Month: January 2013

Guns Across America Event in St. Paul

Just a heads up, there will be a protest against any and all potential new gun control legislation happening at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul on Saturday, January 19 at 12:00 (Why is the protest on the weekend when none of the politicians are there? I have no idea). I’m not sure what this event will amount to since I don’t see any mentioned speakers and it doesn’t appear much was dont to promote it but it could be interesting nonetheless. If I end up attending look for a six foot male wearing glasses and a large blue/grey Swiss greatcoat and introduce yourself. On the other hand I’ve had less than optimal experiences at these kinds of events because a majority of attendees are generally constitutionalists and they often don’t take kindly to anarchists.

EDIT: 2012-01-17: 19:19: I accidentally stated that the event was on the 16the when it’s actually on the 19th. Thanks to Paul for catching that one.

Feds Staking Out SHOT Show

No Lawyers – Only Guns and Money reported that work has spread throughout SHOT Show that undercover agents have been stalking about:

the industry poises for the Obama administration, word spread through SHOT Show that undercover agents supposedly from a variety of different agencies, from ATF to OSI, were wandering around the show floor, passing out business cards that bore an official-looking seal and the words “Suspicious Activity Reporting: 702-690-9142”

Curious, one industry insider called the number. After several rings, a recorded message thanked him for reporting the suspicious activity, and asked for a callback number. Instead, he hung up. Only a few minutes later, their cellphone rang and a caller identified himself as an FBI agent following up on the “suspicious activity report”.

Perhaps SHOT Show needs its own version of Defcon’s Spot the Fed competition:

Basically the contest goes like this: If you see some shady MIB (Men in Black) earphone penny loafer sunglass wearing Clint Eastwood to live and die in LA type lurking about, point him out. Just get my attention and claim out loud you think you have spotted a fed. The people around at the time will then (I bet) start to discuss the possibility of whether or not a real fed has been spotted. Once enough people have decided that a fed has been spotted, and the Identified Fed (I.F.) has had a say, and informal vote takes place, and if enough people think it’s a true fed, or fed wanna-be, or other nefarious style character, you win a “I spotted the fed!” shirt, and the I.F. gets an “I am the fed!” shirt.

On the other hand the people leaving the cards at SHOT Show could be members of the Legion of Dynamic Discord having fun screwing with with attendees. It would be trivial to setup a phone number (say a Google Voice number), walk around SHOT Show, drop cards, and use the caller identification information to call back anybody who calls your number.

Obama Announced Gun Control Plan

I won’t spend a great deal of time on this since you’ve likely already heard about Obama’s annoucement:

Mr Obama called for a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and wider background checks on gun buyers.

The Democratic president also signed 23 executive-order measures, which do not require congressional approval.

Mr Obama said gun-control reforms could not wait any longer, after last month’s school massacre in Connecticut.

“While there is no law or set of laws that can prevent every senseless act of violence completely, no piece of legislation that will prevent every tragedy, every act of evil,” he said, “if there’s even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there’s even one life that can be saved, then we’ve got an obligation to try.”

It was a pretty standard affair. You can read about the 23 executive orders here but most of them appear to be variations of enforcing laws that are already on the books. Some of them were somewhat humorous considering the Fast and Furious fiasco:

4. Direct the Attorney General to review categories of individuals prohibited from having a gun to make sure dangerous people are not slipping through the cracks.

I’m guessing the executive order only means dangerous people who are not employed by a Mexican drug cartel.

9. Issue a Presidential Memorandum to require federal law enforcement to trace guns recovered in criminal investigations.

This one surprised me. Weren’t traces of guns recovered in criminal investigations what lead to the Fast and Furious scandal coming to light? You would think the state would be smart enough to avoid advocating policies that have backfired in the past.

10. Release a DOJ report analyzing information on lost and stolen guns and make it widely available to law enforcement.

Does this mean the Department of Justice will notify domestic law enforcement agents when guns are “lost” in areas of Mexico known to be heavily populated with drug cartel members?

