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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The idea pornography is responsible for rape is just plain silly. Of more interest is the very strong case that arming women decreases rape by a huge factor (see Multiple Victim Public Shootings, Bombings And Right To Carry Concealed Handgun Laws: Contrasting Private And Public Law Enforcement“ by Lott and Landes).
The gist of this seminal (no pun intended) study is hidden carry laws substantially decrease crimes against persons and decrease rapes by an even larger amount. Even a small number of woman with concealed weapons is enough to cause a significant drop in the rape statistics.
Two men have been killed and a third seriously injured after being shot by armed men in a pub in South London
Two people were shot, one of them fatally, in a West London restaurant today
Three men have been admitted to hospital, one of them in critical condition, after a shooting on a Glasgow Housing Estate
I was perusing Bill St. Clair’s most worthy End the War on Freedom blog and was so inspired that for no reason in particular I felt like posting this pictures of myself doing what comes naturally.
Note the AK-74 style muzzle brake… makes the weapon very controllable even on rock and roll but everyone sure as hell gets to see where you are firing from! Photograph was taken by excessively tall good buddy and would-be evil world ruler Willi Zahn.
A woman is seriously ill in hospital after been hit by a stray bullet fired as a result of a gunfight in South London
A man is also fighting for his life after being shot on the doorstep of his home in Berkshire
Strange how this issue is kept strictly off of the political and media radar. Not a word about it on the BBC
But this is from the London Evening Standard
SCOTLAND YARD has ordered police in north London to wear bullet-proof vests at all times because of soaring gun crime — the first time such an order has been made in mainland Britain.
Officers in Haringey have been told protective armour should be worn on the streets even on routine patrols after a dramatic rise in the number of firearms offences.
In the past 12 weeks there were 300 emergency calls in Haringey in relation to alleged firearms, 109 of these resulted in evidence of guns being used or seen.
Bob Elder, chairman of the Police Federation’s constables’ branch, who is based at Haringey, said: “My colleagues are increasingly worried. In Haringey there are 999 calls about firearms activity on an almost daily basis.
“There is a heightened awareness of firearms issues in boroughs such as Haringey and Hackney and there is now a directive that officers should wear body armour on operational duty as a health and safety issue.
“We have pretty strong gun laws in this country but they do not seem to be having any effect.”
Is it possible that we taxpayers could have body-armour as well? Or would it be unsafe in private hands?
On Saturday night, 3 men were shot in Palmers Green, North London. One was killed, the other two are in serious condition
Last night, a man was shot and seriously wounded by an armed intruder in Brixton, South London
The Metropolitan Police have announced a London-wide campaign to tackle the growing problem of gun-related crime
I’m new to bloggery, so please everyone bear with me while I get the hang of it.
Guns. Much is made by libertarians of mass civilian gun ownership, and this does matter, especially politically. But with crime, the mere right of civilians to own a gun, even if most of us choose not to exercise that right, is, I surmise, critical.
If you are thinking of becoming a career criminal, then the difference between a world in which just a few civilians are weird enough to own guns and crazy enough to use them against intruders, and one in which such people are so rare as to be for all practical purposes non-existent… is all the difference. It’s the difference between being shot on about your hundredth robbing expedition (i.e. quite soon), and not being shot ever.
The difference between half the population being armed and all of it being armed is, in contrast, not much of a difference. So, you get to do about one unmolested robbery before the hospital or the morgue beckons, instead of no robberies at all. Not a big distinction.
I sense that we in Britain have perhaps – what with all the new restrictions following the Dunblane massacre – moved from the first of these two gun-worlds to the second.
For decades, the number of robberies you could hope to get away with before getting seriously hurt has been climbing steadily, but you still had to be very short-sighted to become a robber. That didn’t stop everyone, but it did stop most. Gun wimps like me could live safe from most potential robbers, because the robbers didn’t know for sure that we were all gun wimps.
Now, everyone’s a gun wimp. Now, I surmise, robbers can reasonably hope to rob for life.
I have a personal stake in this. On the radio a couple of years ago I announced that there was a big increase in violent crime under way, not because I knew this to be true, but because for the sake of my argument I needed it to be true. (I wasn’t expecting a gun argument, and hadn’t been attending to recent crime news properly.) Sadly, it seems that I was right.
The following is the text of a letter sent to the London Daily Telegraph and published on 5th January 2002
SIR- It is perhaps not surprising to read of the rapid increase in armed crime (report, Jan.3 )
Since the authorities have banned the legal ownership of guns, the market in illegal arms has been stimulated and is no doubt very strong. Also, the treatment meted out by the authorities to people such as Tony Martin and the exhortations of the police to the public to yield passively to armed assault have given criminals the message that the public – unarmed whether it likes it or not – can be expected to be easy targets
It appears that some people (albeit a few) are starting to get it
I’ve stayed aloof from the flying fur up to this point, mostly because I’ve been preoccupied with critically important holiday activities. So many pubs, so little time! But the holiday season is now past and I find myself in stable condition and on the road to full recovery… so it is time to roll up the sleeves and get blogging.
Everyone seems to recognize that Ruby Ridge and Waco were important. I think some writers have skirted the edge of just why that is so without actually stating it: they were liberty’s canaries.
