We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

A call to arms…

…well, arms shops actually.

The absurd ‘assault weapon’ ban which prohibited certain weapons on the basis of largely aesthetic criteria, has expired in the USA as of today. However as Dubya made it clear that if there had been enough support for extending the ban in Congress, he would have signed it into law rather than try and veto it, please resist the urge to feel much gratitude for his lukewarm support for the Second Amendment.

However it was passed before and could certainly happen again.

And so I urge all the redoubtable gun owning men and women of the USA to run, not walk, to their nearest gun shop and purchase nice Kalashnikov or AR-15 or Ruger Mini-14 or FAL or M-14 or whatever, plus a goodly selection of flash suppressors and high capacity magazines, thus ensuring that there are soooooo many of the damn things in circulation that any future ban will simply have no effect.

Use the power of the Buycott, have fun at the range, arm yourself to the teeth and, best of all, absolutely enrage advocates of gun control in the process.

I mean, how good it that?

Good stance and correct breathing: now that is what I call gun control

65 comments to A call to arms…

  • mike

    2nd that. Cool pic – is that you Perry? Wish I’d had the chance to fire a weapon like that when I was in the TA…

  • James

    …and just in time for my arrival there in the next few weeks.

    Lovely Jubbly….

  • James

    Oh, and Perry? Think you need a flash suppressor on that.

  • J

    “The absurd ‘assault weapon’ ban which prohibited certain weapons on the basis of largely aesthetic criteria…”

    Actually, I thougth that was the best part of the ban. Well, obviously enraging gun nuts was the _best_ parts, but after that I mean ;-).

    When you’re defining laws, it’s important and difficulty to define terms. I thought the approach taken – to define common aspects of assault weapons, rather than to define _causal_ aspects of them, was very innovative. It reminded me of Wittgenstein (no, really), where he tries to define ‘a game’ and comes up with the theory of family resemblances.

    http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Colleges/ARHU/Depts/Philosophy/Faculty/JLesher/handouts/10%20Witt.htm

    What I want to know is why the libertarian gun lobby limits itself to guns. Even a very casual glance at people oppressed by their governments, shows that they are going to get nowhere without man portable SAM capability, and plenty of RPGs. I mean when the Feds decide to get facist on you, how’s your AK-74 going to help against the airstrikes?

    My understanding is that the anti-gun lobby say the 2nd ammendment referred to a time when muzzle loaders were all the rage, and that it is anachronistic to pretend it should authorise private ownership of modern assault weapons.

    If they’re wrong, then we need to be authorising Milan, RPG-7, Stinger, SA-7. .50 cals wouldn’t hurt either.

    So, really, the gun lobby needs to decide on its game plan. Either they want to defend themselves from the facsist government of the future, in which case they are fooling themselves if they think a bunch of rifles will help, or they just like playing soldiers with cool hardware, in which case they need to admit it.

    Hey, I like military hardware as much as the next guy, I’ve just never seen the politics in myself.

  • MaDr

    This is a good news- bad news for me. Yes, the ban is over, but now my collection’s value has plumeted. I always have preferred gun shows over the hardware store for my enthusiastic shopping – guess I’m back in business!

  • Well ‘J’, I really do not have any problem with privately owned RPGs and I already know folks who own 50 cals rifles. In many places in the world an RPG-7 is a common private weapon and trust me when I say that not only are they surprisingly accurate, they are a real hoot to fire.

    In reality privately owned weapons are not generally about taking on some future ‘fascist state’ (though there is that) but rather raising cost and therefore barriers to capricious use of force by the state and hopefully preventing that ‘fascist state’ from ever arising. As Saddam proved, allowing folks to keep rifles does not prevent tyranny if the state has armoured vehicles and poison gas and a security service willing to use them without restrain on their own nationals. This is something we have discussed on Samizdata.net before.

    That said, yes, as many weapons in private hands as possible is indeed a disincentive to future tyranny when combined with a culture of liberty that is actually willing to act to defend what needs defending, hopefully before the guns actually need to come out of the cases.

  • Euan Gray

    Personally speaking, I always preferred the old 105mm pack howitzer (lots of bang for your buck) but I don’t see much chance of them ever being legal for the private citizen.

    EG

  • R C Dean

    Perry, no one is going to believe you are exercising good gun control unless you post your target.

    And don’t think you can get away with some target that anyone could duplicate in Word on a standard template.

  • Dave J

    Unfortunately, not everyone in the US will be able to take up this eminently reasonable call to arms of yours until a number of equally if not even more egregious bans at the state level are also swept away.

