Tag Archives | Arma Virumque

Cordial and Sanguine, Part 40: Seen and Unseen

Whenever there’s a violent tragedy, someone immediately starts using it as an excuse to restrict civil liberties. Many on the left understand this when it comes to the Patriot Act, but not when it comes to gun control. (Conservatives have selective blindness in the opposite direction.)

In deontological terms, the right to self-defense is the foundation and presupposition of all other rights; and forbidding private citizens to own guns while allowing police and soldiers to carry them is a violation of moral equality – a reserving of weapons to the powerful while denying them to the powerless.

In consequentialist terms, gun control is a perfect example of the broken window fallacy. Deaths caused by gun use are seen, because they happen. Deaths prevented by gun use are not seen, because they don’t happen. (By “gun use” I mean not just firings but also mere brandishings.) First, preventions are underreported (since few are eager to be victimised twice – first by a freelance attacker and second by the cops), and second, when they are reported, they’re not exciting enough to get much publicity.

People who favour stronger gun control laws focus on the deaths they hope to prevent, but rarely consider the deaths their laws would cause. One useful corrective to this attitude is the Cato Institute study Tough Targets: When Criminals Face Armed Resistance From Citizens.

And although I’m not a fan of the NRA (which I don’t regard as an anti-gun-control organisation), they have a useful blog, The Armed Citizen, documenting lives saved by private gun use.

Cross-posted at BHL.


Understanding Your Ground

Lawrence O’Donnell, Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow, et hoc genus omne are desperately trying to have it both ways.

On the one hand, they want it to be the case that George Zimmerman’s shooting of Trayvon Martin was unlawful, so that they can blame the authorities for not arresting and prosecuting him.

Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman

Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman

On the other hand, they want it to be the case that the shooting was lawful, so that they can blame the law (specifically, Florida’s stand-your-ground law) for allowing the shooting.

So the establishment lapdogs at MSNBC are inconsistent; no surprise there. But which way should they resolve this inconsistency?

Well, here’s the actual text of the stand-your-ground provision, which actually seems pretty reasonable to me:

A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.

(Read the entire law here, including some not-so-nice bits, such as the 14th-Amendment-violating exception concerning self-defense against police officers.)

So unless Zimmerman a) was attacked by Martin, and b) had a reasonable belief that Martin posed a serious danger to him (two conditions that, from the evidence thus far available, do not appear to have been met – and certainly the critics clearly do not believe either condition was met), the stand-your-ground provision offers no defense of his actions.

Of course it is entirely possible that local Florida authorities have been misapplying this law, and indeed that they have been doing so with racist motivations. That wouldn’t exactly shock me. But in that case, the problem lies not with the stand-your-ground law but with the authorities; and the solution is to hold them accountable by depriving them of their monopoly.


Way Long Gone, Part 3

I got back from my voyages on Monday (I announce belatedly).

Roger's Campground

PorcFest was anarchy in miniature: people were smoking weed, packing heat, selling unlicensed food and alcohol, and generally behaving in a peacefully unauthorised fashion. There were pistol safety classes, gay dance parties, and sessions on everything from polyamory, transhumanism, and cop avoidance to alternative currency, alternative medicine, and planning the revolution. C4SS, S4SS, ALL, AltExpo, Fr33 Agents, and SFL were all represented. In addition to my previously mentioned talks I was on a panel on agorism with Brad Spangler, Dan D’Amico, and Bob Murphy. If I go again next year I’ll bring some copies of Kevin’s Homebrew Industrial Revolution; PorcFest seems like the ideal crowd for it.

After that came the IHS seminar at Towson. The students were great, and I spent a lot of time talking with them about philosophy, libertarianism, and science fiction – which (as will come as no surprise to my readers) are three of my favourite subjects. One of the students was wearing a t-shirt with my picture on it! The topics of my lectures were approximately the same as last year. The other faculty were Dan D’Amico, Brian Doherty, John Hasnas, George Selgin, and Amy Sturgis, so it was an even more radical lineup than last year. We found a good Cuban restaurant; I also got a chance to see Jesse Walker, who lives nearby.

My next gig will be Mises University here in Auburn, July 24-30. And then of course there’s always the APS in September and Libertopia in October.


Cory Maye To Be Freed

Cory Maye and daughter

Cory Maye, about whose case I’ve blogged previously (here, here, here, and here), is finally due to be released. (CHT Sheldon.) It falls short of what he deserves – he was required to plead guilty to manslaughter for exercising his right to defend himself and his family, and he’s being offered no compensation for the unjust treatment he has received – but it beats being murdered by the state or spending the rest of his life in a cage, the two fates that judges had previously chosen for him.

All honour to Radley Balko for his untiring efforts to keep this case before the public!

Addendum:

If you’re interested in donating to help Maye get his life back together, Radley has details.


Cognitive Dissonance in Tucson

Pundits are reacting with gross (but predictable) inconsistency to the Tucson shooting: denouncing all calls for violence – even purely metaphorical ones – only to issue their own calls for violence of a decidedly non-metaphorical sort, in the form of restrictions on free speech or gun ownership or equal protection or whatever.

Tucson

So far is our political culture in the grip of what I’ve elsewhere called the incantational model of state violence that they cannot even see their own everyday political advocacy as an instance of incitement to violence, let alone consider what role the institutionalised violence they support might play in creating a culture in which freelance statists like Jared Loughner can view firing into a crowd as an acceptable way of addressing their grievances.

The deaths and maimings of the victims in the Tucson shooting are horrendous; but the media’s selective focus on them, while similar but far more frequent massacres by American soldiers and police officers are ignored, is yet another a sign of profound moral blindness.

There was a further inconsistency in Sheriff Dupnik’s blaming the incident on “vitriol … about tearing down the government,” while simultaneously condemning Arizona as a “mecca for prejudice and bigotry” – presumably a reference to the state’s draconian anti-immigrant policies. After all, Arizona’s ethnic-cleansing laws are not exactly the product of anti-government sentiment; on the contrary, they represent government at its most intrusive and virulent. But to the statist mind, the state is such a noble institution that its greatest crimes must somehow be reinterpreted as the fruit of antistatist rhetoric!

See also Brad and Sheldon.


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