"Libertarianism differs fundamentally from both left liberal and conservative perspectives."

"Popular opinion views [left] liberalism and conservatism as radically different perspectives about the proper size and scope of government. ... Yet [left] liberal and conservative perspectives are the same in one key respect: both advocate using government to impose particular values.
    "Conservatives want to ban drugs, liberals guns. Conservatives advocate banning abortions, [left] liberals subsidising them. Conservatives support subsidies for home schooling and religious schools, [left[ liberals the same for low-income housing and 'clean' energy. ... Thus the goals of favoured policies differ, but not the belief that government should promote specific views ... —all of which involve government interference with private decisions ...
    "Libertarianism differs fundamentally from both [left] liberal and conservative perspectives. ... consistently ask[ing] whether government intervention does more harm than good. And it applies this skepticism regardless of the associated 'values.'
    "Thus libertarianism argues against both drug prohibition and gun control; against government protection of unions, but not against unions per se; against government-imposed affirmative action, but not against privately adopted affirmative action; against any government-imposed content moderation of social media, but not against private moderation policies; against all trade and immigration restrictions; against government restrictions on school choice; against government-mandated licenses; and against the government defining marriage.
    "Perhaps libertarians are wrong about the merits of some government interventions. But applying a consistent lens across policies helps understand the inconsistencies of both [left] liberal and conservative perspectives."

~ Jeffrey Miron from his post 'Libertarian Consistency'

What's 'not seen' by social engineers is generally even more important than what is, explains Don Boudreaux in this Guest Post. Social engineers see only a relatively few surface phenomena, he observes, and remain blind to the astonishing complexity that is ever-churning beneath the surface that goes to create those surface phenomena. They need to turn off their tendency to push their simple coercive solutions at the expense of the freedom that would otherwise solve them.

'Turn off that tendency to coerce,' says Don Boudreaux

Beware the Allure of Simple ‘Solutions’

by Don Boudreaux

The attitudes and opinions of today’s so-called “elite” – those public-opinion formers who Deirdre McCloskey calls “the clerisy” – are childish. And not in a good way. Most journalists and writers working for most premier media and entertainment companies, along with most professors and public intellectuals, think, talk, and write about society with less insight than the average toddler.

This sad truth is masked by the one feature that does distinguish the clerisy from young children: verbal virtuosity. Yet beneath the fine words, beautiful phrases, arresting metaphors, and affected allusions lies a notable immaturity of thought. Every social and economic problem is believed to have a solution, and that solution is almost always superficial.

Unlike children, adults understand that living life well begins with accepting the inescapability of trade-offs. Contrary to what you might have heard, you cannot “have it all.” You cannot have more of this thing unless you’re willing to have less of that other thing. And what’s true for you as an individual is true for any group of individuals. We cannot support governments artificially raising the cost of producing and using carbon fuels, for example, unless we are willing to pay higher prices at the pump and, thus, have less income to spend on acquiring other goods and services. Equally, we cannot use money creation to ease the pain today of COVID lockdowns without enduring the greater pain tomorrow of inflation.

While children stomp their little feet in protest when confronted with the need to make trade-offs, adults accept the necessity of trade-offs. Except, of course, for those childish adults who are paid-up members of the clerisy.

No less importantly, adults -- real adults, those who understand this point -- are not beguiled by the superficial. They understand that not everything immediate noticeable is always important, and that -- all too frequently -- it's the things we don't see that are more important. Especially when the latter cause the former.

Pay close attention to how the clerisy (who are mostly, although not exclusively, Progressives) propose to ‘solve’ almost any problem, real or imaginary. You’ll discover that the proposed ‘solution’ is superficial; it’s rooted in the naïve assumption that social reality beyond what is immediately observable either doesn’t exist or is unaffected by attempts to rearrange surface phenomena. In the clerisy’s view, the only reality that matters is the reality that is easily seen and seemingly easily manipulated -- and manipulated, always and everywhere, with coercion. The clerisy’s proposed ‘solutions,’ therefore, involve simply rearranging, or attempting to rearrange, surface phenomena by means of the government's guns.

• Do some people use their own guns to murder other people? Yes, sadly. The clerisy’s superficial ‘solution’ to this real problem is to outlaw private guns (which ignores that this tends to leave guns in the hands of outlaws). 
• Do some people have substantially higher net financial worths than other people? Yes. The clerisy’s juvenile ‘solution’ to this fake problem is to heavily tax the rich and transfer the proceeds to the less rich (ignoring that there are too few rich to make the coercive transfer worthwhile, while reducing incentives for the less rich to get rich themselves). 
• Are some workers paid wages that are too low to support a modern family? Yes. The clerisy’s simplistic ‘solution’ to this fake problem – “fake” because most workers earning such low wages are not heads of households – is to have government prohibit the payment of wages below some stipulated minimum (ignoring that this tends to price marginal workers out of all employment altogether).
• Do some people suffer substantial property damage, or even loss of life, because of hurricanes, droughts, and other bouts of severe weather? Yes. The clerisy’s lazy ‘solution’ to this real problem focuses on changing the weather by reducing the emissions of an element, carbon, that is now (a bit too simplistically) believed to heavily determine the weather.

