On Gun Control and Violence

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On Gun Control and Violence

By Ron Paul 01/18/2011

The terrible violence in Arizona last weekend prompted much national discussion on many issues. All Americans are united in their sympathies for the victims and their families. All wonder what could motivate such a horrible act. However, some have attempted to use this tragedy to discredit philosophical adversaries or score political points. This sort of opportunism is simply despicable.

We are fortunate to live in a society where violence is universally denounced. Not one public official or commentator has attempted to justify this reprehensible act, yet the newspapers, internet, and airwaves are full of people trying to claim it was somehow motivated by someone else?s political rhetoric. Most disturbing are the calls to use government power to censor certain forms of speech, and even outlaw certain types of criticism of public officials. This was the completely apolitical act of a violent and disturbed man. How sad that the attempted murder of the Congresswoman who had just read the First Amendment on the House floor would be used in efforts to chill free speech! Perhaps some would feel safer if the Alien and Sedition Acts were reinstated.

Also troubling are the renewed calls for stricter gun control laws, and for government to "do something" to somehow prevent similar incidents in the future. This always seems to be the knee jerk reaction to any crime committed with a gun. Nonsensical proposals to outlaw guns around federal officials and install bulletproof barriers in the congressional gallery only reinforce the growing perception that politicians view their own lives as far more important than the lives of ordinary citizens. Politicians and a complicit media have conditioned many citizens to view government as our protector, leading to more demands for government action whenever tragedies occur. But this impulse is at odds with the best American traditions of self-reliance and individualism, and it also leads to bad laws and the loss of liberty.

Remember -- liberty only has meaning if we still believe in it when terrible things happen and more government security is demanded. Government cannot make us safe by mandating security any more than it can make us prosperous by decreeing an end to poverty.

We need to reaffirm the core American value of individual responsibility. Consider the young man who had the courage to tackle the shooter and prevent further carnage because he himself had a concealed weapon. Without that gun, he could have been yet another sitting duck. When peaceful citizens are armed, they at least have a chance against armed criminals.

Advocates of gun control would urge us to leave our safety to law enforcement, but eyewitness reports indicate it took police as much as 20 minutes to arrive on the scene that day! Since police cannot be everywhere all of the time, a large part of our personal safety depends on our ability to defend ourselves.

Our constitutional right to bear arms does not create a society without risks of violent crime, and neither would the strictest gun control laws. Guns and violence are a fact of life. The question is whether it is preferable to be defenseless while waiting for the police, or to have the option to arm yourself. We certainly know criminals prefer the former.

 

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Gun Laws

Gun Laws

Gun Laws
By Murray Rothbard 01/18/2011​

Murray N. Rothbard (1926?1995), the great Austrian economist, economic
historian, and libertarian political philosopher, was the author of​

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Man, Economy,
and State, Conceived in Liberty, What Has Government Done to Our Money, For
a New Liberty, America's Great Depression, The Case Against the Fed, and many
other books and articles. See Rothbard's LewRockwell.com library and his​

resources at the Mises Institute​

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[This is an excerpt from Rothbard's For a New Liberty: A Libertarian Manifesto (1972), available​

here at the Mises Institute​

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For most of the activities in this chapter, liberals tend to favor freedom of trade and activity while
conservatives yearn for rigorous enforcement and maximum crackdowns against violators of the
law. Yet, mysteriously, in the drive for gun laws the positions tend to be reversed. Every time a gun
is used in a violent crime, liberals redouble their agitation for the severe restriction, if not prohibition
of private ownership of guns, while conservatives oppose such restrictions on behalf of individual
freedom.
If, as libertarians believe, every individual has the right to own his person and property, it then
follows that he has the right to employ violence to defend himself against the violence of criminal
aggressors. But for some odd reason, liberals have systematically tried to deprive innocent persons
of the means for defending themselves against aggression. Despite the fact that the Second
Amendment to the Constitution guarantees that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall
not be infringed," the government has systematically eroded much of this right. Thus, in New York
State, as in most other states, the Sullivan Law prohibits the carrying of "concealed weapons"
without a license issued by the authorities. Not only has the carrying of guns been grievously
restricted by this unconstitutional edict, but the government has extended this prohibition to almost
any object that could possibly serve as a weapon -- even those that could only be used for
self-defense. As a result, potential victims of crime have been barred from carrying knives, tear-gas
pens, or even hatpins, and people who have used such weapons in defending themselves against
assault have themselves been prosecuted by the authorities. In the cities, this invasive prohibition
against concealed [p. 115] weapons has in effect stripped victims of any possible self-defense
against crime. (It is true that there is no official prohibition against carrying an unconcealed weapon,
but a man in New York City who, several years ago, tested the law by walking the streets carrying a
rifle was promptly arrested for "disturbing the peace.") Furthermore, victims are so hamstrung by
provisions against "undue" force in self-defense that the criminal is automatically handed an
enormous built-in advantage by the existing legal system.
It should be clear that no physical object is in itself aggressive; any object, whether it be a gun, a​

