I'm very much looking forward to reading this week's blog reflections and entering into the seemingly imminent melee. Friday's class discussion finally sparked some healthy and substantive debate, mostly centered around the issue of gun control; We're still debating the same issue of liberalism-versus-realism just transposed from an interstate to an interpersonal scale: can people cooperate, reduce or eliminate guns, and maximize payout in the Prisoner's Dilemna? Or are they fated to compete, arm themselves, and reach a Nash equilibrium? I think the very fact that gun control sparked such a more vibrant debate than straight political has is a validation of constructivism: most people identify more directly with (and are more passionate about) a position on gun control than a position on international relations theory. We're not even debating policy alternatives: the general consensus seems to be that gun registration and restrictions on assault rifles are a good idea.
Because this is really a debate about theory and not policy, I'd like to address BoVice's assertion that, as he would put it, "idealism is silly" because it is a normative statement ("this is how things should be") that ignores fundamental limits on what can be and provides no prescription for how things can change. I don't entirely disagree with this assertion: applying the gun control example, it is silly to claim that "no one should have guns" because curiosity, greed, and an aggressive streak in at least some humans ensure that there will always be a demand for guns, and the demand for guns ensures that there will always be a supply of guns.
Yet the logic of this argument extends only to a point. An unachievable end should be conceptualized as a kind of mathematical asymptote, which can never be reached but may always be approached. In some cases, approaching an end yields drastically different results than achieving an end -- as in the case of communism and objectivism, which collapse because they are exploited and corrupted by a finite if variable number of people who don't conform to the respective philosophies' unrealistic assumptions about human nature. Attempting to ban guns absolutely would probably produce such a catastrophic effect: a massive illegal arms trade laden with all the negative externalities of organized crime. But the more targeted, albeit still idealistic and unachievable, aim of banning automatic weapons would produce useful results: although such weapons would still exist, they would be less frequent and more expensive; arms with less destructive potential would prevail.
I'm not entirely sure how to algorithmically distinguish useful and helpful from destructive and useless aims. Anyone who solves this question should let me know, so we can share in the Nobel Prize for Figuring Out The Universe. It's possible that some of it may be circumstantial. But, as a general rule, I'd say aims should be circumscribed only by a handful of laws governing human nature and the physical world: humans will always be imperfect and incapable of acting on consistent principle, they will never be entirely rational, they will always have desires, ambitions, and animosities, and...oh, I don't know, there are probably some more. Oh, yeah, and they will always be innately lazy. As a social science student, I'm not all that good at the physical world: i vaguely remember relativity, Newton's laws, and so forth, but in general these are a pretty minor factor in restricting the achievability of ideals.
Posts
2 comments:
The question for me lies in whether or not the Assault Weapons Ban ever actually did anything. Gun-related deaths continue to decline, even in the face of increasingly unrestricted gun ownership. Assault weapons constitute an incredibly small amount of murders anyway (look to "Rational Basis Analysis of 'Assault Weapon' Prohibition" by David Kopel for more info), and actually expending resources on restricting their use almost seems like a waste when put into the broader context. More murders are committed by handgun or hunting rifle than assault weapon. This largely has to do with their unavailability, but the fact remains that there isn't significant evidence that they play the destabilizing role in murder that is often argued.
Banning assault weapons (particularly weapons that can easily be converted into automatics) doesn't take any resources. Even a minimally enforced ban would likely have a significant impact on the availability assault weapons, simply because highly visible, legitimate sources of weapons won't sell them out of customary deference to the law, and the black market tends to inflate prices.
The point of an assault weapon ban isn't as much reducing overall murder rates (it's about as easy to kill someone with a shotgun or a pistol as it is with an assault rifle), but rather mitigating the large-scale acts of violence that have an especially destructive effect on the fabric of a community, mostly massacres and gang warfare. Assault weapons, as the name would imply, allow people to kill more rapidly and effectively in a combat situation.
Of course, the people interested in rapid and effective instruments of death are often the people with extensive connections to the illicit arms market, so a minimally enforced ban would have a limited effect. Truly effective arms control would require greater border security to prevent the importation of black market weapons - yet another iteration of security.
Post a Comment