Category Archives: regulation

Gun “Control”

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The Wall Street Journal‘s student-written Future View column turned to gun control recently, and Rasmus Haure-Peterson, a philosophy and economics major at the University of Oxford, had a thought in his letter.  He wrote, in part,

Given the spree of mass shootings, some targeted gun-control measures are needed for the sake of a safer America, even if they curb some people’s rights on the margins. But gun-rights advocates won’t make that concession unless they know that giving an inch won’t cost them a mile.

Haure-Peterson was on the right track until he got to the first part of this. It’s wrong, morally and legally, to punish—especially under the insidious guise of “restrictions,” or during the hysteria of “mass shootings”—everyone for the crimes of a few. Go after the few.

He got back on track with the last. As long as the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party flat refuse to say what their gun control limiting principle is, the only possible conclusion is that they’re after the natural limit: taking all of our weapons.

Red Flag Gun Laws

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In which I disagree with Ben Shapiro and others who support red flag gun laws.  There are a number of reasons for my disagreement; here are some, in no particular order. They are, each of them individually, must less collectively, deal breakers.

There’s considerable concern—legitimately so—about going through due process to protect the rights of the individual being “accused” of mental instability or of being dangerous otherwise to folks with whom he might come in contact (home, shopping mall,…). If the man truly is that dangerous, though, the court process cannot act quickly enough to mitigate the situation in the real time during which the danger supposedly exists.

There’s the question of defining “mentally unstable” or of defining other parameters of actionable danger the man allegedly represents.  Psychiatric problems have a myriad ways of manifesting, each unique to the man and to the environment in which he exists.  A stroll through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5 is the current edition) illustrates the problem: this is not something a layman can easily understand or apply—and it’s a layman, a cop initially and a judge finally, who will make the decision, for all the “expert witnesses” that will be brought by the conflicting parties to the case).  Even assuming precise enough definitions and diagnoses, both assessments and treatments are concomitantly varied, and they’re slow to diagnose and slow to bring effect. The slowness to identify also prevents timely enough action to mitigate the situation in the real time during which the danger allegedly exists.

There’s the question of who makes the determination of the mental/criminal danger and of what the action should be.  We’ve seen the outcome of government definitions (regardless of any DSM, it’s Government that writes the laws and the legal definitions)—the Gulag of Soviet Russia, the “reeducation” camps of the People’s Republic of China’s Mao Tse-tung and Xi Jinping.  Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein didn’t bother with such niceties; those two just had their undesirables executed.

Each of those, too, constitute prior restraint—acting to limit the ability of a man to act before he acts.  Such prior restraint is the stuff of tyranny. Yet we’re already seeing a ravening thirst on the part of our Progressive-Democrats to engage in prior restraint: those who disagree with them are variously racist, anti-immigration, excessively religious, and on and on.

There is no consideration of the rights of other members of the “dangerous” man’s household.  Their Second Amendment rights would be grievously abused were weapons removed from that man’s household.

That rights abuse becomes dangerous, potentially lethally so, in the case of domestic abuse.  The man’s—the household’s, the abused spouse’s, the child’s—access to weapons is blocked, but the abusive man is still in the house, now with a spouse and one or more children who’ve been denied any means of defense.  And he’s angry from the accusation and the resulting restriction.

Related to this are divorce and child custody cases.  Both of these classes of case are rife with (which is not to say universally so) one or both parties vilifying the other in order to gain advantage in the divorce or child custody.  This is an environment that begs for the abuse of false, or even just emotionally-driven erroneous, accusations of a danger necessitating taking away the weapons.

There’s the false positive: the man is accused and then found not to be the unstable or otherwise dangerous individual originally believed. How does he get his destroyed reputation back?  The blowback for a false accusation of which Shapiro spoke cannot restore the destroyed reputation.  The blowback can only get a sum of money—which has little value to a man whose reputation has been shredded.

There is, also, the false negative: the man is incorrectly found not to be the unstable or otherwise dangerous. Now he’s not only still dangerous, but he’s been warned that he’s being watched.  And perhaps seeking vengeance for the accusation, or his potential actions made even more lethal, and more likely.

All of this, too, results in targeting the tool; the man who might use the tool is considered only secondarily, if at all.

Then there’s the constitutionality of the matter.  Here’s the Second Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

There’s nothing in there—not a syllable—remotely resembling a but for.  There is no phrasing suggesting “except when Government, or a Government-appointed body, decides a man might be dangerous some time in the future.”  The right to keep and bear Arms[] shall not be infringed.  Full stop.

Finally, there’s the matter of limiting principles.  Red flag laws—gun control laws in general—do not carry with them any articulation of a limiting principle that says the law or the evolution of the law goes thus far and no farther.  There is no articulation of a natural limit that blocks further restriction even were the relevant authority wishing to go farther.  The law will just continue to have its definitions and restrictions broadened and tightened in accordance with the wishes—well-intentioned or other—of succeeding administrations.