knife, or a stick, can be used for aggression, for defense, or for numerous other purposes

 

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unconnected with crime. It makes no more sense to outlaw or restrict the purchase and ownership of
guns than it does to outlaw the possession of knives, clubs, hatpins, or stones. And how are all of
these objects to be outlawed, and if outlawed, how is the prohibition to be enforced? Instead of
pursuing innocent people carrying or possessing various objects, then, the law should be concerned
with combatting and apprehending real criminals.
There is, moreover, another consideration which reinforces our conclusion. If guns are restricted or
outlawed, there is no reason to expect that determined criminals are going to pay much attention to
the law. The criminals, then, will always be able to purchase and carry guns; it will only be their
innocent victims who will suffer from the solicitous liberalism that imposes laws against guns and
other weapons. Just as drugs, gambling, and pornography should be made legal, so too should
guns and any other objects that might serve as weapons of self-defense.
In a notable article attacking control of handguns (the type of gun liberals most want to restrict), St.
Louis University law professor Don B. Kates, Jr., chides his fellow liberals for not applying the same
logic to guns that they use for marijuana laws. Thus, he points out that there are over fifty million
handgun owners in America today, and that, based on polls and past experience, from two-thirds to
over eighty percent of Americans would fail to comply with a ban on handguns. The inevitable result,
as in the case of sex and marijuana laws, would be harsh penalties and yet highly selective
enforcement -- breeding disrespect for the law and law enforcement agencies. And the law would be
enforced selectively against those people whom the authorities didn't like: "Enforcement becomes
progressively more haphazard until at last the laws are used only against those who are unpopular
with the police. We hardly need to be reminded of the odious search and seizure tactics police and
government agents have often resorted to in order to trap [p. 116] violators of these laws." Kates
adds that "if these arguments seem familiar, it is probably because they parallel the standard liberal
argument against pot laws."7
Kates then adds a highly perceptive insight into this curious liberal blind spot. For:
Gun prohibition is the brainchild of white middle-class liberals who are oblivious to the situation of
poor and minority people living in areas where the police have given up on crime control. Such
liberals weren't upset about marijuana laws, either, in the fifties when the busts were confined to the
ghettos. Secure in well-policed suburbs or high-security apartments guarded by Pinkertons (whom
no one proposes to disarm), the oblivious liberal derides gun ownership as "an anachronism from
the Old West."​

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Kates further points out the demonstrated empirical value of self-defense armed with guns; in
Chicago, for example, armed civilians justifiably killed three times as many violent criminals in the
past five years as did the police. And, in a study of several hundred violent confrontations with
criminals, Kates found the armed civilians to be more successful than the police: the civilians
defending themselves captured, wounded, killed, or scared off criminals in 75% of the
confrontations, whereas the police only had a 61% success rate. It is true that victims who resist
robbery are more likely to be injured than those who remain passive. But Kates points out neglected
qualifiers: (1) that resistance without a gun has been twice as hazardous to the victim than
resistance with one, and (2) that the choice of resistance is up to the victim and his circumstances
and values.
Avoiding injury will be paramount to a white, liberal academic with a comfortable bank account. It
will necessarily be less important to the casual laborer or welfare recipient who is being robbed of
the wherewithal to support his family [p. 117] for a month -- or to a black shopkeeper who can't get
robbery insurance and will be literally run out of business by successive robberies.​

