This article contains some pretty damning stuff.
Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state’s emergency operations center said Saturday.
The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. “Quite frankly, if they’d been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals,” said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.
[…]
Louisiana did not reach out to a multi-state mutual aid compact for assistance until Wednesday, three state and federal officials said. As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior Bush official said.
Yup, let the finger pointing begin. However although I am rarely loath to heap scorn on the state for cocking things up, it does need to be kept in mind that this is the worst natural disaster in US history and any blame laying needs to keep a sense of proportion (ha, as if) as expecting the state to magically solve even the most unexpected problems with seamless efficiency is at best (and I do mean at best) rather like relying on a well meaning but hopelessly alcoholic uncle to be there for you when things go badly wrong. Well, he might come up trumps but it is probably not a good idea to expect him to be there when you need him.
I also expect membership in the NRA and other similar groups to surge as people re-learn the lessons of the Los Angeles riots: the state might help you pick up the pieces after the fact and a policeman might come around to draw a nice chalk line around the bodies of your murdered loved ones, but when the veneer of civilisation cracks, you had better have a gun and be psychologically prepared to use it because the reality is that when the predators turn up, you are on your own.
Hat tip to Tom Pechinski
Update: LGF has some more as the blamefest starts to gather steam.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor/49756.html
but when the veneer of civilisation cracks, you had better have a gun and be psychologically prepared to use it because the reality is that when the predators turn up, you are on your own.
Jeeze, Perry, you sound like an American!
Perry, when will you learn..? The guns are the problem, not the solution. The predators are those with “citizens guns”, not the agents of the state. Yes, there may be the odd corrupt NOPD cop looting as well, but those shooting at rescue ‘copters and instituting Gang Law in the Superdome are private citizens, not politicians or their gophers. The cops and the Marines are the only hope NO has right now to restore “normality”, I guess.
Ah, no point in arguing. You’ve made up your mind.
Steven is right. With you, it is “my country right or wrong”, it’s just that your country is not even North America, but a neo-conservative quasi-anarchism, and I’m damn glad I don’t live there. So glad in fact, I can even stomach the crippling tax rates and nanny statism we endure in the UK, if that’s the only alternative. (OK, it isn’t, but that’s another argument.)
May you and Mad Max be happy together.
Perry, when will you learn..? The guns are the problem, not the solution. The predators are those with “citizens guns”, not the agents of the state.
This is a joke, right? You’re really not so appallingly stupid as to assert that if the citizens had no guns, there we be no guns except those in the hands of law enforcement and the military? Right?
You’ve bought into pro-Administration spin. The feds declared that they were in charge on August 26th.
*******************
Statement on Federal Emergency Assistance for Louisiana
The President today declared an emergency exists in the State of Louisiana and ordered Federal aid to supplement state and local response efforts in the parishes located in the path of Hurricane Katrina beginning on August 26, 2005, and continuing.
The President’s action authorizes the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures, authorized under Title V of the Stafford Act, to save lives, protect property and public health and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe in the parishes of Allen, Avoyelles, Beauregard, Bienville, Bossier, Caddo, Caldwell, Claiborne, Catahoula, Concordia, De Soto, East Baton Rouge, East Carroll, East Feliciana, Evangeline, Franklin, Grant, Jackson, LaSalle, Lincoln, Livingston, Madison, Morehouse, Natchitoches, Pointe Coupee, Ouachita, Rapides, Red River, Richland, Sabine, St. Helena, St. Landry, Tensas, Union, Vernon, Webster, West Carroll, West Feliciana, and Winn.
Specifically, FEMA is authorized to identify, mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency. Debris removal and emergency protective measures, including direct Federal assistance, will be provided at 75 percent Federal funding.
Representing FEMA, Michael D. Brown, Under Secretary for Emergency Preparedness and Response, Department of Homeland Security, named William Lokey as the Federal Coordinating Officer for Federal recovery operations in the affected area.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: FEMA (202) 646-4600.
Of course not. But it’s a matter of degree. Do you really think that criminals and various drug gangs would shooting at rescue helicopters? Where’s the profit?
But pissed-off citizens and half-deranged, half-starved and dying-of-thirst victims – THEY are the ones doing most of this shooting.
I agree, there are many law-abiding (or otherwise morally-justified) citizens whose posession of guns helps them protect their property. But only against less law-abiding citizens who have taken it into their heads to break out THEIR OWN privately-held guns and go looting.
Against properly-organised criminal gangs (or the NOPD 🙂 ), the private citizen with a gun is just another shootong-related murder waiting to happen…
That last comment was meant for Alfred, of course…
..but him, worry?
Not to mention the fact the cops in N.O. were looting, shooting and bullying with the worst of them. Granting the impossibility that only the police had been armed, do you think that would have made them nicer people?
JM, you’ll see I did mention (above) the possibility that the NOPD were less than incorruptible….But do you really think a store owner with a pump-action is going to stop those guys if they DO decide to take him out?
So yes, corrupt cops with guns=bad news. Corrupt cops without guns (eg most British Coppers)= less bad news….
Proportionately I would have thought that the 1906 San Francisco earthquake was far more of a disaster than Hurricane Katrina was.
..;-)
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that most British Coppers were corrupt, only that they were unarmed.
Of course, as Perry’s vaunted private ownership of guns becomes more prevalent here (albeit illegally), British Coppers are getting tooled-up as well…
If legal and widespread private ownership of guns ever happens here, the cops here will definitely arm themselves by default. Then, when the inevitable citizen-cop fracas occur, the results will just be deadlier…
Against properly-organised criminal gangs (or the NOPD 🙂 ), the private citizen with a gun is just another shootong-related murder waiting to happen…
And what, pray tell, are they without a gun? Are you actually saying that having a gun to defend yourself with attracts being attacked? That criminals prefer hard targets over soft ones?
You make no sense. Your postings reek of that fear of guns that makes them mythological creatures which attract, rather than deter, violence. Like they emit some magical magnetic force that causes all gun-toting people to coalesce into some maelstrom of violence that leaves those without guns safely outside the storm.
Regardless where blame actually lies, the fact is that in the U.S. the Feds are being blamed for it, and Americans perceive Bush as THE Fed. He now has four non-trivial problems on his hands:
1. A failing, disastrously expensive, and unpopular war;
2. Two Supreme Court vacancies, nominees for either or both of which will cause vicious fighting;
3. An economy that for months has been ready to collapse in a stiff breeze; and
4. Being shown live on TV and all over the net making a number of statements exceptional for their stupidity even from him. Several such statements look like candidates to take their place along “I am not a crook” and “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” as the verbal equivalent of seppuku.
As one who believes the only good government is a paralyzed government; and as one who believes that this government is worse than most, I can’t wait to watch the neocons and the theocons and the rest of the cons shred each other in the coming months.
By the way, I love the argument that handling this mess was the responsibility of local authorities. I envision this conversation between a top FEMA guy and a top National Guard guy, taking place at a water cooler in Washington:
FEMA guy: That hurricane coming in looks like a howler. They say it’s going to his New Orleans square in the chops.
National Guard guy: Couple of days from now, yeah, that’s what I hear too. Gonna be wet there.
FEMA guy: The nitwits haven’t asked us for help. We were looking for something from them yesterday, but no phone calls, no nothin’.
National Guard guy: Huh. Nobody’s heard a word from them here, either. What do you make of that?
FEMA guy: Dunno, but it could be a mess.
Etc.
And what, pray tell, are they without a gun? Are you actually saying that having a gun to defend yourself with attracts being attacked? That criminals prefer hard targets over soft ones?
You make no sense. Your postings reek of that fear of guns that makes them mythological creatures which attract, rather than deter, violence. Like they emit some magical magnetic force that causes all gun-toting people to coalesce into some maelstrom of violence that leaves those without guns safely outside the stor
Alfred, having a gun doesn’t make you more of a target, it makes you a target that must be attacked with deadly force. If you are a standard unarmed citizen, the bad guys come up and say “gimme the dosh or I push your face in..”. You back down and they make off with your wallet. Bad news. But you live to see them on Crimewatch, if you’re lucky.
If you have an obvious gun (or are assumed by default to have one, as in the US), they come up to you and pop a cap into you without the tedious conversation, and then they make off with your wallet. Even worse news.
Now, as your posts are getting pretty personal, I am not going to reply to you any more, because otherwise I might let my mask of polite urbanity slip….
oops…sorry, the second para of my post was a quote from Alf too…..
John Ellis: you’re either snarking at Perry or you don’t understand what he’s saying. Private ownership of guns is always good for the gun-owner, but it’s only good for society when the law-abiding can get guns more easily than the crooks. Since good people outnumber bad, armed good people will suppress gun violence.
When private guns have to be obtained illegally, by definition the majority will be in the hands of the less-than-scrupulous. This feeds gun violence.
it’s a paradox, but the way to short-circuit a runaway “gun culture” is gun legalization.
Since when has Bush’s government been demure about barging into local affairs? After all, it’s the government, and it’s here to help.
If you have an obvious gun (or are assumed by default to have one, as in the US), they come up to you and pop a cap into you without the tedious conversation, and then they make off with your wallet.
John, how exactly do they do this if you have a gun? You just let them shoot you? Let’s say you are a criminal in a gang roving around. You see two people. One has something you want and a shotgun. One has something you want and no gun. Which one do you attack? You wouldn’t “take out” the guy with gun, because you might get shot while doing so! Yes, the gang will almost undoubtedly win, but some of them will almost assuredly get shot. Why risk it? Hit the soft target and bypass the hard one. Does that not make sense to you?
You ascribe a warrior mentality to criminals that is completely inappropriate. They do not want to get shot. They are thugs who wants easy pickings. There are plenty of soft targets (unfortunately). Why take risks?
none and JT, I’ve been to busy arguing with A.E.N. to comment on what you had said. Now I will:
None: I agree totally.
