My "root causes" argument vis-a-vis criminality and gun deaths is getting harder and harder to defend. But I'll push a little further, just to see where we go.

You complicate the question of private gun ownership in order to render the claim that less guns will translate into less killings improvable. The simple fact is that nothing projected is provable in the present. We can however base reasoned theories on the facts.

This is suspicious. It reminds me of a certain anti-drug commercial in which the liberal is ridiculed for believing that the drug issue is "complicated." The simple punch line of the spot is "No drug buyers, no drug money. No drug money, no drug dealers. No drug dealers, no drug murders, shootings [...]" The drug warriors use mountains of statistics and evidence to support theories that are motivated by pre-existing political commitments. They use rhetoric to create an unrealistic image of their enemy populations: drug users and sellers. They use facts that implicitly disallow the possibility that drugs can be used for pleasure as well as for harm. In this way, they create a kind of discussion that makes their quite-uncertain predictions seem like the only possible outcomes. Although I realize that the costs of drug use in this country are immense and the results of drug use are often devastating, I find it difficult, in the context of such uncertain knowledge, to make strong morally-based claims about what ought to be done. I wonder if we can find similarities in the arguments made here and discover that the sentiments of anti-gun left are based on similar mythological structures, unprovable fantasized outcomes, and a fundamental distaste for the "enemy" population, in this case, gun lovers.

"according to the FBI, 60 percent of the nearly 2 million guns stolen over the past ten years most likely fuel the black market for criminals. Over 80 percent of those guns were stolen out of a home or car."

So 'criminal guns' are drawn from the pool of legally obtained guns, and are stolen most often where theft is easiest. Where there are guns there is crime. These facts seem to undisputably support gun control. But this conclusion is problematic. One of the most basic features of entrepreneurial capitalism is that certain markets are driven by demand. Drugs are one such market; when the DEA shuts down a major drug corridor, prices spike, but suppliers flood this newly lucrative market and bring prices back down. I think that guns are another demand driven market; especially because they are required by the many people who participate in the drug trade and other huge and permanent criminal enterprises. It might seem that reducing the pool of stealable guns might raise the black market prices for guns and thereby make them less available to criminals. But it is also likely that other supply lines will emerge to service this market. So a potential net effect of gun control would be to shift the balance of gun ownership further away from legal gun owners and toward owners of illegally-obtained guns.

And in areas with larger numbers of gun owners, there are relatively higher crime rates.

But, one might argue, the market for guns is not demand-driven. Criminals want guns if they're available, but they're not going to pressure the market for guns. The manifest implication of the above fact is that high rates of gun ownership cause high crime rates; but it also enforces the converse truth - that criminals do not demand guns where they aren't available. The latter side of the argument undermines the conception of the market for guns as demand-driven. But this statistic does not really address causality. It is possible that the presence of root causes of of crime in an area generate crime, which then draws guns into an area.

Gun theft is most likely in states without laws requiring the safe storage of firearms in the home, according to Americans for Gun Safety.

Furthermore, the argument being presented is that less guns in people's living rooms will lead to less homicide. But it appears that what we need is not less gun ownership, but safer gun ownership. If less guns get stolen in states that have more stringent storage requirements, it appears that strong storage requirements will both limit the flow of guns onto the black market (although I've discussed the problems with 'stanching the supply flow' proposals) and also maintain a balance between illegal and legal gun users.

My arguments lay down the guidelines for future research for the pro-gun-choice side of this debate; however, I have to say that these objections seem easily defeatable and intellectually vacuous. The only other avenue for my devil's advocate defense of the existing gun climate is to go outside of the debate about violence and either assert gun ownership as a fundamental irreversible right (as some interpretations of the 2nd amendment would have it) or claim gun and gun culture a historically and culturally important part of America worth preserving. I didn't go there in this discussion because those arguments seem so preposterous. But maybe there's some real social value in making guns available to people who believe in the strict heroes-and-villains/self-defense mythology. After all, the left's arguments for, say, pot laxity all depend on the acceptance of a mythology about drugs and drug users (in which Clinton, Hendrix, Sagan, Coltrane, and Ginsberg all play parts) that ignores the very real dangers associated with the drug. As is clear, I think the drug and gun issues are fairly similar; they are about sacrificing the social welfare for the sake of subsections of the population who wish to engage in practices that have both subcultural value and some manifestly harmful effects.
posted by neel master at 7:54 PM

Note: the posts below have been reposted from a few days ago, when i deleted them without realizing what I was doing.
posted by neel master at 11:16 AM

[2/8/2003 7:33:49 PM | Sue Gordy-Cufkey]
Should I just address you as “you”? Okay, I can do that.

