detachable magazine and two of the following:

1. Magazine that attaches outside of the pistol grip
2. Capacity to accept a flash suppressor, forward handgrip, or barrel extender
3. Barrel shroud
4. Unloaded weight of greater then 49 ounces

In addition, any weapon capable of holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition is an assault weapon. Also, weapons that are semiautomatic versions of fully-automatic ones and are assault weapons, as well as several rifles mentioned by name, such as AK-47s.

Now if you’re not a gun person, this list probably reads like gibberish. “Barrel shroud?” Well, that sounds dangerous. Flash suppressor? bayonet mount? Grenade launcher!?! Gosh, these weapons are just overflowing with danger! Ban them quick!³

Well, okay. let’s take a look at some assault weapons, then:

Well, here’s an intimidating blunderbuss! This wicked-looking monster of Turkish origin appears as though it would be right at home in the hands of a deranged mall shooter. That collapsable stock can even hold extra ammunition, perfect for those especially crazed slaughterfests. This insane weapon surely must be illegal, right? It even looks unbelievably dangerous! Time to consult our checklist. Remember, a gun must have at least 2 “assault weapon” characteristics to be an assault weapon.

Though I don’t know for sure, its magazine looks to be able to hold at least seven shells (strike 1), and that plus its pistol grip (strike 2) and folding stock (strike 3) easily make it an assault weapon. Only it isn’t! You see, this monster is a pump-action shotgun, and the assault weapons ban only addresses semi-automatic shotguns. Whoops! The fact that you have to rack the slide after every shot, wasting half a second, means that this weapon is 100% legal! But… Hennigan said that the law banned a “super-dangerous class of weapons”. This shotgun sure looks “super dangerous” to me! What’s going on here?

Now how about this frightening hand-cannon:

This is a Smith & Wesson model 500, a .50 caliber revolver. This one has a scope for picking off grandmothers and orphans, and fires finger-sized bullets perfect for murdering innocent children. Seems like this elephant gun is a textbok assault weapon, right? Well, not according to the law. The only “assault weapon” feature this gun would possesses is that it weighs more than 50 ounces, but, amusingly enough, the ban didn’t address revolvers at all. This gun is 100% legal!

Okay, so enough of this. Sooooooo, what is an assault weapon? Well, here’s some woman firing one, a Glock 26:

Look at how unbelievably dangerous that gun is! It holds 11 rounds of 9mm ammunition! ELEVEN ROUNDS I tell you! My god, think of how many people you could assault with 11 death-dealing bullets; 11 I bet!

Hmm, this is a little strange. It seems that there are a number of weapons that seem suitable enough for assaulting people with that aren’t banned, yet some rather innocuous guns are illegal. Why?

For pistols, it’s the 10-bullet magazine restriction, primarily. There are a number of pistols that hold large numbers of bullets not because they’re designed for mass murder, but because it’s practical for the design or application. Police could certainly use more bullets, as could the military, and these weapons are more appealing to consumers compared to ones with lower ammunition capacities.

And the truth is, all guns are “super dangerous” if used improperly, e.g. by criminals, children, or the insane. The two powerful and legal guns pictured above both have legitimate uses: the shotgun would make a perfect home-defense gun due to its lack of a long, unwieldy stock, and the Model 500 .50 caliber revolver is intended for hunting. The Glock 26 also has legitimate uses: self-defense. Neither of the larger guns are concealable enough for a criminal to favor; in fact, they prefer small revolvers less than a quarter the size of the Model 500. If “super dangerous” is a codeword for commonly “used in crimes,” then “super dangerous” firearms are actually cheap revolvers! And as luck would have it, there’s been a legislative effort to ban so-called junk guns. The only problem with this is that it’s blatantly classist. To say that criminals prefer cheap guns is irresponsibly ignorant of that fact that cheap guns are the only ones poor people can afford. To put an effective price minimum on guns is to deny the poor the right to self-defense. That’s certainly something that both Democrats and Republicans could band together to oppose!

As usual, it’s all about the user. The most wicked-looking gun can be used to protect a family, and the smallest peashooter is still enough to intimidate an unaware victim into surrendering property or capitulating to home invasion or rape. Bans just aren’t the answer, and especially ones with such arbitrary restrictions.