The last order I found rather funny was:

18. Provide incentives for schools to hire school resource officers.

I thought the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) proposal was considered bat shit crazy by everybody proposing gun control. I wonder what they have to say now that Mr. Obama has signed an order implementing the plan.

If a ban on semi-automatic rifles, standard capacity magazines, or both makes it into law I’ll take comfort in knowing it will ring in a new era of agorist business. Instead of relying on centralized firearm and firearm accessory manufacturers we will have independent individuals building and selling those goods. The sale of those items will not contribute to the state through the taxation policies that currently lead “legitimate” firearm and firearm accessory manufacturers to line the state’s coffers.

Statist Ignorance Hurts

The amount of ignorance that can be displayed by the average statist is mind boggling. Consider the recent article in Salon trying to refute the claim that disarmed populaces are worse off under a tyrannical regime than armed populaces. The author, Alex Seitz-Wald, claims that gun owners who say the Holocaust was made easier due to the disarmed nature of Jewish individuals in German controlled areas is pure ignorance. Ironically the article itself is a demonstration of pure ignorance. First Alex tries to refute the claim that the Nazis implemented gun control:

The 1938 law signed by Hitler that LaPierre mentions in his book basically does the opposite of what he says it did. “The 1938 revisions completely deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns, as well as ammunition,” Harcourt wrote. Meanwhile, many more categories of people, including Nazi party members, were exempted from gun ownership regulations altogether, while the legal age of purchase was lowered from 20 to 18, and permit lengths were extended from one year to three years.

Gun control advocates continue to claim that Hitler actually liberalized (using the classical definition of the word) gun laws in Germany and therefore claims by gun rights activists that state otherwise are baseless. It’s only in the second paragraph that the author notes the reality of the situation:

The law did prohibit Jews and other persecuted classes from owning guns, but this should not be an indictment of gun control in general.

Therein lies the problem. It seems that Alex either misunderstand or is purposely misrepresenting the argument made by those of us in the gun rights movement. When we discuss Nazi gun control policy we aren’t saying “Hitler disarmed all the Germans and that caused the Holocaust!” we’re saying “Hitler disarmed the Jews and other persecuted peoples which made the job of killing them easier.” This isn’t a minor detail, this is the crux of the argument. The argument we’re trying to make is that disarmed populations are easier to murder because they have less capability to resist state aggression. When it comes to gun control the most dangerous legislation targets specific demographics that the state is planning to persecute in some manner. That is why gun control in the United States initially targeted newly freed slaves. The state had no plans to grant newly freed slaves the ability to resist aggression. Meanwhile the initiators of aggression against the newly free slaves, that is to say the state and various groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, were allowed to keep their arms, which gave them an advantage.

The people who have the most to lose from gun control are those who are persecuted. In the United States that would be minorities, homosexuals, transgendered persons, etc. They are the people facing the most aggression and therefore they are the people most in need of arms for defense. Alex then tries to claim that people who oppose gun control must also oppose every other government program:

Does the fact that Nazis forced Jews into horrendous ghettos indict urban planning? Should we eliminate all police officers because the Nazis used police officers to oppress and kill the Jews? What about public works — Hitler loved public works projects? Of course not. These are merely implements that can be used for good or ill, much as gun advocates like to argue about guns themselves. If guns don’t kill people, then neither does gun control cause genocide (genocidal regimes cause genocide).

As an anarchist I do believe we should prevent the state from partaking in urban planning, eliminate all state police forces, cease so-called public works projects, and eliminiate the state in its entirety. That’s another topic for another post though, I will remain focused on gun control here. What is noteworthy in that excerpt is the final sentence where Alex tries to twist the statement that guns don’t kill people by claiming anybody saying as such must also accept that gun control doesn’t cause genocides. Once again Alex is either ignorant of arguments against gun control or purposely misrepresenting them.