JT: Ditto. Proportionally, much more of a deal. I am not familiar with the exact effects of that quake, but everything that I have read suggests it was relatively worse.
It is amazing that 100 years later the Feds seem less able to cope, but perhaps things were more coherent then? I don’t mean a right/left, market/statist point by that, I just mean that there was perhaps a greater feeling that the government owed a citizen more protection/recovery aid than seems to be the administration’s feeling in the US today…What do you think?
Alfred, as you are now being less personally confrontational (and just dissing my ideas, which is fine), I will answer you:
If you are the standard US citizen, you are not walking around with a shotgun all of the time. You might (illegally in most States I believe) have an easily-obtained concealed weapon, or you might have one in your bedside drawer. The point is, a bad guy who is coming up to you in the street or breaking into your house has to assume it is very likely that you DO have a gun somewhere close by. Before you can draw it/open the drawer for it, he is better off shooting you just in case…
In your example, I suggest that the criminal/criminal gang might go for the armed citizen first (to take out the only significant threat first), take what they want from him, then take from the unarmed guy. They would probably shoot him as well in that scenario, to remove a possible witness to the first killing.
OK, I am suggesting motives to a criminal that I can’t prove, and have no firsthand experience of, but it seems pretty logical to me, especially in a law-and-order-breakdown scenario like NO right now…
John Ellis: you’re either snarking at Perry or you don’t understand what he’s saying. Private ownership of guns is always good for the gun-owner, but it’s only good for society when the law-abiding can get guns more easily than the crooks. Since good people outnumber bad, armed good people will suppress gun violence.
When private guns have to be obtained illegally, by definition the majority will be in the hands of the less-than-scrupulous. This feeds gun violence.
it’s a paradox, but the way to short-circuit a runaway “gun culture” is gun legalization.
Julian, I’m not sure what you mean by “snarking”, but I pobably was..;-)
I would dispute your analysis, though. To say that owning a gun is always good for the gun-owner seems strange. If it leads a person hostile to him, or one covetous of his possessions to attack him with pre-emptive deadly force, it might be rather a bad thing.
Replace “gun” with “(alleged) WMD”, and ask Saddam how he feels about that! It works on a personal level too….
Damn, can’t get my head around these quote tags…maybe it’s Mozilla/Firefox, as well. Anyway, Julian, I’m sure you’ve worked out how my reply was meant to be formatted.
The Wild West was ofen held up to be a society where you were either polite or dead (18th Century aristocratic Europe, too), as everyone (or everyone who mattered) was armed.
But both were extremely violent places and times. Do you want to see those tmes again?
Back to the topic of finger pointing. I was just now watching an interview with the (democrat) president of Jefferson Parish, LA. He made some amazing claims including having his communications cut by an agent of FEMA (he said he had it restored and had his sheriff place an armed guard on it) and being invited by the US Coast Guard to come and get 1000 gallons of diesel fuel. Which, on arrival he was prevented from collecting by agents of FEMA.
I was tempted to write this off as politics and blame passing, but started checking it out.
Jefferson parish (sort of like county) runs from the gulf coast of the delta, up north through the delta and appears on my map to include western New Orleans and part of Lake Ponchartrain.
I read and re-read the White House press release several times
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/08/20050827-1.html(Link)
and it appears that Jefferson parish was inexplicably left out of the FEMA and Homeland Security authorization.
Could the parish president have been telling the truth? It doesn’t seem conceivable to me, but is it possible some bureaucrat is enforcing the letter of the law? Not being included in the order, Jefferson parish doesn’t qualify?
This doesn’t seem even imaginable (I am naive, though). Can anybody add anything substantive?
John, you seem to have certain heavily entrenched pre-conceived notions about the behaviors of criminals that I utterly disagree with. I don’t know what else to say to you, other than to try and place yourself in the criminal’s shoes and think of whether you’d actually risk getting killed in order to “neutralize” a gun-owning target. It’s not a war and there are no fronts, and these are not soldiers. They don’t behave like them. They are predators. Predators don’t hunt the strongest member of a herd–they target the weakest.
John Ellis,
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=161637(Link)
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/493636.html(Link)
And if you want something looking at Britains experience,
http://www.reason.com/0211/fe.jm.gun.shtml(Link)
John, you seem to have certain heavily entrenched pre-conceived notions about the behaviors of criminals that I utterly disagree with. I don’t know what else to say to you, other than to try and place yourself in the criminal’s shoes and think of whether you’d actually risk getting killed in order to “neutralize” a gun-owning target. It’s not a war and there are no fronts, and these are not soldiers. They don’t behave like them. They are predators. Predators don’t hunt the strongest member of a herd–they target the weakest.
So Alfred, how do you explain people taking pot-shots at rescue helicopters and the like?
There are two arguments here: the criminal one, and the average citizen one. Motivations, whilst I don’t pretend to understand them all, differ.
Midwesterner, I am still checking out some of those links. However, I looked at the last, first, and this leapt out:
In the two years since Dan Rather was so roundly rebuked, violence in England has gotten markedly worse. Over the course of a few days in the summer of 2001, gun-toting men burst into an English court and freed two defendants; a shooting outside a London nightclub left five women and three men wounded; and two men were machine-gunned to death in a residential neighborhood of north London. And on New Year’s Day this year a 19-year-old girl walking on a main street in east London was shot in the head by a thief who wanted her mobile phone. London police are now looking to New York City police for advice.
Please tell me how private gun ownership would have helped in ANY of these scenarios…Except in the machine-gunning case, where the tactical issues are completely undefined (and vs machine guns one would have needed pretty heavy ordnance to have made a difference), I cannot see how the victims would have been better off, had they been carrying…
Right, so are you are saying that criminals who are already armed (and I assume you would conceed that criminals will be armed regardless of the law) would be less likely try and use force if their potential victims were unarmed? So the ‘curl up in a ball’ defence is what you suggest? Sorry but I cannot help thinking you really do not live in the real world (I lived through the LA riots and although I did not actually use my handgun, I did do some damage to my car when some gentlemen tried to get me to stop. My place of work did not did not get looted because our neighboring store’s owner stood on the roof next door with a rifle).
But hey, lets not let mere reality get in the way of your world view.
John,
Start with the second one. It’s a good thumbnail sketch.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/493636.html(Link)
After that, check out the study.
New York City is the absolute last place to go for advice. They started the gun laws in this country and they have some of the worst crime to show for it.
Uh, John, rescue helicopters aren’t armed. Your question actually perfectly reinforces my point. If a criminal in NO feels like taking a shot at a helicopter as a lark, he has nothing to worry about. It’s not like a .50-cal or Vulcan cannon will obliterate his firing station as soon as he takes the shot. If they sent in Apaches, Cobras, or armed Blackhawks I seriously doubt they’d take shots at them (assuming that the ROE allowed them to fire back).
Midwesterner, I have now looked at your other links. I find them unconvincing. However you cut it, there seems to be more citizen-on-citizen gun crime/gun incidents in a culture like the US, than in the UK.
I have batted this one around with Perry for years. I accept that in societies like Switzerland, things work out differently.
It is maybe more down to culture than to the availability of guns, and that is as far as I would go. I still think, within a given culture, more widely available firearms mean more firearms incidents.
We may have reached the same old impasse, here. I will respect your view, but beg to differ. And I prefer my own (UK) gun-lite culture, to the US alternative. The recent happenings in Louisiana have only reinforced that.
I have no idea where the blame should fall, I just think that it is interesting to see the crap hand that the Feds have to play and I suspect they will do their damdest to spread the misery around. Net result is less trust in the state generally. That works for me.
Also wrong. If a crim thinks you are armed, they will most likley just go look for someone who is not armed. No great surprise there because unlike what you seem to think, most people in the USA are not armed.
Argosy, you miss my point. Against an armed criminal, having (probably) a concealed weapon is no real help. Quite the converse: if he wants to rob you, he will kill you first, on the offchance you might have a weapon.
And I don’t concede that the criminal would ALWAYS or even usually be armed in a non-gun culture. See my earlier posts. (“gimme the dosh…”). You might lose your wallet, but rarely your life.
Alfred, so you are saying that all civil helicopters should be armed with Vulcans or Air-to-surface missiles, to deter the crazies and enable private gun ownership? Please, you can’t be serious….
Perry, concealed weapons are common in many States, I gather. Even legal in some. So are you saying that there are no muggings in those States?
Also, does the fact that you may have a gun in your bedside drawer mean that there are no burglaries in the US? No, it6 just means that the burglar is more likely to carry a gun too.
I don’t suggest that pre-emptive deadly force is always used in a gun-prolific culture, just that it is more likely to be.
Net result is less trust in the state generally. That works for me.
Less trust generally, or does it get transferred? To Smith & Wesson, perhaps?
😉
Except you dont know what you are talking about. I haven’t heard of any “precautionary” shootings by criminals but I have heard of lots of account of guys avoiding houses with NRA stickers in the windows or on their cars. Most people who get shot are because the bad guy is hopped up on crack and that is exactly why I have no intention of hoping they are just a “normal” mugger”.
In areas where lots of homeowners have guns, there is less crime, that is well known. It is the combination of property ownership and being armed that makes a community safer. It is no coincidence that on the Projects, where no one owns anything and the state does all it can to make it hard for law abiding people to be armed, that weapons are usually owned by criminals.
Kinda like large areas of Louisiana really.
“No, it6 just means that the burglar is more likely to carry a gun too.”
No, it actually means that burglars go for houses that they can be sure are not occupied, unlike Britain.
“more widely available firearms mean more firearms incidents.”
What do you mean by firearm incidents? The majority of firearm uses in the US are defensive, either by state officials, or private citizens. The latter are underreported because the people in question fear (quite rightly) official harassment.
Do you include suicides, thinking perhaps that someone who would shoot himself won’t jump off a cliff, or hang himself.
Accidents too?
“So are you saying that there are no muggings in those States”
“Also, does the fact that you may have a gun in your bedside drawer mean that there are no burglaries in the US?”
