Like a lot of people, I am a big fan of the cartoon show South Park, in which a group of characters send up the hypocrisies and stupidity of the world around them. The makers of the show seem to have a fairly strong libertarian streak although they themselves seem desperate – perhaps wisely – to avoid any explicit label. There is a good interview with them here. And the other day, on a pure whim, I bought this entertaining book, “South Park and Philosophy,” a collection of essays mostly by Richard Hanley, who is a professor of philosophy in Delaware. Most of his essays are pretty smart and funny and I can recommend the book, although religiously inclined people would be appalled, I think, by Hanley’s assumption that religious people are, by definition, crazy.
Hanley understands the bit about how South Park is often seen by its fans, and possibly even by its enemies, as pretty liberal in the old-fashioned, non-US usage of that word. He is quite nice to libertarians, actually, and even gives an accurate summary of the views of Robert Nozick, which is refreshing. No straw men here. However, Hanley goes on to attack libertarianism on the grounds that, such liberties as are defended are in fact a sort of nuisance. “Too much” choice is confusing and takes up a lot of time, time better spent having fun. Hanley, with the unusual and refreshing candour that is the mark of the book, argues that libertarianism is unappealing to people because many people want to remain like children and have the parents do the annoying and time-consuming decisions for them. Excerpt:
“A sure way to make your small child miserable is to put them in charge of the mintiae of life. Make them decide not just what to have for breakfast, or what to wear, but also what brand of toothpaste or underwear to buy, what to cook for dinner, and so on. Make them pay the bills for their stuff. They do not want to do all that crap. They just want to be kids, for Christ’s sake. And part of being a kid is having someone else sweat the small stuff for you. Then you can go play, or play with yourself, or what it is that you want to do.”
And in this respect, I want to be treated like a kid. I want universal health care, so I don’t have to worry about falling ill, and being shit out of luck or coverage. I want gun control, so that I don’t have to worry about protecting myself from a fucking nut job like Jimbo or Ned (whoever they are, Ed) when they want to shoot up the joint. I want social security,so that I don’t have to know all the ins and outs of the fucking stock market….I want consumer protection, so I don’t have to investigate every fucking product like I want to buy, the “sea monkeys” Cartman buys in “Simpsons Already Did It”. I want state utilities, so I don’t have to be constantly figuring out the best deal”…..
He concludes, “What I am proposing is not so very radical.”
No, it is not. What this academic with a foul mouth – presumably trying to show how hip and totally kewl he is – is a statist who has admitted that statists want life to be like childhood. They want the state to take care of the supposedly terrifying idea that we should make provision for our own old age rather than vote for high taxes and steal the money from other people and future, as yet unborn, generations. He finds it a shock that consumers’ best defence is to read the label rather than have state officials regulate consumer products on our behalf (and how well has that worked?). He positively wets his pants in terror about investing in a fund on the stock market, despite the fact that millions of people, who are not even university professors with fancy letters after their names, find this to be a perfectly normal activity. In Victorian Britain, remember, millions of factory workers saved their precious spare money in mutual aid groups called Friendly Societies and even set them up themselves. Amazing. And his comment about guns wins the prize for most cretinous comment of the lot, since he presumably has not been reading up about the appalling spate of shootings of young British kids in London and elsewhere in a country that has tried the sort of gun control he favours.
Many years ago, I recall that the late Keith Joseph, the Conservative politician and confidente of Margaret Thatcher, likened the position of a person under socialism to that of an infant receiving pocket money from his mother. The state would take care of all the pesky stuff like pensions, education, health, housing, transport – pretty much anything serious – and leave a bit of spare cash so that the benighted citizen could gamble around, bet on the horses, take the odd holiday, but otherwise have the freedom of a child in a kindergarten. Joseph put the finger on the long-term cost of this paternalism: by infantilising people, it makes them vulnerable to problems in the long run. It means that people start to forget what it was ever like to have such choices and decisions in the first place.
There is another issue. When people moan that we are overwhelmed by “too many” choices – a question-begging notion if there ever was one – they assume that their own fear of choice must be shared by everyone else. I suppose there are some people who would rather not bother about providing for retirement, or worry about consumer safety. Well, in an open society with a division of labour, people with a dislike of risk can work in corporations for a fixed salary and have a lot of benefits given as part of the package. Other people, meanwhile, prefer to work as entrepreneurs with an uneven income and take more decisions for themselves. There are consumer magazines that check products out on our behalf as a commercial service, and in shopaholic nations like Britain, shopping itself seems to have become a sort of business in its own right. There are endless programmes and magazine articles about it. If a lot of people find certain choices difficult or frightening, then that is a business opportunity for someone else. And so on.
What Hanley wants, and what all such devotees of paternalism want, is for a lot of the messiness and complexity of modern life to be taken away by Big Government. Well, we have had more than a century of experimenting with such a notion, and such paternalism has been tested to destruction. The fraying state of civil society, with problems of rising crime, the “victim” culture, is much of the consequence. Professor Hanley does not want to grow up, and neither do many other people. At least he has had the honesty to admit that Big Government is the dream of toddlers.
Lastly, when thinking about paternalism, remember PJ O’Rourke’s wise words: giving money and power to politicians is like giving whisky and a Porsche 911 to a 15-year-old.
Though I agree with your general point, and also I what I infer to be your view of gun control, I would suggest that “it doesn’t work” is an poor argument against over regulation. Firstly because, at least as far as UK gun control goes, it does work (we have I understand a lower gun crime rate than the US). Secondly, it simply gives the regulators an excuse for more laws (the current ones are just not working….), and thirdly the use of a positive argument is just more elegant.
