Wednesday, October 19, 2005
More From Da Perfessor
If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have found this great column by John Stossel on the worthlessness of gun control laws.
I wanted to know why the laws weren’t working, so I asked the experts. “I’m not going in the store to buy no gun,” said one maximum-security inmate in New Jersey. “So, I could care less if they had a background check or not.”
“There’s guns everywhere,” said another inmate. “If you got money, you can get a gun.”
Talking to prisoners about guns emphasizes a few key lessons. First, criminals don’t obey the law. (That’s why we call them “criminals.") Second, no law can repeal the law of supply and demand. If there’s money to be made selling something, someone will sell it.
A study funded by the Department of Justice confirmed what the prisoners said. Criminals buy their guns illegally and easily. The study found that what felons fear most is not the police or the prison system, but their fellow citizens, who might be armed. One inmate told me, “When you gonna rob somebody you don’t know, it makes it harder because you don’t know what to expect out of them.”
No kidding, huh? It isn’t a coincidence that concealed carry laws have consistently driven crime rates down, folks.
There’s more…
And there’s another myth, with a special risk of its own. The myth has it that the Supreme Court, in a case called United States v. Miller, interpreted the Second Amendment—“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”—as conferring a special privilege on the National Guard, and not as affirming an individual right. In fact, what the court held is only that the right to bear arms doesn’t mean Congress can’t prohibit certain kinds of guns that aren’t necessary for the common defense.
But the money quote about that whole “militia” argument?
Interestingly, federal law still says every able-bodied American man from 17 to 44 is a member of the United States militia.
It’s actually 18 to 45, but here’s that link, in case you think he’s kidding.