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Joe Biden’s Latest “Gun Violence” Fairy Tale

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Gun photo from RGBStock
Free photo from RGBStock

A White House “fact sheet” tells us that “the President is committed to taking action to reduce all forms of gun violence.”

The “fact sheet” departs from the facts starting with its title, which characterizes gun violence as a “public health epidemic.” Gun violence is a set of volitional human behaviors, not an infectious disease spread by gun cooties and amenable to “public health” remedies.

The “fact sheet” announces six “initial actions,” none of which any sane person would expect to substantially impact gun violence.

Ineffectual initial action #1: “The Justice Department … will issue a proposed rule to help stop the proliferation of ‘ghost guns.'”

“Ghost guns” are homemade firearms. They’re not made in government-licensed facilities, nor do their makers generally report them to the government. While some are built from commercially sold kits, firearms are simple technology. You could probably build one from items lying around your house, even if you don’t have machine tools or a 3D printer. No matter how many rules DOJ proposes,  the vast majority of ghost guns will remain beyond its reach.

Ineffectual action #2: “The Justice Department … will issue a proposed rule to make clear when a device marketed as a stabilizing brace effectively turns a pistol into a short-barreled rifle subject to the requirements of the National Firearms Act.”

That’s even dumber than the “ghost gun” rule. Stabilizing braces are even easier to build at home than guns. And if anyone paid attention to a rule against them, that rule would only magnify the carnage of mass shootings as violent criminals sprayed more bullets, less accurately, into their targeted areas.

Now we move from merely ineffectual to idiotically counter-productive with action #3: ‘The Justice Department … will publish model ‘red flag’ legislation for states.”

“Red flag” laws allow police to seize guns from people who haven’t been accused, let alone convicted, of crimes on the claim that they “present a danger to themselves or others.” When a bunch of gun-waving cops show up unexpectedly to confiscate someone’s firearms, that someone sometimes DOES start presenting a danger to themselves or others, when he or she hadn’t before. And if he or she doesn’t respond that way, it’s evidence that the order was unnecessary in the first place.

In addition to likely being 99% ineffectual and counterproductive, the first three “initial actions” are also 100% unconstitutional.

Initial actions number 4 and 5 are just bureaucratic showboating to justify throwing taxpayer money in a hole and setting it on fire: “The Administration is investing in evidence-based community violence interventions” and “[t]he Justice Department will issue an annual report on firearms trafficking.”

Action #6 — the appointment of former Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives thug (and Waco massacre revisionist) David Chipman to head that agency — is probably a subject for a whole column of its own. It might actually be consequential.

The first five “initial actions” are a mix of pro-gun-violence idiocy and public relations fluff that the White House should be embarrassed for even trying to put over on the public as non-fiction.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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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“Vaccine Passports” and the Holocaust: An Invalid Comparison?

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Jewish Synagogue in German-occupied Bydgoszcz (Poland). Inscription in German language means: "This city is free of Jews." September 1939. Public domain.
Jewish Synagogue in German-occupied Bydgoszcz (Poland). Inscription in German language means: “This city is free of Jews.” September 1939. Public domain.

On March 29, the Libertarian Party of Kentucky issued a tweet that aroused considerable controversy (not least among partisan Libertarians themselves):

“Are the vaccine passports going to be yellow, shaped like a star, and sewn on our clothes?”

Kentucky governor Andy Beshear called the tweet “shameful” and implied it was “anti-Semitic.”

Rabbi Shlomo Litvin called the comparison “morally wrong,” but treated it, kindly, as part of a widespread habit of “using Holocaust comparisons to make literally any political point you want to make.”

Was the tweet over the top? Well, maybe.

Was the tweet anti-Semitic? Ask the Jewish protesters in Israel who equate that country’s vaccine passport scheme not only with the yellow Star of David badges forced on Jews by the Nazis, but with  death camp prisoner tattoos.

Was the comparison valid? To at least some degree, yes.

Early on, the Nazis used a “public health” excuse for their targeting of Jews and the imposition of the patches. Jews, they said, spread typhus, and needed to be identified so that others could avoid them and stay healthy.

Yes, that supposed “public health” concern was completely false.

But the notion that COVID-19 represents a permanent, existential threat to humanity, that we can never return to “normal” again, and that those who choose not to get vaccinated represent a significant danger to those who choose to get vaccinated is completely false, too.

Novel viruses hit humankind hard occasionally, then recede as we learn to treat them and vaccinate for them, and as they weaken through mutation. No sane society completely remakes itself around them.

Supporters of vaccine passports tout them as a way to “allow” us to do things such as attend concerts and sporting events.

We’ve never needed health-based government permission to do those things before, and there’s no compelling argument that we should be required to seek such permission in the future.

Vaccine passports aren’t needed to “allow” things. They’re not designed to include, they’re designed to exclude. They’re designed to do something with a long history that includes, yes, the Holocaust: They’re designed to ghettoize (“put in or restrict to an isolated or segregated place, group, or situation”).

Absent government involvement, if a business doesn’t want to accept un-vaccinated customers (or any other kind of customers), that’s, well, their business. But they should shoulder the costs themselves instead of asking governments to create and impose uniform identification schemes for them.

A federal vaccine passport would create yet another government surveillance tool. It would also inevitably be used by local governments to legally exclude the un-vaccinated from particular types of businesses (such as nightclubs), particular expressions of public life (such as youth sports), and quite possibly entire zones of public commerce (such as large shopping centers), all in the name of “public health.”

And the scheme wouldn’t end with COVID-19. It would be continually repurposed and probably made permanent.

I’d like to see everyone choose to get vaccinated, but we should all be opposed to forcibly ghettoizing those who don’t.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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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The Finest Trick of the Developer is to Persuade You That Free Markets Should Not Exist

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“Henry George and the Dragon” cartoon. Public domain.

New York City Council candidate Alexa Avilés asserts that “the free market will never provide decent housing for all, and we should stop pretending otherwise” (“The Free Market Will Never Provide Decent Housing for All,” The Indypendent, April 2).  Who’s pretending?

Avilés doesn’t outright claim that the current housing market is free, but implies that a free market would reinforce the existing power of “banks and corporate landlords” over “tenants in private housing, NYCHA [New York City Housing Authority] residents, and small homeowners.”

In treating the latter as the only beneficiaries of intervention in the market — and conflating a free market with policies that “let big developers take control” — Avilés ignores what Roderick T. Long notes are the far larger effects of “regulations that strangle competition in the housing market.”

Assuming that “developers’ greed drives gentrification and displacement” obscures the ways that limiting competition distorts supply and demand. Market competition compelled stockbrokers, who are not generally distinguished by an absence of greed, to reduce trading fees from $199 to $8.

Long concludes that a free housing market would be one “with landlords competing for tenants,” so that “rental contracts would cease to be as one-sidedly favorable to the landlord as they often are today.” Tenants would also enjoy more power to take many of the steps recommended by Avilés toward ownership, such as “the opportunity to collectively purchase” their buildings.

Moreover,  any free market approach must make unjustified land claims null and void. As Murray Rothbard put it, in such cases any “reform is picayune and fails to reach the heart of the question” short of “an immediate vacating of the title … with certainly no compensation to the aggressors who had wrongly seized control of the land.”

Avilés’s “Green New Deal for NYCHA” could take a page from Franklin Delano Roosevelt and revisit the writings of Henry George, who carried forth the tradition of combining free trade with land reform pioneered by such market liberals as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer. FDR wanted George’s works to be “better known and more clearly understood” since they “contain much that would be helpful today.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

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