I could go on ... and I will.

• Do prices of many ‘essential’ goods and services rise significantly in the immediate aftermath of natural disasters? Yes. The clerisy’s counterproductive ‘solution’ to this fake problem (“counterproductive” and “fake” because these high prices accurately reflect and signal underlying economic realities) is to prohibit the charging and payment of these high prices. 
• When real inflationary pressures build up because of excessive monetary growth, are these pressures vented in the form of rising prices? Yes indeed. The clerisy’s infantile ‘solution’ to the very real problem of inflation is to blame it on greed while raising taxes on profits.
• Is the SARS-CoV-2 virus contagious and potentially dangerous to humans? Yes. The clerisy’s simple-minded ‘solution’ to this real problem is to forcibly prevent people from mingling with each other.
• Do many youngsters still not receive schooling of minimum acceptable quality? Yes. The clerisy’s lazy ‘solution’ to this real problem is to give pay raises to teachers and spend more money on school administrators.
• Do some American workers lose jobs when American consumers buy more imports? Yes. The clerisy’s ‘solution’ is to obstruct consumers’ ability to buy imports. Are some people bigoted and beset with irrational dislike or fear of blacks, gays, lesbians, and bisexuals? Yes. The clerisy’s ‘solution’ to this real problem is to outlaw “hate” and to compel bigoted persons to behave as if they aren’t bigoted.
• Do many persons who are eligible to vote in political elections refrain from voting? Yes. The ‘solution’ favoured by at least some of the clerisy to this fake problem – “fake” because in a free society each person has a right to refrain from participating in politics – is to make voting mandatory.

The above list of simplistic and superficial ‘solutions’ to problems real and imaginary can easily be expanded.

The clerisy, mistaking words for realities, assumes that success at verbally describing realities more to their liking proves that these imagined realities can be made real by merely rearranging the relevant surface phenomena. Members of the clerisy ignore unintended consequences. And they overlook the fact that many of the social and economic realities that they abhor are the result, not of villainy or of correctible imperfections, but of complex trade-offs made by countless individuals.

Social engineering appears doable only to those persons who, seeing only a relatively few surface phenomena, are blind to the astonishing complexity that is ever-churning beneath the surface to create those surface phenomena. To such persons, social reality appears as it does to a simple child: simple and easily manipulated to achieve whatever are the desires that motivate the manipulators.

The clerisy’s ranks are filled overwhelmingly with simple-minded people who mistake their felicity with words and their good intentions for serious thinking. They convey to each other, and to the unsuspecting public, the appearance of being deep thinkers while seldom thinking with more sophistication and nuance than is on display in every classroom of toddlers today.

* * * * 

Don Boudreaux is a senior fellow with American Institute for Economic Research and with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University; a Mercatus Center Board Member; and a professor of economics and former economics-department chair at George Mason University. He is the author of the books The Essential Hayek, Globalization, Hypocrites & Half-Wits, and his articles appear in such publications as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, US News & World Report as well as numerous scholarly journals. 

He writes a blog called Cafe Hayek and a regular column on economics for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Boudreaux earned a PhD in economics from Auburn University and a law degree from the University of Virginia.

A version of his post first appeared at the American Institute for Economic Research blog.

"Arguments about [American] gun rights ... remain a mess"

"To see why it is proper for a government to regulate weapons and to understand the principles by which it should, we need to go back to some fundamental principles of moral philosophy, political philosophy, different kinds of rights, and the nature of government... 

    "You have a natural right to defend yourself against an attack, using unlimited force if necessary. But it still might rightly be illegal for you to own or carry a gun...
    "Remember, the proper question is not, 'Why can the government restrict my access to guns?' The proper question is, 'What share of its legal monopoly on the use of force should the government share with its citizens?' The proper answer is, 'Whatever is needed for those citizens to protect themselves when the government cannot.'
    "Unfortunately, this principle is not articulated in the [US] Constitution and we are stuck twisting the Second Amendment into service. Things would be better if we didn't have to....

    "The current situation in the US is a moral mess. The plainest constitutional defense for a right to own and carry a gun is no longer relevant. The main defense hangs by the thread of a 5–4 Supreme Court ruling weakened by its own caveat. The argument by economists and social scientists is morally empty. And the one possibly valid moral argument doesn’t appeal to any principle that is explicitly in the Constitution or that American politicians are sworn to uphold or, sadly, that people much believe in anymore.
    "Those wanting a morally strong argument for gun ownership should demand, primarily, protection of the natural right to self-defence and not of the civil rights of the Second Amendment. Those who want to help potential victims of murder, assault, and rape should not demand that those victims also surrender their natural right to defend themselves against such threats. Those social scientists honestly trying to determine social effects of particular gun laws should not propose that those determinations qualify as moral arguments, one way or the other. And those who believe a government’s job is to protect citizens’ natural rights should recognise that a government legitimately possesses a monopoly on force and with it a responsibility to regulate weapons.
    "Until we again recognise the difference between—and the relations between—civil rights and natural rights, and until we learn to again ground legislation in the protection of citizens’ natural rights and not on social statistics, arguments about gun rights will remain a mess."