If you had read the original story about the convenience store robbery, you would know that Adams inserted himself into the situation once he became aware of it; he could have called the police and waited for them safely, but instead he chose to get his gun and go after the kids. So your statement that “no person who lives in a liberal democracy should be forced into the position of having to choose to defend his life by taking another,” which I agree with, is not and hasn’t ever been applicable to this specific case. You’d also have read that Adams is well past the age of retirement, and that friends and relatives have repeatedly urged him to leave the convenience store industry.

In any case, I mentioned the J.C. Adams case as an example of what happens in a society consumed with the culture of firearms. My agenda was never to simply pass judgment on Adams because I disagreed with what he did. The reference was in aid of discussing a much broader topic.

You say it is dangerous to assume that criminals will simply lay down their guns, thus giving them a strategic advantage in a society that permits less private gun ownership. One of the reasons that criminals have guns in the first place is the ease which with virtually anyone in America can easily obtain a weapon. And I’m not suggesting the authorities simply ask criminals nicely to relinquish their firearms.

“Crime, by definition, is what happens when one person attempts to take the freedom of another person.” That's a workable definition, but if that's true then there is no more egregious crime than that of taking another's life.

You also find the idea that if we have less guns we will have less killing absurd. Your agenda thus far has been to undermine one argument in favor of no argument. You complicate the question of private gun ownership in order to render the claim that less guns will translate into less killings improvable. The simple fact is that nothing projected is provable in the present. We can however base reasoned theories on the facts.

Some of the facts are as follows:

Gun theft is most likely in states without laws requiring the safe storage of firearms in the home, according to Americans for Gun Safety. And in areas with larger numbers of gun owners, there are relatively higher crime rates. Further, according to the FBI, 60 percent of the nearly 2 million guns stolen over the past ten years most likely fuel the black market for criminals. Over 80 percent of those guns were stolen out of a home or car.

Now consider that along with the following:

In the year 2000, over half a million victims of violent crimes, defined as robbery, assault and rape, reported that they faced an offender with a firearm. That only represents just under 10 percent of all of those violent crimes, which exclude murder. So we can disregard your assertion that it’s equally likely we’ll have fewer gun-to-gun confrontations, because it doesn’t matter. Did everyone catch that? Less than 10 percent of violent crimes excluding murder involved a gun. Now consider this: two-thirds of all the murders in the year 2000 were committed with firearms. Over two-thirds, pal. What kind of boneheaded argument says it’s absurd to think that fewer guns will mean fewer deaths? I’m not even going to provide you with the statistics for other industrialized nations that have serious gun laws. Go look them up yourself.

And remembers this – a pretty significant number of those deaths are either accidents (a couple of kids found their dad’s gun, started messing around with it, gun goes off – kid’s dead) or are committed by people who legally own guns and who are either insane or just got really pissed off. That’s how we lost John Lennon, man. How we lost Phil Hartman. How we lose 80 people every single day in this country.

You put all that together and then tell me that stricter gun laws won’t translate to fewer homicides in this country. You go ahead and do that. Maybe in the warm and cozy confines of academia you’re content simply “to be correct.” I’m talking about saving lives here. But I appreciate your point of view.


[2/7/2003 5:52:01 PM | Neel Master]
We shouldn't refer to each other by name.

We still haven't addressed the moral status of J.C. Adams. In your original post, you are not coy about expressing your distaste for Adams and the things he's been put in the position of doing. Since your response is so unbelievably rife with what-if speculations (which all boil down to "less guns will mean less killings." actually, i'm going to quote the whole thing so there can be no misunderstanding. "once the number of guns stockpiled in the living room gun cabinets of America is greatly reduced or eliminated, the prospect that we’ll be deluged with stories about convenience store owners slain in a hail of dinner forks, abortion doctors done in by soufflé, the D.C.-area Super Soaker, or Woody Allen beaten to death with a large shoe is rather dubious." you heard it right there. less people will be willfully killed by others if there are less guns simply floating around. that is what is being said.)

Of course, an equally plausible future scenario is that there will simply be less gun-to-gun confrontations. In this scenario, certain people will get rid of their guns and certain other people will recognize the increased economic/criminal incentive for gun ownership and use. It is dangerous to believe that criminals will simply lay down their guns when everyone else does. It is realistic to believe that people like J.C. Adams, stripped of their guns, will risk being killed by people who still have them. Crime, by definition, is what happens when one person attempts to take the freedom of another person. I'm not stipulating the right to bear arms as a fundamental freedom, but I am stipulating the right not to be threatened by strangers with guns is one.

I am not offerring a moral equivalency. I'm saying explicitly that the moral position is not to castigate the storeowner who shoots intruders (who have guns.) The moral position is to extend sympathy to him. There is certainly a moral similarity between the two acts, but I'd have to say that the more moral one is the one committed by J.C. Adams under uncertainty and distress. We have to remember that he would not have been in this situation if it were not for the actions of other people with guns.

