Washington DC gun ban to be reconsidered
Since 1976, the US Capital (Motto: “Ain’t got no representation but still paying taxes”) has banned the possession of handguns. So unlike other American cities, hardly anyone is ever murdered there. Criminals break other laws, but for some reason they just meekly obey the gun laws. This has given rise to a uniquely DC tradition, the “Whiffle-bat mugging.”
That may be about to change next spring, as the Supreme Court considers the DC gun law. The supes will decide if DC’s ban is constitutional. If they go thumbs-down, the law goes and gun shops will be open before you can say ‘nightie-night’.
Just imagine what that could mean! The gun-free utopia of Washington DC could become like other American cities. Emergency rooms, unaccustomed to seeing gunshot wounds, would have to study up on the latest rescue techniques. But it won’t be all bad. Honest citizens will start packing, and according to the NRA, crime will virtually disappear as ordinary citizens routinely get the drop on hardened criminals.
OK, you may have gotten the idea I’m not being completely serious about this news story. What do you think? Should the ban stay or go? Does it matter?
Update:
- Ed Brayton over at Dispatches just got a discussion going and it’s already up to 17 comments after only a few hours.
First of all I think it makes sense that DC’s ban in unconstitutional. The constitution clearly states we have the right to bare arms. If you disagree, then change the constitution. And yes I understand this part of the constitution was specifically written for colonial times, where gun ownership was a necessity for protection from a tyrannical government. As my boss states, “Unless someone comes up with a feasible plan on ridding the world of all guns, then I can’t be for a ban on guns to law abiding citizens.”
Personally I am against taking guns out of the hands of citizens. It gives the criminals an advantage and makes the citizen less safe. Criminals are going to get guns whether we outlaw them or not, it’s actually quite easy even when illegal. In some cases it’s easier when it’s illegal because now there are no checks and balances to go through. However I would like to see more being done to train people on proper gun usage and handling. Just allowing someone to carry such a dangerous items is pointless. Anyone wanting to carry a firearm should have to go through classes for training and proper use and learn how to fire one.
The NRA needs to learn some economics if they think the key to lower crime is gun ownership… What makes someone commit a crime or what leads them to commit a crime? What leads someone to do anything? Necessity maybe, but how does one decide whether or not to do something? Most people without realizing it go through the simple process of Cost/Benefit Analysis. If the cost exceeds the benefit, we won’t do “x”. If the Benefit exceeds the cost, we will do “x”. Now plug in real life data…
But better yet, to keep someone from committing a crime all we really need to do is make the outcome of the C/B Analysis for committing a crime worse, or less than the outcome for getting a job, or not committing the crime. In other words I think there is something to be said about the Wiki article and how they point out gentrification. But more than that, when you solve the issues of poverty and low education, you give people a better outcome in the C/B Analysis.
Lowering crime is going to take more than just displacing the poverty stricken citizens to another area, an outcome associated with gentrification that was pointed out beautifully by South Park. And really we need to recognize that when you spend your time and money locking up criminals, what you get is a society of criminals. When you spend time on education and relieving those in poverty, and actually fixing poverty, you get people that have one less thing to worry about and can start working on the next level of Maslow’s Needs.
Is this borne out by countries that have stricter gun ownership laws. Like England, or Germany?
I really would like to see statistics on how many crimes were averted because citizens had guns and blazed away, then compare those with the number of shootings, oh I don’t know…between spouses, or children, or just a*sinine behavior.
See, I think that on an annual basis, a sh*tload of people get plinked, and waaay more than the casualty numbers of GIs in Iraq that we profess to be concerned about.
The idea is that the citizen won’t necessarily have to shoot. If a criminal thinks you have gun, or doesn’t know if you have one, they will be less inclined to attempt to rob you. The idea is to reduce the robbery attempts, not turn Average Joe citizen into a vigilante.
Looking at those stats you linked to, I would say the Freakonomic guys are right, children are more likely to die from a neighbor with a swimming pool than one with a gun. But that aside, I think what you’re getting at here goes along with what I said above:
Banning guns because people do not know how to properly use them, or because the government doesn’t know how to properly set up programs to train and enforce the training of proper gun usage, punishes those that properly use their gun.
But if we are going to ban things based on accidental fatalities resulting from improper use, why stop with guns? What about motor vehicles?
But the data you linked to doesn’t support that. 1.2 million Iraqi civilians have died since the start of the war. That’s way more than 4249 that died unintentionally from firearms from 97 – 01.
My thoughts on gun control come from the discussions I have had for roughly 10 years now, and what I have read. I have yet to see any conclusive data showing how gun laws reduce crime. And I have yet to see anyone present a clear and logical plan on how to rid the world completely of guns. Because of this I can’t really see a reason to support gun laws.