~ John McCaskey, from his 2016 post 'Natural Rights, Civil Rights, and Guns'

"Why are America’s adolescent boys so angry, and why are they expressing their anger through mindless acts of violence?" [update 2]

Source: Statista

"The [latest] tragic school shooting ... forces us to ask once again: What is going on in [American] schools? ...
    "The shootings have one thing in common: they all took place at school. The boys didn’t kill on the weekend, they didn’t kill after school, and they didn’t shoot up the local Dairy Queen.
     "So what’s happening? Why are America’s adolescent boys so angry, and why are they expressing their anger through mindless acts of violence?
    "That they all killed at school is a fact worth pondering. The explanation for all these shootings might very well be found in the destruction of the minds and souls of America’s young people by an education establishment bent on using our children as guinea pigs for their bizarre experiments in schooling. The fact of the matter is that most of our public schools today are intellectual and moral wastelands....
    "The crisis in our schools is at heart a philosophical issue. The precipitous rise in school violence over the course of the last decade runs directly parallel with the rise of 'Progressive' theories of education....
    "Dissuaded from making moral distinctions, fed a daily diet of an 'I’m okay, you’re okay' philosophy, denied logic, knowledge, and truth, and driven by unknown fears and anxieties, today’s young people are left with nothing but their untutored 'feelings' and 'emotions' as their guides through the trials and tribulations of adolescence. Thus we should not be surprised when they respond with outbursts of rage and acts of violence when things don’t go their way.
    "The education establishment has responded to this crisis by turning our schools into something more akin to prisons than places of learning.... A good many schools in this country are simply providing day-care for teenagers and in the worst schools, they are providing incarceration. Class time is more like a prison lockup.
    "If Americans want to stop school-yard violence and address the social pathologies that increasingly afflict our young, if they want to turn our schools into serious places of learning, they should abandon their deadly experiment in Progressive education and restore a curriculum that emphasises reason over emotions, knowledge over feelings, moral judgment over moral agnosticism, and self-control over self-expression."

~ author C. Bradley Thompson, from his 2001 op-ed 'Why [American] Schools are Becoming Killing Fields'

UPDATE 1: Thompson has updated his own earlier op-ed with new thinking and fresh writing, posting, at his blog, a new piece Our Killing Schools, Part 1. A slice:

"Your typical teenage thug is not on his school’s honor roll, does not sob uncontrollably immediately after committing an act of violence, nor does he commit suicide. What most Americans first saw in the scared faces of these adolescent killers was not so much an evil monster but rather the 'boy next door.'
    "Understandably, then, we secretly worry that these boys are not freakish aberrations but bellwethers. We worry that many more are just waiting in the wings ready for that last tumbler to fall into place activating their fateful plunge into the abyss.
    "My interest in this subject was initially inspired by my experiences as a college professor. Every year I meet hundreds of recently graduated high school students, and I am most often struck by four things: first, that students are poorly educated; second, that they hated their high school experience; third, that they are unwilling to make moral judgments; and finally, that they have inflated opinions of their level of knowledge and they are not open to criticism.The result is an often-explosive mixture of ignorance, resentment, nihilism, and narcissism. Thus, the crisis of our schools is a philosophical issue, and to understand that crisis we must know what Progressive education is and the ways in which it has affected America’s children....
    "In the next essay in this three-part series, I will examine how Progressive education has corrupted the cognitive, moral, and psychological attributes and abilities of America’s children."

(About the author: Bradley Thompson is a Professor of Political Science at Clemson University, where he teaches political philosophy. He is also the Executive Director of the Clemson Institute for the Study Capitalism and the founder of the Lyceum Scholars Program. 

    During his academic career, he has also been the Garwood Family Professor in the James Madison Program at Princeton University, a John Adams Fellow at the Institute of United States Studies (University of London), and a fellow of the Program in Constitutional Studies at Harvard University.)

UPDATE 2: Philosopher Stephen Hicks considers three hypotheses to answer the two questions that are possibly even more important than simple questions about guns and "gun control": 

• Why are young males doing this? 
• And why schools in particular? 

These killers are not targeting people at the mall or a music concert or others places where lots of potential targets are concentrated. So: What is special to the killers about schools?

Let’s start with a statistic: “Over the course of the last 25 years, sixteen teenage boys have committed a mass murder at an American elementary or high school.”* Additionally, many other teenage males were planning to kill but were discovered and prevented. So: Why so many (a) young (b) men desiring to (c) kill in (d) schools? ...

