It’s been fourteen years now.
Go read last year’s post. I have nothing to add.
Tag: Philosophy
May Victims of Communism Day
Today is the ninth annual Victims of Communism Day, a day to remember the people murdered by their own governments in their quest to achieve a “worker’s paradise” where everyone is equal, where “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” is the beautiful dream lie. R.J. Rummel, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, has calculated that the total number of victims of Communism – that is, the domestic victims of their own governments – in the USSR, China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cambodia is 98.4 million people. For all Communist governments during the 20th Century, he puts the estimate at approximately 110 million. And this wasn’t in warfare against other nations, this was what these governments did to their own people – “breaking eggs” to make their utopian omelette.
Six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and another six million people the Nazis decided were “undesirable” went with them. “Never again” is the motto of the modern Jew, and many others just as dedicated. But “again and again and again” seems to be the rebuke of history.
The Communists are hardly alone in these crimes. Rummel estimates that the total number of people murdered by their own governments during the 20th Century is on the close order of 262 million, but the single biggest chunk of that truly frightening number is directly due to one pernicious idea: That we can make people better.
Why do I own guns? For a number of reasons, but one of them is this:
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? — Alexandr Solzhenitzyn, The Gulag Archipelago
—
The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed – where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once. — Judge Alex Kozinski, dissenting, Silveira v. Lockyer, denial to re-hear en banc, 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, 2003.
I intend to repeat this post each May 1 that I continue to run this blog. This is the seventh time I have put it up. Since Bernie Sanders made a credible run for the Presidency last year, obviously we’ve not learned a fucking thing from history.
Six years ago, Sipsey Street Irregulars had a post to go along with this one. It’s still up. STRONGLY RECOMMENDED.
More Quora Debate
So somebody over at Quora asked: Why haven’t gun control advocates commented about the Broken Arrow, Oklahoma home invasion shootings?
One Jim Page answered:
The perspective of someone who lives in a country with gun control:
3 people are now dead who would probably otherwise still be alive. The decision as to whether they should live or die was taken by someone who’s only qualification was that they had $300 to spend on an AR15.
The 3 invaders probably felt empowered to enter the victim’s home because they had easy access to guns.
Of course invading that person’s home was wrong, but wrong enough to be killed for?? Without knowing more about the incident, can you categorically say that the invaders meant the victim physical harm? It’s more likely they wanted money or stuff they could sell, and planned to use their weapons to pacify the home owner. Is a person’s TV or the contents of their wallet more important than 3 people’s lives?
Gun control advocates don’t need to comment, because this is an insane conversation that could only be had by people that feel it’s more important to own guns than to be right.
On #2, one of the invaders had a large knife and the two others had brass knuckles, either of which can easily be a deadly weapon. None of them had guns.
On #3, I’m not sure why, on a moral basis, anyone who invades a person’s home should have any expectations of surviving. If they didn’t mean to cause harm, why did they go in with weapons? Is the homeowner supposed to think people entering his home wearing masks and holding weapons don’t mean to cause him harm?
To which Mr. Page replied:
On #2: if they didn’t have guns isn’t shooting them all with a semi automatic weapon even more of an appalling overreaction?
On #3: it’s illegal to break into someone’s home, and the law puts people behind bars for it. It doesn’t give them the electric chair or even life imprisonment. So why should someone expect to lose their lives for breaking and entering? There is a long way between a person being allowed to kill a person for being in their house, and the legal penalty for breaking and entering, and that seems to be bridged by the idea ‘that’s what happens when people own guns’. I don’t see how legal ownership of a lethal weapon can make that right.
I was reminded of my 2004 trilogy of posts beginning with “(I)t’s most important that all potential victims be as dangerous as they can“, so I started with this:
Mr. Page:
You perfectly illustrate the difference in the attitude toward violence exhibited by residents of the UK vs. residents of the U.S., I think. To wit: “(I)f they didn’t have guns isn’t shooting them all with a semi automatic weapon even more of an appalling overreaction?”
Col. Jeff Cooper, a man who pretty much helped develop civilian firearms training once commented:
“One bleeding-heart type asked me in a recent interview if I did not agree that ‘violence begets violence.’ I told him that it is my earnest endeavor to see that it does. I would like very much to ensure — and in some cases I have — that any man who offers violence to his fellow citizen begets a whole lot more in return than he can enjoy.”
In the UK the law pretty much restricts the citizen to “proportional” response – that is, in a situation of extreme stress the victim of the attack is supposed to assess the intention and capability of the assailant(s) and limit his or her response to something that will not be judged an “overreaction” by calm and sober third parties after the fact. Instead in the U.S. overwhelming response is considered appropriate, not appalling. As one popular cartoonist here has stated it, “There is no overkill. There is only ‘open fire’ and ‘reloading.’”
“(W)hy should someone expect to lose their lives for breaking and entering?”
They didn’t die for breaking and entering. Had the house been empty they’d have been fine. What they did was an armed home invasion. The concept of pacifism as it pertains to crime is generally predicated on the concept that all life is of value, and that using violence to injure or kill in defense of mere property is – as you suggest – disproportionate, the value of the material being much less than the value of the lives of the persons attempting to take the material. Surprise! I concur. The life of a human being is of greater value than, say, the contents of my wallet or my home. But this ignores something more important – the fact that the contents of my wallet or home are the least things at risk. Because someone willing to threaten bodily injury or death in order to take my property violates the tenets of the society in which both of us live. He puts in fear not only me, but the entire society. He has proffered a new social contract – “Give me what I want, and I might not hurt you.”
The pacifist culture tells us that we should not resist, that we should call the authorities who are empowered to deal with social miscreants. At most, we should respond (as the British are required) proportionally. Yet a proportional response requires us to read the mind of the assailant. If he holds a knife, are we to ask “Do you actually intend to use the knife, and if so is your intent simply to wound or would you be intending a killing blow?” A proportional response requires the defender to reason cogently in a situation wherein our lives, or at least our health may be at risk. The advantage belongs to the attacker, and that is a recipe for social disaster.
To prevent that social disaster, the new social contract offered by the criminal should be understood by all parties to be: “Whatever it is I want, I have decided that it is worth risking my life for.” And we, the potential victims, should be as dangerous as possible.
So long as a sufficient number of us are, the rest of society will enjoy the benefit of our protection. When there are too few of us, or when those of us who are willing to resist are restricted by law from doing so, there remain only two options: suffer the onslaught of criminals, or increase the police forces to overly burdensome levels. With the second option, assuming that a sufficient level is attained to reduce crime, the officers of the State required to accomplish that task will not then be reduced, they will be reassigned to other tasks, and a de facto police state will exist.
Those are the choices. It seems apparent which Britain has decided on, and which the U.S. has.
Mr. Page upvoted my comment and replied:
I appreciate your long and reasoned response. I mostly agree with you right up to ‘ … and that is a recipe for social disaster.’ It’s not. It’s a recipe for dialling down the violence, and in the case of most developed countries it works, there simply is less violence, and we absolutely prefer it that way. Second: your assertion that the only alternative to the US solution is a police state – and that’s what the Uk has chosen … can you explain what you mean by that? If you had spent any time in the Uk you’d know that it simply isn’t true.
Look it seems to me that one area of disagreement that we have is whether or not an armed person in your house is attacking you or not, if they do not know you are there. It seems that US thinking is that they are. I, and most people in the Uk I suspect, are not comfortable with that, whatever ‘Castle Law’ says. It seems like an amoral solution to a moral problem, with the side effect that there is an upward cycle of up-gunning arms race between criminals and non-criminals. Who does that benefit aside from Messrs Smith and Wesson?
To which I responded:
“It’s not. It’s a recipe for dialling down the violence…”
I suggest you study the rates of violence in the UK from the turn of the 20th Century until the present. Specifically the period right at the middle of the century when laws making self-defense with a weapon essentially impossible were enacted. I guarantee you, violence did not go down.
“Second: your assertion that the only alternative to the US solution is a police state – and that’s what the Uk has chosen … can you explain what you mean by that?”
I suggest you check your reading comprehension: “When there are too few of us, or when those of us who are willing to resist are restricted by law from doing so, there remain only two options: suffer the onslaught of criminals, or increase the police forces to overly burdensome levels.”
