Tech Paladin

Doug McCaughan at KnoxNews makes the great point that for years, schools have been trying to get more computers into classrooms, only to now stigmatize and ban them when students bring their own in the form of cell phones and smartphones.

To a certain extent, I suspect good old-fashioned technophobia, but I think there’s also a lot of the desire for control. Schools want computers under their control, with software they determine, used in ways they approve of; students circumvent this central control by using their own.

Smartphones really are just small form-factor computers these days. They can let you browse the web, send email, organize your day, and play games. Schools have to get with the picture, even if that picture isn’t the one they’d prefer to paint themselves.

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2009/jun/09/teach-cell-phones-dont-ban-them/!

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.

Ars Technica is reporting some disappointing data on the web’s so-called “democratizing” effects. They report that political participation using web-centric methods such as emailing representatives or donating using paypal.

Here’s the money quote:

The depressing take-home from Brady’s talk was that, at least when it comes to participation in politics, the Web isn’t quite the democratizing force that many of us had hoped it would be—in fact, it makes things worse.

Basically, the less educated you are, the less likely you are to be politically active enough to use technology in service of it, or technologically savvy to use it for politics, or else some combination of the two.

No duh.

Is this for real? Did anyone really expect that the web was going to magically erase inequality? It’s the most logical thing in the world that poorly-educated people don’t take advantage of technology — they don’t take advantage of many things, like the opportunity to get an education, for example.

But moreover, why is Ars using the word “democratize” to mean “eliminate inequality?” The hallmark of anything democratizing is that increases freedom and opportunity, not equality, and that’s just what the web has done. But the mere existence of freedom guarantees nothing — in this case, even after controlling for broadband availability, the study still showed that the less educated you are, the less you take advantage of the web. Not that it’s not available to you, not that you’re prevented from doing so, just that you choose not to.

As usual, education is everything. So many things flow from it; lack of political participation and tech-savvyness are already heavily correlated to low levels of education. The web can’t address the symptoms if the cause is going untreated.

I found a graphic from the New York times that perfectly displays not only the root of the current economic problem, but also inadvertently shows why Geithner’s new plan to fund private investment of securitized bank assets won’t work to fix it.

Here’s the graphic:
(click to see a larger version)

There’s a particular quote from this graphic that I’d like to excerpt here:

“The problem:

Banks have come to depend on selling mortgages and other loans to investors like hedge funds and insurance companies. This allows banks to make more loans and earn bigger profits. But the market for these securities has collapsed, contributing to a freeze in lending.”

That’s the most concise description of the problem I’ve seen in a long time. But it leaves out a few critical pieces of information, a few things that I feel are crucial to getting an accurate impression of the situation. As usual, some history is needed to fully appreciate how the current situation came to pass:

The historical origin of the current crisis

Once upon a time many years ago, banks had been heavily regulated as a result of lax lending standards that led to many of them going bust during the Great Depression. During the 70s, many European banks were being deregulated and allowed to put more and more of their money in the stock market, and they were making a killing doing so. The American banks complained to the American government that these regulations were making them no longer internationally competitive, which was true. And so they were deregulated, and by both parties, I might add. The Republicans liked it because it fit their ideology of less market interference and grew the GDP. The Democrats liked it because banks were thus able to lend to many poor people who had not previously been eligible for loans.

The deregulatory push in banking and finance continued, egged on by both parties. A little later, both parties also decided that increasing home ownership among poor people and minorities was a good idea. Again, Republicans liked this because it helped the financial and real estate industries grow the economy, and it increased the GDP, while Democrats liked this because it helped poor people acquire assets and move closer to the middle class.

Now, there was actually a good reason why poor people had a hard time getting loans and credit cards and such before deregulation: it was because they would default on their loans with great frequency. When a borrower defaults, everybody loses. The borrower gets a black mark on their credit rating, and faces pressure from banks, and the banks have to go after them for the money they’re owed and often take a loss. During this period, banks had to own the loans they made, so they were under a strong compulsion not to lend money to risky borrowers. As long banks were required to own their own loans, their solution to this problem was to simply not lend money to people they considered to be at risk of defaulting on any loans they might get. Needless to say, this was politically unpalatable to many politicians, who did not want to be seen as screwing the poor.

However, deregulation had set up a framework to deal with this messy situation. Now, banks no longer had to own their loans; they could package them up as securities and sell them to investors! It was a double win: banks could absolve themselves of the risk associated with lending to risky borrowers and make a pretty penny in the stock market doing it, and more people than ever before could get credit. The credit boom was born. All of the sudden, people started getting credit cards in the mail. You could buy a home for zero money down. Student loans were plentiful (so colleges started charging more). Appliances could be purchased with mortgage-like monthly payment plans.

Amid this credit boom, the government stepped in and told banks to increase home ownership among the lower classes. Banks said, “no problem!”, because risk was now irrelevant. They created the subprime mortgage and sold them by the truckload to poor people eager to live on property they owned. It was the age of free credit, when you could buy whatever you wanted and pay later.

But there was a problem. Because banks felt they no longer had to shoulder the burden should borrowers default, they felt comfortable fleecing them in these new credit products. Subprime mortgages in particular turned out to be a really bad deal for anybody who got one, because in addition to the fact that many of these people probably would not have been able to stomach even a traditional mortgage, the subprime kinds were even worse. A few years into these contracts, poor people started defaulting on their mortgages. What was a trickle became a flood as the real estate prices—elevated to absurd levels due to the rush to buy houses—naturally began to fall.

