Common Sense Gun Control

Here's my thoughts on the "Criminals don't follow the law so why have laws" argument:

Laws are attempts to regulate behavior. Criminal laws are reactive regulation. They can't prevent behavior, they can only react to behavior. Reactive regulation is absolutely necessary. If someone commits a crime some penalty must be imposed to correct their behavior. Criminal laws are NOT preventative regulation. Penalties cannot be imposed on someone who has not exhibited a behavior to prevent them from exhibiting that behavior in the future.

Regulators sometimes think they can impose some type of clever reactive regulation to effect preventative regulation. I sympathize, but my concern will always be that it is impossible for a regulator to control future behavior without restricting present day behavior. The reason why some people argue criminals don't follow the law is not to point out a failure in the entire system of law. It's to point out that no system of law can be designed to achieve perfect preventative regulation. If perfection is a goal in an imperfect system, you can never be finished creating more restrictive regulations.

So over time, as their reactive regulations fail to prevent behavior, their regulations necessarily get more and more restrictive of behavior. Penalties begin to be imposed on people who have never exhibited a criminal behavior. In a free nation, we should be bias toward the least amount of penalties imposed on people who have done nothing wrong in order to control people who continue to do wrong regardless.

Of course, there's always the possibility that the regulators are regulating some aspect of the behavior that has little control over the behavior to begin with. That might be why their polished attempts to regulate the behavior keep producing more of the behavior.

 

My sarcasm may have muddied the waters in my OP. My bad. I'm not advocating for no laws. I'm lambasting the typical leftist reaction to reports of gun violence: more gun laws, on top of the tens of thousands of applicable laws already on the books. The dou¢hebag in the OP was a convicted violent felon, and it was against the law for him to own any guns. He owned a small arsenal nonetheless, along with a boatload of ammunition. If we're not going to enforce the relevant statutes re: known violent criminals, what makes anyone believe that throwing another law into the same blender is going be worth the paper it's printed on?

The answer is clear: no one believes additional that laws will amount to anything more than virtue signalling, so the left will continue working towards its real objective - confiscation.

 

It is anarchy when a citizen disobeys an illegitimate law?

Back in 1850 Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which criminalized the act of assisting a slave to escape. It was an illegitimate law, and juries around the country refused to convict when the government attempted to enforce it. Jury Nullification, the conscience of the community, can be a very good thing.

If you had been around in 1851 would you have voted to convict under that law, just so there wouldn't be 'anarchy'?

 

A society dedicated to the rule of law, in this case the US Constitution as Supreme Law of The Land, that imposes penalty for violating illegitimate legislative acts cannot be described as "free". It thus becomes an authoritarian regime like we are now. The many innocent citizens of J6 now prosecuted and imprisoned for exercising their First Amendment rights are perfect examples.

If your hypothetical 'free society' ruled that each head of household must sacrifice his first born son, would you obey as a citizen?

St. Paul talked about such in Corinthians II--the spirit of the law gives life, the letter of the law gives death.

 

What you mention is the essence of Henry Thoreau's philosophy of life as described in On The Duty of Civil Disobedience.

Brave whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and even Tucker Carlson today are the essential spirit of what might be called the American Spirit.

When tyranny is abroad, submission is a crime. All the doctors who spoke out against the Covid tyranny are brave and good men and women. Those pitiful cowards who followed orders are traitors.

 

The issue is how, in a free society, can it be decided that a legislative act is illegitimate? One way is to challenge the act in the courts and establish that it conflicts with some higher law, such as the constitution. Another way is to support a political movement to persuade legislators of its illegitimacy and get them to repeal or amend the law.

However, if the individual or some faction simply ignore or disobey the act, then they risk being arrested, indicted, convicted, imprisoned, etc. since the act is on the books and still in force. In some circumstances individuals may feel so strongly that they think the risk justified. But they have to be prepared to pay the penalty.

 

It's quite simple, really. If the individual informs himself, if he studies the founding document, reads books about its principles and interpretations, he will be able to discern between legitimate legislation and its opposite. For example, if the individual studies on Article I Section 8, he would learn the actual, enumerated powers that the government has been granted by the people.

If legislation is not founded upon any of those enumerated powers, it becomes illegitimate. If legislation violates any part of the founding document, as the Unpatriot Act does with the Fourth Amendment, that legislation is illegitimate. If one reads, speaks and understands the English Language, one can understand this.

If one needs men in black robes to tell him how and what the language means, well, it's pretty much all over.

 

Very well taken. But, getting serious, laws against gun ownership are not to save people's lives but to give government control over individuals.

 

In that case it is "pretty much all over". The legal opinions of ordinary citizens don't have significant effect.

Arguments about what the law means are made by people trained in the law, tested by examinations, and admitted to the bar.

Decisions regarding what the law means and how to apply it in actual cases are made by a subset of lawyers who have been elected or appointed to judgeships.

Lawyers have always had an outsized influence on the government of the US. 24 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were lawyers. "The rule of law" enables a freer society than having government bureaucrats and officials interpret laws on their own or just make it up as they go.

 

Charles Dickens was quite right--the law sir, is an ass.

St. Paul was also right in Corinthians: the spirit of the law brings life, but the letter of the law brings death.

Since Pierson v. Ray in 1967, in which Earl Warren concocted the sophistry of qualified immunity for cops, it's very clear that "the law is an ass" used to suppress the people, but never to prosecute the vast array of criminals employed by the federal government. One need not be an attorney to be able to see this.

 

And even when intent is clearly criminal, they are more likely to bring a gun and shoot earlier if they think the victim may be armed. It makes robbery at knifepoint obsolete.