Just yesterday someone was in my office telling me how it's impossible to get guns in Japan, and how even the criminal gangs have to manufacture special-purpose bats. So much for that tripe.
I have no desire to turn this into a gun control flamewar; if you're going to comment to the effect that more gun control could've prevented this tragedy, at least entertain me by explaining how it's Bush's fault (and bonus points if you manage to link this to the Israel lobby).
I'm writing about the general powerlessness and impotence fostered by a paternalistic government and eagerly accepted by the cud-chewing masses. Read this article by a Virginia Tech grad student. Money quote:
I am licensed to carry a concealed handgun in the commonwealth of Virginia, and do so on a regular basis. However, because I am a Virginia Tech student, I am prohibited from carrying at school because of Virginia Tech's student policy, which makes possession of a handgun an expellable offenseI am in the same boat. I have a concealed carry permit, have had extensive safety and tactical training, and am even an instructor. Not that this is of any use on campus, where firearms are limited to the omnipresent and omnipotent police. Every time a student gets mugged or assaulted (every month or so, on average), campus police send out a report, with the helpful advice "If confronted by an assailant, don't resist. If he wants your wallet, purse or backpack, give it up." Not a word about carrying even a sub-lethal weapon such as pepper spray. Just give the bad guy what he wants and hope for the best.
Tragedies like this can be prevented if ordinary citizens are allowed to defend themselves instead of being infantilized. A Virginia Tech professor told that student whose article I linked to, "I would feel safer if you had your gun." In a similar vein, my Rabbi has specifically allowed me to carry my pistol in his house, even on Shabbat (when ordinarily carrying items like keys and a wallet is prohibited). As long as idiots like this continue to be the voice of campus officials, we can expect more attacks on soft targets such as schools -- whether isolated acts of insane individuals, or planned terrorist attacks.
[Update May 11, 2007] At least I wasn't kicked out of my school for expressing these views...
16 comments:
Well, it's certainly easier to argue from principle than from evidence. If we were arguing from evidence, we would probably try understanding why some nations that ban handguns have lower crime rates than nations that allow them.
Until then, let's keep talking about compromises with evil. It's much easier that way.
Part of the argument you're making, Aaron, is that advancing a no-tolerance approach to evil is likely to lower the total amount of evil in a society. Your suggestion is that only by imposing the threat of violence on evil people can we stop them. Do you have any reason to believe this?
Truth to tell, I have no particular stake in the gun-control debate. The strongest argument for allowing people to have guns is probably that they're the last defense against tyranny. I can accept that. But they clearly also have their downsides.
So one way to frame the debate is that it's a question of appropriately balancing interests -- the interest in minimizing firearm deaths versus the interest in protecting ourselves from an encroaching government. The particular principles don't especially matter; take your pick. But I hope you'll grant me that there are competing interests here.
Finally, it doesn't serve the debate at all if you characterize your opponents as "hair-brained" idealists who advocate a nanny state or whatever. I have this dream that one day we will all stop minimizing our opponents' desires by characterizing them as hopelessly stupid or evil. At least since 9/11, we've had a great time declaring that the terrorists are only motivated by a desire to destroy things that are just or good or beautiful in the world. Once we declare this, we've decided to
turn off our own minds. Which is sad to me.
If we're going to high-mindedly declare principles that the whole debate is about, I'd like to high-mindedly declare a meta-principle. My meta-principle is this: when establishing principles, don't de-humanize anyone. Give your opponents the benefit of the doubt in all things; if you can still win against their argument, then I'll follow you. If, on the other hand, you can only win by interpreting all their ideas in the weakest possible light, then you have no argument.
As it is, Aaron and Leo have committed the cardinal sin of attacking straw men. Who are these effeminate nanny-state-loving liberals that everyone makes fun of? I've not met them. Please point one out for me the next time you see one.
I'm more unhappy with the whole tone of this discussion than I am with the fact that I probably stand on the opposite side of the political scale from either of you. Can't we argue like adults?
I would have to agree with the last post. Though the biggest straw man here is that those against guns believe that outlawing them would completely eliminate them. While that has largely been effective in Japan, there are many other social factors at play there (i.e. the Japanese have a much higher respect for the law in general).
No one believes that banning guns will eliminate them completely. However, it is a fact that at one point, almost every gun was legally obtained (i.e. manufacturers do not sell directly to criminals). In fact, most gun deaths are due to legally obtained guns. Those with illegally obtained guns either stole them from a legal owner or used a crooked dealer who at one point legally obtained them.
The question is, "will making it harder to obtain a gun decrease the rate of gun violence?" The answer is an overwhelming yes.
