Libertarian View

Let’s start with cards on the table. I don’t own a gun, I don’t shoot and I have no desire to own a gun. I am not a member of the NRA and I live in the United Kingdom which has a general anti-gun culture. However I am, obviously, a libertarian and libertarians generally are against gun control.

Ok, disclaimers out of the way let’s have a look at the issue:

The first thing to make clear is that a ban on guns is not a ban from existence, it will not automatically make guns disappear from society. (This should be an obvious and trivial point, but some of the arguments used in favour of gun control rely implicitly or explicitly on assuming the ban eliminates guns!)

A ban on guns is simply a legal device that makes the owning of guns a crime.

The effectiveness of legal bans is not 100%. e.g.

There is already a ban on the shooting of innocent people with guns.
Its called murder and has always been a serious crime.

However, this has not stopped innocent people being shot. Indeed every person murdered with a gun,  was murdered… despite the ban on shooting innocent people!

Of course, not being 100% effective does not mean that making gun ownership illegal would have no effect.

I can see two effects.

1.  Criminals wouldn’t be able to buy guns legally, making it  more difficult for them

2. Law abiding citizens would no longer own guns

The Impact on Criminals of Making Gun Ownership Illegal

If gun ownership were made illegal, the difficulty of acquiring illegal guns by criminals would probably not be very high.

Drugs have been illegal for a long time and yet they are available in every city for anyone who wants to buy them.

In the UK, which has strong gun control and no widespread culture of gun ownership, it is still very easy for criminals to acquire guns.

Even without gun control in the USA, only 20% of convicted felons purchased their firearms through a licensed fire arms dealer, 80% preferring the black market.
(Armed & Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons & Their Firearms  - Aldine de Gruyter – 1986)

However, it must be acknowledged that banning guns, would have some relatively small effect in reducing criminal gun ownership.

The pro gun control argument  runs: “Well if just 100 criminals who would have murdered somebody with a gun, no longer have access to a gun then we have saved 100 lives.”

This argument commits the fallacy of denying the antecedent

The confusion here is that if  A wants to Murder  B and he doesn’t have a gun, he may still murder Mr B….with a knife, with a baseball bat, hitting him with a car, or in any one of a multitude of other ways.

Guns may be the most convenient tool for the would be murderer (and lack of convenience may stop some murders).  But certainly if you hate someone enough to murder them a little inconvenience is hardly an insurmountable obstacle.

Currently 68% of all homicides in the USA involve firearms:
(The claim by the pro gun lobby that more people are killed by baseball bats than guns is an urban myth)

But, a criminal, intent on murder without access to a gun, clearly has a variety of alternative options for killing his victim.

Empirically, you can analyse gun ownership rates against against homicide rates for different countries to see if higher gun ownership leads to more murders, or if a reduction in gun ownership simply substitutes other methods of murder.

A positive correlation would indicate that higher availability of guns increases the homicide rate.

When you actually  look at the data there is no statistically significant correlation. On a worldwide level, the relationship is actually negative, for the OECD excluding outliers it is also negative. (If you include the USA and Mexico outliers, you get an insignificant positive correlation. If you don’t understand why its correct to exclude these outliers, then your statistics needs a brush up, for a start you should read this!)

Taking a look at the USA specifically, comparing the  state data for homicides with the state by state gun ownership statistics shows no statistically significant correlation either.

For the Statisticians the adjusted R squared is 0.0%!

For the non statisticians, this means that there is absolutely no relationship between the two.

It seems clear to me that both logically and empirically, the impact of banning guns on reducing criminal homicides would be negligible.

Even the argument that banning assault rifles would stop school killings doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. In most of these cases the killer ends his shooting spree by turning the gun on himself or being shot by the police. It is essentially a suicide mission.

What is to stop the would be killer, without access to such firearms, from becoming a suicide bomber instead, killing as many or more than with an assault rifle but using a few pounds of fertilizer and some home electronics ?