First hypothesis considers the motivation -- rule out the obvious, and you're left with hatred.

Think of spousal killing and the statistic that most domestic murders are one spouse killing the other. The relationship is close — hours and hours, days and days together constantly — but it has becomes toxic: they come to dislike and then to despise and then to hate each other. Then one kills the other.

School is a toxic place for many students. Being there is slow poison over hours and days and weeks and months — and they come to hate the place and the individuals in it. As in the toxic marriage, they want to kill the other.

So Hypothesis 1: Unlike shopping malls and concert halls, schools are toxic places for these students, and the same dislike/despise/hate dynamic of toxic marriages is operative in them. [Emphasis mine.]

Second hypothesis considers that it's not specific people the young men are killing -- it's more that the school itself is a symbol of something.

Yet there is an impersonal element in the school shootings, unlike the toxic marriages, so it’s more complicated. The murdered students and teachers very often have no personal connection to the shooter....  

So Hypothesis 2: To school shooters, School stands in his mind as a hated symbol in the same way Jew stands in the mind of an anti-Semite or Banker stands in the mind of an anti-capitalist or Politician stands in the mind of an anarchist, and the destruction of the individuals involved is generic and impersonal.

Third hypothesis considers the fact that few of these shooters expect to emerge alive. What does that tell us? And it's not just that they want to destroy themselves, it's like they want to bring down the whole temple with them:

So there’s a powerful self-destructive phenomenon at work too, something nihilistic. Yet rather than simply subsiding into insignificant lives or quietly committing suicide, they plan and execute a negative act they know will get much attention. They want to destroy themselves, and they want to cause as much destruction to others as they can when doing so.  

So Hypothesis 3: The school shooters are near-but not-quite total nihilists who feel empty except for despair and hate and a need for their lives to have at least one act of significance to define it.

Tragic. But I think Professors Hicks and Thompson are close to the answers here.

Ban guns?

"To ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the law abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless." 

          ~ attrib. Lysander Spooner

Gun buyback: Correlation is not causation [updated]

THE LABOUR-LED GOVERNMENT'S compulsory 'gun buyback' legislation is said by the Deputy Prime Minister to cost somewhere around $300 million. That would buy a lot of policemen.

So clearly the Labour-led Government, along with everyone else in Parliament except ACT's David Seymour, has concluded that this compulsory buyback will keep New Zealanders a lot safer than a lot more policemen will.
That doesn't say a lot for our policemen. (Nor does that figure say anything about the realistic cost of the buyback, which is more like billions than millions.)

But what do we know about how much safer the compulsory gun buyback will make us?
The fact is, neither the Labour-led Government, nor anyone else in Parliament really knows, because they haven't and won't have the time to do that research.

What they are really relying on is the alleged popular success of the Australian compulsory gun buyback after the Port Arthur massacre. So it's worth asking just exactly how successful that gun buyback was in making Australians safer. So I went to look for research that did look at how successful that had been in reducing lethal violence. In 2016 Science Direct published 'A systematic review of quantitative evidence about the impacts of Australian legislative reform on firearm homicide,' which concluded:

Australian studies have not found evidence of changes in lethal violence following gun law reform. Empirical findings about Australian gun law reform contradict ‘popular’ views about those laws...

    These [studies] examined various different time periods, and used a range of different statistical analysis methods. No study found statistical evidence of any significant impact of the legislative changes on firearm homicide rates.

That sounds fairly conclusive, right?

In fact, if you look at the rate gun deaths from 1998 to 2014, you would think New Zealand and Australia already had the same restrictions on guns:

Source: GunPolicy.Org

And yet Australia already has these restrictions that New Zealand politicians are now eagerly rushing through.

So what is going on here? Why do those two declining figures (great news, by the way!) seem about the same even though the two country's gun laws are so different? Why does the popular 'knowledge' of the Australian buyback success not tally with the Australian studies that have found no evidence of changes in lethal violence following gun law reform? Why, in summary, do empirical findings about Australian gun law reform contradict ‘popular’ views about those laws.

And what does it say about the gun buyback programme that the decline began nearly a decade before?

The simple answer from the researchers is this: that the rates of gun death were going down in any case. The evidence from those researchers is that the buyback did not cause the decline (which as you can see form the graph above began before 1996) it simply correlates with its continuation.

Correlation is not causation. Perhaps the popular view is so different because that simple lesson is still widely unlearned.

SO WHAT DO THE the results of Australian research on their buyback programme over there tell us we should expect to see as a result of spending around $300 million on the compulsory buyback programme here? "The results," says one, "suggest that the [buyback will] not have any large effects on reducing firearm homicide or suicide rates." In short, concludes another:

Although gun buybacks appear to be a logical and sensible policy that helps to placate the public’s fears, the evidence so far suggests 23 that in the Australian context, the high expenditure incurred to fund the 1996 gun buyback has not translated into any tangible reductions in terms of firearm deaths. 

