The jury's still out, says Sowell

Okay, so maybe you don't really give a rat's rear end about whether gun control violates the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, or about what the Supreme Court ruled yesterday concerning guns. Maybe you insert your earbuds when people like me get fired up about how gun control would castrate American freedom. "Yeah yeah yeah. Can I like check my Facebook now?"

Let's change the argument, then. In my 28 June blog post, I was arguing against gun control at the ideological level--talking about ideas, like liberty and like the Constitution, which is itself an idea if you think about it, or rather a series of ideas captured on paper at a specific moment, preserved through the written word.

But Thomas Sowell, economic theorist and Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, argues against gun control for more practical reasons. "When you stop and think about it," says Sowell in his article today at Real Clear Politics online, "there is no obvious reason why issues like gun control should be ideological issues in the first place. It is ultimately an empirical question whether allowing ordinary citizens to have firearms will increase or decrease the amount of violence."

Sowell suggests that people reacting to the Supreme Court's decision yesterday upholding the Second Amendment shouldn't get all hot and bothered about it. Instead, they should wait and see how the decision actually influences gun-related crimes.

If the number of crimes decrease, then people can say, "Dude, they were right." (Or something like that.)

If the number of crimes goes up, though, then people should take action...not in railing the judges, but in petitioning Congress to repeal the Second Amendment. The bottom line is that the judges were just ruling according to the Constitution, and if we don't like their ruling, we the people have the ability under the Constitution to change the law "via the ballot box," as Sowell points out.

"Laws exist for people, not people for laws," Sowell says.

Sowell supports the Second Amendment and by extension the Court's ruling because "a vast amount of evidence, both from the United States and from other countries, shows that keeping guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens does not keep guns out of the hands of criminals. It is not uncommon for a tightening of gun control laws to be followed by an increase-- not a decrease-- in gun crimes, including murder."

"Bullcrap," you might be thinking. "This is just like those Teabaggers, trucking out all these annoying little obscure factoids to try to prop up their already bunko argument. How come we never heard of this stuff before anyways?" Glad you asked. Sowell already anticipated your question.

He explains how "a vast amount of evidence, both from the United States and from other countries, shows that keeping guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens does not keep guns out of the hands of criminals. It is not uncommon for a tightening of gun control laws to be followed by an increase-- not a decrease-- in gun crimes, including murder."

"Conversely," he adds, "there have been places and times where an increase in gun ownership has been followed by a reduction in crimes in general and murder in particular."


You asked "how come we never heard of this." Well, as he points out, "Unfortunately, the media intelligentsia tend to favor gun control laws, so a lot of hard facts about the futility, or the counterproductive consequences of such laws, never reach the public through the media.

"We hear a lot about countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States that have lower murder rates. But we very seldom hear about countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States that have higher murder rates, such as Russia and Brazil."


Concerning the Court's decision, then, as the saying goes, "The jury's still out." We the people will just have to wait and empirically prove whether the Court and the Constitution actually effectively stem gun violence, or not. Doing this will cut right through all the hot air emotions of arguments and get to the real-life issues that we all deal with, like worrying about whether we'll get shot full of holes while walking downtown today.

Still packin', at least for now

When you hear the words "Second Amendment," what do you think of first? The NRA, gun control, wingnut militias, "safer bullets" (as former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders so eloquently described them), or "what the crap"?

If your first thought was the last phrase I mentioned, you might want to stock up on other thoughts (i.e., by reading this post and the links attached) so you can think of something slightly less ignorant next time.

Hopefully when you hear those words, you think of the Constitution of the United States (1789), where this amendment is found among the nine other amendments in the Bill of Rights:

Amendment II
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

As the National Archives website linked above explains, the thirteen original states refused to ratify the Constitution unless the Bill of Rights was added. Without these negative rights, i.e., rights that spell out where the government can't tread on the American people, the colonies believed the Constitution left a whole lot of sketchy leeway for the government to butt in on their private lives. The newborn American government could possibly even regress into a tyranny like the one whose chains they'd just busted (England's, stupid).

America's first citizens thus believed that an individual's right to own their own gun was essential to liberty.

Okay, blah blah blah. American Government 101. Enough said. Right.

Well, not according to the decision that was handed down by the Supreme Court today on McDonald v. Chicago. In this decision, the Court ruled 5-4 that America's first citizens were right on this individuals-can-tote-guns business. If one person had voted differently, then a precedent would have been set to vaporize the Second Amendment. Null, nada, kuch nehi, rien. Zilch. With one ruling.

Interestingly enough, the justices in the majority ruling justified their vote (in favor of the Second Amendment) by discussing how this amendment was necessary for the full emancipation of black slaves after the Civil War. They cite the Freedmen's Bureau Act of 1866 in the following way:

"The most explicit evidence of Congress’ aim appears in§14 of the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1866, which provided that 'the right ... to have full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty, personal security, and the acquisition, enjoyment, and disposition of estate, real and personal, including the constitutional right to bear arms, shall be secured to and enjoyed by all the citizens ... without respect to race or color, or previous condition of slavery.'" (p. 26, Syllabus, McDonald et al. v. City of Chicago, Illinois, et al.)

For fun, you can read Justice Clarence Thomas' opinion on pp. 67-122 of the linked syllabus, if you're super bored and/or just burned through a case of Red Bull.

The point I'm making here is that this decision was close--too close. If the ruling had been 5-4 against the Second Amendment, the Court would have set a landmark precedent for the cause of gun control [read: government control], and against the cause of preserving American personal liberty. As Rush Limbaugh put it on his radio program today, "Even the Bill of Rights is up for grabs with this [current administration's] crowd and the left. Folks, we are hanging by a thread, we are hanging by a very thin thread."