There is proportionally less crime in those states.
Resorting to the ultimate false dichotomy (perfection or total failure) only shows the weakness of your ‘argument’.
“And I prefer my own (UK) gun-lite culture”
With violent crime skyrocketing. Sooner you than me.
Alfred, so you are saying that all civil helicopters should be armed with Vulcans or Air-to-surface missiles, to deter the crazies and enable private gun ownership? Please, you can’t be serious….
I wasn’t saying that at all, John. I was saying that the looters felt comfortable shooting at these aircraft because the aircraft were unarmed and they knew there would be no consequences.
Perry, concealed weapons are common in many States, I gather. Even legal in some. So are you saying that there are no muggings in those States?
John, concealed carry is legal in some 40 states (approx.) with about 36 or 37 of those being “shall-issue”. This means that if you request a concealed carry permit and are not a criminal, they MUST give you one. These states often have very low crime rates.
I think that you are set in your ways, John, but maybe Perry, Argosy, and Midwesterner can convince you. However, I must go, because I am going clay shooting shortly. Really. And the only violence comitted will be against small clay disks who have it coming anyway.
John,
You must be a blazingly fast reader.
Seriously, at least take the time to look at Table 3, and Table 7.
Anecdotes and intuition up the wazoo, read the data.
It sounds to me that you believe the sun revolves around the earth and Galileo must die. I’m surprised Perry had the patience.
It must be frustrating for you to try and make a case when the data is against you and your only weapons are anecdotes.
“And the only violence comitted will be against small clay disks who have it coming anyway.”
What did they ever do to you?
“The cops and the Marines are the only hope NO has right now to restore “normality”, I guess.”
I think you mean the National Guard….the U.S. military cannot act in law enforcement capacity unless martial law is declared…and that is determined by Congress, and I believe that would become a nationwide act. I don’t think we want the military taking over law enforcement matters in peacetime.
Gosh, so many different arguments to rebut! Well, like Alfred, I have other things to do now, but I’ll try to get back to this tomorrow. I don’t want to be accused of running away before superior enemy forces!
Alfred intuits correctly, I suppose. I am set in my ways, like Perry, MidWesterner and the rest of you, maybe. But it’s been a nice discussion for the last hour or two.
(Why is it that Perry’s blogs always spark the most comments?)
However, I will try to respond properly to all your points later. For now, suffice it to say that not everyone with Libertarian leanings is an NRA-supporter…
John Ellis, you are so wrong.
On Tuesday August 30th the US blog Capital Freedom posted a piece questioning the police order that the citizens of NO should either leave their legally held fire arms at home or surrender them to police before being allowed into the Superdome to take shelter against Katrina.
This was before the levees broke and disorder erupted. I thought at the time, “What a strange topic to discuss with all the other things going on.” How wrong I was to think that. Anyway I added a comment to the disarmament thread, and I believe that my post of 30th August contains more common sense than your “after the event” ideas:
“The US, until recently at least, was one of the last bastions of freedom on this planet, with a key part of this being that it’s citizens had the right to bear arms. The US is now going down the liberal route where only the criminals are “allowed” to be armed.
I will side with Capital Freedom on this issue. For every thieving scumbag who might have carried a firearm into the stadium I would like to think that there would have been perhaps 100 honest citizens, equally armed. That’s the sort of ratio I like.
And what about the old liberal argument, “If someone is mugged and they are carrying a gun, someone (be it the mugger or the disarmed victim) is likely to get killed. Therefore we should ban all firearms.” The first part of this statement is true, and I could live with that, but the conclusion is false. It breeds a sick society where the old and the weak are frightened to walk the streets, and the criminal classes take control.”
“And the only violence comitted will be against small clay disks who have it coming anyway.”
What did they ever do to you?
Sheriff, didn’t you know? Those “small clay disks” also known as “clay pigeons” are an invasive species. It’s our environmental obligation to eradicate them.
Something weird with the italics. As posted, Sheriff’s “what did..” remark was in italics.
“Sheriff, didn’t you know? Those “small clay disks” also known as “clay pigeons” are an invasive species. It’s our environmental obligation to eradicate them.”
Thought so.
“Something weird with the italics. As posted, Sheriff’s “what did..” remark was in italics.”
No here. What browser are you using?
Re: The preceeding 47 posts
Whatever.
Jon
People are _never_ going to get bored of the pro-gun anti-gun debate, are they? No matter how many times every argument on every side is repeated, and no matter how obvious it is that none of those arguments change anybody’s position, they are _still_ going to be repeated endlessly until the heat death of the universe. The horror, the horror.
ME version 6.0.2800
I c&p your entire post, reselected it in the window and hit the italics button. I never bothered to preveiw.
J,
Speak for yourself. Some of us learn from debates and change our views. Maybe not very often, but it does happen.
Midwesterner: I looked at the document to which you and one previous commenter linked, and at this map of LA parishes: http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/la/laparmap.html
It seems to me that the Jefferson parish was by no means the only one excluded from that document, but rather that all counties to the east of that line were, i.e. it looks like it was assumed that hurricane would land sufficiently far west of NO and the parishes that surround it. Of course, it does not negate your point about a bureaucrat enforcing the letter of the law: stranger things have happened.
John Ellis, this is a conversation that might be more usefully resumed when you have actually lived in the US for a while and are able to speak of the so-called ‘gun culture’ and the ‘gun violence’ from first-hand experience. If you have, well, it just doesn’t come through somehow.
Second, I do not believe the completely exceptional circumstances in New Orleans have any bearing on the standard gun-control debate, one way or the other. In an environment essentially deprived of law and law enforcement, people will die violently. Whether at the hands of a very small minority of armed criminals roaming flooded streets unopposed – it just so happens that criminals tend not to comply with gun laws and even own and trade the darn things; imagine that – or by armed citizens attempting to restore some of the lost order, if only by protecting their own backs and property, very clever are those who can confidently predict which scenario would yield a higher body count.
Never mind that the monopoly of force by the state implicitly assumes the consistent and reliable protection of people and property by the former; that is the contract. Denying citizens the use of weapons for their defense when the state is so completely and obviously unable to provide them this protection is as twisted as it’s immoral.
But some will still make such arguments, never mind how irrelevant they might be to the present circumstances. Just like some activist numbskulls brought up global warming the day after the Asian tsunami, as if greenhouse gases caused underwater earthquakes. Intelligent discourse is one of the first victims during a catastrophe, replaced by wouldas, couldas, shouldas, I-told-you-sos and other energetic posturing that would be comical if the situation was not so dire.
Like LoJack transponders on cars, gun ownership can be a deterrent; that burglaries are lowest in those states known for their high rates of gun ownership and laws allowing homeowners to defend themselves and their property with deadly force is no accident.
That you, as a burglar, can also carry a gun is not relevant; that you have to carry a gun for your own safety, raising the odds of a much more serious crime, that is the deterrent; that your breaking into my home now implies the very real risks of a) getting shot by myself – that’s why you carry the gun, remember – or b) having to shoot me first, turning what should have been the theft of a $500 stereo system into a murder, the consequences of which are far worse than your intended crime, will act as a deterrent on even the dimmest of criminals. They’re not all completely stupid, you know (well, except maybe for those who make it on those cop TV shows…).
The very possibility of encountering pre-emptive deadly force raises the cost to the burglar dramatically. That this increases the incentive for him to kill first and steal later would only be a relevant argument if the consequences of his theft remained unchanged, regardless of the number of people he killed during the robbery. Which is not, has never been and never will be the case, except in blind arguments on internet comment boards.
This altered risk environment switches the burglar’s worst-case scenario from a few weeks and months in the local jail to many years in the kind of facility where long-term survival is in fact a challenge. If not the death penalty, depending on who died, how many or where.
The pattern and calculus are simply different. And it’s not just the gun ownership that does it.
It doesn’t follow that gun ownership can deter all crimes or could even do so. But guns can mitigate criminal activity to a very large degree. To take one obvious example, would those Brink’s fund transport trucks be targeted more or less often if its guards were both unarmed and known to be unarmed ? Probably a heck of a lot more often; so often than one would have to be suspicious of the motivation or sanity of anyone applying to drive them.
They can be, and still are targeted from time to time; but not by your friendly neighborhood car thief or burglar; by those few – usually organized crime – willing to take the risks of using deadly force, and even then because a very large sum of money is involved, or so they think. However badly paid and unimpressive those guards may appear, they and their visible weaponry are sufficient to deter casual criminals. A murder rap sheet and the risk of being shot is enough to make them walk away.
Works just the same for burglaries and a few other crimes. If one is going to evaluate the social costs of gun ownerships, all effects have to be accounted for. Unfortunately, neither side of the debate is interested in figuring out the net result, by definition.
My experience of the US is that the correlation between guns and crimes is actually very weak; one only has to compare the respective number of guns per capita in the US – 200 million guns in circulation, I believe – and Europe, next to their respective crime rates, to note this. Guns do certainly affect crime and other patterns – suicides, for instance – but only those whose knowledge of the problem is limited to selective statistics and ‘expert’ media reports seem to have a definite opinion on the matter. Those of us who live in the middle of the alleged ‘gun culture’ every day often have a very different and much more measured opinion.
Perry :
Ummm, seems to me it’s working best for the Al Sharptons, the Michael Moores and all the rest of the hate-mongers.
Does this really suit you ?
Alisa,
Great map. All of my usual ones had to much detail to find county boundaries easily.
Your observation raised a whole new set of questions. If those counties were excluded deliberately, maybe they were added later. So I went looking. They were.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/08/20050829-2.html(Link)
Based on that, I think the areas selected were reasonable and that maybe what I saw on the TV was fabricated. One hopes we’ll find out. He made very specific statements.
Psst, Perry, you might want to close your italics tag!
fFreddy, who says is it working best for them? IS it because they are getting some news coverage? I suspect that people will draw their own conclusions.