As I was saying, $300 million would buy an awful lot of policemen. Not to fool ourselves that more policemen would have foiled this or any other shooting -- because a police response time of 36 minutes even of the almost-miraculous 6 minutes* to arrive at a site where unarmed people are being shot is telling proof otherwise -- but if we must have knee-jerk law and rushed spending decisions as a result of this massacre, why not head down that path instead of criminalising otherwise law-abiding gun-owners. (Not forgetting that the murderer himself broke existing gun laws in modifying his weapon before his lethal spree, reminding us that no matter what laws are passed, criminals -- like gangs -- will still ignore them whenever they feel like it.)

AND IF WE ARE serious about avoiding another atrocity like this one -- which is after all the alleged aim of this expensive legislation being rushed through with such unseemly haste -- then another unanswered question seems to present itself, which is this: what would you might most want to have with you when a man with a gun bursts through your door and starts shooting? A policeman to defend you all would be a fine thing to have, but in their absence – and experience from around the world tells us that a policeman can never be there in time to defend us – what you may most want is something to scare the gunman off. Just as this arsehole-with-a-gun was finally frightened away by a very brave man threatening the coward with an EFTPOS machine and with a shotgun the gunman had already discarded.

Because self-defence is still legal in New Zealand, just, under Section 48 of the Crimes Act “If one fears for their life or that of another.” Good law. The very same law that police are covered by when using firearms for their activities. Law however that is not set in stone, and that the police have for some time been wishing to overturn.
Could the outcome of the Mosque shootings have been different if the police upheld the law on self-defence instead of vilifying anyone who uses firearms for self-defence? We can never know.

After the Christchurch atrocity, and the political reaction to it, crime researcher Dr. John Lott asks the obvious question:

Police are extremely important in stopping crime, but the police can’t be there all the time. The police themselves understand that they virtually always arrive on the crime scene after the crime has occurred. And that raises a real question, what should people do when they’re having to confront a criminal by themselves?

Anyone like to have a crack at answering that? Because your politicians haven't. And won't.

But you should keep asking it.

We do know already that this rushed legislation will be followed by other more considered legislation, imposing further restrictions on gun ownership, and considering again a programme of costly gun registration. If there is an agenda, it will become apparent then. We must hope, and remain vigilant, that the agenda does not go from vilification of this legal right to removing it from the books altogether.

Because then where would we and other brave men be when we do need to defend ourselves? 

THIS IS NOT AT all to say that a government has no moral right to regulate weapons. Of course they do. Governments (properly) hold the legal monopoly over the use of force in a given geographic area. That's a fundamental definition of what a government is. Being a primary means of projecting force means that weapons and the regulation thereof must be permanently on their radar. But by what principle should this be done? As philosopher John Mccaskey patiently explains, 

To see why it is proper for a government to regulate weapons and to understand the principles by which it should, we need to go back to some fundamental principles of moral philosophy, political philosophy, different kinds of rights, and the nature of government... 

    You have a natural right to defend yourself against an attack, using unlimited force if necessary. But it still might rightly be illegal for you to own or carry a gun... 

      Remember, the proper question is not, 'Why can the government restrict my access to guns?' The proper question is, 'What share of its legal monopoly on the use of force should the government share with its citizens?' The proper answer is, 'Whatever is needed for those citizens to protect themselves when the government cannot.'

Those remain a Q+A that this government, and this country, still need to have. Why don't you begin asking and answering it for yourself?

* * * * * 

* The New York Times lays out the probable response timeline which, however rapid, still allowed the murderer to leave the first place of carnage and drive across town to create another:

It is unclear exactly what time the gunman entered Al Noor, which was crowded with worshipers for Friday Prayer. But the police said that they received the first call for help at 1:41 p.m., and that the first officers arrived there six minutes later.
    The video recorded by the gunman, which was livestreamed on Facebook, showed a man trying to tackle him inside the mosque, only to be shot and killed.
    Six minutes after firing his first shot, he drove away. Three minutes later, a siren can be heard on the video as he is driving to the second mosque.
    The siren becomes louder, then fades, suggesting the police and the gunman may have just missed each other, with officers and medical personnel racing toward Al Noor as he was pulling away. 
    About 30 front-line police officers would be on the streets of Christchurch around lunchtime on an average Friday, said Chris Cahill, a detective inspector who is president of a local labor union for police officers.
        When that first panicked call came in, he added, the dispatcher would have sent all of them to Al Noor….

    The police said a special armed tactical unit arrived at Al Noor Mosque four minutes after the first officers, or 10 minutes after the initial emergency call…
    “Any police force in the world — to get to the scene in six minutes, a specialist team there in 10 — that would be a success,” Cahill said.
Patrick Skinner, a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer now working for an American police department, agreed.
  “I’d say that the police response was rather quick in a tactical sense,” he said, noting that the officers were rushing into a violent situation that was still unfolding — and that had been encouraged by individuals espousing bigotry and hatred.
    Still, it was not fast enough. The officers arrived to a horrific scene, with the dead and wounded outnumbering the city’s usual on-duty police force.