Oops, never mind my paragraph on the Iraqi civilians, I missed your point there and just caught it… ;-p
http://www.statemaster.com/graph/cri_mur_and_non_man_percap-murder-nonnegligent-manslaughter-per-capita
Well, apparently the gun laws in DC don’t do much good..they have the highest murder rate per capita in the country. If I lived there I would be packin’ heat legal or not!
The right to life and property is useless without the right to defend same.
I don’t think you should use “accidental” as the basis, but opportunity use as well. We can look at the statistics as “criminals” but many of those criminals are drunk or argumentatively emotional people that had ready access to a gun that escalated them into major league criminals once they shot their drinking buddy dead. Not every murderer is a career criminal; sometimes it’s just Joe shooting Bob and becoming a murderer. Bob should not have coveted Joe’s wife perhaps.
There’s some basic arguments for “right to bear arms” that just don’t make sense, however often they’re repeated.
1. I need it to hunt for food. That’s really doubtful these days since we don’t hunt for food. Sport maybe, but not food.
2. I need it to discourage criminals. Right. Law enforcement (with all the attendant controls) are insufficient but the average untrained rube is going to do better with no controls. Sounds like libertarian ideology not fully thought out. Why is it that we have the largest incarcerated population in the world (even not accounting per capita which raises it astronomically)? More guns would help bring it down how?
3. I need it to fight my oppressive government. Right. But why stop there? The government has tanks, howitzers, battleships, destroyers, jet aircraft, GBUs, tactical and strategic nuclear weapons and fully trained cadre of professionals (not counting the many, many mercenaries). However, in some idealized universe, your gun becomes a match in this fight. Makes me wonder why “arms” seems to include rifles and handguns, but not grenades and nukes. Arms as understood in 1789, are not modern weapons. I for one would support your right to have as many flintlocks as you’d like since theoretically people could walk up and smack you on the head with a bat while you load those single shot relics.
We live in the 21st century. It’s a better investment to spend money educating your neighbor than arming against him. Our “defense” budget illustrates this strategy of fear guiding our priorities in threat mitigation.
Excuse me while I go get a drink, I agree with Web05 on this one.
LOL James, see you and I aren’t too different after all! :gulp:
Ted:
1. I won’t argue with you here. And really I don’t get the whole hunting for sport thing either.
2.
Absolutely! What would scare you more (don’t think form anyone’s perspective but your own), a trained policeman pointing a gun at you or someone that obviously knows little, threatening you, and might be packing? To me it’s the one that could have a gun because they will tend to be more unpredictable.
But even if that logic doesn’t convince you, would you be more likely or less likely to rob someone if you thought they had a gun? When people are allowed to carry concealed weapons criminals are taking a huge risk.
Well one reason is because we treat people with addictions as criminals and we think tax paying marijuana smokers are evil. But that aside, I don’t think guns will cure all and solve poverty and bring world peace. I think they will help protect a woman walking home late at night on a dark street.
I think Liberals treat guns the same way as Conservatives treat marijuana. “Oh my God if we allow anyone to use it all hell will break loose. Everyone will be getting stoned all day long… WONT SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!” Sorry for getting melodramatic there. But to me, and I am sure many Libertarians as well, it just makes no sense how taking guns OUT of the hands of citizens and KEEPING them in the hands of criminals helps.
3. Won’t argue with you here. I got into a debate with a Libertarian that thought protecting himself and his family with a nuke was okay. :bug: Seriously, I can’t make that up.
I agree with you, and I own no guns because my money needs to be spent on other things. But until someone comes up with a intelligent plan to get rid of all the world’s weapons, people have the right to protect themselves.
Meh. I’m actually a gun owner, but it’s just a nasty habit I never got over. Occasionally feel a bit conflicted, but it’s only for use against zombies and space aliens. All the cool kids had one so I had to get one as well.
Confidentially, whenever I hold that F92 9mm I feel my pecker twitch. It’s probably TMI, but cleaning it makes it a personal homoerotic experience, what with the oil and the clp, but it’s better than viewing Mapplethorpes on the sly.
Criminals are well known for their cost/benefit analysis and logic. Which is why they have excellent impulse control.
I’m against gun control and for gun education. I’d like to address several points in the comments.
1. Hunting for food – Sure, you don’t need a weapon NOW for hunting food, but part of owning a gun from my perspective is preparedness. From what I’ve read we have about a 3 day supply of food at any given time on the shelves in our stores. If we rationed what we’ve got in my house, I figure we could go a month before we needed to forage, even if power was gone…but in the grand scheme of things, a month isn’t that long…
2. Protection from your government – I’m fairly certain that I’m on the fringe on this one, but I’m of the mind that you SHOULD be able to buy an Abrahms (splg?) tank and ammo. I think practically it’d be near impossible without a …well organized militia…because it would be cost prohibitive, but if for no other reason than the fact that we’d just done it, the founders recognized that it’s your right to stand up to your government, with force if necessary.
