http://reason.com/archives/2013/08/21/how-the-right-learned-to-love-gun-contro
Conservatives took a break last week from their sensible skepticism toward big government in order to embrace the liberal logic of gun control. That logic is familiar to anyone who has ever spent much time kibitzing the gun debate, and it goes like this: Government should infringe, or even abrogate, the rights of millions of law-abiding people in order to stop a minuscule fraction who use guns to commit mayhem.
Whether gun-control laws actually produce the desired results is a matter of great dispute. But liberals will happily cherry-pick the data that best make their case. (Why should they be any different?) They will then argue as The New York Times did in 2010, when it denounced a Supreme Court ruling upholding gun rights: “The arguments that led to Monday’s decision,” the newspaper intoned, “were infuriatingly abstract, but the results will be all too real and bloody.”
Translation: Don’t give us any of that airy nonsense about rights. People’s lives are on the line here. This, in essence, was how conservatives reacted last week when a federal judge said New York’s stop-and-frisk tactics were unconstitutional.
Stop-and-frisk was “a policy that has saved thousands of black lives,” wrote noted civil-rights icon Ann Coulter. The Wall Street Journal agreed: “If the judge’s ruling isn’t overturned, the victims won’t be in the tony precincts [but] in the barrios and housing projects.” Channeling The Times, Daniel Henninger of The Journal griped that “when liberals weigh the reality of physical threat . . . against hyper-abstract interpretations of constitutional rights, abstraction wins.”
According to National Review, “intelligent police work” had “reversed what seemed 20 years ago to be an inescapable descent into lawlessness, indecency, and chaos.” Writing in City Journal, Heather Mac Donald concurred: “New York’s 20-year reprieve from debilitating violence may well be over.” She fretted the ruling could “signal the end of the freedom from fear that New York’s most vulnerable residents have enjoyed.” In Commentary, Seth Mandel depicted stop-and-frisk as a “fight to keep the city’s minority neighborhoods safe.”
And, sure, that might be the intent. But then you can claim all sorts of policies will keep a city safe, including a total ban on firearms and surprise house-to-house searches for drugs. If the ends justify the means, then you can do just about anything you want. Conservatives usually like to think they’re a little more high-minded than that.
The other trouble with such consequentialist rationales is that they depend on producing the right consequences. So naturally, conservatives simply assume stop-and-frisk deserves the lion’s share of the credit for New York’s falling crime rate. But crime has fallen steeply across the country – including in many places that did not employ stop-and-frisk.
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http://reason.com/archives/2013/08/...nline+-+All+Articles+(except+Hit+&+Run+blog))
Conservatives took a break last week from their sensible skepticism toward big government in order to embrace the liberal logic of gun control. That logic is familiar to anyone who has ever spent much time kibitzing the gun debate, and it goes like this: Government should infringe, or even abrogate, the rights of millions of law-abiding people in order to stop a minuscule fraction who use guns to commit mayhem.
Whether gun-control laws actually produce the desired results is a matter of great dispute. But liberals will happily cherry-pick the data that best make their case. (Why should they be any different?) They will then argue as The New York Times did in 2010, when it denounced a Supreme Court ruling upholding gun rights: “The arguments that led to Monday’s decision,” the newspaper intoned, “were infuriatingly abstract, but the results will be all too real and bloody.”
Translation: Don’t give us any of that airy nonsense about rights. People’s lives are on the line here. This, in essence, was how conservatives reacted last week when a federal judge said New York’s stop-and-frisk tactics were unconstitutional.
Stop-and-frisk was “a policy that has saved thousands of black lives,” wrote noted civil-rights icon Ann Coulter. The Wall Street Journal agreed: “If the judge’s ruling isn’t overturned, the victims won’t be in the tony precincts [but] in the barrios and housing projects.” Channeling The Times, Daniel Henninger of The Journal griped that “when liberals weigh the reality of physical threat . . . against hyper-abstract interpretations of constitutional rights, abstraction wins.”
According to National Review, “intelligent police work” had “reversed what seemed 20 years ago to be an inescapable descent into lawlessness, indecency, and chaos.” Writing in City Journal, Heather Mac Donald concurred: “New York’s 20-year reprieve from debilitating violence may well be over.” She fretted the ruling could “signal the end of the freedom from fear that New York’s most vulnerable residents have enjoyed.” In Commentary, Seth Mandel depicted stop-and-frisk as a “fight to keep the city’s minority neighborhoods safe.”
And, sure, that might be the intent. But then you can claim all sorts of policies will keep a city safe, including a total ban on firearms and surprise house-to-house searches for drugs. If the ends justify the means, then you can do just about anything you want. Conservatives usually like to think they’re a little more high-minded than that.
The other trouble with such consequentialist rationales is that they depend on producing the right consequences. So naturally, conservatives simply assume stop-and-frisk deserves the lion’s share of the credit for New York’s falling crime rate. But crime has fallen steeply across the country – including in many places that did not employ stop-and-frisk.
....
http://reason.com/archives/2013/08/...nline+-+All+Articles+(except+Hit+&+Run+blog))
