Posted by
Andrews on Thursday, January 19, 2012 11:53:56 AM
I recall all my life hearing about how the total ban on guns in England kept them from having any, or at least more than a handful, of shooting deaths. I wrote several times on the topic, and on the lower homicide rate England enjoys, arguing that the comparison is unfair, as comparisons are often made between our heavily urban cities and much more diffuse, less concentrated and urbanized British cities. I won't go through the whole argument here, but basically the homicide rate comparisons are wrong for a number of reasons. First, they often compare apples and radiator caps (it is not close enough to be an orange). Second, England may have a liberal judiciary, but they do not have the same history as urban America of setting murderers free after very short stays in jail, allowing a single murderer to kill multiple times, at the same time encouraging others by telling them they can kill and serve only a few years. And finally they have not yet absorbed the open hostility toward police that has been accepted in many parts of the US, especially in many urban subcultures, even among those who are not criminals.
However, while I disputed the utility of using British figures, there was one thing I thought was true in their arguments, and that was that there were very few shootings in England. In my mind, since England was governed by such strong gun laws, and as there seemed few easy routes to import guns, as there are in US cities which enact gun laws, such as Washington, it seemed reasonable guns would be rare in England, and so would shootings. I even argued in one essay that with such laws, once a criminal got a gun, unlike in the US, he would be strongly tempted to use it to excess, as it would give him such a tremendous advantage.
But, today, while watching a BBC America program about emergency medical care in the UK, I discovered that my beliefs were in fact wrong, shootings are not quite as rare as the propaganda suggests, and gun laws in England work just as well as they do everywhere else, it just is not quite as disastrous a sin the US for the same reasons homicide rates differ between the two.
I don't mention all of this because it is of any especially political significance, we have known for a long time that gun laws are a bad substitute for actual policing and jailing of criminals for long times*. But I wanted to mention it for another reason. And that is because it showed me how easy it is, even for a skeptical observer, to fall for particular bits of media propaganda. While I refuse to take the media ta face value on almost any issue, here I am surprised to find out they were deceiving me about gun violence in England. I suppose it is because of the ubiquity of the media, it is so all-pervasive you can't help but be fooled on some issue or another. And yet, when you discover you were taken in, it still comes as a shock. And so, if you take nothing else from this post, I would ask that whenever you adopt a position, or consider and argument, ask yourself if it is possible, on any issue, whether you are really sure your beliefs are true. After all, it is very easy to be deceived about things we consider trivial, and yet build on those trivial deceits quite dangerously mistaken beliefs.
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* There is another issue, the fact that our culture, or at least parts of our culture, no longer attach any opprobrium to a criminal record, and thus that strong deterrent is no longer available. Until we return to a culture which disapproves of crime in all its forms, punishment will have to be quite harsh to deter crime. (See "
A Rational Approach to Punishment", "
Social Controls", "
Shame and Behavior", "
Our Rude Behavior", "
Shame and Understanding".)
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POSTSCRIPT
My earlier thoughts on gun control can be found in "
The Absurdity of Gun Control", "
Gun Control, The FDA and Regulating the Law Abiding", "
The Weakest Gun Control Argument", "
Nuclear Disarmament and Gun Control ", among others. Rights, in general, are discussed numerous places, though a good place to start may be in "
The State of Nature and Man's Rights", which provides links to many earlier essays. (Despite its title, this essay actually discusses the fact that rights are rather fictitious in a pure state of nature.)