Steve,
your point about demonizing the opponent is well-taken; it's one that I've made before. My excuse is that a little inflammatory rhetoric goes a long way in coaxing people into debate. Now that the debate is on its way I'll cheerfully retract the "idiot" and other bits of invective.
Now that that's out of the way, let's get to the substance. First, the easy stuff. Steve: "If we were arguing from evidence, we would probably try understanding why some nations that ban handguns have lower crime rates than nations that allow them." That's a canard. Canada has a rich hunting culture with lots of rifles, yet a relatively low crime rate. Israel is flooded with teenage boys carrying M-16s, and yet the most prevalent kind of violent crime is knife stabbing in night clubs. It's simply not true that the presence of guns causes violence, or vice versa.
The "straw man" that Aaron and I are attacking is the stance that the way to prevent violence is through more gun control -- a stance both you and Serge seem to be advocating.
Your disdain for "argu[ing] from principles" notwithstanding, it's important to spell those principles out -- as in any intellectual debate. It's important to classify the arguments as ethical, legal, pragmatic, and keep these separate (though proponents of gun control tend to conflate them).
So, before I write for pages and pages, let me figure out where the two of you (and the rest of the readers) stand.
1. Do you believe civilians have a right to defend themselves, with lethal force if necessary, against assailants?
2. If you answered Yes to (1), how do you propose they do that? Even in a gun-free society, people can wield knives, bats, or muscles. What course of action do you propose to woman walking alone at night?
3. Do you honestly believe the police will be there to protect you in case of an attack?
4. Is there any doubt in your mind that if a law-abiding student or faculty member had been armed that day at Virginia Tech, there would have been many fewer people killed?
Let's get your responses to these four, as a start...
Hi Leo,
First of all, the example of Canada doesn't prove or disprove very much, just as the example of someone being killed with a handgun in Japan doesn't prove very much. What all of us want to know is whether banning handguns would predictably reduce crime. Maybe in the U.S. it wouldn't. Maybe the U.S. is so different from, say, Japan or the UK that banning them would only worsen the problem. It's an empirical question. I don't have an answer. Like I said -- and I meant it honestly: I have no particular stake in this debate. I have few theoretical precommitments.
The example of Israel is interesting. Ditto Switzerland, which you didn't mention. Everyone in the country is armed. Maybe those cultures have more respect for weapons, given that everyone's in the military. Of course it doesn't follow that arming everyone in the U.S. would turn us into Switzerland or Israel. It doesn't even follow that compulsory military service in the U.S., along with universal handgun ownership, would make us safe. It's likely that there are cultural differences between us and those countries.
So if you ask me a purely abstract question, like whether arming everyone makes us safer, I reject the question out of hand.
Your question about whether VTech would have been safer had someone been armed is also a little off. Maybe the answer is yes. But if you allow people to carry guns around all the time, maybe you make things less safe. At the very least, maybe there are more accidental handgun deaths. So again, it's a question of tradeoffs: the benefit of some reduced crime, with other handgun deaths in other ways. It's just not legitimate to focus on one particular case (the VTech murders), assume that things would have been better had more people had guns, and assume that this settles things. It doesn't settle anything. Your principle has to stand in a world with other competing principles.
I'd also like to suggest, by the way, that focusing on these murders and claiming that they prove your point is a good example of a common psychological quirk: people amplify recent tragedies and play down everyday ones. People fear plane crashes more than cancer, though they're far more likely to die of the latter than of the former. You're asking me whether I think the most recent tragedy justifies greater gun ownership, but you're not asking me whether accidental handgun deaths justify stronger gun-ownership laws. Hell, even the NRA says that 776 handgun deaths in the year 2000 is proof that they're getting safer. 776!
Any sensible response to any gun tragedy would take this into account. You would be telling me that we ought to be passing much more stringent gun-ownership laws, including heavy fines or imprisonment for people who don't keep their guns properly locked up. Why aren't you asking me that? I submit that it's because you have a particular principle in mind, and that principle has blinded you to other, equally strong principles.
Now: do civilians have the right to defend themselves? How does society normally answer a question like this? Society uses the common law to answer it. We don't answer it abstractly. We don't have a law on the books that says "citizens have the right to defend themselves." If you want the simplest approximation to what the law says, it's: "Yes, you have the right to defend yourself, but we don't condone it. A civilized society gives the power of violence to the police. You sometimes have to take violence into your own hands, but you should expect to go to jail for it. Protect yourself, but know that you'll suffer the consequences." Sometimes these questions are so hard to answer that we take them out of the judge's hands and put them into the hands of a jury. Your peers decide whether you should go to jail. Sometimes your peers will decide that you couldn't help it, and that in a similar position they also would have taken the law into their own hands. Sometimes they decide that you're a threat to society and that you need to be locked up.