  • ian

    There is a publication of the Libertarian Alliance in which the author seriously argues that any weapon up to and including hydrogen bombs should be freely available – so long as you have the appropriate third party insurance of course.

    Political Note 176 Paul Birch
    http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/polin/polin176.pdf

    There are times when I really really really worry…

  • Tim in PA

    I think that the “arms” we have a right to keep and bear generally refer to individual arms, not things like H-bombs (I can’t imagine what I, as an individual, could lawfully do with an H-bomb, or illegally, for that matter, unless I was some sort of realy evil bastard)
    However, there is precedent for privately owned warships and cannon, so the issue is cloudy. I think “common sense” will get you close enough to the right answer, if there is one.
    I look at all the idiots out there, and weigh the damage they would do with RPG’s versus the need that I may have for them, and come to the conclusion that there are other things that can get the same job done for me. If it doesn’t launch an exploding projectile, then it’s fine by me (not that it’s up to me to tell you what you can own)

    I just got done putting a flash hider on my AR-15, btw. Hooray.

  • T. J. Madison

    >>Personally speaking, I always preferred the old 105mm pack howitzer (lots of bang for your buck) but I don’t see much chance of them ever being legal for the private citizen.

    Can’t Swiss citizens own howitzers?

  • mike

    The H-bomb as a weapon of individual self-defence??? Christ!! That author must dream of having world-threatening Hank Scorpio on his private island-fortress as his very own arch enemy. Or else he dreams of setting up his very own International Rescue station in the stratosphere as a plc…! Or, (how could I be so blind?) both!!

  • Joe

    No, this isn’t the end of the battle. The 1968 and 1934 gun bans are based on a very loose reading of “interstate commerce.” The laws need to be repealed in reverse order. Now would be a good time to dump the 1968 law. Before that, there is an executive order that needs to be killed. I’m going to write a nice letter to GW after the election asking him to repeal the order.

    BTW, W told the Senate that he did _not_ want a renewal bill to reach his desk. I don’t call that “lukewarm” support for the 2nd. I call that smart politics.

  • limberwulf

    J,
    Im not going to argue the defense against tyrrany angle, as others have done so quite well. I jsut want to point out that even if gun enthusiasts just happen to like the toys, then that is their right as well. The most insulting thing, philosophically speaking, about gun bans, is the assumption by the powers that be that any owner of such a weapon is violent or has violent intent. I personally am a knife enthusiast, and while many of my knives are not exactly utilitarian (since they are specifically designed for throwing or fighting), that does not mean that I am intending on commiting violent acts with them. In fact I find it insulting that some beurocrat whose record and reputation show him to be a far more corrupt individual than myself, can presume to know what I am thinking, or can tell me that since I “have no practical use” for my choice of knife or other weapon, that I should lose my freedom to choose to own said item. It is further disturbing as a business owner, to have a beurocrat able to take my freedom to make an item, despite market demands. 2nd amendment rights are about two things: freedom and the idea of being innocent untill proven guilty. That is how it carries over to the political for me.

  • There is a publication of the Libertarian Alliance in which the author seriously argues that any weapon up to and including hydrogen bombs should be freely available – so long as you have the appropriate third party insurance of course.

    I understood that the implication of such an idea was that insuring an H-bomb would be so expensive that no-one would be willing to pay the premiums, so no-one could legally own an H-bomb. Hence you can deny people the right to own H-bombs without denying them the right to own guns.

    In any case, wasn’t that pamphlet a response to Brian Micklethwait’s The Menace of the Apocalyptic Individual? I don’t think it’s an adequate response, as it happens, but that’s another discussion.

  • James

    The Beeb are running their usual (biased) take on this. They’ve got a “Have Your Say” entry for it, and so far it looks like the usual leftie suspects are out in force.

    Perhaps some Samizdatistas should pay a visit and even (or stir) things up a bit? I’ve done my part (assuming they’ll even print it).

  • Go out and buy an AR-15? Piss off!

    Plastic and aluminum, that’s all it is, with a wee bit of steel here and there.

    Make mine a Mini-14, please, if one must have a rifle chambered for the anemic 5.56mm round.

    Make mine 7.62mm, at a minimum!

    And .45 for the sidearm, too!

  • MTFO

    Concerning J’s concerns:

    The idea of the Second Amendment was for the citizenry to be armed at least as well as government agents. The focus of the Bill of Rights was to strictly curtail government power and the most effective way of doing that is insuring that the government would have a helluva time outgunning the People. The BoR is a statement of principles intended to be applied when there is conflict over technical minutiae not specifically covered in the Constitution.