So, moving on to…

 The removal of guns from law abiding citizens

The most obvious and visible benefit of removing guns from law abiding citizens would be the elimination of accidental deaths through firearms accidents.

However, as Steven Levitt pointed out in Freakonomics (p149) the risk of firearms accidents very low. The chance of a child drowning in a house with a residential swimming pool is 1/11,000. The chance of a child being killed by a gun in a house with firearms is 1/1,000,000. (i.e. Swimming pool ownership is 100 times more dangerous than firearm ownership!)

If you want to ban fire-arms because they are too risky for private individuals to own, then to be consistent you would also need to ban swimming pools, cars, knives, bicycles, ladders and lots of other fairly innocuous household objects which are far more risky.

The pro gun control argument then runs: ”But if even 100 people where saved from accidents then it would surely be worthwhile. People don’t need guns, they do need cars, ladders, etc”

This line of reasoning suffers from the Broken Window Fallacy, which is to take into account only the superficial and clearly observable effects and ignore significant less obvious effects.

The gun control side of the argument point to the clearly quantifiable deaths caused by gun accidents. They ignore from their calculations all the lives saved because a potential victim was armed when encountering a potentially violent criminal, or the crimes avoided because the criminal feared the potential victim might be armed.

It is analogous to saying that surgery kills thousands of people every year.

That is true, but it is certainly not the whole story, millions of people are also saved from death each year by surgery.

We can only decide if surgery, or gun ownership by law abiding citizens, is a good or bad thing by looking at both sides of the equation, the lives saved as well as the lives lost.

In the case of deaths avoided because law abiding home owners had guns, it is difficult to quantify, but:

A 1982 survey of male felons in 11 state prisons dispersed across the U.S. found:

• 34% had been “scared off, shot at, wounded, or captured by an armed victim”

• 40% had decided not to commit a crime because they “knew or believed that the victim was carrying a gun”

• 69% personally knew other criminals who had been “scared off, shot at, wounded, or captured by an armed victim

Clearly the deterrent effect on criminals of law abiding home owners being armed, or having the potential to be armed, has a significant effect in preventing both crimes in action and reducing the number of attempted crimes.

The other difficult to quantify benefit of gun ownership is perhaps the most important from a libertarian point of view.

It is the one that was in the minds of the US founding fathers when they drafted the second amendment to the US constitution, which gives US citizens the right to bear arms:

“The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”
― Thomas Jefferson

 In 2002, the JPFO published a list of genocides in the 20th century that have occurred in countries with gun control.

# 1915 – 1917 Ottoman Turkey, 1.5 million Armenians murdered;
# 1929 – 1953 Soviet Union, 20 million people that opposed Stalin were murdered;
# 1933 – 1945 Nazi occupied Europe, 13 million Jews, Gypsies and others;
# 1927 – 1949 China, 10 million pro communists;
# 1948 – 1952 China, 20 million anti communists;
# 1960 – 1981 Guatemala, 100,000 Mayan Indians Murdered;
# 1971 – 1979 Uganda, 300,000 Christians and Political Rivals of Idi Amin murdered;
# 1975 – 1979 Cambodia, 2 million educated persons murdered.
# 1994 Rwanda 800,000 Tutsi’s murdered.
# 1992 – 1995 Bonsia 200,000 Muslims murdered.

Of course there could never be oppression of the people by the state in the 21st century, just ask the residents of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Syria, North Korea…..

The American constitution did not envisage an impeding tyrannical US government, but it was drafted to protect the citizens from the possibility of one.

So far at least, it has worked:

“The beauty of the Second Amendment is that
it will not be needed until they try to take it.”
― Thomas Jefferson

Summary

On the negative side:

Gun control would not stop criminals from killing people either with easily obtainable illegal guns, or with legal substitutes such as knives, bats, etc.

Gun control would disarm law abiding home owners, making them more vulnerable to attacks on person and property by the armed criminals.

