The NRA's (bad) armed-guard argument

The NRA's argument for a policy of armed policeman/guards/teachers in schools:

P1) The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is for there to be a good guy with a gun. (T)

C) Therefore, we need police-officers, armed-security-guards, or armed-teachers at schools. (F)

Even though many people are reacting against P1 as "insane", it's true. Your best chance of survival in an armed confrontation with a bad person is to be armed yourself (or to have another person armed with your interest at heart). There's no getting around that.

Where the argument fails is the leap to C. C is false because armed-guards are not the only way to solve the problem of armed bad-guys in schools. The other way is having fewer armed bad-people. Thus, the problem with the argument lies in a false hidden premise, P2: no regulation of private-firearms ownership is ever justified.

The problem with P2 is that it places gun-rights above the principle-of-peace. And the principle-of-peace is the core of the social-contract. The reason we leave the state-of-nature and form society is first and foremost to end the war-of-all-against-all and have peaceful social-interactions. And in leaving the state-of-nature, we give up those liberties that threaten peace. Once society is established, if a liberty threatens the general-peace, we can justifiably restrict it. If things are getting to the point where the NRA, America's main gun-lobby group, is advocating armed guards in public-spaces to maintain order -- which assumes the threat of violence is ever-present -- then greater regulation of private-firearm-ownership is justified.

Though I don't believe the threat to public-order posed by mass-shootings is enough to justify either armed-guards in schools or gun-controls -- I think most people are over-reacting -- I do think that among the options currently available, regulation of private-firearm-ownership is preferable to having armed police-officers in schools. Many North-American high-schools already have armed police-officers, but this is something we should be moving way from, not extending to elementary- and middle-schools. Armed police in schools, like the heavy-security at our airports, is an unecessary police-state aspect of society that we should avoid.

Given that gun-control is preferable to armed police-offers in schools, I offer the following analysis of various types of gun-control.

1) Good gun-controls:

i) acquisition controls (acquisition permits, background checks, etc.)
-- these work to control who can get their hands on guns
-- they are probably the single most important gun-control

ii) controls on bearing-arms (bans on open-carrying of loaded weapons when weapon is not in use)
-- openly carrying a loaded-weapon communicates to others that one is prepared for violence
-- peaceful intent in public is important to a peaceful-society
-- gun-allowed zones aren't better than gun-free zones in preventing mass-shootings -- Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Ft. Hood all had armed-guards or police on duty, while Tucson is one giant guns-allowed zone (minus university buildings and some private-property)

iii) storage-controls
-- makes it harder for non-owners to gain control of weapons
-- promotes a culture of safe weapon use


2) Bad gun-controls:

i) keeping-arms controls (locking all weapons in central-storage)
-- leaves civilians defenceless at home and creates easy-to-steal-from weapons caches

ii) assault-weapons bans
-- prevents rebellion, the most important reason for civilians to have guns

iii) licensing ownership and registration of firearms
-- makes possible cultural-genocide of gun-culture through disarmament
-- makes gun-owners distrust government (especially in North-America)
-- makes public cooperation on matters pertaining to civilian-weapons more difficult


Gun-controls of unclear effect:

i) magazine restrictions
-- I have no idea whether this would work, or if it does, whether it's not worth the cost placed on rebellion

The intolerance behind arguments for gun-control

If you substitute the arguments typically made against gun-ownership for Islam, their intolerance becomes clear.

1) Practicing x is a choice and thus not subject to discrimination protection. It's not something you can't change like being black or handicapped.

2) Restrictions and prohibitions on x are justified because x is associated with increased violence.

3) The interests of those who find x offensive should be weighed against those like x.

4) You don't need to practice x. x isn't essential to your life like eating or transportation.

5) x gives you a false sense of security. Evidence shows x is more likely to harm you than help you.

The first and last arguments don't seem as intolerant as the middle three because, in the context of religion, they're generally made by atheists and atheists tend to be progressive. The middle arguments are made by conservatives and so sound more intolerant. Yet, they're all intolerant. This only goes to show -- in addition to our main point that arguments for gun-control reflect intolerance -- that progressive thought avoids charges of intolerance faced by other ideologies simply by virtue of being dominant.

Remembering a very good man

Professor Richard Nutbrown, who was the second reader on my master's thesis, has passed away at 64 from a brain tumour.

My memories of him are fond. Though we came from very different ideological perspectives, and though this created a slight discomfort in our meetings, he offered me his full professional efforts and in doing so revealed a kind heart.

After I presented my initial thesis ideas to a less than receptive faculty and graduate student body, he came to me later and started me on the early-modern contractarians. It turned out to be some of the most important guidance I have received to date. Hobbes remains the strongest influence on my political thought.