    “Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people.”
    -Robert A. Heinlein

  • The thought behind the 2nd amendment was not muzzleloaders. During that same period of time, there were bombs, cannons, warships, mines, mortars, rockets and other assorted arms.

    The whole reason for the word arms instead of rifle (which was the term for a muzzle-loading long arm), was the idea of military type weapons.

    The argument of the H-bomb is an argument of the absurd and does not dismiss the fact that military weapons were the intent.

    Even Jefferson did not want to see a day when the citizens of the US would take up arms against his country, but he believed that people needed to arm themselves against a tyrant state.

    I believe that if he were alive today, he would advocate an H-bomb to every household which could purchase one. There is nothing like an H-bomb to keep the government quite. However, he trusted the citizens to only use force, when force was necessary.

    Jefferson even was contemplating as a president to authorize congress to equip each household with sufficient military hardware as was necessary to repel invaders both foreign and local. Talk about your entitlement program.

    What Jefferson could not see was moral relativism. This freedom is the biggest argument why “what is right for you, may be wrong for me” is the biggest threat to personal freedoms. Morality must be constant and communicated from generation to generation.

  • RE: The H-Bomb argument.

    A simple rule of thumb applies.

    If the weapon cannot be used to target an individual in a crowd and incapacitate that individual and no one else in that crowd, then, it probably shouldn’t be widely available to the average citizen.

    So, grenades, military flamethrowers, atomic weapons, et al, are something beyond the pervue of the average citizen to own and operate.

    “Ah, but what about shotguns, huh? How do you use a shot gun in a crowd and not hit bystanders, eh?” I hear you cry.

    Two words. Rifled Slugs.

  • Julian Morrison

    I use the rule of “pointed at” to work out a libertarian rule for H-bombs.

    If your gun is pointed at someone, they’re justified in assuming you’ve already initiated force, they can return fire or sue you for threatening them. A bomb is “pointed at” everyone it would kill if it went off. For a modern H-bomb, that’s a 30-mile blast radius, and people downwind of the fallout.

    In other words, sure you can have a H-bomb in a pure libertarian country, you just can’t bring it anywhere near people without getting your ass sued off (or shot).

  • ThePresentOccupier

    Wish I’d had the chance to fire a weapon like that when I was in the TA…

    Depends a lot on which unit you were in, I’m afraid Mike!

    SLR, GPMG, Bren/LMG, AUG, Sterling, Uzi (bleh), MP5, M16, AK47, Browning, PPK, old sniper rifle (can’t remember the designation, never managed to get on the range with the AI one), SA80 IW & LSW (Still haven’t forgiven them for the last 2). That’s just off the top of my head; all kindly funded by the taxpayer.

  • Julian,

    A cunning attempt to solve the H-bomb paradox but it doesn’t work. There are lots of appliances that may accidentally malfunction and cause devastating damage but this does not count as an argument against having them in residential areas. The gas cooker in my apartment block may explode and destroy the whole block but people are not thus correct in assuming that I have initiated force against them.

    Also if one owned a nuclear missile, even out in the middle of your own private desert, it may theoretically be fired or misfired anywhere in the world.

    Another argument is needed if you want to restrict H-bomb ownership in an anarcho-libertarian society.

  • Paul,

    Don’t you think Birch’s insurance idea might work?

    Most people could afford to insure against their gas cooker exploding and destroying their apartment block, but I suspect that almost no-one could affort to insure against their H-bomb exploding and destroying a city.

  • zmollusc

    Speaking of guns, did anyone else hear the ‘Fathers 4 Justice’ protester (robin)say that the police instructed him to “Climb down or you will be shot”?

    http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/story.jsp?story=561475

  • mike

    I can hardly believe so many of you have commented on this H-bomb stuff!! My cheeks are all warm from continuous grinning and laughter; it is clearly just absurd and that’s the end of it. You nutters!

    ThePresentOccupier: I was in the Durham Light Infantry which meant the SA80 and some donkeys old WW1 rifle on the range I’m afraid. Still, at the time I was less interested in the actual weaponry per se and more in the training and organisation. But it would’ve been fun to stay a while longer and experience some of the better weapons.

  • Simon Jester

    Nitpick, MTFO – PJ O’Rourke, not Robert A. Heinlein.

  • Andy,

    No, the insurance idea won’t do either. Firstly compulsory insurance doesn’t seem compatible with anarcho-libertarianism, but more than that we want to rule out certain highly risky sorts of behaviour not just make them extremely expensive to insure.

