Liberty and Law and Gun Control

Liberty and Law and Gun Control October 3, 2015

Hkmp5count-terr-wiki Increase law and you decrease liberty. We sometimes choose liberty with a bit of chaos over law with more order.

Americans have decided to decriminalize most adult sexual behavior and permit (relatively) easy access to divorce. This increase in liberty has led to problems, but they are problems that the majority of Americans tolerate.

For example, pornography is easily available to everyone, including children, and we have little idea what this will do to the society. Americans do not seem worried about this eventuality because a state that could limit porn would be powerful and we do not want a state that powerful.

Censorship would do some good, but it would also choke creativity. And yet there is a question whether people who have not learned moderation in basic desires will be capable of using their liberty well. There is a reason slave masters encouraged vice and a “party” attitude in their slaves.

This is a hard issue and yet generally, like most Americans, I favor a smaller government. The benefits of liberty outweigh the increase in law that would be needed to impact the porn problem.

Increase liberty and you (generally) increase the number of people who will do stupid and bad things. Tobacco and alcohol are legal and so my generation has a greater struggle with substance abuse with those two products than we do with other illegal substances.

Many people who would experiment with drugs do not, because the drugs are not legal. This was certainly true of me. We are now asking whether our loss of liberty and the increase in government power of banning a substance like marijuana is worth the benefits.

Liberty also increases creativity and self-reliance. A small state has a hard time being a tyrannical state.One liberty Americans have that many other Western nations do not is ease in purchasing and owning weapons. As a result, there is some evidence that we  have increased gun violence. This would not be surprising, so though I know it is contentious, let us assume it to be true for the sake of argument.

The British people have much less of a right to own firearms and this (may) have led to less gun violence. Let us assume (again) that this is true. To achieve this level of control, the British state is far more intrusive than the American state. The British generally have less liberty than most Americans.

Does this come at a cost? Maybe.

If Britain were an American state, it would be the poorest or one of the poorest states. Is this because the British are allowed less liberty by a state large enough to monitor weapons purchases? Again, I am not saying this is the only reason the British state is large, but that one needs an intrusive central government (goodbye federalism) to make stringent gun control possible.

Britain is a much smaller country than the United States and until recently much more homogeneous. How large a state would be needed to make gun control much more efficient? What would be the secondary costs to liberty and hence creativity? We would be safer, but less free.

Perhaps part of the problem is that while we allow freedom to own weapons, we also have a media that glorifies violence. Research is conclusive that consuming violent media makes everyone (somewhat) more violent. For most of us, that increase in violent tendencies is manageable. For marginal people, it is not.

What if we censored violence in our films and video games? Isn’t there good reason to think this would keep the few mentally ill people prone to violence in better shape?

I think most Americans do not want a state capable of doing this, even if the result were a decrease in violence.  I do not think most Americans want a state capable of stringent gun control even if it made certain evil actions less likely.

These are choices with no obvious moral solutions.

When anyone pretends that one side (“gun control”) is good and the other bad, they are wrong. Americans kill each other in high numbers on the highway. If we made driving tests much more rigorous, we could drastically lower the number of fatalities, but at the cost of liberty. The balance we have now with autos, guns, and government has produced, according to our President, the most powerful developed economy in the world.There is no gain without a cost and our liberty comes with a price.

Let’s keep a liberated society, but let’s accept that our liberty has come with a price.


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