We in the gun rights community don’t claim that gun control causes genocide, we claim that gun control laws make the act of genocide easier. The state, in part through it’s active disarming of the general population, reduces the cost of performing violence. Not only do such state actions reduce the cost of performing violence for non-state criminals but those same actions also reduce the cost of performing violence for the state. Killing people is easier when they have little ability to resist and gun control reduces the ability of individuals to resist. Rounding up six million Jews would have been more difficult if those Jews had arms in which to fight back. Alex tries, and fails, to argue against this point though:

Besides, Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown University who studies the Third Reich, notes that the Jews probably wouldn’t have had much success fighting back. “Just imagine the Jews of Germany exercising the right to bear arms and fighting the SA, SS and the Wehrmacht. The [Russian] Red Army lost 7 million men fighting the Wehrmacht, despite its tanks and planes and artillery. The Jews with pistols and shotguns would have done better?” he told Salon.

Proponents of the theory sometimes point to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as evidence that, as Fox News’ Judge Andrew Napolitano put it, “those able to hold onto their arms and their basic right to self-defense were much more successful in resisting the Nazi genocide.” But as the Tablet’s Michael Moynihan points out, Napolitano’s history (curiously based on a citation of work by French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson) is a bit off. In reality, only about 20 Germans were killed, while some 13,000 Jews were massacred. The remaining 50,000 who survived were promptly sent off to concentration camps.

Apparently Alex doesn’t understand the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Uprising wasn’t an example of a well armed population fighting an army, it was an example of a poorly armed and poorly supplied population, already suffering the affects of inhuman conditions and starvation, resisting a heavily armed military force for almost a month. Alex should invest some time in reading The Bravest Battle, which tells the story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. We must first analyze the numbers of Jews killed. This article appears to imply that every Jew in the Warsaw Ghetto was actively fighting the Nazis, but that wasn’t the case. There was a major divide between the denizens of the Ghetto over what to do. Many of the people damned to that Hell believed the best chance of survival was to comply, hoping the Nazis would go easy on them. Only a couple hundred men actively fought against the invading Nazi army. Part of the reason the number was so law was the mentioned divide, the other reason was the overall lack of arms. The Jews living in the Warsaw Ghetto were mostly unarmed save for a collection of pistols, a few rifles, a single submachinegun, some grenades, and very little ammunition. Outside support was almost nonexistent. With almost nothing a couple hundred Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto faced a well-armed force that had submachineguns, rifles, ammunition, and armored vehicles. David’s fight against Goliath had nothing on the Warsaw Ghetto Jews fight against the Nazis.

Likewise the number of Nazis killed that was cited by Alex is erroneous. I’m going to link to Wikipedia here but the important thing to search are the cited sources, which include the book The Jews of Warsaw. The casualty list cited by the Germans was 16 killed and 85 injured. This number doesn’t include Jewish collaborators and is of questionable accuracy. Seeing the Jews as subhuman lead the Nazis to downplay any deaths caused by Jewish individuals and some estimate the total number of Nazis killed in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising are close to 300. When you consider the conditions under which the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto fought the fact that they killed any Nazis is rather awe inspiring, the fact that they killed enough to halt their takeover of the Ghetto for a month is nothing short of amazing. It really is a testament to what a handful of fighting individuals can accomplish. The article continues:

Robert Spitzer, a political scientist who studies gun politics and chairs the political science department at SUNY Cortland, told Mother Jones’ Gavin Aronsen that the prohibition on Jewish gun ownership was merely a symptom, not the problem itself. “[It] wasn’t the defining moment that marked the beginning of the end for Jewish people in Germany. It was because they were persecuted, were deprived of all of their rights, and they were a minority group,” he explained.

According to Mr. Spitzer the disarming of the Jews was merely a symptom. I think the above example of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is a testament to how different things could have been if the Jews were well-armed. When a couple hundred malnourished untrained poorly armed individuals can keep a military fighting force at bay for a month imagine how different things would have been had the general Jewish population been well armed. Six millions Jews were killed by the Nazis. Imagine how much harder that genocide would have been if if even 500,000 of them were armed. Once again we return to the fact that a disarmed populace is easier to murder and the disarmament of the Jews was almost certainly a contributor that allowed the Nazi’s persecution. Had the Jews been well armed they may not have been completely deprived of all their rights. Alex continues:

Meanwhile, much of the Hitler myth is based on an infamous quote falsely attributed to the Fuhrer, which extols the virtue of gun control:

This year will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!