You have chosen the former. England and Wales used to be one of the least violent nations in the world. It is now one of the most violent nations in Europe. Sure, you don’t kill each other much (and you never did) but violent crime there is epidemic. See: https://www.gov.uk/government/up… (XML file) Pay particular attention to the column marked “Total violence against the person” and the numbers following passage of the Prevention of Crime Act 1953. You may not consider that “social disaster,” but levels of violence like that here resulted in people buying guns.
“It seems like an amoral solution to a moral problem, with the side effect that there is an upward cycle of up-gunning arms race between criminals and non-criminals.”
Yeah, we keep hearing that one – “More guns = more crime” – except it hasn’t happened. Over the last decade something on the order of sixty million new firearms were purchased by individuals here, about half of them handguns, and most of those weren’t purchased for target shooting. Concealed-carry laws, for instance, have been gaining popularity around the country – see this graphic:
The states marked in green do not require a license to carry concealed. And what has violent crime done here? DECLINED. To levels not seen since the 1960’s.
5 facts about crime in the U.S.
Who has it benefited? Our general population. Who has benefited from the UK’s policy of disarmament and “proportional response”? The criminals. Which is more amoral – allowing people to defend themselves, or in effect telling them instead to “close your eyes and think of England”?
We’ll see if he has anything to add.
UPDATE, 4/12: Mr. Page indeed posted a response. I have replied. See below:
Kevin, I can see we are not going to agree on this, but just to set the record straight: when you compare figures between the US and UK, you will find that the US and the UK do not define ‘violence’ the same way. The UK definition is much broader, and the UK numbers include such things as bicycle theft and domestic violence, which the US numbers do not. Also – it’s hard to compare ‘home invasion with intent to harm’ between the UK and the US as the UK doesn’t really classify crimes that way, or at least not that I have been able to find. If you equate burglary (breaking and entering to commit a crime), then the US and the UK are in pretty much the same ball park. But if you look at gun-related crime … the US leaves everyone else in the dust. The numbers are further skewed as it seems that in the US unreported crime is much higher than the UK. But the headline feature, surely, has to be the number of people killed by guns. Take a look here for more up to date and detailed figures than you provided: United Kingdom vs United States: Crime Facts and Stats
To your point regarding historical crime stats, the key time points you miss are the tightening of the rules after the Hungerford and Dunblane massacres, where automatic weapons and handguns (respectively) were outlawed and other guns began to be properly controlled. For a brief period after Hungerford, gun crime actually increases. But after the rules are tweaked and enforcement is perfected (and by the way it was NOT draconian, my family owned a number of shotguns and all was done fairly and reasonably, and yes! I like firing guns!), the numbers fall off a cliff. Take a look at this Guardian article, sorry about the rather antagonistic title: So, America, this is how other countries do gun control
‘Yeah, we keep hearing that one – “More guns = more crime” – except it hasn’t happened.’ Look at US gun crime figures compared to everywhere else on the planet. Why is not obvious that if you have guns you have gun crime and without guns you don’t?
One thing: I am not putting forward the UK as an example of perfect gun control. There are better. From the article above, take a look also at Germany. German gun ownership is almost as high per capita as the US, but their gun crime is ridiculously low, and dropping, because they positively vet people that apply to have guns … and only sane people are allowed them. That’s probably how it should be done. Can we agree that only sane people should have guns?
Regarding ‘close your eyes and think of England’ 🙂 The calculation is: in the incredibly rare case where someone actually breaks into my house armed, I will find a way to come out of it unscathed, either by bargaining, or self defence, or running, because the alternative, everybody up-gunned and shooting to kill, is worse. Most people here find a baseball bat or a kitchen knife a sufficiently comforting deterrent. I don’t think you’ll find most people in this country would sit around and do nothing if their home is invaded, we are not pacifists :)! But having a gun makes it too easy to end up with everybody dead. I suppose you could say criminals do benefit, because they don’t end up dead.
Yes – I did misread the section on ‘police state’ – my apologies.
OK, get an adult beverage and settle in:
My apologies, I’ve been AFK all day, and I certainly wasn’t going to try to reply to this on my iPhone. Let us begin:
“…when you compare figures between the US and UK, you will find that the US and the UK do not define ‘violence’ the same way. The UK definition is much broader, and the UK numbers include such things as bicycle theft and domestic violence, which the US numbers do not.”
And that doesn’t really matter, because the statistics I pointed you to were exclusively for your nation. Let’s look at “More serious wounding or other acts endangering life” for example.
1950: 1,078 incidents
1960: 1,847
1970: 2,956
1980: 4,390
1990: 8,920Your population didn’t grow that much over that period (about 45 million in 1950, about 50 million in 1990). So the rate of this specific violent crime increased from about 2.4/100,000 population in 1950 to 17.84/100,000 in 1990. That’s over a 700% increase in 40 years, and the numbers nearly doubled again by the end of the century.
You are not safer than you were in 1960.
“But if you look at gun-related crime … the US leaves everyone else in the dust.”
Only if you cherry-pick the nations you compare us to. Internationally the heavily-armed U.S. ranks about 100th for homicide. Think about that. What disqualified those other 99 nations from your consideration? And why do you concentrate on gun violence? The U.S. has a higher homicide rate committed without guns than England and Wales has by all methods. I will stipulate to our violent tendencies. What I won’t do is attributed those tendencies to the widespread ownership of firearms. I can riff on this subject for a few thousand words, but I’ll pass at this time.
“Take a look here for more up to date and detailed figures than you provided:”
Again, so stipulated. But I wasn’t comparing our rates to yours. I was comparing your rates over history to our rates over the same period. That says that England & Wales has gotten more dangerous over time (going from incredibly safe to notably less so) and the U.S. has gotten safer (from notably unsafe to considerably safer). Your nation has banned the tools of self-defense and made self-defense legally risky by imposing a “proportional response” requirement. Over that same period my nation has loosened the laws on self defense and the restrictions on the ability to have weapons suitable for it.
These two data points seem to contradict the gun control narrative.
“To your point regarding historical crime stats, the key time points you miss are the tightening of the rules after the Hungerford and Dunblane massacres, where automatic weapons and handguns (respectively) were outlawed and other guns began to be properly controlled.”
I’m going to skip quoting the rest of that paragraph and ask again, why the exclusive focus on gun crime? Is it somehow worse than knife crime (the latest focus of your law enforcement attention)? On physical assault with other weapons or bare hands? Because those numbers, as far as we can tell, are not improving. We can’t really tell because apparently they’re not being properly recorded.
‘Fifth of all crimes’ go unrecorded Pullquote: “The problem is greatest for victims of violent crime, with a third going unrecorded. Of sexual offences, 26% are not recorded.”
And if you can link to The Guardian, so can I: Violent crime in England and Wales is up 24%, police figures show
Makes one wonder why the numbers aren’t being recorded, doesn’t it?
“ ‘Yeah, we keep hearing that one – “More guns = more crime” – except it hasn’t happened.’ Look at US gun crime figures compared to everywhere else on the planet.”
I have. Again, why do you ignore those countries that don’t conform to your worldview?
“Why is not obvious that if you have guns you have gun crime and without guns you don’t?”
Oh, it is. This is known as a tautology. Again, why the emphasis on guns versus violence? Here is a good place to give you a quote from the conclusion of a gun control meta-study performed here in the early 1980’s at the behest of the Carter administration that addresses this question directly:
“The progressive’s indictment of American firearms policy is well known and is one that both the senior authors of this study once shared. This indictment includes the following particulars: (1) Guns are involved in an astonishing number of crimes in this country. (2) In other countries with stricter firearms laws and fewer guns in private hands, gun crime is rare. (3) Most of the firearms involved in crime are cheap Saturday Night Specials, for which no legitimate use or need exists. (4) Many families acquire such a gun because they feel the need to protect themselves; eventually they end up shooting one another. (5) If there were fewer guns around, there would obviously be less crime. (6) Most of the public also believes this and has favored stricter gun control laws for as long as anyone has asked the question. (7) Only the gun lobby prevents us from embarking on the road to a safer and more civilized society.
“The more deeply we have explored the empirical implications of this indictment, the less plausible it has become. We wonder, first, given the number of firearms presently available in the United States, whether the time to ‘do something’ about them has not long since passed. If we take the highest plausible value for the total number of gun incidents in any given year – 1,000,000 – and the lowest plausible value for the total number of firearms now in private hands – 100,000,000 – we see rather quickly that the guns now owned exceed the annual incident count by a factor of at least 100. This means that the existing stock is adequate to supply all conceivable criminal purposes for at least the entire next century, even if the worldwide manufacture of new guns were halted today and if each presently owned firearm were used criminally once and only once. Short of an outright house-to-house search and seizure mission, just how are we going to achieve some significant reduction in the number of firearms available?
