Cowboy Confessional

I love the gun control industry.  They’re more predictable that a politician lying.

(Speaking of which, I’m enjoying the sweet sound of silence now that John Edwards has mysteriously shut-up)

Whenever laws are loosened, the gun control industry predicts bloodshed in the streets.  I witnessed such first hand in Florida and later Virginia when those states respectively enacted concealed carry laws, letting honest folk tote weapons in public.  The Brady Campaign, the Violence Policy Center, the Joyce Foundation (if I may be redundant) in a single voice said Hell itself would erupt and swallow those states whole.

Didn’t happen.  Not in Florida.  Not in Virginia.

Not in the 28 other states that followed FLA, rescinding restrictions on packing a heater.  In fact, Professor John Lott notes that not a single peer-reviewed criminological study on concealed carry has found a rise in violent crime compared to national averages.  A hand full of studies show minor declines in violence, and a few show major drops in select categories of bloody bad behavior.

Yet in 2008, when the Supreme Court told the District of Columbia that their handgun ban was history, the gun control industry resurrected the same claims concerning carnage.  They predicted (again) that gutters would run red with blood, which for D.C. meant nothing much would change.  The gun control industry said with certainty that death was inevitable for every living being in that city.

Guess what.

Crime statistics are in for 2009, the first full year in which D.C. citizens have been allowed to keep handguns at home, the overall violent crime rate fell.  Though much higher than most everywhere else in America, the rate of violence in The District plummeted.  Based on Census Bureau population estimates and D.C.’s own online crime statistics reporting system, violent crimes fells 6% in the first full year of liberated handgun ownership and homicides dropped 23% (if you want to check the math, here is a spreadsheet with the raw numbers).

It is unimportant to wonder why the crime rate dropped – there will be plenty of time for criminologists to analyze the dozens of potential variables.  However, private gun ownership did not cause violence to increase and may be the magic variable to explain why it tumbled.

Helmke, Sugarman, Brady, Feinstein … time to pipe down.  Your chorus is off key, again.

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Some days the universe conspires to uncover the blatantly obvious.

In and around the nation’s capital today, Jews were targets, in literal and metaphorical senses. At the Holocaust Museum an aging bigot with an old squire rifle shot a security guard. It was a senseless act by someone so consumed with hatred that his mental faculties are suspect.

In nearby Virginia, another aging bigot said of the President “them Jews aren’t going to let him talk to me.” It was a senseless act by someone so consumed with hatred that his mental faculties are suspect. Unarmed aside from his infected mind and mouth, this incendiary statement came from Obama’s pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright. “They will not let him … talk to somebody who calls a spade what it is.”

Which begs the question “how many degrees of anti-Semitic separation are there between Obama and James Von Brunn?”

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Economics is an ecosystem, and all humans are different species with money being their common food source. Like other ecosystems, the economy adjusts as pressures arise and species adapt to the changing environment.

This is why drugs are cheap and drug profits remain higher than drug users.

The United Kingdom’s Home Office (and organization with a name more pleasant that it’s collective personality) recently concluded that a line of Peruvian Marching Powder costs less than a pint of beer. Buzz heads can dust their noses for less money than a soccer hooligan’s breakfast.

This is one of many side effects of unregulated markets. Despite enormous gauntlets imposed by governments, dope demand rages onward. Volume-focused profit potential has streamlined and optimized the cocaine trade. Like corporations with heavy firepower, the drug lords have tweaked their internal operations to the point where they deliver product at barging basement prices and get rich by shipping the stuff by the metric ton.

Maybe their couriers snort the stuff first … gives them the energy to drag crates of Charlie across the border.

Seem people south of the border have had enough of the game and want to back out of the criminalization business. Growing international consensus based on data like £1 lines has called for de-escalation of dope interdiction. Three former heads of state (not to be confused with non-state heads) recently concluded “The available evidence indicates that the war on drugs is a failed war.”

You think?

At £1 a smack and with import volumes reaching Everest heights, there is no other conclusion. America’s “War on Drugs” is now in its forth decade and has sump-pumped the U.S. Treasury a few billion each year in direct interdiction costs (border patrol, Coast Guard, aid to states, etc.) with a few billion more in financing some shady South American governments in their coca field eradication efforts. Add the cost of warehousing petty possessors in prisons and America’s War on Dope is certifiably a war by dopes, by which I mean Congress.

Yet legalization scares soccer mom’s straight, and is thus decriminalization is doomed.

What many overly protective moms don’t realize is that their kids have an easier time buying heroin at their high school than buying a bottle of Yukon Jack at the corner liquor store. Where as illegal drugs by default are a deregulated industry, and booze is a regulated one, the path from producer to consumer and the means for optimizing production are completely different. Cocaine for kids is created by hut squatters in jungles while Jack is distilled by educated workers in government inspected facilities. Bolivian Blow is transported by a chain of underpaid human mules while whiskey is hauled for profit by trucking companies with union labor, annually inspected vehicles, licensed drivers and tax funded roads. The dealer who sold you child a little crank isn’t afraid of the law but the owner of the corner market fears losing his business license for selling a bottle of brandy to your baby.