But we did not have particularly high levels of gun crime even before regulation and ban, vis a vis the USA (that said, we have quite a lot more violent non-gun crime than the USA). Also other countries with far far higher gun ownership than the UK have lower crime rates, so ascribing lower levels of gun crime in the UK to laws banning guns is simplistic and probably simply not true. The examples of Switzerland and Israel come to mind.
Neil, I recommend Joyce Lee-Malcolm’s book on guns and crime in Britain and her comparisons with the US and other nations. She makes pretty much the point that Perry has in his comment.
Again, I am in agreement with the view that UK gun control is wrong and silly. I just feel that you are so sure that you are in the right, that you are marching into battle with the bannits with a rather leaky water pistol (hope you like the metaphor).
The poster’s original point was that recent gun crimes in the UK invalidated the whole idea of gun control. That surely would only be true if our rates were similar to those in the US (with no gun control). If our gun crime rates are lower than the US it would appear to validate gun control. Now they may have always been lower, and rates in other gun-owning countries may also be lower than the US, but this just makes the whole debate rather confused.
We have in short proved nothing. The two (or three. four…) situations are just too different to compare. So lets stop trying.
A better argument IMHO would be that, yes wider gun ownership in the UK would probably have a cost (more gun crime) but that the benefits (which I guess we might agree on) are so much greater.
Choice is not the chore. The research needed to make an informed choice generally is.
OK, so you read the label on the packet, and its got E948 and E140 in it. What’re those? Are they dangerous? Well, no, since they’ve got E-numbers they’ve been tested for safety, although enough people don’t trust the state that many would automatically suspect they were. But of course in the non-nanny state you’re not even going to get that. Oh, now we’ve got some sodium propyl para-hydroxybenzoate. If you didn’t know that it was E217 would you look at that and think about how much safer it was making your food? And if you see ethyl-2-methylbutyrate or isoamyl acetate do you think “Yummy! Apple and banana!”?
And of course, in a world without the nanny state, manufacturers can put any of that stuff in their foods if it makes it sell better, and its up to you to do the research to decide if its safe. And of course, everyone has to do it, even people who don’t like chemistry, and everyone has to keep up to date. As the world gets more complicated, there’s less any individual can do to keep up, and everyone soon passes their own personal “magic” horizon, where technology is treated as magic that just works, and they neither know nor care how. You trust society to have already checked it out for you.
The web of trust is an absolute essential for the highly technological society we live in today; it is the only way it can work. Most people now live in a mental world that works almost entirely by magic, and these tendencies you’re noticing are only an extension of that to the ultimate, and the tip of a very large iceberg.
Yes, technology also allows you to research it if you want to. You can Google for food ingredients, or advice on avoiding investment scams and dodgy pension schemes, on self defence and weapons manufacture. On astrology, climatology, psychology, biology, theology. On noology, agniology, alethiology, polemology, or dysteleology. Maths, physics, chemistry, engineering, electronics, genetics. The topics are legion, but there is no time, and worse, there is little inclination.
The professor is right about one thing: the statists are like this because most ordinary people want them to be. Because they cannot cope with life on their own, and they want Easy, and politicians are willing to sell it to them. If you want to change the system it is no use trying to change politicians and governments – you would have to change the ordinary people. And isn’t that just what they’re trying to do? To make people fit what they ought to be? Tricky, for a moral libertarian.
Off-topic, a bit, but I was re-reading only yesterday Bill Whittle’s essay on the web of trust (in relation to the Oscars). It’s a very good bit of writing, for a number of reasons. You reminded me of it.
.
The killings suggest that gun control does not work. The rate at which the killings have increased, as well as their absolute number in comparison to the US murder rate, is particularly important in this respect. Of course, one has to take into account other contextual issues, like the increasingly unwinnable war on drugs, sentencing policy, etc.
The debate is only confusing if you want it to be. I think that examples of low-crime nations like Switzerland are quite instructive in showing how silly it is for the likes of the professor whom I attacked to say that gun control is needed to curb shootings. For a long time, gun crime in Switzerland is so low that it is not registered as a separate statistic. Ponder on that.
You can stop trying to compare different national examples, but a lot of useful comparative research can and arguably should be done, not just on issues like gun crime, but on other matters too. One of the great strengths of the US as a federal country, of course, is that different policies can be tried out in different states and people can innovate and copy “best-practice” ideas.
Pa Annoyed writes:
It is a bit tricky, but libertarians should realise that people thought the whole idea of owning one’s own home was pretty crazy in 1970s, socialist Britain. The sale of council houses had a dramatic impact on perceptions.
If people want to be treated like cattle and have no real choices of any value in life, I guess that we end up with the consequences. That is one of the reasons I support emigration and open-ness to immigration, since it gives people who do not think they are infants the opportunity to enjoy a freer, more grown-up life abroad.
Getting back to the issue of South Park. It really is the best thing on US TV. The latest ones have been sublime. The one taking on the Da Vinici Code and the Catholic League was fantastic. The secret of the Easter Bunny is protected by a secret society “The Hare Club for Men”
The satire of the show ’24’ and Hillary Clinton was as good as it gets.
Is South Park available in the UK ? I would think it would be banned as hate speech or at least as Bushite necon propaganda.
I am of the firm belief that the state makes people want easy because that means that they can take more and more control for themselves. An example:
My stepson was witness to an assault on Friday on the way to his grandmother’s house. Like any sensible eleven year old he phoned for an ambulance and the police, waited with the victim until the ambulance got there, gave his name and address to the paramedics, and then continued on his way. While waiting he phoned me and then his grandmother. I congratulated him on his civic mindedness, his grandmother – my mother inlaw – shouted at him for getting involved. I then got a phone call from her during which she had the temerity to tell me off for praising my stepsons behaviour. Needless to say she got a mouthful from me on why society was in the state its in and that its actions like that of my stepson which are the only hope of stalling the decline. Now she’s not going to speak to me for at least a week.