.
.

Question on America's 2nd Amendment

1. So we all know America is going nuts.

2. And we all know that in arguing gun rights/gun control, that no-one is listening to anyone else. (See point 1 above.)

3. And we do know that the discussion (such as it is, see point 2 above) is pitted between those arguing that they have a right to guns for self-defence, those arguing they have a right to guns because their god told them so, and those arguing that no-one has any right to guns at all. Ever. But they can perhaps apply to government for the privilege. (Maybe.)

4. So the discussion has more than just two sides (see point 3 above) but has become tightly focussed around a central misunderstanding of the 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution.

5. Because the 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution has never protected what people think it protects (see point 4 above).

6. The 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution does protect "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, [which] shall not be infringed." So there's that. But the stated constitutional reason for this is neither self-defence nor because your god said so, but because "a well regulated Militia [is] necessary to the security of a free State." That's what the Constitution itself states to be the reason for any right to bear arms at all. And that means that what the 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution actually does protect (see point 5 above) is simply the right of people in pre-Federal America to bring their arms to bear in protection of their particular State (being Vermont, New York, Virginia etc.) And that's it.

7. So (and I'll put this in italics so you can read it again) there is no constitutional right to bear arms in self-defence. And nor, since no reasonable government would be expected nor required to protect a "right to revolution," is there a constitutional right to revolt. (See points 5 & 6 above.)

Q: So I have three questions for you that follow from the above 7 points (and if you aren't a Seppo, just wring your hands for a moment as you imagine that you are):

1. Would you support a constitutional amendment that does explicitly protect "the right to self-defence and the means thereof."
2. What would be the odds of such an amendment having the necessary support of two-thirds of the congress-reptiles? And...
3. If in the unlikely event it did pass, would you expect to see a preponderance of (say) small disposable single-shot handguns instead of automatic weapons with (say) 30-cartridge magazines?

And finally, would you like such a clause in a NZ constitution?

Leave your answers in the comments.

[NB: Both the 2nd Amendment argument above, and the resulting not-unimportant questions, were posed by John McCaskey -- and in much more depth than I have offered. Visit his website here.]

Oregon shooting: The root cause

The step-sister of Oregon’s mass-murderer said the shooting didn’t make sense. “All he ever did was put everyone before himself, he wanted everyone to be happy,” she told KCBS-TV. This is key to understanding the crime’s root cause, suggests Dr Michael Hurd:

“All he ever did was put everyone before himself, he wanted everyone to be happy,” she told KCBS-TV.
    [The murderer]’s step-sister (like most people) thinks self-sacrifice is a virtue. But when you have no rational concern for your own interests, you don’t have much of a life, you possess no self-esteem, and you have nothing much to live for; mix those qualities with a tendency and fascination for violence, and you’ve got a recipe for tragedy...
    ...Another of [the murderer]'s blog articles reportedly lamented materialism as preventing spiritual development. He probably did not like capitalism, since he condemned materialism. People who detest capitalism tend to detest America most of all. They see millions of others having a reasonably good time in a cultural and economic environment they consider rotten to the core. In some, the festering hatred turns to violence, but the hatred towards America (by Americans, especially younger ones) is probably more widespread than most of us realise.
    Anti-materialism, anti-capitalism. Anti-individualism. These are the dominant themes of many public schools and certainly most of academia, with regard to philosophy, culture, social/behavioural science and the humanities. Could these ideas be toxic and unhealthy? Not as an excuse for violence, but as an explanation for mental unhealthiness which only varies in degree from one young person to another, unless they reject those ideas?
    ...Again and again, these shooters are young men who seek out educational settings. It’s almost as if they’re trying to tell us something, in a dark and twisted way: “The ideas you’re teaching us are wrong, toxic, silly and unfounded. See what you’ve created?”

Read the whole article: Whatever Happened to the Search for “Root Causes” of Crime?, Dr Michael Hurd.

RELATED POST: The Arrogant Ignorance of Supporting Gun Control, Dr Michael Hurd (2013):

The arguments for gun control or gun confiscation basically boil down to this: “If guns were illegal, they would not be available. If they weren’t available, people like that crazy killer in [fill-in-the-blank-with-location-of-latest-shooting-here] would not be able to use them.”
    This assumes that a crazy psychopathic killer, hell-bent on murder, would let an obstacle like finding a gun legally stop him. This is absurd…
    The people who claim that violence can be controlled by outlawing guns show how little they understand about the nature of criminals and criminal psychology.
    I suppose this is why the self-same people who favour gun confiscation are the very same ones who plead for all manner of excuses for criminal behaviour. They tend to be the same type of people who feel that everything and everyone is responsible for criminal behaviour, other than the criminal himself.
They can’t understand, or perhaps don’t want to understand or come to grips with, the psychology of evil. It’s admittedly disturbing to try and do so. But this is no excuse for eliminating the right of the nonviolent, noncriminal majority to protect themselves from violence by making it harder or impossible for them to purchase weapons for self-defence.