Sylvain,
That’s a very comprehensive account and makes perfect sense, but if I might add one more point. With the 200 million guns you estimated in circulation in the USA a lot of people will die from gun crime. (Shock horror to all liberals). But I wonder, and I’m not sure if anybody knows the amswer to this, how many of these deaths are due to gang members, drug addicts, pimps, criminals in general etc. killing each other, or being killed by honest citizens defending themselves and their families?
If possible we should re-run the statistical calculations to include all deaths of innocent victims as a minus in the equations, and all the deaths of the scumbags as a positive in the equations. I’ll bet this would produce a different picture than that presented by the anti-gun lobby.
And just for the edification of the gun fearing Mr. Ellis, Steven den Beste IS American. Had you visited his site, I doubt highly that you would have found any sign that he is opposed to private firearm ownership.
Actually, New Orleans is in many respects the textbook case for not trusting the state, and I do not mean after the hurricane.
For DECADES the NOPD has been riddled with corrupt officers, and the machine politicians did nothing to root them out. For DECADES there have been neighborhoods and federal housing projects run by gangs of rapists, murderers and drug dealers. And the corrupt/fearful police did NOTHING to clear those places out. They were either making a profit off the situation, or feared going into a hostile environment against a foe who would likely outnumber and outgun them. New Orleans is and was a city where known murderers walked the street because members of the state could not protect potential witnesses or refused to risk the fallout of an arrest.
New Orleans was a veneer of quaint custom and mild “Old World” debauchery over a Haiti-esque environment of limited state control and entrenched, violent crime. Katrina just scoured off the veneer.
FEMA’s real failing in the eyes of many Louisianians was taht they did not realize that order was CERTAIN to fail in parts of the city out of sight of armed Law Enforcement/Military personnel, just as soon as the winds died down. Whose fault is that? Well the city was not going to say they are a cesspool of crime, but the feds should not have been so naive as to miss the signs. New Orleans had 6 times the murder rate of Boston, and was the same damn size. Law and Order were clearly not well entrenched.
P.S. In an interview on Saturday, Sept. 3rd the Mayor of New Orleans made a reference to the CIA ‘taking him out’ for complaining to Bush too much. Paranoid much? How well do you think they are/were getting along? Interview was on the ABC affiliate in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, the interview done by the New Orleans station, channel 26.
John Ellis writes: Perry, concealed weapons are common in many States, I gather. Even legal in some. So are you saying that there are no muggings in those States?
Your ignorance is terrifying and augurs ill for Britain if most people think like you. In answer to your question:
Yes. There are, essentially, no muggings on those states. Try to step outside your little trashed out, lawless, circumscribed world and imagine normal society. Few burglaries – and certainly none of them “hot”, happen in states where everyone has a (legal) gun.
You are living in British hell and you can’t understand the real world is not like that. Like a whipped dog. You are grateful for being allowed to breathe. Tony Blair, with five personal bodyguards, took away the physical means for Britons to defend themselves, and the legal means too. As Argosy says, you have been brainwashed into believing the rolled up and cowering method of self-defence works.
You’ve got the Stockholm Syndrome and you’ve got it bad.
Jeez this is a lively one! If my lady and I hadn’t being having a stand up knock down row for most of the day now I would have been in sooner!
I’d like to have been around oh, number two, just after the fuckwit Ellis turned up.
Listen up Ellis. We passed a stupid law over here after Dumblaine(for the rest of you read Columbine) that banned all hand guns. Knee jerk reaction time and all that.
What that did was to force people like my father in law, an old WW2 Para, to hand in his hand guns that he won prizes at Bisley for shooting, to the police for pulping down. Now given what I know about what my father in law went through in the War, there is no person on earth I’d rather entrust a hand gun to.
Now what is the situation in the oh so sanctimonious UK of ELLIS?
Well it’s this. I live in the very civilised city of Bristol in a house most folk cant afford. But I can walk down the hill into St Pauls in five minutes flat and pick up an illegal E European 9mm with ammo, a bag of the drug of your choice and still get change out of £100.
If something like the same happened in Bristol as happened to New Orleans, what do you suggest I beat the looters off with Ellis, Golf clubs and kitchen knives!!!?
Blah blah blah…………com on guys, do grow up. If you feel you are under deadly threat (not uncommon in our wonderful world) you need a “meaningful” deterrent to protect your nearest & dearest, your hard-earned property & yourself. In modern parlance that means a firearm, preferrably fully-automatic, a good cache of ammo & the ability & determination to use it if push come to shove. Your wishy-washy PC masters quoting such ridiculous examples as the Dunblane killings equate you with the mentally challenged perpetrator. Thank you, masters, for your confidence in the good folk who elected you; surrounded, as many of you are. with personal minders for whom we are paying, (including their firearms)
In the many countries in which I have had the good fortune to live, I have always known where to obtain, with a little palm-greasing, a gun, should it have been necessary; and I am good guy. Bad guys, in any society, have absolutely no problem in getting their weapons of choice.
If I am to be attacked I will defend myself with maximum force. Happily, I don’t live in PC Dunblane England, (00.05), so me & mine have a respectable chance of protecting ourselves.
No, no, RAB, you would be done for that, as well. Don’t you remember, you are supposed to ask them what they intend to do and then determine how much force to use. “I say, desist at once, you bounder!” should more than suffice on most occasions, although you may have to occasionally use extremely harsh language.
Anyone who saw how fast the sweet kids full of dreams put their hands up when confronted with a shot gun and how little respect they showed for anything else should be able to grasp what works in a crisis when law and order has completely broken down.
RAB – “We” didn’t pass a stupid law. Control Freak in Chief passed a law, disarming British citizens and taking control for their own lives away from them.
He has also disarmed them with his shutting down of freedom of speech. He has also disarmed them with his frightened multi-culti crap – as though primitives allowed in to our country to squat in Birmingham ghettoes with their chador held shut with their lower jaw and their one remaining tooth add to the greatness of British culture and achievements.
He and his commie cohorts have cowed British people into accepting this alternate, insane virtual reality as real. While motorcycle outriders stop traffic for them sailiing through the lights and endless special privileges …just like the nomenklatura that eastern Europeans got shot of at such a cost.
Mr. Ellis,
To follow on to your question regarding whether fewer muggings occur in concealed carry States, an important point missed was that while there are indeed fewer muggings, there are fewer successful muggings also. And those fewer muggings that are successful happen to the unarmed. The armed are generally more successful in fending off muggings. Fighting back does help, and fighting back with a gun helps even more.
Discarding that gun in the face of a large opposing armed force doesn’t strike me as good for ones future. As has been said, even the large groups of armed looters are picking easy targets rather than risk losing their lives tackling hardier prey. Most of the time, any unexpected resistance sends these kinds packing. Surrender works only when your enemy respects the Geneva Conventions.
And you’re right, anyone can just walk up to you and blow your brains out. The big difference comes when they don’t have the element of surprise. Between the victim with the gun and the one without, it’s clear who is more likely to walk away alive. You also seem fixated on this scenario, too much it seems, given it’s not a common one. Perhaps that’s all that’s left to defend gun-fear on these days.
And as others have said, spend some time over here. Being set in your ways is one thing. Being set in them through false ideas of what another place is like is something entirely different.
Verity,
Do we disagree?
I think not!
May I kiss your hand, it’s been a hard day!
Speaking of visual bugs…
<p><strong><em>Update:</</em>strong>
is at the end of this post, and it’s putting everything after it in bold italics here on Safari. Could someone end it with </em><strong>?
RAB – You go kiss your lady’s hand … It was all your fault, anyway!
Glad we’re in agreement, though.
James, from my own experience … I was visiting a friend’s mother in hospital, because I had promised to do so despite it being in a downtown area of Houston that had largely been abandoned. To get to it and away from it, one had to park and walk under a vast, dark, freeway underpass with huge pilings for perhaps 50 yards. A long way.
Carrying concealed in those days was illegal in Texas, so I took my gun out of my purse (I didn’t normally carry it around, but I was frightened that I had promised to go to this hospital, at night) and carried it by my side.
Suddenly, someone emerged from behind the huge pilings supporting the freeway and walked towards me. We were alone, with cars whizzing by on the road next to this underpass. To attract attention, I’d have had to fling myself into the face of traffic that was all breaking the speed limit because it was an unattended area. It was me, with the traffic thundering overhead on the eight-lane freeway and road traffic streaking past, and him.
He was obviously focused on me, the only other person on foot in this unlit, abandoned area, as he walked towards me. I kept walking, so as not to show fear, and I raised my gun and pointed it at his head. He had second thoughts and veered off to the side. I kept walking and kept the gun at that level, turning around a couple of times, until I got to my car, got in, got it started and drove like hell. With no gun, I would have been raped or dead for drug money.
With no gun, I would have been raped or dead for drug money.
And I’m damn glad you had it. Mr Ellis, it seems, is happy to sacrifice you and others like you on the altar of the world he wishes to live in.
None of us live in that world, not even he, as much as his thinks current day Britain is it.
Can we have rather less of the name calling please. If you disagree with John, please play the ball, not the man.
Folks, Mr Ellis seems nice enough, don’t let’s attack him personally. It’s rude, and it’s bad logic.
Heh, GMTA.
I feel more safe or less safe in direct proportion to the ratio of good guys packing to bad guys packing.
I can give you an informed estimate that at least 1 in 4 of the households on my road carry a very high risk of lead poisoning for house breakers.
That makes me safer. Criminals don’t know how to tell which houses are easy targets.
And to pick up on something from earlier in the post, in the non gun controlled parts of my state, breaking into an occupied house is so rare that if someone does, it is immediately assumed that the occupant was the target.
It just doesn’t happen outside of gun controlled areas. And it’s amazingly rare in even them. Crooks are far more risk adverse than gun control advocates will believe.
And Verity, by doing that you made everyone else safer, as well.
