There is no gun debate. There is only demagoguery masquerading as debate. It is boring, not in the slow-boring way, but boring because it is all a rehash with no real path to resolution.
Prosecutorial discretion, though, is a real issue with concrete examples that permeate multiple policy issues. Our lazy acceptance of prosecutorial discretion is driven by a good faith understanding that we have more laws than resources to enforce them, so some picking-and-choosing is to be expected. That has historically been true for prosecutorial discretion in most cases, but this has changed a lot over the past 15 years in ways that are really bad for our system of government.
When used as a way to advance policy, as is happening in D.C., prosecutorial discretion is a perversion of justice and undermines democracy. If representatives cannot pass a law and expect it to be "faithfully executed", then we cease to be a nation of laws at all. If the executive branch chooses to ignore some laws because they, and not the legislature, think the law is wrong then that is dangerously close to authoritarianism, with the application of the law being subject to the whims of one person alone.
To paraphrase the headline of today's essay: "The policy-driven prosecutorial discretion is the problem"
Every legal gun owner in the United States knows this. This is literally the conversation whenever gun owners talk about gun control.
It’s the most obvious, yet under discussed issue whenever gun control is discussed. And one of the main reasons gun owners say things like... 1st enforce the laws you already have before making new ones.
Of course, it will never happen.
Disclaimer: I own several guns. All locked away in a safe. I don’t shoot nearly as much as I would like, but it is fun.
Side note: nothing compares to Alaska for open or concealed carry or firearms. Though the little town in Eastern Oregon that my cabin is in comes close.
The "tons of rules but no enforcement" idea is probably my biggest hang up with progressive thought on criminal justice. I talk to people in philly telling me that it's actually a socioeconomic problem and we have to do the entire progressive laundry list of ideas because criminals are poor people learning about crime from other poor people.
Yet somehow they aren't leaning anything from being told "you will get away with crime". It's totally braindead
Carrying a gun around changes your perspective and can put you in a heightened state of alert. Many years ago, when I was a young libertarian (for my sins), I went to an open carry event. I have always owned guns but had never just walked around with one on my hip and sling around my back. It gives the wearer a sense of power but also a mild sense of paranoia. Like, if I had to use these tools of offense/defense right now how would I do it? Where is my cover? It was mostly what me and some friends talked about while walking to the event.
I don’t think the average person carrying around a gun in public is a good idea for this reason, it distorts your reality and in some important ways puts you in a low key warfare mindset when you are at the McDonald’s getting a number 1 or waterproofing the community center at the church. For most Americans this is not only unnecessary but a distracting and uncomfortable mental disruption to being a positive, peaceful civilian participant in community life.
Matt gets a lot right in this post. It's mostly about handguns not "assault rifles."
But I feel like were never going to get anywhere in this debate until.all sides can speak honestly about the racial angle which Matt tiptoes around here.
Progressives didn't lose their appetite for enforcing gun laws because one day they woke up.and found incarceration declasse. They lost heart because such laws were having a disparate impact on blacks.
Even controlling for poverty, the black homicide rate is around 4 times the rate in general population.
This is the data behind the progressive talking point about Red State homicides being higher. That is largely a factor of having larger black populations as statewide share in places like Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia etc or cities like Louisville, KY or St Louis having high murder rates. That's not the whole story obviously as low strata whites will have elevated murder rates too but it's a very big part of it. If we as a society could bring the black murder rate down to the rate for whites and Latinos of equal SES it would have a huge effect on bigger picture
But conservatives have blind spots too because this does suggest that the south could in fact cut its own murder rate by adopting tougher laws against handguns and I feel that this is insufficiently talked about because the politics around gun laws are very different in the south than the north.
As one of Matt's conservative leaning readers, I do think the trend toward lax gun laws in Red States has gone too far
..not just for violent nut jobs being too easily able acquire guns but way way too many gun suicides and accidental shootings as well.
And i think conservative Republicans as the party of guns bear a big responsibility here. We're probably never going to get meaningful gun regulation in America without conservatives inititiating it or at least in broad measure supporting it. Instead too many just deflect from guns every time a mass shooting happens.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like guns. But even if we had no guns in this country, does anyone think we'd have Japan-levels of crime? Clearly culture also plays a big part.
I was on the red line last night. There was a guy drinking a case of NattyLight and another drinking out of a brown bag. The latter had a blue tooth speaker blaring music.
When I got off three teenage girls jumped the turnstile.
Why do we tolerate such blatant law breaking in DC? I know the types of people who flout big rules and laws will also break small ones if they are not enforced.
