Robert Anton Wilson advanced the idea of a "Guns and Dope Party" (originally suggested, if I recall correctly, by writer Bill Helmer) to bring together "gun nuts" and "dopers" into a libertarian alliance.
I have cited writer Jacob Sullum quite a few times in this blog, as he is very good about writing about the "war on some drugs," as RAW called it. I recently noticed that Sullum has a new "guns and dope" book out.
The book is called BEYOND CONTROL: Drug Prohibition, Gun Regulation, and the Search for Sensible Alternatives. From the publisher's blurb:
"Decades of research have produced scant evidence that popular gun control prescriptions, such as assault weapon bans, universal background checks, restrictions on ownership, and red flag laws, work as advertised. Research on the impact of the war on drugs likewise provides little reason to believe that its doubtful benefits outweigh its myriad costs. In both cases, the burdens often fall on peaceful individuals who pose no threat to public safety, and the policies seem ill-designed to reduce the problems they aim to address.
"Sullum notes that critics of gun control and critics of the war on drugs make similar points, complaining that these policies are unfair, invasive, poorly targeted, and ineffective. But because these two sets of critics tend to come from opposing political camps, they usually overlook their common ground. Beyond Control surveys that territory, showing that conservatives and progressives share concerns about overcriminalization, overzealous law enforcement, draconian penalties, and the erosion of civil liberties."
My local library doesn't have his book so I submitted a request for it to be purchased.
4 comments:
Massively omni-use general-purpose technologies of harm will probably change the parameters of this debate overnight. So I see this book as likely already out-of-date. In one important sense you can't compare gun and drug control, unless the "drug" in question has one purpose: maiming/death of another being.
So, to my mind, regulations on use/availability of poisons and lethal bio/chemical agents would be a more meaningful comparison.
And maybe we should extend the debate over "guns" to assault drones and micro-drones, since presumably something like AI-guided ammunition will become indistinguishable from drones. I've been reading the stories of Palantir AI-driven target-profiling assassination drones. It doesn't take too much imagination to extrapolate where this technology is heading when it becomes widely available, cheaper and smaller, smaller, smaller.
You can now buy a desktop DNA synthesiser for $25,000. Use as you wish, no restriction. Your own personal bio-garage! Sure, regulations suck, until the harm is directed at someone you love, by a total stranger based on nothing but ideology and social media profiles, data mining and untraceable and widely available (uncontrolled, unregulated!) technologies of harm.
I think RAW made a similar point about the right to obtain and use your own portable nyooks. How else can one be truly free?
Brian Dean's point here is one I've thought about ever since I was a teenager. The rights for guns were imagined and codified when we had muskets. It seems that basically the same thinking has been framed up to the present, despite automatic rifles/machine guns/grenade launchers/bazookas/surface to air missiles...the litany of omnilethality. Causing death from further and further away, with more precision and devastation to bodies. I think this category error of scope has gotten more and more egregious over the past 50 years. It seems embarrassingly stupid to me.
When someone talks about their "rights under the law" a lot of thinking stops. WHY do you need something that, you just press down on the trigger and it sprays multiple rounds that obliterate its target? Are you "hunting"? You are? Okay. Wow what a sportsman you are! Sorry, but this never made any sense to me. Go ahead and call me an anti-gun nut. My argument is all those bodies...for what? Protection? Freedom? This has been a major reason I could never get behind the Libertarian party in the US.
People who have taken classes and have no background of assault should be able to have non-automatic hunting rifles. I'm not sure about pistols, which seems like a more complex question.
Brian's reductio non-ad-absurdum of desktop bio weapons and anonymous drone strikes on your neighbors (and yes: Palantir) should be talked about much more...
Just because we have the technical means to make something should not automatically mean we should be allowed to do it if there's an obvious potential for misuse that would cause serious harms. But it seems this idea has been relegated to philosophy of ethics texts. It means NOTHING in the "marketplace."
The logic of gung-ho gun thinking seems to be that everyone should have guns to protect themselves from...people who have guns. So, along Brian Dean's lines: ever-cheaper chemical and biological warfare labs in EVERY GARAGE! To protect yourself! [And bracket off the problems of humans living in contemporary environments; let us stay in the frame of Fear and Protection in a cold, "logical" way. Yes. Let us pretend.]
RAW was very candid about the "Decembrist" agit-prop behind Guns and Dope, and later, when I read The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics, by Smith and Bueno de Mesquita, two political scientists who pointed out that you cobble together as many focused interest groups of voters, tell them what they want to hear to get their votes, and WIN!: this was at the heart of RAW's satirical idea: odd bedfellows: the gun nuts and cannabis nuts, but together: that's a lot of votes.
The first paragraph quoted that starts "Decades of research..." sounds flat out wrong and looks easily proven as such. Google "effectiveness of assault weapons ban" and several studies will come up that provide data showing effectiveness in reducing mass shootings when assault weapons got banned from 1994 - 2004. One can also compare the statistics of gun violence in the US with gun violence in many other countries where obtaining a gun proves much more difficult. Perhaps gun control doesn't "work as advertised", but it seems counter-intuitive to believe that letting anyone have any kind of gun will reduce gun violence. I'll also note that many things don't "work as advertised" particularly if coming out of the mouth of a politician.
The Guns and Dope Party represents one RAW point of view, but see also this:
http://www.rawillumination.net/2012/12/excerpt-from-novel.html
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