Point well taken; however easy or tempting the target, let’s get back to the topic at hand. However ill-informed or wrong-headed he may be in his rather predictable opinions – or lack thereof – we have let Mr Ellis hijack the conversation for a wee too long.
I do not quite get what has or hasn’t gone on with the State Of Louisiana. Yet other things are even more puzzling. Before he broke down on camera during Meet The Press on NBC this morning, the President of Jefferson Parish claimed that FEMA turned down a bunch of trucks carrying water sent by Wal-Mart; supposedly, they were not needed. He made it sound as if they were one of the first to react and wished the government could be as efficient as Wal-Mart.
(You know things are bad when such opinions can be voiced without Tim Russert shutting you up). I just can’t sort out the multiple and conflicting layers of confusion anymore. But it does sound like there is in fact ample ground for finger pointing. Whether it can be resolved into anything relevant or useful is a bet I will not take.
Sylvain, I watched that same interview and made a post at 5:58 answered by Alisa at 8:56 and followed up by me at 9:37.
I’m about as cynical as it gets when someone points a camera at a politician, (I was raised a republican in Chicago) but this was definately an interview in need of fact checking.
If the three claims you and I recall, Wal-Mart water, communications cut, Coast Guard diesel denial, are true, there must be something really wrong. If they are false, then that was one of the worst pieces of political conduct I’ve seen.
While we’re pointing fingers, check this out from the Red Cross (via Instapundit)
A city under siege, indeed! Starve ’em out…
I’m not so sure it is just a question of guns or not. It depends on the cultural context.
Maybe it is just differential reporting, or my defective memory, but I don’t recall much about “predators” in the aftermath of the Christmas tsunami in Sri Lanka or Thailand. Some government corruption and incompetence, yes, but not the victims of the disaster turning on each other. (Surely there were enough international tourists around that it would have been noticed in the media.)
It is not the presence of guns that makes certain portions of the US (and now small areas of the UK) full of violence, and inclined to unleash a Hobbesian war of all against all at any breakdown of state authority. Rather that strain of uncivlization, and fear of it, is a contributing factor to the love of guns there.
Historically the culture of the South has been more violent, both individualistically and institutionally (the militarism, the lynch-mob, the most brutal penal systems) than other parts of the country. And it has maintained greater social divisions, even while the New South has bloomed around, say, Atlanta and the Texan Gulf Coast.
Despite the server-farms of Baton Rouge, Louisiana has been more Old South, than New South. That could be why things have been so bad there. Guns don’t kill people, people do–but more so if the people concerned are used to living by gun-law.
Midwesterner: “lead poisoning”? LOL!
So far WaPo’s coverage seems the least biased (although they still cannot resist an occasional stab at Bushitler), and the most informative. From what I gather so far, and from what I know about politicians and bureaucrats, there will be plenty of blame to share for both Washington and LA authorities. But, the ultimate blame should obviously lie with the French.
Guy, maybe it was less obvious but I somehow doubt there was no every-man-for-himself predation in those areas where assistance was late. There is nothing cultural about that; it’s plain human.
Rapes, beatings and stabbings happened in the Astrodome…people had been disarmed before they went in. Is anyone here actually suggesting that criminals naturally attack armed people over softer targets? Or tha the criminals had legal guns?
The suggestion that the people shooting at rescue helicopters and boats were those wanting rescue is ludicrous. There were pre-existing gangs roaming the streets protecting their turf from all outsiders.
The latest rant from the idiot mayor NOLA to the BBC about FEMA and the Administration is that they are racist and classist. He is so desperately trying to deflect blame from himself he is coming across as hysterical.
Andrew, the suggestion that helicopters were being shot at by citizens is not only non-sensical, but also totally unproven; yet it is being made here and there. Some will assert just about anything to support their pre-established prejudice.
In this instance, it was suggested that drug gangs could not possibly be the guilty party since there is no ‘profit’ in acting this way. But what ‘profit’ would your average stranded citizen derive from such actions ? No rational explanation is offered. What ‘profits’ are drug gangs making in a flooded city full of poor people with nothing anyway ? No idea either. That criminals, given the temporary opportunity to shoot at will with near complete impunity, would be ready and willing to shoot at anything even remotely resembling authority doesn’t even seem to occur to this poster.
The marshalling of unproven – and quite possibly unprovable – assertions to support incoherent reasoning underneath a pre-established, prejudiced conclusion is fairly common, as we know. It can, in times like these, take a surreal tone.
Still. Yesterday, five individuals were shot by the police in New Orleans, after engineers from the Army Corps were shot at. But somehow, someone out there believes that those engineers were probably fired at by mere citizens on a gun power-trip; because guns make otherwise rational people do such things, you see. Wild.
John Ellis’s views are the result of an officially sanctioned policy in the UK which has been going on since the Firearms Act 1920. The official view is that it is too dangerous to the security of the state to allow the common people to have access to arms for their defence, despite this right being protected by our Bill of Rights.
As originally enforced, the 1920 Act did allow the wealthy and well connected to own guns for self-defence, on the secret grounds that in time of crisis these people would be “friends of the government”. After 1945 this policy gradually changed (never the actual law, note, just its interpretation by state officials); this culminated in a memorandum circulated to all police forces by the Home Office in 1968, instructing them that there were no valid grounds ever to approve an application to own arms for self-defence.
In the light of this 85 year process, it is hardly surprising that John Ellis, like so many Brits, has no knowledge of guns, no experience of living in an armed society, and no conception that it is legally and morally valid to own and use arms in self-defence.
To imagine, as he does, that in a scenario whereby law and order has broken down, and all law enforcement officials have abandoned you, you might actually be safer unarmed just shows how deep is the mindset which rejects self-defence and self-reliance. It displays a rather touching faith that a mob of looters, faced with an unarmed and defenceless person, will be happy merely to take his or her possessions, with no thoughts of rape or murder.
I am looking forward to a programme on Radio 4 tonight (Document, 8.00pm), which looks at official concerns about the role of the Home Guard during the war. Faced with the threat of invasion, even the British establishment had to hold its nose and arm the people. But they were not happy about it, because they simply did not trust the people with arms. I have always thought that this was behind the decision to disband and disarm the Home Guard in November 1944, before the war was even over. Maybe I was right.
Heavens to Mergatroid Admin! I do apologise.
Having spent the day giving and receiving gratutous insults it had become a bit of a habit by then.
Swipe me! It had clean gone out of my mind how lucky I am to be living in Blairtain, where the sun shines down from a cloudless sky and dear mr Prescott has no intention of turning the Green and Pleasant into mock tudor estates and car parks. Where the gentleman in in question is not wrong, merely almost correct.(I’ve had the Ministry of Truth on the blower and that’s what they say is the proper terminology.Who knew they monitor these sites?)
Hell I live in a perfect land, where all shall have prizes and there is no crime to speak of. Look at these goverment statistics!
I’m sure I will come to see “The Deferred Success” of his remarks sometime in the next century.
Nice one Nancy! Ibet you’re a League of Gentleman fan too.
Verity, I apologised again as usual and all is well.
We guys are just deluding ourselves into believing we have free will.
John K, That people such as John Ellis do not wish to own a gun and choose to remain defenseless in all circumstances is perfectly fine by me. Risk perception varies hugely among individuals; that some prefer to risk beating, rape or even murder rather than a dangerous armed fight – against people who, it must be acknowleged, are likely more experienced at it – is not a choice that is for me to judge. Many do not want to smoke, eat meat or fast-food, and others refuse to fly in airplanes for reasons that can also be based on a distorted perception of the risks and benefits. Whatever works for them.
I don’t mind any of this at all. Until the same individuals demand or support coercive state powers to force the rest of us to comply with their preferences, always in the name of the greater good of society, of course. Which is to say the spurious peace of mind they would derive from our collective conformity to their likes and dislikes.
And I do mind even more when these closet authoritarians try, however shamelessly and incoherently, to use the opportunity of a completely exceptional, unprecedented outlier event to derive or justify the general rule or system they favor.
It is creepy, in the sense of software feature creep. But selecting and sanctioning social feature creepiness is something democratic systems are exceedingly good at.
There is no freedom in Britain. Absolutely none. Except to choose what to look at on TV. Errr … as long as your state-mandated licence fee to view your own television has been paid, of course.
The BBC website ran an unbelievable screed from a British journo whom I think was called Matt Wills, yesterday. In classic socialist fashion, his idea of a useful contribution to the Gulf states disaster was a lecture about the evils of American capitalism from the confines of a condo in Santa Monica. He called NO mayor Ray Nagin “genuinely heroic”. My impression is that Mayor Nagin is incompetent and not up to the overwhelming disaster which befell NO in any way shape, or form.
American TV stations and newspapers were happy to give plenty of coverage to his childish rants against Bush, but hardly a sound was heard concerning the facts that both he and the equally useless Governor Blanco had days of warning about the coming Category 5 hurricane (which “diminished” to a Cat 4 just before it made landfall). Both presumably knew the NO is below sea level, that the levees keeping out the Gulf of Mexico were built to withstand only a Cat 3, and that a huge population of NO live on benefits in subsidised housing and were therefore unlikely to be financially able to do anything to save themselves. They knew that the NO Superdome would be the refuge of last resort, yet no one had the foresight to so much as stock water there, in advance. Hundreds of school buses which could have been utilised to ferry those without alternative means to safety were left idle.
Al Sharpton, always available as the voice of reason in troubled times, accused Bush of hiding during the disaster, while giving Nagin a complete pass for disappearing for days.
Compare Mayor Nagin’s behaviour with that of Rudy Guilianni, who had no warning nor time to prepare whatsoever for the attacks of 9/11. Within hours, he was on the streets with a bullhorn, in sight and in charge as best anyone could be. Mayor Nagin could have done himself and his legacy a world of good by engaging in similar acts of personal leadership while there was still time, before the storm struck; the fact that he didn’t is no one else’s fault but his own.
