Kopel vs. The Economist, Round 2
Today is the second day of my week-long Los Angeles Time on-line debate with Christopher Lockwood, the U.S. editor of The Economist. Today's topic is the politics of the gun control issue. Tomorrow we'll look at international opinion about U.S. gun policy. On Thursday, we each debunk a favorite shibboleth of the other side. Finally, on Friday, we outline our ideal firearms polices.
Comments below are welcome on today's exchange, or yesterday's. Suggestions for my Thursday topic are also welcome, keeping in my that each article can only be about 500 words long.
Then again, I would . . .
[DK: Good point. A shibboleth is just an in-group linguistic identifier, so you can't really say that it's "false."]
2) Ask him if events happen without those being reported on the evening news.
3) Ask him if he is aware of any studies which estimated the number of crimes deterred by (a) the known presence of firearms or (b) the possible presence of firearms.
4) Ask him if the possible presence of firearms in American homes is a deterrent to residential burglaries.
Would you mind asking Christopher what the hell he means by "regular loader" as in "The type of gun matters. It's simply much easier to kill large numbers of people with a semi-automatic firearm than it is with a regular loader".
Is he simply flaunting his ignorance as a badge of honor? Or is there some aspect of firearms technology to which he is privvy and I am not?
If I had the opportunity I would also ask him if he personally would find it easier to kill with a semi auto versus a "regular loader".
In general, I think the shibboleth to debunk might just be that public policy has all that much effect on anything at all. Politicians and activists (of all stripes) are a little too eager to attribute observed changes to their actions rather than random fluctuations or much larger trends.
I remember reading an excerpt from a council meeting about crime in my sleepy pretty-well-off suburb hometown (i.e. not much serious crime happens). The chief of police, a rather old fellow, was giving his biannual report showing a steep decline in a number of catagories. A councilwoman asked the chief what sort of policies and practices had caused this miraculous decline. His reply instantly made me smile (quoting from memory so this isn't verbatim but the gist is there)
It suffices to say that the councilwoman was not very pleased with the answer but he was far older than she was and unfirable at this point (being generally well-respected). His successor, however, seems to think that buzzwords (everything is proactive with him!) and seemingly random placements of these little police-tents will reduce crime (given the low baseline, I think he ought to take a statistics class).
Oh well, that's my rambling anecdote and, by far, one of the best smackdowns of a politician that thinks that everything is caused by something someone did. Also (not that I think it's germane) it's a no handgun town following the lead of Chicago.
Pointing to nationwide trends, and attributing them to a single factor, is analogous to the tiger-repelling doorstop argument(which is far from slick)
Who on earth thinks the 2nd Amendment (as opposed to a sensible gun policy, which needn't have anything to do with the Constitution) is for hunting? I have never seen that argument; indeed, I find the NRA's marriage of '2nd Amendment individual rights mania' to 'traditional hunting and fishing' to be one of the more amazing big tent feats in modern politics.
[DK: Rudy Guiliani, for one, who states that he believes that the Second Amendment is an individual right, but seems to think it pertains mainly to hunting.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/119536.html
Cf. Bill Clinton: "You do not need an Uzi to go deer hunting and you do not need an AK-47 to go skeet shooting." Although Clinton apparently was not talking about the Second Amendment, since his DOJ took the position that the Second Amendment protects, at most, on-duty National Guardsmen.]
As probably the only person commenting on this post who isn't in favor of firearms, I give you two beliefs I hold that you probably can demolish fairly quickly:
1) We could retain guns while reducing the number of people hurt and especially killed by gun use if we banned automatics and semi-automatics and made it necessary for a shooter to reload each time.
2) If the "arms" of the 2nd Amendment are to protect us from a government so tyrannical that we have to resort to shooting at it, aren't we going to need something more powerful than mere guns against the most militarily destruction-capable government in human history?
Though with regard to UK weapons and crime policy, I'd really like to know what happened with their knife amnesty.
I'm sure the editor of The Economist is going to get all hung up on the standard anti-gun-control rhetoric. I don't see how it would be helpful treat an intelligent person interested in having a meaningful discussion on an important topic like a child.
There are many intelligent and thoughtful people on both sides of this issue, which probably means that there are reasonable arguments on both sides. Why turn an opportunity to learn something into a sophomoric cable-news style food fight?
Tell that to the insurgents in Iraq.
"Mere guns" work pretty well. They have defeated countless mechanized armies that could "out-destruction" them many times over. Even the highly ruthless mechanized armies have been defeated (e.g., Russians in Chechnya).
What I'm saying is that gun rights are somewhat like term limits: They're an issue with a built in divide between the rulers and the ruled. And the people who want the rulers to do what they're already inclined to do don't have to provide evidence that the policy is objectively good. They have to provide politicians with cover, excuses. Reason to believe they can get away with what they already want to do.
You're arguing policy with a PR agent, is what I'm saying.
Guess I missed the independence celebrations in Chechnya.
So you are saying that the real purpose of the right to bear arms is so you can kill politicians you don't like?
I can take a swing at this one. In the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (the Jewish 1943 action), the German goal all along was to execute the residents. Even so, with a small number of arms and improvised devices the Jewish irregular forces tied down major German resources, including Waffen SS Panzergrenadier forces. In the end the Germans were forced to destroy the Ghetto and kill over 12,000 to quell the Uprising.
With several thousand more small arms the resource cost for the Germans would have been much higher.
I would explain the difference between totaltarians who murder millions, and politicians who want to raise my taxes, but to J.F. Thomas, it would be wasted words.
You also missed the Russian victory celebration, too.
The Chechnyan rebels are the down side of a population armed for rebellion. As much as the Russians have engage in some pretty barbarous tactics there, they are fighting an al-Qaeda farm club, so you won't see me cheering for the Chechnyan rebels. But it is a reminder that "mere guns" can sometimes raise the costs of suppressing rebellion to a very high level.
[DK: you will be pleased to see links thereto in today's article.]
This is a testable hypothesis. The assault weapons control act adopted in 1994 required examination of the data. The conclusions from the Clinton Administration's experts? No statistically significant change in deaths of police officers, or mass murders, or number killed in mass murders. Assault weapons were never commonly used in violent crimes.
Not really. The military gets called up to suppress political dissent by the unarmed. Much of the military is probably not pleased about this--but individual soldiers they are given orders. If a soldier follows orders, his conscience bothers him. The cost of refusing that order is court-martial and (assuming a thuggish enough government to justify revolution), execution.
Change the equation by having the dissenters armed. If the soldier follows orders, he stands a good chance of getting shot by the dissenters that he opens fire on AND his conscience bothers him. Refusing orders still has the same cost. An armed populace changes the balance of the equation--and soldiers may elect to do what National Guardsmen did in 1877 in some American cities when given such orders to fire on non-violent labor unionists--they refused, and in some cases, changed sides.
Reload each time? After each shot? Are we talking about single shot-muzzle loaders? Or is the amount of pressure required to pull the trigger after rthe forst shot really all that important? Do we just want to mandate no single-action shooting? All this talk against semi-automatics is pretty silly to anyone who knows a very little about guns-revolvers and bolt or lever action rifles (and shotguns) are about the only non-semi-automatics. Most handguns and many rifles are semis. The demonizing of semiautomatics seems to me to demonstrate nothing so much as ignorance of firearms.