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March 22, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:38
152 Gun Control Part 1: Logic

Guns: do they control violence, citizens or the state?

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Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is 8.06 a.m.
on the 22nd of March, 2006.
Tuesday?
I do think so.
Wednesday.
Something like that.
Some damn day.
Let's talk about guns, baby.
Let's talk about you and me.
Let's talk about all the good things and the bad things that can be.
Well, it's finally time to get to the topic that I've been looking forward to for quite some time.
Because it will help dispel the notion that I'm some mealy-mouthed pacifist who wants to let the bad guys roll all over us, and not raise a hand in defense, but rather squeal to the internet and write a secret blog about how bad Big Brother is.
So, I'd like to talk about gun control, And start to get the conversation going, of course, because I know that it's a very hot topic, particularly in the U.S., although the smug and condescending Canadians are also quite hung up on this particular issue.
And that is the kind of stuff that, you know, if you've seen Bowling for Columbine and so on, which I thought was an interesting film, I like Michael Moore.
I like his passion.
I like his moral fervor.
I dislike his philosophical sloppiness.
But of course, nobody in the modern world, except perhaps for us, knows anything about what they're doing in terms of ethics.
So I'm not too shocked that his stuff can be a little sort of psychologically messy or philosophically messy and so on.
The interesting thing about that movie, though, was that he actually didn't have an answer, which I thought was interesting, because, you know, he tried, he thought, oh, maybe it's this, maybe it's that, that has this sort of high requirement for violence in American society.
But of course, as it turned out, he found that the Canadian society, we have guns too, but we're not violent, blah, blah, blah.
Now, the causes of American violence I won't get into.
It has a lot to do with empire, the drug war, and the decimation of the local population upon arrival, which has strong effects, ripple effects, on a culture throughout history.
But I won't get into it.
That's not the topic for today's podcast.
But trust me, you cannot explain the prevalence of violence through the prevalence of guns.
That really has got nothing to do with it.
Of course, Switzerland, everybody is required to own a gun.
Also not, of course, what I would prefer.
Switzerland has lots of guns, Canada has lots of guns, and Nazi Germany guns were outlawed.
So it really doesn't have anything to do with it.
But of course the problem that we always have, the problem that we always have when we try to use the argument from effect, and we try to go with statistics, and we try to go with interpretations of facts, is that it's all conjecture.
And as we sit here blathering back and forth with our opponents in conjecture land, The grim noose of state power tightens a little closer around our throats.
I've mentioned it before, but I'll mention it again, and I'm sorry if you've heard it before, but Thomas Pinchot said, if they can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don't care about the answers.
Which is all very true.
I really dislike the way that we bicker back and forth about statistics.
You know, Republicans, Democrats and Libertarians and so on.
Bicker back and forth about statistics and historical what-ifs and interpretations without noticing that more and more control... I mean, we notice it, but it's not really what we should be focusing on, is why is there a government?
How is a government conceivably morally justified, not Should we ban this firearm or that firearm?
Well, surely you don't think that AK-47s have any valid use outside of gun warfare and so on.
That sort of stuff is really fiddling while Rome burns.
And yes, I know, before the historical perfectionists write in to tell me that that's a myth, that the fiddle was not invented until over a thousand years after the fall of Rome, I know.
But still, it's a phrase that is out there, and I occasionally will deploy it, regardless of its historical inaccuracy.
So, of course, as you can imagine, I'm sure I'm not going to use statistical arguments as the core of the argument against gun control.
I'm not unhappy to use statistical arguments, but they're secondary.
They're far, far, far down the road.
They are used to buttress, in a minor manner, a theory of morality.
So we would generally expect that an argument for morality, an argument for consistent ethics, would generally improve things in society, right?
So capitalism in general improves things in society.
But the problem with using statistics is that you can always find pockets of people who are harmed.
by a general improvement in society.
