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March 22, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:34
154 Gun Control Part 3: Crime
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Well, I shot the sheriff, but I did not shoot no deputy.
Yes, I shot the sheriff, but I swear it wasn't self-defense.
See, now I've done that bit on Jamaica, that whole song makes sense.
Good afternoon, everybody.
It's Steph.
It's 5... on March the 22nd, Wednesday.
One of the basic things about crime, which I've mentioned briefly in one of my articles on lewrockwell.com, which is the fact, or the sad fact, that when it comes to crime, Governments do not help.
I mean, they actively encourage the pursuit of crime.
And this is really, really true when it comes to violent crime.
And this is really, really, really true when it comes to something like gun control laws.
So, to take an obvious example, if you were the only person who had a gun in the whole wide world, and you knew for a fact that nobody else had any kind of projectile weapon, I mean, including blowguns or arrows or anything like that, if this was the case, then your supremacy in the realm of combat would be pretty unsurpassed.
So, if you were the only person who had any kind of projectile weapon, like a gun with infinite amounts of ammo and so on, then you would be pretty much able to take on anybody you wanted, or even a fairly large group of people, and you would be able to get what you wanted.
You'd be able to walk into any house knowing That nobody was going to be able to fight back, because a gun is something that is just so vastly outclassing.
It so vastly outclasses other kinds of weaponry.
So even things like a baseball bat, or this woman was talking about an ice pick.
A gun is so vastly outclasses those things, because it can be fired from a distance, it's almost always fatal, and it's a lot less stomach-turning to pull a trigger, I imagine, at someone, than it is to swing a bat at them.
So guns are kind of in a special class by themselves when it comes to violence.
So if you were the only person who had a gun in a city or a town or a country or the world, And you decided to become a thief, you would know for a fact that except for dogs, and of course dogs will let you know if they're there long before you actually open the door, except for dogs you would pretty much have no capacity to be harmed because, you know, people would know that you had a gun and if you were the guy with the gun they wouldn't be able to fight back and so on.
So the value, on a purely amoral economic sense, the value of gun ownership increases To the degree that other people don't have it, right?
So that's one of the things that's sort of important.
The asymmetry value of gun ownership is pretty strong.
So that's one of the main problems that you have with the restriction on guns.
It's the same thing with the drug trade, right?
As drugs are pushed out of the market through fabulous DEA enforcement tactics, i.e.
somebody doesn't bribe them properly, Then the remaining drugs go up in value, and therefore you get more people drawn into the drug game.
So that's one of the reasons it's impossible.
It's like pushing a balloon, right?
Pushing in one side a balloon, all that happens is the other side pops out.
Now the same thing is true in terms of gun ownership.
Because as the number of guns goes down in society, the value of having guns increases.
The value of those who have remaining guns.
So that's one of the reasons why gun ownership restrictions, much like restrictions on illicit drugs, simply don't work.
Because the more you restrict them, the more the value goes up of those that remain.
Those drugs or those guns.
Now, the other major, major aspect when it comes to restrictions on gun ownership, from a sort of purely economic materialistic calculation standpoint, is that one of the things that you always have a problem with, in terms of gun ownership or the use of guns for illicit purposes, is the fog of war, or what you can call the fog of war.
Now, the fog of war is a fantastic phrase that I use sometimes in business, which basically means, I'm sorry if you, I'm sure 99 people out of 100 have heard it before, but for our Taiwanese listener, The fog of war actually refers to the fact that you don't have any clue what is going on on the other side of the battlefield.
You don't have any clue what the plans are or anything like that that your enemy general is cooking up.
So you can attack on the flank.
He could be thinking of attacking on the same flank or up the middle or up the other side.
He could be tunneling under you.
He could have withdrawn in the dark of night and have you run forward and then when you're exhausted come around from either side.
The fog of war means that you just don't have any clue what the heck is going on on the other side of the fence.
And when it comes to weapons, when it comes to guns, the fog of war is one of the most essential limiters on the value of having a gun.
So, if you say that only 10% of the population has a gun, and you're a criminal who wants to go and steal from people's houses, if only 10% of the people have a gun, if you don't know which 10%, you have a fog-of-war situation.
That's sort of pretty significant.
Now, if you had a map, a magic map, showing you everyone who had guns and where they were located on a city street, right?
See the little pushpins on a map?