    Libertarians get into difficulties because they do not usually have a robust idea of what liberty in the libertarian sense is actually getting at. Often is is mistaken either for absolute property rights (Rothbard et al) or the efficiency of law (David Firedman, Richard Posner et al). Neither of these will do and their failure can be seen in the paradoxes and reductio absurdium that result from critically examining these ideas.

  • Cobden Bright

    The obvious argument against H-bombs is that ownership would pose a serious threat to the survival of large numbers of other people, and possibly life on earth. Survival, being the most important aspect of human nature, is ultimately a higher moral value than liberty. If you are dead, you have no freedom. Thus you can use an overwhelming threat to your own survival as justification for infringing another person’s liberty (but only to the minimum extent necessary to remove that threat).

    It is similar to the argument against the government having a monopoly on military force, or disarming the populace, or a foreign power placing a large invasion fleet 15 miles off your coastline, or someone with a deadly disease coming into your vicinity, or a person holding a 10 tonne wrecking ball above your house. There does not need to be proof that the threat will definitely occur in order for it to be legitimate to use force against it – simply the presence of a sufficiently large threat to your survival is enough to justify preemptive action.

    I don’t see how tanks, fighter planes etc fall into that ultimate category of threat, but powerful nukes almost certainly do.

  • …we want to rule out certain highly risky sorts of behaviour not just make them extremely expensive to insure.

    I don’t think I see any practical distinction if the insurance is so expensive that no-one is willing to pay the premiums, as I suspect would be the case for H-bombs.

    But how do draw the line between a risky behaviour that we judge is worth permitting and one that we should outlaw? The difference between allowing people to drive cars and allowing them to own H-bombs is fairly clear cut, but there will be marginal cases that aren’t. What is the general rule that you think should apply?

    As far as H-bombs in an anarcho-capitalist society are concerned, the biggest problem I see is that enforcing a ban (whether via compulsory insurance or not) is a public good problem, which is a different issue from whether such a ban would be libertarian or not.

    The other problem I had with Birch’s idea doesn’t have much to do with anarcho-capitalism. His article was in response to Brian’s article The Menace of the Apocalyptic Individual where he speculated about what would happen in the event of, say, H-bombs becoming cheap enough to buy off the shelf in a supermarket. Enforcing a ban in those circumstances would not only be a public good problem, but would also be a very expensive problem, perhaps requiring a substantial loss of liberty for everyone. Arguing that it’s possible to ban something without violating libertarian principles isn’t much use if the ban proves impossible to enforce.

  • ian

    I raised the Birch pamphlet because it seemed to be an example of how applying libertarian principles absolutely rigidly led to absurd consequences. (in passing I suspect bin Laden might be able to raise the money if he could find an insurer).

    I read the pamphlet as being serious – if it wasn’t then I’m certainly never going to play poker with the author! I’d be interested in getting his current take on this if he’s around. Two other pamphlets of his about private courts seemed very sensible and practical examinations of the problems.

  • in passing I suspect bin Laden might be able to raise the money if he could find an insurer

    Really? How much do you think such an insurance policy would cost?

    My estimate: say an H-bomb would destroy about 100,000 homes, with an average value of £100,000. That means an insurance policy would have to cover at least £10 billion. The insurer, recognising that the customer is Osama bin Laden, will reason that the bomb is not going to be used as an ornament in his living room, so will assign a probability of about 1 to the insured event.

    That gives a premium of at least £10 billion. If you include insurance of things in addition to just people’s homes, it will be even higher. This article (Link) claims that bin Laden’s wealth is less than $300 million dollars. I’m pretty sceptical that even bin Laden would try to insure his H-bomb.

  • lemuel

    Suppose someone attacks me with a pointed stick or a pineapple… Can I use the H-Bomb?

  • limberwulf

    It may be that the H-bomb issue would be somewhat moot in a truly libertarian society. If the military were bid out in a free market fashion, there would potentially be less demand for things like H-bombs, thus production would be less focused on. IF that happened, low demand would not encourage producers to make cheaper and cheaper H-bombs, and the cost would remain quite prohibitive. That does not prevent highly wealthy individuals from owning one, but it would likely prevent the walmart version from ever coming into being. I honestly dont think many people would be interested in having one, especially not for home defense, so demand being low would prevent excesses in supply. The current excesses have more to do with the current systems of government, so theoretically in a libertarian society this would all be a non-issue.
    Theoretically being the operative word of course 😀

  • Julian Morrison

    Paul Coulam says: “A cunning attempt to solve the H-bomb paradox but it doesn’t work. There are lots of appliances that may accidentally malfunction and cause devastating damage but this does not count as an argument against having them in residential areas.