I think it's here in Canada, the descendants of the Bourbons of the Louises, however many there were, quite a few I think, that a descendant of the Bourbons is living in Canada, in Ontario, I think in a town called Kitchener and, I don't know, he's working in the line or something like that.
So if you look at the Palace of Versailles and then this guy's house, I think it's fairly safe to say that the fall of the monarchy that occurred in the French Revolution Not so good for this guy.
Generally, he would have been better off in a purely material sense.
He would have been far better off if the monarchy had continued and the rise of democracy and the rise of the free market and so on.
Not so good for him.
You could come up with lots of examples for this kind of thing.
But, for sure, if you look at statistics, you will always find people harmed by any particular progress in society.
And you will also find people who've been harmed by guns.
You will find children who've blown their own heads off with guns found around the home.
You will find people who try to defend themselves against robbers and shot themselves.
You will always find these sorts of things.
This is why statistics It's sort of like arguing about Christianity from the Bible.
You can pick and choose whatever you want and focus on whatever you want.
It really is completely irrelevant.
So, for instance, and this comes from a book on economics that I read once, and I think it's such a wonderful metaphor, and I think I've used it before, so again, I apologize for... I think this is my first repetition ever!
But it's sort of like if you say, well, things fall down, and as they said in the ancient world, well, if things fall down, what about clouds?
What about the moon?
What about flames in a fire?
And of course, if they'd lived long enough, what about helium balloons?
What about smoke?
Well, these things don't fall down, so these sorts of questions are sort of important.
So if you're just looking around in terms of physics and you're trying to figure out statistically, you'll say, well, you know, a bunch of stuff falls down, a bunch of stuff stays in the sky, and a bunch of stuff seems to fall up.
And so, I think it was Aristotle who first came up with this idea of the elements, right?
That there was air, earth, fire, and water, and that each sort of instance of that element was trying to rejoin the master element.
And so, since fire was up in the sky with the sun, the little flames from a fire would leap up to try and rejoin the element of fire.
And earth and water were below the planet, so they stayed down, and air was in the middle of the planet, so that's why the clouds... I mean, that's why the clouds... It was kind of sophisticated theory in a rather insane kind of way.
But this is the kind of mess that you end up with when you have a false premise.
So again, I've used the Ptolemaic system before, but it's also a great metaphor for what goes wrong with science.
And also if you know anything about the medieval system of the humors, there were four humors, and humors not like funny, it was like what we'd call hormones, and so your personality and your illnesses were sort of determined by which of these four humors were present, and there was like Happy, sad, angry, and bitter.
I mean, they had this whole theory going.
And of course, all they were doing was theorizing in a vacuum, as the Ptolemaic guys were, to some degree.
They were taking observable facts.
And with faulty premises, they were building all these incredibly complex theories around those facts.
And so when you got the retrograde motion of Mars in the Ptolemaic system, you just had to keep inventing more complexity.
And when you started to come up with more and more complexity in terms of the human body, you found that you had to invent more and more humorous.
And so you basically know you've got a false premise.
When the argument gets really complicated and messy and relies on a lot of observable facts and doesn't have a theory which explains everything, You kind of know that you're not barking up the right tree.
Another one would be the replacement of the aether-based model of the universe with the Einsteinian model of the universe.
Similarly, of course, in terms of accuracy, if not in terms of general practicality, the replacement of Newtonian physics with Einsteinian physics.
And all of these sorts of things is a natural evolution in terms of thought.
Now, when you're dealing with things like gun control, or just about anything, the problem with statistics is that statistics are going to lead you up the wrong tree, and they're going to stalemate you with other people who argue.
So, if you're looking at the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, people will say, well, it explains 95% of it, and so on, and 95% of things fall down, so a theory which says everything falls to the ground is 95% correct.
But sadly, in physics, 95% correct is pretty wrong.
I mean, it doesn't mean that it's not useful, right?
I mean, like, Newtonian calculations are 99.999% correct, which is fine if you're sailing from New York to Amsterdam, but not so great if you're trying to land on Pluto.