These people without the pushpins don't have the guns.
Then, of course, you could go and steal from the houses where there weren't guns with much, much, much greater security.
Because the real fear for the thief is not getting caught.
It's getting killed or getting hurt.
That's the real fear for the thief.
Or, the real fear for the thief is having a standoff, right?
So, if you're a thief and you have a gun with you, and you come up against a homeowner in the middle of the night who wakes up and hears you stealing, and he stands in front of you in one of these Tarantino moments where you have two guns pointed at two people, Well, the thief obviously doesn't want that situation, because he doesn't know what you're going to do.
He doesn't know if you're some crazy Vietnam vet having flashbacks, or if you've just smoked some crystal meth, or if you're, you know, having visions, and you're sleepwalking, and you think that the very devil himself is in your living room, or even if you're just out of panic and have a muscle twitch and blow him away.
That's a pretty stressful situation, and really not worth the VCR that he's taking, or the DVD, or whatever.
Even the family jewels is not worth getting killed over.
So it's not so much getting caught that the thief minds.
Because if you come, you're a little old lady, you come down into your living room and the thief is going through your cabinets and he's got this sort of black stocking mask on and he's got the black catsuit on and whatever.
Then all he does is he pushes you over and he gets away.
And if he's been using gloves and hasn't left any stuff and whatever, right?
Then he's never going to get caught because the police are going to be like, well, there's nothing we can do here.
So, you know, we're not going to go for DNA samples and all that kind of stuff because nobody's bribing us to do it.
So let's not bother.
So all he does is he pushes the granny away and he runs out.
And it's scary, and it makes for a funny story the next day, and maybe he doesn't get as much as he wants.
But it's not particularly risky, right?
I mean, thieves who break into houses know pretty much that some houses they're going to get found, and then they get to get away, and so on.
It's just part of their calculations, right?
Like if you're a salesman, you know that 90% of your deals aren't going to close.
Unless I'm a really bad salesman.
Like, 90% of your cold calls aren't going to buy the software product or whatever product you're selling, but that's part of your calculations.
So, in a couple of houses per month, if you're a thief, you're not going to get away with what you want to get away with.
That's pretty much understood.
And that's part of the rational calculations in an amoral economic sense of being a thief.
Fair enough.
Now, another equation comes into the mix considerably if you don't know whether somebody has a gun or not.
And the reason for that is sort of twofold.
One, if you don't know if they have a gun, then they could come at you with a gun.
Number two, if you don't know whether they have a gun, then they can be bluffing, and you won't necessarily know it.
So they could have their hand in their pocket, cocked into a gun, Or they could have a toy gun, or they could have a replica of a gun.
And if gun ownership is perfectly legal, you have no idea whatsoever whether or not that person actually has the gun, it is a real gun, or whether they're just bluffing.
So even if you don't have a gun in your house and the thief comes down, you can shout from the top of the stairs and say, I have a double-barreled shotgun pointed at your chest.
Get up, put everything down, and walk away.
And the thief really doesn't know whether you do or don't have that.
And so, that's one of the things.
The fog of war is raised considerably.
When gun ownership is legal.
That's pretty important to understand in terms of limiting crime.
What it does, is it makes it much more stressful, difficult, and dangerous to be a criminal.
It doesn't make it any more difficult and dangerous to be an honest person, unless I guess you go into the wrong house by mistake, or something, and your neighbor is particularly jittery.
That's what locks are for, right?
So it doesn't really raise the threat of being an honest person, because honest people generally don't lurk around other people's houses in the middle of the night.
But it really does raise the threat, risk and danger of being a thief.
And that's fairly important.
Now let's look at another situation.
And what this woman from Jamaica, or who lived in Jamaica, had to say I thought was particularly important around women.
It's Smith and Wesson that make women equal to men, not feminists, right?
In this kind of situation.
So women, of course, being physically weaker, more physically vulnerable, and having the greatest of all horrifying crimes able to be committed against them in terms of rape, the crimes that you can have committed against you and survive, I imagine that rape is the worst.
And, of course, it's not just for women.
It can happen to men as well, but it's just not nearly as common.
I think it's about 10 to 1.
But a woman faces enormous dangers in the world relative to a man.
It's something that guys, especially like fairly big guys like myself, we just don't really understand.
