Like everyone else, I was shocked and saddened by the news of the killing of children in Newtown, Connecticut one week ago. I lived in neighboring Redding for years. Newtown is a nice, charming New England town, the last place in the world where one would have anticipated this tragedy. Such is the nature of senseless violence. It can happen anywhere.
Just as every natural disaster is followed by the fallacious claim of the positive economic effect to follow, every human-caused disaster is followed by pointless—if understandable—over-reaction and a cry that we must “do something.” Politicians and the media have been true to form after the Newtown tragedy.
Within hours, President Obama, spying an opportunity to seize yet more power, called for “tak[ing] meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.” By this he meant enacting more pointless and counter-productive gun control. He followed up on December 19 by appointing Vice President Biden to lead an effort to find ways “to reduce the epidemic of gun violence that plagues this country every single day.”
Obama and the Killing of Children Overseas
Obama is hypocritical in his expression of concern, given his own regular killing of children overseas. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that, through December 1st,
Obama has conducted 300 drone strikes in Pakistan alone, killing sixty-four children. Obama’s drone strikes in other nations and his war in Afghanistan also continue to kill children, as did his intervention in the civil war in Libya.
The casual assumption that the drone strikes are legitimate is false. Glenn Greenwald correctly condemns the rationale for the strikes as “deeply dishonest, ignorant, jingoistic, propagandistic, and sociopathic.”
More broadly, if the U.S. government were actually interested in avoiding terrorism, it would stop creating enemies. It would end its wars and wind down its empire.
Answers That Are Not Even Relevant
As Jacob Sullum observed, the calls for renewing the ban on “assault weapons” is misplaced, since the weapon the killer used “was legal under Connecticut’s ‘assault weapon’ ban, which is similar to the federal law that expired in 2004.” Further, the nature of the firearm used by the killer was irrelevant, given that his victims were defenseless.
Obama’s call for “making access to mental health care at least as easy as access to a gun” is also misplaced. The parents of the killer were well off, and there is no evidence that they faced any barrier to getting their son any care they sought.
Finally, Obama’s call to “look more closely at a culture that all too often glorifies guns and violence” is not helpful. Blaming “culture” for a crime is an evasion. It shifts the responsibility from the criminal to an abstraction.
Obama’s concern with culture is also ironic. Obama does his best to expand government, and government acts through violence and the threat of violence in ruling the people under its control. Further, under Obama, the U.S. government continues to engage in unnecessary war, and continues to seek to glorify its actions.
The Risk In Perspective
Politicians fear monger to get more power for government, and the media regularly facilitate this process. The fact is, though, that the risk of a child being killed in school is infinitesimal. Terence P. Jeffrey summarizes the facts:
Murders of school-age children—those between the ages of 5 and 18—declined by 42 percent between the 1992-93 school year and the 2008-2009 school year, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, and only about 1 percent of the school age children murdered during the 2008-2009 school year were murdered at school.
….
In the 2009-2010 school year, the latest year for which the Justice Department has published data, 17 school-age children were murdered at school. That also was a 50 percent drop from the 34 children murdered at school in the 1992-93 school year.
Further, gun violence in general is in decline. FactCheck.org summarizes the statistics:
The United States has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world — by far. And it has the highest rate of homicides among advanced countries. And yet, gun crime has been declining in the U.S. Firearm murders are down, as is overall gun violence – even as gun ownership increases.
NRA’s Police State Views
The National Rifle Association, in its press conference of December 21, while correctly noting that gun-free zones invite crime, went on to:
- Engage in its own fear mongering, warning of countless murderers out to get children, and claiming that parents need to have a plan of “absolute protection” to save their children from “monsters.”
- Call for an “active national database of the mentally ill,” thus inviting even greater government intrusion in private lives, and the attendant threat to civil liberties.
- Blame video games and movies for violence, reflecting the same lack of concern for the First Amendment Obama demonstrates.
- Ask the federal government to “put armed police officers in every school,” despite the lack of constitutional authority for any federal spending on schools, the undesirability of making schools even more like prisons, and the regular abuse committed by government police.
Un-Do Something
As Gene Healy warns, “If the reaction to the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School is anything like the reaction to Sept. 11, we’re in for a decade or more of frantic overreaction and wasteful, destructive policies based on the false promise of perfect safety.” This is indeed government’s response to problems—to make them worse, or create new ones, almost always at the expense of our liberty.
Asking government to “do something” after a disaster is a mistake. A better approach is to identify things government should un-do.
Addressing School Violence
The best step that could be taken to address parents’ specific concerns regarding school security would be to close the government schools, and end any government control of schooling. With a free market in primary and secondary education, parents could select schools based on any criteria they wished, including security. Schools would have to compete on these criteria, and meet the needs of parents and students.
Schools would be free to retain private security firms to provide systems and services as they saw fit. Parents who wished to home school would be free to do so, without restriction.
Addressing General Violence
Here are three of the many steps that could be taken to reduce violence in general, including against children, while restoring freedom.
End Drug Prohibition
Government should end drug prohibition. Drug prohibition has created crime, and has also led to the deadly aggression by law enforcement in pursuit of the “war on drugs.”
End Government Welfare
Government welfare programs should end, in favor of private charity. The Cato Institute explains the relationship between welfare and crime:
Children from single-parent families are more likely to become involved in criminal activity. Research indicates a direct correlation between crime rates and the number of single-parent families in a neighborhood. As welfare contributes to the rise in out-of-wedlock births, it thus also contributes to higher levels of criminal activity.
End Government Gun Control
Finally, government gun control should end. Criminals are not deterred by restrictions on gun ownership. Self-defense is a right, one protected by the Constitution’s Second Amendment. Inhibiting people from being able to deter violence, or protect themselves from it, is not only wrong, but also encourages violence.
Conclusion
Turning to government for protection is a mistake. It is wiser to seek the freedom that allows us to make our own decisions concerning security, and to end the government actions that have made our lives more dangerous.