I'll tell you what my deepest fear in arguing from principle is: it is that we will all turn into Objectivists, blithely deciding that "Reason tells us X." We will follow that particular train right off the edge of a cliff and never know that we're over the cliff. We'll simplify the world out of existence.
You wonder how to enforce a person's right to self-defense. First of all, I'd like to make it so that people have to defend themselves less. That is, I'd like to reduce crime. Maybe arming people would help reduce the murder rate, but that's not the first place I'd look. For instance, are murders focused in low-income areas of major cities? I'd try to figure out why that is, and why it's gone up in the last 40 years. Giving people the means to protect themselves is one solution among many. But to me, arming people seems analogous to wearing a bike helmet: it's only going to help you once you've been struck by a car. I'd prefer for the car never to hit your bike in the first place. So if I wanted to keep bicyclists safer, I'd push for bike lanes, better traffic enforcement, etc. Helmet use would be fairly low on my list of recommendations.
I'll stop here. I could go on.
Hello all. I was directed to this post by my friend Steve, with whom I share some views and differ on others. Like Steve, I am a bit ambivalent about gun control. I don't believe that the removal of guns makes crime go away or even diminish and I don't believe that the free dispersion of them will either. What compelled me to post is, possibly like Steve, the framing of the problem by a few of the authors here.
First off, this is not a debate about evil and the shootings aren't either. Cho Seung-Hui was not evil, he was mentally ill. Very mentally ill. I have direct experience with non-violent mental illness and it looks almost exactly like that, minus the violence. To frame the gun control debate in the context of "evil" is to miss the point, since it slices the world into Good Guys and Bad Guys. This is easily demonstrably false. I believe it's more useful to think in terms acts and tendencies. Value judgements on acts (which can be a net Good or Evil) and critical evaluations on people's tendency to commit them (tend toward criminality, tend toward civility) when certain variables are at play, such as the presence of guns.
Second off, the gun control debate always becomes a rabid 'stats-off' with one side waving Country X's guns:crime ratio and the other waving Coutry Y's guns:crime ratio. This is dramatically misguided. Comparing Canada to Japan by holding up two variables in isolation is like...comparing Canada to Japan without context. Put another way, I lived in Switzerland for a time, where a rifle was in every home. I didn't feel unsafe, but the guns were pratically irrelevant. Their presence was neutralized by the cultural, historical, and physical contexts in which the people and the guns exist.
To make the recent shootings into a gun debate is to miss the point, and dangerously so. This entire situation came to a head because someone who was severely disconnected from reality and showed violent tendencies was allowed to have the same specific set of freedoms as someone who does not. Everything else is circumstantial, in my opinion. As was pointed out, he could have just as easily hopped in a car and done just as much damage, or set a bomb.
Well, with all due respect, because I have no control over the guns laws, I wouldn't even spend my time thinking about changing them.
The only entity I may possibly control is myself, so in my opinion, the most important lesson to learn is: this was a human being and I am a human being too - how do I prevent myself from getting into his [or similar] shoes?
If you tell me he was an exception [mentally ill] than the question becomes how do I prevent myself from becoming such an exception and how do I know that I am not already zombied in one way or another?
This should be an interesting dilemma to solve algorithmically!
But, in fact, that's just the point. More people die in automobile accidents than by intentional and accidental gun deaths, and yet there are large numbers of people who are far more concerned with removing my ability to protect myself than they are preventing/avoiding automobile accidents.
Then, also, more people die in accidental gun deaths than in school shootings or from whatever gunman running amok.
Therefore, even assuming mad shooters can still get guns, banning guns will AT LEAST reduce the accidental deaths, PLUS a portion of other criminal killings.
If you ever face a mad killer, bad luck to you, but the chances that this will happen are negligible in regard of the risk of a car related death.
Shouldn't you mind travelling in a car more than fretting about a lone killer?
Do you?
P.S. I guess you should write "harebrained" rather that "hair-brained"?
Chris: the gun control debate always becomes a rabid 'stats-off' with one side waving Country X's guns:crime ratio and the other waving Coutry Y's guns:crime ratio. This is dramatically misguided.
I agree; please notice that Aaron and I aren't rattling off facts and figures but rather trying to bring the debate back to basic moral principles -- something our opponents are studiously avoiding. This fetishization of "numbers" and "evidence" leads to absurdities in the best case and atricities in the worst.
Steve: I'll tell you what my deepest fear in arguing from principle is: it is that we will all turn into Objectivists, blithely deciding that "Reason tells us X." We will follow that particular train right off the edge of a cliff and never know that we're over the cliff. We'll simplify the world out of existence.
You couldn't be more wrong. Let me propose a policy for reducing the murder rate to zero. Imprison the entire population in solitary confinement. You'll agree that this will radically curtail crime, yet (I hope) you'll find this solution unpalatable -- because it violates some principle, perhaps?
