Dave Kopel notes the relatively low rate of gun ownership in Iran. It’s mostly restricted to ethnic minorities, or so I’ve heard. It brings to mind something Chip said recently in the comments about one of the benefits of gun-rights being the possibility of revolt. I’m inclined to say that’s one of the worst arguments in favor of them. Better that is the oft-neglected utilitarian argument that lots of us just plain like guns, as well as the recognition that the police are not God walking the earth, and so arms distributed among the citizenry can pick up the slack. We could even be more radical and note the relative novelty of professional police forces & standing army, and consider if community posses & militias could entirely substitute for them. The possibility of revolt, even against a bad government, is quite plausibly an argument against guns in the hands of the people. To quote David Friedman, revolution IS the hell of it. I’m even in favor of secession anytime, anywhere for any reason but I’m hard pressed to think of times when wars for that were worth the price (including our own from Britain). Realistically speaking, even if we ignored the costs of the fighting itself, it doesn’t seem likely that The People’s Valiant Struggles Against Their Oppressors result in better governance. Communism was the biggest killer we’ve yet seen, Algeria* (and other former colonies) got well and truly fucked by its nationalist uprising, and Iran’s mullahs hardly seem better than the Shah. Here I should admit that trying to prevent the revolting populace from gaining access to guns may be futile, as when worst comes to worst they’ll just raid the armories.
*I wish I could link to the War Nerd’s “Algeria: The Psychos Will Inherit the Earth”, but the Exile sucks and it doesn’t seem available now.
On a related note, Robert Farley of Lawyers, Guns & Money has a post on the efficient killing power of the modern nation state which in parts sounds a lot like a radical libertarian (though as far as I know he’s your bog-standard liberal). UPDATE: Also related, Sean Safford of OrgTheory gives a friendly fisking of Gideon Rachman and Andrew Miller’s revolutionary checklist applied to Iran.
On an unrelated note, Karl Smith’s Modeled Behavior blog has moved to a new location with more frequent posting. I somewhat recently found that Charles Davi of Derivative Dribble sometimes makes posts at the Atlantic Business Channel that don’t also appear at his personal blog, so if you can’t get enough derivative-talk you should keep an on eye it. Finally, while I think I’ve already mentioned Eric Crampton’s Offsetting Behaviour here, in the off-chance that I haven’t I encourage you to check it out.
June 23, 2009 at 9:00 pm
I’m hard pressed to think of times when wars for that were worth the price
That’s because you’re only thinking of wars that happened. Wars are pretty much always bad, but being armed is almost always good. The almost wars that didn’t happen because the other side backed down don’t get much attention, but there are plenty of them.
June 23, 2009 at 10:36 pm
I definitely agree it’s good for your country to be well armed and defensible. I was referring to wars of independence (or “national liberation”) which would be examples of citizens being able to stand up to their governments.
June 24, 2009 at 8:20 am
Communism was the biggest killer we’ve yet seen,
Only because Nazi Germany was cut down early by war.
June 24, 2009 at 10:14 am
“Only because Nazi Germany was cut down early by war.”
How do you know what Nazi Germany would’ve been like had it not been crushed? It’s probable that it would’ve become tamer, just like the Soviet Union did after Lenin and Stalin.
June 24, 2009 at 11:59 am
It’s probable that it would’ve become tamer, just like the Soviet Union did after Lenin and Stalin.
A genocidal Nazi Empire might have been tamer after it was finished with exterminating and or enslaving most of the Slavic populations of Eastern Europe.
Google “Generalplan Ost”.
June 24, 2009 at 5:54 pm
It’s hard to say. Stalin had killed a lot more people than Hitler by 1938. Not every communist wound up like Pol Pot either. But leaving aside counterfactuals and sticking to what actually did happen, communism is king of the hill (made of dead bodies).
June 24, 2009 at 11:24 am
Not to parse words, but my point (where I also referenced Kopel’s work) was that an armed populace may serve to deter State aggression. While I suppose this could assume the “possibility of revolt” as the ultimate bulwark against government aggression, the operative term should be “possibility.” In practice, I suspect that the “possibility of messy inconvenience and bad press” may be just as significant as the specter of revolution. The folks holed up at Waco weren’t plotting revolution but they made a decent stand by bearing arms, and the BATF came off looking pretty lame. Do such episodes create a free-rider effect by curbing further encroachments? Tough to know, but such an effect seems plausible.
June 24, 2009 at 5:56 pm
I think some of that makes sense and suspect the high rates of gun ownership and massive militia played a role in Switzerland being at peace (so did mountains and sane political leaders).
I don’t see much reason to believe that the Branch Davidians (or McVeigh in response to them) reduced the violence of our government.
June 27, 2009 at 7:34 pm
Hmm. My sense is that BATF designs were defanged by bad PR. Is there data?
June 27, 2009 at 10:10 pm
What designs are you referring to?