Banks said, “no problem!” because it was actually the investors who bought the mortgages from the banks in the form of mortgage-backed securities who bore the brunt. And as luck should have it, many of these investors insured their investments against default through AIG. But it turned out that AIG didn’t have enough cash to cover this insurance when the mortgages fell down one after another (oops), so AIG collapsed, and then panicked investors dumped their mortgage-backed securities as fast as they could until finally it was revealed that the mortgage-backed securities were actually fairly worthless.

However, banks had convinced themselves and their shareholders that they had plenty of cash by counting the mortgage-backed securities they’d sold as having an extremely high value, and they continued to maintain this story despite the fact that everybody had since agreed that mortgage-backed securities had no value. People started calling them “toxic assets.” Now that these “toxic assets” had lost their value, it turned out that banks didn’t have much money at all relative to what they’d lent out and that they couldn’t really do any more lending. But they couldn’t get rid of the toxic assets because to do so would be to admit that they didn’t have much money at all, which would likely cause a panic that would end with their destruction.

Which brings us to today

Banks won’t lend because the money they claim to have (in the form of mortgage-backed securities) is actually worthless. They can’t write off their bad assets because they’ll probably have to go into bankruptcy. Giving banks money isn’t working because their toxic assets have an on-paper value of many trillions, and there’s no way the government or taxpayers can afford to give just a few banks trillions of dollars. So the banks are basically dead but won’t admit it, and they’re able to continue the fiction because they can claim that they have assets worth trillions of dollars. But the proof is in the pudding because if they were in good health, they’d lend some of it out, and we can all plainly see that mortgage-backed securities are worthless; the little boy has shouted out that the emperor has no clothes.

This is an ongoing, intractable problem. The longer time goes on, the more obvious it becomes that the banks are zombies, but what do we do about it?

Why Geithner’s plan won’t work

Geithner sees the seizing up of the mortgage-backed securities market as the root of the problem of why banks won’t lend, so he wants the government to subsidize private investment of securitized loans to the tune of about a trillion dollars. He’s right about one thing: since banks have come to depend on selling their loans on the stock market, the fact that they no longer can has indeed put a crimp on their lending.

But at the same time, this analysis is about as astute as looking as a man bleeding to death from a knife wound and exclaiming, “The problem is that he hasn’t enough blood in him! Let’s pump him full of blood!” The lack of blood is a symptom, not a cause; the freezing of the market for securitized loans is the same.

In other words, the problem isn’t that investors aren’t buying securitized loans anymore, it’s that loans are being securitized to begin with. As the New York Times piece indicates, “Banks have come to depend on selling mortgages and other loans to investors like hedge funds and insurance companies”. But this dependence is itself the root of the problem; by translocating risk and responsibility for managing it onto another entity (investors and insurance companies), banks were no longer under any financial obligation to lend responsibly, and it was precisely this freedom that led them to lend money to those who they knew full well would not be able to repay their loans.

As long as banks can securitize and sell loans, they will lend to risky or irresponsible people, because they think they will not be the ones to bear the consequences. And the only way to get them to stop doing this is to outlaw the securitization of loans and stop government support of banks that do it.

The solution does not lie in propping up this failed relationship, but rather in severing it once and for all. When banks again have to take ownership of their own loans, they will once more be cautious and prudent about lending it out. To allow this disastrous system of buck-passing from banks to investors to insurance companies to continue is to invite more speculative bubbles and dangerous, credit-fueled consumption.

Geithner’s plan is essentially a lot like saying, “all the junkies have come to depend on a steady flow of crack cocaine, but the supply has dried up and now the junkies are robbing and stealing to get their fix, so the solution is to encourage more sales of crack cocaine.” NO! The solution is end the junkies’ addiction, not prolong it!

If Geithner gets his way and pumps a trillion dollars into subsidizing the securitization of bank assets, there is absolutely no guarantee that we won’t have a similar crisis in a few years time.

Why people want this

It’s not all doom and gloom. There were benefits to easy credit. Home ownership did increase. Poor people were able to send their kids to college by borrowing. The latest and greatest gadgets were within reach of even the most impoverished McDonalds employee. But these luxuries did not come for free; indeed, their very possibility created the largest speculative bubble and its corresponding crash since the great depression.

There are people who want this credit-fueled luxury-fest to continue. Banks and investment houses loved it because they got rich. Economists loved it because it grew the GDP. Politicians loved it because it made them look good. The middle-class loved it because they no longer had to delay their gratification. The poor loved it because they got opportunities they had never before had.

I think that most people actually want free-flowing credit without any of the nasty side-effects of speculative bubbles. Sadly, THIS IS NOT POSSIBLE. As nice as it was when you could send your kids to $40K college on a $40K salary, buy houses without paying a cent upfront, pay off your credit card bills with other credit cards, and buy LCD TVs on monthly installment plans, it is impossible to have such things without their corresponding drawbacks the likes of which we see every day we turn on the TV only to hear new, more dismal employment figures.

The point is this: you can’t have your cake and eat it, too. The Age Of Credit is over, as well it should be, and those who created it should be allowed to die if they set themselves on fire. Only by clearing way the old can the new be ushered in, and unless we would like to loiter for a while in mortgage-backed security hell, I for one am very interested in seeing what type of banking system will be built out of the rotting husks of our current one.

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.

((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. [↩]