3. Criminal deterrence – As I recall, and I don’t have a link offhand, there was an interesting study comparing crime in Great Britain and the U.S. The British stat for robbery was off the charts compared to ours. Actually, I did just find the link…here
The article I read using these stats indicated that they thought the reason GB’s burglary rate was so much higher per population segment was because the burglers didn’t have to worry about getting shot when the B&E;‘d.
To wrap up, the main reason I don’t believe in gun control is simple self protection. As long as guns are in this world, criminals will be able to get a hold of them. Cops can only react to a crime, they can’t generally prevent it, and I believe it’s every able individual’s responsibility to protect themselves.
All that said, I do believe there should be HARSH penalties for misusing firearms, including allowing them to be stolen from your home.
True. By the same token, criminals will also take the easy way vs. the hard way. So a house with an alarm sign will tend to get bypassed in favor of one that doesn’t. Someone who looks like they mean business will more likely be skipped as a mugging victim than someone who doesn’t.
I’ve read that before—and also read that because theft and burglary are so high, the police tend to ignore all but the cases in which the victim is physically assaulted—which, in turn, basically means that criminals feel they have a pass on such things.
On the other hand, I tend to distrust comparisions between the US and other countries in this—if for no other reason than that guns are so pervasive in this society that getting them out of criminal hands would be a several decade effort, if that.
I’ve debated this subject from both sides before (formally and personally). I tend to finally decide when it seems that the gun controller argument is, “People can’t be trusted with guns, because they will hurt each other with them.” I mistrust arguments from mistrusting the populace, as it seems a slippery slope to all sorts of other, more clearly tyrannical behavior. On that basis, I’d rather err on the side of letting people have what they want and live with the consequences, than treat them like children who can’t be allowed to handle scissors.
Well, at the bottom of many of these arguments is the notion that having guns in the hands of the citizenry, defends democracy, freedom, The Constitution. Frankly, that doesn’t seem to make any sense whatsoever because it seems to place gun ownership on par with an educated and activist citizenry.
WRT to English statistics, here’s what it says:
That doesn’t seem conclusive that English system doesn’t work as well because our murder, rape and robbery were all significantly higher despite the freewheeling gun culture. Of these, I would tend to think of murder and rape as being the most serious challenges to individual freedom; the other stuff is generally categorized under property crime (except for assault—which I tend to view as part of the English drink and brawl culture).
GUYK says:
Maybe that’s the fundamental difference that you’ve hit on. I’ve outsourced law enforcement to the police and legal system, and don’t plan to shoot anyone per se in order to save my TV or car from being pilfered.
When we talk about human rights, we don’t generally say that my TV has the same rights as John Smith, the human I shot dead saving my 32” flat screen TV. Likewise, when being robbed, I tend to give it up (grew up in an inner city and got robbed/mugged a few times). The advice from my elders was, “If you get mugged, give up your wallet. The contents of the wallet can be replaced, the crook can be caught, but escalating things to demonstrate the girth of the johnson, is not really the way to tone things down.”
Property rights are not human rights.
Ted, those stats are a little old for this argument if you are going to use them. People here are speaking about what’s currently happening. All that stat allows you to do is speak for 1996.
So what do we tell the woman walking home late one night? Because telling her the same thing would be pretty crass. I still say if you allow her to carry conceal you would create a situation where the robber doesn’t know who might have a weapon and who doesn’t. It presents an obviously dangerous situation for them.
But you also seem to think that if we drop gun laws the US will turn into some outlandish old western where everyone is firing a pistol every second and people are dying needlessly. I just don’t see how that’s accurate at all, especially if the US would make an attempt to train people wanting to buy a weapon. Make training mandatory to anyone wanting to own or carry a weapon.
No, but why doesn’t a human have the right to protect property?
Webs05, I used the same statistics that another commenter used to designate the fault of the English gun control laws relative to burglary. My point was that murder and rape were still substantially higher in the US with the more liberal gun ownership laws.
A human does. That’s what the legal system is all about. It’s only when a person decides that a 32” TV, MSRP $599, is worth the same as a person taking it that I have an issue. I tend to think that emotion plays into the decision to fire, and that’s where the thing falls apart. We want to be rational, but in the heat of the moment we turn emotional. Laws are supposed to abstract that heat of the moment emotion away.
I would tell her what you suggest is crass. I value her more alive than dead, and indignity in life is temporary but dignity in death is permanent. I would rather take effort to make the situation safer for her by educating the community at risk that would assault her because that has all kinds of benefits relative to the alternatives—death for her, death for the assailant, etc tends to be a net loss. Maybe I’d support better lighting, and better alerting techniques.