So, the further you go and the more you're dealing with, the more accurate you have to be.
So when you're talking about the morality of human society and ways to minimize violence and universal ethics, you know, you kind of got to be pretty accurate.
Because if you only get 5% error, guess what?
That 5% who are outside the bounds of your moral theory are going to create a state and end up ruling everybody and dragging everyone down into the pit of slavery.
So I think it's quite important to be accurate and that means reasoning from first principles and that means forget about statistics.
But it doesn't mean that statistics are completely irrelevant in the long run.
It just means get your theory down and then look for some statistics which explain certain aspects of it.
That having been said, let's talk a little bit about the argument for morality in relationship to gun ownership.
And we'll just talk about guns.
This applies to every weapon under the sun.
Of course, if we didn't have states, then we all would be living in a paradise right now, and there would be no such thing as nuclear weapons.
But this is the inheritance that we have, so pretty much everything that I'm saying you can apply to other things, but let's just talk about gun control at the moment, because it's a realm that people are pretty familiar with.
The real question around gun control is, should there be guns?
Are guns morally acceptable to own?
Are guns morally acceptable to own, or are they morally evil to own?
Now, this of course has a larger question around property rights, because what you're really asking is, is certain property acceptable to own or not acceptable to own?
But we'll just talk about guns.
I mean, you can talk about this as an assault on property rights, and I fully accept that, and property rights are universal and we can end the debate right there, but that's not where people are coming from in terms of trying to help win them over to something a little more consistent and a little more truthful than, I don't like guns, so we should ban them, or Brady got shot, he's in a wheelchair, surely you feel sorry for him, don't you?
To look at the argument for morality, we can simply say, Either people should be allowed to own guns, or they should not be allowed to own guns.
And again, this would be a universal phenomenon.
So, gun ownership, good.
Gun ownership, bad.
Now, if gun ownership is bad, great!
Fantastic!
I think that if you want to get rid of all the guns in the world, I think that's absolutely wonderful, because then we have a stateless society, and I'm perfectly content, and my life's work is complete, and I can get on with something other than ranty podcasts that are designed to help the world become incrementally a little better.
Because if guns are wrong, if gun ownership is wrong, then fantastic, we can disband the police, we can disband the military, we can get rid of the National Guard, we can get rid of everything.
Because guns are wrong.
Now if gun ownership is wrong, then of course you can't have a military, because what do the military own?
Except a whole lot of guns!
So, I have no problem with people who say that gun ownership is wrong.
I don't agree with it logically, but if they're willing to go with that, I mean, whatever moves them into the camp of the state and the society, I'm at least willing to take that as a first shot.
So, fantastic.
Group hug, brothers and sisters.
Let's just get it on because we're all in the same camp and we can have a big joyful freedom fest.
Unfortunately, though, this is not what people mean, because they don't think things through, because they've never been taught to think, the poor people.
And so we'll do what we can to try and stimulate a few dormant brain cells and get them to think about things a little bit more consistently.
In a nice, kindly, coaching kind of fashion, not in a berating, libertarian, infighting kind of fashion.
So then we can say to someone, okay, so you think that gun ownership is bad for private citizens, but good for the police and the military.
Fantastic!
Excellent!
Wonderful!
Now we're starting to get some definition.
And if you've read your Socrates, you know that once you get definition, you start to mess with people's minds because they haven't thought about these things.
Now, this argument is particularly powerful, right?
Because if you say, gun ownership is bad, great, let's get rid of all the guns, let's disband the police and the military, or if we're going to have a police and a military, let's give them ping-pong paddles.
Oh no, not even ping-pong paddles, because you can spank someone with a ping-pong paddle.
Let's give them books on negotiating tactics and so on, and we can disband the SWAT teams and the military and the police and so on.
People get rather shocked at that, because they're like, no!
No, you can't do that!
And it's like, well, I'm sorry, you just told me that nobody should be allowed to own guns, or gun ownership should be severely restricted.