It is exactly the attitude of my mother inlaw and people like her that fuel the state’s ever accelerating grab for control, it is ingrained in us from the moment we start school. This conditioning has been going on for some time and it leads people to say “Its not my problem, someone in authority will deal with it.” when exactly the opposite is true. The state stunts our philosophical and political growth from an early age purely for the sake of control. They take away our freedoms, and our choices because we ask them to. We only have ourselves to blame.
Mandrill,
You shock me. Your stepson acted exactly as I would do (and would have done at his age – I hope).
Taylor,
Yeah, we get South Park in the UK. We also have Viz.
Neil,
The last major raft of “gun control” in the UK was the complete ban on handguns introduced by Johnnie Major. As far as I’m aware that had zilch impact on crime but did force some of our Olympic athletes to have to train elsewhere. I used to favour gun-control but the post-Dunblane hysteria made me think. The gun clubs tried everything. They would’ve been happy with all guns kept in locked safes on secure premises but no, that was not enough to assuage our collective angst over a nutcase shooting a bunch of kiddies in Scotland. How often have you ever read this headline:
“British Modern Pentathlon Team go on Epee and Pistol Rampage”.
QED
In general,
I find consumer choice tedious at times. If I’m building a new computer there are so many magic things out of China I can screw into it that it is at times bewildering. I console myself in two ways: firstly, I have the internet to get reviews and also I can ask the lads at the local parts store*. Secondly, I know that whatever choices I make will result in a better machine than if I had a choice between “State computers #1,2,3 and 4”. Even a (relatively) bad decision** will result in a better machine for less quids than if I had no choice.
I was going to say something nasty about Macs here but I don’t want a repeat of that nonsense on SD. Sheesh… and people think abortion is controversial…
*All full citizens of Nerdistan. Typical quote: “Well I’ve got two 500 gig hard drives and It’s not enough because I’ve got Azareus and Limewire going 24/7”. Respect!
**By which I mean anything less calamitous than trying to mate an AMD chip with an Intel mobo.
As I have come to expect from academics (at least in the humanities and social sciences – although there are some honest people even in these areas) Dr Hanley presents a series of false claims as if they were obvious truth.
Government does not invest social security tax for the benefit of the old (thus saving people the trouble of investing for themselves) there are no social security investments in any productive company at all – the whole thing is a Ponzi scheme.
Nor would government be any good at investing if it tried.
“Universal” [i.e. government] health care would not look after everyone as Dr Hanley claims (in spite of the new film by Mr M. Moore that makes such claims for the Cuban health care system) – in fact people would die on waiting lists (or on lists waiting lists to get on the waiting lists) or would die being treated (because their problems had got worse whilst waiting) or would die from the sub standard treatment they got.
The high cost of American health care is caused by previous government interventions (doctor licensing – a scam expossed more than a half century ago by Milton Friedman but still carrying on, Medicare and Medicaid, the vast web of regulations on insurance companies and H.M.O.s and on and on). Yet more government interventions will simply make the problem worse.
As for “health and safety” (raised by pa annoyed as well as Dr Hamley), it is not in the interests of companies to poison their customers and they would be sued to bits if they did.
Such organizations as “Underwriters Labs” are not government institutions, and there are many commercial and noncommercial organizations that exist to independantly check the claims of manufacturers.
Government organizations such as the F.D.A. do manage to push up the costs of medical products and reduce competition (only large scale companies can afford to deal with their regulations) but they do not, overall, improve health and safety.
Indeed by such actions as holding up Beta blockers and other medical products the F.D.A. has cost many thousands of lives.
Nothing human is perfect. But calling in the government has not and will not make things better – it makes them worse.
Human beings looking to government as kind and all knowing parent is pathetic (in the bad sense of that word).
the conservation of tax
some people like to micromanage their life
some people really really don’t like to pay for stuff they are not getting
I get it
I might even agree that you all have a point or three
I live in israel so trust me that I know how much a socialist system sucks
but I’m also lazy
It’s a lifestyle choice , deal with it
I’ll go to a store that’s a block away and buy the brand I don’t like at a higher price rather than walk the extra two blocks to get the brand I like at a lower price
It’s the price I pay for not wasting my time and effort
If we set up society they way you like it
a lot of people would be forced to expend their time and effort on doing things they don’t need to do right now
last time I checked a persons time and effort were her most sacred possession
and forcing us to waste it would be a tax just as any other tax
most people simply prefer pay their taxes straight in money instead of in time and effort
it is not childish , it is a relatively informed choice about how to deal with one of the two inevitables
let’s be clear
I agree with every single point ever made about government waste
I simply don’t agree with the arrogant assumption that other people’s time and effort are not as important as mine and that I have the right to set a price on it (other people’s time and effort)
at least not without some market for it
/rant
Since 1920, Britons wishing to own firearms have beeded a ‘certificate’. At first this was merely a hand written note bought at the post office for a small fee, the idea not being to restrict ownership, merely to monitor who was buying guns in order to gain forewarning of a communist revolution. In the 1960’s this system became massively restrictive and, virtually, only hunters and target shooters could continue to buy firearms.
In 1988, the Thatcher government banned self-loading fullbore rifles in Britain, following the dreadful events in Hungerford.
In 1996, the Major government banned fullbore pistols, following the dreadful events of Dunblane.
In 1997, the Blair government banned smallbore pistols as promised in their manifesto and also in response to Dunblane.
Let’s see how effective these three bans have been by looking at the statistics.
