Monthly Archives: June 2015

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“Gun Control”: The Answer Is NO

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English: MP-446 "Viking" 9mm Handgun
English: MP-446 “Viking” 9mm Handgun (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“I’ve had to make statements like this too many times,” US president Barack Obama said after last week’s shootings at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. “[O]nce again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.”

Hillary Clinton, front-runner for the Democratic party’s 2016 presidential nomination, chimed in as well: “How many innocent people in our country, from little children, to church members, to movie theater attendees, how many people do we need to see cut down before we act?”

The upshot, of course, is that Obama and Clinton want Congress to pass yet another round of victim disarmament (“gun control”) legislation. And they’re more than willing to do a little happy political dance on the graves of the latest nine victims to advance that agenda.

To steal a line from Obama himself, let me be perfectly clear: “Gun control” isn’t about guns, it’s about control.

How do we know this? Because the evidence is clear. If the goal is to reduce violent crime, “gun control” not only doesn’t work, but has the exact opposite effect.

There’s a strong and near-universal correlation between violent crime and “gun control” laws. American cities with the most draconian “gun control” laws routinely report the highest violent crime rates in the nation. Areas with fewer restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms, conversely, report the lowest violent crime rates. Violent crime rates routinely drop rather than rise when and where restrictions on gun ownership and carry are eased.

Above and beyond the blatant falsehoods concerning intent — for Obama and Clinton certainly know the foregoing facts, which are a matter of public record — “gun control” is also illegal, immoral and impossible.

It’s illegal because neither the plain text nor the intended meaning of the Second Amendment are unclear. The “supreme law of the land” forbids both federal and state governments to infringe on the right to keep and bear arms in any way, shape, manner or form.

It’s immoral because each of us has an inalienable human right to defend our own lives. To forbid us the tools to do so is to openly abet all of our would-be murderers.

And it’s impossible because so many Americans already own so many guns (rough estimate: 250 million guns in the hands of 100 million Americans), and with new technologies like 3D printing have the ability to manufacture so many more at will, that we will buy, sell, trade and gift them among ourselves whether the politicians like it or not.

Obama and Clinton don’t have to like it. That’s how it is whether they like it or not. “Gun control” is a utopian fantasy if its goal is to reduce violence, a dystopian fantasy if its goal is, as is clearly the case with these two, to reduce us under an absolute despotism.

The answer to both fantasies is “no.” It’s going to stay “no.” Get used to it.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Speech and Guns: Freedom is indivisible

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XP002By Kamenev (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

A few years ago libertarian novelist and essayist L. Neil Smith wrote a prescient piece on victim disarmament (called, by its supporters, “gun control”). Smith is a prescient guy — he also predicted, among other things, the digital watch and the fall of the Soviet Union. I can’t find the piece at the moment, so I’ll paraphrase:

It’s impossible to effectually outlaw guns without also outlawing writing, speaking and thinking about guns. And it’s impossible to effectually outlaw writing, speaking and thinking about guns without outlawing writing, speaking and thinking, period.

Thinking isn’t a strong suit among victim disarmament advocates, but I guess one of them read the article. A couple of years ago, the US State Department ordered Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed to remove 3D printing files for the “Liberator” pistol from the Internet, pending a ruling on whether the posting of those plans constituted an illegal “weapons export.” In early June, the US State Department filed a new rule proposal on the Federal Register.

The rule is in a combination of bureaucratese and technical jargon, but it boils down to the US government requiring anyone who wants to publish “technical data” on the Internet (where it can be downloaded by foreigners, making it an “export”), relating to how to build weapons, to get the State Department’s permission.

We’ve been around this tree before. Back in the 1990s, the government went after proponents of “strong crypto” for making their software available globally, treating cryptographic algorithms as “munitions” for “export” purposes. Hilarity ensued as cypherpunks arrived at airports wearing t-shirts with the following three lines of Perl on them:

#!/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj
$/=unpack(‘H*’,$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k”SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1
lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp”|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack(‘H*’,/((..)*)$/)

Those three lines of code implemented the RSA cryptographic algorithm. Which meant that flying abroad wearing the t-shirt constituted “unauthorized export of a munition.”

The government ended up backing away from that battle. As a result, all of us now have relatively easy access to tools that help us protect the privacy of our information. Now they’re back, trying to throttle free speech in the name of “arms proliferation control” abroad and, implicitly, “gun control” here at home.

The right to think, speak and publish as we please is inseparably linked — both morally and practically — to the right to keep and bear arms. It’s impossible to support one without supporting the other. And as we can see, the State Department now intends to destroy the latter by destroying the former.

The required “comment period” runs through August 3rd. You can read the proposal and register your opposition to it at:

http://www.regulations.gov/#!documentDetail;D=DOS-2015-0023-0001

If legal opposition doesn’t work, the necessary next step is open defiance. This is not a battle Americans can afford to lose.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Individual Identity: “Born-This-Wayism” is a Reactionary Cul-de-Sac

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Rainbow Brolly -- RGBtock

Is Rachel Dolezal “really” black? The question is reasonable, if a little bit over-hyped from all sides. Reading (and occasionally participating in) a number of discussions about it, I’ve been surprised at the answers people come up with. Here’s mine:

Who cares? Dolezal’s self-identification as an “African-American,” no matter how strange some may find it, only picks my pocket or breaks my leg (as Thomas Jefferson put it concerning other people’s religious beliefs) to the extent that political government either oppresses, or hands out privileges to, people based on their personal self-identification.

I don’t blame Dolezal for that oppression or those privileges, so I’m perfectly content to politely respect her racial/cultural identification. If she says she’s “African-American,” so do I.

That’s not to say that getting rid of government interference would instantly change everyone’s opinions … but as I’ve written before, libertarianism is the only political philosophy that allows everyone to answer “yes” to the question “can we all get along?”

Coming on the heels of Caitlyn Jenner’s “coming out party,” the subject of Rachel Dolezal in particular and trans-racialism in general does shed needed light on the dangers of “born-this-wayism.”

During the long struggle against legal discrimination versus gay men and lesbians, much of the black civil rights community dismissed comparisons between that struggle and theirs. Race and sexual orientation, they said, just weren’t the same thing.

Ditto some “third wave” feminists versus trans-women. There’s still plenty of argument about whether feminist conferences should be open to trans-women; being transgender, some say, does not make one a woman.

And now some supporters of equal rights for trans people reject “transracial” Rachel Dolezal on the same grounds.

Tactically, the claim that one is “born this way,” rather than “choosing” to be, gay, transgender or transracial, has its benefits. And in the first two cases, while the science may not be completely settled, it does seem to at least tend toward agreement.

Strategically and morally, though, “born-this-wayism” is a dangerous trap. Each successful struggle for freedom, or even for basic equality before the law, is followed by a reactionary impulse. We’ve got ours, Jack (or Jackie) … and you aren’t us.

Part of that is due to the government interference I mention above. The “benefits,” like special anti-discrimination protections or even “affirmative action” set-asides, are treated like a fixed pie. If someone new horns in, everyone else’s slice gets smaller. Which, of course, is yet another good reason for getting government out of the matter.

Another part, though, seems to be the mistaken belief that freedom is a similarly fixed pie; that if I get more freedom, you get less. That isn’t so — more freedom for any of us means more freedom for all of us — but it’s a natural fear.

So, again: Is Rachel Dolezal “really” black?

If she says “yes,” why should anyone else have a problem with that? And why should it matter to anyone whether she was “born that way” or “chose” it?

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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