Gun policymaking

There is one circumstance that even the must ardent gun control advocate must admit, if not of the fact, at least of the possibility: that the people who would profit or otherwise benefit from circumventing gun control regulations are smarter and better motivated than those doing the regulating. We see this phenomenon played out regularly with, for example, reference to the prevalence of illicit drug use, and historically with the prohibition of alcohol. The motivated creativity of someone who would make tens of thousands of dollars providing firearms manufactured in Mexico or Honduras to street gangs in a given American city is likely to trump the naive determination of earnest bureaucrats who do not understand the limited influence that government has on human nature. The semi-literate gang enforcer in Chino has much more in the way of practical smarts, at least in acquiring the minimum firepower necessary to an international criminal enterprise, than Dianne Feinstein or Bret Stephens. This disparity is likely to widen with advances in technology. Say what you will about bump sticks, the guy who came up with the idea was pretty sharp.

This is not an argument against gun control; it is an argument against the notion that restrictions will do much good. For good or ill, the technology of repeating firearms is about 150 years old; gun smithing is a community college degree, not an advanced course offering in the theoretical physics department at Harvard. An advanced civilization is much more reliant on the decency of its citizens for its survival than it is the force of its statutes. The Second Amendment applies only to the right to keep and bear arms, it is not necessary to their existence, nor to their availability in the criminal underground. Firearms themselves are not essential to the madness that perpetrates mass murder.

If Mr. Paddock, the perpetrator of the Las Vegas had not provided his own demise, one might reasonably wish to ask: was his primary motivation to shoot or to kill? Would he have foregone the anticipated satisfaction of killing if he had to forego the expected pleasure of shooting? We of course will never know, but even so, we can note, with just a cursory, off-the-top-of-the-head list, dates verified by Wikipedia, the following sample:

Date Number killed
May 18, 1927 45
December 12, 1986 98
December 7, 1981 43
April 19, 1995 168
March 24, 2015 150
March 20, 1995 12
March 11, 2004 192
June 11, 1964 10
December 19, 2016 12
March 1, 2014 31
February 27, 2002 59
May 17, 2010 44
June 3, 2017 8
July 7, 2005 56

The means used for these deaths included airplanes,, knives, sarin gas, explosives, motor vehicles, a flame thrower(!) and matches.

This list is not a sample of inadequate regulation, it is rather a specimen of psychopathic depravity against which the most competent of government is impotent.

The call for gun control is a symbolic protest against an uncomfortable fact: people that are crazy in their motives might be quite rational in their methods; they may in fact be quite ingenious in them. It is a form of inexcusable arrogance to assume that people who seem so illogical in their motives cannot outwit well-intentioned regulation, and the advice of “experts.”

None of which is to say that there should be no limits on guns or gun ownership. Reasonable regulation should be expected to have reasonable results. Expecting to confine the darker and disordered impulses of the psychopath by assuming that decent people cannot be trusted with the means of emergent defense is not reasonable.