November 13th

The barbarians have drenched another date in blood. Democratic theory aside, innocent people were again murdered for no discernible reason beyond provoking general warfare—and again I reject the genocidal military solution that is so emotionally tempting. That said, it’s time to face some hard truths.

There are philosophical and cultural ideologies that are never going to exist in peace with one another. I live, breathe, and procreate multiculturalism, but I have to admit that its limitations fall far short of my own broad philosophical horizons. For all the many failings and shortcomings of my people, we still occupy the moral high ground of human history under principles of individual rights, equality before the law, political self-determination, and scientific reason. Despite our modernly fashionable self-doubt, it is our culture that brought light and prosperity to the world.

The enemy of my culture is anti-humanism, whether it stems from dogmatic religion, totalitarian rulership, or mere bad public policy. I’ll be honest; these enemies are presently growing in strength at home and abroad. There will inevitably be conflict, some violent. I want my culture to continue to survive and prosper, and that means some of its enemies will have to be destroyed—but this must be an option exercised only in self-defense, only to the extent absolutely necessary, and only in keeping with our higher principles.

If we cannot survive and prosper under these moral principles … then we shouldn’t survive or prosper …

Ending Gun Violence in the United States

Cynical reasons aside, I still don’t understand why “gun violence” is worse than any other kind of violence. Nevertheless, let’s talk about reducing or even ending “gun violence” in the United States, but let’s also be honest about the means that would be used and the ends that would be achieved.

“Gun violence” has already been declining for about 20 years now, while the supply of firearms has steadily increased, but with each new highly publicized shooting, there is always an outcry for more “reasonable” or “common sense” gun controls. In fact, though, we are beyond this point. All reasonable controls have been in place for many years. Americans have already accepted violations of their Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Amendment rights in this pursuit.

Frankly, the only real options that remain are prohibition and confiscation. Obviously, if all firearms were removed from the country, there could be no more “gun violence” in the U.S., right? In the long run, this would mean disarming the police and military and closing the borders, but we can ignore those fantasies for this discussion.

So let’s get started!

First, we would have to repeal the Second Amendment. Since the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense and other lawful purposes, we can no longer pretend that “the people” therein were the regular military or even the militia. However, this is a big hurdle to leap.

The Democratic Party has reliably supported stringent gun controls for decades now. Democrats will probably also gain solid control of the federal government in the near future, so passing a proposed Constitutional amendment may not be that hard. Getting it ratified by 38 states would be a much more difficult proposition. Though several of the most populous states are stalwart gun-control bastions, over 40 states have enacted legislation and policies that strongly support the right to arms.

Therefore, repealing or modifying the Second Amendment would likely fail.

Second, even if repeal were successful, additional legislation would be required to actually start prohibiting guns and removing them from society. While less difficult than a Constitutional amendment, federal legislation would face many of the same problems. Pro-gun states would no doubt refuse to go along with prohibition schemes.

This secondary crisis could logically lead to the dissolution of the United States. Assuming the right political processes were followed, such an event needn’t result in civil war or even lesser violence, but a great deal of social and economic disruption would be unavoidable. Populations would be displaced, and North America would likely find itself with several new republics.

Third, assuming that the United States remained intact following federal prohibition, approximately 400 million firearms would still have to be confiscated. (There are about 300 million in circulation right now, but the number would drastically increase during the repeal and prohibition processes.) General confiscation could be eschewed, allowing for a slow attrition process to remove firearms from American society. However, firearms are durable goods, so “gun violence” would persist for centuries without active confiscation efforts.

Of course, confiscation would raise additional Constitutional problems. The Fourth Amendment would have to be repealed or ignored in order to effectively search for and seize firearms from recalcitrant owners. The Fifth Amendment would demand that those who did comply should be justly compensated for their surrendered property—and if everyone complied, this would cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. If both were ignored …

Fourth, compliance with any confiscation regime would certainly be incomplete. Historical examples have proven this even in countries without such strong right-to-arms traditions. Nevertheless, even if only a third of American gun owners were actively non-compliant, that would represent over 100 million firearms remaining at large … in the hands of people highly motivated to resist and confound enforcement efforts.

The results would be bloody. With the Second Amendment gone, the Fourth Amendment suspended, and the Fifth Amendment ignored, the previously law-abiding resisters would face death or imprisonment for their non-compliance. With this final violation of their Eighth Amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment, why wouldn’t they turn to violence? Why shouldn’t they?

