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  • Gun Control Advocates Ignore What the Founding Fathers Really Thought

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    In all my years of existence, the Second Amendment of our Constitution has always been considered controversial. Opponents claim it is the cause of gun violence. Proponents assert that it helps guarantee freedom and safety.

    “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

    These twenty-seven words have been the subject of much debate during the 20th and 21st centuries. Does it mean that citizens only have a right to own guns if the state has a well-regulated militia in place that they are a part of, or does it mean absolutely that the right to bear arms should not be infringed? Perhaps it means that you can only use guns for hunting purposes, or you’re not allowed to have anything more complicated than an 18th century musket because that’s what the founders had when they wrote this?

    The last two questions don’t seem to make sense when you look at the wording of the Second Amendment, but somehow opponents have made this a pillar of their arguments because they keep repeating and insisting on it on the grounds that “we don’t know what the founding fathers really intended when they wrote this.”

    But that’s not true. We do know what the founding fathers thought, because they wrote a series of seventy-eight essays called The Federalist Papers to sell the Constitution to the American people in the late 1780s. Exploring these writings can shed light on the views of the founding fathers, and thus, on the proper interpretation of the Second Amendment.

    In the lead up to the Revolutionary War, Americans were the most heavily-armed people on the planet in regard to citizen ownership of firearms. This was a necessity of life on the frontier because it was needed for protection against Native American attacks along with wild animals. In the more heavily populated areas of New England and the Middle Colonies, the French were to the North and West which created another security threat. Essentially, the people were on their own for protection and needed to take matters into their own hands.

    During the Revolutionary War, the British Army committed many atrocities against the colonists that were fighting for independence. These experiences left a bitter taste for many regarding powerful government and a large standing army. The fear was that a tyrant could seize power and then use the power of the military to oppress the people.

    At the same time, many American citizens identified their allegiance to their state rather than the country, preferring to say I am a Virginian over I am an American. Much resistance to the adopting the Constitution came from a fear that a centralized national government would overpower the state and oppress the people in the state as a result. Federalist Paper No.46, believed to have been written by then future President James Madison, addressed these concerns.

    “The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence.”

    These numbers that Madison is using are based on the population during the 18th century, but the concept remains the same. If the American military was used to oppress the American people, they would be vastly outnumbered by the citizenry. He goes on to write:

    “Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.”

    The concept of the population outnumbering the military being a guaranteed check against the growth of tyranny is only effective if the citizenry is armed to the point where they can make a difference should a fight ever break out.

    During the American Revolution there were essentially three fighting forces on the land in North America. On one side was the British army while on the other was the American Army supplemented by local militias. Both the British and American armies held the militia in inferior regard as they were unprofessional and often unreliable.

    After five years of indecisive fighting in the North, the British devised a strategy were they would conquer the South, move north to crush the middle colonies, and finally conquer an isolated hostile New England. In a worst case scenario, with the South secured, the British high command figured that they would at least be able to hold onto some of their colonies if they lost the war. The British army under General Cornwallis was limited in manpower so their idea was to crush the American army and then install loyalist local governments with militias to maintain the public order in their absence as they moved through the continent.

    That plan ultimately did not work because the local militias of the Carolinas fought what were essentially guerilla campaigns to prevent the British from being able to withdraw from areas they had taken over. The delays caused by this prevented General Cornwallis from a timely execution of his plans, and by the time he did arrive north in Virginia, he was eventually ambushed and cut off by Washington’s army.

    And this is how some citizens with guns who were not in the army helped lead to the defeat of the most powerful military in the world at that time.

    It should be clear at this point that the early Americans saw gun rights as an important check on government power. But perhaps modern weaponry makes this point moot?

    An extreme argument from the gun control crowd is that AR-15s and similar weapons would be futile against the government’s advanced weaponry arsenal consisting of arms like F-15 fighter jets. President Biden himself said, “If you need to worry about taking on the federal government, you need some F-15s. You don’t need an AR-15.”