DOWN TO THE DOCTOR’S: My Asian Expedition, (the Other) Hitchens on Guns, and Cowperthwaite on Statistics

This week, Libertarianz leader Dr Richard McGrath has been allowed out.

I write this from the "land of the free" - from a country never colonised by Western powers: Thailand. More specifically, my better half and I are spending a few days at the Sheraton Hotel in Hua Hin, three hours drive from Bangkok. And I've got to say, it's pretty damn good here - we're staying at a luxury resort on the western coast of the Gulf of Thailand, with cooling offshore winds that offer relief from the otherwise unrelenting heat (lately 35 degrees during the day, dipping to a frosty 28 at night), tasty food, a good book to read (The Prize, by Daniel Yergin, about the history of the oil industry) and a pleasant companion with whom to share some time out from the serious business of earning a living.

For the first time in a week and a half I can see the stars! There were four days in Hong Kong (where I watched a truly great Fiji team win the rugby sevens, and met several NZ rugby legends, courtesy of guest status in the HKRFU box - thank you again, Grant!) and where the so-called "light pollution" (in reality a glorious celebration of prosperity in a land of almost unlimited opportunity) meant the night sky was outshone in that corner of the planet by mere humans. The night lights in Kowloon alone (on the mainland part of Hong Kong) emit more light than a full moon, and probably shine brighter than the whole of North Korea ever could.

After HK, we spent 48 hours in Beijing. The pollution in Beijing allows you to gaze directly into the sun with little discomfort. So, of course, no chance of stargazing there.

Superficially quite modern, and judging by the quality of the cars on the road there are some very wealthy people there. But one gets the feeling this is accompanied by enormous corruption and abuses of power by officials at all levels, and that the average Joe doesn't really stand a chance of improving his lot in life. We did the obligatory visits to the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square (still overlooked by a gigantic image of mass murderer Mao Zedong), and the Great Wall, this last built - like the Egyptian pyramids - using slave labour. My legs are still sore after spending two hours walking up and down it - with 45 degree slopes in some sections, certainly it's a harder walk than it appears at first glance!

From chilly (1 degree overnight) China we flew down to Bangkok for our regular checkup at Silom Dental, then to Hua Hin.

But enough of my travels - I just have to share with readers a short piece on gun control by the late Christopher Hitchens's lesser-known and still extant younger brother Peter, who blogs at the UK’s Daily Mail. I think it's one of the best commentaries ever, on the right to act in self-defence - I mean, how could you fault an article entitled 'Why I Demand The Right To Carry A Gun'? First sentence: 

"We in Britain believe guns are so dangerous that only criminals should be allowed to have them."

It gets even better.

To end, a few snippets of information on probably the greatest bureaucrat of the twentieth century (if not the greatest in the history of mankind) - Sir John Cowperthwaite. I love to read up on this amazing man and his achievements whenever I visit Hong Kong. From his obituary in the Guardian(!):

• When Cowperthwaite became financial secretary of Hong Kong in 1961, the average wage there was 25% of the average Briton. By 1990, the average Hong Kong resident earned more than his British counterpart.
• Hong Kong, by the way, has no natural resources (apart from its harbour) and is a net food importer. Taxation on salaries earned in Hong Kong has been a flat 15% since 1966 - and profits from other sources such as dividends and foreign earnings are not taxed at all!
• When asked what poor countries should do to improve their fortunes, he advised them to "abolish the national office of statistics" (Census enforcers take note!).
• When a delegation was sent over from Whitehall to find out why Cowperthwaite was not collecting employment statistics, he gave them the arse card, sending them back on the next plane.
• He refused to accept state funding to upgrade his residence, pointing that no-one else in Hong Kong was receiving a housing benefit.
• When a group of businessmen asked him to fund a tunnel across Hong Kong harbour, Cowperthwaite told them that if it was viable, the private sector would do it - and it did.
• A quote from his first speech as financial secretary: "In the long run, the aggregate of decisions of individual businessmen, exercising individual judgment in a free economy, even if often mistaken, is less likely to do harm than the centralised decisions of a government, and certainly the harm is likely to be counteracted faster."

I trust you all enjoyed a happy Easter break - and if you wanted to work Good Friday and Easter Monday, you just went ahead and did it!

Back next week.  Promise.

Doc McGrath
Leader, Libertarianz Party

Why? And how? [update 3

WHY?

THAT’S THE FIRST question everyone asked after another idiot committed suicide by massacre, shooting twenty-six adults and youngsters in cold blood in a school in Connecticut before—well, who the hell cares what happened to him after that. Twenty-six human beings died, and something non-human.