Certificates for the legal use of guns
In 1988: 1,037,400
In 2004/5: 698,800
You can see that the legal ownership of firearms has reduced by around one third.
Deaths and injuries caused by the illegal use of guns.
In 1988: 410
In 2004/5: 4,140
Yet, here you can see that deaths and injuries caused by firearms have increased by ONE THOUSAND PERCENT.
Crimes involving the illegal use of handguns
In 1988: 1,484
In 1998/9: 2,687
In 2005/6: 4,652
Pistols have been banned, yet, criminal use of them has DOUBLED.
All figures from the Home Office.
“We have had more than a century of experimenting with such a notion, and such paternalism has been tested to destruction.”
Wish I could agree, but every socialist wannabe – when faced with the stark reality of all that collective failure stretching back to Marx – always whine that it “hasn’t been done properly (or correctly) so far” and they will rectify it this this time round. Irrational hope it seems springs eternal in the world of the fuzzy leftie.
As people above, with their wise comments, have reminded me, I left out firearms.
It is a habit of leftist academics (indeed of leftists generally) to come out with a whole series of false claims (perhaps hopeing that their foes will not have to time or energy to deal with them all – and, thus, some will slip by).
It is indeed the case that even before the First World War (and before the First World War millions of people in Britain owned firearms and the British National Rifle Association was far larger, in proportion to the general population, than the American one) “gun crime” was still much lower in Britain than the United States.
There is no evidence that “gun control” regulations reduce violent crime, and some evidence that such regulations increase it.
But then I would guess that Dr Hanley, being what he is, is not interested in evidence, or in logical argument on these matters.
Full disclosure:
I have personal reasons, as well as political reasons, for hating leftist academics (they made the last days on Earth of both my mother and my father very unpleasant), and I do hate them.
Clarification: I am not suggesting gun control is a good thing or that it has been an overwhelming success in the UK.
The point is that it might, according to some arbitrary measure be working. Or it might just be able to be made to appear to be working if you present the statistics in the right format. Either way, we are now in a utilitarian debate. The precautionary principle and “if it saves ones child’s life” emotional arguments snap into action. This is a debate we cannot and will not win. (It is also in the wrong meta-context, if I understand that phrase correctly).
Rather we should refuse to accept the left’s frames of reference, their battle grounds. In essence we say Dunblane and Hungerford are acceptable costs of a fundamental freedom (the right to defend one’s self) and that freedom demands that we be able to own firearms.
More poetically; the blood of the innocent dead feeds the tree of liberty.
We should also remember that we are all using gun control as a representative of a class of regulation.
e.g. Though it hasn’t made the news much, I am personally more offended that it is now illegal in the UK for me to install my own electric shower (and I’m a Chartered electrical engineer)
“Crimes involving the illegal use of handguns [have] DOUBLED.”
This is my point. You could reasonably argue that the 1997 legislation was designed to stop legal handguns being used for illegal ends (as per Dunblane). Given that context, the law has been 100% successful; no legal handguns have been used in a crime since 1997…
As I said; wrong battlefield.
Naeil Barnes said:
“we say Dunblane and Hungerford are acceptable costs of a fundamental freedom”
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Were any of the people killed in Hungerford or Dunblane permitted to own and carry firearms for their protection? No. Perhaps, if the teachers at Dunblane had been carrying guns, many lives would have been saved and the ‘cost’ of freedom would be greatly reduced.
Indeed, it is not really a cost. Consider how many children Hamilton could have killed with his guns if they had been protected by armed teachers (teachers in Israel are armed by law by the way, a prudent measure in my opinion). I’d make a hesitant guess at about 4.
Then consider how many he could have killed if he had been using a sword or an axe instead, and the teachers had been unarmed. I don’t see why he couldn’t have killed the vast majority of them. He could have killed all of them by blocking the door from the outside and throwing in home made petrol bombs… Is it sick that I’m contemplating how to kill the maximum number of children? No matter, my point is that these deaths are the cost of being human. Being human and armed reduces the cost of being human.
“…it is not in the interests of companies to poison their customers and they would be sued to bits if they did”
Yes it is and no they wouldn’t. So long as the customer doesn’t die immediately, there’s nothing you can prove, and nothing you can sue them for. All the company is interested in is selling more, they possibly don’t even know whether what they’re selling has risks, and you certainly don’t. You’ve no idea what’s in the food you eat, you’ve no idea of the risk level, you can’t afford the testing, and you’ve no way of telling whether an illness you have now was caused by something you ate regularly ten years ago.
I’m all in favour of relaxing some of the rules on H&S, but I don’t imagine for a moment that business self-interest or the courts can prevent the risks going up. More people would inevitably die younger, and that’s fine by me. It’s worth it for being allowed to eat what I want.
CL, Correlation doesn’t imply causation. How do you know from the figures you cite, (and I’m not saying this is the case) that gun crime might not have increased even more if access hadn’t been more strictly limited? It takes a lot of work to come up with a proper answer on sociological questions like this.
When they outlaw guns, then only the outlaws will have them.
It makes no difference if the guns are legal or illegal, those people are still dead but if there were legal ownership of handguns either concealed or not, there would be more dead criminals.
I am in favour of widespread ownership of firearms by private citizens, whether they are handguns or rifles, its matters not to me.
I now live in the USA because as I knew as soon as B.Liar and his excuse for a government got into power the writing was on the wall for the country.
I also have the legal right to own anything in this state from a handgun to a fully functioning machine gun.
My uncle has a .50 cal browning machine gun and goes blatting with it every weekend and no one cares! fancy that Britain, No one cares he has a 50 cal machine gun.