June 24, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Google cache provides all four pages on search: “Algeria: site:www.exile.ru The Psychos Will Inherit the Earth”
Fantastic. Thanks for the reference.
June 24, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Hey, when I tried looking up the google cache I only found the first page. A small unexpected pleasant surprise, which is one of the nicer things in life.
June 25, 2009 at 11:05 am
I think guns may not be causes but rather effects of other cultural tendencies. the taking of responsibility seems to be the litmus between sane and insane forms of power distribution. guns may just be a small part of that. gun ownership always seemed highly correlated with a lack of paternalistic tendencies to me.
June 25, 2009 at 6:07 pm
But not patriarchal tendencies. A reminder again that paternalism should be called maternalism.
June 26, 2009 at 7:25 am
to what degree does sexual selection influence ideology? there is always a subset of men who think the best way to get laid is to agree with women. I maintain that pretty much every guy at an environmentalism rally is there trying to get laid, whether he is aware of this or not.
June 26, 2009 at 4:54 pm
TGGP and I discuss this here and here.
I think I confused TGGP earlier with my position – I’m pretty liberal, but realistically I don’t see how submissively agreeing with a woman’s beliefs merely to please her would make a man more likely to get laid by her. Acting like a pussywhipped bitch isn’t exactly a display of desirable fitness characteristics, except in a VERY limited sense (display of likelihood of exclusive future investment).* I could see it as a niche mating strategy, but it’s not exactly the kind of trait that seems likely to spread your sperm around.
*Also, “pussywhipped bitch” is the male mating strategy that makes cuckolding the best response strategy for females.
June 27, 2009 at 2:00 am
Sister Y, I think that’s being a bit simplistic as there is a huge range in between adamantly opposing a woman’s views and being a “pussywhipped bitch”. The second link leads me to believe that mildly liberal men are getting laid the most. This would fit my hypothesis since the men likely to identify as mildly liberal are exactly the ones who don’t much care about liberal values but do weakly signal them for the purposes of meeting women.
June 27, 2009 at 2:55 am
It’s not about adamantly opposing a woman’s views – just about not selling your own views out for a slight chance at impressing a woman.
Equally congruent with your hypothesis is the proposition that mildly liberal men are just smarter, hence more fit. <3
Also, none of the correlations TGGP or I have run have really strongly suggested any correlation between sexual success and political views (since political views strongly influence mating goals).
June 27, 2009 at 10:31 am
I would say that political views and goals are correlated. We might say that a deeper-level worldview or personality type influences both.
Another possible reason for the correlations I found in the GSS is geographic. More liberal people might be more likely to live in urban areas. Furthermore, considering the “big sort” men are more likely to live in areas where women have similar views & goals.
A final possibility is that rather than women liking liberal views in men, it merely that certain conservative views are repelling. So merely being apolitical could give the same benefits as liberalism.
June 28, 2009 at 4:54 am
I would expect the apolitical to lean slightly right in conservative areas and slightly left in liberal ones simply for the sake of avoiding unnecessary conflict.
June 28, 2009 at 9:08 am
[...] Better Load Your .44, This is Civil War by TGGP [...]
June 28, 2009 at 12:52 pm
TGGP,
“Designs” may have been too ominous a word choice, but BATF abuses of civil liberties really were rampant during the 90s. If you are skeptical, see Kopel & Blackman’s “No More Wacos” (Prometheus Books, 1997), especially pp. 292-310 where they document the extent of the agency’s use of excessive force during the period. A lot of this may be understood as the natural consequence of an overgrown, over-funded bureaucracy creating its own demand and perhaps emboldened under the Reno Justice Department’s newfound emphasis on gun law enforcement. In analyzing what led to the normalization of excessive tactics, Kopel and Blackman cite a cocktail of causes including lack of administrative redress, poor police training, and a corrupt and “good old boys” institutional culture.
While the causes may have been complex, it appears that standard tactics had become increasingly oriented to favor the use of force as an early resort, and that this was becoming SOP. Did this change in the wake of Waco and Ruby Ridge? Congressional and media scrutiny did lead to a number of agency reforms intended to curb agency misconduct. My hunch is that the possibility of another such debacle provided enough incentive for the gungrabbers to tone down their act, if only to stay in business and retain federal funding (it’s worth remembering that at the time of the Waco hearings, several members of congress — including Arlen Specter — were calling for the BATF to be abolished).
If there are stats on armed raids by federal law enforcement, it would be interesting plot trends from, say, 1990 to present. I’ll bet a beer that Randy and the Davidians did us a favor.
June 28, 2009 at 4:55 pm
I don’t know of any data on that sort of things (though I dimly recall being paranoid about the BATF throughout the 90s). Radley Balko might.
July 1, 2009 at 1:21 pm
[...] TGGP, in Better load your .44, this is civil war: [...]