This is why broken windows policing has a larger impact, because policing things like fare enforcement is going to catch people who feel entitled not to follow rules in general.
This article is a good opportunity to share an experiment I conducted on this subject. A week ago, I had come up with three questions that I'd like to see gun control advocates to answer: [https://www.slowboring.com/p/saturday-thread-2bd/comment/13940217]. Those questions were:
1. Which types of gun ownership are you demanding to ban?
2. What is your plan to get those guns out of the hands of those owners?
3. What is your plan if the owners of those guns refuse to comply?
Over the past week, I put this question to some other online communities I'm a part of that have plenty of people who'd like to see stricter gun control. Here were some of the answers I got.
1. Over 80% wanted semiautomatic rifles banned. The ones that didn't mainly wanted restrictions on magazine size and modifications to circumvent single actions, and only one response that was favorable to more gun control at all didn't want any specific gun outright banned. A minority wanted handguns banned, and a couple wanted all private gun ownership banned, with another vaguely saying "the more the better".
2. Buybacks and mandatory liability insurance were really popular answers here, both getting a very sizeable majority. Red flag laws also got considerable attention. However, about a quarter of respondents refused to answer, even when pushed by me, usually along either fatalistic grounds of "what I want won't happen, so what's the point of answering this question?", but also some variants of "you're approaching this entirely wrong, we have to just act on some gun restrictions and see what happens".
3. The refusal to respond here was even stronger, I'd guess about 40%, no matter how much I tried to press, and express my disappointment at refusing to answer. However, I'd say about another 40%, including a few who refused to answer question 2, were pretty much OK with some form of incarceration for those who wouldn't abide. The remaining ~20% wanted to resort to noncarceral options first, such as fines, or revocation of other government benefits. One answer did just simply say "pay cops better".
The actual relationship between general firearms availability and various types of of violent crime is tenuously supported and marginal at best. But as Matt blows by it, and the empirical data is highly contested, I'm happy to just register the objection and move past it. Similarly, I have huge problems with the "initiate maximum pretextual searches" model of policing that make no amount of technocratic merit to that approach compelling.
What Matt is pretty much entirely correct about is the core locus of criminal firearms use is, to a totally overwhelming degree, cheap, stolen, trafficked, or straw purchased, handguns. What I actually want to interrogate is what is meant by "carrying illegal guns" because bearing arms is a constitutional right. A right that has been denied, mostly, to urban black Americans on a totally indefensible, targeted, discriminatory basis for racist as fuck reasons. NYCs stop and frisk era presumes a blanket illegality of bearing arms that has already been found unconstitutional and is absolutely not coming back. Legal concealed carry is now going to be a thing going forwards thanks to the SCOTUS. So what do we mean by "illegal" carrying? Are we talking felon in possession? Because that's easy, everyone should agree that we should prosecute violent felons found carrying guns. Or are we talking about a paperwork violation? People who have struggled to jump through the insultingly stupid circus hoops a handful of blue states are trying to erect as a barrier to the legal exercise of a constitutional right? Your can't bait and switch compliance with an arbitrary and corrupt permitting system for "violent felon" just buy calling it "illegal carrying". Those aren't at all one in the same.
The first step here has to be to have an effective regime for allowing the legal exercise of the right of the people to bear arms while distinguishing those actual criminals who mean to use armed violence to further their enterprise. Because in most blue states a lot of "illegal" carry has never actually been illegal and recent prosecutors have been right to recognize that paperwork crimes are non-violent.
I suppose we should just zero in on the main issue. The large majority of people who illegally posses guns in America are black. This is why the current laws are not enforced properly - because it means putting more black men in prison. Imagine if prosecutors thought it was misandrist to jail so many men relative to women for committing crime and let lots of them off without charge. It's dumb.
I admit I never quite got the whole incarceration debate. Probably this is a place where my position as an outside observer (who came to this country in the past decade) is the most obvious.
Bluntly, I don’t understand why and how progressives were made to care for the freedom and well being of specific young black men, mostly adult, who are overwhelmingly guilty of crime, and not for their victims, mostly black civilians, including many women and children, and more importantly, overwhelmingly innocent?
I realize that framing might sound demagogic, but it seems to me that’s what it comes down to. That’s the trade off at the end of the day. Can someone please explain this ?
If I were to subscribe to the fashionable “critical” analysis, I might suggest that this shows some “systemic sexism (and ageism)” (against women children, the elderly) among American progressives and especially law enforcement , but I don’t buy that mode of thinking… other suggestions?