“Even if we were somehow able to remove all firearms from civilian possession, it is not at all clear that a substantial reduction in interpersonal violence would follow. Certainly, the violence that results from hard-core and predatory criminality would not abate very much. Even the most ardent proponents of stricter gun laws no longer expect such laws to solve the hard-core crime problem, or even to make much of a dent in it. There is also reason to doubt whether the ‘soft-core’ violence, the so-called crimes of passion, would decline by very much. Stated simply, these crimes occur because some people have come to hate others, and they will continue to occur in one form or another as long as hatred persists. It is possible, to be sure, that many of these incidents would involve different consequences if no firearms were available, but it is also possible that the consequences would be exactly the same. The existing empirical literature provides no firm basis for choosing one of these possibilities over the other. Restating the point, if we could solve the problem of interpersonal hatred, it may not matter very much what we did about guns, and unless we solve the problem of interpersonal hatred, it may not matter much what we do about guns. There are simply too many other objects that can serve the purpose of inflicting harm on another human being.”
The estimate of 100,000,000 firearms in the early 80’s was almost definitely low. The current estimate of 300,000,000 is also probably low. But it means the problem of gun elimination hasn’t gotten any smaller. But gun violence has.
“German gun ownership is almost as high per capita as the US, but their gun crime is ridiculously low, and dropping, because they positively vet people that apply to have guns … and only sane people are allowed them. That’s probably how it should be done. Can we agree that only sane people should have guns?”
In an ideal world, yes. I’m not going to get into a lengthy discussion on the topic of American vs. European views of government authority in this thread. Suffice it to say, what you are noting as a victory of “common sense gun regulation” is more an example of a quite homogeneous culture. If I recall my history correctly, those famously law-abiding people managed to kill tens of millions of other Europeans during the 20th Century, did they not? I don’t think I’d point to them as the gun-control ideal, myself.
“Regarding ‘close your eyes and think of England’ 🙂 The calculation is: in the incredibly rare case where someone actually breaks into my house armed, I will find a way to come out of it unscathed, either by bargaining, or self defence, or running, because the alternative, everybody up-gunned and shooting to kill, is worse.”
This is an argument that I hear repeatedly. Since you admitted to missing the alternative to a police state reference in my early comment, I’ll point you to that same excerpt once again:
“So long as a sufficient number of us are, the rest of society will enjoy the benefit of our protection. When there are too few of us, or when those of us who are willing to resist are restricted by law from doing so…”
EVERYBODY doesn’t need to be armed. In fact it takes just a small percentage of the population armed and willing to benefit the rest of society. You say “I will find a way to come out of it unscathed…” You may. What about a single woman, or an elderly man?
I’ve seen this argument before too. A previous discussion yielded this bit of “wisdom” that seems to represent your position:
Consider two scenarios:
1. Attacker has a gun. Defender does not.
2. Attacker does not have a gun. Defender doesn’t either.
Self defence is possible in the second scenario while it isn’t in the first one. Is that clear now?No. How about this instead:
If the law disarms citizens, then it can make self defense impossible where it would have been possible if the citizen was armed.
Take these incidents from 2004, for example: Vulnerable pensioners need the self-defence law changed Pullquote:
“Two women in their eighties have been brutally beaten in their own homes by burglars in the past few days….
“Annie Hendrick, an 89-year-old grandmother, was in a critical condition in a London hospital yesterday after being beaten almost beyond recognition 11 days ago.
“Sally Skidmore was attacked on her 81st birthday a week ago yesterday, as she sat in an armchair watching television at home. She was punched repeatedly in the face and was left with two black eyes, a swollen jaw and a bleeding nose.”
Let’s ignore the Telegraph’s call for allowing women like these to possess at least pepper spray to defend themselves with. I doubt seriously that the perpetrators of these crimes began their criminal careers with the assaults on Ms. Hendrick and Ms. Skidmore. More likely they’ve been doing similar crimes, perhaps without the assault and battery, for some time. Had they met someone armed and willing to shoot, might that not have ended their careers before either lady had the misfortune to meet them? How many other crimes might have been prevented? We literally can’t know. But what we do know in the Oklahoma incident is that the three perpetrators of that home invasion will not be recidivists.
“Most people here find a baseball bat or a kitchen knife a sufficiently comforting deterrent.”
A kitchen knife did not work out so well for Mr. Brett Osborne: Five years in prison for acting in self-defence Pullquote:
’The law,’ explains Harry Potter, the barrister who, with Charles Bott, would defend Osborn, ‘does not require the intention to kill for a prosecution for murder to succeed. All that is required is an intention to cause serious bodily harm. That intention can be fleeting and momentary. But if it is there in any form at all for just a second – that is, if the blow you struck was deliberate rather than accidental – you can be guilty of murder and spend the rest of your life in prison.
‘Moreover,’ Mr Potter continues, ‘while self-defence is a complete defence to a charge of murder, the Court of Appeal has ruled that if the force you use is not judged to have been reasonable – if a jury, that is, decides it was disproportionate – then you are guilty of murder. A conviction for murder automatically triggers the mandatory life sentence. There are no exceptions.’
Pour encourager les autres, as the Froggies put it?
“I don’t think you’ll find most people in this country would sit around and do nothing if their home is invaded, we are not pacifists :)!”
When defending oneself or others can get you jailed, then sitting around and doing nothing might be an option.
“But having a gun makes it too easy to end up with everybody dead.”
Despite the fact that I can give you link after link to incidents were ether the perpetrator ended up captured (wounded or unwounded), driven off, or killed, while the defenders suffered little to no injury. What do you say to those people? They shouldn’t have had a gun?
“I suppose you could say criminals do benefit, because they don’t end up dead.”
Or wounded. Or captured. Or driven off to consider a safer career path. No, they get to keep on victimizing others. And society loses.
Damn, but I do enjoy these.
UPDATE 4/14: And another round:
As I say, we will not agree. Of course you can cherry pick stories in the UK news where a person comes to grief who would have been better off armed, and the daily mail and telegraph are great places to start looking. And of course there are cases where the tabloids can make out that the victim is unfairly punished for defending himself – I assure you that if you look into the case it will not be quite as simple as you suggest, the legal system is quite sane here in general. And for every article you cite where there is a positive outcome where an armed victim saved themselves, I’ll cite one where a child kills themselves or someone else with a gun sitting on a table at home, or a school massacre, or some other ghastly avoidable gun accident or crime occurs.
Is our system perfect? Of course not! But we think it’s OBVIOUSLY miles better than your alternative.
Regarding countries not on the list: who do you want to include? From that guardian article:
If you want to include Honduras, Venezuela, Swaziland, Guatemala, Jamaica, El Salvador, Columbia, I have no problem with that, but I’m not sure it helps your cause to compare the US to countries like that. Isn’t it more useful to consider countries that are a bit less chaotic? I note also that the top 2 Euro countries in the list, Finland and Switzerland the vast majority of gun killings are suicides! But that’s a separate problem. Source here: List of countries by firearm-related death rate – Wikipedia
Regarding historic data – I see where you are coming from, and I agree that the long term is generally the best we to look at trends, but the key point you are missing is that during the majority of the 20th century, in the UK you could own a semi-automatic weapon, rifle, handgun or shotgun, with a little bit of paperwork and a clean criminal record. We have only really been doing proper gun control since legislation following the Dunblane massacre in 1996, finally enacted after massive public pressure in 2003. Here’s Uk gun crime chart from 1990 to the present:
I have no idea why the number increased so markedly up to 2002 or so, but since then the trend has been pretty clear, do you agree? But before 2003, the Uk did not have effective gun control, so am not sure that you can read anything useful into the prior data.
I understand you feel that having guns around overall reduces all crime. That may be so or it may not be (my gut feeling after scanning a lot of data is that the US and the UK are in the same ball park where it comes to non-violent crime, so gun ownership has little effect overall on non-gun crime, but I could well be wrong), but in this country we are more than happy to accept the consequences of NOT having every home invasion turning into the equivalent of the St Valentines day massacre, even if it means a slightly higher level of other types of crime. Yes. We feel it’s better to sacrifice a few unlucky people rather than suffer the consequences of everyone being armed to the teeth, because (sorry) we don’t want to end up like the US, having to justify the craziness of more or less anyone being allowed to own a device specifically designed to kill other human beings as efficiently as possible, by saying it makes everyone safer.