Gun control would open the door to the potential of future state oppression.

On the positive side:

Gun control would prevent a small number of firearms accidents, the risk of which is less than drowning in a swimming pool or falling off a ladder.

If you can think about the issues logically, rather than being swept along by, a natural, emotional response to the most recent tragedy, the conclusion seems obvious.

Having recently analysed the emotionally charged issue of Fox Hunting, I thought it was time to take a reasoned look at perhaps the most emotive issue of all, abortion.

This is a complex area for everyone, but particularly for libertarians who are by definition both pro-life and pro-choice and whose fundamental moral keystone is the principle of non-aggression.

There are two distinct moral/philosophical issues to examine and because of the complexity I will write a separate post on each.

The first is the ethical/moral status of the foetus, is it a potential human life with whatever rights that provides or a full human life with all the associated rights that come with that position.

The second issue, which will be covered in my next post, is the resolution of the conflict of rights between those of the foetus to life (if any) and those of the pregnant woman to the ownership of her body.

In this post I will address only the status and rights of the foetus.

The first step in thinking clearly about the issue is to clarify the meanings of the terms used, particularly “human life”. It is very easy to fall into the logical fallacy of equivocation when using the term “human life”, e.g.

It is clear that both the sperm and the egg are genetically human and that they are both alive in a biological sense. However this is not what we mean by “human life” in a moral sense. If it were then male masturbation would be genocide and female menstruation would be murder. It is also clear that the appendix is genetically human and alive, but nobody argues for a ban on appendectomies to protect the “human life” of the appendix.

There are two meanings of “human life” that are easily confused, the first meaning illustrated with the examples above refers to genetically human life and is a biological use  rather than a moral one.

The second meaning of “human life” is membership of the class of beings to whom we owe moral obligations. This second meaning is the ethically and morally relevant one that we are referring to when we say it is wrong to take a “human life”.

We would presumably consider it equally wrong to kill an intelligent alien visitor without good cause, regardless of the non human nature of his DNA.

So what do we mean by “human life” in the ethical/moral sense

Philosophers debate at length the characteristics required to be members of the moral community and become entitled to the rights associated with it. e.g.

Mary Warren’s list of characteristics:

1. Consciousness (of objects and events external and/or internal to the being), and in particular the capacity to feel pain;

2. Reasoning (the developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems);

3. Self-motivated activity (activity which is relatively independent of genetic or direct external control).

4. The capacity to communicate, messages of with an indefinite number of possible contents on indefinitely many possible topics.

5. The presence of self-concepts and self-awareness.

However, there is an obvious criticism that the criteria listed are derived by observing the properties of a class of entities that are deemed to belong to the moral community and since this class excludes foetuses the argument carries no more weight than a simple assertion that foetuses are not members of the moral community.

Another problem with such criteria is that they not only conclude, inevitably, that a foetus has no right to life, they also entail the conclusion that a new born infant or a mentally disabled adult and many animals have no right to life either. A conclusion that offends our moral intuition.

Fortunately, we can avoid getting drawn into the complex philosophical debates about what constitutes “human life” in a moral sense by looking at the problem from the opposite end, where emotions do not cloud reason so much, that of human death.

If a fully functioning human being, with all the rights associated with that status, is involved in an accident they can be kept in a state of biological life via medical machinery almost indefinitely. However, it is generally accepted that if there is no cerebral brain wave activity then there is no “human life” in the moral sense. Turning off the life support machines is not murder but simply the deactivation of biological processes sustained by external means.

If this were not the case then it would be necessary to keep the corpses of everyone who “died” in hospital on life support machines forever or be guilty of murder!

Having established that human life,in the moral sense, requires cerebral brain wave activity the question becomes much simpler, when does the foetus develop the sort of cerebral brain wave activity that indicates human life?

This is a question of biology, rather and philosophy and it appears in the foetus between twenty four weeks and thirty weeks of conception.
(Pro-life claims of earlier activity appear to be scientifically invalid.)