Question: Why did so many progressive thinkers and activists decide that illegal carrying is nonviolent and shouldn't be prosecuted? It's worth pondering this. I think it's a great example of really terrible racial equity thinking. There's been a lot of rhetoric out there about white power historically working to prevent Black Americans from arming themselves for self-defense. This story is linked to the valorization of Black armed self-defense that has been going on among historians for 20 years. So some people think it's allyship to tolerate illegal handgun possession, or at least they think prosecutors will inequitably target Black men for this, therefore tolerating it is a racial justice view.
If putting five pistol carriers in prison for one year each prevents a murder, then I’m for it. If it takes 500 man years of incarceration to prevent a murder, I’m against it. What I can’t stand about Matt’s gun enforcement crusade is his written about it repeatedly while making no effort to quantify the effect.
Prisons are factories of human misery. People who advocate building more of them should be rigorous about what it will achieve.
Fun fact: The US homicide rate using “hands, fists, feet,” i.e., just beating someone to death, is about half the overall (all weapon type) homicide rate in Italy. Americans are just some murderous motherfuckers.
"That’s regrettable, and I would hope over time to tighten the gun laws at both the state and federal levels."
And this is why you will have vastly fewer conservative allies in this approach than could be had otherwise.
If it is just a stepping stone to broader restrictions, it's a non-starter.
You can still do it in cities that are under Democratic control, which is where it is most needed, so it will still do some good. But few purple and no red states will follow suit.
I wish this piece had grappled with the progress Dems are actually making on gun control. Biden signed a major bill on this less than a year ago, which broadly worked by chipping away at sales and permits. A broad assault weapon ban might be out of reach, but there is plenty more incremental progress to be made there. It's true that that won't solve the handgun problem any time soon, but neither will imprisoning 5% more people for gun crimes; it's incremental progress all around.
The main point here is that Ds are cross-pressured in a difficult way on actual enforcement. Matt thinks the appropriate response is to sell out progressive DAs, which is a fair enough. But it sure seems like Axelrod & Co. have decided that re-opening the policing fight on a national scale is not a winner for Democrats, so their best bet is to focus on gun sales and keep Republicans on defense.
There is no gun debate. There is only demagoguery masquerading as debate. It is boring, not in the slow-boring way, but boring because it is all a rehash with no real path to resolution.
Prosecutorial discretion, though, is a real issue with concrete examples that permeate multiple policy issues. Our lazy acceptance of prosecutorial discretion is driven by a good faith understanding that we have more laws than resources to enforce them, so some picking-and-choosing is to be expected. That has historically been true for prosecutorial discretion in most cases, but this has changed a lot over the past 15 years in ways that are really bad for our system of government.
When used as a way to advance policy, as is happening in D.C., prosecutorial discretion is a perversion of justice and undermines democracy. If representatives cannot pass a law and expect it to be "faithfully executed", then we cease to be a nation of laws at all. If the executive branch chooses to ignore some laws because they, and not the legislature, think the law is wrong then that is dangerously close to authoritarianism, with the application of the law being subject to the whims of one person alone.
To paraphrase the headline of today's essay: "The policy-driven prosecutorial discretion is the problem"
Every legal gun owner in the United States knows this. This is literally the conversation whenever gun owners talk about gun control.
It’s the most obvious, yet under discussed issue whenever gun control is discussed. And one of the main reasons gun owners say things like... 1st enforce the laws you already have before making new ones.
Of course, it will never happen.
Disclaimer: I own several guns. All locked away in a safe. I don’t shoot nearly as much as I would like, but it is fun.
Side note: nothing compares to Alaska for open or concealed carry or firearms. Though the little town in Eastern Oregon that my cabin is in comes close.
The "tons of rules but no enforcement" idea is probably my biggest hang up with progressive thought on criminal justice. I talk to people in philly telling me that it's actually a socioeconomic problem and we have to do the entire progressive laundry list of ideas because criminals are poor people learning about crime from other poor people.
Yet somehow they aren't leaning anything from being told "you will get away with crime". It's totally braindead
Carrying a gun around changes your perspective and can put you in a heightened state of alert. Many years ago, when I was a young libertarian (for my sins), I went to an open carry event. I have always owned guns but had never just walked around with one on my hip and sling around my back. It gives the wearer a sense of power but also a mild sense of paranoia. Like, if I had to use these tools of offense/defense right now how would I do it? Where is my cover? It was mostly what me and some friends talked about while walking to the event.