    No, it still works. With eg: a hand grenade, if the pin’s in then it’s not “pointed at” anyone. This also applies to fixtures eg: boilers, that theoretically could explode but probably won’t. If normal sensible precauations are being taken, nobody has a valid grievance. Now, with a grenade, pulling the pin makes it “pointed at” everyone in arm’s throw, and they could validly gun you down. If you know a grenade is inactive, you know it’s not a threat, if they pull the pin (or brandish it or whatever) then it becomes a threat.

    With a nuke, by contrast, finding out it had been armed wouldn’t be enough to get you clear of the blast radius, because nobody can sprint 30 miles in however long it takes to arm and fire it. If it’s anywhere near you it can kill you. So, it’s “pointed at” everyone even when quiescent. The same would go for some larger conventional bombs.

    Also if one owned a nuclear missile, even out in the middle of your own private desert, it may theoretically be fired or misfired anywhere in the world.

    Which makes it “pointed at” the whole world. So my analysis holds. In fact, with such a missile, even seriously trying to aquire one would probably invoke the “pointed at” clause (because once built, it’s too late).

  • If normal sensible precautions are being taken…

    This seems to me to be begging the question. How do you decide if a precaution is normal and sensible, rather than excessive and wasteful?

    It might be easy to distinguish between a gas cooker and an H-bomb, but you need a general rule that will tell you how to decide marginal cases.

  • …low demand would not encourage producers to make cheaper and cheaper H-bombs…

    I don’t think that’s necessary for Brian’s scenario. His scenario, if I remember rightly, was that normal economic growth gradually made everyone wealthier until, in a few centuries time, even very poor people are as wealthy as Bill Gates is today.

  • Julian Morrison

    Andy Wood says: “How do you decide if a precaution is normal and sensible, rather than excessive and wasteful? It might be easy to distinguish between a gas cooker and an H-bomb, but you need a general rule that will tell you how to decide marginal cases.

    Existing negligence, reckless endangerment, conpiracy to cause explosions, arson etc law already has to deal with this sort of stuff. I suspect most edge cases can be solved, as per normal in law, by the application of common sense.

  • limberwulf

    granted, Andy, but with such economic growth and unrestricted technology, the H-bomb would still be a non-issue, as defense mechanisms, also privately available, would be able to detect and disarm a mere h-bomb. Of course, there would likely be newer weapons as well, so in theory the question could still exist. On the other hand, at such high wealth levels the market still corrects, and ultimately more time would be spent on items that people actually needed, H-bombs would very quickly become museum peices for collectors, and would be held in high tech glass cases where even an explosion would be contained. The free market is a beautiful thing, because wealth is not the only thing created.

  • Well lots of interesting things to talk about on this issue of risk, unfortunately I’m away now for a few days and won’t be able to keep on discussing this much as I’d like to. Though I share Julian’s (and probably other people’s) desire to restrict H-bomb ownership I still think that the particular argument you are using doesn’t do the job. The conceptions of ‘threat’ and ‘pointed at’ are just too fuzzy and your hand grenade analogy is not good. Once the pin has been pulled then its a bit late to start taking action like shooting the grenade holder. You wan’t to pre-emptively forbid the reckless ownership and storage of the thing in the first place.

    Andy,

    Whether things are allowable in libertarian theory and whether they are practical are indeed separate questions but we need not let concerns for the second stop us dicussing theoretically the first.

    I’ll have a look at where this debate goes in a few days time.

  • I suspect most edge cases can be solved, as per normal in law, by the application of common sense.

    So you are, in effect, saying “I don’t know what the rule should be, but I trust the courts to find it”.

    A reasonable answer, I suppose, but I’m still interested to know what that rule is, just to satisfy my curiosity.

  • I find the notion of private nukes absurd. Private ownership of firearms and even anti-tank weapons, a range of shipboard weapons and sundry explosives is entirely justified on the grounds that a deranged person cannot easily cause MASS destruction with them (I think ease is an important criterion or else one could reasonably ban private ownership of propane gas canisters and nails, which is all you need to make a pretty nasty bomb capable of killing large numbers of people in a crowded street).

    However chemical, bio and nuclear weapons are something I would like to keep out of the hands of manic depressives and people with serious PMS problems, if you don’t mind.

