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Accountability folly general freedom media and media people Second Amendment rights too much government

Simplistically Wrong

A clever “meme” made the rounds earlier this year showing, in two columns, what it would be like were guns regulated like cars. 

How reasonable that would be!

“Title and tag at each point of sale”; “Driver training”/“Gun training”; Liability insurance on each vehicle/​gun”; etc. It seems sound, no?

No.

The memester failed to address a context: our car and driver regulations apply to vehicles and drivers on government-​run roads. On your own property you can drive all sorts of vehicles, unregulated. And it is on their own property that most gun owners’ firearms stay most of the time.

So, treating “guns like cars” would put government deeper into our private affairs.* 

The meme came into an economist’s view packaged under the slogan “doing nothing means more people die.” He saw problems. For example, “someone might propose that each person above the age of 10 years old be interned in a mental-​health camp, until and unless experts appointed by the state certified that he or she was not a danger to society.”

Same logic — we cannot do nothing, can we?

Another economist dubbed the problem we have identified here as “a simplistic model of public policy.” Policy advocates tend to assume that if you change a policy we get only one effect. Not true. 

A third economist (I’m going for a trifecta!) discovered that even adding safety features to cars comes at a cost in human life: feeling safer, drivers compensate … and it is non-​drivers who suffer. More drivers hit more pedestrians.

Be cautious when you drive, sure. Be cautious when you shoot, of course.

But be cautious, especially, when you prescribe new laws.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 


* Not to mention that gun rights are specifically enshrined in the Constitution and vehicle rights … not so much.

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Categories
crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies Second Amendment rights too much government U.S. Constitution

The Good vs. Freedom?

Politicians regularly argue for new “gun control” laws, even while ignoring the execution and enforcement of laws already on the books. 

Exhibit A, as I wrote at Townhall​.com yesterday, is the failure of the military to provide the FBI with the information that would have blocked the Sutherland Springs church shooter from getting his guns. 

Meanwhile, in the Washington Post’s Outlook section, Elizabeth Bruenig takes a more … philosophical perspective. She contends that “Western thought moved from seeing freedom as a means to an end — what philosophers call ‘the good’ — to seeing freedom as an end in itself. Thanks to our liberal heritage, we regard freedom as an intrinsic good, perhaps the highest one of all. The more of it we can get, the better off we are. Right?”

Right!

But Bruenig’s answer isn’t in the affirmative. 

Instead, she points to Vatican elections during the Middle Ages in which “canon law enshrined the right of eligible individuals to cast their votes. But their choices … could simply be overturned [by church officials]. Freedom mattered, in other words, but was always subordinate to the highest good, which could sometimes place limits on liberty.”

Ah, the Post advises us to embrace the Middle Ages … just so our freedom doesn’t get out-of-hand. 

Bruenig also thinks that “we largely lack the framework to ask what gun ownership is for.…”

Huh? The Second Amendment answers that gun ownership is “necessary to the security of a free state.” 

In terms of both scholarship and insight, the Founders’ constitutionalism far outshines the Post’s shiny new neo-medievalism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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