I don’t think the average person carrying around a gun in public is a good idea for this reason, it distorts your reality and in some important ways puts you in a low key warfare mindset when you are at the McDonald’s getting a number 1 or waterproofing the community center at the church. For most Americans this is not only unnecessary but a distracting and uncomfortable mental disruption to being a positive, peaceful civilian participant in community life.
Matt gets a lot right in this post. It's mostly about handguns not "assault rifles."
But I feel like were never going to get anywhere in this debate until.all sides can speak honestly about the racial angle which Matt tiptoes around here.
Progressives didn't lose their appetite for enforcing gun laws because one day they woke up.and found incarceration declasse. They lost heart because such laws were having a disparate impact on blacks.
And let's be totally clear black people do in fact commit a disproportionate share of homicides. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-3.xls
Even controlling for poverty, the black homicide rate is around 4 times the rate in general population.
This is the data behind the progressive talking point about Red State homicides being higher. That is largely a factor of having larger black populations as statewide share in places like Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia etc or cities like Louisville, KY or St Louis having high murder rates. That's not the whole story obviously as low strata whites will have elevated murder rates too but it's a very big part of it. If we as a society could bring the black murder rate down to the rate for whites and Latinos of equal SES it would have a huge effect on bigger picture
But conservatives have blind spots too because this does suggest that the south could in fact cut its own murder rate by adopting tougher laws against handguns and I feel that this is insufficiently talked about because the politics around gun laws are very different in the south than the north.
As one of Matt's conservative leaning readers, I do think the trend toward lax gun laws in Red States has gone too far
..not just for violent nut jobs being too easily able acquire guns but way way too many gun suicides and accidental shootings as well.
And i think conservative Republicans as the party of guns bear a big responsibility here. We're probably never going to get meaningful gun regulation in America without conservatives inititiating it or at least in broad measure supporting it. Instead too many just deflect from guns every time a mass shooting happens.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like guns. But even if we had no guns in this country, does anyone think we'd have Japan-levels of crime? Clearly culture also plays a big part.
I was on the red line last night. There was a guy drinking a case of NattyLight and another drinking out of a brown bag. The latter had a blue tooth speaker blaring music.
When I got off three teenage girls jumped the turnstile.
Why do we tolerate such blatant law breaking in DC? I know the types of people who flout big rules and laws will also break small ones if they are not enforced.
This is why broken windows policing has a larger impact, because policing things like fare enforcement is going to catch people who feel entitled not to follow rules in general.
This article is a good opportunity to share an experiment I conducted on this subject. A week ago, I had come up with three questions that I'd like to see gun control advocates to answer: [https://www.slowboring.com/p/saturday-thread-2bd/comment/13940217]. Those questions were:
1. Which types of gun ownership are you demanding to ban?
2. What is your plan to get those guns out of the hands of those owners?
3. What is your plan if the owners of those guns refuse to comply?
Over the past week, I put this question to some other online communities I'm a part of that have plenty of people who'd like to see stricter gun control. Here were some of the answers I got.
1. Over 80% wanted semiautomatic rifles banned. The ones that didn't mainly wanted restrictions on magazine size and modifications to circumvent single actions, and only one response that was favorable to more gun control at all didn't want any specific gun outright banned. A minority wanted handguns banned, and a couple wanted all private gun ownership banned, with another vaguely saying "the more the better".
2. Buybacks and mandatory liability insurance were really popular answers here, both getting a very sizeable majority. Red flag laws also got considerable attention. However, about a quarter of respondents refused to answer, even when pushed by me, usually along either fatalistic grounds of "what I want won't happen, so what's the point of answering this question?", but also some variants of "you're approaching this entirely wrong, we have to just act on some gun restrictions and see what happens".
3. The refusal to respond here was even stronger, I'd guess about 40%, no matter how much I tried to press, and express my disappointment at refusing to answer. However, I'd say about another 40%, including a few who refused to answer question 2, were pretty much OK with some form of incarceration for those who wouldn't abide. The remaining ~20% wanted to resort to noncarceral options first, such as fines, or revocation of other government benefits. One answer did just simply say "pay cops better".
The actual relationship between general firearms availability and various types of of violent crime is tenuously supported and marginal at best. But as Matt blows by it, and the empirical data is highly contested, I'm happy to just register the objection and move past it. Similarly, I have huge problems with the "initiate maximum pretextual searches" model of policing that make no amount of technocratic merit to that approach compelling.