And the 1975 national survey of handgun owners by the Decision Making Information

 

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organization found that the leading subgroups who own a gun only for self-defense include blacks,
the lowest income groups, and senior citizens. "These are the people," Kates eloquently warns, "it is
proposed we jail because they insist on keeping the only protection available for their families in
areas in which the police have given up."​

9 What of historical experience? Have handgun bans really
greatly lowered the degree of violence in society, as liberals claim? The evidence is precisely to the
contrary. A massive study done at the University of Wisconsin concluded unequivocally in the fall of
1975 that "gun control laws have no individual or collective effect in reducing the rate of violent
crime." The Wisconsin study, for example, tested the theory that ordinarily peaceful people will be
irresistibly tempted to shoot their guns if available when tempers are being frayed. The study found
no correlation whatever between rates of handgun ownership and rates of homicide when
compared, state by state. Moreover, this finding is reinforced by a 1976 Harvard study of a
Massachusetts law providing a mandatory minimum year in prison for anyone found possessing a
handgun without a government permit. It turns out that, during the year 1975, this 1974 law did
indeed considerably reduce the carrying of firearms and the number of assaults with firearms. But, lo
and behold! the Harvard researchers found to their surprise that there was no corresponding
reduction in any type of violence. That is,
As previous criminological studies have suggested, deprived of a handgun, a momentarily
enraged citizen will resort to the far more deadly long gun. Deprived of all firearms, he will prove
almost as deadly with knives, hammers, etc.
And clearly, "if reducing handgun ownership does not reduce homicide or other violence, a
handgun ban is just one more diversion of police resources from real crime to victimless crime."10
[p. 118]
Finally, Kates makes another intriguing point: that a society where peaceful citizens are armed is
far more likely to be one where Good Samaritans who voluntarily go to the aid of victims of crime will
flourish. But take away people's guns, and the public -- disastrously for the victims -- will tend to
leave the matter to the police. Before New York State outlawed handguns, Good Samaritan
instances were far more widespread than now. And, in a recent survey of Good Samaritan cases, no
less than 81% of the Samaritans were owners of guns. If we wish to encourage a society where
citizens come to the aid of neighbors in distress, we must not strip them of the actual power to do
something about crime. Surely, it is the height of absurdity to disarm the peaceful public and then,
as is quite common, to denounce them for "apathy" for failing to rush to the rescue of victims of
criminal assault.​

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Don B. Kates, Jr., "Handgun Control: Prohibition Revisited," Inquiry (December 5, 1977), p. 21.
This escalation of harsh enforcement and despotic search-and-seizure methods is already here. Not
only in Britain and numerous other countries, where indiscriminate searches for guns take place; in
Malaysia, Rhodesia, Taiwan, and the Philippines, which impose the death penalty for possession of
guns; but also in Missouri, where St. Louis police have conducted literally thousands of searches of
blacks in recent years on the theory that any black person driving a recent-model car must have an
illegal gun; and in Michigan, where nearly 70% of all firearms prosecutions have been thrown out by
the appellate courts on grounds of illegal search procedures. And already a Detroit police official has
advocated abolition of the Fourth Amendment so as to permit indiscriminate general searches for
violations of a future handgun prohibition. Ibid., p. 23.​

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Ibid., p. 21.​

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Ibid. The extremely harsh idea of jailing people for mere possession of handguns is not a
farfetched straw man, but precisely the beau ideal of the liberal: the Massachusetts constitutional​

amendment, fortunately defeated overwhelmingly by the voters in 1977, provided for a mandatory

 

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minimum sentence of a year in prison for any person caught possessing a handgun.​

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Ibid., p. 22. Similarly in Britain, a 1971 Cambridge University study found that the British
homicide rate, with handgun prohibition, has doubled in the last fifteen years. Furthermore, before
the adoption of the handgun ban in 1920, the use of firearms in crime (when there were no gun
restrictions at all) was far less than now. [p. 119]
[This is an excerpt from Rothbard's For a New Liberty: A Libertarian Manifesto, available here at the
Mises Institute.]​