    The idea of leaving that to insurance markets is also bizarre as I do not want Bill Gates to have a nuclear weapon either. As minarchist, the notion of the state having a preponderance of the means of violence is just fine with me, just so long as it do not actually have a monopoly.

  • I find the notion of private nukes absurd.

    Of course, but as I’ve already mentioned, distinguishing between gas cookers and H-bombs is easy. You still need a rule to decide marginal cases. When does a permissible risk become reckless endangerment?

  • ian

    I’m pretty sceptical that even bin Laden would try to insure his H-bomb.

    Well so am I – but that is why the idea of an insurance backed right of ownership is absurd. In practice of course it is just those people who are most likely to use their weapons idiscriminately – terrorists in other words – who wouldn’t even bother to try.

    As for Bill Gates owning one – these quotes from The Space Merchants, by Frederick Pohl and CM Kornbluth seem apposite.

    “Killing in an industrial feud is a misdemeanor. Killing without Notification is a commercial offense.”

    “In Compliance With Federal Law, Passengers Are Advised That They Are Now Passing Over the San Andreas Fault Into Earthquake Territory, And That Earthquake Loss and Damage Clauses In Any Insurance They May Carry Are Now Canceled And Will Remain Canceled Until Passengers Leave Earthquake Territory.” . . . “And,” said Kathy, “I suppose it says in the small print that yak-bite insurance is good anywhere except in Tibet.”

    (http://departments.ozarks.edu/hfa/slgorman/space_merchants_discussion.htm)

  • I’m pretty sceptical that even bin Laden would try to insure his H-bomb.

    Well so am I – but that is why the idea of an insurance backed right of ownership is absurd.

    No, because if insurance is so expensive that no-one pays for it, then no H-bombs are legally owned. So you have a legal pretext for jailing the owners of H-bombs without the same law being used to jail the owners of gas ovens.

    If the assumption that no-one would be prepared to pay for H-bomb insurance is wrong, then we would need to find a different rule, of course.

  • mike

    “when does permissible risk become reckless endangerment?”

    Andy: This is an interesting question. I’m thinking of something like control. A ratio between two factors: the degree to which the outcome of operating the weapon is intentional as against unintentional; and the degree of skill required in successfully operating the weapon.

    First, how discrete a weapon is in its’ capacity to effect intended outcomes as against unintended outcomes seems important. So with a sniper rifle – other things being equal – you get exactly what you want with a minimum of unintended outcomes, e.g. you kill or disable one specific chap and not five of them, say. With a H-bomb you might blow up the evil Dr Scorpio on his island but you have all kinds of unintended (or more accurately, unwanted) outcomes.

    Second, most weapons require a certain amount of training to use them correctly. I wouldn’t know about using H-bombs, but a gas cooker does require some very limited ‘training’ or skill to operate it (and shut if off) correctly and therefore we trust most people to own and operate one despite the fact it may cause drastic and unintended outcomes. A sniper rifle requires a much greater degree of skill and training to operate it correctly and yet, unlike the gas cooker, it has less scope for causing drastic unintended outcomes on a similar scale.

    So how about linking the two notions of skill and ratio of intended to unintended outcomes in something like this:

    The higher the skill required to effect intended outcomes as against unintended outcomes, the more dangerous the weapon. (This rules out those cases where a high liklihood of unintended outcomes e.g. in H-bombs is unrelated to skill).

    Conversely:

    The lower the skill required to effect intended outcomes as against unintended outcomes, the less dangerous the weapon. (This allows us to keep our gas-cookers and cars and so on).

    Or have I got it all wrong?

  • mike

    Actually let me pre-empt something. I wouldn’t think the content of my post amounts to an exact ‘rule’ to apply in marginal cases, as it will still rely on common sense judgement (like most things) but it does help to make the basis for that common-sense judgement a little more explicit.

    Or as I said – have I got it all wrong?! (I’m pretty good at getting it wrong…)

  • Oh, dear God, you wouldn’t believe the huge pile of rotting corpses I had to pick my way through on the Metro platform this morning.

    And then when I’m in line at the Au Bon Pain waiting for a grande French Roast, this guy sprays everbody in front of him so he can be sure to get the last packet of biscotti.

    Worse yet, crossing the street, I was nearly hit by a bus… which had to swerve to stay out of a firefight between a bunch of young kids, who would have been in school but for the easy availability of guns with pistol grips.

    Not.