Wrong. When ownership of firearms by private citizens is outlawed, then only outlaws and the police will have firearms.
That’s what known as a police state. The criminals have guns, so obviously the police have to have them so as to be able to fight the criminals. Then you’re average law abiding citizen is under threat from both sides, Vicious criminals and gun happy police. I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably say it many times more; Fear is a weapon which the state uses to control us. Not only do we fear the criminals, who are armed, we also fear the police, who are also armed.
Someone get me a gun, I refuse to be intimidated any more.
The work has been done. The researchers applied economic modeling and demonstrated as conclusively as is possible a positive correlation that more gun laws = more crime. I have linked quite a bit during the past year or two but I didn’t memorize it.
But here. You can check out some of these links. Her’s a quote from one of them-
My first vote was cast in 1979.
For Keith Joseph.
Mandrill Wrote:
Agreed. Couldn’t agree more. That was the point I was trying to get across.
Mandrill Wrote:
People should not fear Governments, Governments should fear people.
Taken from the movie V for Vendetta, which I think is the 1984 of the 2000’s 🙂
The UK is now a police state in all but name, I looked in horror at the stories of surveillance cameras now being able to bark orders at the general population.
472569
Perhaps, if the teachers at Dunblane had been carrying guns, many lives would have been saved and the ‘cost’ of freedom would be greatly reduced.
I remember Mark Steyn, in a column not long after the Columbine massacre, saying that an armed man had walked into a school in – as I remember it – Mississippi that same week. The principal shot him in the leg and disarmed him. It didn’t make the BBC news. (Or anywhere else in this country for that matter, so I can’t vouch for the story’s veracity).
On that line, does anyone have any links regarding a correlation between armed crime and gun control within the US? Steyn’s point in that column was that these massacres happen in “liberal” (ie, illiberal) gun-control states. It would be interesting to see some actual data.
…these deaths are the cost of being human.
Changing tack entirely (although not really leading off-topic, since it’s still about libertarian-ish viewpoints miraculously making it into the mainstream media), I’m surprised nobody has mentioned the final episode of Life on Mars here yet (unless I missed it). This seemed to be exactly the point it was making: risk and danger go hand-in-hand with freedom and enjoyment. “If you can feel it, you’re alive; if you can’t feel it any more, you’re dead”.
It’s something I’ve noticed personally as I make my way, hamfistedly, through life. I’m not a natural risk-taker; I wish, in many ways, it wasn’t the case. But it is.
Crime rates by state can be found here:
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/
Vermont, with no gun control what so ever, has a murder rate of 1.3. Just over one third that of Britain, with the strictest gun control of any nation.
Washington DC/District of Columbia, with the strictest gun control in the world (stricter than Britain in fact) has a murder rate of 35.4. The highest in the United States. If it was a nation it would have the third highest murder rate in the world.
If I might request the assistance of fellow Samiz Dataians:
In 1900, the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, said he would “laud the day when there was a rifle in every cottage in England”.
Can anyone find where the full text of what he said?
Thanks, CL. The two extremes seem pretty persuasive, but what about the rest? Are there any states that buck the trend? I don’t really know what the situation is in the various states regarding gun control (with a few exceptions), so while the raw crime figures are interesting, it’s hard to put them into context.
How many of these ‘Gun Crimes’ are the crime of actually owning a gun? If gun ownership were to be made legal, how much of a drop in ‘gun crime’ would we see?
(the same question could be asked of ‘drug crime’)
Interesting to recall that gun control in the UK emanates from purely political selfishness and not from “public safety”. The (now) second most corrupt political regime that this country has known, namely Lloyd George’s 1920’s government decided to restrict gun ownership on the grounds that,
From a Times Online article entitled “Victorian gun crime – the shocking story” which amply demonstrates that gun ownership does not equal gun crime. I particularly like the bit where,
Who told you this?
Mandrell has a point.
He has shown us the light! If we make shooting people legal then we’ll see a massive drop in murder statistics!
OR!
We could NOT be complete dickheads. Hmm… what to do what to do?
mandrill,
Good point. I do wonder what proportion of those gun crimes are ownership or even keeping a gun for someone else (mandatory 4 years isn’t it?)
BTW, been meaning to ask – where’s the moniker from?
Julian,
As Holmes said to Watson, never go east of Whitechapel after dark without a pistol. Having lived in Stepney I can vouch for sagacity of the great detective.
Mid,
315,000 firearms permits in FL (and ten thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire)…. hmm. Is that the total number of Floridians who legally own guns. Sorry if I’m being dense here. It seems a little low for a state with a population of 20 million. In fact, I have never seen a stat for the proportion of Americans who own a gun or guns. In the UK we just get the oft-repeated stat that there are more guns than people in the US without any analysis of the pattern of ownership.
OnePagan,
I care that your uncle has a 50 cal Browning. I’ve seen the vdieo of what one of those things can do to a fridge. I want one too. Alas, I’d be put away for a very long time here in the UK for even looking at such an item.
I am sure that is a great comfort down in London’s badlands right now, Neil.
The Dunblane shooting incident was horrific but how typical of the mindset of our governments that the law-abiding majority get hit in order to follow the precautionary principle of outlawing target shooting “just in case” another nutter goes on the rampage. The net effect is to reduce our ability to defend ourselves, ensure criminals have an implicit advantage on the rest.
Ah, what geniuses we elect!
People who want to be infantilised can go and (not) do their own thing. Their choice. Question is, why should I be forced to do the same? Yes, I really do think the Statists want, no, DEMAND that people are infantilised so they can patronise and control them from on-high. This also manifests itself in the “Liberal” camp as well – free do do anythng they decide we can be free to do.
