On "caring" and prohibition.

[Callisto32]

Something that often comes up in conversations about guns and gun control is the idea of "caring." This is not limited only to this topic and comes up whenever prohibition is considered.

In my personal experience, it is the prohibitionist side that usually starts this with something like "if you really cared about X, you would see why Y needs to be banned."

I can't disagree more. In fact, one of the main reasons I am anti-prohibition is because I care about humanity in general, and want peace in society. In order to achieve that peace, I think it is best to remove prohibition from from society as much as possible. Not just prohibitions on weapons, but on drugs, prostitution, various dog breeds, clotheslines, crossing arbitrary boarders as one sees fit, everything. The only things that I think should be prohibited are actions that actually harm people, or the property of others.

This may seem counter-intuitive at first. Why on earth, if you want peace, do you think people should be able to have (fill in your favorite prohibited item here)? If X causes problems, does it not follow that we should have more peace once it is removed from the equation?

It is because I have decided that the primary problem is people, not stuff. The prohibition causes more problems than it solves by creating a whole new class of criminals that have not harmed anyone or anything.

The response to this is usually that while the non-violent people may not have harmed anyone, it is still okay to punish them because they are culpable for helping to create the violence somewhere down the line. This seems senseless to me. We already have laws, good laws, against such things as robbery, murder, kidnapping, human trafficking and so forth. These are the things that ought to be punished, not being involved in business transactions or simple possession of a certain kind of property.

Punishing these people does nothing but create a burden upon people. Families lose their breadwinners, mothers and fathers have their children stripped from them over possession often regardless of the actual conditions provided to those children, and society (in this case, American society) is forced to bear the burden, both social and monetary, of the largest imprisoned population in the world.

Obviously, this prohibition does not work, or the prison populations would not be so high. People will always find a way to get the things they want. Punishing people for harming no one does not solve any of the problems while the prohibition itself creates more by driving a desired product/service underground and providing an opportunity for all the unsavory trappings of a black market.

Certainly, these objects have the potential to ruin lives. I will not dispute that. But we cannot punish people for having certain potentials. A large, strong man has the potential to cause a lot of damage to the people around him, but nobody would argue that we should prohibit physical improvement.

These are the results of my personal cost:benefit analysis of prohibition. The costs, especially in human terms, have shown themselves to far outweigh any benefits. Thus I reject the idea of prohibition.

Prohibition fails from both a deontological and utilitarian perspective. It fails from the deontological perspective because malum prohibitum is definitively distinct from malum in se, and from the utilitarian perspective because the prohibition causes more suffering than the thing sought to be prohibited.

Prohibition of weapons is part of this framework. People still find weapons with which to execute their pernicious deeds, despite prohibitions, around the world. They ought to be punished for the harm they do, not for the method in which it was done. To differentiate assault from "aggravated" assault is absurd. We should protect all victims of violence equally, regardless of the means of their attackers.

I care about the condition of the corpus populi, and also wish the greatest amount of liberty possible for myself. I realize that to be free, I must allow others to be free as well.

I care, and thus I reject prohibition and choose instead to see as wrong the aggression against others rather than the possession of items many think are unsavory.

[safeinOhio]

1. I'm kind of glad they prohibit

unsafe semi-trucks on the highway. But, that is just me.

[benEzra]

2. That's not banning trucks, it's a restriction on operating a truck in an unsafe manner in public.

Just like banning the consumption of alcohol while driving on public roads, and banning the use or sale of alcohol, are not the same thing.

[safeinOhio]

3. So, you are all for

restrictions on trucks and alcohol, but not on guns and drugs? Even reasonable restrictions, like age requirements to buy and use. Registration and licenses for auto weapons? Bans on the sale of certain poisons? No one or only a few crazies are for a total ban on guns or drugs. When you get down to it, most are in favor of reasonable restrictions. Like smoking, many are against restrictions in bars, some not. Most all are for restrictions in elevators and sales to minors. At this time prescriptions are a reasonable restriction on buying drugs. Even pot can be prescribed in some states. Restrictions follow the flow of public opinion and change all of the time. Over time we have more and more information and restrictions change as we have more information.

[AtheistCrusader]

4. Couple of these cross paths.

For instance, it's already illegal to have a firearm in your posession while intoxicated in most, if not all states. Regardless of whether you are in a bar or not.

That's a restriction on unsafe operation, much like your unsafe semi-trailer analogy.

Firearms are plenty regulated.

[benEzra]

5. I'm OK with some reasonable restrictions on all of the above.

Regarding alcohol, I think restrictions on drunk driving obviously make sense, and I think underage drunkenness is bad, though I think our absolute age prohibitions are counterproductive (the French have a lot less of a problem with teenage and twentysomething binge drinking than we do, and I personally think it is because French kids are more likely to be socialized into responsible alcohol use as they grow up (wine with meals and whatnot) and are hence less likely to approach it as forbidden fruit or think that drinking oneself under the table is a "grown up" thing to do.

Even though I've never used them, I think cannabis and some of the milder club drugs should be treated the same as alcohol, since those are demonstrably less dangerous than alcohol and have less social downside. I think possession of the harder drugs should be treated as a medical rather than a criminal issue, and I think that if the softer drugs were legal, there would be considerably less market for stuff like meth and crack.