“As I say, we will not agree.”
No, we won’t, but for me the purpose of discussions like this isn’t to change your mind, it’s to put both sides of the argument up for those undecided to see and consider. Thanks for doing your part.
“I assure you that if you look into the case it will not be quite as simple as you suggest, the legal system is quite sane here in general.”
From this side of the pond, it appears that your legal system is – at best- schizophrenic when it comes to self-defense, and as a result the apparently real risk of prosecution in the event of a self-defense situation has what one person on your side grudgingly called a “chilling effect” on such actions.
“And for every article you cite where there is a positive outcome where an armed victim saved themselves, I’ll cite one where a child kills themselves or someone else with a gun sitting on a table at home, or a school massacre, or some other ghastly avoidable gun accident or crime occurs.”
I’d be happy to take up that challenge – to the point that I would be willing to bet I could give you at least three “positive outcome” stories for each “bad outcome” story you could find, but this isn’t the place for that. Nor is it the point. The question for me is, “Who gets to decide?” Who gets to decide how I choose to defend myself and my loved ones? Me? Or an entity that isn’t responsible for providing the protection that they deny to me (but still reserve to themselves)? You’ve made your choice. I’m fine with that. But I won’t live under those rules.
“If you want to include Honduras, Venezuela, Swaziland, Guatemala, Jamaica, El Salvador, Columbia, I have no problem with that, but I’m not sure it helps your cause to compare the US to countries like that. Isn’t it more useful to consider countries that are a bit less chaotic?”
But many of those nations are – judging by their laws – gun control paradises! Honduras – 6.2 (legally owned) guns per 100 population (GB has 6.6, the U.S. 112.6 according to Wikipedia), yet it is the undisputed champion of homicide worldwide. Does this not suggest to you that guns aren’t the issue as much as culture? British law has treated firearms as deodands, and now they’re doing the same to knives.
“We have only really been doing proper gun control since legislation following the Dunblane massacre in 1996, finally enacted after massive public pressure in 2003.”
Where “proper gun control” is defined as “banning and confiscating all legally-owned handguns”? What law was passed in 2003 that magically fixed everything?
The British government has been incrementally passing gun control laws since 1920 in order to reach the point in 1996 where they could pass, and more importantly implement, the handgun ban. In 1920 the Firearms Act implemented registration of handguns and rifles and restricted possession to people who could prove “good reason” to have them. At that time “self defense” was accepted as a good reason. The law was passed as a crime control measure, but when the seal on the discussions of that legislation expired in 1981 the real reason behind it came to light – fear of armed revolt by communists (read: unions) as had occurred in Russia just a few years previously.
Though Britain didn’t have Prohibition and the associated problem with Tommy-gun toting mobsters, in 1937 the machine guns that had been brought back after WWI and had been legally registered under the 1920 Firearms Act were – you guessed it – banned, along with short-barreled shotguns. American pundit Charles Krauthammer writing about our 1994 “Assault Weapons Ban” (that wasn’t) said: “It might be 50 years before the United States gets to where Britain is today. Passing a law like the assault weapons ban is a symbolic — purely symbolic — move in that direction. Its only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation.” You started in 1937. Sixty years later you had banned all but a handful of firearms after first requiring that they all be registered and after making acquisition, storage and use of them onerous and expensive. You said you owned shotguns – how many people there are willing to jump through the regulatory hoops necessary to do so?
And you were told that each and every law that was passed would make you safer. The previously mentioned Prevention of Crime Act of 1953 took away “self defense” as a legitimate reason to own a firearm or to carry any “offensive weapon” including things like pepper spray.
To make you safer.
The Criminal Justice Act of 1967 (later consolidated into the Firearms Act of 1968) required registration of all shotguns, previously considered merely “sporting arms” and gave the police the power to refuse registrations if they believed the registrant would “endanger public safety.”
To make you safer.
The 1988 Firearm Act (passed after the Hungerford massacre) had been sitting on a desk in Parliament since 1973 as a White Paper, just awaiting the proper crisis to be implemented. (As Winston Churchill – later quoted by current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel – said, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste. Crisis provides the opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.”) That one banned all semi-automatic and pump-action centerfire rifles and changed shotguns that could hold more than two shells into “firearms” that required the more stringent license required for rifles and handguns.
To make you safer.
Then after Dunblane all centerfire handguns were banned effective October 1997. All other handguns were banned effective February 1998.
To make you safer. Home secretary Alun Michael said after passage of the handgun ban: “This is an important step towards improving the safety of the public after the terrible events of Dunblane. Britain now has some of the toughest gun laws in the world. We recognize that only the strictest control of firearms will protect the public.”
But only after 2003 did you get truly effective gun control? Again, what was the magical change? And did it make you safer? Again, check your statistics. Historical crime data indicates not. Using the data there for “Total Violence Against the Person” minus “Violence without injury” for the period of 1990 – 2014/15 this is the graph I get:
What happened after 2001 to cause that massive spike? It wasn’t just gun crimes that increased. What law was passed after 2003 that caused it to drop? And why were there still over double the number of incidents in 2015 than in 1990? Your population hasn’t grown that much over 25 years. Based on a fixed population of 55 million, the rate in 1990 would be about 327/100,000. In 2014/15 about 650/100,000.
We don’t keep track of statistics the same way, but Aggravated Assault here generally involves a weapon or injury of some sort, so it’s at least comparative. In 1990 our aggravated assault rate was 424.1/100,000. In 2015 it was 237.8.
With our lax gun laws.So, are you safer? You’ve traditionally never killed each other very often, so you get what I call “OMGWTFBBQ?!?” headlines like Murder rate in England and Wales rises 11%. Yeah, 573 dead. So an 11% increase is an extra 63 deaths, or two guys driving lorries through crowds of holiday shoppers. But you’re beating, stabbing and bludgeoning each other at two and a half times the rate we are.
Are you safer? Safer than you were in 1990? Safer than you were in 1960? Because we’re just about as safe now as we were in the 1960’s and we have a lot more guns than we had then, and much more leeway in their use in self-defense.
My argument isn’t that guns necessarily make us safer, it’s that disarming the public DOESN’T. And the numbers appear to back me up, because I’m not fixated on the tools of violence, but the ACT.
I get the feeling this one’s petering out.
UPDATE: Jim is still in it!
Hi Kevin – I think we could go on at this forever 🙂 Two things though really:
First, Honduras, Columbia, Guatemala etc. I honestly don’t think there’s much point in arguing that gun control there is properly enforced, do you? Are you seriously going to suggest we compare the real situation of how many people actually have guns legally/illegally between the UK, Japan, Australia, other euro countries, etc etc to these very out-there countries? I don’t think to do so does your argument much good. ‘Look – we’re miles better than Columbia’ … I should jolly well hope so!
Second: comparative numbers. There are a lot of articles out there saying that the Uk is 5 times more violent than the US. Most of these seem to link back to a survey carried out by Civitas for the Tory party in the Uk from a few years ago, designed to discredit the law and order policies of the Labour government … and it fails to take into account the different definitions for violence between the US an the UK – I believe I mentioned this in an earlier post. I have spent a little time trying to find a rigorous analysis where an honest effort is made to compare apples and apples, and I can only find one, here: Dispelling The Myth – a response to the Civitas report I refer to above. The guy links to his data sources and describes his methodology. He only uses published results, though he does point out that in similar surveys in the UK and the US, UK violent crime is under-reported by about 2x and in the US by about 4x, but that is not taken into account in the calculation. The headline results (sorted from worse in the UK to worse in the US):
You are 1.27x (58.3 / 45.8) more likely to be knifed in the UK than in the US
You are 1.1x (135.7 / 113.7) more likely to suffer robbery in the UK than in the US.
You are 1.02x (26.7 / 26) more likely to be raped as a female in the US than in the UK
You are 1.29x (229.5 / 176.9) more likely to suffer theft of a vehicle in the US than in the UK
You are 1.52x (702.1 / 460.1) more likely to suffer burglary in the US than in the UK.
You are 4.03x (4.6 / 1.14) more likely to be murdered in the US than in the UK.