Shapiro said in his The Ben Shapiro Show, as cited by Fox News, that

partisan anger and political abuse of proposed red-flag gun laws could lead to a power grab by the government if statutes and regulations aren’t instituted properly.

Indeed. And as just laid out, those statutes and regulations cannot be instituted properly. It’s an impossible task.

Shapiro went on:

This is why I say that when the left targets everybody on the right as a potential shooter or a supporter of a shooter, they’re undermining the ability to actually pass laws that could actually do something about this stuff. So, normally we should all be able to agree on a red-flag law.

Again, no.  We are not able to agree on a red-flag law. Not ever.  But not because the Left will always be with us, trying to take our guns away from us on any excuse at all, or because the Right will always be with us saying don’t touch our guns in any way whatsoever.

Rather because safeguards do not, cannot, exist. To paraphrase James Madison, hopefully not too badly,

If men were angels, no Arms would be necessary.

We’re not angels.  We’re men, individual citizens, and operators of government.  Imperfect men. The Second Amendment is our only protection.  The limiting principle there is clear: shall not be infringed, with no caveats or exceptions.

There’s Surveillance

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…and there’s surveillance.

The FBI is looking at ways to scan Facebook (and Twitter, et al.) postings with a view to proactively identify and reactively monitor threats to the United States and its interests.

In late 2016, following an investigation by the American Civil Liberties Union into social-media monitoring done by outside developers on behalf of law enforcement, Facebook and Twitter cracked down on those services and explicitly banned the use of their data for surveillance purposes….
Facebook’s ban allowed law-enforcement agencies to look at public profiles manually but not use software designed for large-scale collection and analysis of user data.

Because

the restrictions reflect a growing understanding that even information posted to a public social network can be misused when gathered in large quantities and paired with outside data sources.

But Facebook’s objections (and they’re not the only Big Tech objectors) are just a bit precious and not a little bit hypocritical. Facebook does exactly that sort of surveillance—with software, mind you—explicitly with a view to selling those connections to advertisers, and others.

The only difference is claimed purpose.

If such surveillance is a bad thing—and it most assuredly is—Facebook, et al., need to cut it out, too.

Suicide Pact

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Now The Wall Street Journal has joined the bandwagon.

Gun rights need to be protected, but the Second Amendment is not a suicide pact.

Indeed, they do, and it is not. But violating the Second Amendment as a matter of routine, or gutting it as the Progressive-Democrats want to do (background checks? Where would the Progressive-Democrats stop? They refuse to say, they refuse to articulate their limiting principle) certainly would be national suicide.

…those in the gun lobby who claim that denying access to guns from those with a history of mental illness violates individual rights.

This is a cynically offered straw man. No one in the gun lobby argues that denying access to guns from those with a history of mental illness violates the individual rights of that person with that history. Their argument is that the definition of such a history is too vague for practical applicability. More broadly, their argument is that the laws don’t adequately protect the individual rights of those surrounding or otherwise associated with the individual in question.

Better is the Enemy of Good Enough

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In the aftermath of Boeing’s failure with its 737MAX, the FAA—and foreign jurisdictions—are on the verge of entering that larger failure regime.

As Boeing Co and safety regulators push to complete long-awaited fixes for 737 MAX jets, testing has expanded to cover increasingly unlikely emergencies including potential computer failures pinpointed by overseas authorities, according to US government officials briefed on the details.
The broader risk analyses and simulator scenarios, some details of which haven’t been reported before, show the lengths to which leaders of the Federal Aviation Administration, in coordination with their foreign counterparts, are going to verify the safety of the MAX fleet before allowing the planes to fly again.

And one thing that is not being addressed in the lengths to which these leaders are going is the adequacy of training that pilots are required to undergo to receive certification.  Instead, excuses are offered.

Ali Bahrami, the FAA’s top safety official, told a Senate subcommittee during a hearing that the June tests “identified a very remote failure case,” adding that FAA pilots decided “the level of proficiency that is required to recover from this event was exceptional” and could overwhelm average airline crews.

Which raises two questions. One is how “very remote,” and when does that criterion cross the Better-Good Enough line?

The other (stipulating that line is not crossed here) is why “average airline crews” would be so inadequately trained?  Where, too, are pilots trained to disconnect from the computers, and disconnect the computers from the aircraft, and go manual? And: what is the adequacy of the manual backups?

In the end, though, demanding Better before going to production too often prevents going to production.  Demanding perfection first—rather than questing after it (or merely after Better) constantly and iteratively while iteratively producing the outcome of those quality iterations—prevents serious efforts to produce.