FEMA shares a huge amount of blame for their bureaucratic addiction to “contracts” at a time when volunteers were ready and willing to provide ad hoc aid. Where I live in Florida, hundreds of air boats used for navigating swamps were offered and were turned down, because they hadn’t been contracted for. All the government speak reassurances that aid is coming in due course doesn’t cut any ice (no pun intended) with people who have watched their children go without water for two days, as happened ALL OVER the affected gulf states, not just NO.
That people such as John Ellis do not wish to own a gun and choose to remain defenseless in all circumstances is perfectly fine by me
Sylvain:
The point I am making is that I do not feel John Ellis “chose” any such option. Probably three or four generations of his family have grown up since the passage of the original Firearms Act 1920. For 85 years, with only a brief interlude between 1939 and 1945, the British state and all its supporters have stressed that armed self-defence is not legitimate, that it is wrong to own a gun for any reason other than strictly defined sporting reasons (and even then, the state reserves the right to ban any class of gun it dislikes), and that the UK does not have, has never had, and does not want, a “gun culture” (which they never define, apart from panicky allusions to “what it’s like in America”).
John Ellis’s preference for disarmament in the face of disaster is similar to the mindset which lauds the NHS as the best possible health system in the world, despite the fact that no other country has adopted such a system. Just as most Brits think there was no health care in this country prior to 1948, most have no conception, and if told simply cannot get their heads round the fact, that until 1920 there was no gun control at all in this country, that anyone could legally buy guns and carry them for self-defence, and that the right to own arms for self defence was, and still is, enshrined in our Bill of Rights. This information is just so contrary to decades of indoctrination that they cannot take it on board, and I feel that John Ellis may fall into this category.
Nancy – use of the 500 school buses to evacuate those who had stayed behind in a hurricane was an integral part of the New Orleans emergency evacuation plan, worked out in advance.
Instead of following the plan, they left the buses, parked and ready to go, to the rising water. The only bus that got out of NO was the one commandeered by that young black guy Jabbar Gibson, on his own initiative. In case you haven’t read about him, he is 20 years of age and he grabbed the keys out of the office and loaded the bus up with children and eldery people and embarked on a 13 hour drive the 350 miles to Houston. He had to stop for gas twice, and both times he had a whip round and people gave what they could. He delivered all his passengers safely to the Houston Astrodome. Meanwhile, Mayor Nagin was sitting panicked in NO with his thumb up his arse.
Nancy, go to Biased BBC (linked to Samizdata on the left, under Specialist Blogs) and read the 250 comments on Matt Wells and his article.
Truthfully, I don’t care what Mr. Ellis or anyone else thinks.
When law and order breaks down (eg. post-Katrina New Orleans, L.A.’s Rodney King riots), the only way to protect yourself, your family and your property from predation is to be armed. Not to acknowledge this is to be wrong not only on a theoretical basis, but in reality.
Lest anyone be unclear on what happened in New Orleans, gangs of thugs broke into gun stores and looted them of firearms.
What thugs?
Oh… forgot to mention: there was no plan to relocate the prisoners, so all city jails were just thrown open.
One last point: it’s not a few states where concealed guns are legal — it’s the other way round: there are only four states where it is completely impossible to get a carry permit (Illinois, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Kansas) and Washington D.C.
Here’s an interesting personal situation: on 9/11, we were living in the City of Chicago, one door down from a large synagogue, and my 10th-floor window looked down on the entrance. Let’s assume Plan B of Islamist terrorism been to hose down Jewish congregants with AK-47s. In terms of Chicago law, all I could have done was watch the slaughter taking place.
Yeah, right. I had my (quite illegal) assault rifle leaning against the wall next to the window, just in case.
Screw the law, and screw all the stupid theories that an unarmed population is a safe population.
That’s wishful thinking: and it’s wishful thinking of the most dangerous kind.
Even if the New Orleans helicopter was fired on by some morons, that’s ONE incident out of the thousands of chopper flights which have come in and rescued people. One does not pass sweeping legislation based on the statistically-insignificant.
Anyway, we have the Second Amendment. We have a right to be armed, and a pox on any who want to try to take that right away from us.
Verity – thanks for that. I usually don’t bother commenting on the BBC forum, but I did yesterday, because I found the viewpoint so outrageous. Of course, mine didn’t get a look in. I assume that most of those emails from the Biased blog wrote in, as well – it was great to read them there, at least. I’ve never read that one before; I’ll make time for it.
I had heard, briefly, about the man commandeering the school bus; what amazed me was that it wasn’t widely and repeatedly played as the story of initiative and valour that it was. I suspect it is because to do so would contrast the Mayor’s lack of same in too stark a light.
John K, even though the law of the land might not give him much choice in the matter, I assume the man is still as free to choose what he believes in, including these rather familiar european anti-gun tirades, as you and I.
Whether the predictable, if not stereotypical, blindspots in his understanding of the issue are a product of the local social, political and media culture around him does not change anything to that. And however scarce the merits of his anti-gun case, or however strong that of others may be, deriving general rule(s) and comments about this complex debate from such an exceptional event, when so few of the related facts are understood to date, is meaningless and unhelpful.
Your overall point is, however, well taken. I would add that the so-called American “gun culture” is, in my experience, a superficial colloquial construct that has been magnified into a universal stereotype by academia, the media and, it must be admitted, Hollywood movies and TV series. In large parts of the country, guns and gun ownership are simply not an active part of the social culture. There was more of a gun culture among the many hunters of southern France where my family vacationed than in most places I know in the US.
In many areas, I would even argue gun ownership is more tolerated than accepted. Which doesn’t jibe with the very concept of a ‘gun culture’, which implies much more than resigned or passive tolerance.
Nancy – I was puzzled that it didn’t get greater coverage in Britain, too, but I think you’re right. The BBC would probably have loved to run a piece – after all, the guy’s black – but on the other hand, he’s an independent thinker and a decisive type. What’s more, he didn’t just take the bus for himself. He rescued the weak. You are right; this would put dithery Democrats Nagin and Blanco in a terrible light – as indeed, it did in the US. What to do? What to do?
John K, even though the law of the land might not give him much choice in the matter, I assume the man is still as free to choose what he believes in, including these rather familiar european anti-gun tirades, as you and I.
Sylvain,
Although you are right to say that the likes of Ellis have free will, and can make their own minds up, it is still hard to shake off the decades of indoctrination which the British state has encouraged, forbidding any notion that it may be just to use arms in self-defence.
I saw an example of this on TV news tonight. A British family had got back safely to the UK from NO. The dad told how his family had been holed up in their hotel, and how he and the staff had barricaded the place, and patrolled at night to keep out looters. Yet he also said that when offered a gun by a kindly doctor, he had refused, because he was afraid he’d injure himself with it. He just had no way to cope mentally with the prospect of having to use a gun in self-defence. Rather than quickly familiarise himself with the basic operation of a pistol, he preferred to be unarmed, even though he knew his family was in a desperately dangerous situation. He just could not envisage himself defending his family in that way. That’s what the 85 year process of forbidding armed self-defence has done to the psyche of a perfectly normal British guy. He was more afraid of having a gun than of the prospect of a mob of looters getting into his hotel. What can you say?
John K: you exaggerate the role of “environment” in people’s opinions. I’m a Brit, I support gun ownership.
I tell you this: I am less than 30 years old, and yet in (private) school I took .22 rifle shooting lessons as a school activity, and 7.62mm bolt-action rifle shooting lessons with CCF (the school-affiliated branch of army cadets). So it’s entirely untrue that everyone in Britain is somehow gun-ignorant!
I think the reason so many here support disarmament, is not that they’re ignorant (we’ve always seen guns in US films and old war movies), but because they can’t find it in themselves to believe that such uncivilised measures would be necessary. As with NHS, they assume they will be protected. This assumption is deeply enough embedded in Britishness, that mere facts haven’t made much of dent in it yet.
Julian,
As you pointed out, the CCF is largely the preserve, sadly, of the private sector. Can you imagine what the average state school teacher would have to say about the imposition of armed militarism into their school?
It is, as you say, entirely untrue to say that everyone in the UK is gun ignorant. But consider this: only about 1% of the population legally owns a gun, so 99% are fairly gun ignorant. Of the 1% with access to legal firearms, they have had it drummed into them that they only own these guns for sporting purposes. If civil order ever broke down, many gun owners would be too afraid of the legal ramifications to even dare take their guns out of their legally madated gun cabinets. Through cases such as Tony Martin and Linda Walker, the state has made it very clear what it thinks of people who use guns for self-defence. The state does not like it.
Part of the problem in the UK is that most people get all their knowledge about guns from the movies. They may see Bruce Willis using a gun, but cannot imagine they would ever need one. And thanks to Phoni Toni, anyone even mildly interested in guns will not even be able to buy an inert replica. The other problem, as you say, is that thanks to 85 years of state mandated disarmament, they imagine somehow that the state will protect them. Wrong. It will protect el Presidente and Cruella, but if the shit ever hits the fan, the little people are on their own, and ringing 999 will get you a recorded message inviting you to kiss your arse good bye. And at that point, when it is a little too late, people might begin to realise that the state disarmed them in 1920 for its own good, not theirs, and whether they live or die is their problem, not its.
Sylvain Galineau writes,
From the reports we have received in the UK those “profits” were being made from extortion by those very same gangs. Initially from tourists and others in the dome being threatened with rape or violence if they didn’t pay up and later from those same people being extorted for cash in exchange for a place on the evacuation buses to Houston. One group of 3 girls reported here that one of the ‘gang’ members was in uniform …
Not the nicest place for a holiday I would guess, and certainly not a place I would ever visit again.
John Ellis said
Do you really think that criminals and various drug gangs would shooting at rescue helicopters? Where’s the profit?
I suggest that the profit lies in delaying the rescue efforts which would eventually put an end to the conditions that make looting, robbing, raping, and generally lording it over people that otherwise would not respect you, possible.