Mandrill: Grandma not speaking for a week? Sounds like a result.
“…is a statist who has admitted that statists want life to be like childhood.”
They are of course entiteled to wish what they want, and even to establish bodies or organizations that grant them their wish – i.e. permit them to live like children. Nothing wrong with that.
But what they want is entirely different from what the professor states. The want to enslave other people, to rob them (tax them), to force them into their scheme of things.
They want a violent (government violence) and oppressive society.
When the necessary implications of their wish is stated explicitly – it sounds totally different from the innocent appearing phrase “life like in childhood”.
Nick: many people in the US own several weapons, I think most of them are collectors. This may account for at least part of the high ownership stats, although “more guns than people” still sounds bogus to me.
Pa Annoyed:
Reputation – a company does not want its reputation trashed by the newspapers and/or broadcasters spreading stories that its products are unsafe (and there are plenty of organizations out there who are only too happy to find out the information for these stories).
Courts do not want award damages for long term damage – you are mistaken, they do.
Indeed there have been cases in the United States where courts have awarded damages when then is no real evidence of short or long term damage (just clever shake down lawyers and stupid juries).
“Health and safety” regulations do not protect companies from the courts. The defence “but we obeyed all the regulations” is often not accepted.
So the United States has BOTH the vast web of regulations AND tort law.
As for your desire for less absurd health and safety regulations.
This comes under Milton Friednmans warning against wanting “barking cats”.
If government has the power to impose health and safety regulations of course they will be absurd – that is the nature of the beast.
Konshtok: “I’ll go to a store that’s a block away and buy the brand I don’t like at a higher price rather than walk the extra two blocks to get the brand I like at a lower price”
That is perfectly fine. Given the choice, you have made a calculation based on things important to you. In this case brand loyalty comes below convienience and price in your estimation. Where is the problem there?
Konshtok: “..last time I checked a persons time and effort were her most sacred possession
and forcing us to waste it..”
And of course you are not being forced to do anything of the sort. You make decisions based on criteria important to you. For example, if you decide you can’t be bothered to price all the funds in your pension, employ a pension company to do it for you.
Konshtok: “..last time I checked a persons time and effort were her most sacred possession …”
Of course. Goes without saying.
“…and forcing us to waste it..”
No, freedom does not force you to waste time on making wise choices (in health care, pensions, etc.). You are perfectly free to make dumb choices, without wasting your time.
Freedom only forces you not to impose your work on other people by force, and not to make other people waste their time and effort so you can enjoy your lazy lifestyle at no cost to yourself.
Konshtok: “..last time I checked a persons time and effort were her most sacred possession …”
Of course. Goes without saying.
“…and forcing us to waste it..”
No, freedom does not force you to waste time on making wise choices (in health care, pensions, etc.). You are perfectly free to make dumb choices, without wasting your time.
Freedom only forces you not to impose your work on other people by force, and not to make other people waste their time and effort so you can enjoy your lazy lifestyle at no cost to yourself.
Sorry for the double comment….
Obviously I was like totally unclear about what I was trying to say
people (as opposed to politicians and other ticks ) who prefer government programs to the free market are not doing it because they are childish or uninformed about government waste and mismanagement
they accept the trade off of higher taxes and bad service in exchange of not having to bother thinking about things they don’t find fun
now if we changed the system to one more to your liking with lower taxes and more free market choises
for those people the total tax burden
meaning both the money and the annoyance of having to deal with stuff they didn’t have to deal with before would increase
that’s what I meant by conservation of taxes
less tax and less annoyance for you means less tax but way more annoyance for them
so the total tax burden doesn’t really change
I know I’m not using “annoyance” and tax burden” in a very accurate or traditional way
but work with me on this
I think you can see what I’m aiming at
konshtok: “I know I’m not using “annoyance” and tax burden” in a very accurate or traditional way but work with me on this I think you can see what I’m aiming at”
I am ok with your use of “annoyance” but I cannot accept your use of the term ‘tax burden” to describe the overhead of *MY* time I *CHOOSE* to apportion to tasks *important* to me.
It rather seems a perversion of the concept of tax, which is usually something someone else imposes on you, not usually something you willingly impose on yourself in persuit of goals you freely elect to persue.
Alisa said:
“Who told you this?”
In reference to me saying:
“…teachers in Israel are armed by law”
http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel200409022215.asp
Of interest:
“Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy that swiftly ended terrorist attacks against schools. Earlier this year, Thailand adopted a similar approach. It is politically incorrect, but it does have the advantage of saving the lives of children and teachers. The policy? Encourage teachers to carry firearms.”
CL: OK, I see where the confusion is. Teachers in Israel are not armed by law. In fact, most teachers in Israel are not armed, period, except for schools that are located in the territories and other “sensitive” areas, such as towns and villages that are close to the border. In those areas there may be teachers and other staff that are armed. What the article you linked to says is true, or rather was true in the 70ies, that is to say that gun control was eased to allow for self defense in general, and in schools in particular. Unfortunately, this trend seems to have been reversed, if not as far as ownership is concerned, at least when it comes for the actual use of the weapon in self-defense.
konshtok,
If you want to abdicate responsibility to others who provide such a service, go ahead. People do it all the time. The issue is that if the State provides it via taxation, by its very nature it will be both a monopoly and compulsory provider of those services and therefore almost certainly both bad and expensive with no opt-out.
The market will be quick to provide simple ways to do almost anything if peolpe want to trade money vs convenience. In fact most things in life ARE about people trading money for convenience – the first profession ever was something along those lines…
In the UK we have a vibrant online insurance market, energy market etc. Sites have sprung up to provide online services to compare those products.
Putting money into a savings account at a fixed rate is the ultimate Financial Markets lazy cop-out and loads of people do it.
