Monthly Archives: April 2007

The W-88? That’s perfect for home defense.

Often when I discuss victim disarmament gun control with its supporters, I am confronted with the question. “Do you think we should allow people to own machine guns, F-16’s or even nuclear weapons?”

I always answer “Yes, of course”. To me, the question is not how deadly the weapon, but how its owner wishes to use it. If someone wants to waste their time and money building a superweapon that they will then use peaceably, or just admire in a glass case, it is no skin off my nose. After all, so long as they don’t attack other people with them or damage other people’s property, they have a perfect right to enjoy themselves however they wish.

Are there people who wish to own F-16’s and nuclear weapons so that they can kill people? Definitely – members of the Armed Services Committees in Congress, for example. But, without tax-payer funds how many of them could really afford to commission such weapons? Even with economies of scale, an F-16 costs something like $10,000,000 to build and about $5,000 per hour in fuel and maintenance to fly. Additionally, firing the weapons systems can cost up to $1,000,000 per sortie. If forced to work productively to earn their keep, how many of people would have the free time to design, build and practice with such weapons? How many of them would settle for the reduced mayhem of a cruise missile when they can kill a larger number of people with a cheaper and more reliable low-tech truck-bomb made out of fertilizer?

Let us be realistic: without government demand for them, I don’t think nuclear weapons or even F-16’s would exist. They are expensive to build, and of limited use. They require a significant amount of industrial infrastructure, including hundreds of factories,hundreds of engineers, and thousands of workers to build, maintain and support them. In the absence of significant consumer demand for these superweapons, all those resources would be invested in other more profitable ventures, like the flying cars we were supposed to get by the year 2000.

I honestly think the legality of the ownership of squad weapons or fighter jets or ICBMs is irrelevant. A dedicated, would-be mass murderer will have an easier time killing a bunch of people with rifles, hand-guns or homemade bombs than with an F-16. It is far better that we allow these weapons to fail on the market place than to outlaw their ownership.

I am an anarcho-capitalist living just west of Boston Massachussetts. I am married, have two children, and am trying to start my own computer consulting company.

Montana Says No To Real ID

Earlier this week, Montana became the latest state to say no to Real ID:

HELENA – Gov. Brian Schweitzer said “no, nope, no way, hell no” Tuesday to national driver’s licenses, signing into law a bill supporters say is one of the strongest rejections to the federal plan.

The move means the state won’t comply with the Real ID Act, a federal law that sets a national standard for driver’s licenses and requires states to link their record-keeping systems to national databases.

Though several states have either passed or are considering resolutions or bills against the act, Montana is the first state to outright deny its implementation, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

“This is the first one saying, ‘We’re not doing it,’ ” said Scott Crichton of the Montana ACLU.

Good for them. Similar rumblings of revolt have been heard from Maine, Arizona, Idaho, and Missouri.

Where does your state stand ?

Venezuela Launches Surveillance Blimps

The British have cameras, the Venezuelans have $465K dirigibles to do their surveillance:

Venezuela launched a Zeppelin on Thursday to patrol Caracas, seeking to fight crime in one of Latin America’s most dangerous cities but also raising fears that President Hugo Chavez could be turning into Big Brother.

Around the hot-dog stalls of the run-down suburb where the airship took its first flight, most people felt the unmanned eye-in-the-sky could help counter routine hold-ups, shootings and carjackings.

In the refined cafes of east Caracas, there was more cynicism, condemning the blimps as a waste of money that would not work in bad weather or at night, when Caracas is at its most risky, resembling a shuttered-up ghost town.

You know, it doesn’t take socialists to conduct surveillance on citizens, governments around the world have done so. But it’s only an oil-rich socialist who’s going to drop $465K a pop on surveillance blimps.

Hat Tip: Reason

Why Gun Control Isn’t The Answer

In today’s Los Angeles Times, James Q. Wilson takes on the Europeans who have responded to the Virginia Tech Tragedy by attacking America’s gun control laws:

There is no doubt that the existence of some 260 million guns (of which perhaps 60 million are handguns) increases the death rate in this country. Although Pellet Guns are lower risk and are mainly used for things like shooting practice, they can still be dangerous like other guns as well. We do not have drive-by poisonings or drive-by knifings, but we do have drive-by shootings. Easy access to guns makes deadly violence more common in drug deals, gang fights and street corner brawls.

However, there is no way to extinguish this supply of guns. It would be constitutionally suspect and politically impossible to confiscate hundreds of millions of weapons. You can declare a place gun-free, as Virginia Tech had done, and guns will still be brought there.

If we want to guess by how much the U.S. murder rate would fall if civilians had no guns, we should begin by realizing — as criminologists Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins have shown — that the non-gun homicide rate in this country is three times higher than the non-gun homicide rate in England. For historical and cultural reasons, Americans are a more violent people than the English, even when they can’t use a gun. This fact sets a floor below which the murder rate won’t be reduced even if, by some constitutional or political miracle, we became gun-free.

Banning guns (and confiscating the millions that are out there if that was even possible) may reduce the murder rate by some amount, but it won’t, by itself, make up for the differences between American and European culture. And, while, were on that subject, Wilson also sites this interesting fact:

In 2000, the rate at which people were robbed or assaulted was higher in England, Scotland, Finland, Poland, Denmark and Sweden than it was in the United States. The assault rate in England was twice that in the United States. In the decade since England banned all private possession of handguns, the BBC reported that the number of gun crimes has gone up sharply.

So, the existence of strong gun control laws, or even the banning of private ownership of weapons, won’t necessarily do anything to contribute to a general drop in the crime rate. If England’s experience is any indication, it may actually increase the crime rate.

As Wilson points out, there is one lesson to draw from the Virgina Tech tragedy and those that have preceded it. We aren’t doing a very good job of identifying and coping with people such as Cho Seung-Hui, Dylan Klebold, and Eric Harris, who have such severe personality disorders that they are capable of committing crimes that shock the conscience of the world.

Until we figure out how to do that, the next massacre by a madman may be just around the corner.

Tribute to the Fallen

The video I have chosen for this post is but one of many tributes for the fallen students and faculty at Virginia Tech. The tragic events brought about by a very disturbed individual have raised many critical issues which need careful consideration. Having said that, it is also important to remember the victims of this horrific event. The killer who has received the media attention he so hoped for has had his moment to be immortalized by the media; those whose lives were unjustly taken deserve to have their moment to be remembered.

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