Posted 5:02 PM by Floyd

I was reading Nick Denton's blog today. Denton is a journalist who worked for First Tuesday and the Financial Times; he is now trying to make a career out of blogging. Denton has been tearing George W a new one every time the president enacts some new tariff to safeguard another chunk of electoral votes. He's well worth reading and has been added to my links.

But I diagree with one of his latest postings, DC and gun control:

Second Amendment advocates would find it much more convenient if the DC sniper was a terrorist. But they know perfectly well he's probably some gun nut. When that emerges, we'll hear a lot about the regulations that didn't stop him, and some disingenous statistics about crime rates in Europe and the US.

But the gun lobby is about as convincing as the tobacco companies which pretended cancer had nothing to do with cigarettes. Crud. Easy access to firearms *is* associated with higher murder rates. Dunblane -- the Scottish shooting spree -- was an exception rather than the rule. The Second Amendment obsessives, if they are ever going to speak to concerned Prince George's County soccer moms, need to acknowledge the facts.

And there is still an honest case to be made for the Second Amendment. It goes something like this. Guns do result in more fatal murders, but that is a small price to pay to guarantee freedom. The balance between the individual and government is ultimately determined by force. All the rights -- to privacy, a fair trial, of free speech, to property -- are underpinned by the power of individuals to organize against overmighty government, demonstrate, and ultimately take up arms. At a time when we are giving central government more powers, the counterweight of a people's militia is more important than ever. Even as a madman runs amok in the DC suburbs.

It's true that access to firearms makes murder easier than using an alternative. And I acknowledge that fact without reservation, even though I am a libertarian and staunch opponent of gun control. The reason that I don't have any problem admitting this is that firearms are here to stay. There are tens if not hundreds of millions of guns in America, and passing a gun control law won't change that. Even if the government managed to get a large proportion of those guns out of circulation, more could be smuggled into the country just like drugs are. Also, there are legitimate purposes for guns in the hands of police and military. If guns are banned, we can expect that those guns will be stolen from the unwary, and marketed by the unscrupulous.

So arguing over whether guns make murder easier strikes me as a pointless exercise, like arguing over whether the use of the printing press to create millions of copies of Das Kapital and Mein Kampf means that the world would be better off illiterate.

Let me qualify my earlier statement. Access to firearms makes murder easier -- for murderers. For those of us who do not wish to do murder, it makes no difference. There have been places and times in which guns were plentiful, but murderers were not. One was pre-gun-control (pre-1916) Britain, which had murder rates one-sixteenth that of the U.S. at the time. Another is present-day Switzerland.

I may be an "obsessive", but I'm not nuts enough to try to sell Prince George County's soccer moms on gun rights by telling them that sure, there may be a few more deaths in their neighborhood due to guns being legal, but it's worth it to keep the government in check. This reminds me of an argument that I came across secondhand in Albert Jay Nock's writings, where he said that when a centralized police force was proposed for London, libertarians said openly that a few throats cut in Whitechapel each year were a cheap price to pay to be free of the oppression those police could cause. This is an argument that could appeal only to people who are libertarians in the first place. It was a loser in 19th-century Britain, and won't fare much better today.