Policy derived from maximizing utilitarian criteria (even when these are reasonable) -- as opposed to grounded in moral principles -- can lead to the absurd scenario of harvesting a healthy person's organs to save the lives of six dying people.
Before we argue about specific policies, we must agree on a common language. How much power do you think the state should have? What about individuals? What checks and balances should there exist between the two?
Yes, I'll grant you that if every single gun were to disappear from the earth tomorrow, there would be no more public shootings. My proposal to allow trained, responsible, law-abiding civilians to carry firarms addresses that problem quite effectively.
I'm still waiting to hear your suggestion for that woman walking in the street (a potential rapist doesn't need a gun, of course). And what recourse did you suggest for citizens against state tyranny? I hear crickets chriping...
Hi Leo,
It's gotten to the inevitable point in any online discussion where the discussants talk past one another, and/or don't listen to one another. So I'll tell you what: this will be my last post on the subject, and the next time you're in Cambridge, Massachusetts (mathematicians need to make a pilgrimage to Harvard or MIT at some point in their lives, don't they?), give me a call and we'll get a beverage of your choice. Sound good? You've got my number and my email address.
As to the value of laying down moral principles: my point is that the law is what happens when principles meet reality. We can't argue in the abstract about what policy would be best for The Innocent Woman In The Park At Night. By writing a law to protect her, we cause other things to happen. Let's say that our law makes guns more easily available. This law will have consequences outside of The Innocent Woman. It may, for instance, put more guns in the hands of criminals. It may make more guns available to children in the home. Etc. So what do we do then?
I've grown tired of college-bull-session philosophizing about abstract moral principles, because they so rarely have any connection to reality. You want to argue to me that the presence of guns discourages potential acts of violence. Fine, I'll accept that this is a plausible idea. But I won't actually believe it until you give me some evidence that it's true in the real world.
You wonder about using guns as a defense against state tyranny. I said in my first post that this seems like a perfectly good reason. But then a) in practice, how well would guns defend against the state, and b) there are other principles in the world that need to be balanced against it.
I don't see this discussion going anywhere. It would go better in person, because then we'd both see that the other is not a lunatic. I'll see you in Cambridge, Leo.
Steve,
I agree that when making concrete policy choices, one must take empirical facts into account. However, I still maintain that before we can draft policy we must agree on a set of principles -- otherwise we're children groping in the dark, prone to stumble on absurdity or atrocity.
These principles are largely about offsets and tradeoffs. Harvesting your organs to save six lives entails one such tradeoff; why is it an unacceptable one? The gun control issue involves several such complex, interacting tradeoffs -- and we have no hope of reaching a coherent conclusion without first deciding how to prioritize and weigh those tradeoffs.
Your offer to meet in Cambridge is very kind and actually rather plausible. A visit there is long overdue, especially since my good friends Maxim and Tamar have recently had a baby I must see! And yes, I've been neglecting Harvard and MIT in my tour-o-talks; so maybe sometime in late May or June. Finally, I never thought of you as a lunatic -- hopefully that's mutual!
blech
i'm removing this rantathon blog from my 'math' feeds
see y'all on the prairie at the next shoot out!
At the risk of losing more readers (pause to wipe a tear for Thane), let me post an article Aaron emailed me -- an engaging and worthwhile read for everyone. Money quote:
<<
Enter the tele-experts. Understandably self-serving, they work to place bad behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality, making it amenable to their "therapeutic" interventions. The Drew Pinskys of the world conjure so-called mental diseases either to control contrarians or to exculpate criminals. To listen to the nation's psychiatric gurus is to come to believe that crimes are caused, not committed. Perpetrators don't do the crime, but are driven to their dastardly deeds by a confluence of uncontrollable factors, victims of societal forces or organic brain disease.
The paradox at the heart of this root-causes fraud is that causal theoretical explanations are invoked only after bad deeds have been committed. Good deeds have no need of mitigating circumstances. Even though Cho went about his business meticulously and methodically, liberals (and increasingly conservatives) toss the concept of free will to the wind. They acknowledge human agency if – and only if – adaptive actions are involved.
>>
All I can say is that I agree entirely; read the whole thing. Woe unto a nation that loses the ability to call evil when it sees it.
Aaaron : So the state actively interfering to remove my ability to protect myself in a situation where the state is not likely to be of any help is equally wrong.
The "state" isn't always optimal, many laws are idiotic, but still, as Steve Laniel said:
So one way to frame the debate is that it's a question of appropriately balancing interests
May be you should also speak to him in Cambridge.
May be you should also speak to him in Cambridge
I'll take this as a joke and not as a suggestion that Aaron and I need to have our heads set straight by someone.
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