    It’s really difficult to imagine why the sitting President of the United States would make this argument, as it does nothing to win over the pro-Second Amendment crowd to accepting gun control measures. To the contrary, it only seems to reinforce former President James Madison’s view that an armed citizenry is essential as an equalizer to a corrupt government.


    Daniel Kowalski

    Daniel Kowalski is an American businessman with interests in the USA and developing markets of Africa.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • Gun Control Comes from a Place of Privilege

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    The concept of privilege gets a bad rap in many circles, and understandably so. Many have taken it way too far, using it as a means of bullying their political opponents into submission. But while the excesses of this rhetoric are certainly problematic, I don’t think we should do away with the concept entirely. Behind all the moral grandstanding lies a kernel of truth, one that can provide some valuable insights if applied correctly.

    The principle, essentially, is that certain people have unearned advantages, and those advantages can shape how they see the world. Affluence, for instance, can make someone blind to the needs of the poor. Likewise, those with an above average aptitude, intelligence, or physical appearance might find it difficult to relate to those who were not equally endowed with those gifts.

    The problem with this blindness is that it can easily lead to hubris, that is, unwarranted self-confidence. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of privilege is thinking we know the best course of action for a given situation when we really don’t.

    The classic example of this is the story of a famous French princess who, upon hearing that the peasants had no bread, simply replied, “then let them eat cake.” She was so unfamiliar with their circumstances that the solution she dismissively prescribed was positively laughable. Another example of privilege was when the lockdown elite told us to “just stay home,” seemingly oblivious to the fact that staying home is simply unfeasible for many working class people.

    Now, progressives are typically pretty good at pointing out places where privilege is leading to blindness and hubris (indeed, they often see privilege even where it doesn’t exist). But there’s one occurance of privilege that always seems to get a pass, and that is the privilege associated with gun control.

    Consider, for example, someone who’s from a wealthy, safe neighborhood. They know very little about what it’s like to live in a high-crime area. They have probably never been robbed or threatened with violence from a total stranger. And if they do face threats, they have no qualms with calling the (armed) police who are usually responsive and happy to help.

    Now compare that to the experience of someone from a rougher part of town. First, the cops there are probably not as responsive. What’s more, the cops can often become antagonistic, poking their nose where it doesn’t belong (see below) and sometimes arresting the very people they arrived to help. 

    Unsurprisingly, confidence in police is noticeably lower in these communities.

    So what do you do if you live in a high-crime area where you can’t trust the police to help you? For many, the answer is to buy a gun. Indeed, 88 percent of gun owners cite crime protection as one of the main reasons they own a gun, and people who have been recent crime victims report higher rates of gun ownership than those who have not been recent victims.

    This brings us to the point about privilege. To many people who grew up in these rough neighborhoods, saying “just call the cops” is like saying “let them eat cake.” It isn’t actually helpful advice. It just demonstrates how little we know about their circumstances and how unqualified we are to speak to their issues.

    To be sure, the people in these communities are often divided over the issue of gun control themselves. Even so, if someone is buying a gun, there’s a good chance it’s because they don’t feel safe without it. So before we tell them they are better off disarmed, perhaps we should take stock of how privileged we are to not need guns ourselves.

    The connection between gun control and privilege may sound new to many, but it’s actually an issue that goes back decades. In 1978, for instance, the economist and libertarian philosopher Murray Rothbard drew attention to this problem in his book For a New Liberty. To make his point, he quotes an article written by Don Kates for the Cato Institute’s Inquiry Magazine. Kates, for his part, pulls no punches.

    “Gun prohibition is the brainchild of white middle-class liberals who are oblivious to the situation of poor and minority people living in areas where the police have given up on crime control,” Kates writes. “Such liberals weren’t upset about marijuana laws, either, in the fifties when the busts were confined to the ghettos. Secure in well-policed suburbs or high-security apartments guarded by Pinkertons (whom no one proposes to disarm), the oblivious liberal derides gun ownership as ‘an anachronism from the Old West.’”

