When you mention the word ‘Prohibition’ in a political context most people’s thought fly to the 1920’s, Rum Runners, Al Capone, and the failed great experiment, but that is so much more to legal prohibition that simply alcohol.
We pass laws all the time to prohibit the posses of materials or the commission of acts, but what never happens is total success. Prohibition does not stop people from acquiring materials their desire, or engaging in acts they feel that they must do. The legal action may reduce the incidents, but it does not eliminate them.
This should not be taken as an argument that all legal prohibitions are foolish and should be voided. We have a right and proper prohibition on murder, theft, assault, and hosts of other actions and materials, but these laws come with a cost, a cost that in these cases is well justified. However not all prohibitions are worth their cost.
The federal prohibition on marijuana in my opinion cost far more than it benefits us. I have no doubt that removal of this prohibition will have costs, addiction and accidents I think are easily predicable ones, but they would cost society less than our current, and insane, war on a weed.
I have family and friends advocating a new federals prohibition on assault rifles/weapons. I do not doubt their intention or sincerity. I take it as a given that they hold this position because they feel it will benefit our society, but I also suspect that they think this would be a low cost or even free prohibition. I don’t think this would be the case.
The law would have to be enforced. Agents empowered to seek out law breakers, investigations created to gather the required evidence, courts empanelled to try the suspects, jails enlarged to house those convicted, parole officers hired to monitor the ex-cons after their release, and a host of other direct costs. Aside for these monetary factors there are other costs that need to be considered.
Enacted, the prohibition means hat the supporters are willing to imprison people for possession of a material without any other crime. A person who has threatened no one, who has harmed no one, is subject to criminal punishments, including fines, prison, and other negative effects, such as difficulty in gain employment and such. This is a heft cost to lay upon people, I would insist that you have to posses a very compelling reason for doing that.
Of course the counter is that a prohibition will save lives, and saving lives is a very compelling reason.
But will it save lives?
We know from other countries that compliance with a prohibition will be low, millions of weapons would still be floating out there, and a prohibition would do nothing to address the causes.
‘Assault Weapons’ are used and very very few crimes, and aren’t even the most common weapon in mass/spree killings, so prohibiting them does very little. The causes run deep, most likely starting in biology, running through environment and most critically all of this is cooked in culture. I do not find it credible at all that all the influencing factors to create a spree killer would fall into place and then that potential mass murdered declines to go a rampage because he can’t get an AR-15, when shotguns and pistols would do the job as well. In my opinion all a prohibition would achieve is a change in the tool used, but not in the outcome. To force killers to switch to the already preferred weapon, the pistol, I am not willing to pay the price of prohibition.
I had to post this. The face of gun-control.
http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/scott-whitlock/2013/04/03/chris-matthews-links-pro-second-amendment-ted-cruz-prosecutor-shooti
It really is amazing to me just how irresponsible many of the high-profile advocates of gun-control are. The level of demagoguery is something that belongs to a bygone era, perhaps 1860. These fools really seem like they want a civil war. If they keep it up they just might get one. I hope they fail.
It is such a contentious issue that finding a neutral source might be difficult. But this wikipedia page doesn’t look bad. Note how even mild mannered Canadians resisted enforcement of the law so much that 70% of the long guns that were supposed to be registered never were.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Firearms_Registry
Excellent post, Brad!!! I LOVE it when another culture has tried it and we can look at their resullts!! This is particularly cool because it is Canadians. They share our continent and have similarities in culture – enough such that extrapolation to our own culture is reasonable. Geat info!! (Do you have a link to look it up at?)
Regarding policy costs
Canada had a fun experiment with registering all rifles and shotguns. At the time handgun registration already existed in Canada, but handgun ownership was fairly rare while long gun ownwership was common. The anti-gun movement claimed the new registration policy would save lives and only cost 100 million dollars.
Ten years later and 2 billion dollars spent, that law is dead and buried after needlessly aggravating millions of innocent Canadians and arguably shifting power in Canadian politics. And all that without having any noticeable effect on solving Canadian crime, 2 billion dollars wasted that might have been spent more productively by directly fighting crime.
So even people who hate guns will pay a cost they might not understand they are paying by supporting many of the proposed anti-gun policies which at first glance seem to cost them nothing.
The first thing to get straight about this policy to is to defy the propaganda word “assault weapon”. The real target of the banners are rifles, so this current campaign should be called the campaign to ban rifles.
So-called “assault weapons” are a fiction invented by the anti-gun movement, and have no place in reality except as a legal fiction when some law is passed against them. Every one of those anti-“assault-weapon” laws has a portion which defines the legal fiction so that law can be enforced. And most of those laws have contradictory definitions just because “assault weapons” ARE so fictional. In fact the California definition is so arbitrary and capricious that police have even arrested the same man twice even though both times it turned out he was not in actual violation of the law. Even police can’t tell what is illegal vs legal since the concept underlying the law is so arbitrary.
What I find hugely ironic is even if the desire by some people to ban so-called “assault weapons” is genuine, almost every proposed law to do so is having the exact opposite of the effect desired by the banners. Instead of reducing the number of such weapons in the hands of the public it is dramatically increasing them. This is no surprise since the exact same thing happened in 1989 and 1994, the last times our nation tried to ban these firearms.
For example, the bill proposed today by Senator Diane Feinstein, which is an enlargement of her earlier ban which was in force from 1994 to 2004, is really just a ban on manufacture and not a ban on possession. Her bill will not take any rifle away from a person who already owned it before passage of her law. So naturally people are buying rifles which might be banned before the law goes into effect. The gun-control movement is creating an artificial demand which is dramatically multiplying the number of such firearms in the hands of the public above and beyond normal market forces.
Before 1989, the rifles which today so scare the anti-gunners were rare and expensive and the manufacturers few. Those rifles were mostly of interest to gun-buffs and collecters, and the vast majority of gun-owners had no desire to ever own one. No desire up until the anti-gunners tried to ban them, that is. So today millions of these rifles are in the hands of the public, the AR-15 type rifle is manufactured by almost every large gun company in America and a host of small companies, and the AR-15 type rifle is the best selling rifle in America for the last few years.
Very ironic.