It's really hard to understand what it's like to be a woman who gets... And I'm not saying that this is the smartest thing for a woman to do, but, you know, it's something that I don't really think of.
When I was younger and I'd leave a disco or a bar or whatever at two o'clock in the morning, I might walk for a while, then catch a cab, or if the bus was down, or it stopped running, or the subway, then I might walk home.
And I would do that with no particular sense of fear.
Like, maybe once in a great while, if I saw a gaggle of shaven-headed youths approaching me on the sidewalk, I would feel a moment of fear, but I never really felt any particular threat.
Because, well, for a variety of reasons.
I felt if I walked tough and walked tall and all that and I contacted them or whatever, I could brazen it out and that seemed to work.
Or, you know, maybe they know all about those reverse psychological techniques and were kind of laughing at me.
Who knows?
But I never felt any particular threat other than very occasional stabs of fear.
And once, when a friend of mine and I used to go hiking in the woods, and when I was about 12 we were sort of bullied for an hour or two by a couple of older kids in the woods.
We had to make them a fire and so on, and it was kind of scary, but I was brave enough in terms of my words, but not brave enough in terms of my actions.
To point out to these children, when I was sort of 11 or so, and this kid was 16 or 17, I said to him, oh man, why don't you pick on someone your own size?
And so he sort of punched me in the stomach, and so down I went, right?
Because I wasn't about to have a fight, but I wasn't about to let it go without pointing out to him that he was a pretty rank coward.
So that wasn't the smartest thing in the world, because he could have done a lot worse.
But really, that's the only time I've ever even been hit by anyone outside my family.
But it's rare.
Now, women, of course, face an entirely different situation.
Christina has talked to me about this when I've asked her, because she's 98, 99, actually about 100 pounds, 105 pounds, and she's 5'2".
So, technically, she's called little.
She's about 100 pounds, 105 pounds.
And she's five foot two.
And so she's, technically she's called Little.
And as a small woman, I mean, she's never had any problems at all because she's very wise and very smart.
But she says, you know, she's conscious of it.
Conscious of her size.
And it's very hard for guys to imagine sort of what that's like.
So, for women, very important to actually have the capacity to carry a weapon.
And not a sort of silly weapon like a switchblade or something, but a real weapon like a gun.
Now again, as a woman, you don't have to carry a gun to be part of this fog of war.
If somebody is a rapist or somebody who wants to prey on you because you're a woman, it could be a mugger who just prefers the smaller amount of physical threat that he's going to get from women, then if you have a purse, which women do, and I sort of thought originally those were to carry concealed weapons, but the fog of war is going to envelop you too, so the thief is not going to have any clue whether or not you have a weapon.
So, I think I've labored this point long enough.
Stretched it out as far as humanly possible.
No, wait!
Let me rephrase it again, but in Spanish.
So, one of the problems with gun restrictions, restrictions on gun ownership, is that basically what the government hands out to criminals is a map of who does not have a gun.
So it lifts the fog of war for everyone except other criminals.
And that's sort of important.
That's one of the main reasons why crime increases when gun ownership diminishes.
Because the government has handed out a wonderfully color-coded map for every human being in society, saying, has gun, not has gun, might have gun.
So for has gun, we have police, military, and so on.
For not have gun, it's just about everybody else, especially people who aren't in their own homes.
And for might have gun, it's all the other criminals.
Now, one of the other things that happens with the government is, and I'm not going to delve into the motivations for this, but generally it's good to have the population terrorized.
For the government, it's good to have the population terrorized.
And there's no better way to terrorize the population without lifting a finger than to decrease one's capacity to have weapons in society and then let the resulting crime waves frighten the society.
The government doesn't really have to lift a finger.
And, of course, the frightened population begins calling for what?
Yes!
Yes!
You guessed it!
You in front!
Yes, right there!
More government protection!
Fantastic!
So, this is exactly what it is.
It's a lazy government's way of terrorizing the population, right?
Strip away gun ownership and then let the resulting crime wave terrify the population into increasing the size of the government or demanding for an increase in the size of the government.
It's really quite wonderful.
It's lazy, but, you know, it gets the job done.
And so this problem of penetrating the fog of war is one of the big problems for the private citizens.
So, the problem within the home that you have to have your gun locked in a special cabinet with a lock on the handle, with the gun thing locked to safety, with it chained up, with it, you know, stuff that Houdini couldn't get out in less than an hour or so.
