Logic of gun control
This is not rocket science.
Divide the world into the Good Guys (GG) and the Bad Guys (BG), and think about the possible combinations of who has or doesn't have access to guns. There are four possibilities:
A. Both GG and BG have access to guns.
B. GG have access, BG don't.
C. GG don't have access, BG do.
D. Neither GG nor BG have access.
Reasonable people can argue about which possibility describes the most desirable situation. There are many interesting facets to that debate. In trying to identify the most desirable possibility, many will opt reflexively for D, the gun-free society. But there are at least four problems with that one.
First, even if it were ideal, nobody has ever had a plan for getting there. The experience of other societies has been that even house-to-house confiscation searches don't do it; and they weren't starting with a society containing 200 million or so guns in private hands. As always, the people who would be willing to give up their guns would not be the people you most want to disarm.
Second, even if you could find a way, how could you do it without repealing the Second Amendment? Do we really want to start repealing the Bill of Rights? Every slippery slope argument applies.
Third, if you did accomplish it, what would society be like then? You would have re-instituted the Rule of the Strong, where the weak (the elderly, female, disabled, and the otherwise vulnerable) would have no choice except to live at the mercy of the physically stronger intruder or attacker. Even the physically strong individual would have no effective recourse against multiple attackers. People badly underestimate the difference such a policy would make, because the media generally refuse to report defensive uses of guns, although some hint of it can be seen in the large increases in home invasions and street muggings in Britain where the law-abiding have been disarmed. "Hot" burglaries (homeowner present) are rare in the US for obvious reasons.
Fourth, in that case only the police and the military would have guns, and you have to consider what that might imply. Authoritarian regimes always disarm the population, and for good reason. Blacks in the American South got some taste of that, when gun control measures were aimed only at them.
But there can be no argument over which is the absolute worst case: It's possibility C, where the Bad Guys have guns and the Good Guys don't. And that is precisely the situation that is created by gun control, which disarms only the law-abiding.
In order to give people an illusion of safety, Virginia Tech purposefully created situation C on its campus. It is very likely that none of the officials responsible for this policy would agree to post a sign on his front lawn proclaiming that "HOMEOWNER IS UNARMED." But they did that, in effect, for the 26,000 people for whose safety they were responsible.
Byron
Divide the world into the Good Guys (GG) and the Bad Guys (BG), and think about the possible combinations of who has or doesn't have access to guns. There are four possibilities:
A. Both GG and BG have access to guns.
B. GG have access, BG don't.
C. GG don't have access, BG do.
D. Neither GG nor BG have access.
Reasonable people can argue about which possibility describes the most desirable situation. There are many interesting facets to that debate. In trying to identify the most desirable possibility, many will opt reflexively for D, the gun-free society. But there are at least four problems with that one.
First, even if it were ideal, nobody has ever had a plan for getting there. The experience of other societies has been that even house-to-house confiscation searches don't do it; and they weren't starting with a society containing 200 million or so guns in private hands. As always, the people who would be willing to give up their guns would not be the people you most want to disarm.
Second, even if you could find a way, how could you do it without repealing the Second Amendment? Do we really want to start repealing the Bill of Rights? Every slippery slope argument applies.
Third, if you did accomplish it, what would society be like then? You would have re-instituted the Rule of the Strong, where the weak (the elderly, female, disabled, and the otherwise vulnerable) would have no choice except to live at the mercy of the physically stronger intruder or attacker. Even the physically strong individual would have no effective recourse against multiple attackers. People badly underestimate the difference such a policy would make, because the media generally refuse to report defensive uses of guns, although some hint of it can be seen in the large increases in home invasions and street muggings in Britain where the law-abiding have been disarmed. "Hot" burglaries (homeowner present) are rare in the US for obvious reasons.
Fourth, in that case only the police and the military would have guns, and you have to consider what that might imply. Authoritarian regimes always disarm the population, and for good reason. Blacks in the American South got some taste of that, when gun control measures were aimed only at them.
But there can be no argument over which is the absolute worst case: It's possibility C, where the Bad Guys have guns and the Good Guys don't. And that is precisely the situation that is created by gun control, which disarms only the law-abiding.
In order to give people an illusion of safety, Virginia Tech purposefully created situation C on its campus. It is very likely that none of the officials responsible for this policy would agree to post a sign on his front lawn proclaiming that "HOMEOWNER IS UNARMED." But they did that, in effect, for the 26,000 people for whose safety they were responsible.
Byron
posted by Byron | Tuesday, April 17, 2007
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