The resistance and bloodshed might last generations—decades more of intensified “gun violence,” moved from its former home in the criminal underground into the front yards of polite society. Police would be killed on confiscation missions. Prohibitionist politicians and other political enemies of the resistance would be assassinated. The resistance fighters—now branded domestic terrorists—would themselves be killed or captured. They might be defeated in the long run … or they might not be. Constant, low-grade domestic warfare could be maintained indefinitely. Again, firearms are durable goods capable of lasting for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years, and the technology behind them is actually quite simple. How many more technological restrictions could our civilization accept or endure in the crusade to rid it of “gun violence”?

Finally, after many, many years and considerable costs in blood and treasure, we might succeed in removing all firearms from the United States. There would be no more “gun violence.” We would have addressed one of the hows of violence … but still not have touched any of the whys. Therefore, people would still become the victims of murder, rape, robbery, and other crimes of violence—just as the unarmed or disarmed always have.

On the Tactics of Mass Murder

In a world populated by more than seven billion persons, the tiny minorities formed by the willfully evil and dangerously insane will number in the millions. Therefore, as I’ve noted before, it is not surprising in a concurrent era of global information networks that we will hear of their horrific deeds all too frequently. How we respond to such events is a measure of our own rationality—but that’s not directly what I want to discuss now.

To tell the truth, I’ve avoided this discussion for a while. However, not naming a potential danger does nothing to mitigate it. Furthermore, the evil and insane can benefit from the information revolution just as easily as the rest of us, so they will find no shortage of terminal inspiration or instruction when the time comes. In the end, our best policy prescription may simply be to not make risks of mass murder worse than they already are.

Misery loves company. This aphorism may explain as much as anything else why certain individuals choose to end their own lives while inflicting as much collateral damage as possible. Garnering the wide recognition they feel they deserve but have never received may be another motivation—which is why I refuse to name perpetrators of these atrocious crimes. In the end, though, I can’t answer the why. A very few broken human creatures stare into the abyss of grief or envy or rage and see mass murder as the best course of action toward even the pettiest of goals. Others in the vast majority of semi-rational human beings who may look into that same abyss will reject violence as unjustified no matter how noble the ends might seem—even when they lack the self-awareness to articulate doing so.

The how is what I want to discuss here. The means and methods of mass killers are so often what drives the public-policy debate … at least after the fact. That’s where the prevention efforts are usually focused. Those efforts are misguided at best.

The entertainment media have made a fetish of the personal weapon, be it a gun or a knife or some other type of sidearm. It has been transformed into a talisman of power in the popular imagination, though its actual lethal capabilities are much more modest. In fact, personal weapons are not the most effective choice for mass slaughter, but deranged individuals embrace the mythology and select them anyway, no doubt indulging in cinematic fantasies of the carnage they will cause. There are deadlier and more destructive methods to exact social vengeance, but if these means are presently used with greater frequency, then we certainly don’t hear about that fact from the politically motivated news media.

The typical American arguments for and against the right to bear arms don’t really matter in this case. Even if guns and knives were completely prohibited, the ban would always be incomplete. If all responsible adults were legally authorized to carry defensive weapons at all times and in all locations, the armed citizen would still be the exception rather than the rule. Actually, we could indulge in the fantastical extremes of these positions … and we would still fail.

All weapons more dangerous than a plastic sippy cup could magically vanish from existence, but mass killers would still arise and still carry their crimes to completion. Conversely, all responsible adults could be armed and ready to defend against any and all direct attacks, but this wouldn’t stop mass murder either. Would-be killers would simply change their tactics, and the results would probably be worse.

Personal weapons are essentially precision tools, best suited for defensive purposes against no more than a few discreet targets. A single bullet isn’t terribly lethal. A blade can be much deadlier but has a more limited threat radius. By choosing a personal weapon for his crimes, a would-be mass murderer has already limited the amount of damage he can do.

Impersonal weapons are by far the more dangerous selection. Explosives, fire, poison, these are just a few things that can be used to kill both indiscriminately and on a large scale. Deployed with insidious planning, the results of such attacks can be truly devastating—and they give the killer not bent on suicide or imprisonment much greater opportunities to escape and repeat his crimes again and again.

The will to commit atrocious acts is and has always been the greatest threat. We’ve learned that lesson over and over again throughout history, but as rational, compassionate people, we want to forget that horrific evil can and does exist in the darkest corners of the human heart. When it escapes into the world through willful intent or insane delusion, the innocent will always be its victims. With billions of human souls sharing life today, these incidents will occur with chilling regularity and frequency—and yet they are still vanishingly rare in absolute terms.