On other occasions, he would email me, or bring by my desk, papers which he thought I would find useful. This might seem standard for a supervisor to do, but he did it without prompting. These gestures didn't stem from prior meetings, email requests, or having just read something I wrote. Rather, if he came across something in his own research that he thought would be of value to me, he made sure I got it.

Finally, when I was having difficulty with Faculty of Arts administrators, he took up my cause. And he did so in spite of the fact that he would be working with these people long after I was gone.

Impartial, intelligent, and considerate. The world is down a good man.

Prepare for drug shortages

The Globe and Mail reports that,

Provinces will begin bulk-buying several different generic drugs as part of the first steps Canada’s premiers are taking to make health care less costly and more efficient for Canadians.

This means that the monopsony model used for provincial health insurance plans will now be used for generic drug purchases. It's unclear whether provinces will be providing the drugs through provincial insurance plans or simply re-selling them to pharmacies.

Once this policy goes into effect, there will be more shortages of certain types of generic drugs. Worse, you'll end up paying more on average for those drugs that suffer shortages. If provinces let generic drug prices fluctuate, the price of drugs that suffer shortages will rise consistent with increased demand. If provinces fix the prices of generics, then you will have to pay for the more expensive brand names when generics experience shortages. This, however, is better than our provincial health insurance plans for doctor and hospital services. Because provinces ban private delivery, when shortages occur (i.e. waiting-lists), your only option is to wait.

The reason there will be shortages of certain types of generics is that monopsonies are a form of central-planning and therefore suffer from the knowledge-problem. When there is one purchaser in a market, they need to know what everyone will need in the future. This is impossible because they cannot gather knowledge of 'time-and-place' -- i.e. the circumstantial knowledge of particular people in the economy. In healthcare, this would be a patient's knowledge of his or her particular ailments and the doctor's knowledge of how different kinds of people react to different treatments. This type of information can only be transmitted through prices that arise from a market with multiple buyers and sellers. One buyer can drive down the price, but they do so at the expense of the efficient aggregation of information.

There are market-failures in health-care, which I have addressed elsewhere, but ceteris paribus, the allocation of prescription drugs in Canada is about to get worse.

Guns and violence

The disorder that this Globe and Mail editorial decries is part of a society that guarantees the final protection against tyranny: civilian arms.

The idea that allowing civilians to possess arms is insane and indifferent to killings is, in truth, a value judgement that better protected liberty is not worth additional disorder.

This is a value judgement that is not applied in other areas. Legal rights and due process similarly increase disorder by seeing criminals go free on rights violations. Yet, we tolerate this disorder knowing that legal rights and due process protect the liberty of the innocent. And we value the liberty of the innocent more than increased order.

So why permit disorder for legal rights and due process but not guns? The assumption is that Western liberal-democratic states can be entrused to protect liberty but that they could never turn tyrannical and deny it. The idea that liberal democratic states will never stop being liberal reflects an obedience to authority that is far scarier than the American willingness to let the people, not just the rulers, be armed.

Natural-rights help the nanny state

Natural-rights thinking contributes to nanny-state restrictions for the simple reason that weighing of rights is not possible. Many petty restrictions are seen as justified because they prevent a small number of people from harm or death. Smoking bans, seat-belt laws, gun-control, etc.

I suspect natural-rights libertarians will object that this is because the rights in question aren't rights. None of these violate property-rights, which are the only natural-rights. Even if it's true that these restrictions don't violate property-rights, it means that that natural-rights thinking is only valuable in arguments against petty restrictions in an ideal society where everyone recognises that our natural-rights consist only of property-rights. That makes natural-rights libertarians' thinking pretty limited in our modern context of value-pluralism.

The alternative doesn't have to be a utilitarian framework where odd rights violations follow, e.g. society is justified in executing curmudgeons because no one likes them around. (That said, I think that overall, utilitarianism would lead to more a liberal society under value-pluralism than natural-rights.) Rather, a contractarian society can allow for weighing of rights without utilitarianism's bizarre rights-violations. The reason is that it permits probability calculations in its thought. In a contractarian framework, you can say, for example, that gun-rights will be permitted even though more people will be injured or die because the deaths will only affect a few people and chances are it won't be you. Alternatively, many will receive additional utility from the option of owning and enjoying firearms and chances are that will include you.

A quick thought on Mill and liberty

Is John Stuart Mill responsible for most nanny statism even though he wanted to create a new sphere of individual liberty against the civil societal majority above and beyond that enjoyed against the state?

I don't have in mind the usual conservative objection that a civil societal sphere of liberty requires a welfare state, the idea that people free from customs will necessarily suffer consequences that only societal alms can remedy.

I mean many petty restrictions on liberty are defended by recourse to harm to others. If by contrast we justify all restrictions by recourse to Hobbes' concept of peace -- lack of a known disposition to contend by force -- I think the remaining liberty is closer to what most liberals have in mind.