Thursday, March 4, 2010

Eugene Volokh on Reason TV

From Reason TV, the very reasonable Eugene Volokh.



One thing he said made me realize something for the first time. The famous claim that most DGUs are merely brandishing the gun in order to scare away the criminal was mentioned in the video. How can pro-gun folks use that argument when they continually demand proof and statistics for everything proposed by their opponents? Is there a double standard there?

The thing I most liked in his remarks was the fact that it's difficult to say if more guns means less crime. There are conflicting studies.

What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.

4 comments:

  1. "How can pro-gun folks use that argument when they continually demand proof and statistics for everything proposed by their opponents? Is there a double standard there?"

    Well there are a couple of reasons that pro-gun folks can use that argument.

    One is that it is impossible to prove a negative. Since the crime that was going to be committed was not committed at the mere brandishing of a firearm, how can one accurately portray that? The crime didn't happen. Where do we keep statistics on crimes that didn't happen, and their causes? (Although, Prof. Kleck did attempt to quantify this, and conservatively came up with his "2.5 million times annually" number. To me, the most telling part of that is that he admits that he was anti-gun and set out to prove that guns were linked to higher crime rates. In other words, he was trying to prove that more guns = more crime. And he couldn't. It turned his thinking around.)

    Secondly, the individual right to keep and bear arms exists (whether you agree or like it, it does and the Supreme Court agrees). In order to put gun control in effect, the gun control folks are the ones that must prove their side, not vice versa. In other words, pro-gun folks don't have to "prove" anything.

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  2. Once again a Type 2A demonstrates that logic flows out of a gun barrel.

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  3. I agree that it is difficult to prove that more guns equal less crime. But it’s super easy to disprove the Brady Campaign’s “More guns = more blood” hypothesis.

    -TS

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  4. TS says:

    I agree that it is difficult to prove that more guns equal less crime. But it’s super easy to disprove the Brady Campaign’s “More guns = more blood” hypothesis.

    PRECISELY!

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