  • flaime

    That said, yes, as many weapons in private hands as possible is indeed a disincentive to future tyranny when combined with a culture of liberty that is actually willing to act to defend what needs defending

    Or an incentive for tyranny…He who owns the biggest gun makes the rules…

  • Julian Morrison

    mike, yes, you’ve got it all wrong. Your scheme makes fencing foils (a decade of study and practise) more dangerous than nukes (push button “A” and retire to a safe distance).

    A sensible edge case rule would likely take into account such things as whether it’s deliberately designed to cause harm, how easy it is to notice and avoid if it becomes harmful, how quickly and easily it can be converted (deliberately or not) from safe to destructive use, who is using it and are they qualified and trustworthy, and the actual amount of harm it could be expected to do.

  • Or an incentive for tyranny…He who owns the biggest gun makes the rules…

    Not really. Lots of people with guns does raise the cost of tyranny as ‘big guns’ are how you fight wars or put down open revolts, but are not much use for actually making a tyrants writ run deep: if the tyrannts local stooge (and no tyrant can rule without lots of local stooges) is of the view he could get a 7.62mm hole in his head if he swaggers around a community too often, that does indeed make a difference to the nature of things.

    That said, without the culture of liberty I mentioned, no amount of guns will make a much difference: that is why lots of guns in America or Switzerland is rather more likely to yield good results than lots of guns in a more tribal pre-extended society.

  • MTFO

    Simon Jester:

    You might be right – I was quoting from “Time Enough For Love.”

  • It’s a bit late to be getting involved with this discussion, but Eric Raymond has some interesting arguments about nuclear weapon control.

    I would prefer the risks of private nukes to the disarmament of the civilian population. But that’s not a choice anyone will actually ever have to make, because the intersection of the set of people who want nukes and the set of people who would obey or be deterred by a law against them is nil. A law against nukes would therefore be pointless, except as an assertion of the power and right to enforce other sorts of weapons bans that are harmful in themselves.

  • Julian Morrison

    Rob Fisher: Yup, which is why my approach takes a more robust approach than banning. Bringing a live nuke anywhere near me (or attempting to do so) counts as initiated force, and I could validly gun down the owner-operator without warning and without legal comebacks.

  • mike

    Julian: no I don’t think you understood me properly (maybe I didn’t express it clearly enough).

    My scheme wouldn’t make fencing foils more dangerous than nukes. I should have made it clear (I wrongly assumed it would be obvious) that we are concerned with a high liklihood of intended outcomes as against unintended outcomes – nobody wants unintended outcomes right!?

    With the fencing foil, a high degree of skill is required to effect the particular outcome you intend (prevent people from entering some area) – yet the unintended outcome of people actually impaling themselves on the foil has nothing to do with your skill in actually making the thing and more to do with their idiocy (or whatever motive they may have had, e.g. being chased by a machete wielding madman) in trying to jump the fence.

    With the nuke a low degree of skill is required to effect your intended outcome sure (as you say push button A and retire to a safe distance) – but the point is, that low degree of skill equally triggers off all your unintended outcomes too.

    The point is whether skill is required to prevent unintended outcomes from happening in favour of your intended outcomes – because if it isn’t, then you cannot be said to have any control over the ratio of intended to unintended outcomes, i.e. it would not really be up to you whether you achieve what you want or accidentally achieve all these other horrible things you never really intended to happen. Without such control the weapon (or whatever it is we’re talking about) becomes more dangerous.

    So with a low degree of skill required to prevent the uninteded outcomes and effect the intended outcomes the weapon is a lot safer (because less control is required to achieve what you want), and where a high degree of skill is required to prevent the unintended outcomes and effect the intended outcomes then the weapon is more dangerous (because more control is required to achieve what you want).

    On this scheme nukes are still absurd because the ratio of intended to unintended outcomes is unrelated to skill and so you can exercise almost no control whatever over the effects of a nuke going off.

  • Mike,

    I think I would replace your phrase “unintended outcomes” with “harm caused to people who did not consent to the risk”.

    What you seem to be describing is some of the inputs we need to make the decision. We still need a criterion for judging when to ban and when to permit.

    Suppose we have two devices, A and B, which are identical in every respect, except that, using the sort of inputs you describe, we estimate that A has a 1% chance of killing X people and B has a 1% chance of killing X+1 people. How do we determine the value of X where we would allow A, but forbid B?

  • mike

    Andy: yes as I mentioned above, my scheme merely tries to make the basis of the judgement more explicit rather than provide an exact criterion (or as you say, ‘describes some of the inputs’ for the decision).

