We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata slogan of the day The debate over guns is a clash of cultures, a confrontation of different kinds of character, a disagreement over social philosophy and even, though few notice this, over free will and determinism. The contending factions don’t need guns to detest each other. They would anyway.
– Fred Reed
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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I cannot fit myself neatly into this divide.
I’m in favour of gun ownership because, on balance, I trust people. Guns are very democratic. It’s hard to push around people with guns. But then libertarians aren’t so hot on democracy.
I find people who agitate in favour of gun rights seem to be motivated by mistrust and misanthropy. Crime, in particular, looms large in the pro-gun propaganda. Not just intellectually, but emotionally too, the case for gun ownership (as it is often put) seems to rest on more on fear of other people than anything positive.
In fact the greatest threat to liberty does not come from criminals, it comes from the state. Playing up the threat of crime will tend to empower the state at the expense of all our liberties. The pro-gun case often seems shockingly unconcerned with due-process or justice – why not act as judge, jury and executioner, shooting criminals on sight? This attitude, that protection from crime overides other considerations, is the very thing that empowers the state to deprive us of our rights. Including, ultimately, the right to bear arms.
It is primarily mistrust of the state rather than fear of crime which motivates me to advocate gun ownership. I like the idea that people who work for the state should be under no illusion they have a monopoly on the means of violence. The way I see it, defense against crime is only a secondary, though still an important, reason for owning a firearm.
Joe,
You’re using two different meanings of democracy. When you say, “Guns are very democratic,” you are saying that guns have a tendency to equalize the potential for use of force as a means to an end. Thus, guns tend to decentralize power into the hands of individuals.
When you say, “libertarians aren’t so hot on democracy,” the word democracy is used in a completely different context. In the sense that libertarians dislike democracy, democracy is seen as a tool for one group of individuals to use violent force to infringe upon the rights of other individuals throught the act of voting. In this sense, democracy tends to centralize power.
So there is after all no contradiction in libertarians being gun rights advocates and at the same time having a distaste for democracy. Both views affirm the rights of individuals.
Right, Joe. I don’t particularly care whether I have a gun (I don’t, and I don’t have plans to ever get one), but the government’s reasons for wanting to remove this don’t make a lot of sense. If most people who owned guns abused the priviledge, then perhaps removing gun ownership would be necessary (for the survival of society). The fact is that most people who own guns are peaceful, and hence the government has no right to remove this right from the people.
The government does not have the right to disarm me. Never trust a government with arms that does not trust citizens with arms.
Consider the extent to which the state may terrorize society by merely withholding its protection from criminals in certain cases. It is for this reason that Friedrich Engles referred to criminals as “Socially friendly elements,” and the big state still uses them to do its dirty work. The history of American infringement of RKBA begins with the laws passed in the Restoration South to disarm Black citizens. Blacks had been using firearms to defend themselves from night riders, so when whites regained control of the state legislatures laws were passed to disarm the Blacks. Lower federal courts were striking these laws down on 14th/2d Amendment grounds, until the U.S.Supreme Court in the Cruikshank case (look it up on Findlaw) held the RKBA was not incorporated, the Blacks lost their guns and the KKK had its way. That was then; this is now. Now other people are doing the terrorizing and the cultural devide is in another place. “No justice. no peace” is leftist code for “Stand and deliver.” If you can’t defend yourself and your property, you must go along with the state wishes of you, including enslaving you to finance its efforts to address the “root causes” of crime. Also, if your adjenda is for the state to use its power to transform society, if, for example, you would like the state to force civil society to accept you or even to esteem you, if you like Cataline, “Lust after new things,” then the reservation by civil society of a meaningful right to self-defense stands in the way of your hopes of using the state to remake civil society according to your wishes. The RKBA divide has other causes. There is Hesperophobia. Oddly, the Bellisares book used all sorts of questionable data to argue the unimportance of firearms, but had to throw in the obligatory PC line that they were, neverless, a major cause of Western hegemony. Cortes conquered a nation of 10 million with 200 men with matchlocks, don’t you know. So if you thing the wrong side won King Phillip’s War, you don’t like guns. Then too there is simple treason. Armed people are militarily strong, not just because they can hit things with rifles, a rather unimportant factor now, but because they are morally, spiritually ready to use force. Thus our foreign enemies or merely those persons, foreign or domestic, who wish that we were less powerful or less ready to use our power, do not like our guns. Truly guns are THE great cultural divide.
Fetishizing violence is a good way to get a lot of it. People everywhere (especially libertarians) must remember the proven power of nonviolent resistance. Indians and blacks were able to defeat their oppressors without firing a shot (well, ok, some shots were fired, but they weren’t what ended the oppression). If something can be acheived without violence, e.g. an end to the most brutal kinds of oppression, then it should be. Guns are not the solution there.
Guns are far from a panacea against crime and oppression, but the principle that a large portion of the populace can defend itself against burglary would probably keep a lot of burglers from burlgling. If people use their guns responsibly, the government should not take away their rights to own one (a violent criminal has, for example, lost his right to use a gun).