And what this means, of course, is that the The criminal does not have to worry about the gun in the nightstand.
The loaded gun with the safety on in the nightstand.
Because, of course, that's kind of where you want it if you're in a crimey kind of neighborhood.
So, the criminal, if you have a locked cabinet in the basement with the key in the attic, so to speak, when you go into a house, if that's what the house owner is stuck with, then there may be a gun in the house, but who really cares?
Because the gun owner can't actually get at it in any kind of useful way.
So, for instance, concealed carry permits are also kind of important.
If everybody has to, I don't know, lash the gun to their forehead, that also gets rid of the problem of the fog of war.
Because if everybody has to lash a gun to their forehead who's carrying it in public, pretty much the thief is going to, I'm guessing, kind of zero in on the guy who's not peering around a gun.
Because, you know, you don't want to mess with those people.
You're also not going to want to hold up somebody when there's somebody else around who has a gun lashed to their forehead.
Unless it's lashed to their forehead in such a way that they can't get it loose and get it useful in any kind of time frame that's helpful to preventing a crime.
And that's another important thing.
So concealed carry permits raise the fog of war again.
And this, of course, diminishes the value of crime.
It increases the risk, increases the risk of injury, increases the risk of not getting what you want in terms of stealing from people, which means that the job of criminal becomes less economically advantageous.
Now, of course, it would be nice if everyone said, being a criminal is bad, so I won't be a criminal because dealing is wrong and blah blah blah.
But of course, we're not dealing with that constituency here, really, are we?
These are people who've already said, you know, I'm not so much with the law, either moral or human, so I'm just going to go for it.
So, of course, the only thing you're going to be able to use to prevent these people is to diminish the returns of what it is that they're pursuing.
They're already agents who have decided on an amoral, pragmatic, material-based approach to maximizing their resources, so wagging your finger at them and saying, uh-uh-uh, is not going to do anything, because they've already crossed over into that shadowy realm of the grey market and the black market and the evil, predatory, criminal market.
So, you're going to have to tweak their incentives, or you're going to have no hope of stopping them at all, except in hindsight, which is not useful in any way, shape, or form.
So, if you get rid of people's ability to carry concealed weapons, then you, again, you are lowering the fog of war so the criminal can see exactly who he or she is supposed to focus on, and who he's supposed to avoid.
Again, you've got now not pushpins on people's houses about who's got a gun and who hasn't, But you've got pushpins on people themselves.
So basically, now the only people that the criminal knows do not have guns or do not have access to guns in any useful time frame are homeowners, women, anybody out in public who's not a criminal, and I'm sure that they can recognize each other pretty well because that's part of their job, right?
I mean, they're supposed to be able to find people who are undercover, so they've got to be pretty good at recognizing other criminals.
I don't know if there's a secret handshake or it's just a matter of mutual introduction, but pretty much a criminal is not going to have much trouble identifying other criminals.
But he is going to know for sure that if you're not a criminal, if you're not a cop, and if you're not one of the militia who's currently got a gun in front of him, You're pretty much not going to have a weapon on you.
And that completely lowers the fog of war.
And what does that do?
Of course, it raises the incentive and benefits of being a criminal.
And that is exactly what you don't want when it comes to reducing the value of crime.
So, these sort of two major points that I wanted to get at.
One, that when the ownership of guns diminishes, the value of each remaining gun increases in terms of its ability to aid you in the transfer of resources, shall we say.
So that's one of the reasons why controlling guns, much like controlling drugs, does not do anything beneficial in terms of getting rid of the problem.
In fact, it makes it worse.
And the second is that by having clearly enunciated and available to all kinds of criminals laws, then you are immediately drawing a big red circle around everyone who doesn't have a gun.
And that completely gets rid of the fog-of-war problem for the criminal, which makes being a criminal that much more advantageous.
It's much less risky.
You're going to get that many more goods.
So everybody who is a criminal in that way is hunky-dory.
Now, let's get to the final point about gun control.
Maybe not the final point, but the final point for me today, given that I have about six minutes left in my drive.
And the final point is, of course, the relationship between the citizen and the state.
Now, of course, in a stateless society, who cares?
Not a big problem.
You've got guns.
The DRO have guns.
You don't have guns.
You've still got the protection of the fog of war.