What Matt is pretty much entirely correct about is the core locus of criminal firearms use is, to a totally overwhelming degree, cheap, stolen, trafficked, or straw purchased, handguns. What I actually want to interrogate is what is meant by "carrying illegal guns" because bearing arms is a constitutional right. A right that has been denied, mostly, to urban black Americans on a totally indefensible, targeted, discriminatory basis for racist as fuck reasons. NYCs stop and frisk era presumes a blanket illegality of bearing arms that has already been found unconstitutional and is absolutely not coming back. Legal concealed carry is now going to be a thing going forwards thanks to the SCOTUS. So what do we mean by "illegal" carrying? Are we talking felon in possession? Because that's easy, everyone should agree that we should prosecute violent felons found carrying guns. Or are we talking about a paperwork violation? People who have struggled to jump through the insultingly stupid circus hoops a handful of blue states are trying to erect as a barrier to the legal exercise of a constitutional right? Your can't bait and switch compliance with an arbitrary and corrupt permitting system for "violent felon" just buy calling it "illegal carrying". Those aren't at all one in the same.
The first step here has to be to have an effective regime for allowing the legal exercise of the right of the people to bear arms while distinguishing those actual criminals who mean to use armed violence to further their enterprise. Because in most blue states a lot of "illegal" carry has never actually been illegal and recent prosecutors have been right to recognize that paperwork crimes are non-violent.
I suppose we should just zero in on the main issue. The large majority of people who illegally posses guns in America are black. This is why the current laws are not enforced properly - because it means putting more black men in prison. Imagine if prosecutors thought it was misandrist to jail so many men relative to women for committing crime and let lots of them off without charge. It's dumb.
I admit I never quite got the whole incarceration debate. Probably this is a place where my position as an outside observer (who came to this country in the past decade) is the most obvious.
Bluntly, I don’t understand why and how progressives were made to care for the freedom and well being of specific young black men, mostly adult, who are overwhelmingly guilty of crime, and not for their victims, mostly black civilians, including many women and children, and more importantly, overwhelmingly innocent?
I realize that framing might sound demagogic, but it seems to me that’s what it comes down to. That’s the trade off at the end of the day. Can someone please explain this ?
If I were to subscribe to the fashionable “critical” analysis, I might suggest that this shows some “systemic sexism (and ageism)” (against women children, the elderly) among American progressives and especially law enforcement , but I don’t buy that mode of thinking… other suggestions?
Question: Why did so many progressive thinkers and activists decide that illegal carrying is nonviolent and shouldn't be prosecuted? It's worth pondering this. I think it's a great example of really terrible racial equity thinking. There's been a lot of rhetoric out there about white power historically working to prevent Black Americans from arming themselves for self-defense. This story is linked to the valorization of Black armed self-defense that has been going on among historians for 20 years. So some people think it's allyship to tolerate illegal handgun possession, or at least they think prosecutors will inequitably target Black men for this, therefore tolerating it is a racial justice view.
If putting five pistol carriers in prison for one year each prevents a murder, then I’m for it. If it takes 500 man years of incarceration to prevent a murder, I’m against it. What I can’t stand about Matt’s gun enforcement crusade is his written about it repeatedly while making no effort to quantify the effect.
Prisons are factories of human misery. People who advocate building more of them should be rigorous about what it will achieve.
Fun fact: The US homicide rate using “hands, fists, feet,” i.e., just beating someone to death, is about half the overall (all weapon type) homicide rate in Italy. Americans are just some murderous motherfuckers.
"That’s regrettable, and I would hope over time to tighten the gun laws at both the state and federal levels."
And this is why you will have vastly fewer conservative allies in this approach than could be had otherwise.
If it is just a stepping stone to broader restrictions, it's a non-starter.
You can still do it in cities that are under Democratic control, which is where it is most needed, so it will still do some good. But few purple and no red states will follow suit.
I wish this piece had grappled with the progress Dems are actually making on gun control. Biden signed a major bill on this less than a year ago, which broadly worked by chipping away at sales and permits. A broad assault weapon ban might be out of reach, but there is plenty more incremental progress to be made there. It's true that that won't solve the handgun problem any time soon, but neither will imprisoning 5% more people for gun crimes; it's incremental progress all around.
The main point here is that Ds are cross-pressured in a difficult way on actual enforcement. Matt thinks the appropriate response is to sell out progressive DAs, which is a fair enough. But it sure seems like Axelrod & Co. have decided that re-opening the policing fight on a national scale is not a winner for Democrats, so their best bet is to focus on gun sales and keep Republicans on defense.