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.