People buy Which? Magazine or “What HiFi?” and use the recommeded items as a gold standard.
We are surrounded by such services.
In the information age there is even LESS of a need for monolithic, compulsory, legally enforced monopoly State services. Where they should exist is where the logistics pretty much require it to be a monopoly (e.g. urban water delivery and sewerage removal – but not purification, mind), as a State monopoly is likely to be less of a problem than a private monopoly in such cases.
There is no proven case for monopolistic, legally enforced tax-funded housing, healthcare and education delivery, which are the top budget items in any household.
For the record, Jimbo is the gun and hunting loving uncle of Stan in South Park, and Ned is his amputee Vietnam war buddy who speaks through one of those creepy voice-vibrator things.
Jimbo and Ned are famous for thier technique of hunting otherwise illegal game by shouting “IT’S COMING RIGHT FOR US!” right before they hit it with a rocket launcher.
And for the record, Jimbo and Ned have never shot any joints up. They just shoot various cute and fuzzy animals.
“less tax and less annoyance for you means less tax but way more annoyance for them”
That may be so, but do they have a right to impose more tax on me so they’ll avoid annoyance ?
I mean – I see how people may wish to impose a tax on me, especially if they reckon they will receive some of the income. But surely you can’t think or claim that this is right?
Nick M,
This is just the number of people who can lawfully stick a loaded gun in their pocket or under their shirt or whatever and go out in the street with it. Most people don’t ever bother with applying because they have no need or desire to. But thugs don’t know which of us are the small percentage of armed citizens. It makes us all safer.
As for the more-guns-than-people claim, most likely correct. That could explain this:
Which is a cut and paste from a comment I made in this thread, to which I could add that a hugely disproportionate share of those few murders are of people who are themselves criminals.
I am now probably so far OT that I’ve lost the point of the post. All I can add is that if you want daddy to protect you, you must stay a child and do what daddy says. I will gladly forfeit that protection (such that it is) because I do not want to remain a child and I do not want to do what some appointed daddy orders. Idiots like that academic are welcome to stay children if they want. But I will take strong offense if they try to do it at my expense or force the same choice on me.
Guns are machines for killing and, like many machines, they increase the productivity of the user. Their efficiency at killing is the reason for their huge popularity. Armies equip their soldiers with guns for very good reasons.
As for the more-guns-than-people claim, most likely correct.
I find it hard to believe, unless it includes guns held illegally.
O’Rourke wasn’t quite so specific. The exact quote is, “Giving money and power to politicians is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenagers.”
But I agree with the sentiment.
@ Midwesterner:
Dosn’t Wisconsin have very tough gun control? I thought it was only a handful of states to not issue CCW permits.
Not to dispute the effectiveness of guns as a crime deterrent, just looking to strengthen your argument 😉
@ magnetic north:
True, guns are very effective killing machines and most are designed to kill, which is very convenient because some people need killing.
Perhaps one clause of my comparison slipped by you. I compared a killer armed with a gun attacking victims armed with guns, to a killer with another weapon, attacking UNARMED victims. Guns may make good killing tools, but this is serously hampered by lots of other people with equally good killing machines trying to kill you. When you’re armed, even with a poor weapon, but nobody else is armed…well you can do what you like pretty much.
TCL, very true and I wondered about bringing that up. However, paradoxically, we have a (haphazard) visible carry policy. But I can’t recall ever seeing anyone outside of the security industry or a recreational shooting context carry a gun.
We do have guns in most homes. Since a very high percentage of crime occurs in homes, I think that explains our still very good comparative safety.
Alisa, in my part of Wisconsin (rural/suburban transition) I would not be surprised if guns held a two to one edge. I’m not saying they do, just that it wouldn’t surprise me.
A person who only owns one gun??? Madness! 😀
I remember when I first got into guns I got the smallest, cheapest safe I could find. “But the biggest” everyone said, “you’ll need it”. I ignored them, thinking I’d never need more than one….they were totally right of course…
timc , jacob
You are barging into an open door
I totally agree that the free market is the better choice in both price and quality
what I disagree with is the idea that the reason most people in the free world are NOT libertarians is that most people are emotionally immature
I find that explanation emotionally immature
so I’m trying to figure out why people don’t go for choice as much as we think they should
assume for the sake of argument that people are not childish and then try to figure out why they don’t share your politics
I’ll try to make my ideas more coherent and post them sometime (but I’m lazy so no promises)
and about guns in Israel
thats total BS
there are no guns in israeli schools with the possible exception of the security guards at the gates and even those ones are new ( like the last 10 years or so)
.
I don’t agree. Guns have an edge over less well-designed utensils not only when they are used against armed targets, but also when those targets are making energetic efforts to escape.
Or, try a thought experiment.
Select a representative sample of twenty males aged 20-50. Motivate them to kill. Release ten in random town centres with guns, and ten with swords. Maybe even the fearsome samurai swords that it seems may be banned.
Now count those dead in each location. I’d be willing to bet good money that the gunmen would prove more lethal than the swordsmen.
As you most likely know knoshtok (but some people not)…..
What tends to happen is that people do indeed pay the vast taxes and accept the endless regulations (which vastly increase costs and reduce quality if various ways) – BUT then they find out that have to think about nasty things anyway.
Health care is a good example.
People pay for government health care(the N.H.S.) but then come to understand (when they have a serious medical problem) that they have to work out how to pay for medical treatment and have to think about what medical treatment to go for (and where to get it – for example a British hospital or overseas).
Sadly they often leave it too late.
Absolutely brilliant analysis, excellently written. Thank you!
Alisa,I know that teachers in Israel aren’t armed by law.