And if people just say, well, gun ownership should be severely restricted, there should not be AK-47s, and people should only be allowed to have BB guns, fantastic!
Then let's at least let them have that as a logical consistency, and say, okay, so we need to disband the military in terms of its size and scope at the moment, and we need to just give people in the military, the Marines, only get BB guns, or potato guns, or something like that.
And the police only get BB guns and potato guns and stuff like that.
And I don't agree with that either, but at least let's start working with people in terms of logical consistency.
But let's just say that they're radical, they say private gun ownership should be disallowed.
Well, okay, there's no private, public, they're just people, right?
So gun ownership is disallowed, so we disband the police.
Now, when you talk about disbanding the police because gun ownership is bad, people get all freaky freaky on you, and they start to say, well, we can't do that, because there are criminals, you see, and the criminals have guns, blah blah blah.
So, okay, so now we're starting to talk about something that can be useful, right?
So I'm starting to talk about a principle here, which is always what we want to get to with people.
So it's like, okay, so you think that gun ownership is bad, but that the police need guns to defend themselves against criminals.
Because if the police don't have guns, the criminals will run rampant, blah blah blah, right?
Right.
Okay.
Fantastic.
So then, of course, the question is, why do only the police need to defend themselves against the criminals?
What about private citizens?
The police are just people.
They don't change their moral nature when you put a uniform on and eat a donut.
So, you know, what's the big deal, right?
You can't sort of say, well, this guy, no gun, no gun, no gun, bad gun ownership, bad gun ownership, oh wait, he's put his uniform on, he's sitting in a car, tapping on a computer, and drinking a coffee.
Now, gun ownership.
Good, good, good, good, good.
We must have gun ownership.
Oh, he's on a break.
Bad.
Bad gun ownership.
No gun ownership.
Oh, he's gone for lunch.
No gun.
Oh, he's back on duty.
Good gun ownership.
I mean, this is all insanity, right?
You don't change human beings' moral nature 20 times during the course of the day, depending on this, that, or the other.
So, that's obviously not a valid moral theory.
I mean, you can say that you like cops to have guns and private citizens shouldn't have guns, but you can't say that it's a should, or it's an absolute, or it's a moral, or it's an ethic, or it's anything that people should obey.
It's just a matter of, you know, I think that Charlize Theron is kind of cute.
I mean, there's no law, right?
It's just an opinion.
It doesn't mean anything.
And you certainly can't put it forward as any kind of universal rule.
But if you're going to start talking about, no, there should be a law, there should be this, there should be that, then of course you fall into the argument for morality, and you better damn well know what you're talking about, because if you get it wrong, millions of people tend to get killed.
So it's fairly important.
I mean, to me, if you are, and this is sort of a minor aside, but it's relevant, I think, to what we're talking about in general, and specifically to today.
If you are a false philosopher, if you are a philosopher who goes around spouting off about how things should be and right and wrong and good and bad, in other words, if you're every damn person on the planet, if you're a false philosopher and you haven't thought things through and you haven't gone through the rigor of having
Intense debates, both with yourself and with other people, and if you haven't learned, and if you haven't reasoned, and if you haven't figured it all out, to the best of your ability, and if you don't put things forward with a certain amount of tentativity, and if you're not open to correction, but you're just some low-it-all loudmouth in a bar, or anywhere, like these idiots who are talking about, oh, Afghanistan, the war's great, now go get me another coffee from the free teacher's lounge, and turn up the thermostat, because it's two degrees colder than I like,
If you're people who have opinions about war, if you're a false philosopher, then you are about 10,000 times worse than somebody who cuts somebody else open in a hospital while having no idea about surgery.
You are a thousand times, ten thousand times worse than somebody who goes around diagnosing patients in a hospital and pretending to be a doctor when you have absolutely no clue about anything to do with medicine.
Now, those people we throw in jail.
I'm not saying that this would be the answer, but just be aware that when you run into people who are false philosophers, They are 10,000 times worse than people who pretend to be doctors, who cut people open, who prescribe random things, and who get everything wrong, because getting things right is a very narrow path and a very difficult path.