You are 6.9x (241.05 / 34.7) more likely to suffer aggravated assault in the US than in the UK.
You are 35.2x (3.17 / 0.09) more likely to be shot dead in the US than in the UK.
These are absolute numbers, like compared to like as far as possible, from snapshots taken in 2013. Building a narrative based on whether crime rates go up or down year on year is not much use when comparing the UK and the US if you don’t take into account the initial starting points. Here’s at least one initial starting point and in my opinion it doesn’t make the US look good, guns or no guns, and there is no argument here at all that the UK is bludgeoning its citizens to death 3 times more than the US. That would come under either murder or aggravated assault in the figures above.
I am not making this stuff up. By all means check this guy’s sources … I have spot checked a couple of calculations (rape and knife crime) and I can’t find any errors. If you can, let me know.
If you do take into account this guys assertion that crime is underreported in the US 2x as much in the US as the UK, the situation in the US looks even bleaker.
If you can find an alternative analysis of like for like crimes between the US and the UK, please cite it.
As to why crime of any sort increases or decreases, I would say that there’s a lot more that goes into it than gun control, eg poverty, alienation, the gap between rich and poor, policing, sentencing, social security, healthcare, education etc etc. Generally the poorer and more alienated people feel, the more they commit crime. There comes a point I suspect when for some people any risk is worth taking.
Frankly the best way it seems to live in a country with low crime is to live in a country with a strong social conscience, where the disadvantaged are looked after. Not everyone’s cup of tea I know.
Out of curiosity – do you think we are the only people on the planet reading this conversation?? 😀
I’ve got to dig through that link and see what’s in it, but Jim is holding up his end of the argument with skill and enthusiasm.
UPDATE 4/18: OK, there’s been another exchange. I put up my response this evening, but copying everything over here isn’t a simple cut-and-paste exercise. Maybe tomorrow.
UPDATE 4/19: OK, here’s my latest response to Jim:
OK, I’ve read your link and explored the authors methodology, and honestly can find little to criticize except one thing – it compares one year’s data only.
Which completely avoids my point.
Going back to your opening paragraph:
“First, Honduras, Columbia, Guatemala etc. I honestly don’t think there’s much point in arguing that gun control there is properly enforced, do you? Are you seriously going to suggest we compare the real situation of how many people actually have guns legally/illegally between the UK, Japan, Australia, other euro countries, etc etc to these very out-there countries? I don’t think to do so does your argument much good. ‘Look – we’re miles better than Columbia’ … I should jolly well hope so!”
I have already stipulated to the US’s (much) greater tendency toward violence. You seem to attribute it to the presence of firearms, and I attribute it to culture. I understand we won’t reach any consensus on this, but I wanted to make the point clear. If you study world history prior to the invention of the (effective) firearm, you will note that violence was much more widespread, and the world much more lethal back then. I recommend you look at Long Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime (PDF) and The Better Angels of Our Nature.
What I was trying to get across to you was not the relative safety of the UK vs. the US, but rather the relative safety within each nation over time.
Going back to the link I provided before, Historical crime data let’s look at one data series – “More serious wounding or other acts endangering life” for the period 1898–2001/02 (all that data set is good for). Again, this data set is for “number of incidents” and per capita is more what we’re interested in, so I’ve looked up the census data and interpolated between those data points to give that measurement. As you noted, this data is restricted to the polity of England and Wales and does not include Scotland or Northern Ireland.
Here’s the graph I get:
Gun control in the UK began as I said in 1920 with the registration of firearms. Doesn’t appear that things were very violent there in 1920. In 1937 full-auto weapons and short-barreled weapons (excluding handguns) were banned. Still doesn’t look very violent. Post WWII violent crime began to inch up. The 1953 Prevention of Crime Act – passed to make you safer – removed self defense as a valid reason to carry any kind of weapon, and removed self defense as a valid reason to possess a firearm.It apparently didn’t make you safer.
The Criminal Justice Act of 1967 and the Firearms Act of 1968 – again, passed to make England safer – didn’t.
The 1988 Firearms Act which banned semi-auto and pump-action rifles – again, to make you safer – again, didn’t.
The handgun ban of 1997? Ditto.
Now you assert that after 2003 these laws or some additional law you can’t seem to point to magically started working! Yet the current level of violent crime dwarfs what you had in the 1950s. It’s bad enough that police departments have been cooking the books to make it look better.
Met tried to silence PC whistleblower who exposed crime figures scandal
‘Fifth of all crimes’ go unrecorded – not because they aren’t reported, but because the police deliberately record them as less serious offenses or don’t record them at all.
Yes, we kill each other a lot over here, but then we always have. The UK used to be damned near idyllic. Now it’s just about average – again, excepting the fact that y’all just don’t kill each other very much. But regardless, you aren’t safer than you were.
Europeans (and others) wring their hands over our supposedly astronomical homicide rate and tell us we need to get with the 21st Century and get rid of our guns so we can be safer, just like you. I respond with this:
We’ll see if anything further develops.
Mental Maps
In 2005 I posted the piece below, titled Three Strikes and You’re Out or Third Time’s the Charm?
In either case, please note which direction they’re traveling every time.
Back in February of last year I posted Love that Detroit Iron! which I will repost here in its entirety:
You have to give them an “A” for effort, or at least persistence. What a way to reimport the classics!
Marciel Basanta Lopez and Luis Gras Rodriguez have again attempted to sail from Cuba to Florida, but once again have unfortunately been intercepted by the Coast Guard short of their goal. Back in July they made the journey in a specially modified 1951 Chevy pickup.
Yes, really. Here’s a picture of it:
Well, they just nabbed them (and eight of their friends and relatives) trying again. This time in a specially modified 1959 Buick!
They must have a lot of that funky green paint.
What’s next? A 1955 Ford?
Well, they must’ve run out of green paint, and instead of a ’55 Ford, they used a ’48 Mercury:
Migrants’ ‘taxicab’ boat stopped at sea (Link broken)
The Coast Guard halted a homemade craft about 25 miles off the Keys that looked like a taxi. The boat was loaded with Cuban migrants.
BY JENNIFER BABSON
[email protected]KEY WEST – A blue, 1948 Mercury automobile loaded with Cuban migrants made it within 25 miles of the Keys late Tuesday before being stopped by the U.S. Coast Guard.
The unusual, homemade ‘boat’ — described by federal officials as possibly a ‘taxicab’ and sporting a white top — was stopped south of Summerland Key in the Lower Keys. It was the third time in nearly two years that Cuban migrants have tried to make it to the United States using trucks or cars specially rigged to operate as boats.
One of the men aboard the Mercury tried to make the voyage in February 2004 in a Buick but was sent back to Cuba, according to Luis Grass — the brainchild behind similar attempts who made his way to Miami this year.
I wonder what Luis “drove” on his successful attempt?
BOARDING THE CRAFT
Television footage from NBC 6 in Miami on Tuesday night showed Coast Guard officers boarding the vehicle, which appeared to have been modified with a boat prow in front.
As many as 12 Cubans voluntarily left the car late Tuesday and moved onto a Coast Guard cutter, according to numerous federal sources. It was not immediately known if they would be returned to Cuba.
The interdiction unfolded just before dusk Tuesday.
“A U.S. Customs and Border Protection aircraft detected it just before 8 p.m.,” said customs spokesman Zachary Mann. “According to our guys, it looked like a floating taxi.”
Citing U.S. policy, Coast Guard spokeswoman Sandra Bartlett said she could not immediately comment on the incident or whether the migrants would be returned to Cuba, a process that could take several days.
Under the U.S. wet-foot, dry-foot immigration policy, Cubans who reach U.S. soil are almost always allowed to remain in the country, while those caught offshore are generally returned to Cuba unless they can convince a U.S. immigration officer they have a ‘credible fear’ of persecution if returned to the island.
‘DRIVING’ THE WAY
It was the latest in a series of recent attempts by Cubans to try to ‘drive’ their way to the Keys.
In July 2003, a group of Cuban migrants — dubbed “truckonauts” and heralded for their ingenuity — attempted to flee Cuba in a retrofitted, green 1951 Chevy truck. The group was stopped off Islamorada — their truck-boat floating on a pontoon bed and powered by propellers that had been attached to the vehicle’s drive shaft.
The vessel was sunk at sea as a hazard to navigation.
Returned to Cuba, several of the Cubans tried again in February 2004 using a similarly rigged 1959 Buick sedan. At least some of those who attempted that voyage, however, were taken to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba for resettlement in a third country.
