Hating Guns, Drugs, and Booze

It’s been noticed more than a few times that there aren’t many substantive differences between the Republicans and Democrats. While this is true in many ways for the parties themselves, the Left and Right certainly differ on a range of issues from welfare to abortion to gay rights.

What they have in common — at least the mainstream varieties — is a desire to use the state to shape society in whatever way they see fit. As Andrew Napolitano put it, “We have migrated from a two-party system into a one-party system, the big-government party. There’s a democratic wing that likes taxes and wealth transfers and assaults on commercial liberties and there’s a republican wing that likes war and deficits and assaults uncivil liberties.” And both parties love prohibition, just of different things.

Alcohol Prohibition

But there are major problems with this simplistic analysis. For example, gun ownership has been increasing rapidly in the United States while gun crime has been falling. In addition, most guns are owned by people in rural areas, then suburban, then urban. Crime rates are exactly the opposite. Further, as Thomas Sowell points out in Intellectuals and Society,

Russia and Brazil have tougher gun control laws than the united States and much higher murder rates. Gun ownership rates in Mexico are a fraction of what they are in the United States, but Mexico’s murder rate is more than double that in the United States. Handguns are banned in Luxembourg but not in Belgium, France or Germany; yet the murder rate in Luxembourg is several times the murder rate in Belgium, France or Germany.

And what about that lower murder rate for Britain? Well, Thomas Sowell again, “London had a much lower murder rate than New York during the years after New York State’s 1911 Sullivan Law imposed very strict gun control, while anyone could buy a shotgun in London with no questions asked in the 1950s.” What matters are the trends, not simplistic and vulgar comparisons. Instead, an international study done at Harvard noted,

To bear that burden would at the very least require showing that a large number of nations with more guns have more death and that nations that have imposed stringent gun controls have achieved substantial reductions in criminal violence (or suicide). But those correlations are not observed when a large number of nations are compared across the world.

Finally, when it comes to gun bans, the results are predictably terrible. John Lott again, “Every place around the world that has banned guns appears to have experienced an increase in murder and violent crime rates.” This includes Washington, DC, Chicago, Britain, Ireland, and Jamaica. One British newspaper ran the darkly humorous article “Gun Crime Soaring Despite Ban.” Change the “Despite” to “Because” and you have an accurate article.

Conclusion

Penn Jillette has half-joked, “If you can convince the gun nuts that the potheads are ok and the potheads that the gun nuts are ok, then everyone’s a libertarian.” Arguments about whether these things should be regulated and how much so would be the subject for a different article. But it’s hard to understand why many liberals think that prohibiting drugs creates black markets with drugs, but that it wouldn’t happen with guns. Does one really think that drug cartels couldn’t add guns to their list of products to push? And the same goes for conservatives in the reverse.

It’s really quite simple; prohibition doesn’t work. Freedom does.

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.