    Kates goes on to highlight exactly what kind of people are being impacted by gun control policies. Citing a 1975 national survey, he notes that the leading subgroups who owned a gun only for self-defense were blacks, the lowest income groups, and senior citizens. “These are the people,” Kates eloquently warns, “it is proposed we jail because they insist on keeping the only protection available for their families in areas in which the police have given up.”

    Four decades later, FBI data showed African Americans were still disproportionately impacted by anti-carry laws, accounting for 42 percent of all possession charges even though they accounted for just 13 percent of the overall population.

    Of course, none of this will make gun control any less contentious. There is no silver bullet here. But perhaps this paradigm can at least give us a lesson in humility. Namely, don’t assume you know what’s best for someone if you haven’t walked a mile in their shoes.


    Patrick Carroll

    Patrick Carroll has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • Australia’s Gun Laws and Homicide: Correlation Isn’t Causation

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Australia’s Gun Laws and Homicide: Correlation Isn’t Causation

    • guns2.JPG
    03/21/2019

    In the wake of the March 15 New Zealand shootings, advocates for new gun restrictions in New Zealand have pointed to Australia as “proof” that if national governments adopt gun restrictions like those of Australia’s National Firearms Agreement, then homicides will go into steep decline.

    “Exhibit A” is usually the fact that homicides have decreased in Australia since 1996, when the new legislation was adopted in Australia.

    There are at least two problems with these claims. First, homicide rates have been in decline throughout western Europe and Canada and the United States since the early 1990s. The fact that the same trend was followed in Australia is hardly evidence of a revolutionary achievement. Second, homicides were already so unusual in Australia, even before the 1996 legislation, that few lessons can be learned from slight movements either up or down in homicide rates.

    A Trend in Falling Rates

    As noted by legal scholar Michael Tonry,

    There is now general agreement, at least for developed English-speaking countries and western Europe, that homicide patterns have moved in parallel since the 1950s. The precise timing of the declines has varied, but the common pattern is apparent. Homicide rates increased substantially from various dates in the 1960s, peaked in the early 1990s or slightly later, and have since fallen substantially.

    This was certainly the case in the United States. US homicides hit a 51-year low in 2014, falling to a level not seen since 1963. This followed the general trend: peaking in the early 1990s, and then going into steep decline. And yet, we can’t point to any new national gun-control measure which we can then claim caused the decline. In fact, the data suggests gun ownership increased significantly during this period.

    homicide_51yr_0.jpg

    Source.

    Australia followed the same pattern, although national homicide data collection was spotty before the early 1990s:

    tonry1.JPG

    Source: Standardized homicide rates per 100,000 population, four English-speaking countries, various years to 2012. See “Why Crime Rates Are Falling Throughout the Western World” by Michael Tonry.

    Part of the reason that the collection of homicide data in Australia is so recent a phenomenon is because it has tended to be so rare. Politically, it simply wasn’t a national priority. Australia is a small country, with only a few more million people than Florida, spread out over an entire continent. In the relatively high homicide days of the early 1990s, Australia’s homicides totaled around 300. This means in a bad crime year, in which homicides increase by only 20 or 30 victims, it could swing overall rates noticeably.

    This brings us to our other problem with using post-1996 homicide data as definitive proof of anything. The numbers are too small to allow us to extrapolate much. As data analyst Leah Libresco wrote in 2017 in The Washington Post:

    I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths…

    This doesn’t stop many reporters in mainstream outlets from claiming that any decline in homicides can with certainty be attributed to whatever the most recent gun-control restrictions were.

    But it rarely works in the opposite direction. For example, during the 1990s, many American states liberalized gun laws considerably, allowing more conceal-carry provisions and lessening controls in general. Needless to say, The New York Times doesn’t point to this and say “American homicide rates decreased in response to loosening of state gun laws.”

    Of course, I’m not saying that these changes in gun laws by themselves indisputably “prove” that more conceal carry laws reduce homicides. But, if I subscribed to the same standards of rigor as most mainstream journalists, I’d likely have no scruples about doing this, in spite of what other factors ought to be considered.