The quote has been widely reproduced in blog posts and opinion columns about gun control, but it’s “probably a fraud and was likely never uttered,” according to Harcourt. “This quotation, often seen without any date or citation at all, suffers from several credibility problems, the most significant of which is that the date often given [1935] has no correlation with any legislative effort by the Nazis for gun registration, nor would there have been any need for the Nazis to pass such a law, since gun registration laws passed by the Weimar government were already in effect,” researchers at the useful website GunCite note.

I’ve never used that quote, nor have I seen it cited (which seems odd to me considering how many gun blogs I read and gun rights activists I talk to). Although I would rather not jump to conclusions I’m curious why Alex didn’t give an example of that quote being used on gun blogs or opinion columns. It would seem that the people who post that quote aren’t the only ones who have trouble citing their sources. Either way Alex finally moves away from Hitler:

“As for Stalin,” Bartov continued, “the very idea of either gun control or the freedom to bear arms would have been absurd to him. His regime used violence on a vast scale, provided arms to thugs of all descriptions, and stripped not guns but any human image from those it declared to be its enemies. And then, when it needed them, as in WWII, it took millions of men out of the Gulags, trained and armed them and sent them to fight Hitler, only to send back the few survivors into the camps if they uttered any criticism of the regime.”

Wait, both gun control and gun rights would have been absurd to Stalin? You would think he would have been in favor of one or the other unless he held no opinion either way. According to Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership (JPFO) the Soviet Union established gun control laws in 1929, which would have been during Stalin’s reign. Of course I do not know how to read Russian so I can’t verify the source for myself but the fact that JPFO gives a citation and Alex doesn’t provided any citation gives credibility to Stalin holding a preference for gun control. The article finishes up with the following:

Bartov added that this misreading of history is not only intellectually dishonest, but also dangerous. “I happen to have been a combat soldier and officer in the Israeli Defense Forces and I know what these assault rifles can do,” he said in an email.

He continued: “Their assertion that they need these guns to protect themselves from the government — as supposedly the Jews would have done against the Hitler regime — means not only that they are innocent of any knowledge and understanding of the past, but also that they are consciously or not imbued with the type of fascist or Bolshevik thinking that they can turn against a democratically elected government, indeed turn their guns on it, just because they don’t like its policies, its ideology, or the color, race and origin of its leaders.”

Huh. So, if I read Bartov’s statement correctly, a society cannot turn on a democratically elected government unless the people have been imbued with fascist or Bolshevik ideas? Interesting. Obedience to the state seems like a very fascist idea in of itself but I’m an anarchist so what do I know. Someday I would like Bartov to explain to me how a state gains legitimacy just because a majority of voters checked the box next to the names of the current leaders. One must remember that most people in the United States don’t vote (and good on them) and therefore cannot be made a party to the state itself. Furthermore many individuals, such as felons, are unable to vote in many states meaning they are entirely at the mercy of decisions made by others. If a majority of voters in a state that disallowed felons to vote favored deporting all felons to prison camps would it be illegitimate for the felons to resist? As you consider this remember that many felony crimes are nonviolent.

Once again we have a gun control advocate attempting to refuse criticisms of gun control by ignoring or twisting facts. This is par for the course, which is why I cannot take gun control advocates seriously.

Messing with Both Sides

It appears that a third faction has entered the fray. Now we have gun control advocates going head to head with gun rights advocates and a third faction, potentially the Legion of Dynamic Discord, messing with both sides. The Blaze, Glenn Beck’s “libertarian” rag, wasn’t very happy about finding a game titled Bullet to the Head of the National Rifle Association (NRA):

I saw something today that upset and deeply disturbed me. I was walking past my son’s bedroom, where he spends all his time on his computer playing those damn games of his. I stopped when I heard the sound of Wayne LaPierre’s voice as he gave his speech about the Newtown massacre. I was surprised my son, who is just 14, was getting involved in anything political, but I was glad he was exposing himself to the right people. I opened the door, intending to tell him how proud I was, when the image on the screen stopped me cold. It was not, as I suspected, a video of Wayne LaPierre’s speech, but was in fact a virtual recreation of the event, a video game. And in the game was a virtual Wayne LaPierre, standing at his podium, giving his speech… with a crosshair over his head. Before I could even utter a word to scold my child, he clicked his mouse. And the virtual Wayne LaPierre’s face disappeared in a spray of blood.