We don’t need no stinking license!

Despite all, nothing will change. Drug ideology in America is pervasive to the point that every mom and dad who still toke a jay while the kids are out of the house absolutely want the current interdiction model. They would change their minds if they could be their kid for a day and were given the assignment to score some snort after science class and some schnapps after school.

The contrast would kill them, and then kill the war on drugs.

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People committing crimes do not like to be photographed in the act.

This includes cops.

I grew up with law enforcement officers (LEOs). My childhood friend was the son of the local police chief and I was riding shotgun in squad cars before I was old enough to drive. I discovered that the best part of being a cop is the perpetual amusement of odd occurrences, which might explain why I live in San Francisco these days for it is perpetually odd and amusing.

One night we pulled up behind a poorly concealed tiny Toyota. After the patrol officer (the first female officer on that squad who nicknamed herself ‘Patty Pig’) circled the bouncing vehicle twice, a man who easily cleared 6′4″ unfolded himself from the backseat, attempting to pull up his pants while crawling behind the wheel to make a sanctioned getaway.

Most criminal activity is more serious that backseat coitus. One tool LEOs like to cuff criminals with are cameras. The U.K. is positively mad for them, littering every street corner with snappers. There is even a proposal to put cameras in pubs. Subjects are videotaped in case their presence near a crime scene later becomes of interest to the constabulary. Though the efficacy of such evidence remains in debate, there is little to dissuade the U.K. police from fully utilizing cameras to catch miscreants committing crimes.

Unless bobbies are doing the dirty work.

Under the thin guise of anti-terrorism, it is now criminal to snap a member of Her Majesty’s forces, a member of any of the intelligence services or a constable. The prohibition is based on the corner case that a terrorist group might compile a photographic inventory of peace officers, a theory ignoring the fact that terrorist strive to induce terror in the citizenry and not armed guardians.

Blanket prohibitions are tools of oppression. Fungible laws can be applied brutally against inconveniently honest folks and the loyal opposition alike. Universal injunctions are routinely abused because few if any reasonable exceptions are included. Prohibitive laws need to be specific, not general, which is not what the U.K. now endures.

Restricting surveillance of LEOs in public has a horrific downside. It discourages and perhaps prevents applying justice to law enforcement officer who break the law. It elevates above the law people vested with power, and thus facilitates the abuse of that power.

Which brings us to the late Oscar Grant who is now a household name in the San Francisco bay area. Oscar was shot by a LEO after ringing in the New Year. The event took place on an Oakland subway platform while the train on which he had ridden waited to be released. Sensing that the LEOs on duty were being a bit too belligerent, a number of fellow riders whipped out their cell phones and began gathering grainy videos.

They are a YouTube sensation for self-evident reasons.

I wasn’t there. I’m not a witness. I cannot pronounce guilt or innocence. But at first blush the videos appear not to show a police action but an assassination. The former LEO has proffered explanations that a jury will some day consume, but they will dine up several home videos as well. It will be a wholly indigestible spread.

The videos will be a significant influence … unless the government somehow suppresses them as evidence.

The good folks at the Witness Project have long understood this. In locales less civilized than Oakland – a rapidly shrinking list – the Witness Project supplies video cameras so locals can document governmental abuses. Relief may not come from the regional legal system, but it may come from millions of YouTube watchers and the governments that those citizens command.

Which no longer includes the United Kingdom. They long ago revoked the right of self-defense and now the ability to keep bull bluecoats in line. Little wonder that England and Wales have turned violent – the laws favor the lawless … including lawless LEOs.

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I came across a quote by an economist named R. T. Naylor. I can’t vouch for anything Naylor has written though his book titles are entertaining (Wages Of Crime, Hot Money and the Politics of Debt and Patriots and Profiteers: On Economic Warfare).

The quote that caught my attention was “… never in history has there been a black market defeated from the supply side.” His claim is that it must be impossible to eliminate the supply of something if there is demand. I don’t know if “never” is an appropriate adverb, but I am incapable of finding evidence to the contrary.

Some examples:

• * Alcohol prohibition in the 1920’s generated a huge black market and vast criminal enterprises to supply the booze.
• * The drug wars of the 20th century generated a huge black market and vast criminal enterprises to supply the dope.
• * Gun control laws generated a huge black market and vast criminal enterprises to supply the firepower.
• * Controls on money influencing politics has generated a huge black market and vast commercial enterprises to supply the cash.

For policy wonks and other people with too much time to kill, this creates an important and rather libertarian conclusion: attempts to restrict supply will inevitably exacerbate the original problem. Sure, a few heads were ingesting new and exotic drugs in the 1960’s but every attempt to make drug use illegal stoked its mystique. Banning booze led Ma and Pa to become moonshiners while Lil Sis became a flapper in a speakeasy. Attempts to eliminate private firearm ownership have led to a more aggressive brand of street thug. And this election cycle is breaking all records for campaign cash from lobbyist.

Legislators and other disreputable sorts should head history, though they rarely do.

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