Doesn't really matter.
Who cares?
In the current situation, of course, there are a bunch of mealy-mouthed liberals who say, oh, well, you know, that was fine to have gun ownership at a time when only the government only had guns too, but now the government's got nuclear weapons and blah blah blah, so gun ownership doesn't help, and so we might as well get rid of all the guns and stuff like that.
And I swear to God, these frickin' liberals who are in their Security-controlled condos and Barbara Streisand, who travels with 19 bodyguards and lives in a gated community that might as well be on Pluto, as far as the average criminal goes.
Yeah, I guess it's fine for them to not worry about gun ownership, because they're not threatened with crime!
Jesus Christ, what the hell is the matter with these people?
When some other rich American celebrity comes out for gun control, I'm just gonna ralph right into my lap, which you really don't want on a live podcast, because that would be fairly gross.
But it's all well and good to talk about.
I'm in my gated community.
I arrived in my black helicopter with my 12 security guards, and I think that gun control is just fine.
Well, of course, do your security guards have guns?
Well, of course, but that's different, because they're cops on off-duty.
So, I think that's just kind of funny.
Like, I'd love one, I'd love Barbra Streisand to be turned loose in Harlem, and just to find out, hey, you know, Babs, how do you feel about gun control now?
Would you feel a little bit more comfortable with a Smith & Wesson in your corset?
But that to me is just kind of funny, right?
It's like all the armchair warriors talking about how we should go to Iraq and do X, Y, and Z, or the soldiers should stay, or we should increase the deployment while they're sitting there picking belly lint out of their fat guts and picking their ears and saying, yep, I think there should be brave people going out there.
I'm just not one of them.
That would be kind of the same way that I would look at people who talk about, let's get rid of guns, who have no need of them because they're in gated communities.
So that's great, but what about the poor people and the women who have to actually go out in the world and who don't have bodyguards and who don't have gated communities and security fences and armed dogs?
And what is it?
I want sharks!
Frickin' sharks with laser beams!
I can't do Dr. Evil very well, but I do occasionally use his little finger in my mouth when I'm talking about the price of our software with clients, which will occasionally get a laugh, which is kind of what you need when you first talk about multi-hundred thousand dollar software deals.
You really want a bit of a giggle up front.
Now, this relationship between the state and gun ownership and the private citizens, to me, is not necessarily one like, if everybody has a .45, we can overthrow the government, because I don't think that that's at all relevant.
I don't think that's ever how it's going to work.
And the last thing that I'd want is an angry mob taking over government before they knew what the hell they were doing, which means quite a bit of listening to free-to-main radio.
So, I would rather that we continue to have the debate until we know what we're doing, because then, when we look up from our plans, the government will have fallen already, because nobody will believe it anymore.
And the Empress' new clothes will be revealed as pretty much nothing, and we'll just be able to turn the White House into a museum of past horrors.
So, that doesn't really matter to me, that if we get enough handguns we can do anything like take over the government or something, which is just not going to work.
You can't fight violence with violence.
But what it does mean to me is that it's going to blunt the brutality of the cops just a little bit for the citizens to have weapons and that's going to do something.
It's going to slow down the increase in the size of the government for the private citizens to have weapons and particularly it's going to slow down police brutality.
You can of course see from the examples quoted in the last podcast about Jamaica that it could be said that there are just a few problems with corrupt cops.
Especially those corrupt cops who know that the citizens are disarmed and there's smack that they can do to do anything about police brutality.
So that's sort of my particular thoughts about it.
I think that it's very important, of course, that there's no gun ownership restrictions whatsoever, both logically, morally, practically, from a crime reduction standpoint, from a limitations on the powers of the state standpoint, and particularly from the protection of women standpoint.
I think it's absolutely essential.
I really don't care for New York intellectual women or men who are sitting up there in their condos with security guards out front talking about that they want gun control, because it really doesn't have a lot of credibility if you're not in the line of fire to say that you don't need your weapons.
That really doesn't make much sense at all.
So I hope these chats have helped you a little bit.
Please, of course, let me know what you think.
It's a very exciting topic, a very interesting topic, and something which we should continue to have conversations about.
Feel free to visit me at www.freedomainradio.com or send me an email at freedom at freedomainradio.com.
As you can tell, maybe from the site, we're kind of about freedom.
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