Comments Elsewhere

Alex: “Involuntary dependence, of course, may be a different matter – but some people (indeed, perhaps most) may indeed want to be dependent on the police for their safety, simply because they don’t want to have to do it themselves, and have more trust in those forces than you do.”

That’s fine. Under a laissez-faire system anybody who doesn’t want to carry a gun is free to deputize other people to do the gun-toting for him.

But it perhaps doesn’t need to be pointed out that gun control laws — by their nature — require involuntary dependence on the armed forces for anyone who wanted to carry a gun but isn’t allowed to under the terms of the gun control. So the objection stands, on this point at least.

Alex: “However, I suspect you’re actually making the claim that people ought not to depend on the police forces for protection, regardless of whether they want to or not: because we can’t trust them not to abuse their power to pick on certain minorities (at least that seems to be roughly what you say in your post on Condoleeza).”

Well, there are two separate claims. (1) Depending (voluntarily or involuntarily) on professional armed police forces may be foolish, in that it exposes you to abuse or neglect by the pigs, because you have little opportunity for redress or self-defense. (2) Enforced dependence on professional armed police forces is dangerous, in that it corrodes freedom and contributes to domineering and abusive pigs, because you have no way to opt out of the system and no other choices about how to defend yourself. I think both are probably true but that (2) is much more certain than (1); also that if you knock out (2) then the dangers involved under (1) will be correspondingly reduced (because if the pigs aren’t protecting you, or are themselves part of the problem, then you can always take steps to get your self-defense from other folks or by other means.

Alex: “As I said before, at there are at least some checks on how police/military use firearms.”

I think even a casual review of how the military and police act would show that these aren’t even remotely effective. Why would they be? The checks are set and enforced by the police and military’s commanders, not by the people directly affected by their actions, so they curtail only the abuse or neglect that tends to embarass or undercut the existing structure.

Alex: “Generally, if you think that the police/military will pick on minorities, why won’t the civilian population if they have access to guns?”

Well, I take it that what you’re asking is why won’t the non-minorities in the civilian population pick on the minorities if they have access to guns. One answer is that the minorities will have access to guns too under a system with no gun control laws. (As a matter of historical record, the idea that gun control laws could protect minorities by disarming racial terrorists is an exact inversion of what actually happened, in the United States at least.) Another answer is that one of the issues with the police (the failure to defend people who need help) will be irrelevant when those people can defend themselves, and the other (active aggression and abuse of innocent people) is likely to be undermined to the degree that State-deputized professional police stop being the sole enforcers. The pigs can much more easily get away with gross abuse of other people’s rights in part because their special position, as the deputized enforcers of the State, tends to be used as an excuse, or a justification for, all kinds of violence that would never be tolerated by the courts or by your neighbors if it were being committed by private citizens without a badge. If you take away the privileged position that allows cops to frequently get away with murder, in the most literal sense, then I think there’s a corresponding decrease in worries about abuse of arms.

Alex: “I suspect that there is some reason to have a military force with guns for self-defence against outside agression (not sure on humanitarian intervention) – but I’m not convinced that you couldn’t introduce more checks on the goverment so as to prevent the use of the army against the civilian population. That would ideally lead to no gun ownership within a state.”

I’m not sure what you’re suggesting here. A system in which domestic police don’t carry guns, and the only people who do are regular military who can’t carry except when deployed in a foreign theater?

If so, then as long as that lasts you wouldn’t have (legal) gun use within the state, but it would remain the case that all the (legal) guns remain in the hands and under the control of the political classes, which is my primary objection. As a practical matter, it’s also hard to imagine how there wouldn’t ultimately have to be provisions for the use of guns within the borders of the state at some point. To take the extreme case, suppose I start making Kalashnikovs openly in the capital. The government tells me to stop; I keep making them. They send cops without firearms to stop me; I mow them down with my Kalashnikovs. Now what? Either they deploy military forces within the country to stop me, or else they don’t have a viable gun control law.