A Moment of Clarity

It's worth celebrating a moment of refreshing honesty, in which pretenses of "common sense" are set aside, and a man speaks his real mind.

Realistically, a gun control plan that has any hope of getting us down to European levels of violence is going to mean taking a huge number of guns away from a huge number of gun owners.

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The US doesn't just have a gun violence problem because of its lax gun regulation. It has a problem because it has a culture that encourages large-scale gun possession, and other countries do not. That, combined with Australia's experience, makes large-scale confiscation look like easily the most promising approach for bringing US gun homicides down to European rates.

Large-scale confiscation is not going to happen. That's no reason to stop advocating it. (I also want to repeal all immigration laws and give everyone a monthly check from the government with no strings attached, and will argue for those ideas even though they're doomed.) But it does mean that we should be realistic about what gun control with an actual shot of passage can achieve. It can make us safer. It cannot make us Europe.

The main form of "safety" he seems to think Australia and similar countries achieved was a reduction in suicides by gun. As far as I know, you're as safe from suicide right now as you decide to be. Access to guns may make suicide by gun more likely, but there's no reason to believe (as he asserts) that it would "save" thousands of lives a year. It's not that hard to tie a rope, and it's quite easy to take a few extra pain pills if you can get access to them.

Still, just because I disagree with everything about his proposal and a lot about his analysis, let's celebrate his honesty. This is the real goal: large scale confiscation of firearms, as well as completely eliminating immigration restrictions and instituting a universal basic income. Disarm the public to the greatest possible degree, completely eliminate official border security as well, and then tax anyone with property for enough to pay everyone who comes as much as they are said to 'need.'

Clearly he thinks this will lead to a US that looks like Europe. It will, in the sense that it would destroy both American and Europe. America would rapidly absorb multitudes more from the poorest parts of the world, and rapidly lose whatever wealth could fly. Europe would lose the protection the American military has provided it for seventy years, and with it the capacity to sustain public assistance budgets as large as has been common for decades. That isn't what he imagines will happen, but that is what would happen in fact.