Sporklift Driver
A question for you Brits: Just how bad IS the BBC? Are they capable of rigging something like this?
(Link)
(Sorry, but my computer skills are not up to the task of extracting the URL where the video is placed. But if you scamper through the website linked above really fast, just skimming quickly down the first entry and then clicking on the words, “here’s a direct link,” you won’t get any on you. Promise.)
If the BBC didn’t script the Lt. Commander’s comments, politics in the U.S. are about to get really, really interesting.
It’s the BBC wilfully failing to point out (or misundertstanding) the federalized sructure of the USA. Everyone, including the prez, was waiting on a “go” from the locals – and they weren’t giving it.
RAB: You killed me with the “Heavens to Mergatroid” haven’t heard that since Jan whined, Marcia, Marcia, Marcia.
Thanks for the flashback.
I’m so overloaded from Hurricane reports, I decided to listen to this short video today sent by a friend to “blank out” and remember some good in life.
MOVIE:
http://www.youarelovemovie.com
If you have 2 minutes, blank out and relax. Life has been chaotic this year!
Oh, I am a firm believer in MY right to own a gun. That said, I won’t explain my reasons.
Just… because.
🙂
Well the Beeb’s beatification of the mayor and the governor may in fact back-fire. This is especially the case since ABC has done a poll and Bush’s approval for handling the event is 55%. The polling on how NOLA and LA handled the situation is rather more dire.
There is quite a bit of evidence including this demonstrating how badly the mayor performed.
OK, sorry I have been away so long. I feel like I’m holding up my end of the argument by myself, but I’ll try to respond to the most relevant posts. Sorry if I’ve missed anyone out…
John East:
And what about the old liberal argument, “If someone is mugged and they are carrying a gun, someone (be it the mugger or the disarmed victim) is likely to get killed. Therefore we should ban all firearms.” The first part of this statement is true, and I could live with that, but the conclusion is false. It breeds a sick society where the old and the weak are frightened to walk the streets, and the criminal classes take control.”
You could live with either the mugger or muggee being killed (over a few quid/dollars)? OK, we are on different planets. I respect your right to a different opinion but, there seems no point in further argument.
J: You might be right, but it’s still worth talking. Better jaw, jaw, than war, war. Although not every one here would agree, perhaps…;-)
Silvain: I have lived in the US, but only on the wussy East Coast. I disagree with the general tone of your argument, but it’s all anecdotal, I concede. In Britain (have you ever lived here?) if such an event occured, I believe you wouldn’t get a general breakdown in law and order in the first week. Even if/when you did, if would be fisticuffs rather than gunfire in most cases…
I also concede that burglars are not indifferent between felony and murder raps. But if thet know their life is on the line when they break into a citizen’s house, they are more likely to be (1) more determined – so I agree that home guns might be a deterrent – but (2) more ready to use deadly force if confronted.
In the public arena, those badly-paid security guards are a mild deterrent. If they are armed, it makes little difference. The crimial who decides to go for them will simply gear up appropriately.
As I have already said, culture makes a huge difference. Switzerland is hugely different from both the UK and the US. But if you compare crime between the US and the UK, compare GUN crime, not crime generally.
Verity: Ho hum. I don’t think I can be bothered…Oh, yes I can. My society is neither trashed out or lawless. Too many laws, maybe. But rather that than the armed anarchy of the US when the State fails. I hate Blair too, but the society I want to see is just that, not a group of nervous and itchy-fingered militiamen glowering at their neighbours over their garden fences. (Yes, I know I exaggerate to make the point..)
Enough for now, I will try to address the other 30-odd posts excoriating me tomorrow….;-)
John Ellis:
If you think anyone is going to try and read all that, you are seriously mistaken.
Actually, John K, I did read it. I was looking for any reference to facts. I didn’t even find any anecdotes this time.
THere was, however, a whole lot of speculation and presumption with out any stats to back it up.
He really is handicapped in this debate, being denied the use of facts.
We’ll have to see what tomorrow holds. I’ll read it.
none, to clarify, the US military (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines) cannot operate within the United States without explicit permission from state government. In Florida (which was directly hit, to the point where towns simply do not exist any longer) things are comparatively fine because the Governor and local authorities gave permission immediately. This didn’t happen in Louisiana.
Also, the National Guard is under the control of the state government, unless and until it is federalized. See above for what needs to be done for that to happen.
Except that simply is not true. Places with armed guards (banks, for example) are only attacked by specialized armed bank robbers (the same is true in the UK it would seem) and it happens quite rarely. Retail or Office properties with armed guards however (even poorly paid rentacops) are hardly ever attacked as banditos just go somewhere else where the chance of getting shot is a great deal lower. Armed guards are a very big deterant indeed and it matters very much if they are armed or not. Criminals DO NOT LIKE GETTING INTO GUNFIGHTS.
John K, Midwesterner,
When the debate progresses to the exchage of links, references and statistics, it gets too boring for most, including me. However, for your delectation (after all of 2 minutes of research, so there might well be imperfections in these sources):
1) Relative incidence of gun crime in the UK. You can find a US source to compare with, I’m sure, but I doubt it’ll beat it. http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/guncrime.pdf(Link)
2) Gun crime reduction in Australia, subsequent to toughening of gun control laws.
(Link)
But it seems to me that either what I’m saying makes intuitive sense to you, or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, no amount of stats will change your mind. That’s why I have been arguing anecdotally.
Anyway, I have no more time to devote to this old chestnut, and had better do some real work before I get fired! One parting shot (as this was all sparked by Perry’s note advocating gun ownership to mitigate against a breakdown in society – as opposed to my view, which is that it accelerates such a breakdown):
If you can’t agree that the situation is more violent and deadly in NO than it would be likely to be in an equivalent UK city in a similar situation (and this IS theoretical, unless someone floods Liverpool to settle the issue), then I simply can’t converse with you about this any more. Our starting positions are too far apart.
All the best with your tooled-up society – but please don’t bring it over here….
One thing that we might usefully agree on, is that in a society with more lax gun control, there are fewer of certain crime types, but more gun-related crimes.
This is maybe a starting point for a more reasoned choice between alternatives…
John Ellis,
Thank you for the fascinating links. Lots of data!
It appears that all of the press releases were written by gun control advocates, but the data…. wow!
It’s going to take me some time to go through it all and I too, have to work. But I hope to post within 12 hours or so.
Just a quick skim, and it’s pretty obvious that they had their hands full trying to interpret the data in favor of gun control.
Thanks again for the links. More later.
Why even try to compare NO to a UK city? It probably has more in common with Caracas or Sao Paolo than any city in western Europe. It was a violent place before the floods, and a violent place after. And anyone who thinks gun bans keep guns out of the hands of criminals needs their bumps examining.
John Ellis,
You seem a lot like that hunter in the old joke. You don’t come back only for the hunting, do you ?
– How would you know I have ‘only’ lived only on the ‘wussy East Coast’ ? It seems you are once again overreaching for for flawed conclusion based on 1) unproven assertions and 2) the usual shallow stereotypes; fyi, Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia are on the East Coast too and when it comes to gun laws and criminal justice, they ain’t exactly Massachusetts.
– Burglaries are lowest in states that authorize homeowners to own guns and defend themselves and their property, whether you like it or not. The risk of being hurt or killed, as well as the much harsher penalties for armed robbery and murder, act as effective deterrents and have done so for decades. Likewise, car theft is lowest where there are enough anti-theft transponders to increase the odds of vehicle recovery and arrest by an order of magnitude.
You may of course keep refusing whatever evidence does not fit your prejudice and repeat that which superficially seems to supports it, no matter the actual details or relevance of the data.
– As for Brink’s armed guards being a ‘mild deterrent’, as compared to what ? A tank ? An Apache helicopter ? A cruise missile ? Deterrence is relative; unless you state what your point of reference is, your assertion is meaningless.
Yes, those guards would be a very mild deterrent in Baghdad or Mogadishu. Is that where you live ? In the UK – or in the US for that matter – they are in fact quite sufficient to deter most if not all petty criminals, which is all they are meant to do. Of course, if you don’t know or can’t tell the difference between mere theft and armed robbery, there is little point in arguing this point with you either.
Brink’s and their insurer(s) can afford to lose 1 truck in 10,000 to those very few willing, able and ready to use an RPG-7 and heavy weaponry in broad daylight. They can’t afford losing half of them to petty criminals, which is exactly what would happen if their guards were unarmed in unarmored vehicles.
Please answer the original question : would those trucks be more or less likely to be attacked and robbed they were unarmored and their guards were unarmed ? The answer is totally obvious – to anyone rational and honest, at least – regardless of any dismissive and irrelevant assertions of deterrence level, as if you were an expert.
The goal is not to protect the truck against a commando of SAS or an entire airborne battalion with air support; it’s simply to raise the costs of attacking it beyond the reach of the most common criminal : the petty thief. If you can’t grasp this, I’m afraid you can’t tell risk from deterrence.
The criminals who will ‘gear up appropriately’ are those willing to take the risks, from harsher sentences to the non-negligible odds of being hurt or killed by one of these guards. In the end, the truck and its crew do work as an effective deterrent against most threats.
If you disagree, denying once again the obvious and decades of practice and evidence, let me suggest that you follow your own reasoning by opening your own fund transport business using standard vans and trucks with unarmed guards, thereby undercutting Brink’s business with your much lower costs. You could make a killing. (Literally, I’m afraid….) Assuming you could find a customer and hire a single driver to begin with, of course.
– Lastly, I have no issues with comparing gun crimes in the US and the UK, and comparing them with the number of guns in circulation in both countries, as well as the various gun categories. The correlation between gun ownership and gun crime is, in scientific terms, simply weak. Never mind the nature of these crimes, which you of course studiously avoid, preferring to assume that all are innocent random victims.
