Posted by
SteveJ on Friday, February 01, 2008 12:00:00 AM
My co-worker, Shelley, has an idea for cutting down on crime: Take away everyone's guns.
Aside from the inconvenient existence of the Second Amendment, the disarmament hypothesis may seem sensible at first blush. It's simple cause and effect. Remove the gun from an armed robbery situation and it's no longer armed robbery. Disarm the populace, and a shootout between rival gangs is reduced to, say, a pointed argument or maybe just a strongly worded letter between the aggrieved parties.
Let's suppose Congress passes "Shelley's Law" and the president signs it. Amid great fanfare, Washington dispatches a troop of feds who go door to door with pillowcases and collect the proscribed firearms. One by one, each homeowner greets the bureaucrat at the front door, then reluctantly gathers all the guns and deposits them into the outstretched pillowcase.
Now here's the part that requires some imagination. The feds get to an inner-city street lined with crack houses. Inside one house are several hardened, steely glinted thugs -- drug users whose habit prompts convenience-store holdups and gang violence. The bureaucrat raps on the door. "United States government," he announces. "I'm here to pick up any guns you might have. Open up, please."
The thugs look at each other in utter dismay. "It's all over. The government's here to get our guns." Like beaten men, they collect the arsenal spread out piecemeal over several rooms and turn everything over to the bureaucrat.
"Now what?" says one of the thugs, after showing the federal agent and his bulging pillowcase out the door. "We can't rob at gunpoint no more. What can we do?"
At that point, one of his comrades flashes a brochure from a correspondence school. "Maybe we could become ... I don't know ... accountants. Locksmiths. X-ray technicians. Yeah, that's it. We can start earning an honest living." The men glance at one another and nod slowly. "Yeah, that's cool. With no guns, we might as well do something else."
Calculating the likelihood of such a thing ever happening would involve such enormous numbers that we wouldn't know what to call them.
Unlike the last scenario, this one requires very little imagination: A single mother and her toddler son huddle together in a room of their ramshackle house. She hears someone trying to break in. The street crime outside has kept the woman in a perpetual state of fear, jumping at the slightest sound. But now, her worst dread is coming to pass. Several violent kicks jar the back door until it flies open. Two large men enter. "Dear God," she gasps.
As the brutes walk toward the woman and her son, she instinctively unlatches a cabinet and thrusts her hand into a drawer for the revolver that has been her security for years. But it's not there. She remembers, to her horror, that the feds confiscated her gun a few weeks ago. The government -- that body designed to protect the weak -- has effectively disarmed the woman, removing her only immediate defense against such predators. Now she and the boy are at their mercy.
The rape and assault get a brief mention on the evening news. Just another statistic. The Law of Unintended Consequences claims another victim.
That's the trouble with so many well-meaning ideas. They allow the advocate -- the politician and the activist -- to bask in the acclaim that good intentions bring. But in practice, ideas like Shelley's to often energize the evil they seek to curb.