    Faced with a lack of evidence that 1996’s law caused Australia to follow the same trend in homicides as both the US and Canada, advocates for laws like Australia’s then fall back on the strategy of pointing out that Australia’s homicide rates are lower than the US’s. The problem with this strategy, of course, is that Australia’s homicide rates were not comparable to those in the US either before or after 1996. The causes of the difference in rates between the two countries obviously pre-dates modern gun regulation measures in both countries. (We might also point out that several US states — some of which have very lax gun laws — have very low homicide rates comparable to Australia’s.)

    Attempts to explain this away have been numerous, and in many ways, justifying gun control policy has come down to endless attempts at using regression analysis to find correlations between gun policy and homicide rates. These can often be interesting, but their value often rests on finding the right theoretical framework with which to identify the most important factors.

    Those who work in public policy, and who lack a good foundation in broader issues around criminality tend to just go directly to legal prohibitions as the key factor in homicide rates. But this isn’t exactly the approach taken by those who engage in more serious study of long-term trends in homicides.

    Famed crime researcher Eric Monkonnen, for example, in his essay “Homicide: Explaining America’s Exceptionalism,” identified four factors which he thought most likely explained the higher rates in the United States: the mobility of the population, decentralized law enforcement, racial division caused by slavery, and a generally higher tolerance for homicide. Monkonnen concludes: “To assume that an absence of guns in the United States would bring about parity with Europe is wrong. For the past two centuries, even without guns, American rates would likely have still been higher.”

    Monkonnen’s conclusions on this matter don’t necessarily make him laissez-faire on gun control. But they doillustrate his recognition of the fact that factors driving differences in homicide rates between two very different societies go far beyond pointing to one or two pieces of legislation. And if gun control laws are to be posited as the cause of declines in homicide, there need to be a clear “before and after difference” in the jurisdiction in which they are adopted. Comparisons with other countries miss the point.

    Suicide Rates Are Back at Pre-1996 Levels

    Perhaps recognizing that homicide rates haven’t actually changed all that much in the wake of 1996, some defenders of Australia’s gun legislation have tried to gild the lily by claiming that an additional benefit of legislation has been a decline in suicide rates. This is a common strategy among gun control advocates who often like to claim gun control is a suicide prevention measure.

    [RELATED: “Guns Don’t Cause Suicide“]

    For example, it’s not difficult to find media headlines proclaiming “suicide figures plummeted” in Australia after the adoption of the 1996 law. But Australia runs into a similar problem here as with gun control: suicide rates fell substantially during the same period in Canada, the US, and much of Europe.

    Moreover, in recent years, suicide rates in Australia and the US have climbed upward again. There’s little doubt that suicide rates fell from 1995 to 2006, dropping from 12 per 100,000 to under 9 per 100,000. But after that, suicide rates climbed to a ten-year high in 2015, rising again to 12 per 100,000, or a rate comparable to what existed before the 1996 gun measure. In other words, suicides are back to where they were. But as recently as 2017, we’re still hearing about how gun control also makes suicides decline.

    Overall, this is just the level of discourse we should expect from the media and policymakers on this matter. Even the flimsiest correlation to the passage of a gun control law is assumed to have been the primary factor behind a decline in homicides. Meanwhile, any easing of gun laws that coincides with declining homicides (as happened in the US) is to be ignored. In both cases, the situation is more complicated than reporters suggest.

    But don’t expect this to be a restraining factor on the drive for new gun laws in New Zealand. In Australia, the 1996 gun-control measure was passed only 12 days after the massacre used to justify the new legislation. New Zealand politicians look like they’re trying to take an even more cavalier attitude toward deliberation and debate. Meanwhile, in Norway, where Anders Brevik murdered 77 people in 2011 — 67 of them with semi-automatic firearms — the national legislature didn’t pass significant changes to gun control regulations until 2018.

    Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for Mises Wire and The Austrian, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado, and was the economist for the Colorado Division of Housing from 2009 to 2014. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

    Contact Ryan McMaken

    Source: Australia’s Gun Laws and Homicide: Correlation Isn’t Causation | Mises Wire


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