No one who has read about the Branch Davidians will argue David Kouresh was other than a wacko. He was a religious nut. He was at the outer limits of American society, His death showed us precisely where that limit sat and was a clarion call to those of more moderate beliefs. It showed them they had better join in holding the line or else soon find themselves on the wrong side of it:
First they came for the Jews, but I did nothing because I’m not a Jew. Then they came for the socialists, but I did nothing because I’m not a socialist. Then they came for the Catholics, but I did nothing because I’m not a Catholic. Finally, they came for me, but by then there was no one left to help me.
Pastor Father Niemoller (1946)
I am not saying that the government actions were equivalent to the full blown horror of Nazism. They were not. They were however equivalent to the earliest, most tentative steps of it. Americans are not quite as sanguine about their governments’ motives and actions as Father Niemoller, nor are they disarmed or unwilling to fight if push comes to shove.
We need armed nuts; they serve a valuable purpose. To quote myself from a discussion on the politics of space over a decade ago and why we needed our own unreasonable extremists in that endeavour:
The ends define the middle
David Khoresh provided us a warning. He showed each of us exactly how far from the edge we stood and left us to decide what to do about it. The fact that American citizenry are armed means there is a very real set of checks and balances between citizen and government. The founders and the framers of the Constitution intended this to be so and that is why there is a Second Amendment in the hallowed Bill of Rights.
This is why I do not believe the United States is even remotely near a revolutionary situation. There are no problems there which cannot be dealt with in a civil and civilized Constitutional manner. I would go so far as to say no sane person should wish the line be crossed. Revolutionary results are unpredictable. Once a society has broken down into factions that solve all problems by weight of arms rather than by law, it can be beastly difficult to recover civil society.
Besides the oversights and misreads by Charles Dodgson that Perry has already pointed out, Charles also missed the whole point behind my argument when he says
But the state is involved in sales of private cars in the United States; individual states maintain registries of who owns what vehicle. That’s what the funny metal plates with the numbers on them are all about. They also generally demand annual inspections, and will deny the use of a car even to that car’s lawful owner if they don’t like the smell of burning oil coming out of the tailpipe.
I was more hopeful in this bit where Charles stumbled upon the truth but then he picked himself up and hurried away as if nothing had happened.
As to the breathalyzers, that’s not tied to purchases, but the sad facts there are even worse. Even if you’ve already purchased a vehicle, the state will deny you the use of that vehicle — your own lawfully acquired property — for trifles like a few drunk driving arrests. And, as Walter seemed to acknowledge, most of them won’t let you drive unless you buy insurance, interfering with another private choice.
Yes. The state places many regulations on the use of your property after you buy it. It does not stop you from acquiring it nor does it specify from whom you can buy it or to whom you can sell it. In most states the local government is more concerned with collecting sales tax on the transaction than on who was involved in the deal. Indeed, all the use regulations only apply if you intend to operate the auto on public roads and lands. Keep it in the garage or drive it only on your property and you often don’t have to deal with any of that.
With guns, laws were originally of a similar “use type” and codified what was already common sense, i.e. no shooting in town, etc. The current trend in firearm regulation, however, interferes with the acquisition and possession, not just the use. That is a very important difference. I believe the technical term is prior restraint but perhaps a Constitutional scholar out there could clear that up.
This issue actually runs deeper than guns. It touches upon the fundamental worldview of individuals, states and the balance of rights. Are we subjects with a few privileges doled out by an over-riding state or are we citizens with basic rights that our chosen leaders must observe?
As you probably guessed, I lean very heavily toward the latter. While I value the US Constitution, I don’t believe it grants us any rights. It simply codifies what our basic rights already are. That’s the bit in the pre-amble talking about self-evident truths and inalienable rights. The US is different from most countries in that the government acknowledges its obligation to recognize those inalienable rights and vows to protect them. To the extent that it limits those rights and the liberties they describe, the government reneges on that promise.
I have to ask about this one too:
Which is what I think of people who try to protect their civil rights with guns. Any actual use of the guns against government authority turns into a firefight which, even Perry acknowledges, you basically can’t win:
Why then has every newly installed tyrant and dictator begun their reign by rounding up the guns in private hands? No to dwell too long in the past, but I believe it was Ben Franklin who said “Tyranny can not exist in the United States because the whole body of the people is armed.” (emphasis mine)
Charles may not realize it, but he is making our point when he states.
If Britain were just trying to maintain control and damn the consequences, they (Irish Republicians) would all have been rounded up and shot, along with any other Catholic who showed a hint of sympathy for the cause. There’s a ready stock of Protestant militants to serve as informers and triggermen …
Yup. You have some definite sectarian violence there. But what if the weapons are scattered across ethnic, racial, religious and economic lines and you can’t get one group to turn on the other? When everybody is a potential resister and willing to pay the price, you have to kill everybody to end all resistance.
Which brings us to the granddaddy of them all. Do you think the US military would fire on its own citizens? A very similar question was actually asked some Marines during a training exercise in 29 Palms. The exact question is in this article, but the upshot was something like: “Would you fire on citizens who refused to turn in illegal weapons?” 60% said no, 28% said yes, 12% didn’t care either way. The implications of those numbers could fill volumes.
But aren’t you just a teensy weensy bit curious why they asked?
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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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