They are 10,000 times worse than false doctors.
In fact, you could say that they're a million times or about 170 million times worse than false doctors, because false doctors are kind of limited in the number of people that they can get killed.
And the people that they can get killed, to some degree, are sick anyway.
But false philosophers like Marx and Engels and, you know, there's about a bajillion of them.
Schopenhauer and Heidegger, all these sorts of people.
Nietzsche, to some degree, of course.
Hegel, to a very large degree.
Rousseau.
I mean, you can go on all these false philosophers at the grand academic sense, but also at the minor guy in a bar in the corner kind of sense.
These people are millions of times worse than people who pass themselves off as doctors, because doctors can only kill people who are sick, and they're limited to maybe a couple hundred people in their lives, even if they're dedicated at it, because some people are just going to survive anyway.
But if you would not feel comfortable allowing a surgeon to operate on you without having any clue about what he was doing, and without any anesthetic to boot, Then it's important to understand that false philosophers who put bad ideas out there that evil people use to justify the extensions of brutality are kind of responsible for the deaths of between 170 million and 250 million people throughout the world in the 20th century alone.
And the people who are talking in the teacher's lounge in a comfortable room in Canada about how wonderful the war is kind of are participating in a very real way in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
If we just talk about Iraq and Afghanistan and the torture of people at Abu Ghraib, they are absolutely handing the torture implements and justifying and covering up and so on, all of these kinds of human crimes and war crimes.
Because false philosophy is worse than false medicine.
False medicine is localized.
False philosophy allows gangs of thugs to prey upon and slaughter hundreds of millions of people.
So just be aware of what it is that we're dealing with, of the serious nature of what it is that we're dealing with.
I'll make jokes and giggle about it from time to time, actually quite continually, because I want the conversation to be enjoyable.
But please don't mistake my lightness for a lack of seriousness.
Because these things are deadly serious and millions of people's lives do hang in the balance.
It's just not that much fun to talk about it at that level.
It's a bit heavy.
And I found that many people will take that as a kind of responsibility.
The kind of responsibility that drove the weathermen underground to start bombing people, which of course didn't do anything.
And look that up if you want.
It's a very interesting phenomenon.
It happened in the 60s when you had a group of radical social anarchists bombing people and blowing things up because they disagreed with the Vietnam War.
And of course, other foreign policy adventures that America was performing at the time.
It's a very serious topic.
It's just that if I talk about it with the level of seriousness that it entails, most people will find it kind of oppressive, because we seem to take a lot of ownership for things that we did not create.
It's a natural human habit, and it's false.
People say to me when they're teachers, while I'm taking blood money and so on, it's like, you didn't create this system, you didn't create this public school system, and it's either you out there reaching out to the young, or it's going to be some crazy socialist out there poisoning their minds and destroying their lives.
I don't think it's necessarily bad to be a spy in an enemy camp, as long as you're doing good while you're there, that's the important thing.
People also write to me and say that I got out of the army and I still feel guilty about it, and I talked about one guy today who posted on the board, and my particular opinion is, okay, so not only did you save your own life, but you also saved the lives of many, many people that you would have murdered when you were a soldier, or helped murder.
So that's got to be considered, I think, not such a bad action.
I mean, if you go out and save a bunch of people's lives, you're probably satisfied, but today, well, it's exactly what happens when you get out of the army.
You're saving people's lives.
So the argument for morality in regards to gun control is fairly simple, and you can see that it's so simple I've had to stretch it out enormously with lots of tangents.
But the question is, if gun ownership is bad, then great.
The first thing that you want to do is deal with the people that you have some control over if you're the government, and so you have to disarm everybody.
Who is in the government?
Get rid of the IRS, any arms, FBI, CIA, any kind of arms that the military has, and you know, they just become like bands of people who like to get together and put pins on maps, rather than people who actually have scuds and bombs and planes and aircraft carriers and all that kind of nonsense.