Never mind that 60% of firearm murders in urban areas are criminals fighting other criminals, mostly gangs. In other words, body counts that would be in no way affected by gun controls. Unless you are daft enough to believe the introduction of such laws would make drug gangs register their artillery. Yeah, and then they will call the cops when another gang steps on their turf. Riiiight.
Only confused, ignorant or prejudiced minds would flatly claim that guns are “the problem”.
Pick one.
Time now Gentlemen perleeze! ‘Avent you any homes to go to!?
Thank you for calling but England will be closed for the 5th Test until sometime on Monday night.
We may all take time out on saturday to have a sing song, last night of the Proms and all that, but business will be resumed as soon as possible.
All calls answered in strict rotation- please leave your message after the tone…
Sorry RAB, I just can’t let it go.
John Ellis, if you’re still there. I diligently perused those links mostly just ’cause I’ve heard a lot of rumors about the success of Australian gun control and wanted to see for myself.
It was a very useful experience. When my comment exceeded 1000 words I stopped. Here’s what I found in an abbreviated nutshell. I would be very nervous for my health if I lived in Australia. The Port Arthur shooting murder of 35 people on April 28, 1996 was quite possibly due to, not in spite of, vigorous gun control laws. Tasmania passed strong gun control laws in January 1993, over three years before Australia as a whole. One of the previous links I gave you covered that connection. So let’s just review regular crime.
Since different states had many different levels of gun control prior to May of 1996, I chose to just look at Tasmania. Their gun controls were enacted earlier so the picture is clearer.
Since gun control measures were enacted in 1993, gun assaults have reduced by 2 per 100,000. Total assaults have increased by 200 per 100,000.
The number of armed assaults as a percentage of all assaults increased from less than 6% to more than 20%! Combine that with the statistic above and what do you get. A lot more armed violence.
Total robbery increased from 7 per 100,000 to ~40 per 100,000! Still feel safer? Curiously during that time gun robbery ~quadrupled and total armed robbery ~tripled!
While incidents of property damage with guns only went up about 25%, total property damage crime rocketed over 371% in four years! Almost 100% per year!!
There is good news. Among people committing suicide, they were less likely to use a gun. Although in Australia as a whole, reductions made in gun suicides were exceeded four times over by increases in overall suicides.
I’ll finish by quoting Israeli criminologist Abraham Tennenbaum’s response to the July 1984 massacre at a McDonald’s in San Ysidro California. He wrote that:
“what occurred at a [crowded venue in] Jerusalem some
weeks before the California McDonald’s massacre: three
terrorists who attempted to machine-gun the throng
managed to kill only one victim before being shot down
by handgun carrying Israelis. Presented to the press the
next day, the surviving terrorist complained that his
group had not realized that Israeli civilians were armed.
The terrorists had planned to machine-gun a succession
of crowd spots, thinking that they would be able to escape before the police or army could arrive to deal with them.”
Even if I choose not to have guns, I am far safer when other law abiding citizens do.
Midwesterner, the interesting thing is that both gun-control and pro-gun advocates use examples – such as the Israeli one you quote – that overstate, and therefore reinforce the implied assumption that guns mostly kill average civilian at random.
Except most data shows guns to be much more likely to be used by criminals against other criminals. Activity which is more likely, all things being equal, if there are more guns in circulation – even if hard to buy, a high number of guns per capita makes it likelier they will get stolen or even lost, for instance – but which is unlikely to be affected by gun-control laws, which will simply hamper those citizens least likely to use guns against others.
Call me insensitive or callous if you wish, but I do not count the violent deaths of drug dealers, pimps and other organized crime thugs as net losses to society. Quite the opposite. Scum killing scum does not bother me.
What about the rest of murders by firearms ? Well, a large proportion of the remainder occurs in those areas where there is already a lot of crime and a larger-than-usual proportion of the population is, as a result, motivated to arm themselves; not only criminals but everyone else in their immediate vicinity. In other words, most these killings occur in those places where guns are already prevalent and most likely to be put to use. Crime produces most gun deaths, either directly, with criminals killing criminals or non-criminals, or indirectly as a reaction or consequence of its intolerable proximity.
Hence the bogus and oft-quoted statistic that having a gun in your house makes it x times more likely that someone will die from a gunshot. Controlling for the few but highly lethal statistically outlying areas where the most likely and avid gun users – gang members these days – reside and therefore encourage the rest to arm themselves, the correlation turns out to be mostly that. Guns do not cause crime. A gun does not and cannot turn anyone into a murderer by its mere presence and existence. In essentially asserting that they can and do, gun-control advocates actually ascribe to them more power than their opponents ever did.
Sylvain,
I would have liked to include the data for that in my comment but I ran up against several institutional obfuscations. Presumably deliberate.
One of the most amazing was in a table of all gun deaths by category. One of the categories was “killed by another”. Not the slightest mention of whether it was cold blooded murder or desperate self defense or gangster to gangster.
I guess it must all be in the eye of the beholder. We must not judge other peoples values, you know. 😉
I decided to avoid the rest of your arguments in my summary because my point was to demonstrate with their own numbers that gun control isn’t just useless. It is a statistically provable danger to our health and safety everywhere, all the time. With virtually no exceptions
OK, this will be my last.
Midwesterner, I actually usually disagree with the general thrust of the argument on both sides. One side claims that guns produce crime, as if an inanimate mechanical object had the power to turn people into murderers. The other claims that guns reduce crime all by themselves, as if the same artifact could produce security and justice. In other wides, both sides assert ad nauseam that correlation is causation.
When the data doesn’t fit these views, appeals to vague or supposedly higher authorities – ‘culture’ being a common one – are heard. So if Switzerland has little gun crime despite a lot of assault rifles stored in homes, it’s conveniently waved away as a cultural issue (see Ellis falling into this popular bit of superstition above; more below).
In fact, the most likely explanation given the data and its distribution is that yes, the more guns going around the system, the higher the number of them – in absolute terms – used for criminal activity, all other things being equal. And therefore the more deaths by firearms. Crime causes most murders, and the higher the absolute number of armed criminals the higher the number of deaths by firearms. No need for grand social theories or complex statistical surveys.
Which means that given a significant, existing population of well-armed criminals, the introduction of gun-control laws is likely to be not only ineffective but counter-productive by denying private citizens the ability and right to defend themselves. By making it harder or impossible for non-criminals to defend themselves, it only makes the criminal population – who will not abide by the gun-control rules, by definition – relatively more lethal.
Once we accept that murder is predominantly the activity of criminal groups and individuals, it follows that the presence of many guns in those areas with very few of them will not have any significant adverse effect per se. Switzerland, a country with historically very low crime rates, and dozens of highly-armed low-crime counties in the US can attest to this.
Moreover, those Swiss citizens who are in fact trusted with the custody of assault weapons are not randomly chosen; broke 18yo losers on drugs with a one-inch thick police record do not serve and come home with a state-supplied firearm. Swiss gun owners are effectively selected among those citizens with a clean bill of psychological and social health; which makes the country a rather atypical example and the appeal to cultural factors not only unnecessary, but entirely spurious. It also does prove that storing a gun in your home does not, in and of itself, make it more likely that someone will be shot under your roof.
In the end, guns do not produce or reduce crime anywhere near as much as either side claims they do. Some types of crimes – burglaries, some armed robberies – will be reduced through deterrence, regardless of John’s and so many others’ incoherent ramblings to the contrary e.g. that burglars are somehow more ‘determined’ by widespread gun ownership. Never mind that the man who arms himself to protect his life and property is also clearly more determined than those who do not; we must also somehow believe that the thief who breaks into a house to steal some jewelry is more ‘determined’ than the man upstairs who gets up at 2am to defend his life, family and property from an intruder. Go figure. When people try and grasp at such improbable straws, you can smell the rhetorical desperation.
To recap, criminal activity is the main source of murder. With a high number of guns per capita, a high number of criminals will end up armed, and there will be more deaths by firearms. Given this and assuming a given country has a low number of guns per head, it may make sense to try and keep that number low by controlling and selecting those who have guns, as in Switzerland. It does not follow, however, that citizens ought to be deprived from the right to defend themselves against armed criminals, with or without a firearm. That is simply immoral.
Likewise, given the present situation in America – a significant, armed, active criminal population – gun-control laws would likely worsen the problem by increasing the proportion of guns in criminal hands relative to the overall gun stock over time.
In either case, the right to defend one’s life with deadly force should be upheld.
Sylvain, thank you for a fairly concise summary of the situation. I would like to briefly clarify one thing, however-
To recap, criminal activity is the main source of murder. With a high number of guns per capita, a high number of criminals will end up armed, and there will be more deaths by firearms.
Most deaths by firearms in the US are suicides, not murders, it is somewhat misleading to conflate them.
rosignol, thanks. I assume it’s somewhat clear here we were focusing on those firearm deaths that are not self-inflicted. Better to make it explicit.
rosignol & Sylvain,
The ratio of law abiding citizens with guns to criminals with guns has a direct causative relation to safety.
Anything that improves the ratio is good.
Anything that worsens the ratio is bad.
This has been the logical side of my case from the very start. If you cannot agree with these three statements, then I think it’s your argument that is flawed.
While I believe there are also philosophical reasons, John Ellis was expressing purely consequential concerns.
The problem is that you have little control on the criminal side of that equation. But it’s a given that gun control has little or no impact on those criminals who are already armed so it’s unlikely to yield a better ratio.
Consequential concerns are OK; it’s the reasoning underpinning them that was the problem here. At least it was my beef. In John’s case, much of it was ultimately either flawed or entirely subjective e.g. the whole argument about burglars being more or less ‘determined’, which is not only entirely unprovable but also irrelevant to risk and deterrence; or the allegation of a Swiss cultural factor to wave away a large and, as it turns out, highly relevant sample that conflicts with many of his stated assumptions.
People can clearly come to the wrong conclusions with the best of initial intentions.
OK I *really* should be out of here. Was a pleasure.