We might mitigate the risks posed by certain strains of this social violence, perhaps at great cost to liberty and prosperity, but in so doing we might only clear the way for more virulent strains to manifest themselves. The how that we can see and discuss won’t give us the solution to this problem. That answer—if there is an answer—still lies within the why. If we can find a solution, I do know that it won’t be political or tactical. It will have to be emotional or spiritual … or, dare I say it, moral.

Meanwhile, to make public policy in anguish is … and always will be … folly.

Justice Done in Florida

Or was it?

As it turned out, young George Zimmerman wasn’t standing his ground when he fired that fatal shot in Sanford, Florida, but being beaten into it by younger Trayvon Martin. At least, given the evidence and testimony presented at trial, the state failed to prove otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt, leaving the jury to presumably accept that self-defense had justified the defendant’s actions.

Like many, I at first thought that the defendant must be guilty of something. He had surely confronted the victim and provoked the fight that led to the fatal shooting. (In some respects, I had perhaps even wanted him to be guilty, because I am a person who avoids unnecessary confrontation and could not reasonably see myself in the defendant’s place.) Unlike most, though, I also wanted the local police and prosecutors to do their jobs without political interference, so I was dismayed when the case was pushed as a racial cause célèbre.

I was also willing to change my opinion as the actual facts emerged from the cloak of propaganda. Two currents swayed me both before and during the trial.

First, the state brought an unsustainable charge against the defendant. In Florida, second-degree murder requires that the perpetrator act with hate or a depraved mind, motives that were clearly absent even before the trial commenced. I wondered about this overreach, until the answer struck me. The state had to win on an accusation that couldn’t later be turned against its own agents. A loss would be preferable to exposing constables on patrol to potential murder charges merely for contacting suspicious individuals.

Second, at trial, the most compelling evidence and testimony supported the defendant’s version of events. While the defendant may have initiated contact, the facts strongly suggested that the victim was the aggressor in the fight that followed. That is reasonable doubt right there, even if you feel or believe that there is still guilt lurking somewhere. Confronting a suspicious individual in your neighborhood may be foolish, but it is not a crime and does not justify battery upon your person.

In the end, most of us might never have heard of the incident if the mainstream media hadn’t initially jumped to the conclusion that an old Jewish man had shot a 12-year-old black boy without provocation. Maybe the outcome would have been different then.

Propaganda in Review: VPC’s “Concealed Carry Killers”

The Violence Policy Center recently pushed out its latest version of “Concealed Carry Killers,” a review of all presumably unlawful homicides between 2007 and 2012 that were allegedly perpetrated by individuals licensed to carry concealed firearms.¹ I needed something to cheer me up, so I decided to evaluate this study in detail here. Fortunately, doing so didn’t take very long, since the total number of incidents was very small—which tells us something already. Following along as I deconstruct the propaganda may take a few minutes, though, so pour yourself a drink, get comfortable, and enjoy the show.

Before I parse the numbers and draw comparisons and conclusions, I should comment on the relative validity of the VPC data. With three exceptions,² it is drawn entirely from news reports, so certain details are probably incorrect, though I have assumed their validity for this analysis. (For example, I could argue that the licensing status presented in many of the cases amounts to hearsay evidence, but I won’t.) As usual, suicides and unintentional killings are conflated with intentional homicides to produce a higher number of fatalities. I will redact the suicides in my analysis below but not the unintentional fatalities.³ Finally, that the perpetrators were licensed was germane to relatively few of the cases. Many if not most of the incidents occurred at private residences or businesses, where non-licensees could have been legally armed, while others involved obvious premeditation and were clearly not the result of the perpetrators spontaneously killing someone just because they had legally carried weapons at hand. However, this study is about the propensity of licensees to commit murder, so the fact they were licensed cannot be dismissed even on its irrelevancy to their crimes. What I will redact are the included homicides that were actually committed by non-licensees, police officers, and security professionals.

The VPC study details approximately 370 incidents that occurred between May 2007 and November 2012. These resulted in a total of 500 fatalities and led to 168 individuals being convicted on homicide charges.⁴ These figures suggest that licensees kill about 89 people per year unlawfully. With an estimated eight million licensees in the United States,⁵ that works out to an annual homicide rate of 1.11 per 100,000 licensees. I will put that rate in context a bit later, but let’s parse the numbers a little more accurately first.

