This article is a little dated – I wrote it right after Sandy Hook and boy has my thinking progressed since then on how far gone our government is! Still, I make some good points on gun control.
See also: More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws, by John R. Lott, Jr. (1998), and this must-read study in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide: A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence, by Don B. Kates and Gary Mauser.
December 2012. Despite my personal preference to focus on other issues, the gun debate has been reignited once again and I do have some thoughts to share on the subject.
Gun control is a two-part debate: (1) will stricter gun control or more liberal gun rights result in greater day-to-day safety, and (2) regardless of the answer to the first question, isn’t it necessary to have an effectively armed citizenry in order to deter governmental tyranny?
I usually skip the first question because regardless of the answer to that one, the second one is decisive in my opinion. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Mussolini and Pol Pot among them killed over 100,000,000 of their own, mostly disarmed, citizens in the twentieth century. No matter how many mass shootings there are, nothing can compare with a murderous government. I am not suggesting that our current government is murderous, I am just anticipating the obvious. In the immortal words of the great Lord Acton, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” State power rests on firepower–give the state an absolute monopoly on firepower and it has an absolute monopoly on power, full stop.
Today, however, I will also address the first question, the more pressing question: Would a gun ban reduce violent crimes in the United States? >continue reading<
