Gun Ownership Debate

Dust Up: A 4 day debate series of gun control issues from the LAtimes: Here are 2 days from Mr Kopel’s side of the debate. Follow the link for the other view & 2 days.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-dustup26apr26,0,5618950.story

1/Gun fictions
What are the most treasured myths in the gun debate?
All this week, David Kopel and Christopher Lockwood debate gun control.
April 26, 2007

Today, the Independence Institute's Kopel and The Economist's Lockwood address the myths, mantras and fibs of the other side. Previously, they debated the international view on guns, the fading politics of gun control and the lessons of Virginia Tech. Later this week, they'll talk about possible solutions. - LAtimes

Loaded language
By Dave Kopel

H.L. Mencken could have been writing about the modern anti-gun lobbies when he observed that "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

"The lobbies have frightened people about the non-existent "undetectable plastic gun", about "cop-killer bullets" (which were actually invented by the police) and about so-called "semi-automatic assault weapons"—whose only real difference from other firearms is that they are cosmetically incorrect, with a military or futuristic appearance.

The lobbies claim that guns are less regulated than teddy bears. (To test this theory, go to your local mall, buy a teddy bear, and then buy a gun. See which one involves more time and paperwork, plus FBI authorization.)

You often hear that X number of "children" are "killed by guns every day." (The sensational number usually depends on counting 19-year-old gangsters as "children.") Or that "a gun in the home triples your chances of being murdered." Or that the danger of guns in the home far exceeds their protective value. (True, if the home contains criminals or the violently insane, but not for normal people.)

Or that the laws on gun sales at gun shows are different from the laws about gun sales everywhere else. (They're not, and only a tiny fraction of crime guns come from gun shows.)

But the greatest myth is that if we were "gun-free", we would be freer or safer.

First, it's impossible. You can ban the legal manufacture of firearms for citizens, but you can't stop theft and smuggling from government supplies.

Nor can you prevent the home production of firearms, which isn't hard for a good machinist, and is already common in places such as the Philippines and the United Kingdom, where excessively severe laws about legal guns make illegal manufacture attractive. Even on the isolated and blockaded Pacific island of Bougainville, the government could not prevent the people from building copies of the M-16 machine gun.

Dave Kopel is research director of the Independence Institutein Golden, Colorado, and the co-author of the law school textbook Gun Control and Gun Rights (NYU Press).


2/Are guns all-American?
Should we be concerned that so much of the rest of the developed world believes U.S. gun laws are crazy?

Foreign governments are anti-gun; foreign people are a different story
By Dave Kopel

Chris, I wish you were right, but the United Nations has changed everything. With the support of many governments, including United Kingdom and Canada, the U.N. is conducting a relentless assault on the Second Amendment.

The U.N. has already declared that there is no human right of self-defense, and that American gun laws are a violation of international law because they are too lax.

Even those in New York City!

Around the world, U.S. taxpayer dollars are used for U.N. gun confiscations which leave people defenseless against criminals, such as the government-allied sex trade kidnappers who prey on the people of Cambodia.

Perhaps it is the foreign laws which are really the crazy ones. The United Kingdom has the most severe anti-gun laws in the West.

Yet according to the United Nations, Scotland is the most violent developed country in the world, and England and Wales are not much better; with significantly higher total violent crime rates than the U.S.

The British rate of home invasion burglaries is about nine times the American rate, partly because the British ban on defensive gun ownership guarantees safe working conditions for home invaders.

Home invasions are also more frequent in Canada and other nations which prohibit defensive guns.

As you know, The Economist wrote last week that "A system of registration for guns and gun-owners, as exists in all other rich countries, threatens no one but the criminal."

Yet Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom are among the many nations demonstrating that gun registration does indeed pave the way for gun confiscation. Canada's gun registry was supposed to cost $2 million, and the cost is now over $2 billion.

Criminals benefited from Canada's gun registry disaster, because police and financial resources which could have been used to fight crime were wasted on compiling (highly inaccurate) lists of the serial numbers of farmers' shotguns or rifles.

A forthcoming article by Gary Mauser and Don Kates in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy analyzes international data and debunks the simplistic notion that higher rates of gun ownership are associated with higher rates of homicide.

Gun confiscation, however, is correlated with homicide—in that gun confiscation is almost always a condition precedent for genocide and other murderous atrocities by government.

This was historically true in Turkish Armenia, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Guatemala, Cambodia, and Idi Amin's Uganda. It is still true in Ethiopia, East Timor, Srebrenica, Rwanda, Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, and Zimbabwe.

The experience of the Holocaust also shows that to the extent that victims do obtain firearms, they have a much greater chance of survival, even under the worst conditions.

In October 2005, the people of Brazil voted on a U.N.-backed gun confiscation plan, and 64% said "Não.

"The confiscation campaign leader later warned his international allies, "First lesson is, don't trust direct democracy."As Foreign Policy magazine observed in February 2006, the right to arms today "strikes a chord with people of very different backgrounds, experiences, and cultures, even when that culture has historically been anti-gun."

Aggressively hostile to the right of self-defense against solitary criminals and criminal governments, today's international political and media elites are out of step not only with America, but with more and more people around the world.

Dave Kopel is research director of the Independence Institutein Golden, Colorado, and the co-author of the law school textbook Gun Control and Gun Rights (NYU Press).