1. It may be worth mentioning that both the Brady Campaign and the NRA supported this bill. Democratic New York senator Charles Schumer said, “When the N.R.A. and I agree on legislation, you know that it’s going to get through, become law and do some good.” [↩]
2. It’s on page 275, center column [↩]
3. in all seriousness, though, I do agree that grenade launchers should be illegal. [↩]

((so said a reformed Chicago gang member, whose firsthand experiences display the brazenness with which bans are ignored by criminals. In this case, the man was talking about how easy it was for him and his buddies to acquire illegal guns through illegal means, and how little they cared about it.))

I’ve long believed that bans don’t work. We’ve all learned in school about the utter failure of America’s experiment with prohibition; how alcoholism remained a problem, how otherwise law-abiding citizens were branded criminals, how a thriving black market enabled the rise of the Mafia and in fact increased crime. But we seems we have forgotten this lesson in modern times, as bans are all the rage to solve tough problems.

The most wide-reaching ban covers drugs. Drugs of all sorts, from marijuana to heroin are universally banned (except in some cases where authorization is specifically granted, such as certain medicinal uses of marijuana). And look at how well it’s worked: since 1972, the year Richard Nixon coined the term “war on drugs”, drug use itself has risen across the board. It’s pretty much common knowledge that the “war on drugs” has been a dismal and expensive failure.

If our goal is to keep people off drugs, then it certainly seems that criminalizing the possession, use, manufacture, sale, and transportation of drugs hasn’t worked to accomplish that goal. I’m not a drug user, never have been, and don’t approve of drug use, but I’m a results-oriented person—and the drug ban just isn’t working. I’m also by no means an expert on the subject, but the only historical parallel I can draw is when we tried banning the drug “alcohol” with disastrous effects. It seems somewhat foolish that we’re trying the very same thing with other types of drugs today. Didn’t we learn anything in our middle school history classes?

Even if we did, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence doesn’t seem to have. Today I was reading one of their blog posts which was talking about gun-running from Texas to Mexico when I ran into this bombshell:

Mexico is a rich market for smugglers because it bans high-caliber automatic weapons — even police are prohibited from using them — and has strict gun laws that make it extremely difficult for members of the public to buy handguns.

Looks like someone forgot history! The Brady campaign favors gun bans, yet admits here that they cause black markets! Again, prohibition is an excellent example of the best way to dry up this sort of black market: legalize the goods in question! Black markets of any sort exist for one simple economic reason: when demand for a good or service is not being addressed because of legal barriers to consumption.

The Brady Campaign is essentially claiming, “a lack of supply has caused this black market.” Alas, there’s a logical fallacy in their argument: they’ve ignored demand. While it’s true that the extreme difficulty of acquiring handguns could lead to a black market in such weapons, we too in the United States have a gun ban: one on automatic weapons, which are illegal for civilian purchase. Strangely, though, there isn’t any particular underground heavy weapons gun-running problem to speak of. This points to the fact that there just isn’t much demand for automatic weapons here. Why? Because automatic weapons are only useful if you’re fighting a war. For hunting, sporting, home- or self-defense, a fully-automatic weapon is not only impractical, but also more dangerous to the surrounding area (an issue for defense) and more expensive to maintain and purchase ammunition for (an issue for everyone). It’s well-established that petty criminals favor concealable revolvers and only fire an average of about 2.3 shots where any shots are fired at all; they’re looking for a quick buck, not a slaughterfest.

But gangs are another story. Gangs routinely battle their rivals in ways that mimic full-scale military war, and they’re constantly looking to get their hands on more powerful weapons, no matter the legality. In Mexico, the drug cartels rake in the dough playing the role of underground gun merchants and use the profits to buy and sell the very drugs that these gangs often fight over, in many cases partaking in the violence themselves with well-armed private militias.

In other words, it’s not just the gun ban that’s caused the problems; there are deeper issues at work in Mexico. While a black market may have been encouraged by the ban, the unusually high demand is what allows it to continue. Basically, Mexico has a drug and gang problem for political, economic, and cultural reasons. This has caused an upswing in demand for guns across the board, from gang members to outgunned police trying to keep the peace to ordinary citizens wanting to protect themselves from the new threat, all of which have logically resulted in a rise in gun violence. This lead to a virtual handgun ban, which in turn nurtured a black market; now, the black market has only joined the existing, unsolved drug and gang problems. Meanwhile, violence has only increased, and the core issues remain unaddressed.

As usual, it’s not about guns, it’s about culture and circumstance expressing themselves through guns. To solve these hairy problems, we have to address the uncomfortable issues of poverty, cultural identity, economic deprivation, as well as political restriction. Guns are a common scapegoat for entrenched violence-related issues because they’re easy to be frightened of. But we owe it to ourselves to rise above that.