If you go to the helpfully provided link you will discover that it is in fact a game that allows you to shoot Wayne LaPierre in the head. It is also worth noting that the game, according to a poster on the forum, is merely a minigame in the Sandy Hook Killing Simulator. Is it tasteless? Perhaps. More importantly though is that the game is meant to piss off both gun control and gun rights advocates:

Share this everywhere, especially gun-nut and anti-game websites. Also see if you can’t send it in to the NRA somehow, like through the feedback on their website or something.

I want to first note that this was the inevitable backlash created by the NRA’s blaming, at least in part, of violent video games for the tragedy as Sandy Hook. I’ll let the game’s creator speak to that:

But right now, I really want to shoot Wayne LaPiere in the head in a video game because I’m pissed about how he and others on his side have blamed violence on video games. This’ll ultimately be a bonus level in the final game, but I want to get it done and released ahead as quickly as possible, in part because I wanna see the man wet his pants on television and bitch about being victimized in a video game.

This is what backlash looks like ladies and gentlemen. With that said I think this game could useful for Operation Mindfuck. Think about it. How many gun control advocates would be interested in playing the minigame just to get a crack at virtual LaPierre? I’m sure many would jump at the opportunity, and therein lies the mindfuck. A gun control advocate so angry at the NRA that they play a game where they can use a gun to kill LaPierre. Personally I think we could gain some mileage by promoting this minigame to advocates of gun control.

I will also note that as a Discordian pope I applaud the apparent attempt to spread discord throughout both gun control and gun rights camps. When both sides take themselves so seriously it helps to introduce a third faction to lighten the mood.

Obama isn’t Above Using Human Shields

You have to hand it to Mr. Obama, he knows how to propagandize. When he unveils is plan to turn currently lawful gun owners into criminals with the stroke of a pen he will be surrounded by small children:

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney announced this afternoon that President Obama will unveil a “concrete package” of gun control proposals including assault weapons bans, high capacity ammunition magazine bans, and closing loopholes on background checks.

Carney said that the president will be joined by Vice President Joe Biden as well as children who wrote to the president after the Newtown shootings.

“They will be joined by children around the country expressing their concerns about gun violence and school safety, along with their parents,” Carney confirmed.

Talk about a manipulative man. This also raises a question, is the use of children as political human shields allows by the Geneva Convention? I would imagine now but I’m not an expert on the subject. Either way it’s a pretty disgusting thing to do.

New Criminals Created in New York

New York has a slew of new criminals thanks to the passage of new draconian gun control legislation:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has signed the nation’s first new gun-control bill since last month’s massacre at a Connecticut school.

“I am proud to be a New Yorker because New York is doing something, because we are fighting back (against gun violence),” Cuomo told reporters shortly before signing the bill.

The law, among other things, requires background checks for would-be purchasers on all private sales, fortifies the state’s existing assault weapons ban, limits the number of bullets in magazines, and strengthen rules that keep the mentally ill from owning firearms.

By “fighting back” Cuomo means turning nonviolent gun owners into criminals that will not be the target of state aggression. There will likely be court battles over this legislation but in the mean time gun owners in that state will no longer be considered lawful. Here’s my question for gun owners living in New York, are you read to created some discord or will you continue to beg your state to return your previous freedoms? New York, considering the passage of these laws, would be the perfect place to begin implementing Plan B. There are now designs available for functional magazines that can be fabricated on 3D printers. If I were a denizen of New York I’d begin setting up shop and cranking out standard capacity magazines. Make the state’s prohibition meaningless by ensuring everybody has multiple standard capacity magazines. Civil disobedience is more likely to net your positive change then begging.Beyond that all I have left to say is good luck to those of you living in New York and if you need somebody to hold your contraband while the court battle is ongoing let me know (and no, this isn’t a cheap ploy to steal your stuff).