Why did he do it? Why do any of these random shooters do it? An email doing the rounds attributed* to Morgan Freeman (the modern American “voice of God”) has one answer:

This may sound cynical, but here's why.
    It's because of the way the media reports it. Flip on the news and watch how we treat the Batman theater shooter and the Oregon mall shooter like celebrities. [The Columbine murderers] are household names, but do you know the name of a single victim of Columbine? Disturbed people who would otherwise just off themselves in their basements see the news and want to top it by doing something worse, and going out in a memorable way. Why a grade school? Why children? Because he'll be remembered as a horrible monster, instead of a sad nobody.
    CNN's article says that if the body count "holds up", this will rank as the second deadliest shooting behind Virginia Tech, as if statistics somehow make one shooting worse than another. Then they post a video interview of third-graders for all the details of what they saw and heard while the shootings were happening. Fox News has plastered the killer's face on all their reports for hours. Any articles or news stories yet that focus on the victims and ignore the killer's identity? None that I've seen yet. Because they don't sell. So congratulations, sensationalist media, you've just lit the fire for someone to top this and knock off a day-care center or a maternity ward next.
    You can help by forgetting you ever read this man's name, and remembering the name of at least one victim. You can help by donating to mental health research instead of pointing to gun control as the problem. You can help by turning off the news.

Sound comments. As a news consumer myself, I’ve never found it hard to turn of the news at times like this.

And at this blog, I’ve always followed the policy of never naming murderers. Why give them the oxygen of publicity.

THE NEXT QUESTION EVERYONE was asking was How?

How can this be stopped from happening again? Answers were rolling in even before the mourning started, and well before facts started to come in. President Obama said “meaningful reform” must be enacted so it won’t happen again. Rep. Dianne Feinstein has a bill all ready to put to Congress in the first week of the next session, banning … something. And talking heads and talkback callers everywhere are calling for guns to be made harder to obtain, semi-automatic weapons to be banned,  gun licensing to be made harder the “gun culture” and gun ownership to be throttled by lawmakers bringing a clipboard to a gunfight.

Throttling gun cultures with more laws. Prohibition. This surely ignores that only the law-abiding listen to such laws. 

And what have all the laws against guns in schools done but disarm everyone there—leaving defenceless the people who run them and all the youngsters they should be protecting, and telling murderers they get at least thirty minutes of safe shooting before any threat to their life is likely to arrive.

It is said that as the armed idiot roamed the corridors bravely killing unarmed six- and seven-year-olds, a very brave school principal Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung (right) charged him in a desperate attempt to stop him. She died in the attempt.

Imagine yourself in that position, desperate to save the children in your care and utterly powerless to do anything about it.

I wonder what you would have wanted in your hand when you confronted the gunman: a small handgun? or a clipboard?

* * *

*Probably incorrectly. But since Morgan Freeman is the name most Americans would come up with if asked to name the man to play the voice of God, he’s the obvious choice for the actual author(s) to pick.

UPDATE 1: Lenore Skenazy from Free Range Kids comments:

It’s impossible not to feel afraid, sad, sickened and deeply pessimistic when something like this occurs. However, “something like this” — well, there aren’t a lot of somethings like this, and that’s a truth I am desperately trying to remind my heavy soul. It may feel like “school shootings happen all the time,” but they don’t. They are rarer than rare. They are as unpredictable as anything can be. And if today we find ourselves making a mental list, “Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook,” that’s because they are few enough, in a country of 300 million, that we know their names.
    This does not mitigate our sorrow, but it can — with some effort — mitigate our fear. It is not to dismiss the parents’ pain that I encourage you to turn off the TV. It is to keep some perspective…

And she points out the deadliest school massacre in US history was in 1927—and why its aftermath matters now .

UPDATE 2: Foregoing the knee-jerk, Australian Tim Blair takes the wide perspective, observing there are both more guns in the US, and fewer deaths…

There is always a bigger picture. In the case of the latest horrific US mass shooting, the bigger picture is this:
    There are around 310 million non-military firearms in the US, basically enough to equip every man, woman and child with a deadly weapon. Close to 5.5 million new firearms are produced within the US every single year – two million more than the entire amount of firearms owned by Australians. Another three million firearms are imported to the US annually. Nearly 50 per cent of Americans have at least one firearm in their house. The market for firearms has increased constantly since the election of Barack Obama in 2008, with Smith & Wesson expecting almost $400 million in gun sales during 2012.
    And the rate of firearm-related murders keeps falling.
    You read that correctly. As the number of guns in the US increases, the deaths keep going the other way. “The rate of gun-related murder and manslaughter fell 11 per cent from 2008 to 2010, the most recent year for which comparable statistics are available,” Businessweek reported in October. Moreover, “the gun-killing rate has fallen a total of 51.5 per cent since 1993.”

UPDATE 3: Fred Rogers talks about discussing tragic events in the news with kids, which at the moment encompasses everything from Newtown Connecticut to Apia, Samoa. It includes this piece of advice for all of us:

[Hat tip Noodle Food]