Fine.
Then we're a complete agreement.
Let's have a stateless society.
And people say, well, no, we can't do that because you need to enforce the no guns, right?
Which is kind of funny, right?
And again, it's like, I'm sorry.
I mean, this is like a joke, right?
You're not really serious about this, that you need guns in order to get rid of guns, that you have to have guns because guns are bad.
I mean, that is...
A contradiction, right?
It's good to get rid of guns because guns are bad.
So it's good to own guns because it's bad to own guns.
I mean, that's kind of silly, right?
I mean, that's not a serious proposition, right?
People aren't seriously putting that forward and expecting to be taken with any kind of seriousness.
Seriously, I have to use the word seriously a little more often in this podcast.
So the answer is completely unclear, then, in my perspective, right?
They're saying, okay, guns are bad, so we need to have the police have lots of guns so they can disarm people.
So guns are both bad and good, and they're bad for some people to own and good for other people to own, so basically people are just talking a kind of gibberish, right?
They might as well be barking in Chihuahua speak.
So obviously that's not a valid moral theory.
And then they say, well, you know, it's because the criminals and the police need their defense and blah, blah, blah, right?
And so you say, OK, well, great.
So defense against criminals is a good thing, right?
So if you use guns to defend yourself, then that's a good thing.
And certainly, if defense of the population is important, it's fairly important for the population to have that defense sooner rather than later, right?
I mean, there's no particular point saying that three days after I'm mugged, I get to draw my gun, right?
I mean, that's not really going to help.
So, given that when you are being mugged directly, or if you're a woman, somebody's threatening you with rape, or I guess if you're a man too, somebody could be threatening you with rape, then it's important that you actually get to defend yourself at that time.
So, after you get buggered, or after you get raped or mugged, being able to call 911 and have the police show up half an hour later, or 20 minutes later, or 10 minutes later, Doesn't really do you much good, right?
So if you say that using guns to defend yourself is good, to defend the population is good for the police, then obviously it's far better if you get to do it right in the moment, right?
So everybody would say that policing is better if any time that you wanted you could snap your fingers and produce a policeman and have that policeman defend you, everybody would say, well, that would be better policing than making a call later and having the cops fill out some paperwork and promise they'll get back to you and never bother.
So that is something that everybody would agree is better policing.
So the closer the sort of gun being used for self-defense is to the actual crime, the closer it is in terms of time and physical proximity, the better, right?
The better defense can be achieved.
So then naturally, of course, this would be a logical thing to say, or a logical place to go, to say, well, there's no greater proximity of a gun to a crime than for somebody to be able to pull it out when the crime is about to be committed, right?
So for somebody to actually have a gun would make more sense than for somebody to have a gun somewhere else, or a cop somewhere else that they could call later.
And this is just using the person's own argument, right?
The cops need guns because self-defense is good, and criminals have more guns, so the cops should have guns, and so on.
So, if the cops can do it, then the citizens can do it.
Because if the cops are somehow morally different from the citizens, then that's a proposition that needs to be proven with reference to some sort of biology.
Which, you know, you have to make up different rules for the same species, right?
That's like saying some birds have wings and some birds have unicorn horns, you know?
But they're still birds!
That some birds have four legs and walk on the land and some birds have two wings and go, let me just making stuff up.
Or it doesn't actually get you anywhere.
So making up opposite moral qualifications or properties or natures for different human beings doesn't get you anywhere in terms of logic or consistency.
So that doesn't work, right?
So you have to allow everybody has the right to self-defense.
Either nobody does, in which case there's no cops, we have a stateless society and that's wonderful.
But then of course you're faced with the problem, right?
I mean, if nobody has any capacity for self-defense, self-defense is always wrong, then the good people are going to be disarmed, and the bad people who don't care about morality are going to be armed, and it seems to me that that's not going to do a lot to raise the status of morality within society.
Everyone who's good has no weapons, and everyone who's bad has all the weapons in the world.
