Last November, eleven-year-old Domonic Davis was killed, and five others were wounded, in a drive-by shooting in Cincinnati. “Federal investigators,” the Associated Press reports, “believe the 22 shots could be fired off with lightning speed because the weapon had been illegally converted to fire like a machine gun.”

Per the AP report, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE) reported a 570% increase in the number of “conversion devices” — weapons modified for full automatic fire — seized between 2017 and 2021.

Why? Because with the advent of 3D printing and machining equipment that fits within both home garages and home hobbyist budgets, making a gun into a “machine gun,” or even making a gun from scratch, is getting easier and cheaper.

Cue cries of “there oughtta be a law” from the usual suspects.

There are many reasons for there not to be laws about manufacture and possession of little bits of plastic or metal that might be used to make automatic weapons, starting with the fact that ownership of weapons is a sacred human right, followed by the fact that the Second Amendment to the US Constitution says any such laws are void, with the fact that such laws do not work and can never work in a distant third place.

At the moment, though, I’d like to focus on a fourth reason that’s as utilitarian as the third.

“Those who would outlaw weapons,” the late L. Neil Smith wrote, “must first outlaw the knowledge of weapons. And those who would outlaw the knowledge of weapons must outlaw knowledge itself.”

Specifically, knowledge of things like engineering, machining, and chemistry. Guns are, at this point, simple examples of those arts and sciences. While it’s been improved in various ways over time, the “machine gun” has been around since 1884.  There’s no way to get rid of it without making everyone on the planet much poorer because even amateur engineers, machinists, and chemists would all have to be killed, no new ones trained, and all texts related to those fields consigned to fire.

Nor are guns the only practical application of Smith’s maxim.

Those who want to outlaw drugs must first outlaw, among other things, chemistry and horticulture.

Those who want to outlaw strong cryptography and cryptocurrency must first outlaw, among other things, math and computer science.

If it was even possible to get rid of guns, drugs, and crypto — it isn’t, but if it was — the politicians who want to do so would have to figure out how to get us to give up everything modern, from the bicycle to the automobile to the microcomputer to the smart phone to most of the food we eat to accomplish their objective.

They’d have to outlaw Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), the set of fields that they’re constantly complaining not enough students are going into.

Are you willing to let them take us down that road into a world where roads would no longer exist? If not, it’s time to give up the fantasy of “gun control.”

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Last October, Robert Card killed 18 people and injured 18 others in a shooting spree across several locations in Maine. Card was later found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Now, the New York Times reports, an analysis of Card’s brain reveals significant damage, probably related to his eight years of exposure to explosions as a US Army grenade instructor, and quite possibly explaining his paranoia and “increasingly erratic and violent” behavior in the months leading up to the shootings and his suicide.

While some people tend to unduly write off avoidable atrocity as unavoidable tragedy, it’s difficult to deny that brain trauma — natural or artificial — can play a role in turning otherwise reasonable people into killers.

For example,  former US Marine Charles Whitman, who killed 17 people in a rampage at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966, presented with a behavioral history not dissimilar to Card’s, and an autopsy found a pecan-sized brain tumor that may have caused his mental collapse by pressing on the part of his brain responsible for anxiety and “fight or flight” response.

I find the whole topic at least a little bit scary on a personal level, as I stood right next to thousands of bone-rattling explosions in the Marine Corps myself as an 81mm mortarman.

No, I don’t hear imaginary voices. No, I’m not paranoid (at least I don’t THINK I’m paranoid). No, I don’t plan to pick up a gun and go kill anyone. And fortunately I’m surrounded by family and friends who would notice and take action if I started showing symptoms of any such kind of breakdown.

But Card’s family and co-workers noticed and took action too. His son and ex-wife talked to the local sheriff’s office about his seeming mental decline. His army reserve unit also reported problematic behavior and he was detained for psychological evaluation and treatment. Even when “the system” seemed to “work” as advertised, it didn’t work for Card or for his eventual victims.

When writing on issues of public concern (I hope we can agree that mass murder is such an issue), I often try to offer practical and ethical solutions. Here, I have few to offer. But I do want to offer a cautionary note:

If we allow government to “medicalize” murder and simply attribute mass shootings to mental illness, traumatic brain injury, etc., the flip side of that coin won’t be pretty when it comes to personal privacy.

We’ll start seeing mandated examinations — first for persons actually displaying symptoms, then later for anyone working in jobs deemed “unsafe for the human brain” — at risk of involuntary commitment if we “flunk” our CTs or MRIs.

If you think that can’t happen, you’ve probably never been ordered to urinate in a cup or blow into a breathalyzer to prove you don’t use drugs or haven’t been using alcohol.

Unless we, and our healthcare providers, get better at going the extra mile to help those who might otherwise become Robert Cards, that’s the dystopia we’re heading for.

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Does the exit path from William Blake’s Dark Satanic Mills lead through Trump Tower?

The Wall Street Journal‘s Alex Castellanos doesn’t quite think so, and not just because “Mr. Trump can’t be imitated” (“The Republicans Are a Party in Search of a Future,” March 1). Still, Castellanos asserts that “only the next generation of Republicans” can move past Biden-era Democrats’ vision of “goverment as a factory where they crank out laws, rules and regulations on an assembly line.”

Jared Polis, who maintains that “the government policy should be completely agnostic about what unit of exchange is used,” is conspicuously absent from Castellanos’s list of Democratic governors who “can’t imagine a world in which they wouldn’t assert top-down, mechanical control.” And while Polis may be an outlier in the current red-versus-blue map, he wouldn’t always have been.

While Biden perpetuates Donald Trump’s protectionism, it was Democrats who read Henry George’s book-length case against tariffs into the Congressional Record in 1892, the same year George challenged the notion that “there devolves on the State the necessity of intelligently organising … a great machine whose complicated parts shall properly work together under the direction of human intelligence.”

Speaking of continuations of Trump policies, Castellanos chides “Mr. Biden’s shameful retreat from Afghanistan” without noticing that the decades-long Sisyphean effort to remake that country epitomized what he calls “arrogant, old top-down government that can’t keep up with our instantly adaptive world” (when the government in question was the USSR rather than the USA, this was an obvious enough point to be made in popcorn action flicks from The Living Daylights to Rambo III).

A century after George noted that “social and industrial relations” were “not a machine which required construction, but an organism which needs only to be suffered to grow,” the March-April 1995 issue of Utne Reader contained an observation that “natural systems, such as human communities, are simply too complex to design by the engineering principles which we insist on applying to them” from John Perry Barlow, who was a Republican but one who would do such atypical activities as writing for Utne Reader.

Barlow’s Electronic Frontier Foundation helped ensure that what was still called “the information superhighway” would have the leeway to develop more horizontally than hierarchically.  The road ahead isn’t one that can be smoothed by either administration or annexation.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “The roads must grow” by Joel Schlosberg, The Wilson, North Carolina Times, March 5, 2024
2. “The roads must grow” by Joel Schlosberg, The Enterprise [Williamston, North Carolina], March 5, 2024
3. “The roads must grow” by Joel Schlosberg, The Johnstonian News [Smithfield, North Carolina], March 5, 2024
4. “The roads must grow” by Joel Schlosberg, The Butner-Creedmoor News [Creedmoor, North Carolina], March 5, 2024
5. “The roads must grow” by Joel Schlosberg, The Wake Weekly [Wake Forest, North Carolina], March 5, 2024
6. “The Roads Must Grow” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, March 7, 2024
7. “Libertarian Leanings: The roads must grow” by Joel Schlosberg, The Kingman, Arizona Daily Miner, March 8, 2024
8. “The roads must grow” by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], March 11, 2024