Monday, August 13, 2007

Ryan has Mixed Feelings...

...about this.
Posted by David Codrea at 8/13/2007 12:21:00 PM

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

One person may own no guns and commit crimes.

One person may own one gun and commit no crimes.

One person may own many guns and commit no crimes.

One person may own many guns, and commit many crimes with many guns.

One person may own many guns and commit many crimes with some guns.

One person may own many guns and commit many crimes with no guns.

One person may own one gun and commit one crime.

One person may own one gun and commit many crimes.

One person may own one gun and commit crime with no gun.

One person may own one gun and lend it to someone else to commit a crime.

One person may own one gun and lend it to someone else to commit many crimes.

One person may lend a gun to many people to commit many crimes.

One person may sell a gun to someone else to commit a crime.

One person may sell a gun to someone else to commit many crimes.

One person may have no gun, and steal one, but commit no further crime.

One person may have no gun, but steal one and use it to commit crime.

A gun used in a crime may never be found.

A gun used in a crime may be confiscated and destroyed.

A gun used in a crime may be confiscated and find its way out on the street once.

A gun used in a crime may be confiscated and find its way out on the street many times.


These are just the permutations that I can think of off the top of my head. It's waste of brainpower to even explore these when the common link between them is the criminal, and reason should guide one to the conclusion that since many crimes or few crimes may originate with a single person, it would be more effective to extinguish the fire at its base. The competing approach results in too many dead-ends or complex interrelationships. Waste, waste, waste. There aren't any good or bad guns, and guns aren't a pathogen.

Crime rates across the country skyrocketed during the deluge of disarmament legislation that occurred between the late sixties and mid-nineties. From this we could surmise that such laws increase crime. Then we have a drop occurring after the passage of another federal law, so looking at both trends, we could say that such laws probably had no effect on crime. Or we could take into account the shortcomings of the statistics with respect to arbitrary categories and the ability of criminals to commit multiple crimes, and also with uncertainties about actual populations, and determine that the laws are worthless, we don't have enough information to point out the real causes, we're disarming people who aren't a threat to anyone else's liberty, and the criminals don't care about the law anyway.

So either disarmament results in more crime, or it has no effect on crime. Either way, it lessens public safety and welfare, and destroys individual liberty by wasting tax revenue and interfering in the lives of citizens where the government has been explicitly barred from doing so.

Counting guns isn't a sign of progress, but it's an easy excuse for a metric when there isn't any. I could say that I was productive today because I made 5,000 keystrokes. What if half of them were the backspace key?

8/13/2007 7:34 PM
Anonymous said...

TJH,
BRAVO!

8/13/2007 11:09 PM

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