A foetus younger than this is not a human life in the ethical sense and can have no more right to life than the body kept warm on a life support machine. The woman having an abortion is no more guilty of murder than the doctor who turns off the life support machine of a brain dead accident victim.

It is tempting if you currently hold anti-abortion views at this point to revert to the potential for human life argument and try to distinguish the case of the dead man on the life support machine. After all he has no potential for life, whereas the foetus has potential for a full human life.

However, we have already refuted the argument for rights for biological entities with the potential for human life on the grounds it would make menstruation murder and masturbation genocide. With advances in biological science even non embyonic  cells now have the potential for human life. Can we seriously consider cutting nails or hair as murder!

To conclude, a foetus up to 24 weeks is not a “human life” in the moral sense, it is a  genetically human biological entity with the potential for “human life”, but such an entity has no right to life.

Abortion of a foetus up to 24 weeks does not involve the violation of any human rights and libertarians should support the woman’s right of self ownership to abort a foetus if she wishes to.

A lot of socialists on Twitter still cling to Marx’s labour theory of value and see all employers as exploiting the employee.

The argument runs that any increase in the value of raw materials has been created by the labour of the employees and they should be entitled to that increase in value. Paying them a wage deprives them of what is rightfully theirs, the excess being taken as unearned surplus profits by the exploiters.

Unfortunately because it is very hard to understand economics and remain a socialist,  most people putting forward this view are economically naive.

Here is a simple common sense argument that helps demonstrates the error of this view.

Exactly the Same Labour Activity Can Produce Products With
 Very Different, Even Negative Values

Consider two workers in the non exploitative socialist Utopia, let’s call them Murray and Friedrich. They are both skilled labourers and make widgets.

Murray works for Tescopoly Plc and his widgets are painted blue.
Carl works for Leylandus Plc and his widgets are painted red.

In the market Blue Widgets are very popular they command a high price and sell in large numbers. Tescopoly makes large profits and the increase in wealth is shared between all the workers in the business. For each hour spent making widgets Murray is rewarded with £50.

Unfortunately, Leylandus misread the market and nobody wants red widgets. Despite making thousands of them, none were sold and Leylandus made a huge loss. This loss must be shared equally between the workers in the business. For each hour spent making widgets Carl must contribute £50 of his savings.

Both workers did exactly the same thing, they made widgets. In one case the widgets made a profit and in another they made a loss. Despite containing the same amount of labour, one product was worthless to consumers while the other was highly valued.

If socialism is all about equality how can its own system of reward give one man £50 an hour while costing another £50 an hour for doing the same thing?

It should be plain that the relative value of the products and performance of the two businesses was determined, not by the labour hours spent, but by the decision of the entrepreneur to produce one type of product or another and meet the demands of the market most effectively.

The idea that wage labour benefits the capitalist and not the employee is also a myth.

The benefits to the employee are:

1. Capitalists take on the risk of business failure. The workers are paid wages for the time they spend working on the job, they no longer have to take the risk that their work will yield no reward. They have certainty of income which enables them to plan their lives.

It is no different to the way that some people choose risk and invest their life savings in shares, others prefer security and invest in savings accounts. One accepts risk in return for the chance of high reward, the other accepts a lower reward in return for security. Nobody claims the holder of a savings account is being exploited, particularly during a stock market crash!

2. Capitalists provide cash flow for employees during the production process. A Christmas decorations business may operate at a loss all year, only to make enough profit in December to make the business very profitable for the year. The capitalist provides the money to pay the workers during the period that the business is paying out for materials, etc and not receiving any money in.

Most workers do not want to run the risk that they could work all year and end up having to pay out for losses. They do not want to wait until the end of the year when the production has been sold and the accounts worked out before they have money to buy groceries.

Far from exploiting workers, the wage system gives them security and meets their time preference requirements for quick payment, which is why so many of us are employees and quite happy to be so.