What About the Nature Preserves

The life of a free market environmentalist can be interesting. One of the most important tasks of a free market environmentalist is to overcome political environmentalism. People who have lived their entire lives under political environmentalism are often unable to think of alternative systems. I do not mean to insult those who advocate political environmentalism. As an advocate of a different system it is my duty to convince others that it is better, which is what I hope to do with my posts on environmentalism.

One of the questions often asked to libertarians is how would national parks exist under free market environmentalism. In fact a recent thread in /r/Libertarian lead to this very question, to which I provided an answer. In this post I plan to clean up and expand upon what I said in that thread.

A common misconception people hold regarding national parks is that they were established after the state foresaw the need to preserve exceptionally beautiful areas of nature. This isn’t the case. The value Yellowstone, the first national park, held was actually first realized by Norther Pacific Railroad. The Not So Wild, Wild West discussed this starting on page 207. On that page there is a quote from an unnamed Northern Pacific Railroad official that demonstrates what I’m claiming:

We do not want to see the Falls of the Yellowstone driving the looms of a cotton factory, or the great geysers boiling pork for some gigantic packing house, but in all the native majesty the grandeur in which they appear today, without as yet a single trace of that adornment which is desecration, that improvement which is equivalent to ruin, of that utilization which means utter destruction.

Northern Pacific Railroad saw Yellowstone, in its natural state, as a source of profit. Namely they could make a great deal of money by transporting tourists to the area. One must wonder why then did Northern Pacific Railroad lobby the state to establish Yellowstone as a national park instead of simply claiming the land for themselves. This has much to do with the Homestead Act. The Homestead Act was a bill passed by the federal government meant to encourage development of western territories. In exchange for living on granted land for five years the state would grant an individual or family a deed for no additional cost. As you can imagine the Homestead Act encouraged many individuals to claim great tracts of land and do everything possible, whether it be destructive to the land or not, to survive on the land for five years. What homesteader wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to own a piece of Yellowstone? Obviously Northern Pacific Railroad needed the area protected from homesteaders and the only way to do that was to beg the state to make some kind of exemption for the area we now call Yellowstone National Park (in addition to that Northern Pacific Railroad asked the state to grant it a monopoly on transportation to the park, no surprise). Effectively the state was lobbied to protect against a problem of its own creation (in other words business as usual).

Could Yellowstone have been preserved in a stateless society? I believe so. In fact I believe it would be better preserved in a stateless society (Yellowstone is periodically used by drug gangs since it’s an optimal place to hide from the state’s drug prohibition). First, of all the absence of a state would have eliminated the threat created by the Homestead Act. Second, there was obviously recognized value in Yellowstone as it existed in its natural state. The second point brings the important aspect of self-interest, which is the basis of all human action, into the equation. As a tourist destination I believe people would have acted to preserve Yellowstone.

This is where I’m going to diverge from most libertarian philosophies. Under most libertarian philosophies land can only become owned if one mixes their labor with the land, an act of appropriation, or obtains it from appropriator. Libertarianism makes no allowance for claiming ownership of land in its natural state. With that said there is a method of declaring ownership that I’ll call de facto ownership. Property rights are only applicable if other individuals recognize them. I could claim myself to be the owner of the Egyptian pyramids but that claim would be entirely pointless since nobody would respect it. The same applies to any claim of property, if nobody else in society respects the claim then the claim is meaningless. I’ll be taking a concept from my post describing alternatives to prisons. If enough individuals wanted to prevent the development of Yellowstone, or any other nature preserve, they could accomplish their goal by simply refusing to cooperate with anybody who attempted to develop it. Effectively an individual attempting to develop Yellowstone would find themselves banished from society insomuch as others would be unwilling to interact with him or her. Life is miserable when nobody is willing to cooperate with you. Imagine how your quality of life would diminish if nobody was willing to serve you at a restaurant, sell you food at a grocery store, or fix broken water pipes in your home. In effect the land would become useless because no value could be derived from it. Sure one could build a factory in Yellowstone but if nobody is willing to buy the goods that came from that factory then the self-interest wouldn’t exist to build it. The land would essentially become toxic to development and create a de facto deed to nobody (or the community, depending on how you look at it).