I mean, that's a bit of an argument from effect, but it does seem to me that that's kind of not where you want to end up with a moral system, right?
You want to arm all the criminals and disarm all the good people and expect that the level of violence or brutality is going to go down in society.
So having a moral rule which says there is no such thing as valid weapon ownership doesn't really help you at all.
It's illogical in general, but it really doesn't help you in a practical sense, because all the bad people get armed, all the good people stay disarmed, and You end up with the gulags again, which is really not so good.
But at least you don't have the justification of a state, and at least people who are good can sort of say, oh man, we're sliding into a violent, you know, horrible society, so let's go get us some of those guns and stem the flow, right?
This doesn't happen when you have illegal gun ownership.
When gun ownership becomes illegal, you don't get that option.
If it's just a general principle against self-defense, then that's fine.
Now, the other interesting question against... I mean, the other interesting thing that you can do with people who are not interested in self-defense is you can say, OK, great, would you mind giving me your wallet?
It's the same thing you can do with people who say that they're against property rights.
I mean, it's an interesting thing.
And if they hand over your wallet, then great!
Go on a spending spree and have some fun, and they're not going to have any problems with it, because there's no such... no valid self-defense, and there's no valid property rights, and so on.
Now, if they hesitate about giving you their wallet, then of course you can accuse them of a certain amount of hypocrisy, right?
So it's like, okay, so self-defense is bad, but if I ask you for your wallet and say that I'm going to get angry at you if you don't give it to me, you won't do it, right?
You will actually resist, and so obviously it's sort of a theoretical thing for you that you're not willing to exercise in your real life.
So you're a stinky hypocrite and stop talking about this stuff until you've got a few more brain cells to rub together on the issue.
But of course people never do that, right?
They're just slaves to propaganda.
They don't actually think anything through.
They just make stuff up that they've been told.
And, you know, they think that if... They're like children, right?
I don't like broccoli and I like candy, so I'm gonna not eat broccoli and only eat candy.
Oh, gee, my bones seem to be kind of brittle.
That's not so good.
I seem to be rather weak and overweight, and my pancreas is going crazy, and I have diabetes, because I'm only going on base emotional preference, which is fine.
But you don't call it nutrition, right?
I mean, if you... I like candy is not a statement of nutrition.
I don't like guns is not a statement of political or moral philosophy.
So, it's just a level that people reason at, right?
I mean, it's silly.
I don't like violence.
Well, yeah, who does?
Right?
But it's not like you say, I don't like violence, so I'm going to get rid of guns.
Sure.
Absolutely.
That makes perfect sense.
That's a moral philosophy.
So if you then say, well, self-defense is a valid right, but only for the police and not for the individual citizens, then of course you have this huge problem.
You also have this huge problem in terms of national defense, saying that national defenses are right.
In other words, some people can defend the country and have all the weapons in the world that they want, and other people can't defend the country and can't have any of the weapons except for maybe a few peashooters, which is sort of ludicrous, because the government always wants to maintain the balance of power, right?
The only reason that guns are still allowed in America is because the army has nuclear weapons.
If the army only had guns, you'd only be allowed a peashooter, and if the army only had peashooters, you'd only be allowed foul language.
Right?
And if the sailors were brought in, who I believe are fairly good with foul language, you wouldn't even be allowed that.
You'd be allowed stern glances, perhaps.
So, this is the kind of level at which people are thinking, or not thinking, I guess you could say, wherein they just carve everybody up into these different moral categories and have completely opposing moral rules for each one.
There are criminals in the world, and criminals will always have guns.
You know that old famous saying, right?
If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.
Well, that's not entirely true, of course.
If you outlaw guns, only outlaws and agents of the state will have guns.
Which is kind of a big difference.
Not that they're different in terms of their moral content, but semantically people feel that they're different.
So, only agents of the state will have guns, and only thugs will have guns, if you outlaw guns.
Now, the other question, too, is, of course, saying that the police need to be able to protect the citizens' property rights and sanctity of the body from physical violation and so on.