I think I would also tell her to drink less, and party less, because the majority of rapes are conducted by people she knows.
To the Founders, it was, right alongside other quaint restrictions like protection against having soldiers forceably quartered in your home. The explicit justification may not seem to apply any more, but that doesn’t mean the articulated right has (or should) go away.
True, though:
Which is why if someone swipes a pack of gum from my store, I can’t just haul off and shoot him. If someone breaks into my house while I’m in bed (or stops me on the street demanding my wallet), though, my peceived danger is greater, and having a gun may, if I choose to have one, help protect me and mine from greater injury.
One could argue that the greater gun violence in the US (vs. the UK) is due to a much greater pervsiveness of guns in society since its founding. The questions is, if that’s so, and if *overall* gun possession reduction would help reduce gun violence, how do you get to fewer guns in society? Will gun control laws actually get guns out of the hands of those who would use them criminally? Since many of those folks are already using guns illegally, either in violation of parole, purchased illegally, or of an illegal type, it seems unlikely.
I am well-aware of the statistics of guns being used on folks other than attacking criminals (the old “He furiously broke off from the argument, went to his room, grabbed the pistol he kept there, and returned, shooting the person he’d been shouting at” thang). It’s a difficult balancing act between having a gun ready enough to protect your household and not ready enough to be seized on the spur of the moment. I agree that greater education and training is necessary, but won’t resolve the issue cleanly.
I suspect this is another one of those darned issues where the simple answers—unfetterd gun ownership or complete gun restrictions—will each have undesirable consequences. Dagnabbit.
This discussion has gone so well I didn’t feel the need to weigh in – thanks to everyone! Let me ask your opinion on something.
I agree there is no solution at the extremes. Ban all guns, then only criminals have them. Wide-open gun ownership with no registration, then it’s hard to tell criminals from responsible owners.
How about gun registration? We register cars, require insurance for them, make people pass a test to operate them, and have varying penalties for misuse.
In a gun-registered society, suppose someone breaks into your home when you are not there. They find your unlocked guns, steal them, and use them in a violent crime. Ballistics samples are on file, and the gun is traced back to you. Your negligence is on file because you were fined for letting your gun be stolen, and now you’re also liable to the victim’s family in the civil suit that they file against you.
Presto: most gun owners start locking their guns, because an unlocked gun becomes a legal hazard to them as it should be.
Carrying on that scenario: the police find your gun in the hands of a criminal. It no longer matters what his “story” is; the gun isn’t registered to him. At minimum they have him on illegal gun possession, and may add stolen gun charges too. A substantive weapon against violent criminals.
That scenario seems reasonable to me, with two caveats:
1. It doesn’t address the “we need our guns to protect us from the guvernment” fringe—obviously, if every gun is registered, the jackboots will know whose doors to kick in first.
2. Driving is a privilege, not a right. Gun possession is a right, not a privilege. If all we are registering is guns (like car tags), that’s one thing. If we are registering gun ownership, that could become a bit dicier—though case law seems to allow it at present, it’s also been a way for folks to play politics or persoinalities (if you have to register with the local sheriff, and he doesn’t take a hankering to you, I wouldn’t be surprised if the registration process were very slow, if not glacial).
That said, gun registration seems the best compromise
I don’t see this as viable. Someone else commits a crime against you—steals your gun—but you are responsible for their subsequent crimes?
Being sued for gross negligence is one thing, but I don’t buy the transitive property of crime. As it is, gunmakers are exempt from negligence and safety lawsuits by congress so that we can continue with the gun culture unfettered.
Registration and safety enforcement should be the key—that alone will restrict gun numbers and take guns out of the hands of criminals (i.e. like you said, if you posses an unregistered weapon, in the commission of the crime or not, then the penalty should be pursued. A reasonable penalty.).
But it’s not in the interest of gunmakers to reduce the number of guns floating in the general population.
If someone steals your silver candelabra and bashes a store clerk over the head with it, no. But if you have a weapon, and you fail to take the most basic step to secure it, then I could see some level of civil liability. Presumably you could buy insurance against that liability like any other. The criminal himself still gets three felony charges, a very different level of responsibility.
(I’m defining a ‘weapon’ as a device primarily designed to inflict harm. A gun or a sword would fit that definition; a kitchen knife would not. A definition for lawyers to wrangle over.)
So if I have a sword up over my mantlepiece and someone swipes it and runs someone else through with it, I should be liable? Hrm.
Guns … yeah. Though I’d want the minimum standards for liability pretty clearly defined.
In answer to your question DOF, I’m generally against gun registration for a reason already mentioned. If there’s a list, the jackboots know exactly where to come first. This has played out at least once historically when Germany invaded France. They got the gun registration list and went a-knockin, severely crippling the resistance movement.