Nobody wants arms trafficking in the same way that (almost) nobody wants everybody walking around stoned out of their brainstems. But history teaches us that banning outright something whose negative effects you wish to curtail will do nothing except entrench that which you which to avoid, at the cost of untold amounts of money and innocent victims. Bans are not the answer.

I’m not a drinker, but I oppose alcohol bans because they encourage alcoholism and crime. Likewise, I’m not a gun owner, but I oppose gun bans for the same reason. Guns are mere objects; they’re used daily by the police to keep the peace, and by law-abiding citizens for self-defense. They can’t kill anyone on the own absent some human desire to kill; that’s the thing we need to go after.

The other day, my fiancée said, “You know, the liberal approach to guns is a lot like the conservative approach to birth control: keep it out of peoples’ lives and everything will be fine.” She’s right, of course. Liberals constantly deride conservatives’ efforts to restrict abortion and sex education because liberals know that absent these options, people will simply turn to illegal ones. In counties where abortion is illegal, women get back-alley street abortions or do it themselves with coat hangers. In the absence of school sex education, or in the case of abstinence-only education, ignorance of the basic biological machinery and consequences to improperly using it lead to unwanted pregnancy and sexually-transmidded diseases, not chastity.

So it’s with some amusement that I’ve begun to turn a critical eye towards most liberals’ approach to children and gun control. It seems to be, “Keep guns out of kids’ hands, period.” I hope I’ll be forgiven if this strikes me as the exact same argument that conservatives make about sex. The fact is this: absent information, kids will get curious, on any subject under the sun, be it sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll, or, yes, guns.

Thing is, liberals already know this for their own issue: “curious kids + sex = pregnant or diseased kids, so the solution is informed kids.” So why is it so hard to accept that the solution to “curious kids + guns is dead kids” is also “informed kids”? Liberals continue to stubbornly believe that kids can be kept away from guns forever, that their natural curiosity conveniently evaporates when faced with firearms the way that liberals know for a fact it doesn’t with sex. So perhaps some statistics are in order:

According to the U.S. Justice department in a Rochester study, of the urban ninth-graders who committed crimes with guns, only 10% had been taught about guns by their parents; 90% acquired their guns illegally and learned about them from delinquent friends.

The CDC reports that since 1981, 1.21 children (ages 0-14) per 100,000 are killed by guns, compared to 1.75 for suffocation, and 5.57 for vehicle-related deaths. That means that almost five times as many children are killed by cars than guns.¹ Across age groups, firearm homicide ranks as between the 4th and 5th most likely causes of injury-related death after motor vehicles, fire and burning, suffocation, poisoning, or drowning, depending on the age group.

The problem isn’t that kids are around guns. There will always be kids who have access to guns, just the same way that there will always be kids who are able to have sex. It’s the education of these kids about the possible negative consequences of experimenting that’s the key. What’s worse, a kid placed in a sexual situation who’s understandably curious about sex due to a parental blackout, or one who’s been schooled in the physical and psychological consequences of unprotected sex? Which one is more likely to say no? Same thing with guns; kids who find them after never having been taught about their danger and power will likely treat them as toys.

In fact, there are news stories that make the headlines all the time about kids who go to their friends’ houses, find loaded guns lying around, and shoot themselves or others. Even if an individual family tries its damnedest to segregate its kids from guns, it can’t compel the rest of the world to do likewise. Someday, that kid may just find himself in a situation where there’s a gun available, and if he doesn’t know based on education and experience how powerful and dangerous guns are, tragedy can result.

This is all old news to conservatives, who have bandied about the phrase, “You can’t childproof your guns, but you can gun-proof your children” for ages. yet these same people often insist that ignoring the prickly subject of sex is the wisest course of action in raising their children. Madness, I say!

I mean, if there was some story in which a teary-eyed mother bawled, “Oh, if only we’d been more successful in sheltering Susannah from the evil dangers of sex, she wouldn’t have gotten pregnant!”, liberals would laugh the world over, because this is a patently ridiculous attitude. So why is that attitude so difficult to take regarding guns?

Both liberals and conservatives can learn from each other, but fundamentally, they could also learn from themselves. By opening their mind to their own arguments but on different subjects, they could gain a wider understanding of each other.