Fantastic!
Well, let's just say that it's very important to maintain the citizens' property rights and to keep them free of violence.
Well, of course, as I've mentioned recently about war, and it applies equally to the police, it's sort of hard for me to understand, then, what that means.
Because if people are supposed to have their property rights in person defended, but in order to gain access to that defense, they have to have both of those things violated.
It seems a little bit odd to say that, you know?
In order to save your leg, I need to amputate your leg.
It's like, okay, well, maybe you're saving my life by amputating my leg.
But don't tell me that you're saving my leg by amputating my leg, because it's just going to go into the trash.
And the same thing is true of property rights and freedom from violence.
Because the police are funded through taxation, it is a pure violation of property rights and freedom from violence to have taxation, which generates supposed protection property rights.
And, of course, given that the taxation does not only go to pay the police, right?
Taxation would be like 2-3% if all it did was go to pay for the police.
Actually, I think about 1.5% the last time I checked on it, which, of course, would be a far less egregious violation.
But, of course, the police are out there collecting taxes for, you know, the welfare state, Social Security, the gold-plated pensions of the bureaucrats and the politicians, and they're out there protecting state unions, and they're out there doing this, that, and the other.
So given that we're all at, you know, 40 to 60 percent taxation, it's a little hard for me to understand exactly how the police are protecting me.
I would rather hire somebody to do it myself.
People say, OK, well, you're not allowed to do that.
And, you know, well, why not?
You know, it's my choice.
It's my money.
I should be able to, you know, if I have to give my money up at the point of a gun to all these policemen and bureaucrats and state officials and so on, can they really be said to be protecting my property rights?
Well, of course not, right?
It's like democracy.
We listen to the people.
So, I'm not going to sum it up, because of course there's the magic rewind button, but basically the argument for morality pretty much destroys any arguments against the ownership of weapons.
money, right?
So I'm not going to sum it up, because of course, there's the magic rewind button.
But basically, the argument for morality pretty much destroys any arguments against the ownership of weapons.
Either people can do it, in which case fine, Or they can't do it, in which case we have a stateless society and you can go around telling everyone they shouldn't own guns, but you can't physically prevent them from owning guns because you can't pull a gun to their head and say, get rid of that gun, right?
Anybody who's interested in saying there should be no guns, all they can do is argue for no guns, which is fine.
I mean, if you can make a moral argument that convinces everyone that gun ownership is bad, fantastic.
I will think you're an absolute moral hero.
We should erect the biggest statue in the world to you.
Because gun ownership and self-protection is kind of an overhead, right?
Because there are bad people in society, it's kind of an overhead to have all of this stuff kicking around in society.
Making guns is economically unproductive, except insofar as it protects your property.
But it's overhead, right?
It's like an alarm system for your house.
If there were no thieves, people wouldn't put them in and they'd buy something more enjoyable instead.
So if you can make an argument that people should get rid of guns, which actually causes people to get rid of guns and other weapons, fantastic!
I fully support your right to do that, and if there's any way I can help, let me know.
But if you're against gun ownership, then you can only make that argument, right?
You can't force people to get rid of their guns, because the only way you could do that is if you had a gun, and you've already said that gun ownership is bad, so that's never gonna work.
So right there we're in a stateless society.
And if you say that gun ownership is allowable, that's fantastic.
Then we'd have no disagreement, and you may have problem with me saying that everyone can have their pocket scud, but we can get into that debate another time, but Millie is an extension of the argument, right?
Now that's sort of my initial take on the question of gun ownership.
I think it's a very interesting problem.
It's pretty easy to solve in a lot of ways, but we get a huge amount of propaganda and get lost in quite a maze of statistics.
I think in general statistics are useful, and perhaps if I get a chance at lunch today we'll talk about those.
But that's sort of my first take.
Please let me know what you think.
I hope that it's helpful.
All the best, as usual.
Steph checking out with a slow fade for the iPod users.
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