Among that group was Grass, an enterprising mechanic credited with converting the classic vehicles into seaworthy escape vessels. Grass, his wife and young son were among 20 Cuban migrants resettled in Costa Rica last November.
ANOTHER TRY
Grass said late Tuesday that one of his pals — who may have subsequently received a U.S. visa after failing last year to reach Florida by Buick — made Tuesday’s voyage with his two sons and his wife, who was having difficulty leaving Cuba because she is a doctor.
“He finally made a taxi from Havana to Miami,” chuckled Grass, who told The Herald he spoke with the man’s friends in Havana late Tuesday.
The group, he said, was from San Miguel Del Padron in Havana.
Grass and his family finally made it to the United States in March after crossing the Mexican border and requesting political asylum.
You have to admire their ingenuity and doggedness.
Bill Whittle noted once that if your map of idealism matches up with reality, you take note of which way the rafts are traveling when determining whether capitalism or communism works better. I can’t remember the last time anyone risked their lives getting on a raft made of an antique car, much less flotsam and jetsam, and set sail for Havana to join the People’s Paradise of Cuba.
How do you go about having a productive debate with people disconnected from reality? How do you reason with people who’ve abandoned the practice? How do you even discuss first principles with people who think words mean only what they want them to mean, and can change their definition at any time? For whom “winning” is the only priority, and are unparalleled masters at psychological projection?
Quote of the Day: Ctrl-Left Edition*
Via Instapundit today:
It’s important to understand why liberals are so angry and so scared. They are angry because they believe they have a moral right to command us, apparently bestowed by Gaia or #Science or having gone to Yale, and we are irredeemably deplorable for not submitting to their benevolent dictatorship.
They are scared because they fear we will wage the same kind of campaign of petty (and not so petty) oppression, intimidation, and bullying that they intended to wage upon us.
(* As far as I know, the exquisitely accurate expression “Ctrl-Left” was coined by Jonathan Sullivan.)
Quote of the Day – Brad Thor Edition
If you’re unfamiliar with Brad Thor (I was), he is the author of technothrillers such as his most recent novel Foreign Agent. He was interviewed by Reason‘s Nick Gillespie on current political events (and his new novel). Today’s QotD comes at 25:40 of the interview:
I’m a big believer of Federalism. There’s too much going on in Washington, it’s too disconnected, and we ought to be making decisions… I moved to Tennessee because I didn’t like the decisions in Illinois. I mean, if the states are the laboratories of democracy, Illinois’ a fricken’ meth lab.
Civilizational Suicide
Over on Facebook, Firehand linked to an excellent essay by Patrick Deneen, “David A. Potenziani Memorial Associate Professor of Constitutional Studies at Notre Dame.” Professor Deneen begins his piece How a Generation Lost Its Common Culture:
My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.
I would argue that many have been taught to actively hate their own culture, but the majority? As Elie Wiesel once observed:
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.
I strongly recommend you read Professor Deneen’s entire essay, but here’s the money shot:
Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctable outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide.
(Bold emphasis mine.) Which is why I’ve been saying for years that the only thing that can save education is to take off and nuke the current system from orbit until the rubble bounces.
But I’m pretty sure it’s too late for that.
George? Meet Ben.
So George Takei, the guy who votes for the party that actually put him and his family in a concentration camp, asks:
It’s safe to assume none of us actually wants to see ISIS-inspired terrorists armed with semi-automatic rifles, able to attack at will within our own borders. But to prevent that, we must address a rather tricky question: How much liberty must we concede?
George, meet Ben. Ben Franklin:
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
The answer to your question, George, is NONE.
Remember “Civility in Politics”?
Wandering around on Facebook today I ran across a golden oldie from Roberta X, the meat of which was this quote:
What is clear is once anyone has become so convinced that one of the two halves of the Running Things Party comprises every human vice and ill (and no few I had previously thought limited to the animal kingdom), then there’s no further reason to talk. The attitude itself is what gives rise to purges and pogroms, killing fields and death marches — no matter who espouses it or what virtues they ascribe to themselves and their supposed peers, or even practice. Persons who speak like that will murder you — or hand you over to be used up and killed — if they even suspect you might be a member of a group they loathe; and they will sleep soundly that night. Left, right, center; amoral and “practical” or rigidly moral and unworldly, it doesn’t matter: once that level of dehumanizing rhetoric has infected someone’s mind, they are like an armed landmine.
That was in reference to this particular little screed at DailyKos which I won’t bother to excerpt from.
I’ll quote the whole fucking thing, but not the overwhelmingly supportive comments:
Murdering, Lying, Thieving, Rat-F*** Republican Pieces of Sub-Amphibian Sh**…
…mendacious, death-loving, frothing, lamprey-mouthed, inhuman, abominable, atrocious, verminous, rapacious, sadistic, bullying, invasive, grasping, psychopathic, twisted, warped, animalistic, belly-crawling, mouth-breathing, illiterate, innumerate, know-nothing, imbecilic, sheep-raping, horror movie extras masturbating into wads of money while fantasizing about war collateral damage…(inhale)…puppy-torturing, vacuous, mindless, nihilistic, evil, diseased, soulless, morally bankrupt, greedy, insecure, envious, kleptomaniac charnel-house mascots stewing in universal hatred for all life…(inhale)…toxic, ugly, bestial, humorless, loveless, compassionless, demonic human-shaped ruins forever slouching toward Bethlehem in search of some fresh nightmare to wreak on the defenseless via other people’s money and heroism…(inhale)…Satanic monkey-shit-throwing, cowardly, chickenhawkish, parasitic, baby’s-candy-stealing, wife-beating, minority-purging, syphilitic Confederate poltergeists with erectile dysfunction…
…perverse, prurient, crocodile-eyed, necrophiliac mass-producers of human misery and gleeful destroyers of truth, justice, and the American way…sepulchre-hearted human deserts walking the Earth only to look for more victims…silly, stupid, ignorant bastards proud of every good thing they’ve never done, every person they’ve never been considerate toward, every fact they’ve never learned and will never acknowledge, and every virtue they will never possess or even attempt to comprehend…preternaturally drunken, bleary-eyed, zombie-like, empty vessels who wander aimlessly until given instruction by their masters…unthinking, unquestioning, unfeeling diabolus ex machina mockeries of the human condition, perpetually acting out a burlesque of the basest and least interesting psychological dysfunctions…
…face-chewing, self-devouring, medieval barbarian museum dioramas and depraved Nazi homunculi preserved in formaldehyde to frighten children…sick, ominous, loathsome, Nosferatu-impersonating Gollum-acolytes feasting on the flesh of our society while complaining about its taste…tax-evading, sommelier-abusing, election-buying, yacht-aficionado hemmorhoids flying flags of convenience and berating their six-year-old Chinese employees for requesting bathroom breaks…
Republicans, you vile, repulsive, scum. You’re not leading this country. You’re not contributing to this country. You’re not even part of this country. You are the maggot-ridden rot that arises in this country’s damaged flesh; you are the vultures constantly picking at us to see if we’re weak enough yet to become your next meal; you create problems where none would otherwise exist, just to further weaken America and quicken your own insatiable appetites; you are garbage, and you are traitors. And you are not welcome in this country anymore.
Note that this was during the 2012 election cycle. As I asked back then, what happened to that “New Civility” thing we were all supposed to be supporting after the Gabby Giffords shooting here in Tucson?
Now we have the Left making excuses for physical assaults on Trumpists.
So I’ve added a fifth quote to the masthead of this blog, a proclamation by Billy Beck made several years ago and obviously prophetic.
Yup. Our “austerity riots” are going to be spectacular.
ETA: Scott Adams, author of the comic strip Dilbert and predictor of a Trump presidency for months now, has come out to endorse Hillary for his own personal safety.
The Last Überpost
This blog is now thirteen years old. I started TSM on Wednesday, May 14, 2003. I missed the blogiversary last year, and the year before that I put the blog in semi-retirement.
In preparation for this post, I went back and read some of those first pieces I wrote just to see what I had to say back then.
Nothing’s changed much, really.
In one early post I wrote:
I am who I am, I think, primarily because of reading. I feel pity for people who don’t or won’t or can’t read for pleasure. Short of a bodice-ripper, I don’t think there’s a book out there that can’t teach you something. (Oh, wait. Battlefield Earth…No, that taught me never to read L. Ron Hubbard again.) My primary influence was Science Fiction. At about 12, I discovered The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. I, and I was never the same kid again. I went for SF, and I found Robert Anson Heinlein.