I do *not* support blanket bans on smoking in restaurants, even though I'm a nonsmoker (air quality standards for nonsmoking sections would be equally effective and less about punishing "sinners"). And I do not support banning tobacco or tobacco products. Heck, I think water pipes should be legal for smoking tobacco; it would arguably cut down on lung cancer risk, at the very least.

I've detailed elsewhere the litany of gun restrictions I'm OK with, including age requirements for purchase, background check for purchase, the Title 2 restrictions on automatic weapons (although I think the registry should be reopened), and whatnot. I am OK with non-arbitrary ("shall issue") licensure for carrying a firearm.

The thing is, most of what is reasonable with regard to gun law is already on the books, and most of what the gun-control lobby wants (restrictions on rifle stock shape, 1860's era magazine capacity limits, limiting licensed carry to the wealthy and politically connected and their employees, etc.) is neither reasonable nor connected with reducing/preventing gun misuse.

[GreenStormCloud]

9. But such laws must reflect reality.

Back in the 1930s the restrictions on how many hours a trucker could drive were set up. They were absurd. They assumed that the day had 18 hours instead of 24. They assumed that the human body did not have an internal rhythm and could be reset like a windup clock. You could drive for 10 hours, rest for 8, and start the cycle again.

So lets say that it is summer time. You get up and start driving at 6AM. Take a one hour lunch break. (Did not count toward the 8 of rest.)Stop at 5PM. You have used up your ten. Officially, you are too tired to drive. There are still several hours of daylight left, and modern trucks are very comfortable, unlike the monsters of 1930. So you eat, shower and go to bed at 7PM. And you roll and toss until 10PM because you just aren't sleepy at 7PM. Then the alarm goes off at 1:45AM to get dressed and start driving again at 2AM. The all-wise federal government now says that you are ready to drive. And you are about to take a big rig with a haz-mat load over a two lane road in the Rocky Mtns, with only a 3hrs 45 minutes of sleep. Reality: We trucker faked our log books. We kept driving in daylight while our bodies were still awake and shut down a few hours later, then got a good night's rest.

The 1930s rule was that you could not take a haz-mat load through a tunnel. An accident could cause major problems in the tunnel. That was before interstate tunnels. You had to take the load around the tunnel. That meant getting off of the interstate and onto the two lane system. In dry, good weather, daylight, I didn't mind doing that. So I was approaching an interstate tunnel some miles ahead, at night, with in a storm. I had previously been over the detour and knew it to have lots of sharp switch-back turns and areas where mud flowed across the narrow road. I pulled over in a rest area, took the haz-mat signs off, and drove through the nice dry, well-lit, straight, one-way, tunnel. Once on the other side, after I was out of the rain, I put on a new set of signs.

Those actions that I took were illegal, but remaining legal would have been too dangerous. The laws simply did not reflect the reality of the situations. So also with many gun laws. They do not reflect reality and obedience to them places law-abiding people at needless risk.

BTW - A few years ago, the Feds finally changed the hours-of-service rules to reflect a 24 hour day, and to reflect the reality of safer interstate tunnels.

[shedevil69taz]

6. I agree in principle with your position.

But you know there was going to be a BUT right? There's always a but.

There is one thing I can think of that should be prohibited: child pornography.

Obviously you'd agree that people that in anyway force or coerce the child into such acts should be punished right? I think that anyone possessing material where such acts are depicted should also be punished as well as have major amounts of counseling.

[Callisto32]

10. Like any political principle, it's not perfect

I recognize that.

The point of the post is that often there is a false dichotomy presented. Either you care, or you don't want prohibition. This is not the case.

In the case of child pornography, the issue goes to consent. How old must a person be before they can actually consent? Implicit in my thinking is that we are dealing with rational people, of near normal intelligence and reasonable experience in the world. A 17 year old allowing him/herself to be filmed while engaging in sexual acts...probably okay. Four-year-olds? No way.

[SteveM]

7. When they "mature," most prohibitions end in morals-based culture wars...

in which the owner/user of the thing is morally condemned, and punishment of the owner is passionately sought. At this point, the prohibitionist seeks moral validation for his/her passionate moral conviction from a "thing" larger than himself -- almost always government with its coercive power. Thus the stunning corruption, waste, ineffectiveness and bitterness of prohibition policies almost always lives quite comfortably alongside the moral "cleanliness and purity" of the prohibitionist: in this theater, contrast invites comparison, the objective of the prohibitionist all along.

[rrneck]

8. Prohibitions deny the opportunity to learn.

Here's an ever popular car analogy: In the nineteenth century I seem to recall that people believed speeds in excess of sixty miles an hour would be fatal. Anyone in the twelfth century could not even imagine traveling at today's highway speeds yet we seem to be able to think at a mile a minute with little problem. Through the use of carefully designed restrictions we have learned, as a culture, to drive cars with considerable success. There are still tragic failures but on the whole, we are a very mobile species.

All of the other marvels of technological innovation from firearms to narcotics work the same way. They are not in themselves bad, but we must be trained to use them properly. We, as a culture, have to decide who gets to use the technology, and why it gets used under any number of possible circumstances.

So in the case of firearms, we have shooting sports, hunting, self defense training and all of the other social activities that go along with the proper use of that technology. That training is codified in the various licensing requirements associated with its use. If you use it wrong, you get a different kind of training called jail. Some people learn easy, others learn the hard way. Some don't learn at all.

The toothpaste will never go back in the tube, but we don't need to stomp on it either.