A moral equivalency! Amazing. I just realized that I'm being accused of creating a moral equivalency for demanding that we take the position of the victim as seriously as we take the position of the criminal.

I mean, if someone on the pro-gun right reads your post, he has an easy target. You're blaming the victim, for god's sakes. In my formulation, tedious though it may be, the pro-gun person gets no target. I recognize the difficulty of the situation of J.C. Adams and I recognize the manifest undeniable truth that he was put in this situation by people who chose to put him there. I'm not saying they got what they deserved; i'm not saying they were asking for it. I'm not saying that their outcomes (which weren't punishment, but consequences) fit the seriousness of the crime they undertook (but certainly we can distribute as much responsibility for the outcome to them, since their actions were the precipitating cause of all of this and since they could not have possibly been unaware of the risk. i don't think it's absurd to say that criminals, when undertaking an action, can be counted on to weigh the outcomes.)

And I want to point out that the purpose of analysis isn't to "get you anywhere." It's to be correct. But maybe I'm wrong; after all, I never went to journalism school.

[2/7/2003 8:36:34 AM | Sue Gordy-Cufkey]
Typically, Neel offers up a moral equivalency that gets you absolutely nowhere. The argument against the wide availability of firearms is not one that presents itself as the answer to the problem of the criminal culture. Nor does it promise that “we would be safe again” without guns. The root causes of economically-motivated crime must be dealt with but it is possible to deal with the problem of guns separately and to do so is warranted. I don’t need to list the all facts right here, because we all know them. How many people get slaughtered every year with the ease of pulling a trigger? And how often has a gun served as the instrument in extracting from society some of our greatest thinkers, artists, physicians and politicians?

Solve the criminal culture by getting rid of guns? Certainly not. However, once the number of weapons stockpiled in the living room gun cabinets of America is greatly reduced or eliminated, the prospect that we’ll be deluged with stories about convenience store owners slain in a hail of dinner forks, abortion doctors done in by soufflé, the D.C.-area Super Soaker, or Woody Allen beaten to death with a large shoe is rather dubious.

But his argument of is fascinating nevertheless, and I invite Neel to write a dissertation on the subject of complex socio-economic knotting and share it with us at his earliest convenience. I'll suggest a title: "Jeffrey Magee Syndrome and The Anti-Gun Argument."


[2/7/2003 12:02:53 AM | Neel Master]
The argument, elaborated below, that unfortunate gun incidents are caused by a widespread gun culture is perfectly reasonable. But the rhetorical question posed below,

Sure, the pro-gun [i prefer "pro-gun-choice" -neel] lobby screams about the need for self-defense – every responsible citizen needs a gun to defend him or herself. But isn’t that because there are so many other people with guns?

is sneaky. What it suggests is that if law abiding people just gave up their guns, the gun culture would recede, and we would be safe again. But social problems are not knots that just need untying. A knot is a complex arrangement the development of which can be reversed to yield its simple antecedent. But culture is too complex to be manipulated in this way; reversing one's steps only leads to new problems. Eliminating guns will not eliminate a criminal culture; it will succeed in shifting the power toward people who wish to use unlawful and illiberal methods to redistribute wealth. Although I have only sympathy for those who commit economically-motivated crime, the left cannot endorse their action. Anyone who believes in democracy must believe that the solutions to income inequality and other root causes of criminality must be pursued through the system. We can and must find enough sympathy to go around, for both the criminal and law-abiding. Whether or not J.C. Adams experiences his situation as tragic, it is clearly a tragedy. No person who lives in a liberal democracy should be forced into the position of having to choose to defend his life by taking another; and I think the truly liberal position is to realize that this statement applies to J.C. Adams as much as it does to the dead young man.
posted by neel master at 11:13 AM

World: Law to Protect Migrant Workers Short One Vote

UNITED NATIONS -- A United Nations convention aimed at protecting the rights of migrant workers worldwide needs to be ratified by only one more country before it becomes international law.


The treaty gives migrant workers and their families the same protections as nationals of the countries where they work.

posted by neel master at 10:33 AM

Online Articles and Papers concerning Human Rights of Migrant Workers
posted by neel master at 10:30 AM

Falling Down: Social Contracts and the Logic of the Absurd
Justin Shaw

Since its release in the year following the 1992 Los Angeles race riots, Joel Schumacher's film Falling Down has become the subject of much political debate for its portrayal of a socially-disenfranchised white man, "D-Fens" (Michael Douglas) who reacts violently against a politically-correct society. This film raises the question of the nature of a filmic social contract with its audience and its contribution to a film's political appeal. Does Falling Down merely pander to a reactionary, right-wing sentiment in its audience, or is there a more complex exchange taking place between film and spectator?

posted by neel master at 10:21 AM