    How to determine the exact ratio of intended to unintended outcomes at which we should enforce a ban?
    (I presume this is what you mean with X and X+1).

    Without meaning to sound callous, couldn’t we work it on percentages? I mean where X = 0 then with B the unintended killing is 100% greater than the intended killing of zero; where X = 50 then with B the unintended killing is 2% of the intended killing of 50. So assuming we were going to be very cautious, then we would presumably want the probability of our unintended killing to be as small a percentage of our intended killing as possible, let’s say less than 1%. So in this case for A and B the value of X would have to be at least 100.

    But as to what percentage the ideal ratio should be set at, well, that’s a matter of opinion; how much do we value the individual’s right to self-defence over the risk of accidentally killing someone they didn’t intend to kill.

  • John Ellis

    Tim, two days ago you posted:

    I can’t imagine what I, as an individual, could lawfully do with an H-bomb, or illegally, for that matter, unless I was some sort of realy evil bastard

    I’ve just re-read Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, where he outlines this scenario: chap called Raven totes an H-Bomb around with him in his motorcyle sidecar. He wirelesses it to a personally-portable ECG. If anyone kills him, the Bomb goes off. Pretty awesome personal protection, I should say….;-)

  • Without meaning to sound callous, couldn’t we work it on percentages? I mean where X = 0 then with B the unintended killing is 100% greater than the intended killing of zero; where X = 50 then with B the unintended killing is 2% of the intended killing of 50.

    You seem to have misunderstood my example. All of the deaths are unintended for both A and B.

    You might compare a gas cooker of brand A, which has a one in a million chance of killing 50 people with a gas cooker of brand B, which has a one in a million chance of killing 51 people. All else being equal, we would prefer people to use brand A, but what if brand A costs twice as much as brand B, or a thousand times as much? When are we going to say that the small additional risk of brand B is worth the money saved?

    I do have some thoughts on this, but it would require a much longer posting than is suitable here. I may post them on my own blog, but I’m not promising anything.

  • I can’t imagine what I, as an individual, could lawfully do with an H-bomb, or illegally, for that matter, unless I was some sort of realy evil bastard

    I’m not sure what I could do with a megaton H-bomb, but small nukes could in principle be used for rocket propulsion. Read Project Orion by George Dyson.

  • mike

    Ah yes I see, I beg your pardon. It’s a vagueness problem isn’t it? – like that paradox about how many stones make a heap…

    There is a book on this by Timothy Williamson (1994 I think). I don’t have it but I remember looking at it ages ago – I think he argues that you do need to have some exact cut-off point by means of quantifying your values rather than arbitrary opinion…

    This is a challenge to the fact-value dichotomy though is it not?

  • limberwulf

    John Ellis,
    very cool idea, as long as EVERYONE KNEW. And also as long as no suicidal people killed him, or as long as he never had a heart attack while riding along 😛

  • Cobden Bright

    Julian wrote – ” Bringing a live nuke anywhere near me (or attempting to do so) counts as initiated force, and I could validly gun down the owner-operator without warning and without legal comebacks.”

    I don’t agree. It would count as a *threat*, but not force until used. The rules governing your response would, I presume, be similar to that in other cases where someone (or a society) felt extremely threatened – a warning would be the minimum morally required action before taking violent steps against the nuke-owner (a bit like the US did with Iraq).

    After all, he may not have realised that you were within 30 miles of him. He may have realised, but may be transporting the nuke to defend his country against attack. He may have any number of legitimate reasons to be doing what he’s doing. Your right to survive free of mortal peril is set against his right to do the same, and is still circumscribed by defending that right using the minimum force reasonable under the circumstances. So if you could get him to disarm just by asking, but you shoot him without warning first, then you would be in the wrong IMO.

    Even wars start with a declaration of war.

  • Just had a grope with an AK clone a few days ago; didn’t get to shoot it, but gawd, though a nimble bit of kit – it was the carbine varient – what a piece of crap it is.

    I just wrote “Stupid law to appease stupid Liberals succumbs to stupid NRA forgetting what the point was.”
    a day or two before, talking about proper arms for Militias. Let me quote myself about assault weapons:

    But if you are an an NRA member, odds are you have something in your closet that will knock over an elk at a quarter mile, or disable a humvee at half a mile. You don’t need training to use it; you KNOW how to use it! Those poor bastards with AKs and baynets and grenade launchers may as well spit as return fire.

    The only thing an assault weapon is good for is identifying who the bad guys are. Because anyone carrying one is coming to get YOU, with a lot of other poor bastards just like him.