Exposing a pre-pubescent to R.A. Heinlein is a dangerous thing. Especially when you set him up with things like Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, and The Menace From Earth, and then you hit him between the eyes with Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. And then follow those with Stranger in a Strange Land and Time Enough for Love. Anything that man wrote, I read. Even his crap was better than most people’s best work.
But I also read Asimov, Clarke, Poul Anderson, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Silverberg, James Blish, Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, Ben Bova, Alan Dean Foster, Piers Anthony… Many more. It’s called “speculative fiction” for a reason. It awoke, or at least encouraged, an interest in how things work – from cars to guns to computers to governments. But Heinlein’s responsible for my politics. I found Henry Louis Mencken and P.J. O’Rourke much later. By then the foundation had set.
I’m not a Libertarian, though. Nor am I a Republican or a Democrat (though that’s what my voter registration says – I like screwing with their primaries.) I’m sure as hell not a Green. I don’t “affiliate.” I figure that anyone willing to run for elective office should be immediately disqualified. At least, anyone willing to run for national office. I’ve forgotten who said it, but someone did: “Anyone who rises to the level of national politics is either a cutthroat or a useful idiot.” Or both. The ones that are both are the really dangerous ones.
My politics and my personal philosophy are also based in the works of two other writers: John D. MacDonald, and Robert B. Parker. Their characters of Travis McGee and Spenser, which I read through my adolescence, resonated with my personal sense of rightness and honor, socially responsible independence: in short – morality.
Note that “school” was not mentioned in that excerpt. In an earlier post I pointed to an LA Dogtrainer Times piece (link now broken) about how a school valedictorian couldn’t write a research paper with a bibliography, so the “Collapsing Schools” theme dates back to the beginnings of the blog.
In an even earlier piece I said:
I am strongly interested in the rights of individuals, in particular the restrictions upon our government to respect those rights.
As such, I’m not much of a fan of the government we have. In fact, I used to use this signature line:
The Constitution may not be the finest work ever set to paper,
but it beats whatever the government’s using these days.So it comes as no surprise that I’m not real enamored with the Republicans, and I find the Democrats abhorrent. Of course, I think the Greens are flakes, and the Libertarians tend to be flakes of a different shape.
My opinion of the Republican party has declined precipitously over the last thirteen years. As has my opinion of the Democrat party.
And here we are.
In October of 2003 I wrote Not with a Bang, but a Whimper? decrying other bloggers abandoning the ideological field. Toren Smith of The Safety Valve was quoted:
After thinking it over for a while, I think The Safety Valve has run its course. Frankly, I’m tired of getting all bent out of shape about the stupidities of the world, which seem to be getting worse and worse as time goes by. The last few months it seems every day brings worse news about the corruption of science, the destruction of society by PC-think, the complete and utter end of rational political discourse, and the hydra-like expansion of government powers. International politics has gone insane. California is heading into the socialist shit pit, and most of the US seems poised to follow sooner or later. I may escape temporarily to someplace like Texas, but sooner or later I’ll probably have to head for Belize or the Caymans.
—To hell with rubbing my face in all the downer crap that’s out there. Yes, I know–even if you don’t go looking for politics, politics will come looking for you. But I’m going to try crossing the street, at least for the time being. And if necessary I’ll shoot the bastard with my carry piece. And in the meantime I’ll let my friends like Kim and James and the rest of the gang off to the right in my blog links “gaze into the abyss.”
They’re clearly tougher than I am.
It took me eleven years, but I got there, too. I just didn’t (completely) quit.
I have concluded that the problem isn’t the government, though. Quoting Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” THAT I blame on the government.
Packing thirteen years of blogging into a few paragraphs (using words that mostly aren’t mine, naturally – I’m nothing if not consistent) I’d like to state my case one more time for the record.
Educator John Taylor Gatto studied the history of American public education after he got out of teaching in the the New York City school system. In his book The Underground History of American Education he noted:
At the start of WWII millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-level academic tests before being inducted. The years of maximum mobilization were 1942 to 1944; the fighting force had been mostly schooled in the 1930s, both those inducted and those turned away. Of the 18 million men were tested, 17,280,000 of them were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier, a 96 percent literacy rate. Although this was a 2 percent fall-off from the 98 percent rate among voluntary military applicants ten years earlier, the dip was so small it didn’t worry anybody.
WWII was over in 1945. Six years later another war began in Korea. Several million men were tested for military service but this time 600,000 were rejected. Literacy in the draft pool had dropped to 81 percent, even though all that was needed to classify a soldier as literate was fourth-grade reading proficiency. In the few short years from the beginning of WWII to Korea, a terrifying problem of adult illiteracy had appeared. The Korean War group received most of its schooling in the 1940s, and it had more years in school with more professionally trained personnel and more scientifically selected textbooks than the WWII men, yet it could not read, write, count, speak, or think as well as the earlier, less-schooled contingent.
A third American war began in the mid-1960s. By its end in 1973 the number of men found noninductible by reason of inability to read safety instructions, interpret road signs, decipher orders, and so on—in other words, the number found illiterate—had reached 27 percent of the total pool. Vietnam-era young men had been schooled in the 1950s and the 1960s—much better schooled than either of the two earlier groups—but the 4 percent illiteracy of 1941 which had transmuted into the 19 percent illiteracy of 1952 had now had grown into the 27 percent illiteracy of 1970. Not only had the fraction of competent readers dropped to 73 percent but a substantial chunk of even those were only barely adequate; they could not keep abreast of developments by reading a newspaper, they could not read for pleasure, they could not sustain a thought or an argument, they could not write well enough to manage their own affairs without assistance.
Consider how much more compelling this steady progression of intellectual blindness is when we track it through army admissions tests rather than college admissions scores and standardized reading tests, which inflate apparent proficiency by frequently changing the way the tests are scored.
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Back in 1952 the Army quietly began hiring hundreds of psychologists to find out how 600,000 high school graduates had successfully faked illiteracy. Regna Wood sums up the episode this way:
After the psychologists told the officers that the graduates weren’t faking, Defense Department administrators knew that something terrible had happened in grade school reading instruction. And they knew it had started in the thirties. Why they remained silent, no one knows. The switch back to reading instruction that worked for everyone should have been made then. But it wasn’t.
In 1882, fifth graders read these authors in their Appleton School Reader: William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others like them. In 1995, a student teacher of fifth graders in Minneapolis wrote to the local newspaper, “I was told children are not to be expected to spell the following words correctly: back, big, call, came, can, day, did, dog, down, get, good, have, he, home, if, in, is, it, like, little, man, morning, mother, my, night, off, out, over, people, play, ran, said, saw, she, some, soon, their, them, there, time, two, too, up, us, very, water, we, went, where, when, will, would, etc. Is this nuts?”
Yes, it is. And no one did anything to correct it. What has the result been? A Daily Mail article Thursday covers the publishing of a vanity-press book ostensibly written by a Democrat Congressman. Here’s the part I find pertinent:
‘Voters claim they want substance and detailed position papers, but what they really crave are cutesy cat videos, celebrity gossip, top 10 lists, reality TV shows, tabloid tripe, and the next f***ing Twitter message,’ the congressman gripes in the book.
‘I worry about our country’s future when critical issues take a backseat to the inane utterings of illiterate athletes and celebrity twits.’
The product of 100+ years of public schooling, with the accelerating aid of the Department of Education (established in 1979 under the Carter administration) has brought us to this point where significantly less than half the population of the country understands the system of government or economics they live under. Or is even interested in understanding them. I’ve quoted from the 1983 report A Nation at Risk before, too. It’s author had this to say in the preface:
Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. This report is concerned with only one of the many causes and dimensions of the problem, but it is the one that undergirds American prosperity, security, and civility. We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur–others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.
If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.
I’m convinced this was intentional. As the anonymous Congressman states:
‘Voters are incredibly ignorant and know little about our form of government and how it works,’ the anonymous writer claims.
‘It’s far easier than you think to manipulate a nation of naive, self-absorbed sheep who crave instant gratification.’
Yes, it is. Which is how Donald Trump ended up the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee this year.
Across the Pond, it’s no better.