To begin, we shouldn’t count the killings that were actually committed by non-licensees or by those who were licensed only pursuant to their employment (such as cops and security guards). Redacting these reduces our total number of fatalities to 453. That leaves us with 81 presumed homicides per year or an annual rate of 1.01 per 100,000 licensees.

Next, many of the cases were unresolved. While some of these may eventually result in convictions, the accused are presumed innocent until proven guilty—despite the blood lust of the lynch mobs. Redacting these alone reduces the total to 427 fatalities. The annual rate then becomes 76 unlawful homicides or 0.96 per 100,000 licensees.

Lastly, a full third of the 500 fatalities were actually suicides, which have nothing to do with concealed-carry licensing. Redacting just the suicides, gives us 332 bona fide homicides. Including negligent shootings, that is 59 murders per year or 0.74 per 100,000 licensees.

Of course, if we were to remove all the suicides, the presumptively lawful killings, and the homicides committed by non-licensees, the rates would become lower still. I won’t split these hairs, because none of the numbers mean much in isolation. We need to compare them to other homicide rates to see if licensees present some unusual threat to public safety, which is what the VPC report implies that we should believe.

First, let’s establish the overall homicide rate. From 2006 to 2010, there were nearly 71,000 murders committed in the United States.⁶ That’s about 14,200 per year or an annual homicide rate of 4.5 per 100,000 residents. In other words, all other things being equal, you are over six times more likely to be murdered by a non-licensee than by someone licensed to carry a concealed weapon.

Now, I’m going to frighten, anger, and possibly sadden you.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 794,300 police officers employed in 2010.⁷ In the same year, the Cato Institute reports, police officers caused 127 fatalities in association with credible excessive-force allegations.⁸ Ladies and gentlemen, that is a homicide rate of 15.99 per 100,000 cops. You are over 21 times more likely to be murdered by a police officer than by someone licensed to carry a concealed weapon … all other things being equal.

But all other things are not equal. In 2010, approximately 3,800 black men were arrested on murder or manslaughter charges, representing about 45 percent of the total for such arrests that year, though black men comprise only about six percent of the general population. Black men were also killed with disproportionate frequency, making up over 42 percent of murder victims that year.⁹ In other words, black men are killing each other at an appalling rate—well over 20 homicides per 100,000 men.¹⁰ A black man is over 35 times more likely to be murdered by another black man than anyone is to be killed by a concealed-carry licensee.

As the above examples have shown, even the VPC’s most inflammatory numbers indicate that individuals licensed to carry concealed firearms are less dangerous than the average citizen and considerably less dangerous than certain other sub-populations. Nevertheless, the report should serve as a reminder that every population has its bad actors. The concealed-carry community may be more scrupulously law-abiding than most, but it is still not immune to evil or insanity.

I want to conclude with a thought experiment that explores how licensed concealed carry might intersect with a mass-shooting incident and VPC-style propaganda. Below, I will present two scenarios, one essentially fantastical and one frighteningly plausible. First, the fantasy …

A man wearing a long coat and a backpack walks into a crowded shopping mall. He approaches the balcony overlooking the food court on the floor below and produces an AR-15 rifle from under his coat. Leaning over the railing, he begins to fire indiscriminately into the lunchtime crowd.

A few yards away, a concealed-carry licensee is sitting on a bench waiting for his wife and daughter to finish shopping. His first impulse is to run toward the nearby emergency exit. He was trained to avoid confrontation when he applied for his license, but he isn’t sure if his family is safe … and he immediately recognizes that a mass shooting is in progress. After scant seconds of indecision, he acts, drawing his semi-automatic pistol and firing two shots at the deranged gunman.

The shots connect, but the murderer is wearing ballistic armor under his coat. He flinches and turns his rifle toward the licensee, firing wildly. The licensee adjusts his aim. He manages to get off a third shot, striking the gunman in the head, before he himself is hit in the thigh.

The shooter collapses, unconscious. The licensee calls for help, but he is already bleeding badly. In the chaos and confusion that follows, medical and law-enforcement personnel take several minutes to arrive on scene. The licensee bleeds to death.

The would-be mass killer succumbs to his wounds several days later. Two more of his victims also die, but dozens recover from the injuries left by his small, high-velocity bullets. No one has a clear idea of what happened.

The news stories report that two shooters were killed in a gun battle at the mall, along with two innocent bystanders. One of the gunmen, the reporters note, was licensed to carry a concealed handgun. The Violence Policy Center records the incident as four homicides attributed to a licensee.