Nature preserves can exist without a state so long as enough people demand it. In essence the creation of nature preserves in the absence of a state falls unto society instead of a handful of bureaucrats sitting in some marble capitol building. It also means that there isn’t a state that can later sell or allow privileged access to the preserve (for example, the state wouldn’t exist to sell drilling rights to an oil company).

Laws Only Apply to Little People

The wonderful thing about living under a state is that there are two legal systems to choose from. If you are a serf you get one set of laws but if you are a ruler or allied with a ruler you get another set of laws. For example, if a police officer kidnaps somebody it’s called an arrest, if you kidnap somebody it’s considered a criminal act. David Gregory, the man who held a 30-round AR-15 magazines in Washington DC in front of a national audience, will not be prosecuted for violating Washington DC’s standard capacity magazine ban:

Looks like NBC’s David Gregory won’t have to turn to the life of a fugitive, after all. Despite waving around a 30-round magazine that’s illegal under District law on a Dec. 23 Meet the Press broadcast, Gregory won’t be prosecuted, D.C. attorney general Irv Nathan announced in a letter this afternoon.

Having carefully reviewed all of the facts and circumstances of this matter, as it does in every case involving firearms-related offenses or any other potential violation of D.C. law within our criminal jurisdiction, OAG has determined to exercise its prosecutorial discretion to decline to bring criminal charges against Mr. Gregory, who has no criminal record, or any other NBC employee based on the events associated with the December 23, 2012 broadcast.

So Gregory gets away scot-free, despite having committed a crime. In the letter, Nathan describes not pressing charges as a “very close” decision.

David Gregory, being a proponent of gun control, is an ally of the state and therefore is granted special privileges by the state. People often claim, mistakenly, that the United States is a nation of laws. The United States isn’t a nation of laws, it is a nation where one set of individuals, those either composing or allying with the state, are allowed to disobey the very laws they are tasked with creating and enforcing while the remainder of the population, those who are not members or allies of the state, suffer brutal prosecution.

In the gun rights community a lot of emphasis is placed on lawful gun owners. I no longer put emphasis on the lawful criteria because what is or isn’t lawful in this country is arbitrary. Lawful is defined entirely by dictates of the state. What is lawful one day, say possessing standard capacity magazines, can be unlawful the next day with little more than a stroke of a pen. Under such circumstances being considered lawful means little more than being willing to submit to the state’s already numerous and every increases number of decrees. Why do people place value on a willingness to submit to such conditions?

Checkmate

So somebody went and designed a magazine that can be created using a 3D printer. Not only did they design such a magazine but they tested it and it worked very well. This demonstrates the futility of a magazine ban. Combining a box with a spring isn’t exactly rocket science, in fact boxes and springs have been used by humanity for centuries.

I still think the best defense against any firearm-related prohibition is to take a page from alcohol prohibition and the prohibition of some drugs. During the era of alcohol prohibition people were still able to get alcohol. From bootleggers to people making bathtub gin there was no way to enforce the prohibition. Even if you wanted to spend a night on the town you had options in the form of speakeasies, which were secret locations where individuals wanting to socialized over drinks could go. The current prohibition on some drugs has proven to be similarly futile. Those wanting to buy verboten drugs can generally do so easily. We must do the same with firearms. By making firearms and related accessories so prevalent we can render any prohibition irrelevant. The prevalent availability of cannabis has not only rendered the prohibition almost entirely meaningless but it has also allowed advocates of cannabis legalization to point to example after example of people using the plant to no ill effect. Advocates of gun rights have done a similar job with firearms. By making firearms so prevalent in society we’ve prevented many individuals from believing prominent gun ownership is dangerous to society. In the case of a prohibition we would have to step up production to ensure firearms become even more widely available.