Links - Guns and Prohibition
Separating good thinking from bad.
It would be better if we didn’t have bad conditions (e.g., crime, illness, poverty, etc.). This is both uncontroversial as well as shallow. Just a half step removed from this uninteresting and unhelpful thinking lies the all-too common belief that prohibition is a cure for things we (in some cases) don’t like.
Gun violence and accidents are in this category. But so too is drug abuse.1
Michael Huemer has the complete argument against the most extreme form of gun control summed up in these two posts (part one/part two).
Succinctly he writes,
Like most controversial issues, the issue of gun control is highly complex, and it is commonly treated in a sadly oversimplified manner. I can’t fix that problem here (though I have discussed the issue at greater length elsewhere[1]). Here, I will address only what seem to me the two most important arguments concerning the simplest and most extreme form of gun control, which would be a complete ban on private gun ownership. The first argument is that gun prohibition would violate the right of individuals to protect themselves. The second argument is that gun prohibition will fail because criminals will disregard the law.
In particular I LOVE how Huemer straightforwardly demonstrates that there are two arguments and puts them in the correct order—ethical/moral/rights and then practicality.
I also LOVE how he draws the direct parallel between gun control (prohibitions) and drug control (prohibitions). It is essential that any reasonable person understand how consistent the arguments are between both of these two issues.
I’ve shown this before, but it is worth repeating with a new element:
And my new framing relevant to this post:
The only consistent positions are ban/ban or free/free, and the others are child-like poor thinking. Note that nuance can allow for regulation at the margins in the free/free position and ban/ban still suffers from all of Huemer’s second problem, compliance, while being anti freedom (morally wrong).
I would also recommend on this topic Trevor Burrus speaking to Aaron Ross Powell on his (Re)Imagining Liberty podcast. He highlights the impracticality along with the problematic empirical claims of gun control proponents. He should be applauded for epistemic humility regarding what we just don’t know as well as identification of the separate issue of gun suicides.
I hate this vague term “drug abuse”, but I think it gets the point across nonetheless.