Category Archives: Reason

Gunning For Your Rights: Data Vs. Rights-Based Deductive Reasoning

GUNS, Individual Rights, Natural Law, Reason, Science

When motivating for the individual, natural rights to life and property always proceed from an argument from rights and not from a utilitarian, outcome-based position. After all, individual rights are not predicated on an optimal statistical outcome.

With respect to the Second Amendment right of self-defense: Ample empirical data exist of a statistically meaningful correlation between a well-armed citizenry—i.e., in middle-class neighborhoods as opposed to in gangland—and lower crime rates, in aggregate. New Hampshire is an example of a heavily armed, low-crime state.

Moreover, the benefits of a well-armed population redound to the non-carrying crowd. David Kopel is one of the finest and most respected 2nd Amendment scholars in the country. About these “free riders,” Kopel writes the following in the Arizona Law Review, Summer 2001, Symposium on Guns, Crime, and Punishment in America:

American homes which do not have guns enjoy significant “free rider” benefits. Gun owners bear financial and other burdens of gun ownership; but gun-free and gun-owning homes enjoy exactly the same general burglary deterrence effects from widespread American gun ownership. This positive externality of gun ownership is difficult to account for in a litigation context (since the quantity and cost of deterred crime is difficult to measure), and may even go unnoticed by court–since the free rider beneficiaries (non-gun owners) are not represented before the court.

In other words, the unarmed owe the armed among you a debt of gratitude. We subsidize your safety. Read on.

However, what if this were this not the case? What if, for some weird, wonderful, unlikely and inexplicable reason, arming yourself, commensurate with your right to defend your life, increased the aggregate crime rate in your community? Would this hypothetical empirical data somehow invalidate your inalienable, individual right to protect your life, loved-ones and property?

No! It would so do only if you accept that, de facto, you do not posses an inherent right to life and property.

For, at the risk of repeating what ought to be obvious:

… a right that can’t be defended is a right in name only. Inherent in the idea of an inalienable right is the right to mount a vigorous defense of the same right. If you cannot by law defend your life, you have no right to life.
By logical extension, Britons are bereft of the right to life. Not only are the traditional ‘Rights of Englishmen’—the inspiration for the American founders—no longer cool in Cool Britannia; but they’ve been eroded in law. The great system of law that the English people once held dear, including the 1689 English Bill of Rights—subsumed within which was the right to possess arms—is no longer. British legislators have disarmed their law-abiding subjects, who now defend themselves against a pampered, protected and armed criminal class at their own peril. Naturally, most of the (unnatural) elites enjoy taxpayer-funded security details. …

To Love Liberty Is Lonely

Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Liberty, Reason

Walter Block: “I think most people are hard wired to oppose freedom and justice, so I’m only optimistic in the long run: oh, 1000 years or so.”

So true, Walter my mentor. As another wag once said, the argument for freedom is a rational one; the argument for collectivism an emotional argument. Which is more intuitive to most people, reason or emotion? The latter, of course.

More Walter.

In The Media, It’s All About The Angle, The Spin

Anti-Semitism, Europe, Islam, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Media, Reason

You ought to take note of the media’s meta-narrative on the issues, by which is meant the overarching theme that infests each and every news story. You’ll discover that there’s an angle, a spin. Thus, bimbo Brooke Baldwin (transcript not up yet), a CNN anchorette, framed a perfectly logical statement made by ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU as “controversial,” in Baldwin’s words. Said Bibi:

“I would like to tell all of the European Jews, and all Jews wherever you are, Israel is the home of every Jew.”

Because the thought process of the ubiquitous bimbo is so obtuse (blunt, not sharp); it’s hard to discern what is meant by such utterances. In other words, why is what Bibi said controversial? This is unclear to the rational individual.

The truth is that the subordinate satellites states that make up Europe refuse—and no longer have the power—to properly and vigorously defend their innocent citizens, Jewish and Christian, from an identifiable threat:

… the Monster State is inherently both stupid and evil. Like a primitive organism, it answers to nobody and nothing but its reflexive need to grow.

To wit, the Monster State refuses to protect its people from plagues. It welcomes high-risk travelers from the Ebola hot-zones. Simultaneously, it quarantines aspiring fighters for Jihad here at home, in the West, so the homeland is the only arena in which they can act-out.

The nightwatchman state of classical liberalism would keep killers out of the country, not in the country.

What Bibi said follows from an irremediable reality articulated in “A Modest Libertarian Proposal: Keep Jihadis OUT, Not IN.”