In 2004’s Those Without Swords Can Still Die Upon Them, I quoted Steven Den Beste:
In my opinion, the four most important inventions in human history are spoken language, writing, movable type printing and digital electronic information processing (computers and networks). Each represented a massive improvement in our ability to distribute information and to preserve it for later use, and this is the foundation of all other human knowledge activities. There are many other inventions which can be cited as being important (agriculture, boats, metal, money, ceramic pottery, postmodernist literary theory) but those have less pervasive overall affects.
I agree with that, but I went further:
I believe that there are three things crucial to the rise of individual freedom: The ability to reason, the free exchange of ideas, and the ability to defend one’s person and property. The ability to reason and the free exchange of ideas will lead to the concept of individual liberty, but it requires the individual ability to defend one’s person and property to protect that liberty. The ability to reason exists, to some extent, in all people. (The severely mentally retarded and those who have suffered significant permanent brain injury are not, and in truth can never be truly “free” as they will be significantly dependent on others for their care and protection.) The free exchange of ideas is greatly dependent on the technologies of communication. The ability to defend your person and property – the ability to defend your right to your own life – is dependent on the technologies of individual force.
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Individual, private possession of firearms isn’t the only thing that permits individual liberty, but it is one of the essential components in a society that intends to stay free. An armed, informed, reasoning people cannot be subjugated.
So what do you do if you want to fetter a free people?
1) Remove their ability to reason.
2) Constrain their ability to access and exchange information.
3) Relieve them of the means with which to defend themselves and their property.
Which of these seems easiest, and how would it be best accomplished? And best resisted?
But I concluded this year that I was wrong. Our ability to reason was destroyed, rendering the other two requirements moot. From a tactical standpoint, this is known as exploiting a single point of failure.
How was this accomplished? Philosophy.
I’ve quoted Ayn Rand from her 1974 speech to West Point graduates, Philosphy, Who Needs It? on a number of occasions. Once more:
You have no choice about the necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e., into principle. Your only choice is whether these principles are true or false, whether they represent your conscious, rational convictions – or a grab-bag of notions snatched at random, whose sources, validity, context and consequences you do not know, notions which, more often than not, you would drop like a hot potato if you knew.
As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation – or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown.
Your subconscious is like a computer – more complex a computer than men can build – and its main function is the integration of your ideas. Who programs it? Your conscious mind. If you default, if you don’t reach any firm convictions, your subconscious is programmed by chance – and you deliver yourself into the power of ideas you do not know you have accepted.
I have discussed on a number of occasions (there’s links in the left sidebar to some of them) the difference between the philosophy of John Locke – responsible for the success of the American Revolution – and the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau – responsible for the disastrous French Revolution and all the horrors of socialism that followed. But as reader Oren Litwin noted in a comment long ago, now lost when Haloscan went away, but archived here in a couple of places:
If the non-socialist end of the political spectrum cannot create a political philosophy that is both good theory and emotionally appealing, we’re doomed.
Any political philosophy that is not self-reinforcing is by definition not the best political philosophy. Libertarianism (with a small “l”) features a stoic acceptance of individual risk (i.e. the lack of government intervention) for the sake of long-term freedom and prosperity–yet takes no measures to ensure that the society educates its young to maintain that acceptance of risk. The equilibrium, if it ever exists in the first place, is unstable and will collapse.
This aside from the fact that libertarianism is emotionally cold and unfulfilling to most people, who have not trained themselves to consider lack of outside restraint to be worth cherishing.
Rousseau’s philosophy has the advantage of being beautiful in theory, and attractive to human nature, as illustrated by this cartoon I recently discovered:
And 100+ years of public education has resulted in this electorate:
We didn’t use to be like this. Dinesh D’Souza wrote in his book What’s So Great About America:
In America your destiny is not prescribed; it is constructed. Your life is like a blank sheet of paper and you are the artist. This notion of being the architect of your own destiny is the incredibly powerful idea that is behind the worldwide appeal of America. Young people especially find the prospect of authoring their own lives irresistible. The immigrant discovers that America permits him to break free of the constraints that have held him captive, so that the future becomes a landscape of his own choosing.
If there is a single phrase that captures this, it is “the pursuit of happiness.” As writer V. S. Naipaul notes, “much is contained” in that simple phrase: “the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation, perfectibility, and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known [around the world] to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”
This was more recently echoed by immigrant Craig Ferguson in the opening to his book, American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot:
One of the greatest moments in American sports history was provided by Bobby Thomson, the “Staten Island Scot.” Born in my hometown of Glasgow, Scotland, in 1923, he hit the shot heard round the world that won the Giants the National League pennant in 1951. Had Bobby stayed in Glasgow he would never have played baseball, he would never have faced the fearsome Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca in that championship game, and he would never have learned that if you can hit the ball three times out of ten you’ll make it to the Hall of Fame.
Today I watch my son at Little League games, his freckled Scottish face squinting in the California sunshine, the bat held high on his shoulder, waiting for the moment, and I rejoice that he loves this most American game. He will know from an early age that failure is not disgrace. It’s just a pitch that you missed, and you’d better get ready for the next one. The next one might be the shot heard round the world. My son and I are Americans, we prepare for glory by failing until we don’t.
But in 2012 Aaron Sorkin in his HBO television series The Newsroom hit a nerve around the internet with a speech on why America isn’t the greatest nation in the world. Embedding no longer allowed, but by all means, please watch the whole thing. And listen carefully at the end when McAvoy concludes:
We were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed by great men. Men who were revered.
Men like Huntley and Brinkley, Edward R. Murrow, Eric Sevareid and Walter Cronkite. But the media is part and parcel of the problem as well, because its acolytes are immersed in the same philosophy Rousseau espoused, and it’s not the one of failing until you succeed. No, as illustrated by Professor Brian Anse Patrick in his book The National Rifle Association and the Media: The Motivating Force of Negative Coverage, members of the media see government as the Church of State, and they are its clergy – handing down to the laypeople only those truths they believe we should have. And that same philosophy moved through the colleges of education producing the teachers and administrators that gave us the electorate we have today, that has apparently selected Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as our choices for the next President of the United States. That actually gave Bernie Sanders, a socialist, a pretty good shot at the brass ring.
All because we’ve never been taught what government really is – a necessary evil, best kept small and watched closely. Those of us who understand that have learned it strictly on our own, and we are vastly outnumbered. People think we live in “a nation of laws.” Iowahawk in his inimitable way illustrated the problem with that thinking this morning:
We have a myriad of laws, each selectively enforced, but never applied to those in power. Want to wash someone’s hair for pay in New Hampshire, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, or Texas? Be prepared to go to school first or at a minimum pay a license fee. This is known as “freedom.”
In 2003 Reverend Donald Sensing wrote a piece, Bush Republicanism = Roosevelt Democratism? in which he said:
Because the present-day Republicans and Democrats are both big-government activists, they have a foundational philosophy that is the same:
America is a problem to be fixed, and Americans are a people to be managed.
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A friend of mine emigrated here from Romania after Ceaucescu’s regime fell. He told me the other day that Americans are over-regulated. Think about that; a man coming from a communist country believes that Americans are over-regulated. It chills.
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I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free.
Five years later I asked him if his position had changed any. He replied:
Yes, most definitely it has. The demise of freedom in this country has accelerated even faster than I imagined back in 2003. With the unconstitutional power grab embodied in the “bailout” bill that passed last week, the federal government now controls the core of the American economy, the credit and investment markets. This is not one step short of a controlled economy, it is a controlled economy. The secretary kommissar of the treasury now has the permanent mandate to intervene and indeed take control of the markets in any way he sees fit, anytime he desires.
Surely no one is so naive as to think this power will be used only rarely and delicately as time goes on. Rather, the socio-economic engineering urges of future kommissars will be ever less restrained. Remember Steven den Beste’s dictum: “The job of bureaucrats is to regulate, and left to their own devices, they will try to regulate everything they can.” No one seeks or accepts high, powerful, federal office in order to do little.
The government also now controls the home mortgage and student loan industries. To mix in a pop-culture metaphor, the Federal government is now Negan, and we are boned. All it has to do is kill or imprison somebody once in a while to keep the rest of us in line, surrendering half our shit. Who gets into office is immaterial. The machine goes on until it eventually will collapse under the weight of its own corruption.
And when that happens our “austerity riots” will be SPECTACULAR.
So I’m pretty much done being outraged by it all. Check back from time to time. I may post cat memes.