Two Old Tales for Tax Week

 

Here in tax week and apropos of nothing really, I recalled a couple of stories about citizen’s interactions with our nation’s public servants. The first was told to me twenty five or more years ago by a man who was old then and is probably long since dead now. I don’t recall his name, and so I’ll call him Smith. One day years before he told me the story, Smith and his wife were being rudely threatened and insulted in their home by a nasty IRS agent wearing a green sports jacket. At one point the agent turned to Smith and said “do your realize I can throw you in jail?”. Being something of a hard head, Smith replied “do you realize I can blow your brains out?”. The agent then left in a hurry. Smith then picked up the phone, called the local IRS office, and warned them that there was a man in a green sports jacket going around town impersonating an IRS agent and threatening people. According to Smith that was the end of affair, and he never heard any more from the IRS.

The second was told me over thirty years ago by a colleague named Bob. Bob lived out in the country in the plains of west Texas. He enjoyed guns and shooting and decided it would be fun to become gun dealer. He filed his application with the ATF, and eventually an agent named Chauncey showed up to interview him. He took Chauncey out to the small out building behind his house which he intended to use as his store. Bob had applied for an ordinary license to deal in sporting and personal arms, but somehow in the bureaucracy his application had been coded as one for a license to deal in weapons of war. When Chauncey asked Bob what he would be doing with a license to sell such weapons, Bob, instead of explaining the error, decided to have a little fun. He stepped outside and pointed to the flat plains around him and said “well I guess I’m not going to be selling them to the communists in the hills”. That was a mistake. Chauncey was not amused, but eventually the error was corrected, and Bod got his license.

I believe Bob’s story. It sounded just like him. I’m more skeptical of Mr. Smith’s tale, but both are interesting yarns.

Guns and Laws

 

The fundamental principle about law and guns is this: people have a right of self defense to defend lives and property against attacks. Since they do, they have a derived right to possess the means to do so. The dodge that they have the right in principle but have delegated it completely to the police will not do. It is only rarely that policemen will be on hand when crimes happen. Their function is to try to catch criminals after they commit crimes. The term “first responder” is inaccurate. In most dangerous situations, a person’s first responder is himself. The best to be reasonably expected from the police is that they sometimes would be fairly rapid second responders. There is also the question of whether the police always will be on the right side. The right to self defense includes the right to self defense against tyrannical government. The coming of a tyrannical government is not a serious threat at present in this country, but an armed citizenry are an important part of  keeping  things that way.   (If someone claims people do not have those rights, then his necessary conclusion must be that operationally any attackers – criminals, Nazi secret policemen, Putin’s Russian soldiers - may do what they want with people, and their only ethical option is submission. Some on the gun banning left left may have no problem with that conclusion.)

However, the principle that people have a right of self defense does not answer all the questions about citizens and their weapons, despite what some advocates of gun rights may claim. Since the right to possess arms for self defense is derivative from the right of self defense, it applies only to arms appropriate for self defense in each context, not to any weapon anyone might want to have at any time. If a person announced he planned to put an operational 81mm mortar or .50 caliber machine gun in his back yard to protect himself, his neighbors and the authorities would be right to stop him (and to worry about his sanity), since there would be no reasonable need for such a weapon for self defense.

The difficulty is with drawing a line somewhere in the large range between the pistols, shotguns, revolvers, and ordinary rifles which are appropriate for self defense and the mortars and the machine guns which are not. It is a hard problem, and reasonable people will reach different conclusions about it. For example, are thirty round or more detachable magazines  for AR-type rifles appropriate tools for self defense, or are they items which cannot be justified as tools for self defense? The same question comes up for the AR-type rifle itself. The present answer in most of this country is that the both AR-type rifles and the magazines are legal. In gray areas it usually is better to lean in the direction of the citizen rather than the direction of the politicians and officials.  I  think the rifles and thirty round magazines probably are appropriate for self defense, but I am not sure about very large drum magazines. There are reason to consider becoming more restrictive about some things.