1. these statistics were collated from the CDC WISQARS Injury Mortality Reports using the following math: (17/22 * s1) + (5/22 * s2), where s1 is the statistic in question for 1981-1998 and s2 is the statistic in question for 1999-2005. This had to be done because the 1999-2005 statistics were separated from the 1981-1998 statistics for some reason. [↩]

GunPundit discovered some really telling maps showing the locations of murders in Baltimore. it turns out that you can break it down by type of murder and race of victim, interestingly enough. Here are the graphs I found for 2007:

Gun homicides resulting in dead white people:

Gun homicides resulting in dead hispanic people:

Gun homicides resulting in dead black people:

We can take one of two conclusions from this:

1. Black people are inherently violent, and can’t stop from killing each other.
2. Black people suffer from atrociously high murder rates because they suffer the most crushing poverty due to structural economic and political factors, and poverty is the primary motivator for crime of all sorts including murder.

Number 1 is blatantly racist and utterly ridiculous. That leaves number 2. It’s unfortunate that these maps don’t list anything like income level or social class of the victim, but I believe that race can be viewed as a proxy of it here. Clearly the violence suffered by black people is a function of the crushing poverty they live in, rather than the legal availability of weapons. studies show that 60% of guns used in crimes are stolen¹, and about 65% of them are the same guns over and over again²–these guns tend to be 6-shot revolvers³ which are not targeted by the most prominent efforts to control guns, such as the ineffective assault weapons ban (looks like it pays to understand the issue you’re regulating!).

Only 3.8% of felons are the ones who commit 55.5% of all gun-related homicides according to a recent California study⁴. Felons are legally banned from buying guns, and the consequences for selling guns to them are severe, so it’s not law-abiding gun merchants who are the problem. They get their guns from illegal street dealers or just steal them. Either way, efforts to prevent hardened criminals from getting guns has clearly failed, as the Baltimore map so chillingly indicates.

Furthermore, it can’t be that the very presence of weapons is the reason because about 29% of black households own guns, compared to 44% of white ones.⁵. If whites have more guns in their houses, why then were there only three whites killed by gun violence in 2007 in Baltimore? Something other than availability of guns must explain all the gun-related homicide suffered by black people.

In fact, handguns are completely banned in England, and the gun-related crime rate has in fact accelerated since the policy was instituted in 1997:

Generated from statistics found in Criminal Statistics, England and Wales.

In cases where they can’t get guns, UK gang members have resorted to killing each other with swords and street signs.

Here are the answers I personally have arrived at:

• Illegally acquired guns are the problem, not legally-acquired ones. We have to prevent felons and other dangerous people from getting guns, not law-abiding citizens. Existing efforts to prevent those not allowed to buy guns from acquiring them have failed, and something needs to be done about this.
• Presence and availability of guns is not the direct cause of gun violence, poverty is; among those with more guns and better lives, gun violence is almost nonexistent (the gun murder rate of non-black people in Baltimore in 2007 was 2.35 per 100,000, compared to 35 for overdose on prescription drugs).

These are my conclusions that I believe are supported by a battery of facts garnered from legitimate and official studies, rather than the raw emotion my prior position was based on. Restricting the type of guns that can be legally purchased is literally worthless; the people who are the ones committing all the murders steal their guns 60% of the time or buy them from illegal street dealers 39.2% of the time, meaning that only 0.8% of criminals legally buy their guns from corrupt or negligent gun merchants. In either event, they use concealable revolvers rather than the high-capacity guns most legislators feel inclined to regulate, such as “military-style” “assault rifles.” Criminals only use them 6.8 % of the time, preferring revolvers. Regulating handguns is stupid because despite the fact that 83.2% use them, next to no criminals follow the appropriate laws. Do we regulate how fast computers can be since the FBI estimates that cybercrime costs $400 billion per year?No, that’s ridiculous. A small minority (composed mostly of employees of the Russian Business Network) is the cause of the majority of the problems; we should go after the criminals, rather than use sledgehammer tactics that affect mostly law-abiding computer-users.

The same approach should be taken with guns. What we need are raids on known street dealers, and we need harsher penalties for committing a crime with a gun. But most of all, what we need are comprehensive poverty reduction programs. Crime in general–including gun violence–is symptomatic of systematic economic, political, and social deprivation; if we work on that problem, gun violence will dry up on its own, as it already has among those in Baltimore who don’t live under such horrific conditions.

1. Guns used in Crime [↩]
2. Armed and Considered Dangerous, available at JSTOR if you have access. Or, you can take a look through google books [↩]
3. Armed and Considered Dangerous again [↩]
4. Prevalence and Incidence of Arrest among Adult Males in California [↩]
5. Targeting Guns [↩]