But everybody is a potential reservist and almost everybody has a gun.
Never felt safer than when I was there.
Go for a walk in Jafo?
Sure!
Just look at the guy out with his family and an M16.
Pax israeli.
Pietr: every male is a potential reservist, and yes, many of those have weapons, although they seldom carry them outside their homes. Most teachers in Israel are women, who never served in a combat unit, and never saw a weapon after their 3-week basic training. Most women never served in the reserves, either. Your general point about feeling safer in the streets is well taken, though, as there is often someone around who is armed, normally a young soldier during their compulsory service in a combat unit, going home or returning from a leave. They are required to take their weapons home with them.
Magnetic north said:
“Or, try a thought experiment.
Select a representative sample of twenty males aged 20-50. Motivate them to kill. Release ten in random town centres with guns, and ten with swords. Maybe even the fearsome samurai swords that it seems may be banned.
Now count those dead in each location. I’d be willing to bet good money that the gunme would prove more lethal than the swordsmen.”
Ok you just completely ignored my point again.
Try this (the correct) thought experiment:
Select a representative sample of twenty males aged 20-50. Motivate them to kill. Release ten in random town centres with guns, and ten with swords. Maybe even the fearsome samurai swords that it seems may be banned.
In the towns where the gunmen will be released, arm each person with a gun. In the towns where the swordsmen will be released, disarm each person.
Now count those dead in each location. I’d be willing to bet good money that the swordsmen would prove more lethal than the gunmen.
The Cynical Libertarian is quite correct.
Someone who is planning to murder people is unlikely to respect “gun control” regulations.
All “gun control” (such as the gun control at Virginia Tech – where, only a little while ago, the administrators were celebrating the blocking of a measure in the Commonwealth of Virginia legislature that would have allowed people to take their firearms into State college property) is to disarm honest people.
Disarming honest folk (the only people who are going to respect “gun control” regulations) is not saving lives – it is creating helpless victims.
Cynical,
Your point, as I understand it, is that if everyone has guns, no individual will be able to gain such an edge in lethality as to be able to enjoy a particularly successful killing spree.
Mine is that if no-one is armed with a gun, the same happy situation arises.
My apologies for not making this more explicit. I have quite limited time to post comments.
I find the prospect of a streetful of armed people fairly alarming. Some will have troubled themselves to attend extensive training. Others will just have bought the thing and stuffed it in a pocket. All temperaments will be represented, from the most aggressive to the most submissive. There seems to be plenty of scope for the shooting to start.
I understand you, magnetic north.
You believe nations will never need armies. At least not ones with guns.
You believe nations will cooperate with their enemies to ban guns from planet.
You believe no nations will ever permit guns to be smuggled to people in the nations of their enemies.
You believe we will all be safer if we will just turn in all of the legal guns and trust the government to protect us from the rest.
You believe that even though 300 metric tons of just one drug, cocaine slips into our country, we’ll be able to keep out enough guns to assure that no criminal will ever have one.
Riiight.
Kum Ba Yah. Or better yet, let’s all join hands and sing Imagine. Those bad guys will hear us and understand. They will change their ways.
Me? I’d rather trust randomly selected strangers with guns than assure that only criminals have them.
I don’t know what makes you think I’d disband or disarm the army.
I don’t think perfection is possible, so some illegal guns are inevitable. But if they can be made scarce enough, bearing in mind that potential spree killers are also very rare, the two will seldom, if ever, combine.
While, if everyone is carrying guns, a steady drip of unnecessary casualties can be expected.
My argument recognises two poles, of no guns and unversal gun ownership. I regard the former as more desirable. But I accept that, once we have moved too far towards the latter, there will come a point when a move all the way to that pole would be better than remaining with a “no gun” policy that is no longer achieving anything worthwhile.
I do not think the UK is close to that point yet. It would be a bitter pill to swallow, taking the decision that we were. It would feel a bit like saying “OK, now we’re like Afghanistan. Everyone’s going to have the means to blow each other away. The police had better be armed like soldiers from now on.”
Look, we’re used to an unarmed police force, and that has worked for us pretty well up to now.
I know there are countries like Switzerland, with assault rifles in every home, which are almost never misused. But, firstly, those are kept in the home and therefore not to had every time there’s a dispute about parking, or someone spills another’s drink. And secondly, we are not the Swiss. We’re not the disciplined and restrained people we reputedly were 50 years ago.
If we ever move to universal arming, the price in hot-blooded and accidental shootings will be high. So the alternative would have to be pretty bad. It is not at present. I hope that remains the case.
so SOME illegal guns are inevitable It is wishful thinking, Magnetic. There are only some illegal drugs that get inside the US/UK/wherever, and only some illegal aliens, too. They smuggle people, for god’s sakes. Also, there are plenty of other, perfectly legal and mundane means to commit (mass) murder. are we going to outlaw all of them? And, BTW, a gun is the most effective means of defense against most such other threats.
m.n., the UK once was a place where everybody had “the means to blow each other away”. You had far less violent crime then. And the police were unarmed and were even known to borrow guns from private citizens.
You appear to be struggling desperately to find a way to blame this on the availability of guns. Why? It is clearly not. What is the real cause that you are afraid of?
Mid: I cannot speak for Magnetic, but many, otherwise perfectly reasonable people, have irrational fear of guns. I have known some (in the US, obviously, I doubt you could find many here in Israel). These are mostly people who never actually saw a gun in their life, let alone held one. I am not saying that everyone who advocates gun control belongs to this group, but I suspect many do. It seems to me that this group is often overlooked by the “pro-gun lobby”, especially by libertarians, who mostly focus on the government vs. civil society aspect of the gun debate.