These questions have gotten more attention since the murders in Uvalde this week. Normal people have had normal reactions to the slaughter, while repulsive politicians have had predictably repulsive ones. It would have been less repugnant and probably more expedient for Democrat politicians to have waited for the bodies of the victims to cool before dancing gleefully over an imagined opportunity to use the crime to enact some of their agenda on guns. Beto O’Rourke’s stunt the next day and Democrats’ refusal to condemn it were more of the same, perhaps a little more grotesque.

The Democrats’ behavior illustrates a reason many people who believe in self defense are often unwilling to support any new restrictions, reasonable or not. They believe their opponents’ real objective is to disarm them completely and leave them helpless and so think it better not to give an inch. (The same sort of worry keeps many people who are pro-choice on abortion from supporting any new restrictions there, reasonable or not. They believe their opponents’ real aim is to outlaw abortion completely and so think it better not to give an inch.)

Beto O'Rourke, Gun Enthusiast

It is unfair to Bobby Frank O’Rourke and his associates  Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, and Pete Buttigieg to charge them with being “anti-gun”. These people love guns. They need guns.  They depend on guns. The things they want to do to the country are accomplishable (if at all) only at gunpoint. They are not in the business of inspiring or persuading other Americans  to do what they want. They don’t expect people to go along with them voluntarily. They plan to use the government to  force us to do so, and government power comes - in the words of a famous advocate of strong,vigorous central government -  from the barrel of a gun.

What they object  to is guns, and thus the means for self-defense, in  the hands of private citizens. Helpless and defenseless people are likely to do as they are told. People with options and capacities for exercising them may decide not to obey orders.  Americans are stubborn enough about not  following the dictates and wishes  of their assorted  would be masters in the political and bureaucratic classes.  Knowing that they have the ability - as a last resort if things ever get bad enough to justify it -  to resist very effectively and having the would be masters know it as well only tends to make them more so.

Millions of Americans who own firearms are peaceful people who are no threat to their neighbors or public safety. The leftist politicians who want to disarm them know this. Yet they persist in trying to disarm them. There probably are various reasons for this. However the safe assumption for people to make is that anyone who wants to make you helpless may have something unpleasant in mind for you.  It is also the natural one.

Guns This Week

Many have asked what the mass murders in Las Vegas should mean for  issues related to citizens’ rights to be armed.  The answer is nothing at all, and claims to the contrary reveal a depressing lack of understanding of the role of principles in the conduct of life.  People either have a right to self defense, or they have no such right. If they have a right to defend themselves, they have a right to possess   and use the means for doing so.  If they have no such right, they may be forcibly disarmed and left  to submit to whatever aggressors – official or otherwise – choose to inflict upon them. That is the fundamental question  to answer first, and it is one to be decided in terms of general ethical principles.  Only then can particular schemes, policies, and proposed rules be considered rationally.  Claims  by leftist politicians and their flacks in  the traditional media that  one terrible criminal act  “changes everything” are not only ghoulishly opportunistic, but deeply anti-intellectual.  Single events do not change general principles, and pretending otherwise is substituting emotion for serious  thought and/ or hoping to con the public into doing so.  One’s rights are independent of and not contingent upon the actions of anybody else, criminal or otherwise.

That if the right to be armed for self defense is recognized and arms are available to people, criminals and madmen sometimes will obtain arms and commit crimes should have been obvious to all before last weekend.  It is just one special case of the fact that free societies with respect for individual rights are in some ways easier marks for criminals and terrorists than tyrannical police states are.  Free people face  such risks, knowing they are saved from the greater danger and harm that a truly effective security state would bring. 

 In looking at policy and politics on guns, it is important to remember something a writer on the subject observed.  Advocates of gun control do not wish to eliminate the ownership of firearms. They wish to centralize the ownership in members of a ruling class and its agents. It is also important to consider the following question. If the advocates of gun control do not wish the peaceful citizens of this country harm, why do they yearn so intensely  to make them helpless?