Now for the reality …

A man wearing a long coat and a backpack walks into a crowded shopping mall. He approaches the balcony overlooking the food court on the floor below and produces an AR-15 rifle from under his coat. Leaning over the railing, he begins to fire indiscriminately into the lunchtime crowd.

In a nearby store, a concealed-carry licensee is buying a pair of shoes. She hears the sudden burst of shots and thinks about the compact revolver holstered in her purse. Unsure of the situation or the gunfire’s origin, she decides to wait and avoid conflict if possible, as she was trained to do when she received her license. The manager quickly locks down the store and ushers the shoppers into the relative safety of a back office.

Outside, the deranged gunman continues shooting. His rifle malfunctions multiple times due to the cheap high-capacity magazines that he chose mainly for their wicked appearance, but he manages to reload again and again, pulling magazine after magazine from his full backpack. He hits scores of people as they attempt to hide or flee.

In the chaos and confusion that follows, medical and law-enforcement personnel take several minutes to arrive on scene. The police order the shooter to drop his rifle, but he turns it on them, firing wildly. One officer is struck in the head, dying almost instantly.

The other officers return fire, hitting the suspect multiple times. He drops his rifle and collapses. He is arrested and taken to the hospital for treatment.

The police secure the area, while paramedics attempt to evacuate the wounded. The mall is locked down for several more hours as the police interview witnesses and search for other possible suspects. They eventually make their way to the shoe store.

When contacted by the officers, the licensee informs them that she is licensed to carry concealed, as she is required to do under her state’s law. The officers ask if she is armed, and she replies affirmatively. Exercising caution, the police take the licensee into custody on suspicion that she may be an accomplice.

The licensee is later released without charges. Almost two dozen victims die that day, and dozens more eventually recover from their injuries. The shooter himself survives his wounds but is ruled incompetent to stand trial.

The news stories report that 22 shoppers and one police officer were killed when a gunman opened fire with an “assault weapon.” The reporters note that a woman licensed to carry a concealed handgun was also arrested at the scene but has yet to be charged. The Violence Policy Center records the incident as a mass shooting associated with a licensee but pending resolution.

A concealed-carry licensee may [rarely] stop a mass murder in progress, but licensees do appear to provide some deterrence. The pattern is already clearly visible. Would-be mass killers preferentially target unsecured locations where firearms are prohibited by law or policy, ensuring that they will face the least possible resistance. Of course, eliminating gun-free zones and embracing the deterrent effect of lawfully armed citizens may simply compel future murderers to modify their tactics … but that’s a discussion for another time.

1. Violence Policy Center, “Total People Killed by Concealed Carry Killers” (2012).


2. The VPC also includes data from various reports published by the Michigan State Police and the Minnesota and Texas departments of public safety, which are no doubt inclusive of the news data. In other words, some of the results for these three states have probably been counted more than once.


3. Modern firearms don’t “go off” accidentally, so an unintentional shooting is almost always the result of negligence.


4. I have extrapolated the number of convictions to include perpetrators who likely would have been convicted if they hadn’t been killed during the commission of their crimes, committed suicide, or been ruled incompetent to stand trial. However, more than one of the actual convictions appear unjust to my eyes.


5. U.S. Government Accountability Office, Gun Control: States’ Laws and Requirements for Concealed Carry Permits Vary across the Nation (2012). Looking at the statistics another way, concealed-carry licensees comprise about 2.5 percent of the population but are allegedly responsible for only 0.4 percent of all homicides.


6. As usual, I take most of my crime statistics from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports.


7. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook (2012).


8. National Police Misconduct Reporting Project, 2010 Annual Report.


9. Uniform Crime Reports.


10. The only “epidemic of violence” in the United States is largely confined to certain minority communities. It has nothing to do with guns and everything to do with institutionalized poverty and the war on drugs.

American Violence

 

Despite recent dramatic incidents, violent crime has been steadily declining in the United States. The reasons for this are as varied and complicated as the sources of violence. In fact, they are still hotly debated among criminologists and economists, but the fact remains that the general risk is much lower than it once was.

Furthermore, as the Baltimore example shows, the vast majority of murders are perpetrated by career criminals against other criminals. Though murderous spouses and rampaging lunatics grab headlines, they are the rare exceptions. Those citizens who can avoid the culture of criminality face even less risk of falling victim to violence.

No Correlation between Firearms and Violence

As a supporter of the right to arms and of human freedom in general, I am prepared to accept a high price for those liberties if need be. However, it is always nice when the evidence shows that more freedom is at least not more dangerous than less freedom.

Please see walls of the city for methodology and sources.